“And not being married, you, well—in point of fact, you can’t know. A
man, especially as he gets on in years, has to make concessions to his
wife. All life is compromise, as you know, and married life in
particular. A certain happiness, or, at any rate, peace, must be
secured, and compromise is the highroad to it—in fact, the only road.
But it is absurd for me to be saying all this, because of course you know
Lady Fergusson.”
I knew her well, but I knew also that in that _ménage_ the grey mare was
not the better animal; it was Sir Edmund who ruled, and any compromise
that was made came from his wife’s side.
He may suddenly have been aware that some such thoughts were passing in
my mind, for he added, not without a slight flush, “Of course, you have
not seen her lately”—as though during the few months of our estrangement
both her character and his own had undergone one of those changes that
happen only in tracts and fairy tales. He even had the hardihood to add,
“You’ll notice a great difference when,” but stumbled over it and went on
quickly—“that is, if you ever honour us by your company again, as I most
cordially hope you will.
“For,” he continued more fluently, “it is about that that I have come;
about that, and our letter to you, which I have been regretting ever
since it was sent. What I want to make clear—without any disloyalty,
mind, to Lady Fergusson—is that that letter was written when we were in a
highly nervous state and was written almost wholly at her Ladyship’s
wish. You recall what I said about compromise?
“Well, my dear doctor,” he said, “my dear Greville, if you will permit me
to call you that once more—for the sake of harmony, for the sake of that
peace which must dominate a home, I consented to write that letter and to
do many other things which were a natural consequence of it. When your
reply came, I recognized the good sense of it at once; I knew, as any man
of the world must know, that my poor boy cannot be wholly absolved, that
it takes two to make an elopement no less than a marriage. I knew—but
women have not our penetration and common reasonableness, our sagacity,
shall I say?
“Lady Fergusson,” he continued, “could not take that view, and compromise
made me, in that moment of stress and disaster, when the Hall and all it
stood for seemed to be toppling about us like a house of cards,
compromise made me as wax in her hands.
“I have come now, in humility and shame, to apologize for my share of
this most lamentable quarrel, and to ask you, for the sake of my poor
wife, to overlook it, to forget it, and once more to show your
magnanimity by coming to the Hall and doing something to relieve that
poor distraught creature’s pain.
“I ask nothing for myself,” he concluded. “I merely grovel. But for her
sake you will come, won’t you? No one knows her symptoms as you do. In
no one has she such confidence.”
I had listened to the harangue without a word, but not without many
thoughts. Chiefly had I been wondering if husband and wife were in
collusion, or if they were really acting independently. To this day I
don’t know.
As he came to an end, he advanced to me with an extended hand, which I
took.
“I will come to the Hall to-morrow,” I said. “But I should like as much
publicity to be given to your new friendly attitude as to the hostile one
now terminating. I count on you to let others know, as well as myself,
that you have reason to be ashamed of your conduct towards me.”
“How?” he asked blankly.
“I must leave that to you,” I said.
I was relieved that the hatchet was buried, not because I had been
incommoded by the feud to any great extent, but quarrels are not in my
line, and this one was uncomfortable to the village. More than
uncomfortable: degrading.
It was humiliating, for example, to one who would wish every one to be
dependent and honest, to see the embarrassment into which some of my
neighbours could be plunged when I had come suddenly upon them while they
were talking with Sir Edmund or Lady Fergusson. They had to decide in a
moment which side to be on, whether to acknowledge me or not. I was, of
course, in the long run, of infinitely more use to them than the Hall
people could be: but wealth is wealth, and position is position, and poor
human nature is poor human nature and ever will be. I don’t expect it to
change, but I cannot bear to be a cause of plunging it into its less
admirable moods.
Our community was too small for the Hall people and the doctor to be at
enmity; and a large part of a country doctor’s duty is to act as cement,
a fuser of classes, and while the vendetta held how could I be this?
But if a sigh of relief went up when it was known that I had been seen to
drive into the Hall gates again, no one emitted it with more genuine
heartiness than the rector, who had been put in a peculiarly awkward
position. For although my friend of many years’ standing, he had not,
poor fellow, enough courage to take any stand in the matter. I am not
blaming him. The church does not train men to take a very strong stand
on such occasions, nor indeed require recruits from the ranks of the
independent and outspoken. Clerics, it is true, can become approximately
courageous and frank, but preferment usually precedes the operation.
Your country rector or vicar keeps himself as free from trouble as
possible—very wisely—and listens to all sides even if he is not a
partisan of all sides.
The Fergussons were too important for our rector even to contemplate the
risk of losing them. So far as his church was concerned, he was safe, as
I was not an attendant; but I was on this committee and that with both
Sir Edmund and himself; we were all three of us governors of the
almshouses. I had brought the rector’s numerous children into the world;
I was even godfather to one of them. The rector was continually coming
to me for advice. My usefulness was as necessary to him, or at any rate
as comforting, as the Hall’s prestige, patronage and port.
Both of us he had, of course, held reprehensible in a very high degree
for the effect on his parishioners of the defiance of morality involved
in Ronnie and Rose’s escapade. He blamed the Fergussons for providing a
Ronnie, and me for my association, although so vicarious, with Rose. How
could he expect his simple flock to keep in the straight path, he asked,
if the seventh commandment was treated with such contempt by the sons and
daughters of the rich and exalted? He felt that his stewardship was
under a cloud, even though Ronnie was merely a visitor among us from
India and Rose from Wilton Place. Both had been children under him, when
he was young and far more energetic than now. If they had weakened and
fallen, was it not a reflection on his own zeal?
Mrs. O’Gorman told me something of the good man’s line of self-torturing
argument when I called on her one day, for he did not himself dare to
present the case to me.
“What do you think the old fellow’s saying now?” she said. “He’s saying
that if any of the husbands and wives in his congregation—Joe Smithers,
for example, and Alice Leith—were to bolt together for the bad motive,
he’d have not a word to reply to them if they were to say they did it
because Captain Fergusson and Mrs. Holt had made a break.
“‘Rubbish! my dear sir,’ I said to him. ‘People don’t argue like that;
at least not honestly: only for effect. And people don’t wait for
examples; they do what they want if they have the courage, but for the
most part they do nothing at all, because they’re cowards.’
“It takes more courage, I told him, to do what Captain Fergusson and Mrs.
Holt have done than to resist temptations; and my own belief is that no
temptation worth the name ever is resisted. It’s only resisted when it’s
pretending to be strong. Passion isn’t resisted; but mercifully there’s
very little of it in England. What we call passion is usually a mixture
of a certain amount of loneliness and a certain amount of curiosity and a
certain amount of appetite and a tremendous desire to escape from what
one is doing and have an adventure. But passion, burning hot and
self-sacrificing—there’s very little!
“The rector,” she went on, “actually had the nerve to congratulate
himself on the good conduct of the parish. He seemed to think it’s due
to his sermons. I put him right. ‘My dear man,’ I said, ‘it’s not your
sermons; it’s the want of opportunity.’”
“You’re so uncompromising, Mrs. O’Gorman,” I said. “And you put into
speech what other people only dare to think, and sometimes not even that.
It’s a great privilege to be Irish.”
“Well,” she said, “all I hope is that that poor child of yours is happier
with her soldier than she ever was with her solicitor.”
“Barrister,” I corrected.
“Barrister,” she said. “I knew he was a barrister but I wanted to be
alliterative. Don’t forget that my father was a scholar and a poet, and
he taught us to make phrases.”
* * * * *
Rose—the older Rose—used to write regularly. They were living at Kwala
Lumpur, in the Straits Settlements, and Ronnie was doing well with
rubber. He would never be really strong again, but they seemed to be
happy. I wrote regularly in reply and sent news of Rose the less, whose
perplexity about her mother’s disappearance and the change of home was no
longer acute. In the first instance Eustace had told her that her mother
had gone away across the sea, and left it vaguely there. To a child of
five such voyages may seem natural.
“What message shall I give to your mother?” I wanted to ask, but I never
did; nor did Rose send any message to her daughter. It seemed better to
let the tie relax and gradually cease to be. Rose was never one to ask
for things “both ways.”
Eustace meanwhile was still in the Argentine, and it was three years
before he returned to England. His work at Buenos Aires had led to
various profitable ventures into which he had been glad to throw himself
as he shrank more and more from the idea of resuming life in London. The
house in Wilton Place being let furnished at a high rent, and Rose being
safe with me, why should he return? The hymnist may ask, with an
outraged wonderment in his voice, “Can a mother’s tender care cease
towards the child she bare?” but my experience is that it can do so quite
easily. I have watched it in the process. As for a father’s tender care
for the child he engendered, that often never begins to exist at all.
Eustace, at any rate, endured separation from his daughter with exemplary
fortitude.
At the end of three years he was ready, however, to face the music again,
and a letter arrived saying that he would come down for the week-end to
see Rose and talk things over.
He duly arrived, very grey, but looking strong and hard and handsome. He
watched Rose very carefully at lunch, but seemed to have no wish to be
alone with her—almost a fear that he might have to be. Rose studied him
gravely, too, but merely answered his questions and volunteered nothing.
I have had all my life only one rule of conduct with regard to children,
and that is to treat them as if they were grown up; I ask their advice,
consult with them, even conspire; and great has been my reward in
consequence. But Eustace was one of those men who too consciously come
down a peg or two with the young, and Rose was made uneasy. She
disappointed him by her ignorance of the Argentine and expressed no
interest when her father told her that in sailors’ language Buenos Aires
became Bows and Arrows.
I had been troubled by the fear that he would want to take Rose away and
try the experiment of being a father to her: but it was a false alarm.
Once again I had been guilty of the folly of anticipating disaster—a
foible to which human nature is ever too prone.
Eustace had many plans, but they did not embrace any intimate association
with his flesh and blood. Having satisfied himself of my genuine desire
to keep Rose, he told me some of them. He was selling most of the Wilton
Place furniture, keeping only enough for a small service flat. He would
spend most of his week-ends in the Dormy House at Bellingdon (what golf
and tobacco can do for bachelors, widowers and the separated, no pen can
ever compute!), but would like to come down to me occasionally, if I had
no objection.
“I don’t think I am the best companion for a child of Rose’s age,” he
said. “When she is older I hope that she may come and live with me, but
just now I am both unsettled and unhappy and I should not be able to give
her sufficient attention. She should go to school, I think, and then
part at least of the holidays—the summer holidays—she and I could spend
together by the sea. I might do a little sailing.”
Of the other Rose he said nothing. Nor did I mention her. But Rose the
less was like enough to her mother (her double in expression, in certain
moods) for him inevitably to have her in his thoughts whenever the child
was present. Except at meals, however, she was careful to be absent.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Rose was growing up. When Eustace returned she was eight and I
did not want better company. In herself she was interesting, and it was
interesting also to compare her with her mother at the same age: I almost
felt sometimes as if both were present. She was more with me than the
other Rose had been, for I was now less often out and away, having a
younger man to take the harder work: and when I was away it was for
shorter periods because the car was so much swifter than poor old Silver.
Another reason was that this Rose was less friendly with the neighbours:
not because of any natural shyness, but because she did not receive the
same quality of welcome. The little Rose of twenty years earlier, whose
father had died suddenly, was more acceptable than the little Rose of
to-day, whose mother had run away from husband and child with another
man—and that man the heir to the Hall. We are often not logical in our
censorious moods; and one of the last things to go, in the decay of
feudalism, will be respect for the Great House. No one was so mean or
courageous as to refuse Rose’s acquaintance; but she must have felt
instinctively that she was a little under a cloud and therefore have been
the more prepared to keep within the home borders.
She was, however, as welcome as sunshine in both adjoining
territories—the Westerleys’ and the Sturgis’s. Colonel Westerley, who
was getting very blind, found her invaluable as a guide. Again and again
I have listened to them on their tours round the beds, Rose’s clear
little voice raised (for he was getting deaf too) to keep him in touch
with the progress of every plant.
“This is where the fritillaries are”—she had great difficulty with some
of the names. “There are two new purple speckled ones and three white.”
“Now we’re opposite the auriculas. The yellow ones are terrific.”
“Oh dear, how the rain has broken down the tulips!”
“Now we’re opposite the hedge-sparrow’s nest. Wait a minute while I see
if there are any more eggs. No, only three still.”
So she would mark the changes of each morning, meanwhile leading the
gentle old warrior by the hand.
The three Sturgis sisters—though none of them was destined to soar to the
realms of bliss as Mrs. Julius Greville—fulfilled part of the destiny
that the other Rose, all unconsciously, had planned for them, by becoming
the most solicitous foster-mothers to her daughter. Out of their
unselfishness and their leisure they suggested that Rose should go to
them for lessons: a proposal that I was very glad to accept; and so it
came about that the eldest gave Rose an hour a day with pencil and paint
brushes in the studio (Rose’s grandfather’s studio), and the other two
each an hour in more general instruction. Having a full measure of the
Quaker placidity to keep them contented with their lot, they had no wish
to roam, and were thus ever to be depended upon.
Not that their lot was to be despised, for they had turned Theodore’s
house into a very beautiful serene place. It was a Georgian house,
panelled in white, with many recesses; and the three sisters had filled
these with blue china. The gods dispense their gifts capriciously, and
upon these descendants of a sect vowed to hostility to the arts and
graces they had conferred the most exquisite taste. A series of
provident ancestors had put them into a position to gratify most of their
wishes, and their home kept pace with modern culture in all its quieter
aspects.
* * * * *
Rose, you see, if she had not many friends, had very good ones. Her
chief lack was the chief lack of many only children—contemporaries. How
much happier she would have been had she playmates of her own age, I
cannot say; but it is absurd to pretend that without them she was
unhappy.
And this I can say with certainty: she kept me young. She did not
actually transform me into a contemporary, but she so arranged it that
there was very little awkwardness or fear between us. I am not
pretending to have been in her complete confidence, I am merely stating
the fact that we were under very little constraint together.
Even had we been real contemporaries, how could we really have known each
other! A man may guess at a man’s thoughts, may fairly safely measure
him by himself; but how can a man guess at a girl’s thoughts? Speech
reveals so few of them. If while one is speaking twenty words one can be
thinking of a hundred different things, what of the silent pauses? How
they must teem! Where was my Rose when her blue eyes looked through
their black lashes into space? How could I follow her unaided? Or would
she have aided me? Not would, but could. Could she have told me? Could
any of us tell all our thoughts in any given hour? Even if ships that
passed in the night signalled to each other the whole passenger list
there would always be a few of the steerage and some of the crew unnamed.
And if those were revealed, there would still be a stowaway!
* * * * *
One matter never mentioned between Rose and me was her mother’s _faux
pas_. What the child knew about this I did not discover, or wish to. I
am old-fashioned enough to prefer to talk of grown-up matters only with
grown-up people. The longer the gaiety and happiness of children can be
unclouded by knowledge of the difficulties and disasters which can
proceed from our emotional instincts, the better. So far as I was
concerned Rose was ignorant of her mother’s rebellion. We talked about
her as a child, but we did not touch on recent history. English families
are marvellous in their capacity to regulate conversational reservations.
One funny little pet turn of speech to which Rose was addicted comes back
to me very vividly as I write. Every one has favourite locutions, and
Rose had the habit of prefacing many of her remarks with the phrase “As a
matter of fact”; only, being mostly in a hurry to express herself, she
used to contract the last three words to one: “As a maffact.” Very few
minutes could pass, when we were together and she was unburdening herself
on this or that question, without her beginning a sentence: “As a
maffact, Dombeen.”
* * * * *
When the War came Rose was thirteen and I was sixty-five; and we were
therefore both non-combatants. But it did not leave us—any more than
anyone else—untouched; for I was old enough to be saddened and shocked by
the calamities that it bred; and Rose was young enough to be ripe for the
new Hedonism which the peace inaugurated and which is still in full
swing. Ronnie, the other Rose told me, longed to be in it, but was too
delicate, and they remained on their estate throughout its lengthy
course.
The War found the old Colonel still living, but he did not long survive.
He was not of the kind that spends its breath in lamenting the decadence
of the Army in present times—I never heard him couple the Service and the
dogs—but he had had his little autobiographical weaknesses, in which
border skirmishes played no inconspicuous part, and in the presence of
the gigantic drama in Belgium and France he found his occupation gone.
No one wanted to listen to him any more; and he was too aged and infirm
to be of any use. The War must have hit countless other retired officers
in this way and in a moment have dried up their streams of reminiscence
and emptied all their boasts. The Colonel was, however, a rural
gentleman and not a frequenter of clubs, and his lot was comparatively
easy; but I saw a steady decline in his strength, and he did not long
survive the death of two of his grandsons in the Battle of Mons.
* * * * *
The Colonel was not our only loss. Mrs. O’Gorman had been declining for
some time, and in the early spring she also left us.
I have been at many death-beds, and at most the grief was that of the
living rather than the dying. Nature has mercifully arranged that most
people are ready for the end—even look forward to it. Suffering or
weakness has broken down their resistance: the goal they desire is peace.
Others, with more fight in them, morphia lulls into acquiescence. But
Mrs. O’Gorman needed no drugs, nor were there tears to distress her.
Being the last of her clan her house was uninvested by relations. Only
the faithful Julia, her servants and I were about. Steadily and quietly
her flame lowered and was extinguished.
“I’m ready to die,” she said, “but it wouldn’t be true to say I should
want to if I had strength. It’s a muddling old world, but one hates the
dark. And I like to know what’s going on. I should have liked to see
your new Rose growing up. And that other Rose, poor darling, I don’t
like leaving her. And my little Peek, it will be horrid not to be able
to pat him and give him his sugar.
“Perhaps when we’re dead,” she went on, “we can still watch our friends.
If so, you can be very sure I shall be watching you. But don’t worry. I
won’t move the furniture or bother you with manifestations. I’ll simply
be looking on, and if there’s any means by which a spirit can add to the
content of a living friend, you can be sure I shall apply it. But there
can’t be,” she added, “or we should all be happier.
“It’s a sin,” she said another time, “that all we can leave are our
twopenny-halfpenny possessions. Why can’t we leave our brains? I don’t
pretend that mine are particularly desirable, but they would be a godsend
to that stupid woolly Mrs. Stansted, for example. It’s a pity I can’t
hand them on to her.”
To the end she kept up her spirit and to the end she teased poor Julia.
“Have you ordered your mourning yet?” she asked her once.
Julia’s reply was a sound of protest and a sob.
“But I want you to. I told you to. All this fuss about a simple little
matter like dying is so ridiculous. Don’t you want me to be happy in
heaven, Julia?”
More sobs.
“Now listen. I command you to get your mourning. I want to see if it
becomes you. Why shouldn’t I? A young bride is allowed to see the
bridesmaids who are to follow her to the church; why should an old widow
woman be prevented from seeing what her chief mourner will look like?”
Nothing, however, could get Julia to consider death a subject matter for
discussion, or as anything but a gaunt, grisly, abnormal happening.
“I hope they don’t insist on one’s entering heaven the very instant one
dies,” Mrs. O’Gorman said at another time. “That won’t suit me at all.
What I want is a really long sleep first—weeks and weeks of it. What do
you think, Julia, will they be in such a hurry?”
Poor Julia, all this was hard to bear; but when the old lady’s soul and
body did at last part company and her will was made public, it was found
that the legacy to her faithful companion was ten times larger than she
had foreshadowed in conversations. The poor of the village were
remembered also, and both the Roses had little mementoes.
* * * * *
We lost the Fergussons too, although not by death. They had not long
remained at the Hall after the burial of the hatchet, even though my
invaluable attendance was theirs once more. They had become restless and
discontented. The Hall estate had been bought for Ronnie to succeed to;
and of what use was it now? Sir Edmund had nothing to do—his interest in
tree-planting and general improvements disappeared, and he gradually took
a dislike to the place. The result was that they left for one of the
Continental health resorts—Aix-les-Bains, I think it was. When they went
I decided to take no new patients, and gradually allowed my practice to
pass to others, and when Mrs. O’Gorman died I retired altogether.
* * * * *
I said something a little while back about Rose and her ignorance of her
mother’s flight—or, at any rate, silence regarding it. That was when she
was a child. But later, when she had reached the teens, references to
her mother gradually came naturally into her conversation, and she would
even ask me about her.
“Tell me about mother, Dombeen,” she would say. “Was she like me? Mrs.
O’Gorman says that our voices are just the same.”
“Did you like her better than me?” She wanted to know this very badly.
I have no doubt that she had collected other views as well as mine and
had a fairly sound idea of the situation.
“Of course it was naughty to run away from father,” she began once, after
one of Eustace’s visits, “but—” Here she broke off with a suspicion of a
chuckle.