The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

Then Philip’s voice spoke.

“How has he been to-day?”

“Ah, so bad, poor darling!” she said. “Sometimes I almost despair, Philip; if it wasn’t for you I know I should. Of course he tries all he can, but it seems almost as if his powers of trying were failing. It makes me utterly miserable to think of him.”

Evelyn did not move nor reveal his presence in any way. He felt as if the speaker was but being the echo of his own thoughts. Philip said something sympathetic in tone, but he did not catch that; he wanted only to hear how far Madge agreed with himself.

“And I dread his suspecting more,” she went on. “I so often see him feeling his face, as if trying to picture it to himself more clearly. And if for a moment I should break down and let him know—ah, I can’t talk of it. Let us go to the library and see if he is there.”

Her voice choked a little over this; then without more words they passed out of the drawing-room again, and Evelyn felt as if something had snapped in his brain. He almost wondered that they had not heard it.

As soon as the door had closed behind them he got swiftly and quietly up from his seat and felt his way to the centre window, which opened on to the terrace. He undid the shutters of it, stepped out, and closed it behind him. He was hardly conscious of any motive in his action—he certainly had no plan as to what he should do next. One overwhelming fact had become a certainty to him, the fact contained in Madge’s last sentence, and he knew nothing more than that he must go away somewhere, lose himself somehow, do anything rather than go back to her, to be pitied, to be secretly shuddered at, to be a daily, hourly fear to her. Indeed, he would never look upon their child.

It was a cold, windless evening, and the rain descended in a steady downpour, hissing on to the shrubs, while the gutters of the house gurgled and chuckled. But louder than the rain and more sonorous was the great rush and roar of the river below, as it poured seawards, swollen to a torrent of flood from these persistent rains. And something in the strength and glory of that deep voice called to him; he must go down to the river, for it had something to say to him. Yet it was not the river that called to him, but in some mysterious way Tom Merivale, whose jovial, deep voice was shouting to him to come with the authenticity of actual hallucination. He hardly knew which it was; he knew only that he could never go back to the house he had just left, and that something called, with promise in its voice of life, real life, or of death and deliverance, he knew not which.

He had no stick to guide him, but without hesitation he crossed the gravel of the terrace, and felt his way along the wall of it to where a stone vase stood at the top of the steps leading to the lawn below. A purple clematis twined round it; he had made a study of it for a picture last summer. Then came the twelve steps, the shuffling across the soaked grass of the lawn, and a further flight of twelve steps into the rose garden.

But at the thought of deliverance of some kind so close to him, so that he need no more now think of “to-morrow and to-morrow,” and all the impossible to-morrows, his poor tired brain cleared, his myriad troubles and sorrows seemed to roll away from him, for though the bitterness of death was not past, the bitterness of life, in comparison to which the other was sweet, was over. So with unclouded mind and soul, which no longer rebelled and resented, he thought quietly, as he felt his way across the rose garden, and struck the steep path leading to the river, of all the past.