The Angel of Pain. Benson Edward Frederic

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 my hand and bites me, if possible I kill it.”

      “Well, anyhow your inconsistencies make up a very charming whole,” said the other, looking round. “It is all charming.”

      “I’m glad, and you think you can pass a day or two here without missing the – the complications you live among? I wish Philip could have come down, too; but he is buried in work, it appears, and we know how his leisure is occupied just now.”

      Evelyn moved suddenly in his chair.

      “Ah, do you know, I am rather glad Philip isn’t here,” he said. “I don’t think – ” and he broke off again. “And as soon as I’ve finished this portrait, I’m going to do his,” he added.

      He was silent a moment, feeling somehow that he never would do Philip’s portrait. He would not be able to see him, he would not be able to paint him; something, no shadow, but something so bright would stand between him and the canvas that he would be unable to see beyond or through it.

      But Merivale did not seem to notice the check. His eyes were looking out over the glowing garden, where all colours were turned to flame in the almost level rays of the sun as it drew near to its setting. The wall behind the deep garden bed glowed as if the bricks themselves were luminous, light seemed to exude from the grass, the flowers were bells and cups of fire.

      “Ah, this is the best moment of all the day,” he said, “when sunset comes like this. The whole of the sunshine of the hours seem distilled into it, it is the very essence of light.”

      He rose from his chair, and went to the edge of the verandah, stretching his arms wide and breathing deeply of the warm, fragrant air. Then he turned again to his companion.

      “That, too, I hope is what death will be like,” he said. “All the sunlight of life will be concentrated into that moment, until one’s mere body can hold no more of the glow that impregnates it, and is shattered. Look at those clusters of rambler; a little more and they must burst with the colour.”

      Evelyn got up too.

      “Don’t be so uncomfortable, Tom,” he cried, in a sort of boyish petulance. “I could go mad when I think of death. It is horrible, frightening. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to get old. I want to be young always, to feel as I feel to-day, and never a jot less keenly. That’s what you must tell me while I am here; how am I to remain young? You seem to have solved it; you are much younger than when I knew you first.”

      Tom laughed.

      “And another proof of my youth is that I feel as I do about death,” he said. “The more you are conscious of your own life, the more absurd the notion that one can die becomes. Why, even one’s body won’t die; it will make life, it will be grass on one’s grave, just as the dead leaves that fall from the tree make the leaf-mould which feeds that tree or another tree or the grass. It doesn’t in the least matter which, it is all one, it is all life.”

      Evelyn shivered slightly.

      “Yes, quite true, and not the least consoling,” he said; “for what is the use of being alive if one loses one’s individuality? It doesn’t make death the least less terrible to me, even if I know that I am going to become a piece of groundsel and be pecked at by your canary. I don’t want to be groundsel, I don’t want to be pecked at, and I don’t want to become your canary. Great heavens, fancy being a bit of a canary!”

      “Ah, but only your body,” said the other.

      Evelyn СКАЧАТЬ