The Osbornes

by E. F. Benson

Dora read the telegram again.

“No; I think you are quite right to put that interpretation on it,” she said truthfully enough. “We’ll hope to get good news again to-morrow. I am glad she is out of pain.”

But secretly she feared something she did not say—namely, that there was something wrong, but that Sir Henry had not been able without further examination to say what it was. Yet, after all, that interpretation might be only imagination on her part. But there was nothing in the telegram which appeared to her to be meant to allay the anxiety which he must know existed.

Dora went to bed that evening with a great many things to think about, which had to be faced, not shirked or put aside. The day, which by the measure of events had been almost without incident, seemed terribly full of meaning to her. Lady Osborne had seen a doctor; she had talked over domestic affairs with Dora ... that was not quite all: Claude had thought that a cheque had been forged, but found on examination that he had made a mistake. Set out like that, there seemed little here that could occupy her thoughts at all, still less that could keep away from her the sleep that in general was so punctual a visitor to her. But to-night it did not come near her, and she did not even try to woo its approach. She had no thought of sleep, though she was glad to have the darkness and the silence round her so that she might think without distraction. All these things, trivial as events, seemed to her to be significant, to hold possibilities, potentialities, altogether disproportionate to their face value. It might prove not to be so when she examined them; it might be that for some reason a kind of nightmare inflation was going on in her mind, so that, as in physical nightmare things swell to gigantic shape, in her imagination these simple little things were puffed to grotesque and terrifying magnitude. She had to think them over calmly and carefully; it might easily be that they would sink to normal size again.

She took first that affair of the cheque, which had turned out, apparently, to be no affair at all. Claude had made a mistake, so he had himself said, and the cheque which he and the bank had suspected was perfectly genuine. But Dora, between the time of his thinking there was something wrong and of his ascertaining that there was not, had passed a very terrible quarter of an hour—one that it made her feel sick to think of even now. There was no use in blinking it; she had feared that Jim had forged her husband’s cheque. She had hardly given a thought to what the consequences might be; what turned her white and cold was the thought that he had done it. Her pen had spluttered when the thought first occurred to her, but she believed Claude had not noticed that. But had he noticed the sob of relief in her voice when he told her that the cheque was all right? He was not slow to observe, his perceptions, especially where she was concerned, were remarkably vivid, and it seemed to her that he must have noticed it. Yet he had said nothing.

Anyhow the cheque was correct, and she was left with the fact that it had seemed to her possible that Jim had been guilty of this gross meanness. And, just as if the thing had been true, she found herself trying to excuse him, saw herself pleading with Claude for him. Poor Jim was not ... was not quite like other people: he did not seem to know right from wrong. He had always cheated at games; she remembered telling Claude so one day down here at Grote, when he and Jim had been playing croquet and Jim had cheated. But they had not been playing for money. So Claude had told her. And he had told her the cheque was all right. That was all: there was nothing more to be thought of with regard to this.

Yet she still lingered on the threshold of the thought of it. Jim had got “cleaned out” (his own phrase) in the Derby week, had pledged the quarter’s rent of Grote in advance to pay his Derby debts. And somebody had told her that Jim had lost heavily at Newmarket afterward, and he had told her that he had paid and was upright before the world in the matter of debts of honour.

She had passed the threshold of that thought and was inside again. Where had he got the money from? Well, anyhow, not by forgery. Claude had said that the mistake was his. But how odd that he should not have been able to recollect about a cheque for five hundred pounds, drawn only ten days before!

Dora still lingered in the precincts of that thought, though she beckoned, so to speak, another thought to distract her. What a wonderful thing, how triumphant and beautiful was the love of which she had seen a glimpse to-day! It was all the more wonderful because it seemed to be common, to be concerned with biscuits and coffee. A hundred times she had seen Lady Osborne wrapped up in such infinitesimal cares as these, and had thought only that her mind and her soul were altogether concerned with serving, that the provision for the comfortable house and the good dinner was aspiration sufficient for her spiritual capacity. Yet there had always been a little more than that: there had been the moment in church when the sermon was to her taste, and the hymn a favourite, and she and her husband had tunelessly sung out of one book. That had touched Dora a little, but she had then dismissed it as a banal affair of goody-goody combined with a melodious tune, when she saw the great lunch that they both ate immediately afterward.

But now these details, these Martha-cares had taken a different value. This morning Lady Osborne had been in great pain, had broken down in her endeavour to carry on somehow, and was face to face with a medical interview which she dreaded. But still she could think with meticulous care of her husband’s milk, of his slippers, of his tendency toward strong coffee. What if below the Martha was Mary, if it was Mary’s love that made Martha so sedulous in serving?