Page 430 - lady-chatterlys-lover

mummy tangled in its own bandages. Look at him!’
But hysteria is dangerous: and she was a nurse, it was her
duty to pull him out. Any attempt to rouse his manhood
and his pride would only make him worse: for his manhood
was dead, temporarily if not finally. He would only squirm
softer and softer, like a worm, and become more dislocated.
The only thing was to release his self-pity. Like the lady
in Tennyson, he must weep or he must die.
So Mrs Bolton began to weep first. She covered her face
with her hand and burst into little wild sobs. ‘I would never
have believed it of her ladyship, I wouldn’t!’ she wept, sud-
denly summoning up all her old grief and sense of woe,
and weeping the tears of her own bitter chagrin. Once she
started, her weeping was genuine enough, for she had had
something to weep for.
Clifford thought of the way he had been betrayed by the
woman Connie, and in a contagion of grief, tears filled his
eyes and began to run down his cheeks. He was weeping for
himself. Mrs Bolton, as soon as she saw the tears running
over his blank face, hastily wiped her own wet cheeks on her
little handkerchief, and leaned towards him.
’Now, don’t you fret, Sir Clifford!’ she said, in a luxury of
emotion. ‘Now, don’t you fret, don’t, you’ll only do yourself
an injury!’
His body shivered suddenly in an indrawn breath of si-
lent sobbing, and the tears ran quicker down his face. She
laid her hand on his arm, and her own tears fell again. Again
the shiver went through him, like a convulsion, and she laid
her arm round his shoulder. ‘There, there! There, there!