The Angel of Pain. Benson Edward Frederic
to spend a couple of nights in the New Forest with the Hermit, but when this engagement was again remembered by him, it seemed to him at first impossible to go. What he had learned in this last hour was a thing so staggering that he felt as if all the affairs of life, social intercourse, the discussion of this subject or of that, as if any subject but one contained even the germ or protoplasm of importance, had become impossible. But go or stay, everything was impossible except to win Madge’s love. Then another impossibility, bigger perhaps than any, made its appearance, for the most impossible thing of all was to be alone, anything was more endurable than that; and side by side with that rose another, namely, the impossibility of keeping his knowledge to himself. He must, he felt, tell somebody, and of all people in the world the Hermit was the person whom it would be most easy to tell.
Then a sort of pale image of Philip came into his mind. He was conscious of no disloyalty to him, because he was incapable of thinking of him at all, except as of somebody, a vague somebody, who dwelt among the shadows outside the light. Mrs. Home was no more, nobody was anything more than a dweller in these shadows. Nor, indeed, had he been able to think of Philip directly, concentratedly, would he have accused himself of disloyalty; either Madge would never love himself, in which case no harm was done to anyone, or she would do so, in which case her marriage with Philip was an impossibility – an impossibility, too, the existence of which had better be found out before it was legally confirmed. Yet all this but quivered through his mind and was gone again, he caught but as passing a glimpse of the world of life and conduct as he caught of the stations that his train thundered through in its westerly course; they but brushed by his inward eye, and had passed before they had ever been focussed or seen with anything like clearness.
The Hermit had once told him, it may be remembered, that he wanted deepening, and Evelyn on that occasion had enunciated the general principle that he had no use for deeps, the surface being sufficient for his needs. And even now, though his egotism was so all-embracing, it was in no sense whatever profound. He did not probe himself, it was of the glittering surface alone on which shone this sun of love that he was conscious. Deeps, perhaps, might lie beneath, but they were unexplored; life like a pleasure boat with shallow-dipping oars went gaily across him. Indeed it was probable that before the depth – if depths were there – could be sounded the sun, so to speak, would have to go in, for with that dazzle on the water it was impossible to see what lay below.
Tom Merivale’s cottage, which had begun life as two cottages, stood very solitary some mile or two outside Brockenhurst, and though the high road passed within a few hundred yards of it, it was impossible to conceive a place that more partook of the essential nature of a hermitage. Between it and the high road lay a field, with only a rough track across it; beyond that, and nearer to the house, an orchard, while a huge box-hedge, compact and homogeneous with the growth and careful clipping of many years, was to any who wished to be shut off from the outer world a bar as impenetrable as a ring of fire. Immediately beyond this stood the cottage itself, looking away from the road; in front a strip of garden led down to the little river Fawn, and across the river lay a great open expanse of heath, through which, like a wedge, came down a big triangular wood of beech-trees. It was this way, over the garden and the open forest, that the cottage looked; not a house of any kind was in sight, and one might watch, like a ship-wrecked mariner for a sail, for any sign of human life, and yet in a long summer day perhaps the watcher would see nothing to tell him that he was not alone as far as humankind went in this woodland world. Tom had built out a long deep verandah that ran the whole length of the cottage on the garden front; brick pillars at the two corners supported a wooden roof, and a couple of steps led down into the garden. Down the centre of that ran a pergola, over which climbed in tangled luxuriance the long-limbed tribes of climbing roses. Ramblers spilt their crimson clusters over it, or lay in streaks and balls of white and yellow foam, while carmine pillar seemed to struggle in their embrace, and honeysuckle cast loving tendrils round them both and kissed them promiscuously. And though a gardener might have deplored this untended riot of vegetation, yet even the most orderly of his fraternity could not have failed to admire. Nature and this fruitful soil and the warm, soft air to which frost was a stranger, had taken matters into their own hands, and the result, though as fortuitous apparently as the splashed glories of a sunset, had yet a sunset’s lavishness and generosity of colour. On each side of this pergola lay a small lawn of well-tended turf, and a shrubbery on one side of lilacs and syringa and on the other a tall brick wall with a deep garden bed below it gave a fragrant frame to the whole. The Hermit’s avowal, indeed, that for the last year he had done nothing except carpentering and gardening implied a good deal of the latter, for the turf, as has been stated, was beautifully rolled and cut, and the beds showed evidence of seed-time and weeding, and had that indefinable but unmistakable air of being zealously cared for. But since such operations were concerned with plants, no principle was broken.
Evelyn arrived here soon after six, and found himself in undisturbed possession. Mr. Merivale, so said his servant, had gone off soon after breakfast that morning and had not yet returned. His guest, however, had been expected, and he himself would be sure to be in before long. Indeed in a few minutes his cry of welcome to Evelyn sounded from the lower end of the garden, and he left his long chair in the verandah and went down through the pergola to meet him.
“Ah, my dear fellow,” said Tom, “it is delightful to see you. You have come from London, have you not, where there are so many people and so few things. I have been thinking about London, and you have no idea how remote it seems. And how is the picture getting on – Miss Ellington’s, I mean?”
Evelyn looked at him with his direct, luminous gaze. Though he had come down here with the object of telling his friend what had happened, he found that at this first moment of meeting him, he was incapable of making his tongue go on its errand.
“Ah, the portrait,” he said; “it really is getting on well. Up to this morning, at any rate, I have put there what I have meant to put there, and, which is rarer with me, I have not put there anything which I did not mean. Do you see how vastly more important that is?”
The Hermit had passed his day in the open merely in shirt and trousers, but his coat was lying in a hammock slung between two pillars of the pergola, and he put it on.
“Why, of course,” he said, “a thing which ought not to be there poisons the rest; anything put in which should be left out sets the whole thing jarring. That’s exactly why I left the world you live in. There was so much that shouldn’t have been there, from my point of view at least.”
Evelyn laughed.
“But if we all left out all that each of us thinks shouldn’t be there, there would be precious little left in the world,” he said. “For instance, I should leave out Lady Ellington without the slightest question.”
He paused a moment.
“And when the portrait is finished she, no doubt, would leave out me,” he added, with charming candour.
“Quite so,” said Merivale; “and since I, not being an uncontrolled despot, could not ‘leave out’ people, which I suppose is a soft way of saying terminate their existence, I went away instead to a place where they were naturally left out, where for me their existence was terminated. It is all part of the simplifying process.”
They had established themselves in the verandah again, where a silent-footed man was laying the table for dinner; and it struck Evelyn for the moment as an inconsistency that the tablecloth should be so fine and the silver so resplendent.
“But in your simplification,” said Evelyn, indicating the table, “you don’t leave out that sort of thing.”
“No, because if I once opened the question of whether I should live on the bare necessities of life, or allow myself, so to speak, a little dripping on my bread, the rest of my life would be spent in settling infinitesimal points which I really don’t think much matter. I could no doubt sell my silver and realize a few hundred pounds, and give that away. But I don’t think it matters much.”
“All the same, it is inconsistent.”
“In details that does not seem to me to matter either,” said Merivale. “For instance, I don’t eat meat partly because I think that it is better not to take life if you can avoid it. But when a midge settles on