"Little Anna Alexievna!" he said, "you were too clean for him."16
Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from all this foreign travel meekly, pensively, a little sadly, and yet not without a kind of relief, to the grey mildness of Trinity.He saw him, capped and gowned, and restored to academic dignity again, nodding greetings, resuming friendships.
The little man merged again into his rare company of discreet Benedicts and restrained celibates at the high tables.They ate on in their mature wisdom long after the undergraduates had fled.
Presently they would withdraw processionally to the combination room....
There would be much to talk about over the wine.
Benham speculated what account Prothero would give of Moscow....
He laughed abruptly.
And with that laugh Prothero dropped out of Benham's world for a space of years.There may have been other letters, but if so they were lost in the heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-office.Perhaps to this day they linger sere and yellow in some forgotten pigeon-hole in Kishinev or Ekaterinoslav....
17
In November, after an adventure in the trader's quarter of Kieff which had brought him within an inch of death, and because an emotional wave had swept across him and across his correspondence with Amanda, Benham went back suddenly to England and her.He wanted very greatly to see her and also he wanted to make certain arrangements about his property.He returned by way of Hungary, and sent telegrams like shouts of excitement whenever the train stopped for a sufficient time."Old Leopard, I am coming, I am coming," he telegraphed, announcing his coming for the fourth time.It was to be the briefest of visits, very passionate, the mutual refreshment of two noble lovers, and then he was returning to Russia again.
Amanda was at Chexington, and there he found her installed in the utmost dignity of expectant maternity.Like many other people he had been a little disposed to regard the bearing of children as a common human experience; at Chexington he came to think of it as a rare and sacramental function.Amanda had become very beautiful in quiet, grey, dove-like tones; her sun-touched, boy's complexion had given way to a soft glow of the utmost loveliness, her brisk little neck that had always reminded him of the stalk of a flower was now softened and rounded; her eyes were tender, and she moved about the place in the manner of one who is vowed to a great sacrifice.She dominated the scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her eyes and a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-sympathetic, half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's unparalleled immolation.The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere, and at his bedside he found--it had been put there for him by Amanda--among much other exaltation of woman's mission, that most wonderful of all philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's CRYSTAL AGE.
Everybody at Chexington had an air of being grouped about the impending fact.An epidemic of internal troubles, it is true, kept Sir Godfrey in the depths of London society, but to make up for his absence Mrs.Morris had taken a little cottage down by the river and the Wilder girls were with her, both afire with fine and subtle feelings and both, it seemed, and more particularly Betty, prepared to be keenly critical of Benham's attitude.
He did a little miss his cue in these exaltations, because he had returned in a rather different vein of exaltation.
In missing it he was assisted by Amanda herself, who had at moments an effect upon him of a priestess confidentially disrobed.It was as if she put aside for him something official, something sincerely maintained, necessary, but at times a little irksome.It was as if she was glad to take him into her confidence and unbend.Within the pre-natal Amanda an impish Amanda still lingered.
There were aspects of Amanda that it was manifest dear Betty must never know....
But the real Amanda of that November visit even in her most unpontifical moods did not quite come up to the imagined Amanda who had drawn him home across Europe.At times she was extraordinarily jolly.They had two or three happy walks about the Chexington woods; that year the golden weather of October had flowed over into November, and except for a carpet of green and gold under the horse-chestnuts most of the leaves were still on the trees.Gleams of her old wanton humour shone on him.And then would come something else, something like a shadow across the world, something he had quite forgotten since his idea of heroic love had flooded him, something that reminded him of those long explanations with Mr.Rathbone-Sanders that had never been explained, and of the curate in the doorway of the cottage and his unaccountable tears.
On the afternoon of his arrival at Chexington he was a little surprised to find Sir Philip Easton coming through the house into the garden, with an accustomed familiarity.Sir Philip perceived him with a start that was instantly controlled, and greeted him with unnatural ease.
Sir Philip, it seemed, was fishing and reading and playing cricket in the neighbourhood, which struck Benham as a poor way of spending the summer, the sort of soft holiday a man learns to take from scholars and literary men.A man like Sir Philip, he thought, ought to have been aviating or travelling.
Moreover, when Sir Philip greeted Amanda it seemed to Benham that there was a flavour of established association in their manner.But then Sir Philip was also very assiduous with Lady Marayne.She called him "Pip," and afterwards Amanda called across the tennis-court to him, "Pip!" And then he called her "Amanda." When the Wilder girls came up to join the tennis he was just as brotherly....
The next day he came to lunch.
During that meal Benham became more aware than he had ever been before of the peculiar deep expressiveness of this young man's eyes.
