It amused her, she said, to keep it bright and make it toute prête.
Toute prête for what? I asked.
For la petite, she said.
But why should she do that? I asked, concealing my astonishment. How
could so young a child be coming to live here, with all us old folks?
Suzanne resumed her polishing. It was in her heart, she said, that the
little Rose was to make her home here. It was what her mother would have
wished.
I never saw more pleasure written on the human countenance than lighted
up Suzanne’s when I told her that she was right.
* * * * *
Mrs. O’Gorman was naturally the first person whom I officially told.
“I’m glad of it,” she said. “I was hoping you might.”
“Other critics won’t be so well satisfied,” I said.
“Don’t mind them,” said Mrs. O’Gorman. “But what an adoptive fellow you
are! You’re a regular creche! No children of your own, O dear
no!—nothing so vulgar as marrying and begetting—but if anyone has a
daughter going begging you’re the boy to bring it up! It’s amazing. How
old are you?”
I told her. And I may as well tell every one: when Rose the second came
to me for good I was fifty-six.
“Fifty-six!” she said. “The prime of life. Uphill till you’re fifty;
then the top of the hill till you’re sixty; then the steady decline.
It’s a foolish world, Doctor; there’s no steadiness in it. We’re always
hurrying to the churchyard: some of us unassisted, others being pushed by
our medical men.”
I told her that that was too old a joke for her to crack. We looked to
her for something original.
“Old jokes are best,” she said. “At any rate, there’s something very
sound in that old one about the advantage of adopting a child rather than
having one of your own. Those, it says, who adopt choose, whereas those
who have a child in the ordinary manner must put up with what they get.
You’re one of the clever ones, Doctor; you choose. And may Rose the
second turn out as pretty and as sweet as that other one! Bring her to
me quickly. There’s no time to waste; when one is nearly eighty one
can’t postpone.”
* * * * *
Little Rose quickly became a comfort, and she was like enough to her
mother for me to feel that a benign miracle had been performed and the
clock set back twenty years. It is given to few persons to enjoy a
second time on earth, and I think of myself as peculiarly fortunate in
having twice been the most intimate companion of a child. For my first
Rose, I shall always have, I imagine, the tenderer spot; but the second
Rose did perhaps more to cheer me, for I was much older when Eustace left
her in my charge, and she helped to keep me young. It is possible that
but for her mother I might have made more of a life of my own, and even,
it is possible, have been the father of Roses. No one can tell—nor am I
suggesting resentment or even disappointment. I am probably better
qualified to bring up other people’s children than my own, and the world
is over- rather than under-populated. But the Devil’s advocate, who
thought of this possible count against the first Rose, would be
hopelessly dumb when called upon to indict the second.
The second Rose was a more active child than her mother had been—not
restless but alert—and there was little that did not interest her. Her
mother had made her own entertainment, but this Rose found most of hers
in the visible world. Nothing escaped her notice.
In the excitement of her new life she did not miss her mother with any
poignancy, and seemed to be satisfied with the explanation of her absence
that she had gone across the sea. This was true. Ronnie had left the
army and he and Rose were on their way to the Malay States, where he was
to grow rubber. As for Eustace, the child never mentioned him at all.
He had been one of those fathers who are seen only at breakfast and on
Sundays.
Until a nurse was found—the Wilton Place nurse having refused to live in
the country so far from the Knightsbridge barracks—Rose had a bed in my
dressing-room.
One of her timidities was concerned with moths. For some odd reason
those foolish gentle insects, who have never been known to harm anyone
but themselves, terrified her, and often and often she would wake me in
the night with the cry, “Dombeen, there’s a mawf in the room!” or “Come
quick, Dombeen, there’s a little mawf somewhere.”
She grew out of her fears, of course, and in time occupied a more distant
apartment; but for a long while I rarely got through the night without
some such call—the little monkey even employing it as an appeal when
there was no danger, as the boy called “Wolf! Wolf!” in the fable. But
no matter how suspicious I may have been, I always went. “Dombeen,
Dombeen, there’s a mawf in the room”—how I wish I could hear that now!
“Little Mawf” became one of my names for her.
* * * * *
It was with the new Rose as with the old: my patients were intensely
interested in her. Not many, however, were the same as those who had
been so solicitous about her mother. Some had left the neighbourhood;
some preferred my assistant; some were dead. Mrs. O’Gorman was, I think,
Rose’s favourite, in spite of the years between them—the old lady now
nearing the eighties and the child not yet six. Seventy years is a big
dividing gulf, and yet when they were together there was little sign of
it, such was the adaptability of both.
The first time that I took Rose to tea, Mrs. O’Gorman gave her two
presents—a fearsome agate brooch (she had an early Victorian taste in
ornaments) and a paint-box that had been her companion on sketching
rambles when she was active. It was one of the old-fashioned boxes, with
the colours in cakes and a drawer underneath with a porcelain palette in
it and many fascinating accessories. The agate might as well have been
thrown into the river, but the paint-box was a treasure beyond price, and
it played a great part in Rose’s destiny, for it turned her thoughts to
art, and some of her grandfather’s skill soon began to manifest itself.
Having this resource, Rose needed less entertaining than any child I ever
knew. Give her a pencil and a piece of paper and she would be happy
until the paper was covered on both sides. It is odd that her mother had
no desire to draw and no aptitude: that the talent should skip a
generation and manifest itself again in Theodore’s grandchild; but so it
was. Rose the elder had beguiled her loneliness by telling herself
stories; Rose the younger scribbled men and women and little girls and
little boys and dogs and huntsmen and princesses and cats on the blank
spaces of letters and the insides of envelopes or whatever scraps of
paper could be found, from morn till dewy eve.
* * * * *
Ronnie’s people took too much delight in illness to be happy in their
aloofness from me. Disregarding a certain solidarity in the medical
profession, they had assumed that Dr. Vaughan in the next town would be
only too willing to obey their capricious summonses whenever the
slightest pain made itself felt in either of their systems. But Vaughan
was a friend of mine by no means desirous of supplanting me anywhere or
of getting a footing in the Hall. He therefore refused to go. Doctors,
it is notorious, must obey calls of distress or bear the consequences,
but not when other doctors are nearer, and, as he knew why I was not
called and knew also that Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson knew that he knew
why I was not called, he was in a very strong position—strengthened by
the alliance of the telephone, which enabled him to make quite sure of
his ground. Most telephone wires, could they be induced to repeat all
that they have ever transmitted, would have some odd things to tell, and
the conversations between Vaughan and myself while this feud was
flourishing would not be least amusing. We had the great advantage of
having been contemporaries at the same hospital, and it is, at bottom,
only contemporaries who really understand each other. Old and young may
meet, but contemporaries mingle.
In the face of the confederacy between Vaughan and myself the unhappy
Fergussons, racked with gout, were forced to send for Vaughan’s rival, a
young bumptious and climbing practitioner who had just set up in the
place and was pulling every wire for social advancement, but who, for all
his latest learning and diplomas, was wanting in the most important
quality that a medical attendant can possess, the power to suggest
confidence. There are patients who would languish under the care of the
most brilliant physician in the world lacking the gift, and who would
recover quickly though only a farrier, possessing it, should stand beside
their bed. Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson were therefore very awkwardly
placed.
Their next step was really rather Napoleonic and made Sir Edmund’s rise
to wealth clear to me. They determined to bring down a new doctor who
should be both agreeable to them and capable as a healer and establish
him in our very village, not only as a constant attendant upon
themselves, but as a menace and source of annoyance, and even loss, to
me. But here they were baulked by the goodness of my friends. One
cannot be a doctor in the same rural neighbourhood all one’s life, and
succeed a father who also had been there for years and years, without
setting up certain relationships that are thicker than water. I had made
no effort to do so, but simply through being one’s more or less amiable
self, and liking my work rather than not, I had done so. If I had
consciously toiled to be popular, I might have failed; but I had just
gone on my way, neglected no one, at any rate not scandalously, spoken my
mind when it was asked for, and hurried, I hope and believe, very few of
my neighbours under the turf. To have built up this structure of
friendliness was my part in the frustration of Sir Edmund’s masterful
campaign. His own contribution to his failure was his neglect to have
become the owner of any property in the district except the Hall and its
satellite cottages. The result was that when his nominee tried to rent a
house in which to set up his rival practice, he could not get one.
Anybody else could have had one—an avowed burglar even, with all his
tools about him—but not a doctor!
The situation was not made any easier for the Fergussons by the
palpitations of their cook—a very excellent cook—who, on being forbidden
to visit me about her malady, at once gave notice. If she might not have
the doctor she wished, she explained, she should certainly leave. Nor
would she stay out the month either, she added, but would cheerfully
forfeit her wages in order that she might the sooner submit her agitated
heart to my examination. Good cooks having never grown on blackberry
bushes, and this one being especially clever with chicken’s livers (one
of Sir Edmund’s many culinary weaknesses), her departure was a very
serious blow to him, in a very sensitive part.
To say that Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson’s aches and twinges multiplied
under their disappointments is to state the case with parsimony. They
increased to such an extent that the two old coddlers saw graves yawning
for them on every hand, and longed with a consuming longing—which was not
the less because each had to hide it from the other for pride’s sake—for
the solicitude and knowledge of the only man who knew them through and
through—a longing so constantly consuming that there was nothing for it
but to go to London or to fly the flag of truce. They hated London, but
to capitulate was too undignified; and so for a while the Hall was empty.
* * * * *
By what chance the news of Rose’s flight reached Mrs. Stratton I have no
notion. But in course of time she heard it, and I hardly need say did
not deprive me of an opportunity of learning what her feelings were. I
cannot give the exact words of her letter, because I tore it up quickly,
but its spirit remains with me.
It was largely a fantasia of triumph on the motif “I told you so.” What
could be expected, it asked scornfully, of such a bringing-up as the poor
girl had had? When children are handed over to cynical and irreverent
bachelors we must look for trouble. What chance had Rose of living a
sound life after so much careless familiarity with me and my friends?
And so on. It all pointed to the importance of steady self-sacrificing
home-training. We might sneer at the old-fashioned ways as much as we
liked, but they were the best, after all. Her own girls, Mrs. Stratton
was thankful to say, had been brought up to respect religion and do their
duty, but their training had made no difference to their natural
brightness and joy. It was not necessary to be superior to
conventionality in order to be gay!
Poor Milly Stratton! What a Benjamin’s portion of humble-pie was hers
not long after, and how careful we should be to discourage tendencies to
self-righteousness! If there is a good little cherub that sits up aloft
filled with benevolent protectiveness for the simple sailor-man, there is
no less surely a mischievous little imp, infinitely more watchful, whose
mission in life is to detect the complacently virtuous and make things
hot for them. Milly Stratton came very quickly within his sphere of
action, poor woman.
Driving up the road just before lunch I saw a strange figure in the
garden and was instantaneously conscious that she was unhappy. Why the
set of the shoulders, the movement of the arms, of an unknown visitor
seen among rose bushes at a considerable distance, should convey an
impression of mental disorder, I cannot explain; nor am I a particularly
good observer. All I can say is that in a flash I received the
suggestion; and, as it happened, it was right.
On reaching the house I found that the stranger was Mrs. Stratton, who
turned a distraught face to me as I approached her.
“Dr. Greville,” she said, “I am come both to ask your forgiveness and
your advice.”
“Forgiveness?” I exclaimed.
“Yes, forgiveness. I was very hard on you many years ago, in that room
there, on the night of the reading of poor Theodore’s will, and I was
very hard on you the other day in a letter which I wrote about Rose.”
“That’s all right,” I assured her, adding that she certainly had had
provocation on the first occasion, and no doubt also I was not very nice
to her. I was younger then and perhaps too assertive: perhaps rather
offensively proud of being selected by Theodore as his daughter’s
guardian.
“No you weren’t,” she said. “No one was horrid but myself. I was proud
and self-righteous. But,” she added brokenly, “I have been punished.”
She began to cry and I led her into the house.
“Tell me after we have had lunch,” I said. “You must be tired and
hungry.”
She said that she could eat nothing, and was as good as her word.
Throughout the meal she looked miserably, and yet with a kind of fierce
wistfulness, at little Rose, who did not know in the least what to make
of it—why this stranger should be here at all, why the tears rolled down
her cheeks with no accompanying uproar, why she refused such delicious
cheese-cakes.
A more uncomfortable meal I never ate, and all the while I was
speculating as to what had happened. Could the placid George have
revolted at last and left her? But that was impossible. Had he been
speculating and come to disaster? More likely.
When we were left alone the story burst forth. It was not George. In a
way it was worse, more damaging to her pride: it was her youngest
daughter Angelica. Angelica, aged only twenty, and not even engaged, was
going to have a baby.
O these babies! All the troubles and complications of the world come
from them. If only they could be eliminated the globe would gradually
fall back into a permanent peaceful wilderness. That was perhaps my
thought during the silence that followed her announcement. But “Good
Heavens!” was all that I could think to say: said, I hope, with a note of
sympathy to balance the surprise.
“I came to you,” Mrs. Stratton resumed, “because poor George is so
helpless, and you are a doctor and, I trust, in spite of my behaviour to
you, a friend of the family—almost, in a way, one of the family.”
It was no time to repudiate the second suggestion.
“So carefully brought up as she has been!” the mother went on. “But
that’s all over,” she added quickly, probably recalling her letter to me.
“The thing now is to see what can be done? You will help, won’t you?
You must know of some place in Paris where she could go?”
Odd how all doctors are supposed to know this, and odder, perhaps, how
naturally even the most insular and irreconcilable of the censors of
France turn in these times of despair to that deplorable country!
“Surely you need not exile the girl?” I said.
“The scandal would be bound to leak out at home,” she replied. “Besides,
there are her sisters to think of. They must not be contaminated.”
“They don’t know, then?”
“Not yet. Certainly not.”
“Where is Angelica now?”
“She is still with us.”
“Then,” I said, “I should imagine that her sisters do know. And in any
case, why contamination? They need not be corrupted by the knowledge.
It might make them the more understanding, the more merciful.”
“Don’t you blame her?” Mrs. Stratton asked, as a kind of challenge.
“I blame her—yes,” I said. “I think she has been foolish: she has
wronged herself and you; she has flung away treasures of pride. But you
must remember that I don’t know her; I have no idea of the strength of
her temptation; and in any case I cannot consider everything lost. The
error is not irreparable. It is according to Nature. At its worst,
apart from a criminal want of prudence, it is but an anticipation of a
ceremony.”
“Then you think we should condone it? Keep her among us?”
“Within touch, most certainly,” I said. “Don’t exile her. This is when
she wants kindness more than at any time in her life—this is when you
have your first real opportunity to be her mother. You ought to jump at
it instead of suddenly freezing into a judge.”
“But the disgrace?”
“Well, you must exercise a little discretion, of course, and do all you
can to preserve her good name. Many a family has been confronted with
the same problem and carried it off with success.” I had it in my mind
to add that if no cupboard held a worse skeleton than an unlegalized baby
there would not be much wrong with the world; but I refrained. I
refrained also from reminding her of the line in “Lear”, “The gods stand
up for bastards.” Mrs. Stratton could not have understood, nor was she
in the mood for any levity. Indeed, I was perplexing her sufficiently,
all unready as she was for such novel ideas as I had been unfolding.
“What does Stratton say?” I was moved to ask, to break her silence.
“George?--Oh, he doesn’t know about it. I wanted to see you first.”
“You must tell him,” I said. “You’ll find that he will agree with me.”
“Won’t you come back with me?” she asked. “It would all be so much
easier if you would. Angelica might tell you things that she won’t tell
me. I don’t mean the man’s name—no one could get that from her. I am
sure you could help. It would be such a load off my mind if you would
come.”
And I had of course to comply.
I could not leave instantly, and while I was making the preparations I
was amused to see, out of the window, Mrs. Stratton stealthily
approaching the kitchen door. She knew that Suzanne ruled there, and her
mind had by no means relinquished France as an ally!
I discovered afterwards that my guess had been right. But Suzanne had as
little practical sympathy as Mrs. Stratton had colloquial French, and the
interview was a complete failure. There are delicacies of situation
beyond Ollendorff’s range.
If Mrs. Stratton assured me once on the journey, she assured me thirty
times, that she would never be able to hold up her head again.
“Nonsense!” I replied; and I was right. She is holding it fairly high
still, but with far less self-righteous aloofness. Angelica’s illicit
bantling, whose existence we were able to conceal from the world, did
more to humanize its grandmother than anything else could have done. As
for Angelica, she is now married and a respected matron, with sons and
daughters born in as lawful a form of wedlock as Church and State can
provide.
But that has nothing to do with my story, and I apologize for the
digression. My reconciliation with the Fergussons also is not precisely
in the direct line of this narrative, but having described the earlier
stages of the coolness, I must be permitted to record the later.
Coming back along the Lowcester road one afternoon, I found a big car at
such an angle across it that it could not be passed; and on approaching
closer I discovered it to be the Fergussons’, with Lady Fergusson inside.
So they had returned! I had become accustomed to looking fixedly in
front of me when we had chanced to meet before they took refuge in town;
but the present situation would have rendered such a manœuvre impossible,
even if, directly I pulled up, the Fergussons’ chauffeur had not come to
ask if I would do her Ladyship the kindness of speaking to her for a
moment.