Chapter V: Part 5

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.

I asked her what she was doing there, so far from her own domain.

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.

I went to the door and she extended her hand.

“Do come in for a few moments,” she said. “I want very much to speak to you.” Here she groaned.

“But—” I began. There was something very offensive, after being cast off as I had been, in the assumption that I should be ready to be taken on again whenever the relenting mood occurred to them. Nor had I shaken her hand.

She burst forthwith into tears and I entered the car. I could not (as she knew) allow her to make an exhibition of herself at the window, with the chauffeur looking on.

“Dr. Greville,” she said, “I am a very miserable woman. Don’t be hard on me. I have been punished enough.” She groaned again, among the sobs.

“Tell me as quickly as possible,” I said. “I want to get on. My rounds are not finished yet.”

“I knew you would come back this way,” she said, “and I intercepted you. It is so little that I am able to do alone. That letter, now—it was not my letter, I did not wish it, it was Sir Edmund’s. Sir Edmund was implacable, but I—I knew that blame cannot be cast like that, just on one, and Ronnie was so fascinating, how could a girl help falling in love with him? But Sir Edmund could not see it. All he could see was Rose as a temptress and the ruin of his son and his name. You know how I have to give way to him? Believe me, I have regretted it ever since, and nothing but very wicked pride—we were always so proud, we Ancasters—has kept me from trying to see you sooner. But now my pride is humbled. Poor Sir Edmund—I don’t know what he would say if he knew I was talking to you like this—poor Sir Edmund is ill, and you must forgive us for his sake. Say you will. No doctor but you inspires any confidence. We have tried so many.”

“I forgave you long ago,” I said.

“Then you will come to the Hall again? Quickly? Will you? Sir Edmund is ill. I don’t know what it is, but something grave, something new and mysterious. Never mind about me”—she groaned again—“but he, poor darling! he must be looked after, he must be healed. You will do this for my sake? You will come to us again?”

“I must think about it,” I said. “It is not quite as simple as you seem to suppose. I have been very oddly treated in a very public manner.”

“I know you’ll come,” she cried, as I returned to my car. “You have such a good heart and I am so penitent.”

That evening I was sitting over my cigar after dinner—Rose having gone to bed—when the servant announced a gentleman to see me.

“What name?” I asked, for I was enjoying some well-earned repose, and indiscriminate callers had to be guarded against; but before she could reply a muffled-up figure was in the room. Removing his scarf, cap and goggles, he revealed himself as Sir Edmund Fergusson.

“You must excuse this visit,” he began nervously, “after what has happened, but it has been on my mind for a long while to explain.”

“Won’t you sit down?” I said.

“You are very kind,” he replied, taking a seat, while a spasm of pain crossed his heavy features. “The fact is—but that has nothing to do with it. What I want to do is to explain. This unhappy business of Ronnie has broken us up, but I want you to know—” He broke off and again a twinge took him.

“Would you mind if I were to light my pipe?” he asked.

I offered him cigars.

“You are too kind,” he said, taking one. “More than I deserve really. But—”—he lit it—“you, well, the best way I can put it is perhaps to say you are not a married man.”

I agreed.

“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.

* * * * *