The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

But Mrs. Home, gentle and loving and pitiful as she was, could not do quite as he asked, though her hands and her lips yearned for him.

“No, Philip,” she said; “but with whom do I shake hands, and whom do I kiss? You, the Philip who is my son, or the man who has said this? Indeed, dear, I know you well, and it is not you who have spoken.”

He looked at her steadily.

“Yes, it is I who have spoken,” he said. “This is now your son, the man who has said these things. Do you cast me off, too?”

Unfair, unjust as the words were, she felt no pang of resentment with him, telling herself that he was not himself. And, whatever he was, her relationship to him, she knew, could never be altered. If he was lying in the condemned cell for some brutal murder, whatever he had done or been could never make any difference to that. He knew that, too, his best self knew it, and it was to his best self she spoke.

“You know I can never cast you off,” she said, “and those were wild words but they are unsaid. Here is my hand, my darling, and here are my lips. You want me also never to say any more about it. I will not; but I must say this about you—that you will not always feel like this. I know you will not. And when the change comes, tell me. You cannot take that belief away from me.”

He kissed her, holding both her hands in his, but his face did not relax.

“Poor mother!” he said again.

They walked back towards the house together, down the grassy walk between the yew hedges, where Mrs. Home had first heard his footstep, and Philip, according to contract, began at once to speak of other things. Dismal though this was, it was still perhaps better than silence; whatever had happened, the present was with them, and the present had to be lived through; ordinary human intercourse had got to be continued. Whether in the immediate future he would go abroad, and try by the conventional prescription of travelling to find, if not relief, at any rate the sense of unreality that travelling and change sometimes give, he had not yet determined, though the idea had occurred to him. He was still really incapable of making plans at all, he could not yet face the future, but, so far as he had considered it, he was not disposed to think that he would try it. For idleness to a man accustomed to lead a very busy life, a life, too, which every day demands concentration of thought and decisiveness of action, is in itself irksome, even though the panorama of foreign lands and skies is drawn by before him. To such a mind, even when it is at peace with itself, a holiday is generally only a means of recuperation, and the recuperation effected, such a man frets to be at work again, and to him now, with this dreadful background always with him, the idea of travel appealed very little. He would be better, so he thought, back at work, and the harder and more continuously he worked, the less intolerable, perhaps, would be the burden which he carried about with him. Truly, we make our own heaven and hell, and since the kingdom of God is within us, so also within us are the flames of the nethermost pit.

But in those three minutes as they went back again to the house, Mrs. Home made her resolve. Whatever it cost her, and however difficult each minute might be, however much she might long herself to go and weep, or better still, to weep with him, she would do her very best to act as he had wished, and never in thought or word dwell on the past. A tragedy had happened; but it was necessary to go on, to begin life again, not to sit and bewail; nothing was ever cured, so she told herself, by thinking of what might have been avoided, if things had been different. But things were this way and not otherwise, and that which had not been avoided had already become part of the imperishable past, the hours of which are, indeed, reckoned up, but do not perish, since it is of them that the present is made.