The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

T was just a year later, a warm, mellow afternoon of mid-October. For the last few nights there had been an early autumn frost, though the days were almost like a return of summer, and the beech-wood below Philip’s house at Pangbourne was just beginning to don its russet livery. The frost, too, had made its mark on blackened dahlias, but the chrysanthemums were still gorgeous. And on the terrace were walking two figures, both dressed in black, one tall, who strolled beside the other, Madge and Mrs. Home. The latter was still as like a Dresden shepherdess as ever in the pretty china delicacy of her face, but Madge had changed somewhat. Trouble had written its unmistakable signs on her face, but tenderness had been at work there, too, and though her eyes were sad, yet with the sadness was mingled something so sweet and gentle that no one who loved her would have wished that the sadness should not be there, if the other had come hand-in-hand with it. And it was hand-in-hand that they had come during the last eighteen months of her life, which had been to her of such infinitely greater import than all the years that had gone before.

“Yes, it is even as I tell you,” she was saying. “I never think of Evelyn as blind. I think of him—well, a good deal, but he always comes back to me, not as he was in those last weeks, but in those first few weeks before, bright-eyed—you know how bright his eyes were—and full of a sort of boyish joy at this jolly world. No, I scarcely feel sad when I think of him. He was fragile; he would have broken if he had had to bear more. And I think God knew that, and spared him by letting him die.”

She walked on a little without speaking. Mrs. Home’s hand on her arm pressed its sympathy, but she said nothing.

“I have been allowed to forget, too,” Madge went on, “or to remember it only as a nightmare from which I awoke, the way I shrank from him, and I only wonder now whether, if he had lived, I should have got used to it. Ah, surely it must have been in a dream only that I shrank from him.”

“Yes, dear, it was only that,” said Mrs. Home. “At least, no one knew. You behaved so that no one guessed.”

“Philip knew. If it had not been for him during those months I think I should have gone mad. And for the second time he kept me—it is hardly an exaggeration—kept me sane when baby died.”

Mrs. Home, when she had anything important and difficult to say, often gave out little twittering, mouse-like noises before she could manage to speak. Madge knew this, and thus, hearing them now, waited for her to overcome her embarrassment.

“And is there no hope for Philip, dear?” she asked at length.

Madge had rather expected this was coming, but her answer gave her less embarrassment than the question had caused his mother.

“I owe Philip everything,” she said, “and though I don’t suppose I can ever love again in the way that I have loved, still—you know once I told him quite truthfully that I would give him all that I was capable of. You see, I did not know then what love meant. That was a niggardly gift to offer him. And now again I can give him—oh, so gratefully—all I am capable of. It is, I hope, not quite such a mean thing as it was. I think——”