The Essential E. F. Benson: 53+ Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
some day he and she would live on some golden sunlit island together. She remembered it all now.
Her mind came back to the center again, and started off anew on that splendid deed of the morning. She had quite lost her head when she called out, "No, Hughie, not you!" It must have been Hugh to do it, no one else could have done it. The idea of Berts or Seymour wrestling with and overcoming that mountainous and maddened sea was unthinkable. Only Hugh could have done it, and the deed was as much part of him as his brown eyes or his white strong teeth. And if at the end the sea had flung him down and broken him, that was after he had laughed at the peril and snatched its prey out of its very jaws! Even as things were now with him, Nadine could not regret what he had done, and if time had run back, and she saw him again plunging into that riot and turmoil, she felt that she would not now cry out to him like that. She would have called Godspeed to him instead.
Once again her mind rippled away from its center. She had called out to Seymour or Berts to go. At the time it had been quite instinctive, but she saw now what had prompted her instinct. She meant—though then she did not know she meant it—that she could spare any one but Hugh. That was what it came to, and she wondered if Hugh had understood that. Seymour without doubt must have done so: he was so clever. Probably he would tell her he understood, and ask her if it was not that which was implied. But all such consideration seemed to her to matter very little. There was only one thing that mattered, and that was not whether Hugh lived or died even, but simply the fact of Hugh.
Her mother had telegraphed that she was coming at once; and Nadine remembering that she had not told the servants got up and rang the bell. But before it was answered there came an interruption for which she had been waiting. One of the two nurses whom the surgeon from Chester had brought with him knocked at the door. She had been tidying up, and removing all traces of what had been done.
"The room is neat again now," she said, "and you may come and just look at him."
"Is he conscious or in pain?" asked Nadine.
"No; but he may regain consciousness at any time, but I don't think he will have any pain."
They went together up the long silent passages in which there hung that curious hush which settles down on a house when death is hovering by it, and came to his door which stood ajar. Then from some sudden qualm and weakness of flesh, Nadine halted, shrinking from entering.
"Do not come unless you feel up to it," said Nurse Bryerley. "But there is nothing that will shock you."
Nadine hesitated no more, but entered.
They had carried him not to his own room, but to another with a dressing-room adjoining. His bed stood along the wall to the left of the door, and he lay on his back with his head a little sideways towards it. There was nothing in the room that suggested illness, and when Nadine looked at his face there was nothing there that suggested it either. His eyes were closed, but his face was as untroubled as that of some quiet sleeper. In the wall opposite were the western-looking windows and the room was lit only by that fast-fading splendor. The cloud-island still hung in the sky, but it had turned gray as the light left it.
Then even as Nadine looked at him, his eyes opened and he saw her.
"Nadine," he said.
The nurse stepped to the bedside.
"Ah, you are awake again," she said. "How do you feel?"
"Rather tired. But I want to speak to Nadine."
"Yes, you can speak to her," she said and signed to the girl to come.
Nadine came across the room to him, and knelt down.
"Oh, Hughie," she said, "well done!"
He looked at her, puzzled for the moment, with troubled eyes.
"You said that before," he said. "It was the last thing you said. Why did you—oh, I remember now. Yes, what a bang I came! How's the little fellow, the one on my back?"
"Quite unhurt, Hughie. He is asleep."
"I thought he wouldn't be hurt. It was the best plan I could think of. I say, why did you call to me not to go at first? I had to."
"I know now you had to," said she.
"I want to ask you something else. How badly am I hurt?"
Nadine looked up at the nurse a moment, who nodded to her. She understood exactly what that meant.
"You are very badly hurt, dear Hughie," she said; "But—but it is worth it fifty times over."
Hugh was silent a moment.
"Am I going to die?" he asked.
Nadine did not need instruction about this.
"No, a thousand times, no!" she said. "You're going to get quite well. But you must be patient and rest and sleep."
Nadine's throat grew suddenly small and aching, and she could not find her voice for a moment.
"You are quite certainly going to live," she said. "To begin with, I can't spare you!"
Hugh's eyelids fluttered and quivered.
"By Jove!" he said, and next moment they had quite closed.
The nurse signed to Nadine to get up and she rose very softly and tiptoed away. At the door she looked round once at Hugh, but already he was asleep. Then still softly she came back and kissed him on the forehead and was gone again.
She had been with him but a couple of minutes, but as she went back to her room, she heard the stir of arrivals in the hall, and went down. Dodo had that moment arrived.
"Nadine, my dear," she said, "I started the moment I got your telegram. Tell me all you can. How is he? How did it happen? You only said he had had a bad accident, and wanted me."
Nadine kissed her.
"Oh! Mama," she said. "Thank God it wasn't an accident. It was done on purpose. He meant it just like that. But you don't know anything; I forgot. Will you come to my room?"
"Yes, let us go. Now tell me at once."
"We have had a frightful gale," she said, "and this morning Hughie saw a fishing-boat close in land, driving on to the reef. There was just one shrimp of a boy on it, and Hughie went straight in, like a duck to water, and got him off and swam back with him. There was a rope and Seymour and Berts pulled him in. And when they got close in, Hughie put the boy on his back—oh, Mama, thank God for men like that!—and the breakers banged him down on the beach, and the boy was unhurt. And Hughie may die very soon, or he may live—"
Nadine's voice choked for a moment. All day she had not felt a sob rise in her throat.
"And if he lives," she said, "he may never be able to walk again, and I love him."
Then came the tempest of tears, tears of joy and sorrow, a storm of them, fruitful as autumn rain, fruitful as the sudden deluges of April, with God-knows-what warmth of sun behind. The drought of summer in her, the ice of winter in her had been broken up in the rain that makes the growth and the life of the world. The frozen ground melted under it, the soil, cracked with drought, drank it in: the parody of life that she had lived became but the farce that preceded sweet serious drama, tragedy it might be, but something human.... And Dodo, woman also, understood that: she too had lived years that parodied herself, and knew what the awakening to womanhood was, and the immensity of that unsuspected kingdom. It had come late to her, to Nadine early: some were almost born in consciousness of their birthright, others died without realizing it. So, mother and daughter, they sat there in silence, while Nadine wept her fill.
"It was the splendidest adventure," she said at length, lifting her head. "It was all so gay. He shouted to that little boy in the boat to encourage him to cling on, and oh, those damned reefs were so close. And when they rode in, Hughie like a horse with a child on his back over that—that precipice, he said something again to encourage him."
Nadine broke down again for a moment.
"Hughie never thought about himself at all," she said.