All went well for a few days. And then Ronnie, against my counsel, and also against Rose’s,which usually prevailed, joined a party on a bobsleigh, and was carried into the hotel, an hour later, with a fractured leg and a vast variety of bruises. I let the Fergussons know, assuring them that there was no danger, and together Rose and I, with the assistance of a nurse, got him through. He was fairly patient, but his disappointment was acute, and now and then under his weakness he broke down. More than once I went into the room to find Rose soothing him as though he were a baby. All his dependence came out, to be met by all her tenderness. I had not thought she possessed such hidden stores of it.
I must confess to feeling miserably out in the cold most of the time, for Ronnie, though he was as gay as possible with me, and brave enough under the pain that his dressings inflicted, was happy only with Rose, and I could not fail to see it. And he exacted far too much attention from her. I hardly had any of her company. She could not do this or that because Ronnie might want her; Ronnie would be lonely; she had promised Ronnie to read to him; she had sworn that when he woke up, no matter at what time, he should find her beside him. I admired her sense of duty—and resented it too!
After a fortnight the Fergussons joined us, to supervise their son’s recovery, and Rose and I went home, for she had her school and I my practice; but I was conscious that not all of herwas with me in the train; and Ronnie’s parting from her, I realised, had been too emotional. Suddenly he had kissed her as though his heart was breaking, and she had almost to be torn away.
I have seen so many sick men under the influence of gratitude to their nurses that I did not lay very much stress on this incident; but I could not forget it. I wished, however, that Rose should, and during the journey back I did all that I could to distract her. She was very quiet at first, but gradually became more like herself, and by the time we reached home and she began to prepare for school she seemed usually, at any rate when with me, natural again and free from care. But away from me? And when she was day-dreaming? It was at these times that I realized again and bitterly how finite is our understanding of each other. We live alone! I would have given anything to be able to penetrate her thoughts, and help. But I could not.
Was she in love or merely reflective? Was she looking back or forward? I longed to know, but could not ask.
Mrs. O’Gorman cheered me up. “It’s likely it’s nothing at all,” she said. “Just a passing storm, even if that. Very few of the romances of seventeen persist. I was like that myself: my heart was broken a dozen times before I was Rose’s age, and at eighteen I seriously meditated suicide because my violin teacher was married. It was in Dublin. I remember to this hour thesmell of the Liffey that came up to me as I leaned over Carlisle Bridge one evening coming back from a lesson, and pretended I wanted to drown myself and all my grief. No one could have entered such water as that! And ten days later I had forgotten all about the fiddler, and was inventing a novel with me the heroine and the hero an actor at the theatre that week, who didn’t even know of my existence. Maybe Rose will be like that. Don’t worry.”
Rose had only two more terms, and as she spent most of the Easter holidays with a school-fellow, she did not meet Ronnie. During the few days she was with me she seemed to be heart-whole; certainly there was no suggestion of blighted affection, for her spirits were of the highest. So Mrs. O’Gorman, I assumed, was right again.
It was just before Rose’s return from school for ever, in the summer, that I had an unexpected visit from Mrs. Stratton, in the character of the solicitous aunt. She arrived in the forenoon, and while doing justice to lunch unfolded her purpose. Briefly it was to renew the attack begun eleven years earlier, only now with perhaps more reasonableness.
My unpardonable offence was still the same—celibacy, but it had assumed an increased gravity. To be a bachelor of thirty-four in charge of achild of seven was deplorable enough; but to be a bachelor of forty-five in charge of a girl of eighteen was heinous. It was thus that her nasty mind worked. And not only hers but, she assured me, countless other persons’. In fact, I gathered from her remarks that the unsuitability of my household was the only theme with which, in a few days’ time, the world would be occupied.
“This morbid interest in my affairs is very disgusting,” I said.
Mrs. Stratton admitted it; but how could I deny that some handle was being given? “You two alone here.”
“Well, I do deny it, absolutely,” I said. “Don’t you all know the conditions of the will? Don’t you know that Rose is in my care until she is twenty—that is to say, for two more years—entrusted to me by her father, to act as a father in his place? It is monstrous to suggest that I am not worthy of that confidence.”
“But I am not suggesting that,” Mrs. Stratton replied indignantly.
“Of course you are,” I said. “The mere fact that you come here and put these ideas into my head is tantamount to a charge, an indictment.”
“I don’t mean that,” she protested.
“It doesn’t matter whether you mean it or not: the effect is the same. By bringing your indecent suspicions here you are hoping to make it impossible for me any more to be natural with this girl.”
“No, no!”
“Yes, yes,” I replied. “Excuse me if I speak with plainness, but I feel strongly about it. It is abominable. Don’t you believe that decent living and pure affection are possible in this world?”
“I am sure they are, but I am troubled about my niece’s—my brother’s only child’s—good name.”
I thanked her sarcastically for the compliment. I was conscious that I was being rude, but I could not control myself. There are some persons who always draw out our inferior qualities, just as the companionship of others can increase the value of our character by fifty per cent. Mrs. Stratton invariably evoked my worst side. Any fine edge that I possessed was blunted when we were together.
“It is what people may think and say that is so disturbing to me,” she explained. “You know how they talk.”
“I am learning,” I said. “But anyone over thirty-five should have acquired an indifference to public opinion.”
“That is a counsel of perfection,” she replied. “In ordinary life we are all governed by it, or at any rate we are largely influenced. It would be heart-breaking to me if I thought that people were saying horrid things about Rose and you. Mind, I don’t say that they are talking already,” she conceded. “But they’ll begin very soon.”
“How soon?” I asked.
“I can’t say with any definiteness. How could I?”
“Well,” I said, “I want to know. It is your business to tell me. Rose comes back on Wednesday. Will they begin on Thursday?”
“But you’re being absurd.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I want to know. I must arrange things. Will they begin on Friday? Remember—a girl of eighteen!—eighteen is just the age for these people to gloat over: eighteen and forty-five, what a titbit for you all!”
“Please don’t mix me up in this,” said Mrs. Stratton indignantly.
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “What a titbit for every one else! But, anyhow, remember that this girl of eighteen will have been alone in her guardian’s house two whole days by Friday, with nothing but the maids and whatever good character he may have built up for himself to protect her. May I safely take no steps till Friday?”
Mrs. Stratton was becoming very cross. “You’re being ridiculous,” she snapped.
“Not at all,” I said. “Logical merely. Very well then,” I went on. “If we may have two days, why not three? And if three days and there is no public clamour, and the windows are not broken by the Association for Getting Morality into Others or the Society for Suspecting Every One Else, perhaps we could have a week of innocent companionship, Rose and I? I have notunnaturally been looking forward to it. And if one week, why not two? Surely you must see that I am entitled to know this?”
“I can’t think why you never married,” was her reply. “Don’t you see how much wiser that would have been? Everything would have been simplified.”
“Rose and I have got on very well alone,” I said.
“But how much nicer for Rose to have had a woman’s guidance?”
“Why?” I retorted. “On all questions touching life, worldly education and so forth, a man can be as instructive; and in so far as protectiveness goes he can be as tender and as thorough. What remains girls get by instinct. And Rose likes me: that’s another great asset. Supposing that she did not like my wife?”
“But that’s being too fantastic.”
“Very well, then. Supposing that my wife didn’t like Rose? Women can be very disapproving of each other—very jealous.”
“All this doesn’t affect the main thing,” said Mrs. Stratton. “I am still worried by the extreme impropriety of you and my niece living here alone.”
“Then tell me,” I said, “what you propose—for you must have some proposition in your mind.”
“Rose could come to us,” said Mrs. Stratton. “We are planning to go to the Italian Riviera for the winter—to Nervi.”
“But on returning,” I said, “there would be the same opportunities for calumny.”
“Might it not be possible to have a companion for her?” Mrs. Stratton asked. “Some nice woman to live here? I know of one I could recommend.”
“No,” I said, not without emphasis, “it might not, I will not have any nice woman here. Besides, if I did, what would be the result? Simply more suspicions! I should be thought bigamous instead of merely monogamous.”
“Oh no!” said Mrs. Stratton. “I meant an elderly woman.”
“Good Heavens!” I exclaimed.
Mrs. Stratton’s visit was disturbing. I had been looking forward to two years of Rose’s company before the time arrived when she was twenty and would probably want to be independent, and I thought I was entitled to it. These two years were to be very precious—a kind of reward, if you like, for my foster-parental solicitude; and now they were threatened.
It was not public opinion that I was fearing, but the self-conscious restrictions that were being forced on me to the ruin of easy natural familiarity. I should always now be wondering if this or that excursion were wise, or what constructions the beastly world would be putting on this or that occurrence. Nothing could be simple and unselfconscious any more!
I took the problem to Mrs. O’Gorman.
“But you don’t mean to say that this comes as a surprise to you?” she asked, when I had finished the story.
“Yes, it did,” I said.
“O the poor innocent!” she exclaimed. “And for a doctor too! And haven’t I been telling you about it, for years, here in this very room where we’re sitting?”
“Well,” I said, “I hadn’t thought. I was thinking of Rose as a schoolgirl still, not a woman.”
“All girls are women,” said Mrs. O’Gorman. “That’s the difference between girls and boys. Boys go on being boys long after they’re men; girls can be women from birth. Let’s be practical now. What are the alternatives, do you say—Rose to visit about, or a duenna to be imported?”
“There seems to be no other,” I said.
Mrs. O’Gorman laughed her triumphant knowing Irish laugh. “There is at least one more,” she said. “Supposing Rose should become engaged—then no one would have anything to say. Many girls are married and mothers when they’re no older than she is now.” She paused.
“You’re frowning, Doctor,” said Mrs. O’Gorman. “You don’t like it.”
“It’s not what I was wanting,” I said.
“I’ve made you jealous,” she went on maliciously.
“How can I be jealous when I’m not in love with her?” I asked.
“Listen to the man!” she mocked. “As if jealousy had any logic, any rules or reason! Every one’s jealous—not only lovers. It’s one of the impulses of life; it’s a part of all kinds of honourable respectable emotions that every one praises, such as ambition. Possessiveness always leads to it—and that is why you’d hate Rose’s lover so, because he’d be taking her away from you: first her thoughts, and then herself. So should I be jealous if you spent more time talking with that nincompoop, Mrs. Galloway, than with me. Jealousy runs through life. It’s elemental. Listen to your spaniel growling when you’re patting my Peek. It’s no use being ashamed of jealousy, and it’s no use believing people when they say they are superior to the feeling.”
“All right,” I said. “Let us leave it at that: if Rose became engaged I should be jealous. Horribly jealous. I admit it. Disappointed, frustrated, too. I’ve hardly seen her yet, and some fellow carries her off just when she’s of age to be a companion. It’s too absurd.”
“But that’s life,” said Mrs. O’Gorman. “No sense in it whatever. Just a stupid hurrying along to the tomb. No time to do anything, except to say, at intervals, ‘Good Heavens! what have I been doing with my time!’”
“No, no!” I said. “It’s better than that.”
“Very little,” she replied. “But anyway, let you and me be practical at the moment. There are three possible courses: One—that Rose maybecome engaged and then Mrs. Stratton and all her friends would cease to think of you as an immoral man. Two—that you should invite some elderly spinster or widow to live in your house as a perpetual chaperon. And three—” she paused again.
“Well, what is three?”
“Three,” she resumed: “that you should go on as you are and tell them all to go to the devil. All my votes are for number three.”
“Mine too,” I said.
“But of course the first may happen—don’t forget that,” she warned me.
“I’ll wait till it does,” I said. “Thank you for your sympathy and counsel.”
“‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,’” she called after me, with a rather sinister chuckle.
The warning brought back all my misgivings, and as I walked home I knew perfectly well that the happiest years were behind me and that, to a large extent, my Rose was no more. I had lost her. Even if Mrs. Stratton proved to be wrong and the world did not talk, I had lost her. For the reason that we should be living an unnatural life. A lonely girl of eighteen has too little in common with a man of forty-five whose attitude to her is parental. It is not such as he that she would choose for a companion. Being normal, she would choose a younger man, nearer her both in age and aspirations: some one to commit, if necessary, follies with; not an old buffer.
This point of division comes in every family, but it can be less poignant with real parents. At any rate, a real father would have no such temptation as could assail me, and might have assailed me had I not always thought so naturally of myself as Theodore’s deputy, his chosen nominee to bring his daughter up and cherish her; to make her (his phrase was always coming back to me) “beat the band.” Would Rose beat the band? Had I been worthy? Can any child be depended upon to react to tuition? Impossible to count on it: the guardian at most can do his best and hope for the best.
Hitherto I had not much to reproach myself with; but I now saw that the real testing-time was on us. The real breaking-point too, for every day Rose, as she ripened and matured and became more conscious of adult things, would be growing towards her own life, her own mate, and consequently away from my life and me. Once again I realized how like ashes in the mouth the fruits of parenthood can be. The new generation is always receding from the old; the old pathetically trying to catch up and understand. The metaphor of a stream rushing between the two occurred to me: almost none able to swim and so few bridges!
Once again I realized how pitiless life is, in its unresting urgency: moving ever on and on, no matter from what contentment, from what joy: the next moment always more important than this one!
Rose came back a woman grown. Not short, not tall—the right height—and to my eyes so sweet, so desirable, that I could not understand how any young man could fail to succumb, and I dreaded the time when Ronnie and she would meet.
But I need not have done so, for when that moment arrived it was not fraught with passion; indeed, they seemed a little constrained, Ronnie in particular, and it was not until two or three days had passed that the shyness wore off. Whatever Ronnie may have felt, he did not seek Rose’s society unduly.
I had proof that, so far as Rose was concerned, there was nothing serious, a little while after, when, regardless of Mrs. Stratton’s nastiness, we had settled down to a very delightful routineà deux. During one of our talks Rose was frank about her plan of life.
“Of course, Dombeen,” she said, “I don’t want to leave you before I must, but I want to marry some day; I think every girl who is healthy ought to, and have children.”
She stopped and looked into an unfathomable distance.
“Boys,” she said. “I don’t want girls. I should love to have a boy in the Navy, and see him in his bright buttons, with sun-burned hair, and freckles. But it would have to be the right man, of course.”
“What kind of a man would that be?” I asked, a little wistfully, I fear.
“Don’t be unhappy,” Rose said, with one of her gay smiles and a touch on my arm. “It won’t be yet, anyway. We’ll have lots more good times together before then.”
“You never can tell,” I said. “He may be just round the corner at this moment. In any case I should like to know what kind of man you are thinking of. I might”—here I made an effort to laugh lightly—“I might be able to find him for you.”
“It’s difficult,” she said.
“How old?” I asked. “Do you want him to be your own age?”
“Pretty nearly,” she said. “I want to have fun as well. Older men are rather nice, I know, but they’re rather grave too. I should hate to be tied to a stodge. Some one who could go long walks, and climb a tree if necessary, and ride, and be silly at parties. But not really silly underneath, of course; and yet,” she added, “older men are very attractive, aren’t they?”
“I hope so,” I said: “now and then.”
“Oh, you vain thing!” she replied. “No,” she went on, “he should be older than I am, anyway.”
“A fellow like young Fortescue?” I hazarded.
“Oh no. He thinks too much about his clothes.”
“But he’s very good-looking.”
“Yes, in a way. And I should want him to be handsome. I want my boys to be handsome, you see. But not like Harry Fortescue: he’s too pretty.”
“Very well then. Young Somers-Flint?”
“No, he’s too noisy. He has that terrible laugh. I should want him to be amusing, of course, and see all the funny things in life, but more quietly. Besides, I can’t stand men with thin noses. His nose is absurd.”
“If you want big noses,” I said, “what about Harold Swain?”
“Oh, but that’s just the other extreme,” she said. “The man’s a—what do you call those birds at the Zoo, all colours with little eyes set like jewels and enormous beaks? I know—toucans. The man’s a toucan.”
“But he’s over six feet and a first-class cricketer,” I said.
“Yes, I like that,” she said. “I should like him to be good at games. But he mustn’t be grotesque.”
“Surely you can mention some one who comes at any rate nearer your ideal? What about”—I did my best to make my voice sound natural—“what about Ronnie?”
I did not look at her, so I cannot say whether Rose blushed or not.
“Ronnie,” she said meditatively. “Yes, I like Ronnie. Ronnie is a dear. But—”
“Yes?”
“Ronnie is to play with,” she said. “He’s not for a husband. I should want my husband to be stronger than that.”
“And then,” I said, quite normal again, “there are other things besides looks and character. There’s employment, for example. Do you wanthim to be rich and idle or do you want him to be busy? And if busy, what do you want him to do?”
“Yes,” said Rose, “I want him to be busy. I want him to be away all the day, so that his return will be an event to both of us. I don’t believe in husbands muddling about at home between breakfast and dinner. I’m sure father would have been happier if his studio had been somewhere else and he had to go away to it and remain away. He got tired of the house—I can see now, although I didn’t know then—instead of looking on it as a harbour of refuge after his work was done. That’s what made him so restless and forced him to go away so much: that and his love of seeing new and beautiful things.
“It must be dreadful,” she mused, “to be an artist and have such a keen eye for lovely effects and know that they can never be really reproduced in paint. I wish we knew more about Turner and what he felt. He came nearer getting it than anyone, I suppose; but he must have suffered agonies of disappointment and failure. The worst of it is, he seemed never to let anyone know him, so we have no evidence.”
“Well, don’t go to the opposite extreme,” I said, “and marry a sailor, for you’d hardly see him at all.”
“Oh no,” she said, “I shouldn’t do that. I should want him to come back every evening, and stay back.”
“Then no doctor need apply,” I said.
“No, I’m afraid not,” said Rose. “I want all his attention when he has finished with business. That’s an essential. And a steady home that I can make like a home, and go on improving. With a big nursery.”
“In the country, or London?” I asked.
“In the country,” said Rose. “But not too far out. A place where you can hear the train come in, and go a little way across the fields to meet him and take away the fish basket.”
“Ah!” I said, “now I know. He’s something in the city.”
“I don’t mind if he is,” said Rose, “so long as he comes back every evening, and loves me, and makes enough money for me to have a hansom everywhere when I go to town, and to take the children to the sea in the summer. That’s my idea of a husband.”
“I hope you may find him,” I said, “and having found him, keep him simple and deeply rooted. And you must make me a promise. Will you?”
“Of course.”
“Let no one but me supply that big nursery with its rocking-horse.”
So we talked; not once but many times. And this Prince Charming in the guise of a businessman with a tall hat, catching the 9.15 up and the 5.46 down, became a joke with us: one of us at any rate, in the English way, which avoids facing facts, making haste to joke for fear of having to cry.
For a while it seemed as though the alarms about the censorious world were false; but I could rid myself very rarely, and then only for a few moments, of my fool’s paradise convictions. During the moments that were free from this haunting, our new united life went along happily. Rose had taken over the housekeeping by way of experience; we entertained; a school-fellow came on a visit; we walked over to Mrs. O’Gorman’s fairly often; there were parties here and there; and no serpent in the form of a successful lover entered Eden.
I was more than ever struck by Rose’s quiet detachment. She had no absorbing interests: most things found her ready to scrutinize them, but nothing captured her. Most young Britons of both sexes have their hobbies and overwork them, but Rose moved serenely through the days, getting everything done and apparently having time to turn aside if occasion called. I admired this gift immensely. My own tendency is to concentrate almost too exclusively. If she had a hobby it was the arranging of flowers, and I think that her skill and taste in this charming and neglected branch of domestic art amounted to genius.
And then, further refusals being no longer possible, Rose accepted an invitation to her Aunt Stratton’s, and nothing was ever the same again. O that woman!
I could see that something was wrong directly Rose came back. We were sufficiently on terms of intimacy for wireless to be established between us: at any rate from her to me. She did not exactly exhibit constraint, but there was something, as we say, on her mind. I was conscious of that. She talked freely enough; gathered up the strings of local life in her absence; told me something of the Strattons, the only one of whom that she really cared for being Angelica, the youngest, a girl of about twelve. Her Uncle George she liked, in a negative way; perhaps, more accurately, was sorry for. The others we didn’t discuss.
“That’s over anyway,” she said; “and nothing would get me to go abroad with them. But—” and then she stopped.
I waited for the rest of the sentence, but it never came. Instead, she asked some question about our own neighbourhood and we passed on to other interests.
But I guessed then what she was meaning to say and later discovered that I was right.
“But,”—she was thinking—“although the visit to the Strattons is over, I shall have to be away a good deal, if not altogether, because it’s not suitable for Dombeen and me to be alone in this house. People are going to talk—and I couldn’t allow Dombeen to have to suffer from that.” Such were her thoughts—the fruit of Milly Stratton’s insinuations. That she herself would suffer did not matter. Eighteen can lookafter itself, but forty-five must be carefully guarded—that is how she would have argued. Eighteen is too immature, but forty-five, although, of course, an incredibly advanced age, lends itself to scandal, and doctors must have sound reputations.
Then set in a broken period which I look back upon without pleasure. All parents, I suppose, have to go through similar seasons, when misunderstandings or a want of sympathy alienate them from their children, or their children from them. During the time of dependence things can be all right, and again after independence is attained; but when the wings are beginning to sprout, sons and daughters have it in them to be more than difficult. How much of it have I seen! I was no parent myself, and Rose was not pining for independence; but she was restless and disturbed because of me: she did not want to go away, but thought that she ought to, knowing that I could not.
At last I could stand it no longer. “Look here, Rose,” I said, “what’s the matter? You’re not happy. Tell me why.”
“It’s difficult to explain,” she said.
“Then I will,” I said. “You are persuaded that it is unsuitable for us to be together here alone. Your dear Aunt Milly suggested the idea, and you can’t forget it. You think people will talk.”
“Oh! Dombeen,” she said, “when did you take to clairvoyance?”
“When your pretty head became transparent,”I replied. “Well, what is to be done? If you feel like that you must go away—or—”
“Yes—or what?”
“Well, if you were to become engaged I suppose that everybody would be satisfied and we could go on as we are. Our only saviour is that punctual husband, with the tall hat and the fish-basket. And he’s not yet on the horizon.”
“No,” she said.
I soon began to have proofs of the accuracy of the Stratton prediction. It is extraordinary—especially in a country district where no one in easy circumstances has enough to do—how intensely interesting the affairs of other people, neighbours chiefly, can be, and how difficult it is not to be inquisitive and censorious. I don’t suggest that in a city there are no meddlesome onlookers, with fingers sharpened for pies that do not belong to them; but in a city there are more distractions and there are also certain impediments to familiarity. In the country you are bound, unless there has been a feud, to know your neighbours; but one may live at No. 5 in a London terrace for half a century and never meet the occupants of No. 4 and No. 6.
Hitherto I had been on terms of pleasant and easy intimacy with most of my patients; and where there was less cordiality it was probablynot my fault. A certain interest in my affairs had been shown—there had been questions as to my biggest break recently, as to what I was sending to the Flower Show, the size of marrows, the chance of the Isle of Wight disease among the hives, and, of course, inquiries after Rose. But no more. No one had ventured to give advice. But now I began to detect admonitory symptoms, fumblings towards counsel as to conduct.
Lady Fergusson, for example, Ronnie’s mother, after a long talk about pelargoniums, wondered if it were true that dear Rose was going to the Riviera with the Strattons. So nice for her to be with young people. So nice to be able to go away. It was much to be hoped that nothing would interfere. How fortunate some girls were! In her youth there had been no such gadding about. And so forth.
Then the rector’s wife, Mrs. Cumnor, a good enough woman in her way but overburdened with family cares—not however so overburdened that she had no time or strength left to take on the cares of others as well: mine and Rose’s, for instance; she too began to cut in.
Rose, she said one morning, after I had finished with her second daughter’s pulse, chest and temperature, was, she knew, never ill. How enviable a state! And so active and clever too. Now that she had finished with school she would, of course, with such a constitution, go out into the world.
“Might not her vocation be at home?” I asked.
“Of course it would be hard for you to have to lose her,” Mrs. Cumnor conceded, “terribly hard; but—” and then she changed the subject.
Her husband, who had clearly been put up by his wife to contribute something to the campaign, was more jovial about it: wondering if any young men would dare to propose to a girl who was always in the company of such a handsome guardian. Was it fair to Rose to have a resident spoilsport? And so on—with plenty of hearty laughter as an ameliorative.
Mrs. O’Gorman confirmed my fears as to the neighbourhood’s determination.
“The whole pack’s in full cry after you,” she said. “You’re too happy for them: they can’t bear the sight of it. You’re free too—and so many of them are shackled for life and full of nasty envy. It’s not the best possible world! And yet,” she went on, “it’s the only one I want. Perfection would be very boring.”
“What shall we do?” I asked. “We are beaten.”
“Yes, I’m afraid you’re beaten. The pack has won. But it’s only anticipating your fate by a few months. All parents have to lose their children, and you’ve been luckier than most. Rose is certain sure to marry, and marry young too, so you’d have lost her at twenty any way, if not before. She’s on the road to nineteen now, and you mustn’t grumble.”
“And what is there left for me?” I asked.
“You?—why that doesn’t matter, because you don’t matter. You’re a sterile old stick. Sterility has no vote. You’ll just rub along, getting through the days, till the end. You’ve had your chance and lost it.”
“You don’t give me much encouragement,” I complained.
“Why should I?” she replied. “The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do. But you might marry yet?”
“Never,” I said.
“Very well then, you must rust and bear it.”
Cold comfort indeed!
If ever there were two people on this planet who might have been let alone, and wanted to be let alone, and deserved to be let alone, they were Rose and I. But it was not to be.
While with the Strattons, at some “At Home,” Rose had met a Mrs. Lovell, who was about to go into business as a florist, and she had offered Rose a post. It was to be a florist’s of a new kind, for not only were flowers to be sold but they were to be arranged too. The staff was to include flower-arrangers who on the evenings of dinner-parties would go out to decorate the tables. Premiseshad been taken, just off the Brompton Road, and already a connection was being formed. If Mrs. Lovell still had room for her, said Rose, she would go. It was not what she had dreamed of, but it was something definite, a start.
“There is so little for an untrained girl to do,” she said. “It isn’t as if I was brought up to have to earn my own living. I’m going to be fairly well off, aren’t I?”
“Fairly,” I said, “when you’re twenty.”
“There you are!” she said. “But at the moment, if I have to go, I should like to try to be independent. And of course, I have to go,” she added: “it was cowardly to say ‘if.’ I can’t teach: I don’t know anything. I can’t type or do shorthand. I don’t want to be a companion to an old lady—unless it were to Mrs. O’Gorman; but she’s got Julia. But I like being among flowers, even though they’re cut, and I like Mrs. Lovell, and I think that’s a Heaven-sent opening. Almost no one arranges flowers as a profession now. The only one I’ve heard of is a little Japanese man. So we shall have the field to ourselves. It’s fun to be doing something original.”
And soon afterwards she went.
Of this part of Rose’s life I have little to say. I can tell only what I know at first hand. Whenever I was in London—but that was very seldom—I called at the florist’s; and Rose came down for Sundays now and then. She seemed to be happy and uncomplicated. Whether herassociation with me—whether my general tutelary influence in her earlier years—was being of any use to her I had no means of judging. She might have been equally capable without it. Educationalists never know.
The flower scheme failed to prosper, but Rose did not give up London. Even if there were not the same objection to returning to live with me, she had probably lost the wish to do so. I am sure that she was fond of me, but she had made new friends. London was full of variety and attraction, and she had contracted the habit of employment and liked it. I don’t know anything about the economics of a florist’s business, except that to me the thought of having to pay money for flowers is repellent: flowers, one feels, should be free to all; but Mrs. Lovell had not enough experience and Rose was quite capable of giving a bunch of daffodils away rather than haggle over the price. Moreover, the time was not ripe for the professional arranger. I do not know that it is even yet.
To Mrs. Lovell, however, Rose remained true, and therefore continued with her as an ally in her next scheme, which was an old curiosity shop. Not an old curiosity shop where oddity was the prevailing note, but an old curiosity shop where everything had some beauty, either of shape or colour, or was picturesquely obsolete. Such shops, I have observed on my London expeditions, are now very numerous, but Mrs. Lovell’s wasone of the first. They are usually directed by women. Just as a man may sell wine or be secretary to a golf club and lose no caste, so may what we call ladies keep these shops. Blue and green and purple glass; old stuff for patchwork quilts; spinning wheels; Stafford and Leeds jugs; lace; amber necklaces; beads; brass pestles and mortars; painted rolling-pins; early Victorian dolls—the place was full of things of that kind, and Rose, in a charming smock, was standing in the midst of it on the day that I unexpectedly looked in, smilingly engaged in the task—an easy one—of selling a very young and obviously adoring curate a warming-pan: not, as he was explaining, for use, but for decoration. On seeing me she blushed very becomingly and nearly broke the little divine’s heart by her too apparent eagerness to turn to the new customer.
Rose begged the afternoon off—and it was the kind of shop that did itself very little harm by shutting up for the whole day now and then—and we met for lunch and then loitered about in Kew Gardens.
“Has that little curate proposed to you yet?” I asked.
“Not yet,” said Rose.
“Any one else?”
“One or two,” she replied.
“I suppose a great many men come to that shop?” I said.
“Oh yes. They’re very jolly too, some of them, until they fall in love; and then they’re so dull.Isn’t it funny what a difference it makes? And then they propose and I lose them.”
And I, I thought to myself, have lost Rose! Is loss the rule of life? It seems to be.
It was on one of Rose’s week-end visits just before she was twenty that she took out a photograph and handed it to me. The photograph was an amateur snapshot of a group on a lawn, among whom was Rose.
“Quite good of you,” I said.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t me that I wanted you to look at, but the man behind me.”
It is strange what effect the most ordinary words can sometimes have! Rose’s were casual enough, but my heart absolutely stopped for a moment and a mist crossed my brain. God knows I did not want to keep this child from marriage; her engagement would even be a blessing in disguise, for it would bring her back to her home; but her remark none the less was like a knell.
And yet she had told me nothing! Nothing—and to the fearful swift apprehension of a jealous foster-father, everything!
I pulled myself together and examined the man: tall, regular-featured, with a high forehead due more to thinning hair than to formation of skull. Eyeglasses. His general expression suggested a somewhat condescending benignity, with assurance. I didn’t like him.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“His name is Eustace Holt,” Rose said. “He wants me to marry him.”
“Yes?” I heard my voice say.
“I rather think I shall.”
I had no more words. I drew her to me and kissed her hair. The action, I suppose, implied a kind of possessive protectiveness. I had wondered vaguely how I should behave when the news broke: and this was the way!
After a long silence Rose went on to say that he was a barrister; had been a private tutor for a while after leaving Oxford, but was now at the Bar and beginning to do well in chamber practice. Not an advocate.
I looked at the photograph again. Probably I should have been cool about any young man who had captured Rose’s heart, knowing so well that none could be worthy; but to this one I felt positive hostility. He had the effect of filling me with a sudden warm rush of affection for Ronnie.
“Well?” Rose said.
She knew me sufficiently to discern a want of sympathy; but I hope that I succeeded in concealing the greater part of my antagonism. You see, I was still a liar. Not all my intimacy with Rose and admiration for her candour had cured me. Perhaps had I said, “My dear, I hate the sight of the man: he looks priggish: do promise me to do nothing about it for six months,” it might have changed her life. At any rate it could havedone no harm, and it would have had the additional merit of expressing a truth. But I couldn’t. For one thing, I had not the courage to be destructive about her own choice, when the romance was still so young; for another, I had not the right. She had seen the man and loved the man, or thought she did; and all the ground for my sudden prejudice was a tiny snapshot.
“Well?” said Rose.
“He’s not what I was expecting for you or hoping for you,” I replied. “At any rate, not in appearance. He’s—well, he’s too—too urban. Too prim. In spite of what I said about the fish-basket, I have always thought of your husband as more careless, easy-going, gayer than this. I had thought of him as having something of Nature—more of the open air or the sea—but this man’s from the Squares. He travels in the Tube. He carries an umbrella.”
“My dear Dombeen,” said Rose, “how can you know things like that? I’m sure I don’t, and I’ve seen quite a lot of him. He may be a Londoner, but that’s nothing. Barristers must live in London. I wish I hadn’t shown you that foolish picture. He’s really very distinguished looking, he has a most delightful voice, he does everything well. He’s a plus man at golf.”
“I can believe it,” I said. “But that isn’t the point. The point is not, is he a remarkable man, but is he fitted to be Rose’s husband? I’ve known you for as many years as you have beenon this earth, and I’ve watched you grow up in body and mind, and perhaps I’ve been able to help you in both—and when we help people we learn about them—and I’ve thought often of the best kind of man to carry you away from me when the time came, but never was it a polished Londoner marked out for professional eminence. Where—just to mention one trifling matter—where are his jokes?”
“Jokes aren’t everything. But any way he can be quite amusing.”
“Jokes go a long way,” I said; “and you especially would be very dull without them. As for his golf, that’s nothing. Golf isn’t really a game, nor does it really carry any open-air love with it. How old is he?”
“He’s thirty-four,” said Rose.
“Thirty-four, thinning at the top, once a tutor, now a barrister, and going to marry this uncalculating child! O my dear!” I said.