My first impulse was to hasten after the fugitives and try to bring them
to reason. But reflection showed me that this was impracticable. I had
no notion where they had gone or even when; probably not by train, but
all the way in the motor, and there has never been such an ally of
runaways as petrol. In the old days there was some chance, even though
faint, of tracking and overtaking a pair of horses; but motor-cars vanish
into thin air, leaving rainbow splashes in the roadway to mock the
pursuer in every hue.
Then I wondered if Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson knew. For Rose to tell
me at once was natural; but would not Ronnie wish to let a little time
elapse before breaking the news? I guessed so. At any rate, it was not
for me to be the bearer of such ill tidings. If it was for anyone to
storm the citadel, that person was the wronged Eustace.
Eustace? Yes. And what of him? He had been told as well as I, I
supposed. Rose had never done anything underhand or secretive in her
life, and she would have made it a point of honour to let her husband
know that she had cut the knot. At this moment he was probably sitting,
stunned, in his library, or perhaps with his little Rose in her nursery,
and most likely harbouring evil thoughts of me.
* * * * *
In my dismay and distress I put off dinner for an hour or so, and walked
out into the rain to Mrs. O’Gorman’s. It seemed an occasion for the old
Irish lady’s pitiless candour. The equally pitiless downpour would, I
felt, help too. There are times when one welcomes a storm to fight one’s
way through.
My thoughts were not idle as I stumbled against the torrents. No aspect
of the case did they neglect. I can tell only of what I know, and I have
no information as to Ronnie’s hold on Rose after his return and what
steps preceded her decision to run off with him. But it is not difficult
to realize, at any rate, the temptation. Here was the old friend of her
happiest days once more—free and I don’t doubt more than rejoiced to see
her again. He had been in strange countries, and probably had carried
her image with him through all his wanderings and loneliness. He had
never been articulately in love with her when they were youthful
together; he had not proposed after that accident—I am sure she would
have told me if he had, because she knew that I liked him. When she used
to talk to me about her marriage and all those nice boys who were to
gallop about the nursery, I had thought naturally of Ronnie as their
father. One visualizes a figure on such occasions, and Ronnie sprang
into being. But, as it happened, I was wrong. Rose had not thought of
Ronnie like this: she had merely liked him, automatically so to speak,
and when Eustace came along there was no earlier occupant of her heart to
eject. Eustace found it all too easy.
But after her marriage so much had happened. And it must never be
forgotten that Ronnie compelled interest, all unconsciously maybe, by the
force of personality. He was quite ordinary in everything but
personality, which in his case was physical more than spiritual. His
ready smile, his white teeth, his gaiety, his good humour, his general
friendliness and out-for-funnishness won him an easy way into the good
graces of the world. He was popular almost universally. Rose, as I have
said, had never to my knowledge, or even to my suspicion, been in love
with him; nor he with her in any but a superficial degree, even if that;
but there was always that intimate experience in Switzerland in the
background; and each had since had too much time to think about the past
and to speculate upon the might-have-been: Rose in the watches of the
night taking stock of her marriage and its disenchantments, and Ronnie in
a foreign land sick of a fever.
Both were older too—not so much older in years, but older through what
had happened: the passage of time being often almost negligible in
influence compared with certain experiences. A woman grows mature so
swiftly: a three weeks’ honeymoon can do it, a night can do it; the birth
of her first child always does it. It may be only in compartments, but
maturity is there somewhere. And Rose’s child was five years of age. As
for Ronnie, I suspect that such adventures among women as had fallen to
him—and a handsome young officer in India has many admirers—had chiefly
thrown his thoughts back, in comparison, to Rose. When he might have won
her he had not; after, when he wished he had, she was another’s. I don’t
say that he had brooded on this, but he probably recurred to it when
least happy; and regret, like love, never stands still: it increases or
it diminishes.
And her disenchantment, her starvation! Eustace’s frigid decorum, his
supervision of the housekeeping books, his morbid interest in her
minutest personal expenditure, his tendency to relapse into the tutor and
shape her mind wholly by his, so that instead of the home containing a
rising barrister and an impulsive, warm-hearted, generous woman it should
contain merely a rising barrister and his female derivative—all this had
surprised her and depressed her. Marriage, she had known—being a normal
creature, full of the instinct of her sex, and not only the instinct but
her sex’s capacity to endure—was necessarily a matter of adjustments.
Any two persons agreeing to live together have to learn each other’s ways
and make allowances: even two men and two women. How much more so then
when the two persons suddenly thus beginning a new and intimate
co-habitation are a man and a woman, natural enemies—or, at any rate,
natural censors of each other, naturally jealous of each other, naturally
misunderstanding each other! Perhaps the word enemies may stand.
In the case of her own marriage Rose quickly learned that the adjustments
were all to be hers. The only change that Eustace made was to add a wife
to his house: he kept the same habits: he played his golf at the Old Deer
Park just as he had always done; he read the books from the London
Library; he took her, regardless of her taste in music, to concerts. But
he had never really loved; he had been attracted by Rose’s gaiety and
vividness, even if he had neglected to cherish those qualities after they
had passed into his keeping; he had known that rising barristers are
usually furnished with wives, and that they do not rise the less because
those wives are beautiful. He had known also that marriage is a natural
state; that the duty of a good citizen is to have children; that wives
can be more comfortable than housekeepers; and so on. I don’t say that
he had put any of these thoughts into words: they were merely the outcome
of common knowledge. Nor do I want to be unfair to him or to suggest
that he was not proud and affectionate. I think that he was. But again
I say that he had no imagination: he took things for granted, and
directly a husband does that he is doomed.
Eustace’s refined and comfortable home in Wilton Place was never
disgraced by anything so unseemly as passion or even eagerness.
Returning from his chambers he had never upset furniture in his desire to
get to her. When he brought flowers to her and she crushed them to her
bosom in an ecstasy of enjoyment, a spasmodic return to nature, he warned
her that she was in danger of breaking the stalks. He had brought the
flowers though. That is the trouble: he was always nice and handsome and
courteous. But there it stopped. Having no imagination, no instinctive
knowledge of women, no sexual shorthand, he was unaware that nice men are
negligible. What women want is not niceness but devotion, not courtesy
but worship.
And then—I was still fumbling towards an explanation of Rose’s desperate
act—then there was the disappointment about the boys. Rose, as I have
said, had set her heart on being a mother, and the mother of sons, and
there was only one surviving child and that was a girl. I have brought
enough children into the world to know something about the part that they
play in married life, and I can set it down firmly as a fact that it is
all to the bad when the sex of the child is not that which the parents
had desired. The girl who ought to have been a boy has to suffer for it;
and so, though in a less degree, does the boy who ought to have been a
girl, but he is not a common figure. Has it ever been suggested, I
wonder, that some of the traditional alleged untrustworthiness of women
is due to the fact that they were not wanted. I don’t say that I agree
as to this inferiority of the sex, but proverbial lore, which is the
wisdom of many and the wit of one, has decided that they are false and
fickle, unstable, coy and hard to please, and so forth: and that may be a
cause. Certain it is that the nurse who announces that the little pet is
a girl is rarely treated as a bringer of good news; whereas if she can
say it’s the finest boy she ever had in her arms she is, for the moment,
an angel. Why should an unwanted child trouble to be constant and true
and without caprice? Some revenge it is entitled to.
Rose, however, does not come within the category of the unwanted, for her
sex had been determined by her father and mother months before I assisted
at her début, and her name had long been chosen. Why they should have
desired a girl instead of another of the lords of creation, I cannot say:
probably because the father was an artist, and artists are notoriously
eccentric. But there it was: they wanted a girl and they had one,
whereas that girl, when her own time of fulfilment came, wanted not only
a boy but many boys, and could not bring up one. Rose, I am sure, had a
feeling of resentment for the girl who had lived where the boy had died.
With that tiny boy baby much of her joy in life was buried. He had lived
long enough in the actual world for her to make a little god of him; and
before that life had been there was the life he had lived under her
heart.
To say that she was not fond of Rose would be to tell an absolute
falsehood—she took a grave pleasure in her, although treating her perhaps
more as a toy than a daughter, as a wonderful doll whose capacities she
never tired of studying—but she was steeped in a deeper rapture when her
breast nurtured a son. That is all.
To put it in another way, I don’t believe that when Ronnie arrived and
opened the door upon whatever fair prospect he displayed to her or she
imagined she saw—whatever avenue of escape—Rose would have stepped
through had the child she was to leave behind her been a little boy of
five instead of a little girl.
Who knows what women feel? We may guess, but they will never tell us.
They won’t even tell each other. As regards Rose and Ronnie, my guess is
that his pathetic collapse attracted more than his radiant vigour would
have done. Had she found him triumphant, as of old, she would have
remained unscathed. Strong and masterful he might have called to her in
vain, for she was never a sensualist. It was his dependence that swayed
her and decided her. It was the boy Ronnie needing tenderness and care.
Involved and fantastic as it may sound, I have the belief that it was the
mother instinct that took Rose off with Ronnie more than love. What I
mean is that she did not go with him as most women go with men, through
ordinary passion, but because he was fragile and in need of protection
and she thought of him as her own, or—subconsciously of course—even as
one of those unborn sons which he himself would have begotten. So
mystical can women be!
But of course the wild hope of escape was present too: the wish to live a
little more fully while there was yet time; the feeling that to endure
another moment with Eustace was impossible and wrong.
And again Theodore’s wish came back to me. Was this “beating the band”?
Could anything be farther from the ordinary conception of that successful
and honourable act than running off with another man and leaving husband
and child? And yet, it had required courage, devotion, disregard of the
world’s censure—all the things that properly-brought-up and even
universally respected people need not possess. What a muddle is our
civilization!
* * * * *
“You must forgive this untimely and unprofessional visit,” I said, as I
was shown into Mrs. O’Gorman’s over-furnished sitting-room.
“Don’t be foolish, Doctor,” she replied. “Have done with your
politeness. Don’t I know why you’re here?”
“You do?” I exclaimed.
“Of course I do,” she said. “It’s about Rose. She’s bolted.”
“But surely the villagers aren’t talking?” I said in a panic of alarm.
“You don’t mean to say it’s not a secret!”
“No one knows but you and me,” said the old lady.
“And Suzanne,” I corrected:
“O, Suzanne! She doesn’t matter. She’s an ally. But no one else knows.
I know because I had a letter to-day. Rose took me some way into her
confidence when she was staying with you. Old people often get told
things. But don’t worry; it’s all right.”
“All right?” I echoed. “What do you mean? Do you want young wives to
behave like this?”
“When they’re like Rose—yes,” she said. “The poor lamb was miserable.
That iceberg of hers was no good except to freeze her. She wants life,
love, human emotions, and she’ll get them with the young Captain.”
“But—” I exclaimed, aghast at this Bolshevism. “You talk as if people
had the right to do as they please—break laws—anything.”
“Not all of them by any means, the idiots,” she replied. “But Rose—yes.
Rose ought to have all she wants. I advised her to. It’s—no don’t
interrupt me—it’s your own doing very largely. You brought her up to be
happy and true to herself. She saw you always at work ministering to
other people—Oh! I know you were paid for it—I’ve paid you myself—money
thrown away too, for I only get worse—but that doesn’t matter: you’re a
soft old thing at heart. Anyway, there was Rose, the apple of your eye,
with a natural sweet disposition, and the centre of your circle of
friends, and the mistress of your easy-going prosperous house, and she
gets into kindly humane habits. Then she marries this refrigerator K.C.,
or whatever he is, and begins to miss everything that she had been used
to. He’s a stupid fellow—he hasn’t even the sense to be ill and touch
her heart that way—he can’t lose his temper—can’t swear—only be politely
rasping now and then—and he gradually wore her down, diluted her
sweetness, crushed her nice impulses, made her live according to Cocker.”
Wonderful, I thought, what a lot the old lady had divined, for I’m sure
Rose never told her in words.
“There was no doubt about his selfishness,” I said.
“As for selfishness,” said Mrs. O’Gorman, “I don’t mind that. That
hasn’t necessarily anything to do with it. All the most attractive men
are selfish, even if the most selfish men are not the most attractive.”
“I wonder if that’s true,” I said.
“Think about the unselfish men you know and you’ll soon realize its
truth,” she replied. “Unselfish men don’t give us any fun at all—I’m
talking as a woman, remember—they make it too easy. The selfish ones
keep us thinking, and when they forget themselves it’s delicious: I mean,
it used to be.” She sighed and laughed. “But it’s about Rose we’re
talking,” she continued. “Having got rid for a while of her husband, she
comes down here and finds that poor boy, her old friend, ill and
miserable, and all the love she ought to have felt for him years ago
suddenly materialized, but a million times stronger, and there you are.
‘Bolt, my lamb,’ that’s what I said to her, although she never asked for
my advice. ‘Bolt, my lamb, and be happy while you can.’”
“Well, I’m—” I began.
“Say it,” she said. “Say you’re damned. Nobody minds. But you’re not
so damned as that poor child would have been if she’d gone back to the
Arctic Zone. I’m old enough to believe that the whole purpose of unhappy
people’s lives is not endurance. I’ve seen too much of it. And so has
every one, especially you doctors. Endurance? No. Let revolt and
escape have a chance too. That is, if people really want them. The
trouble is that really wanting things is so rare. It’s a lukewarm
world!”
“Anyway,” I said, “I’m amazed that you could dare to advise anything so
revolutionary to Rose. It’s a terrible responsibility.”
“We look at it differently,” she replied. “I’m twenty years older than
you, and, being a woman, perhaps I feel more bitterly for Rose. Besides,
I’m a rebel and you’re not. I’m a believer in cutting knots, and
you—although you’re more sympathetic than most—are still in favour of
‘endurance vile.’ Let those endure that enjoy it, say I, but let the
others try for a second innings and a happier. If Rose had remained it
would have been for what purpose? To pander to her husband’s
respectability. Do you defend that? Is that your idea of a sound
motive?”
“Everything can be put up with,” I said feebly. “Ever since I began to
practise I have been watching couples putting up with bad jobs.”
“And admiring them?”
“In a way—yes,” I said.
“And wanting the same kind of death-in-life for your own girl?”
“Well—” I began.
“You must answer that question, yes or no,” she insisted.
“No,” I said.
* * * * *
“And then,” I began again, “there’s the child. What about her? Left
motherless.”
“Well, and what about Rose herself?” Mrs. O’Gorman retorted. “She was
motherless and fatherless too, and she grew into happiness and became a
beautiful woman, thanks in some degree to some one who shall be
nameless.”
“But who,” I said, “might possibly be feeling not a little guilty over
the way that things are turning out.”
“But who, if he did so,” Mrs. O’Gorman added, “would be a very silly old
boy.”
“Do you hold me absolutely innocent then?” I asked.
“Innocent of harm—yes,” she said. “Because there’s not the harm you seem
to think. There’s social shipwreck, of course, but that’s nothing,
because they’ll live abroad. There’s the Iceberg’s grief, but that
doesn’t matter because he was never really in love. There’s little
Rose—but she’s only five and will adjust herself. No, the only real
sufferers will be the Captain’s father and mother, who, like all
_nouveaux riches_, were thinking of a grand match for him. They’ll be
very sore, and not unnaturally. But the world isn’t for fathers and
mothers: it’s for sons and daughters.”
“You are a cynical old woman,” I said, “and I’m ashamed of you. I’m
almost sorry I’ve kept you alive so long.”
“You didn’t,” she said. “If I’ve survived it’s been in spite of you.”
“But what of Rose herself?” I asked. “How can this be any but harm to
her?”
“Because she’s happy,” she said. “She’s happy now—to-day—and she’s going
to be happier once she’s on the sea, sailing away with her boy to make a
new home together. She’s got something to squander herself on, and
that’s happiness, even when the something isn’t worth it.”
“But her child?” I returned to the point.
“Her child will be all right, too. You—or some one else—will bring her
up.”
“I don’t say that it is so in Rose’s case,” the ruthless old commentator
added, “but lots of girls are better away from their mothers than with
them, and lots of mothers better away from their girls. Children often
enough would be the better if they were brought up by other people and
not their parents. I’m sure I should have been. My mother and I were
like Kilkenny cats most of the time.”
* * * * *
To my intense surprise, who should arrive the next day but Eustace,
leading his little girl by the hand. I had expected to hear from him;
but I had never thought to have him again under my roof. Vaguely I had
guessed that he might associate me in some way with his wife’s action;
unjustly, of course, but people are oftener unjust than not, and he was
wounded to the quick and in no position to be too fair and reasonable.
Besides, it was while Rose was visiting me that she had met Ronnie again,
and it was the news of his return and illness in one of my letters to her
that (I now saw) had determined her to come just at that time on a visit
to her early home. I had touched an old chord and set it vibrating. All
this Eustace, I thought, knew, and I was taking his resentfulness,
however ill-founded, for granted.
But how often we are in error in our notion of what other people are
feeling! And how difficult it is to learn not to continue to make such
mistakes! Eustace was harbouring no such grudge; he held me innocent; he
even went so far as to wonder, when we were alone, if he himself might
not somehow have been to blame. He could lay nothing specific to his
charge; and yet. . . . But no, it could not be through fault of his own.
Try as he might—and he had passed sleepless nights in reviewing the
past—he could not recall ever having failed in any direction whatever in
his duty as an affectionate and solicitous husband.
The letter that Rose had left for him, he averred, when it came to
essentials, said nothing. He did not show it to me but gave me the
sense. It expressed sorrow at her failure to make him a worthy wife,
regret at the collapse of their dream, and then said that she was sure
that when he thought it all over he would understand, and, understanding,
forgive. But if he could not forgive he would forget.
“Forget!” Eustace exclaimed. How could he forget? How could he ever
forget? The shame of it too.
But he must not inflict his misery on me. That would be unfair, and I
naturally had my own disappointment and grief to dispel.
We were sitting over our tobacco, late—too late for me, for I was very
tired and the contemplation of spilt milk has never much attracted me.
Would I tell him, he asked, of my own affairs? What was the health of
the neighbourhood? Good? All the same, I must agree that it was
extraordinary, incredible even, that his wife, the mother of his child,
should find it possible to do this—this—he hated to be hard on her—but he
was bound to call it, this scandalous thing? To leave her home in Wilton
Place, one of the most charming and convenient houses in London, every
one said: to leave her circle of friends, hers and his—was not that all
amazing and beyond credence? As for himself, he would say nothing,
except that barristers, by the very nature of their calling, are
peculiarly in a position to be protected by their wives rather than made
by them to look foolish if not despicable. How thankful he was that when
he was called to the Bar he had decided to specialize and not take up
advocacy. The spectacle of a leading divorce court counsel himself
unable to retain his wife’s affections would be too ludicrous; his career
would be finished. As it was—but his mind was in a whirl on the whole
question of his future.
That I felt sorry for him as he laid bare his wounded ego, I need not
say. No one could have failed to pity him. But to see him so blind to
any but his own misfortune, so incapable of putting himself for an
instant into Rose’s place, or to realize that such a woman must have
suffered much and long before she could take such a step, was to withhold
a certain measure of sympathy.
He would not, he began again, inflict any more of his perplexities on me.
It was not that that he had come for. Would I mind if he took the key
and went for a walk? He had no desire for bed and I must be weary.
I was rising to comply with this exceedingly welcome suggestion when he
began again. What was not the least extraordinary part of the whole
mystery, he said, was the circumstance—mark this!—that Rose had never
given the faintest indication of unrest, dissatisfaction. How could one
account for it? It was not as if he had been cool or careless or in the
slightest respect neglectful. He taxed his memory in vain in the attempt
to collect a single instance. As to his having given any of the ordinary
causes for jealousy that was laughably out of the question.
He laughed now, to illustrate the impossibility, and his hollow travesty
of mirth gave me deeper knowledge of the poor fellow than all his words.
If he had only known that such complete failure to provide a wife with
cause for jealousy is no surety of married bliss.
None the less, he went on, guiltless as he held himself to be, he could
not keep at bay the suspicion, the reflection, that a man is not deserted
by his wife without some reason. What it could be passed his
comprehension, but he had the gnawing fear that it existed. Could I
offer any suggestion? I had known Rose longer than anyone else, even
though she was an immature girl when she left me.
I said that there must of course be some reason. Was it not
possible—women are strange creatures—that Rose needed something more than
a good home, a circle of London friends none of whom had she known before
marriage, unintermittent courtesy from her husband?
“Women are not like us,” I went on: “women are capricious—it is a
commonplace of the dramatists and novelists, who are supposed to
know—look at Shakespeare, Browning, Hardy, every one—they are capricious,
incalculable, they have odd whimsies, desires—every doctor can tell you
about them—they take sudden dislikes. In short,” I said, “they are
women.”
He agreed heartily.
Some women, I continued, even actually appreciate a little bullying, a
little roughness; some must be continually re-wooed, taken on new
honeymoons. The greatest mistake in marriage can be the limitation of
honeymoons to one. As for Rose—he must remember that she was born and
bred in the country: her early days had been spent in gardens; perhaps
she was spoiling for the open air again. Oh, yes, I knew that Wilton
Place was near the Park; but I meant something more open than that. She
had a touch of the woods in her: something of the dryad, even the naiad.
Surely he had noticed that?
No, he had not. I was thinking of her, doubtless, as a child, and he had
known her as a woman and a mother. I must remember that. Nor could he
quite agree that I had in the least accounted for anything more than a
sudden wish for a holiday in the country. I had said nothing yet to
explain her physical treachery—her infidelity.
“There,” said I, “I have no theory to propound.” Nor had I. I would not
have propounded it for the world.
In that case, he said, he must fall back on what was at once the kindest
and the most plausible theory—that Rose had lost her reason. Yes, that
was it. Her mental balance was disturbed, and in her derangement he had
become antipathetic to her, the author even of some imagined inconstancy;
and in her nervous, unhinged condition she reverted, perhaps
subconsciously, to her youthful days, and, thinking herself again the
playmate of this boy, this soldier, she had automatically, as it were,
resumed friendship with him, and he had been base enough to take
advantage of her distraught state and had carried her off. That, he felt
sure, was the explanation; yes, that was it.
He fell into a long silence, but I had no hope. He had now, I could see,
given up all idea of his nocturnal walk. Nor could any movement of my
own—adjusting the shutters, moving ashtrays, and so forth—deflect his
thoughts.
What steps he intended to take, he went on, he could not say. He had not
decided. All that he had decided was not to make the case public, and to
go away. London had become unbearable; he shrank equally from the spoken
condolence of his friends and from their tactful avoidance of the
subject. He had long wanted to visit the Argentine, where his services
were, as it chanced, in demand at the moment in connexion with some big
dispute, and in the future of which he was a firm believer, and he should
take this opportunity of throwing some of his care on to the bosom of the
sea, the great simplifier.
But in order to do that with a comparatively assured mind Rose must be
left in good hands.
This brought him to the purpose of his visit, which he could assure me
had not been to force me to listen to his tale of woe at all. Would I,
to put it briefly, would I let him leave Rose with me? He should feel
absolutely at peace if I would. There was no one else whom he could
trust in the same way. He had many relations, it is true, but—well,
there it was. And somehow there was a kind of fitness in it. I had
brought up his own Rose, who was the most beautiful creature he should
ever meet—here he almost broke down and I admired him for it—and, well,
and—here he broke down completely.
I confess to being deeply touched by the confidence implied in his
request; and I shivered as I remembered my unfounded suspicion that he
was likely to hold me to blame, at any rate in part, for his tragedy. It
seemed to me as high a compliment as could be paid, that he, with his
poor torn feelings and his pride all in rags, should be willing to place
his daughter under the care of the man whose possible laxity had been
responsible for her mother’s defection.
But the question would have to be considered very thoroughly. The
responsibility would be very great, nor was I in some ways as well fitted
to become a little girl’s foster-father as I had been, twenty years ago,
when the other Rose had come to me. I was then young enough to be an
active playmate and I was flexible. I had now become not only older but
a man of fixed habits, many of which would have to be broken. Could I
break them, and did I want to break them? For Rose’s child (could she
have engineered so complicated a business as having one without the
assistance of anyone else) I would do anything, but this was
Rose’s-and-Eustace’s child, and that made so much difference. I could be
sorry for Eustace, but never could I like him, and supposing that some of
his least admirable characteristics manifested themselves now and then in
his offspring, might I not become actively antipathetic? Human nature
can be so unreasonable, so unjust, and I pretended to no immunity from
illogical aversions.
Nor was I in any need of a constant companion. Since Rose’s marriage I
had tended more and more to eremitical consolations—to my prints and
gardening—whenever my patients permitted me. Nor was the personnel of
the place of the kind that it had been when Rose’s mother had come “for
good.” In those days, as I have told—and very likely told twice—I had
old Hannah to help me. But Hannah was now a rheumatically crippled
paying-guest at Lowestoft who could do nothing for me even if I again
lured her forth. And the march of progress had established a cash
chemist near enough to my rounds to lead me to give up dispensing, and so
there was no longer Wellicum for the new Rose to help and hinder and
besiege with questions. The same march, in another department of its
attack upon the goodness and oldness of the days that are gone, had
substituted a motor-car for my horses and traps, and so there was also no
groom for Rose to help and hinder and besiege with questions. There was
a chauffeur, it is true, but a man who has to do with machinery does not
compare, as guide, philosopher and friend of small inquiring persons,
with a man who has the care of horses.
A gardener I still had, though Briggs was dead; and neighbours, among
them Mrs. O’Gorman, now getting on in years, but with all her faculties;
and some kind of a spurious, inferior Hannah could be obtained; and if
Rose liked animals she could be provided both with a pony and a boy to
look after it. None the less, it was a great problem and I had very
serious doubts; yet I knew I should say yes. And I should say it with
the more confidence because of Suzanne. Suzanne was my sheet-anchor. It
is true that I could not consider her attitude to the elopement very
sound: it was indeed far too lenient; but I seemed to be surrounded by
old women with advanced sympathies (perhaps all old women at heart side
with love’s rebels?), and Suzanne’s profound affection for Rose’s mother
could not but make her careful over the little girl.
But as we get older we become more self-protective; so I gave no promise,
but shook hands with Eustace and said that I would think it all over and
let him know in the morning what I decided. Upon this promise he
permitted me, to my great joy, to go, at a very late hour to bed. My
last waking thought was one of satisfaction that he had not, at any rate,
said anything about band-beating.
* * * * *
If we are all to be arraigned at the Judgment Seat and put finally in our
places, why not wait till then? Let God dispense favour and disfavour,
rewards and punishments, that being His _métier_, and meanwhile let me be
unjudicial and kind. That had been for so long my creed that I was
staggered when, not long after, Ronnie’s father, with whom I had been on
amicable, neighbourly terms for years, and with whose interior I was too
intimately acquainted, cut me dead in the post office.
The next afternoon her ladyship, Ronnie’s mother, failed to acknowledge
my salutation, and I knew that my disgrace was complete. Obviously it
was I who was to blame for Rose’s wickedness.
That evening I received by hand a letter from Sir Edmund stating that
after what had happened it was the wish of himself and his wife that I
should never darken his door again. I remember the phrase
distinctly—never darken his door: he must have carried it in his mind
from a melodrama witnessed in his youth. Much as they had esteemed me in
the past, the letter continued, and much even as they were indebted to me
in my capacity as a doctor, they could never forget that their poor son’s
affections had been basely stolen—all ill and weakened as he was—by a
woman whom I had brought up. They did not say that it was the direct
effect of my loose training, but that was the suggestion. Their hearts
were broken, their heads were abashed, and they had lost their only
child, the prop of their old age and declining years, and it could never
have happened had not Rose been my ward and grown up in my house, in that
village, as a neighbour of their own. Under the circumstances I must see
that further intercourse between them and me was an impossibility. And
the remark applied also to my assistant. The letter ended with a request
for my account.
My answer was chiefly an acknowledgment, but I could not refrain from
suggesting that while I had been bringing up the girl who had run away
with their Ronnie, they had been bringing up the boy who had run away
with my Rose. Were we not equally bereaved and distressed and even
ashamed, they and I? But nothing but a cheque came in reply to this.
* * * * *
In due time I wrote to Eustace to say that I would take Rose while he was
away and do my best to preserve her sweetness. And then I paid a visit
to the wing of the house where Hannah had reigned, to see what was
needed.
To my surprise, I found Suzanne busy with a polishing-cloth.