“Have you got any right to behave like that to me, Michael?” she asked. “What have I done that you should treat me quite like that?”
He looked at her, completely recalled in mind to her alone. All the hopes and desires of the autumn smote him with encompassing blows.
“Yes, every right,” he said. “I wasn’t heeding you. I only thought of my mother, and the fact that there was a very dear friend by me. And then I came to myself: I remembered who the friend was.”
They stood there in silence, apart, for a moment. Then Michael came closer. The desire for human sympathy, and that the sympathy he most longed for, gripped him again.
“I’m a brute,” he said. “It was awfully nice of you to--to offer me that. I accept it so gladly. I’m wretchedly anxious.”
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 grass. 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.”
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.