The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

Through the City the tides of traffic were at their height; all down the Strand also there was no break or calm in the surge of vehicles, and the progress of the motor was slow and constantly interrupted. Sometimes for some fifty or a hundred yards there would be clear running, and his thoughts on the possibilities which might exist would shoot ahead also. Then came a slow down, a check, a stop, and he would tell himself that he might spare his pains in going at all. True, before now it had more than once occurred to him as conceivable that Evelyn was falling in love with Madge, but on every occasion when this happened he had whistled the thought home again, telling himself that he had no business to send it out on this sort of errand. That, however, was absolutely all the preparation he had had for this news, and he had to let it soak in, for at first it stood like a puddle after a heavy storm on the surface of his mind. This was an affair of many minutes, but as it went on he began to realise himself the utter hopelessness of this visit which Lady Ellington had recommended. They might both of them, it was possible, when they saw him, recoil from the bitter wrong they were doing, the one to his friend, the other to her accepted lover; but how could that recoil remain permanent, how could their natural human shrinking from this cruelty possibly breed the rejection of each by the other? However much he himself might suffer, though their pity for him was almost infinite, though they might even, to go to the furthest possible point, settle to part,—yet that voluntary separation, if both agreed to it, would but make each the more noble, the more admirable, to the other. Or Madge again alone, in spite of Evelyn, might say she could not go back on her already plighted troth, and express her willingness to marry him. She might go even further, she might say, and indeed feel, that it was only by keeping her word to him that she could free her own self, her own moral nature, from the sin and stain in which she had steeped it. Loyalty, affection, esteem would certainly all draw her to this, but it was impossible that in her eyes, as they looked their last on Evelyn, there should not be regret and longing and desire. Whether he ever saw it there himself or not, Philip must know it had been there, and that at the least the memory of it must always be there.

How little had he foreseen this or anything remotely resembling it on that moonlight night. She promised to give him then all that she was, all that she knew of in herself, and it was with a thrill of love, exquisite and secret, that he had promised himself to teach her what she did not know. It should be he who would wake in her passion and the fire and the flower of her womanhood, and even as he had already given himself and all he was to her, so she, as the fire awoke, should find that precious gift of herself to him daily grow in worth and wonder. It was that, that last and final gift that she had promised now, but not to him. And with that given elsewhere, he felt he would not, or rather could not, take her, even if it was to deliver her soul from hell itself.

Then (and in justice to him it must be said that this lasted only for a little time), what other people would say weighed on him, and what they would say with regard to his conduct now. And for the same minute’s pace he almost envied those myriad many to whom nothing happens, who know nothing of the extremes of joy, such as he had felt, or the extremes of utter abandonment and despair, such as were his now. Assuredly, in the world’s view, it was now in his power to do something to right himself, to make himself appear, anyhow, what is called a man of spirit; he could curse her, he could strike him; he could make some explosion or threaten it, which would be hard for either of the two others to face. Madge had sat to Evelyn alone, she had often done that, Evelyn was a friend of his; and here he could blast him, he could make him appear such that the world in general would surely decline the pleasure of his acquaintance. Madge again, if he was minded on vengeance, how execrable, how rightly execrable, he could make her conduct appear. There was no end to the damage, reckoning damage by the opinion of the world, that he could do to both of them. All this he could easily do; the bakemeats for the marriage-table were, so to speak, already hot—they could so naturally furnish the funeral-feast, as far as the world was concerned, of either Evelyn or Madge. The whole thing was indecent.

Step by step, punctuated to the innumerable halts of the motor-car, the idea gained on him. Between them there had been made an attempt to wreck him; wreck he was, yet his wreck might be the derelict in the ocean on which their own pleasure-bark would founder. At that moment the desire for vengeance struck him with hot, fiery buffet, but, as it were, concealed its face the while, so that he should not recognise it was the lust for vengeance that had thus scorched him, and, indeed, it appeared to him that he only demanded justice, the barest, simplest justice, such as a criminal never demands in vain. It was no more than right that Evelyn should reap the natural, inevitable harvest of what he had done, and since Madge had joined herself to him, it must be to her home also that he should bring back the bitter sheaves. Indeed, should Philip himself have mercy, should he at any rate keep his hand from any deed and his tongue from any word that could hurt them, yet that would not prevent the consequences reaching them, for the world assuredly would not treat them tenderly, and would only label him spiritless for so doing. For the world, to tell the truth, is not, in spite of its twenty centuries of Christianity, altogether kind yet, and when buffeted on one cheek does not as a rule turn the other. More especially is this so when one of its social safeguards is threatened; it does not immediately surrender and invite the enemy to enter the next fort. And the jilt—which Madge assuredly was, though perhaps to jilt him was akin to a finer morality than to go through with her arranged marriage—is an enemy of Society. Male or female, the jilt, like the person who cheats at cards, will not do; to such people it is impossible to be kind, for they have transgressed one of Society’s precious little maxims, that you really must not do these things, because they lead to so much worry and discomfort. Wedding-presents have to be sent back, arrangements innumerable have to be countermanded, subjects have to be avoided in the presence of the injured parties.

It was the unworthier Philip, as he drove to Chelsea, who let these thoughts find harbourage in his mind. But somewhere deep down in his inner consciousness, he knew that there was something finer to be done, something that the world would deride and laugh at, if he did it. How much better he knew to disregard that, and to be big; to go there, to say that his own engagement to Madge was based on a mistake, a misconception, to accept what had happened, to tell them, as some inner and nobler fibre of his soul told him, that his own personal sorrow weighed nothing as compared with the more essential justice of two who loved each other being absolutely free, however much external circumstances retarded, to marry. He was capable even in this early smart of conceiving that; was he capable of acting up to it?

He was but twenty doors from the studio in King’s Road when the finer way became definite in his mind, and he called to the chauffeur to stop, for he literally did not know if he could do this. But he realised that otherwise his visit would be better left unpaid; there was no good in his going there, if he was to do anything else than this. Then he got out of the car.

“You can go home,” he said to the chauffeur.

The man touched his cap in acknowledgment of the tip that Philip gave him, waited for a lull in the traffic, and turned. Philip was left alone on the pavement, looking after the yellow-panelled carriage.

Then he turned round quickly; his mind was already made up; he would go there, he would act as all that was truly best in him dictated. But as he hesitated, looking back, two figures had come close to him from a door near, hailing a hansom. When he turned they were close to him.

His eyes blazed suddenly with a hard, angry light; his mouth trembled, the sight of them together roused in him the full sense of the injury he had suffered.