Dodo's Daughter: A Sequel to Dodo

by E. F. Benson

"How is he?" he asked.

"He is going on well. They do not know more than that yet. He is getting over the concussion, but they cannot tell yet whether he will be able to walk again."

"And are you going to marry him in any case, if he is a cripple, I mean?" he asked.

"If Hughie will have me. I daresay I shall propose to him, and be refused, just as used to happen the other way round in the old days. Oh, I know what his soul is like so well! He will say that he will not let me spend all my life looking after a cripple. But I shall have my way in the end. I am much stronger than he."

Seymour saw and understood the change in her face when she spoke of Hugh. Admirable as her beauty always was, he had not dreamed that such tender transformation could come to it, or that it was capable of assuming so inward-burning and devoted a quality and yet shining with its habitual brilliance uneclipsed. The love which he had dreamed would some day awake there for him, he saw now in the first splendor of its dawning, and from it he could guess what would be the glory of its full noonday, and with how celestial a ray she would shine on her lover. For the moment it seemed to him not to matter that it was another, not he, on whom that dawn should break, for whom it should grow to noonday, and sink at last in the golden West of a life truly and lovingly lived without fear of the lengthening shadows and the night that must inevitably close as it had preceded it; for by the power of his own love, he could detach himself from himself, and though only momently reach that summit of devotion far below which, remote and insignificant, lies the mere husk and shell of the world that spins through the illimitable azure. So Dante saw the face of Beatrice, when he passed into the sweetness of the Earthly Paradise, and there came to him she whom the chariot with its harnessed griffins drew. And not otherwise, in his degree and hers, Seymour looked now at Nadine's face, glorified and made tender by her love, and in the perception that his own love gave him, he hailed and adored it....

"I came to scold and reproach," he said, "but I also came just to see you, to look at you. There is no harm in that. And if there is I can't help it. Nadine, I used to wonder what you would look like when you loved. You have shown me that. I—I didn't guess. There's a poem by Browning which ends 'Those who win heaven, blest are they.' The man who speaks was just in my case. But he managed to say that. I say it too, very quickly, because I know this unnatural magnanimity won't last. I agree with all you have said: it wasn't your fault. I hope you won't be tied to a cripple all your life, or, if he has to be a cripple, I hope you will be tied to him. There! I've said it, and it is true, but it rather reminds me of holding my breath. Give me a kiss, please, and then I'll climb swiftly down out of this rarefied atmosphere."

He kissed her on the mouth, as his right had been, and for a moment held her to him in an embrace more intimate than he had ever yet claimed from her. Edith, it may be remembered, had once seen him kiss her, and had pronounced it an anemic salutation. But it was not anemic now: his blood was alert and virile; its quality was not inferior to that which, one day in the summer, made Hugh seize her wrists, demanding the annulment of the profanation of her marriage with Seymour. In both, too, was the same fierceness of farewell.

For a few seconds Seymour held her close to him, and felt her neither shrink from him nor respond. Her willing surrender to his right was the utmost she could give, and he knew there was nothing else for him.

And then he proceeded to descend from what he had called the rarefied atmosphere with the speed of a yet-unopened parachute.

"Damn Hugh," he said. "Yes, damn him. For God's sake, don't tell him I asked after him, or hoped he was getting better. I don't want him to die, since I don't suppose that would do me any good, nor do I want him to be crippled for life, since that also would be quite useless after what you have told me. But if you said to him that I had asked after him, I should sink into the earth for shame. He would think it noble and nice of me, and I'm not noble or nice. I should hate to be thought either. His good opinion of me would make me choke and retch. I should not be able to sleep if I thought Hugh was thinking well of me. So hold your tongue."