Tono Bungay

After that the spirit of our relations changed.  The old ease had gone.  She came to me less frequently, and when she came she would have some one with her, usually old Carnaby, and he would do the bulk of the talking.  All through September she was away.  When we were alone together there was a curious constraint.  We became clouds of inexpressible feeling towards one another; we could think of nothing that was not too momentous for words.

Then came the smash of Lord Roberts A, and I found myself with a bandaged face in a bedroom in the Bedley Corner dower-house with Beatrice presiding over an inefficient nurse, Lady Osprey very pink and shocked in the background, and my aunt jealously intervening.

My injuries were much more showy than serious, and I could have been taken to Lady Grove next day, but Beatrice would not permit that, and kept me at Bedley Corner three clear days.  In the afternoon of the second day she became extremely solicitous for the proper aeration of the nurse, packed her off for an hour in a brisk rain, and sat by me alone.

I asked her to marry me.

All the whole I must admit it was not a situation that lent itself to eloquence.  I lay on my back and talked through bandages, and with some little difficulty, for my tongue and mouth had swollen.  But I was feverish and in pain, and the emotional suspense I had been in so long with regard to her became now an unendurable impatience.

“Comfortable?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Shall I read to you?”

“No.  I want to talk.”

“You can’t.  I’d better talk to you.”

“No,” I said, “I want to talk to you.”

She came and stood by my bedside and looked me in the eyes.  “I don’t—­I don’t want you to talk to me,” she said.  “I thought you couldn’t talk.”

“I get few chances—­of you.”

“You’d better not talk.  Don’t talk now.  Let me chatter instead.

You ought not to talk.”

“It isn’t much” I said.

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“I’m not going to be disfigured,” I said.  “Only a scar.”

“Oh!” she said, as if she had expected something quite different.  “Did you think you’d become a sort of gargoyle?”

“L’Homme qui Rit!—­I didn’t know.  But that’s all right.  Jolly flowers those are!”

“Michaelmas daisies,” she said.  “I’m glad you’r not disfigured, and those are perennial sunflowers.  Do you know no flowers at all?  When I saw you on the ground I certainly thought you were dead.  You ought to have been, by all the rules of the game.”

She said some other things, but I was thinking of my next move.

“Are we social equals?” I said abruptly.

She stared at me.  “Queer question,” she said.

“But are we?”

“H’m.  Difficult to say.  But why do you ask?  Is the daughter of a courtesy Baron who died—­of general disreputableness, I believe—­before his father—?  I give it up.  Does it matter?”

“No.  My mind is confused.  I want to know if you will marry me.”

She whitened and said nothing.  I suddenly felt I must plead with her.  “Damn these bandages!” I said, breaking into ineffectual febrile rage.

She roused herself to her duties as nurse.  “What are you doing?  Why are you trying to sit up?  Sit down!  Don’t touch your bandages.  I told you not to talk.”

She stood helpless for a moment, then took me firmly by the shoulders and pushed me back upon the pillow.  She gripped the wrist of the hand I had raised to my face.

“I told you not to talk,” she whispered close to my face.  “I asked you not to talk.  Why couldn’t you do as I asked you?”

“You’ve been avoiding me for a month,” I said.

“I know.  You might have known.  Put your hand back—­down by your side.”

I obeyed.  She sat on the edge of the bed.  A flush had come to her cheeks, and her eyes were very bright.  “I asked you,” she repeated, “not to talk.”

My eyes questioned her mutely.

She put her hand on my chest.  Her eyes were tormented.

“How can I answer you now?” she said.

“How can I say anything now?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She made no answer.

“Do you mean it must be ’No’?”

She nodded.

“But” I said, and my whole soul was full of accusations.

“I know,” she said.  “I can’t explain.  I can’t.  But it has to be ‘No!’ It can’t be.  It’s utterly, finally, for ever impossible….  Keep your hands still!”

“But,” I said, “when we met again—­”

“I can’t marry.  I can’t and won’t.”

She stood up.  “Why did you talk?” she cried, “couldn’t you see?”

She seemed to have something it was impossible to say.

She came to the table beside my bed and pulled the Michaelmas daisies awry.  “Why did you talk like that?” she said in a tone of infinite bitterness.  “To begin like that!”

“But what is it?” I said.  “Is it some circumstance—­my social position?”

“Oh, damn your social position!” she cried.

She went and stood at the further window, staring out at the rain.  For a long time we were absolutely still.  The wind and rain came in little gusts upon the pane.  She turned to me abruptly.

“You didn’t ask me if I loved you,” she said.

“Oh, if it’s that!” said I.

“It’s not that,” she said.  “But if you want to know—­” She paused.

“I do,” she said.

We stared at one another.

“I do—­with all my heart, if you want to know.”

“Then, why the devil—?” I asked.

She made no answer.  She walked across the room to the piano and began to play, rather noisily and rapidly, with odd gusts of emphasis, the shepherd’s pipe music from the last act in “Tristan and Isolde.”  Presently she missed a note, failed again, ran her finger heavily up the scale, struck the piano passionately with her fist, making a feeble jar in the treble, jumped up, and went out of the room….

The nurse found me still wearing my helmet of bandages, partially dressed, and pottering round the room to find the rest of my clothes.  I was in a state of exasperated hunger for Beatrice, and I was too inflamed and weakened to conceal the state of my mind.  I was feebly angry because of the irritation of dressing, and particularly of the struggle to put on my trousers without being able to see my legs.  I was staggering about, and once I had fallen over a chair and I had upset the jar of Michaelmas daisies.

I must have been a detestable spectacle.  “I’ll go back to bed,” said I, “if I may have a word with Miss Beatrice.  I’ve got something to say to her.  That’s why I’m dressing.”

My point was conceded, but there were long delays.  Whether the household had my ultimatum or whether she told Beatrice directly I do not know, and what Lady Osprey can have made of it in the former case I don’t imagine.

At last Beatrice came and stood by my bedside.  “Well?” she said.

“All I want to say,” I said with the querulous note of a misunderstood child, “is that I can’t take this as final.  I want to see you and talk when I’m better, and write.  I can’t do anything now.  I can’t argue.”

I was overtaken with self-pity and began to snivel, “I can’t rest.  You see?  I can’t do anything.”

She sat down beside me again and spoke softly.  “I promise I will talk it all over with you again.  When you are well.  I promise I will meet you somewhere so that we can talk.  You can’t talk now.

I asked you not to talk now.  All you want to know you shall know…  Will that do?”

“I’d like to know”

She looked round to see the door was closed, stood up and went to it.

Then she crouched beside me and began whispering very softly and rapidly with her face close to me.

“Dear,” she said, “I love you.  If it will make you happy to marry me, I will marry you.  I was in a mood just now—­a stupid, inconsiderate mood.  Of course I will marry you.  You are my prince, my king.  Women are such things of mood—­or I would have behaved differently.  We say ‘No’ when we mean ’Yes’—­and fly into crises.  So now, Yes—­yes—­yes.  I will.  I can’t even kiss you.  Give me your hand to kiss that.  Understand, I am yours.  Do you understand?  I am yours just as if we had been married fifty years.  Your wife—­Beatrice.  Is that enough?  Now—­now will you rest?”

“Yes,” I said, “but why?”

“There are complications.  There are difficulties.  When you are better you will be able to—­understand them.  But now they don’t matter.  Only you know this must be secret—­for a time.  Absolutely secret between us.  Will you promise that?”

“Yes,” I said, “I understand.  I wish I could kiss you.”

She laid her head down beside mine for a moment and then she kissed my hand.

“I don’t care what difficulties there are,” I said, and I shut my eyes.