Michael Part 31

He looked up at her.

"Take my arm again," he said.

She felt the crook of his elbow tighten again on her wrist. She had not known before how much she prized that.

"But are you sure you are right in being anxious, Mike?" she asked.

"Isn't it perhaps your own tired nerves that make you anxious?"

"I don't think so," he said. "I've been tired a long time, you see, and I never felt about my mother like this. She has been so bright and content all day, and yet there were little lapses, if you understand.

It was as if she knew: she said good-bye to the lake and the jolly moor-hens and the gra.s.s. And her nurse thinks so, too. She called me out of the room just now to tell me that. . . . I don't know why I should tell you these depressing things."

"Don't you?" she asked. "But I do. It's because you know I care.

Otherwise you wouldn't tell me: you couldn't."

For a moment the balance quavered in his mind between Sylvia the beloved and Sylvia the friend. It inclined to the friend.

"Yes, that's why," he said. "And I reproach myself, you know. All these years I might, if I had tried harder, have been something to my mother.

I might have managed it. I thought--at least I felt--that she didn't encourage me. But I was a beast to have been discouraged. And now her wanting me has come just when it isn't her unclouded self that wants me.

It's as if--as if it had been raining all day, and just on sunset there comes a gleam in the west. And so soon after it's night."

"You made the gleam," said Sylvia.

"But so late; so awfully late."

Suddenly he stood stiff, listening to some sound which at present she did not hear. It sounded a little louder, and her ears caught the running of footsteps on the stairs outside. Next moment the door opened, and Lady Ashbridge's maid put in a pale face.

"Will you go to her ladyship, my lord?" she said. "Her nurse wants you.

She told me to telephone to Sir James."

Sylvia moved with him, not disengaging her arm, towards the door.

"Michael, may I wait?" she said. "You might want me, you know. Please let me wait."

Lady Ashbridge's room was on the floor above, and Michael ran up the intervening stairs three at a time. He knocked and entered and wondered why he had been sent for, for she was sitting quietly on her sofa near the window. But he noticed that Nurse Baker stood very close to her.

Otherwise there was nothing that was in any way out of the ordinary.

"And here he is," said the nurse rea.s.suringly as he entered.

Lady Ashbridge turned towards the door as Michael came in, and when he met her eyes he knew why he had been sent for, why at this moment Sir James was being summoned. For she looked at him not with the clouded eyes of affection, not with the mother-spirit striving to break through the shrouding trouble of her brain, but with eyes of blank non-recognition. She saw him with the bodily organs of her vision, but the picture of him was conveyed no further: there was a blank wall behind her eyes.

Michael did not hesitate. It was possible that he still might be something to her, that he, his presence, might penetrate.

"But you are not resting, mother," he said. "Why are you sitting up? I came to talk to you, as I said I would, while you rested."

Suddenly into those blank, irresponsive eyes there leaped recognition.

He saw the pupils contract as they focused themselves on him, and hand in hand with recognition there leaped into them hate. Instantly that was veiled again. But it had been there, and now it was not banished; it lurked behind in the shadows, crouching and waiting.

She answered him at once, but in a voice that was quite toneless. It seemed like that of a child repeating a lesson which it had learned by heart, and could be p.r.o.nounced while it was thinking of something quite different.

"I was waiting till you came, my dear," she said. "Now I will lie down.

Come and sit by me, Michael."

She watched him narrowly while she spoke, then gave a quick glance at her nurse, as if to see that they were not making signals to each other.

There was an easy chair just behind her head, and as Michael wheeled it up near her sofa, he looked at the nurse. She moved her hand slightly towards the left, and interpreting this, he moved the chair a little to the left, so that he would not sit, as he had intended, quite close to the sofa.

"And you enjoyed your day in the country, mother?" asked Michael.

She looked at him sideways and slowly. Then again, as if recollecting a task she had committed to memory, she answered.

"Yes, so much," she said. "All the trees and the birds and the sunshine.

I enjoyed them so much."

She paused a moment.

"Bring your chair a little closer, my darling," she said. "You are so far off. And why do you wait, nurse? I will call you if I want you."

Michael felt one moment of sickening spiritual terror. He understood quite plainly why Nurse Baker did not want him to go near to his mother, and the reason of it gave him this pang, not of nervousness but of black horror, that the sane and the sensitive must always feel when they are brought intimately in contact with some blind derangement of instinct in those most nearly allied to them. Physically, on the material plane, he had no fear at all.

He made a movement, grasping the arm of his chair, as if to wheel it closer, but he came actually no nearer her.

"Why don't you go away, nurse?" said Lady Ashbridge, "and leave my son and me to talk about our nice day in the country?"

Nurse Baker answered quite naturally.

"I want to talk, too, my lady," she said. "I went with you and Lord Comber. We all enjoyed it together."

It seemed to Michael that his mother made some violent effort towards self-control. He saw one of her hands that were lying on her knee clench itself, so that the knuckles stood out white.

"Yes, we will all talk together, then," she said. "Or--er--shall I have a little doze first? I am rather sleepy with so much pleasant air. And you are sleepy, too, are you not, Michael? Yes, I see you look sleepy.

Shall we have a little nap, as I often do after tea? Then, when I am fresh again, you shall come back, nurse, and we will talk over our pleasant day."

When he entered the room, Michael had not quite closed the door, and now, as half an hour before, he heard steps on the stairs. A moment afterwards his mother heard them too.

"What is that?" she said. "Who is coming now to disturb me, just when I wanted to have a nap?"

There came a knock at the door. Nurse Baker did not move her head, but continued watching her patient, with hands ready to act.

"Come in," she said, not looking round.

Lady Ashbridge's face was towards the door. As Sir James entered, she suddenly sprang up, and in her right hand that lay beside her was a knife, which she had no doubt taken from the tea-table when she came upstairs. She turned swiftly towards Michael, and stabbed at him with it.

"It's a trap," she cried. "You've led me into a trap. They are going to take me away."

Michael had thrown up his arm to shield his head. The blow fell between shoulder and elbow, and he felt the edge of the knife grate on his bone.

And from deep in his heart sprang the leaping fountains of compa.s.sion and love and yearning pity.