The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

He painted on for some little time in silence, and Philip, complying with his request that nothing more should be said about it, answered his next question, some common topic, and himself introduced another. But all the time his thoughts were busy enough on the tabooed subject. For a second time, as at the opera a few nights ago, the vague suspicion crossed his mind that Evelyn was in love with Madge, and had somehow betrayed this to her; but now, as then, he formulated this thought only to give it instant dismissal. That being so, he was morally bound to do Evelyn justice, to accept without either comment or reservation the fact that he really required another sitting from Madge, and to do his utmost, whatever her unwillingness and whatever the cause of it, to make her sit to him again. Both the Philip known to the few intimates and the Philip so much respected by the world at large had a very strong sense of fairness, and the fair thing quite certainly was this. It was impossible to deny an artist another sitting if he felt like this about it; it was doubly impossible to deny it to a friend. Even if the picture had been an order, a commission, it would have been but shabby treatment, now that he knew how Evelyn felt about it, not to do his very utmost to get Madge to give him another sitting; but the picture was not that, it was a present, given too, as he had said, “with his love.” He could not really doubt that when it was put to Madge like this, she would see it as he himself did.

The task itself of talking to her on the subject, it was distasteful to him, for she had been mysteriously indeed, but unmistakably in earnest, about it a few nights ago at the opera. Whatever the cause (and he consciously turned back from even conjecturing at the cause), she had, so she thought, at any rate, an adequate reason for not wishing to continue the sittings, even when the artist’s point of view was presented to her, and he foresaw that he might find himself in an opposition to her that would be painful to both of them. Nor had the change in her, which the world compared to the action of a snail retiring into its shell, escaped him. She had been for the last ten days or so reserved, silent, and apt to be startled. More than once he had asked her if anything was wrong, and the vehemence of her assertion that nothing was wrong had rather surprised him. But here, again, he had to pull himself up, and studiously refrain from conjecturing that Evelyn was in any way connected with any private worry of hers. Besides she had said that nothing was wrong; he was bound to accept that. For this reason he rejected the notion of consulting Lady Ellington about it; that would imply a distrust of the girl herself.

He was going to see her as soon as this sitting was over, and since he had thoroughly made up his mind that he must do his best to persuade her to do as he desired about the portrait, he determined not to put it off, but to speak to her to-day. But he judged it better not to tell Evelyn what he was going to do, because on the one hand his mission might fail of success, and on the other because he had been asked to allude no further to the question. So for the remainder of the sitting they talked, neither quite naturally, since both were thinking of the one subject that could not be talked about, on strictly public topics. But every minute was an age of discomfort, and Philip, at any rate, was heartily glad when it was over, and he was out again in the hot, sunny streets.

Madge scarcely knew how the days had passed since that afternoon in the New Forest, for it seemed to her that all the values of life were altered, as if a totally new scheme of things must be made, for that which existed at present was not possible. Day after day, too, brought the twenty-eighth nearer—that date before which something which would upset and reverse her whole world must assuredly occur. For she was pledged then to do that which she knew she could not do, the impossibility of which was every hour more vividly impressed on her. She had herself promised her mother to do nothing whatever, unless Evelyn made some further advance; what she did not know was how very skilfully he had been debarred from that. But already the promise she had herself given had begun to lose for her its moral validity, it was only in a second-hand sort of way that she considered it binding, for one thing only she felt was really binding on her, and that the impossibility of fulfilling her pledge to Philip. That was outside her power; by what step she would make that known, she did not yet consider. A way must be found; what the way was seemed to her, if she considered it at all, very immaterial.

For side by side with that impossibility, and not less securely throned, was another certainty, namely, that Evelyn must repeat what he had said before; no man could leave it like that. And in those days she knew what it was to start and change colour when the door-bell rang, to frame any excuse, or no excuse, to go downstairs and see what the post had brought, to watch at balls and parties the arrival of fresh-comers, and glance across the crowded rooms in a sort of yearning certainty that now at last she would see one face among the crowd, which would come slowly closer and closer through the throng, until it was by her. Then—even the trivial, commonplace little details were imagined by her—he would ask her for a dance, or take her out to some unfrequented room. Philip at the time would probably be with her; he would certainly smile and nod at Evelyn, and resign her to him for “just ten minutes.” But the days went on, and none of these visions were realised; he appeared no more at houses where she had often seen him. Often, too, people asked her about the progress of her portrait, and to these she replied that it was finished. Finished! These moments were lit with a certainty and a sure hope, but there were others, black ones. What if he had spoken without thought, excitedly, carried away by some moment’s passion, bitterly regretted since? Supposing he did not really love her, supposing it had been just the flame and the blaze of a moment.

There was no preparation possible for the crash that was inevitable. No gradual estrangement from Philip, ending in a quarrel, was to be thought of; she could not scheme and soften things; the granite of the bouleversement could not be kneaded into dough. More than once he had asked her if anything was the matter, and on the last occasion, as we have seen, she had denied it with vehemence—the vehemence of one who is sick with a deadly, devouring sickness, whose instinct, feverish and irresistible, is to hold on to the last, affirming her health. But her own vehemence had startled not only him, but herself, and she had vowed to show more self-control, and exhibit that self-control in its most difficult demonstration—merely that of appearing quite normal, and not exercising or, indeed, needing any self-control at all. More especially was this difficult when she was alone with him—the half-hinted caress, the look of love in those honest eyes, had to be somehow telegraphed back; some resemblance that would pass muster as a response had to be sent by her. It was all so mean, and the only comfort, and that cold, was that it could not now last long. For the one supreme impossibility remained—she could not be at his side on the twenty-eighth. Some thing, Fate or her own action dictated by it, would interfere with that, but about it she felt a sort of cold irresponsibility. Meantime, since responsibility was not as yet definitely fallen on her, the need for normal behaviour was paramount.

To-day Philip was coming to tea; he was going to return to dinner, and they, with her mother, were going to the theatre. After that there was a dance; from the hours between five and the small hours of the next day she would scarcely be alone a moment. And it was in loneliness that she could best bear the hopeless tangle—that tangle which, so it seemed to her now, could never be unravelled, but must be cut with a knife. A small knot more or less no longer made any difference, and it was with apathy almost, certainly without strong feeling of any kind, that she heard from Lady Ellington that she would perhaps be late for tea, and in consequence that Philip and herself would be alone together. An hour or two more of make-believe did not seem to her now to matter much; the hours that there could be of that were definitely limited, and, since limited, it was possible to deal with them. For it is only the endless succession of impossible hours, this knowledge that they will continue as long as life itself, that brings despair. But above all, till the crash came, she must be normal. She must give no sign of the storm that was raging within her, and though the depths and lowest abysses of her nature were upheaved by wild billows yet somehow the surface must be kept calm. It was one of the forces outside her own control which had taken possession of her, and with a sort of shudder she thought of the duck-and-drake discussions she had held with Evelyn about incontrollable forces, making these things of vital import the subject for a jest and an epigram. But she knew now, as she had not known then, what such a force meant.

This dismal drawing-room, with its frippery hanging over the window to hide it from the gaze of the square, its grand piano, its window at the opposite end, which commanded a small sooty yard! A hundred drawing-rooms east and west of it were exactly like it, yet on this had Fate—that cruel, velvet-pawed cat—pounced, selecting it at random, to make it the scene of one of her mean little dramas, at which one cannot laugh for fear of tears, at which one cannot cry because other people laugh. And here Madge sat alone, Lady Ellington not having yet returned, the silver urn occasionally lifting its lid with the infinitesimal pressure of the steam beneath, with all the mocking accessories of comfortable life round her, waiting for the inevitable explosion. It might be to-day, it might be to-morrow, it might be any day up to the twenty-eighth. But by that time it must have come; yet the same carpet would be trodden on, the same pictures would cast incurious eyes on to a human tragedy, the same everything would preserve its mute, inanimate composure. That composure she, too, had now to rival; she must be as suitable as the sofa.

Her greeting of him, anyhow, was good enough.

“At last!” she said. “Philip, it is weeks since I set eyes on you. Where have you been, and what have you done with yourself all this time? Now, don’t say it has only been business. I don’t believe you do any, and I shall send a detective to get on your track. Ah! you wouldn’t like that, I can see it; you gave what novelists call an involuntary shudder.”