第51章 CHAPTER THE THIRD(7)

Perhaps men only begin to love when they cease to be dazzled and admire.He had thought she might reproach him, he had felt and feared she might set herself to stir his senses, and both these expectations had been unjust to her he saw, now that he saw her beside him, a brave, rather ill-advised and unlucky little struggler, stung and shamed.He forgot the particulars of that first lunch of theirs together and he remembered his mother's second contemptuous "STUFF!"Indeed he knew now it had not been unexpected.Why hadn't he left this little sensitive soul and this little sensitive body alone?

And since he hadn't done so, what right had he now to back out of their common adventure? He felt a sudden wild impulse to marry Mrs.

Skelmersdale, in a mood between remorse and love and self-immolation, and then a sunlit young woman with a leaping stride in her paces, passed across his heavens, pointing to Asia and Utopia and forbidding even another thought of the banns....

"You will kiss me good-bye, dear, won't you?" said Mrs.

Skelmersdale, brimming over."You will do that."He couldn't keep his arm from her little shoulders.And as their lips touched he suddenly found himself weeping also....

His spirit went limping from that interview.She chose to stay behind in her chair and think, she said, and each time he turned back she was sitting in the same attitude looking at him as he receded, and she had one hand on the chair back and her arm drawn up to it.The third time he waved his hat clumsily, and she started and then answered with her hand.Then the trees hid her....

This sex business was a damnable business.If only because it made one hurt women....

He had trampled on Mrs.Skelmersdale, he had hurt and disappointed his mother.Was he a brute? Was he a cold-blooded prig? What was this aristocracy? Was his belief anything more than a theory? Was he only dreaming of a debt to the men in the quarry, to the miners, to the men in the stokeholes, to the drudges on the fields? And while he dreamt he wounded and distressed real living creatures in the sleep-walk of his dreaming....

So long as he stuck to his dream he must at any rate set his face absolutely against the establishment of any further relations with women.

Unless they were women of an entirely different type, women hardened and tempered, who would understand.

9

So Benham was able to convert the unfortunate Mrs.Skelmersdale into a tender but for a long time an entirely painful memory.But mothers are not so easily disposed of, and more particularly a mother whose conduct is coloured deeply by an extraordinary persuasion of having paid for her offspring twice over.Nolan was inexplicable; he was, Benham understood quite clearly, never to be mentioned again; but somehow from the past his shadow and his legacy cast a peculiar and perplexing shadow of undefined obligation upon Benham's outlook.His resolution to go round the world carried on his preparations rapidly and steadily, but at the same time his mother's thwarted and angry bearing produced a torture of remorse in him.It was constantly in his mind, like the suit of the importunate widow, that he ought to devote his life to the little lady's happiness and pride, and his reason told him that even if he wanted to make this sacrifice he couldn't; the mere act of making it would produce so entirely catastrophic a revulsion.He could as soon have become a croquet champion or the curate of Chexington church, lines of endeavour which for him would have led straightly and simply to sacrilegious scandal or manslaughter with a mallet.

There is so little measure in the wild atonements of the young that it was perhaps as well for the Research Magnificent that the remorses of this period of Benham's life were too complicated and scattered for a cumulative effect.In the background of his mind and less subdued than its importance could seem to warrant was his promise to bring the Wilder-Morris people into relations with Lady Marayne.They had been so delightful to him that he felt quite acutely the slight he was putting upon them by this delay.Lady Marayne's moods, however, had been so uncertain that he had found no occasion to broach this trifling matter, and when at last the occasion came he perceived in the same instant the fullest reasons for regretting it.

"Ah!" she said, hanging only for a moment, and then: "you told me you were alone!"...

Her mind leapt at once to the personification of these people as all that had puzzled and baffled her in her son since his flight from London.They were the enemy, they had got hold of him.

"When I asked you if you were alone you pretended to be angry," she remembered with a flash."You said, ‘Do I tell lies?'""I WAS alone.Until-- It was an accident.On my walk I was alone."But he flinched before her accusing, her almost triumphant, forefinger.

From the instant she heard of them she hated these South Harting people unrestrainedly.She made no attempt to conceal it.Her valiant bantam spirit caught at this quarrel as a refuge from the rare and uncongenial ache of his secession."And who are they?

What are they? What sort of people can they be to drag in a passing young man? I suppose this girl of theirs goes out every evening--Was she painted, Poff?"

She whipped him with her questions as though she was slashing his face.He became dead-white and grimly civil, answering every question as though it was the sanest, most justifiable inquiry.

"Of course I don't know who they are.How should I know? What need is there to know?""There are ways of finding out," she insisted."If I am to go down and make myself pleasant to these people because of you.""But I implore you not to."

"And five minutes ago you were imploring me to! Of course I shall.""Oh well!--well!"