The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

Evelyn shifted slightly in his seat. This summing up of the past was a thing he was not inclined to. It was summed up and finished with, except in so far as the present was the finished past. Why go over the accounts again? There was no doubt as to their correctness.

“I don’t know whether it was all accidents,” he said, “but if you begin to call things accidents, there is no stopping. If one thing is an accident, everything is. That I stayed at his house at Pangbourne when you were there you may call an accident. That we made friends there you will call an accident also, if you call the first an accident. And if you are consistent you will call the fact that we loved each other an accident. Only, if you call that an accident, you are using the word in a different sense to that which I use it in.”

“Then nothing is an accident?” she asked.

“Yes, my buying this bottle of champagne was an accident, because I didn’t mean to. But as it has happened, we may as well drink it.”

But a sudden stab of disappointment somehow pierced Madge. She had been serious, and so to a certain point had he. But now, when their talk seemed to be becoming fruit-bearing, he could dismiss it all with a jest. Her wifehood, for a month or two ago she would have done likewise, had developed her in a way that marriage had not developed him. He was still the bright-eyed boy. She, on the other hand, was no longer a girl but a woman. All the sub-consciousness of this twanged in her answer.

“You are so undeveloped,” she said suddenly.

But to his ears there was no reproach in this; it concerned the future, not the past. And his bright eyes but grew brighter.

“Surely,” he said, “but the development is in your hands. And I lay it—whatever it is—at your feet.”

That, too, Madge felt was so extraordinarily genuine; small as was the tribute, it could not be but graceful. Everywhere he was that, in no relation of life was he otherwise—the beautiful, undeveloped manhood put out buds everywhere, yet at present no bud was expanded into a flower. There was brilliant promise, no promise could be fairer or more sincere, for he was incapable of insincerity, yet it was the “imperishable child” with whose fate she had bound herself up. Everything was there, except one, and that was the man. His talent was brilliant, and she could not have parted with the constant companionship any more than she could have parted with the light of day, yet something was missing.

It was not less definite, this sense or quality which was missing in Evelyn, because it was indefinable; one could not know another person, whether man or woman, without knowing whether it was there or not, and indeed almost everybody was possessed of it. Philip had it to a notable degree—indeed it was that which, if she searched her heart, had in its extraordinary abundance in him made her originally accept the possibility of her becoming his wife. It had nothing to do with the ardour of love, since the man for whom she alone had experienced that had nothing of it. Nor was it brilliant in any way, since all that was his also. Only it was bed-rock; it was something quite secure and responsible, and willing to take all responsibility, and human. It co-existed with dulness, it existed in people who were frankly intolerable. It was probably bourgeois, but she felt the possibility, as yet far off, so far off that she would only strain her eyes if she tried to focus them on it, of its being necessary, just as food and drink were necessary. The little ghost at Le Touquet, in fact, had apparently begged its way across, and had established itself in the King’s Road. But ghosts of this kind do not mind prosaic surroundings; the discerning reader will perceive they have no need of tapestry or panels, for they are concerned in no way with what is past and ancestral, but with what is alive and knitted into the fabric of the present.