Watersprings - Arthur Christopher Benson (short novels to read TXT) 📗

And so he turned and left her, though an unreasonable impulse seized him to take the child in his arms, and tell her how sweet and delicious she was. She had held the little book in her hand as they sate, as if she had hoped he would ask to look at it; and as he closed the door, he saw her put it down on the table with a half-sigh.


XIII


GIVING AWAY

He was to go off the next day; that night he had his last talk to his aunt. She said that she would say good-bye to him then, and that she hoped he would be back in June. She did not seem quite as serene as usual, but she spoke very affectionately and gently of the delight his visit had been. Then she said, "But I somehow feel--I can't give my reasons--as if we had got into a mess here. You are rather a disturbing clement, dear Howard! I may speak plainly to you now, mayn't I? I think you have more effect on people than you know. You have upset us! I am not criticising you, because you have exceeded all my hopes. But you are too diffident, and you don't realise your power of sympathy. You are very observant, very quick to catch the drift of people's moods, and you are not at all formidable. You are so much interested in people that you lead them to reveal themselves and to betray themselves; and they don't find quite what they expect. You are afraid, I think, of caring for people; you want to be in close relation with everyone, and yet to preserve your own tranquillity. You are afraid of emotion; but one can't care for people like that! It doesn't cost you enough! You are like a rich man who can afford to pay for things, and I think you rather pauperise people. Here you have been for three weeks; and nobody here will be able to forget you; and yet I think you may forget us. One can't care without suffering, and I think that you don't suffer. It is all a pleasure and delight to you. You win hearts, and don't give your own. Don't think I am ungrateful. You have made a great difference already to my life; but you have made me suffer too. I know that like Telemachus in Tennyson's poem you will be 'decent not to fail in offices of tenderness'--I know I can depend on you to do everything that is kind and considerate and just. You won't disappoint me. You will do out of a natural kindliness and courtesy what many people can only do by loving. You don't claim things, you don't lay hands on things; and it looks so like unselfishness that it seems detestable of me to say anything. But you will have to give yourself away, and I don't think you have ever done that. I can say all this, my dear, because I love you, as a mother might; you are my son indeed; but there is something in you that will have to be broken; we have all of us to be broken. It isn't that you have anything to repent of. You would take endless trouble to help anyone who wanted help, you would be endlessly patient and tender and strong; but you do not really know what love means, because it does not hurt or wound you. You are like Achilles, was it not, who had been dipped in the river of death, and you are invulnerable. You won't, I know, resent my saying this? I know you won't--and the fact that you will not makes it harder for me to say it--but I almost wish it WOULD wound you, instead of making you think how you can amend it. You can't amend it, but God and love can; only you must dare to let yourself go. You must not be wise and forbearing. There, dear, I won't say more!"

Howard took her hand and kissed it. "Thank you," he said, "thank you a hundred times for speaking so. It is perfectly true, every word of it. It is curious that to-day I have seen myself three times mirrored in other minds. I don't like what I see--I am not complacent--I am not flattered. But I don't know what to do! I feel like a patient with a hopeless disease, who has been listening to a perfectly kind and wise physician. But what can I do? It is just the vital impulse which is lacking. I will be frank too; it is quite true that I live in the surface of things. I am so much interested in books, ideas, thoughts, I am fascinated by the study of human temperament; people delight me, excite me, amuse me; but nothing ever comes inside. I don't excuse myself, but I say: 'It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves.' I am just so, as you have described, and I feel what a hollow-hearted sort of person I am. Yet I go on amusing myself with friendships and interests. I have never suffered, and I have never loved. Well, I would like to change all that, but can I?"

"Ah, dear Howard," said his aunt, "that is the everlasting question. It is like you to take this all so sweetly and to speak so openly. But further than this no one can help you. You are like the young man whom Jesus loved who had great possessions. You do not know how much! I will not tell you to follow Him; and your possessions are not those which can be given away. But you must follow love. I had a hope, I have a hope--oh, it is more than that, because we all find our way sooner or later--and now that you know the truth, as I see you know it, the light will not be long in coming. God bless you, dearest child; there is pain ahead of you; but I don't fear that--pain is not the worst thing or the last thing!"


XIV


BACK TO CAMBRIDGE

"I HAD a hope . . . I have a hope," these words of his aunt's echoed often through Howard's brain, in the wakeful night which followed. Nothing was plain to himself except the fact that things were tangled; the anxious exaltation which came to him from his talk with his aunt cleared off like the dying away of the flush of some beaded liquor. "I must see into this--I must understand what is happening--I must disentangle it," he said again and again to himself. He was painfully conscious, as he thought and thought, of his own deep lack both of moral courage and affection. He liked nothing that was not easy--easy triumph, easy relations. Somehow the threads of life had knotted themselves up; he had slipped so lightly into his place here, he had taken up responsibilities as he might have taken up a flower; he had meant to be what he called frank and affectionate all round, and now he felt that he was going to disappoint everyone. Not till the daylight began to outline the curtain-rifts did he fall asleep; and he woke with that excited fatigue which comes of sleeplessness.

He came down, he breakfasted alone in the early morning freshness. The house was all illumined by the sun, but it spread its beauties in vain before him. The trap came to the door, and when he came out he found to his surprise that Jack was standing on the steps talking to the coachman. "I thought I would like to come to the station with you," said Jack. Howard was pleased at this. They got in together, and one by one the scenes so strangely familiar fled past them. Howard looked long at the Vicarage as he passed, wondering whether Maud was perhaps looking out. That had been a clumsy, stupid business--his talk with her! Presently Jack said, "Look here, I am going to say again that I was perfectly hateful yesterday. I don't know what came over me--I was thinking aloud."

"Oh, it doesn't matter a bit!" said Howard; "it was my fault really. I have mismanaged things, I think; and it is good for me to find that out."

"No, but you haven't," said Jack. "I see it all now. You came down here, and you made friends with everyone. That was all right; the fact simply is that I have been jealous and mean. I expected to have you all to myself--to run you, in fact; and I was vexed at finding you take an interest in all the others. There, it's better out. I am entirely in the wrong. You have been awfully good all round, and we shall be precious dull now that you are going. The truth is that we have been squabbling over you."

"Well, Jack," said Howard, smiling, "it's very good of you to say this. I can't quite accept it, but I am very grateful. There WAS some truth in what you said--but it wasn't quite the whole truth; and anyhow you and I won't squabble--I shouldn't like that!"

Jack nodded and smiled, and they went on to talk of other things; but Howard was pleased to see that the boy hung about him, determined to make up for his temper, looked after his luggage, saw him into the train, and waved him a very ingenuous farewell, with a pretence of tears.

The journey passed in a listless dream for Howard, but everything faded before the thought of Maud. What could he do to make up for his brutality? He could not see his way clear. He had a sense that it was unfair to claim her affection, to sentimentalise; and he thought that he had been doubly wrong--wrong in engaging her interest so quickly, wrong in playing on her unhappiness just for his own enjoyment, and doubly wrong in trying to disengage their relation so roughly. It was a mean business; and yet though he did not want to hold her, he could not bear to let her go.

As he came near Cambridge and in sight of the familiar landscape, the wide fields, the low lines of far-off wolds, he was surprised to find that instead of being depressed, a sense of comfort stole over him, and a feeling of repose. He had crammed too many impressions and emotions into his visit; and now he was going back to well-known and peaceful activities. The sight of his rooms pleased him, and the foregathering with the three or four of his colleagues was a great relief. Mr. Redmayne was incisive and dogmatic, but evidently pleased to see him back. He had not been away, and professed that holidays and change of scene were distracting and exhausting. "It takes me six weeks to recover from a holiday," he said. He had had an old friend to stay with him, a country parson, and he had apparently spent his time in elaborate manoeuvres to see as little of his guest as possible. "A worthy man, but tedious," he said, "wonderfully well preserved--in body, that is; his mind has entirely gone to pieces; he has got some dismal notions in his head about the condition of the agricultural poor; he thinks they want uplifting! Now I am all for the due subordination of classes. The poor are there, if I may speak plainly, to breed--that is their first duty; and their only other duty that I can discover, is to provide for the needs of men of virtue and intelligence!"

Later on, Howard was left alone with him, and thought that it would please the old man to tell him of the change in his