Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 1

Christmas Roses and Other Stories.

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick.

Christmas Roses

I

THEY were coming up everywhere in their sheltered corner on the wall-border, between the laurustinus and the yew hedge. She had always loved to watch their manner of emerging from the wintry ground: neck first, arched and stubborn; heads bent down as if with held breath and thrusting effort; the pale, bowed, folded flower, when finally it rose, still earthy, still part, as it were, of the cold and dark from which it came; so that to find them, as on this morning, clear, white, triumphant, all open to the wind and snow, was to renew the sense of the miraculous that, more than any other flower, they always gave her. More than any other flower, they seemed to _mean_ to come, to will and compa.s.s it by the force of their own mysterious life. More than any other flower, winter piled upon their heads, unallured by spring and the promise of sunlight, they seemed to come from the pressure of a gift to bring rather than a life to seek. She thought always, when she saw them, of Christmas bells over snowy fields, in bygone centuries; of the Star in the East, and of the manger at Bethlehem. They were as ancient as that tradition, austere and immaculate witnesses in an unresponsive world; yet they were young and new, always; always a surprise, and even to her, old as she was, bereft and sorrowful, a reminder that life was forever a thing of births, of gifts, of miracles.

They did not fail her this morning when she came out to them, and she thought, as she stopped to look at them, that one was not really old when, in the shock of sheer happiness, one knew childhood again and its wonder. Yet, as she worked among them, cutting away dead leaves and adjusting sprays of evergreen so that the rains should not splash them with mud, it was a new a.n.a.logy they brought; and, for the first time, measuring her resource after the appeal Tim's letter had made upon it, she reflected that the Christmas roses were rather like herself. She, too, in this wintry season of her life, was still determined and indomitable. Widowed and childless, with many mournings in her heart, griefs and devastations in her memory, she, too, was a force, silent and patient; and it was this that people still found in her. For the appeal always brought the answer. She had felt herself, so often, benumbed into lethargy, and, yielding to the mere mute instinct of self-preservation, had so often folded herself up and lapsed into the blank darkness of her grief (her husband's death, so many years ago; and Miles's, and little Hugh's, and her dear, dear Peggy's). But it had always been to hear herself, as if in a dream, called to from the outside world, and to feel herself, in answer, coming up again, rising, if only to snows and tempests, in a renewal of life which brought with it, always, a renewal of joy in life.

For months now, since August, she had been sunken in the last grief--it must be--that could come to her; for Miles was the last, of her own, who had remained--Peggy's youngest boy. The oldest, already a soldier, had been killed in the first months of the war, and, after all his years of peril, it had seemed as if Miles was to escape. But, cruelly, just at the turning of the tide, when victory had become a.s.sured, he had been shot down, and in his crashing fall through the air she had felt the end of everything, Peggy dying again with him; for Peggy, too, had died like that, crashing and falling and dragged, in a horrible hunting accident.

There seemed, now, nothing more left to suffer, and nothing more to live for, either, unless it were her poor Tim; and it had, exactly, been Tim's letter that had driven her out to wrestle with the elements, after her wont in any disturbance or perplexity, so that she could think over what he told her while she wielded her trowel and fork on the convenient wall-border.

She had, on rising from the breakfast-table, sent Tim a wire: "I shall expect her. Writing later," and had then called to Parton to bring her old warm coat, her hood with its satin lining, and her buckled galoshes.

Parton was accustomed to her mistress's vagaries in regard to gardening, and made no comment on the enterprise except to express the hope that it would not snow again. Parton, in spite of her youth a most efficient combination of parlourmaid and lady's-maid, was devoted to her mistress; the little pat and tweak she gave to the bow of the hood, and the gentleness with which she adjusted the galoshes, expressed a close yet almost reverential relationship.

It was not freezing, and under the light fall of snow the ground was soft. Mrs. Delafield found herself enjoying the morning freshness as she tidied and weeded, and had her usual affectionate eye for the bullfinches nipping away at her plum-buds and the t.i.ts and robins at the little table spread with sc.r.a.ps for them near the house; while all the time Tim's letter weighed on her, and the problem it presented; and as she pondered on it, and on Rhoda, her niece, Tim's only child, her firm, square, handsome, old, white face was not devoid of a certain grimness.

Mrs. Delafield was very handsome, perhaps more handsome now than she had been in youth. Her brow, with the peak of thick white hair descending upon it, her thick black eyebrows and her rather thick, projecting nose, were commanding--almost alarmingly so to those who in her presence had cause for alarm. The merely shy were swiftly rea.s.sured by something merry in her gaze and by the benevolent grace still lingering on her firm, small lips. She had square eyes clearly drawn, and with an oddity in their mountain-brook colouring, for one was brown and one was freaked with grey. Her form was ample and upright, and in all her gestures there was swiftness and decision.

It was of Tim she thought at first, rather than of Rhoda, the cause of all their distresses. But she was not seeing Tim as he now existed, bleached, after his years of India, invalided, fretted by family cares, plaintive and pitiful. She saw him as a very little boy in their distant Northern nursery of sixty years ago, with bright curls, ruddy cheeks, and the blue eyes, candid and trusting, that he still kept; standing there, bare-armed and bare-legged, in his stiff, funny little dress of plaid, before the fire-guard, while nurse, irate, benevolent figure, cut bread and b.u.t.ter for breakfast. Dear little Tim! still her younger brother; still turning to her, as he had always done, for counsel or succour in any stress or anxiety. It was nothing new that the anxiety should be about Rhoda; there was nothing, even, that had surprised her in Tim's letter; yet she knew from the sense of urgency and even breathlessness within her that the blow which had been dealt him could not leave her unaffected. She could, after all, still suffer in Tim's suffering. And even before she had let her thoughts dwell decisively on Rhoda, she had found herself thinking, while the grimness settled on her face, "I shall know how to talk to her."

She had always known how to talk to the moody young beauty; that was why Tim had sent off this letter of desperate appeal. She never quite saw why Rhoda had not, from the first, felt in her merely an echo of her father's commonplace conventionality and discounted her as that. Rhoda had never, she felt sure, guessed how far from conventional she was; how much at heart, in spite of a life that had never left appointed paths, she knew herself to be a rebel and a sceptic; no one had ever guessed it. But there had always been between her and Rhoda an intuitive understanding; and that Rhoda from the first had listened and, from the first, had sometimes yielded, proved that she was intelligent.

Mrs. Delafield saw herself so accurately as Rhoda must see her. The terse, old-fashioned aunt in the country residence--yes, dear Fernleigh, square and mid-Victorian, with its name, and its creepers, its conservatory, and its shrubberies, was so eminently a residence; and she had never wanted to alter it into anything else, for it was so that she had found it when, on her mother-in-law's death, she and the young husband of so many years ago had first gone there to live. Rhoda must see her, her hair so smooth under its cap of snowy net, her black gowns--stuff for morning wear, silk for evening--so invariable, with the frills at neck and wrists, thick gold chains and the dim old brooches that went with them, as belonging almost to an epoch of alb.u.ms on centre-tables, of Mendelssohn's sacred songs, and archery tournaments; an epoch of morning family-prayers and moral categories, where some people still believed in h.e.l.l and everybody believed in sin. She didn't think that Rhoda had ever seen through all these alienating appearances to the reality she herself knew to be so different; but it had always been evident that she felt it through them; that she was at ease with her aunt, candid, even if angry, and willing, even when most silent and recalcitrant, to come down to Fernleigh, when her distracted parents could deal with her no longer, and to "think things over," as they put it to her, imploringly.

Mrs. Delafield could see Rhoda thinking things over from a very early age, from the earliest age at which recalcitrancy could count as practically alarming. She could see her walking slowly past this very border at the time that she had determined to go on the stage,--she had only just left the hands of her devastated governesses,--pausing now and then to examine unseeingly a plant, her hands clasped behind her, her dark, gloomy, lovely, young head brooding on the sense of wrong, and, even more, no doubt, on plots and stratagems. Her aunt had always watched her, while seeming, in the most comfortable manner possible, to give her no attention; noting everything about her,--and everything counted against poor Tim's and Frances's peace of mind,--from the slender, silken ankles to the tall column of the proud young throat; all of it, every bit of Rhoda, so determined by an insatiable vanity, which was the worst of her, and by a sardonic pride, which was the best.

Rhoda, to do her further justice, was even more wonderful in the eyes of her admirers than in her own. Her consciousness was not occupied so much with her own significance as with all the things due to it; and it was upon these things, and the methods of obtaining them, that she brooded as she walked. "Naughty girl," had been her aunt's unexpressed comment; and perhaps one reason why Rhoda had found it comfortable, or, at least, composing, to be with her, was that it was a relief to be seen as a naughty girl rather than as a terrifying portent.

Mrs. Delafield had determined at once that Rhoda should not go on the stage, though not, really, because Tim and Frances had begged her to dissuade the child. She could perfectly imagine having wished to go on the stage herself in her young days; and it was this consciousness, perhaps, that made her so fair to Rhoda's desire. She had taken her stand on no conventional objection; she had not even argued with Rhoda; she had simply been able to make her feel, bit by bit, that she hadn't one little atom of talent.

It had been the same thing, really, when Rhoda had announced her intention of marrying a dreadful young man, a bad young man,--Mrs.

Delafield knew where to apply her categories,--who had a large studio where he gave teas and painted small, disagreeable pictures. They were clever pictures; Mrs. Delafield was aware of this, though Tim and Frances saw them only as disagreeable; and the young man, if bad, was clever. Mrs. Delafield had travelled up to town several times in this emergency, and had even accompanied Rhoda to the studio, where a young lady with bare legs and feet was dancing, with more concentration than spontaneity, before a cigaretted audience. Oddly enough, after this visit, it had been much easier to make Rhoda give up Mr. Austin Dell than it had been to make her give up the stage. Mrs. Delafield had merely talked him over, very mildly, him and his friends, asking here and there a kindly question about one or a slightly perplexed question about another. It had been Rhoda herself who had expressed awareness of the second-rate flavour that had brooded so heavily over dancer and audience, not leaving Mr. Dell himself untouched. On the point of Mr.

Dell's income Mrs. Delafield soon felt that Rhoda knew misgivings--misgivings as to her own fitness to be a needy artist's wife. She made no overt recantation, but over her tea, presently, agreed with her aunt that it was a pity to dance with bare feet unless the feet were flawlessly well-shaped. "She is such a little fool, that Miss Matthews!" Rhoda had remarked. And after this there was no more talk of Mr. Dell.

II

When, in the second year of the war, poor Tim and Frances, dusty, jaded, nearly shattered, but appeased at last, were able to announce the engagement of their daughter Rhoda to the unexceptionable Niel Quentyn, Mrs. Delafield's special function seemed ended; but, looking back over her long intercourse with her niece, she knew that Rhoda had felt her a relief rather than an influence; that she had made things easier rather than more difficult to her; that, in short, she had always successfully appealed to the girl's intelligence rather than to what poor Tim and Frances called her better self; and it was of Rhoda's intelligence, and of what possible pressure she might be able to bring to bear upon it, that she thought finally, as she worked at her border and waited for the fly that was to bring Rhoda's baby and its nurse from the station.

She had not been able to rejoice with her brother and his wife over Rhoda's match. She who had measured, during her years of acquaintanceship with her, her niece's force, had measured accurately, in her first glance at him, Niel's insignificance. He was good-looking, good-tempered, and very much in love; but caste, clothes, code, and the emotion of his age and situation summed him up. He had money, too, and could give Rhoda, together with a little handle to her name, the dim, rich, startling drawing-room in which her taste at once expressed itself, and a pleasant country house, where, as he confided to Mrs.

Delafield, he hoped to inspire her, when the war was over, with his own ardour for hunting.

Rhoda was far too clever to quarrel with such excellent bread and b.u.t.ter; but what could he give her more? for Rhoda would want more than bread and b.u.t.ter; what food for excitement and adventure could he offer her indolent yet eager mind and her nature, at once so greedy and so fastidious? Mrs. Delafield asked herself the question, even while she watched Rhoda's wonderful white form move up the nave at her splendid, martial wedding; even while poor Frances wept for joy and "The Voice that breathed o'er Eden" surged from the organ; and she feared that Niel was getting far more than he had bargained for and Rhoda far less.

The first year, it was true, pa.s.sed successfully. Poor Frances, who had, fortunately, died at the end of it, had known no reason for abated rejoicing. She lived long enough to see the baby, little Jane Amoret, as Rhoda persisted in calling the child; and she had welcomed Niel home once on leave--Niel as much infatuated as ever and trying to take an intelligent interest in Pica.s.so. It was since then, during the past year, that Tim's letters had expressed a growing presage and appeal.

Moved by the latter, and only a short time before her own grief had overtaken her, she had gone up to London and stayed with him for a few days, and had taken tea with Rhoda.

At Rhoda's it had been exactly as she expected. The drawing-room was worthy of its fame; so worthy that Mrs. Delafield wondered how Niel afforded it--and in war-time, too. Rhoda, as she often announced, was clever at picking up things, and many of the objects with which she had surrounded herself were undoubted trophies of her resource and knowledge. But all the taste and skill in the world didn't give one that air of pervading splendour, as of the setting for a Russian ballet, in which the red lacquer and the Chinese screens, the blacks and golds and rich, dim whites were, like Rhoda herself, sunken with her customary air of gloomy mirth in the deepest cushions and surpa.s.singly dressed, merged in the soft, unstressed, yet magnificent atmosphere. It was the practical side of matters--the depth of good, dull Niel's purse measured against the depth of Rhoda's atmosphere--that alarmed Mrs. Delafield, rather than Rhoda herself and Rhoda's friends, of whom poor Tim had so distressingly written.

There were many suave and merry young men, mainly in khaki, and various ladies, acute or languorous, who had the air of being as carefully selected as the chairs and china. There were tea and cigarettes, and an abundance of wonderful talk that showed no sign of mitigation on account of her mid-Victorian presence; though, as Mrs. Delafield reflected, musing on the young people about her, no one could say, except their clever selves, how much mitigation there might not be. Like Rhoda, no doubt, they felt her reality through her mid-Victorianism. Her small black bonnet with its velvet strings, and her long, loose jacket trimmed with fringe, would not restrain them beyond a certain point. Yet she suspected that they had a point, and she wondered, though the question did not alarm her, where it could be placed.

They talked, at all events, and she listened; at times she even smiled; and since by no possibility could her smiles be taken as complicities, she was willing that they should be taken as comprehensions. Rhoda's friends, though so young, were chill and arid, and the enthusiasms they allowed themselves had the ring of provocation rather than of ardour.

Yet she did not dislike them; they were none of them like Mr. Dell; and, though so withered by sophistication, they had at moments flashes of an uncanny, almost an ingenuous wisdom.

The occasion had not alarmed her, and she had found but one moment oppressive, that of the appearance--the displayal, as of a Chinese idol, indeed, or a Pekinese spaniel (Rhoda had three of these)--of poor little Jane Amoret. She rarely disliked her niece, even when feeling her most naughty; but she found herself disliking her calculated maternity, with its kisses, embraces and reiterated "darlings." Jane Amoret had eyed her gravely and, as gravely, had held out her arms to her nurse to be taken back when the spectacle was over. Jane Amoret's attire was quite as strange as her mother's drawing-room, and Rhoda had contrived to make her look like a cross between an Aubrey Beardsley and a gorgeous, dressed-up doll Madonna in a Spanish cathedral.

On returning to Tim, Mrs. Delafield found that she could not completely rea.s.sure him, but she laid stress, knowing it would be, comparatively, a comfort, on Rhoda's extravagance, eliciting from him a groan of "I know!--I know!--Poor Niel's been writing to me about it!--Dances; dinners; gowns. One would say she had no conscience at all--and at a time like this!" But he went on, "That's nothing, though. That can be managed when Niel gets back--if he ever does, poor fellow!--and can put his foot down on the spot. You didn't see him, then? He wasn't there--the young man?"

Tim had never before spoken definitely of a young man.

"The young man?" she questioned. "There were a dozen of them. Of course, she'll have a special one: that's part of the convention. Rhoda may cultivate--like all the rest of them--every appearance of lawless attachment; but you may be sure, dear Tim, that it's only a pose, a formula, like the painted lips and dyed hair, which doesn't in the least mean they are demi-mondaines."

"Painted lips? Dyed hair? Demi-mondaines?" Tim had wanly echoed. "Do you really mean, Isabel, that Rhoda paints and dyes?"

"Not her hair. It's too lovely to be dyed. But her lips,--why, haven't you seen it?--ever since she was eighteen. It is all, as I say, a pose; a formula. They are all afraid of nothing so much as of seeming respectable. I imagine that there's just as much marital virtue at large in the world nowadays as when we were young.--Who is the young man?" she had, nevertheless, ended.

"My dear, don't ask me!" Tim had moaned, blanched and battered in his invalid's chair. (Why wouldn't he come down and live with her? Why, indeed, except that, since Frances's death, he had felt that he must stand by, in London, and watch over Rhoda.) "I only know what I've heard. Amy has talked and talked. And everybody else is talking, according to her." Amy was Frances's sister, a well-meaning, but disturbing woman, with a large family of well-conducted, well-married, unpainted, and unfashionable daughters. "She is here every day about it.

They are always together. He is always there. The poet--the new young poet. He has a heart or a chest or a stomach--something that has sent him home and that keeps him safe at Whitehall, while poor Niel fights in France. Surely, Isabel, you've heard of Christopher Darley? Wasn't he there? Young. Younger than Rhoda. Black hair. Big eyes. Silent."

Silent.--Yes, there had been, beside Jane Amoret, one silent person in Rhoda's drawing-room. And she had been aware of him constantly, though, till now, unconsciously. Very young; very pale; aloof, near a window, with an uncalculated aloofness. She reconstructed an impression that became deeper the further she went into it. Thick backward locks that had given his forehead a wind-blown look, and a gaze now and then directed on herself, a gaze grave, withdrawing, yet scrutinizing, too.

"Yes; I think, now that you describe him, I must have seen him," she murmured; while a curious alarm mounted in her, an alarm that none of Rhoda's more characteristic circle had aroused. "He wasn't living by a formula of freedom," she reflected. "And he wasn't arid." Aloud she said, "He looked a nice young creature, I remember."

"He writes horrible poems, Amy says; blasphemous. There they are. I can't understand them. He casts down everything; has no beliefs of any kind. Nice? I should think that's the last adjective that would describe him."

She had picked up the un.o.btrusive volume and found herself arrested; not as she had been by the memory of the young man's gaze, nor yet in the manner that Tim's account indicated; but still arrested. Very young--but austere, dignified, and strange, genuinely and effortlessly strange. So a young priest might have written, seeking in close-pressed metaphysical a.n.a.logies to find expression for spiritual pa.s.sion. She stood, puzzled and absorbed.

"No, it isn't blasphemous," she said presently. "And he has beliefs.

But surely, Tim dear, surely this young man can't care for Rhoda."

How could a young man who wrote like that about the mystic vision care for Rhoda?

"Not care for Rhoda!" Tim's voice had now the quaintest ring of paternal resentment. "The most beautiful young woman in London! Why, he's head over heels in love with her. And the worst of it is that, from what Amy sees and hears, she cares for him."

"It's curious," Mrs. Delafield said, laying down the book. "I shouldn't have thought he'd care about beautiful young women."

And now Tim's letter, on this December morning, announced that Rhoda had gone off with Christopher Darley; and Mrs. Delafield could find it in her heart, as she worked and pondered, to wish that her dear Tim had followed Frances before this catastrophe overtook him.

"Good heavens!" she heard herself muttering, "if only she'd been meaner, more cowardly, and stayed and lied--as women of her kind are supposed to do. If only she'd let him die in peace; he can't have many years."

But no: it had been done with _le beau geste_. Tim had known nothing, and poor Niel, home for his first peace leave, had come to him, bewildered and aghast, with the news. He had found a letter waiting for him, sent from the country. Tim copied the letter for her:--