Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 17

"Not at all. I like it. I think it's only people who don't know how to be quiet who mind the heat," said Mrs. Dallas. "This is the one time of the year that one can sit out of doors in a thin dress, and I am very grateful for it." Even about small things Mrs. Dallas always seemed to have her mind quite made up. Her likes and dislikes, for all the inertness of her demeanour, were clear and unshifting. She sometimes made Rupert feel himself amorphous, vague, uncertain; and this feeling, though blissful, had yet its sting of sadness and anxiety.

"Well, some people aren't able to be quiet, are they?" he observed. "On a day like this I always think of people in factories,--great, roaring, clanking places with the sun gnawing at their iron roofs,--and the pale, moist faces, the monotonously rapid hands."

"Do you?" said Mrs. Dallas. She often said that, in that tone, when he gave expression to some enthusiasm or sympathy. She did not make him feel snubbed, but always, when she said, "Do you?" she made him feel young again, a little bewildered and a little sad. He imagined, to explain it in her, that people's thoughts did not interest her, her woman's intuition probing below their thoughts to their personalities.

It was he, himself, with his heart full of devotion, that interested Mrs. Dallas. Yet it was not of him that she next spoke. "How is Marian?"

she asked. "Is she painting to-day?"

He was aware that his face altered and that his colour rose. He had to steady something, in his glance and in his voice, the pressure of his new consciousness was so great, as he answered, "Yes, she's been painting all the morning."

"I haven't seen her for some days now," Mrs. Dallas remarked.

"No." The longing in him to confide in her, to pour out his grief and his devotion, was so strong that for the moment he could find only the simple negative.

"I quite miss Marian," Mrs. Dallas added.

He looked down at the little foot placed on a cushion beside him, and he said, "You've always been so kind, so charming to Marian." He remembered Marian's words with a deepened wrath and tenderness.

"Have I? I'm glad you think so. It's been very easy," said Mrs. Dallas.

A silence fell.

"May I talk to you?" Rupert jerked out suddenly. "May I tell you things I've been feeling? I have been feeling so much--about you--about myself.--I long to tell you."

"By all means tell me," said Mrs. Dallas with great placidity; and one could see that she had often made the same sort of reply to the same sort of appeal.

"You know what you have been to me," said Rupert, turning on the step so that he could look up at her. "You know how it's all grown--beautifully, inevitably. No one has ever been to me what you are."

Mrs. Dallas's sleepy eyes rested on him, and her delicate nostrils, slightly dilating, might have been, though without excitement, inhaling a familiar incense.

"I do love you so much," said Rupert in a trembling voice, gazing at her; "I do love you. You understand what I mean. You know me now and you couldn't misunderstand. I want to serve you. I want to help you. I want you to lean on me and trust me--to let me be everything to you that I can." And as he spoke he stretched out his hand and laid it on her hands folded in her lap.

Mrs. Dallas let it lie there, and she looked back at him, not moved, apparently, but a little grave. "No, I don't think I misunderstand your feeling," she said after a moment. "Of course I've seen it plainly."

"Yes, yes, I knew you did.--And that you accepted it,--dearest--loveliest--best." He had drawn her hand to him now and he pressed his lips upon it. And as he kissed Mrs. Dallas's hand, as that imagined happiness was consummated, he felt his mind cloud suddenly, as if in a cloud of fragrance, and, thought sinking away from him, he knew only an aching sweetness, the white, warm hand against his lips, the darkness of the glimmering room near by, and the scent of the carnations, exhaling their spices in the hot sunshine. Closing his eyes, he breathed quickly. And above him, a little paler, Mrs. Dallas, for a moment, as if with the conscious acceptance of a familiar ritual, also closed her eyes and breathed in, with the scent of her carnations, the immortal fragrance of the youth and pa.s.sion that, to her, could soon no longer come. "Dear boy!" she murmured.

They heard the step of Colonel Dallas descending from the upper lawn.

Rupert drew back sharply; Mrs. Dallas softly replaced her hand upon the other in her lap. Her husband appeared, and he looked very fretful.

"The sun is quite tropical. It's impossible to play in it. We don't get a breath of air down in this hole." He took out his watch--Colonel Dallas was always taking out his watch. "What time is tea?" he asked.

"At five o'clock, as usual, I suppose," said his wife.

"It's only just past four," said the colonel, with the bitterly resigned air of one who loses a wager he had hardly hoped to win. "I shall go to the Trotters'. It's better than being baked in this oven. Their lawn is shaded at all events." He spoke as if there had been some attempt to dissuade him from the alleviations of the Trotters' lawn.

"I don't know why you didn't go half an hour ago," said his wife.

"You've so often discovered that the sun is tropical on the upper lawn at this hour." And as the colonel moved off she added, "Just tell them that I'll have lemon-squash instead of tea, will you?"

It was a rather absurd little interlude; yet it had its point, its appropriateness; it fitted in with those thoughts of succour, and Rupert tried, now, to recover them, saying, after the gate had closed upon the colonel and keeping still at his little distance, "Are you very unhappy?"

How he was to help Mrs. Dallas except by loving her and coming to see her every day and being allowed to kiss her and hold her hand he did not clearly know, but it seemed the moment for returning to those offers of service. He did not attempt to regain her hand. Mingling with the rapture, when the kiss and the scent of the carnations had blurred his mind, there was also a sense of fear. He was different; and there was more in his love than he had known.

"Very unhappy? Not more than most people, I suppose. Why?" Mrs. Dallas asked. Her tone was changed. Her moment of diffusion, of languor and acceptance, was gone by.

"Why?" Rupert felt the change and the question hurt him. "When that's your life?--This?"

"By that, do you mean my husband?" Mrs. Dallas inquired kindly. "He's not my life. As for this--if you mean my situation and occupation--having love made to me by a pleasant young man while I smell carnations, I can a.s.sure you that there's nothing I enjoy much more."

She did more than hurt him now; she astonished him. "Don't!" he breathed. It was as if something beautiful were being taken from him.

Instinctively he stretched out his hand for hers and again she gave it; but now she looked clearly at him, a touch of malice in her smile, though her smile was always sweet.

"Don't what?"

"Don't pretend to be hard--flippant. Don't hide from me. Give yourself to the real beauty that we have found."

"I have just said that I enjoy it."

"Enjoy is not the word," said Rupert, in a low voice, looking down at the hand in his. "It's an initiation. A dedication."

"A dedication? To what?" Mrs. Dallas asked, and even more kindly; yet her kindness made her more removed.

Her words seemed to strike with soft yet bruising blows upon his heart.

"To life. To love," he answered.

"And what about Marian?" Mrs. Dallas inquired. And now, still gently, she withdrew her hand and leaned her cheek on it as, her elbow on the cushions of her chair, she bent her indolent but attentive gaze upon him. "I should have thought that dedication lay in that direction."

His forehead was hot and his eyes, hurt, bewildered, indignant, challenged hers yet supplicated, too. "Please don't let me think that I'm to hear mean conventionalities from you--as I have from Marian. You know," he said, and his voice slightly shook, "that dedication isn't a limiting, limited thing. You've read my books and cared for them, and understood them,--better, you made me feel, that I did myself,--so that you mustn't pretend to forget. Love doesn't shut out. It widens."

"Does it?" said Mrs. Dallas. "And what," she added, "were the mean conventionalities you heard from Marian? I've been wondering about Marian."

"She is jealous," said Rupert shortly, looking away. "I could hardly believe it, but she made it too plain. It seemed to take the foundation-stones of our life away to hear her. It made all our past, all the things I believed we shared, seem illusory. It made me feel that the Marian I'd loved and trusted was a stranger."

Mrs. Dallas contemplated his averted face, and as she heard him her glance altered. It withdrew itself; it veiled itself; it became at once less kind and more indolent. "And you really don't think Marian has anything to complain of?" she inquired presently.

"No, I do not," said Rupert. "Nothing is taken from her."

"Isn't it? And if I became your mistress, would you still think she had nothing to complain of?" Mrs. Dallas asked the question in a tone of detached and impartial inquiry.

How far apart in the young man's experience were theory and practice was manifested by the hot blush that sprang to his brow, the quick stare in which an acute eye might have read an ingenuous and provincial dismay.

"My mistress?" he stammered. "You know that such a thought never entered my head."

"Hasn't it? Why not?"

"You know I only asked to serve--to help--to care for you."

"You would think it wrong, then, to be unfaithful, technically, to your wife?"

"Wrong?" His brow showed the Saint-Bernard-puppy knot of perplexity.

"It's not a question of wrong. Wrongness lies only in the sort of love.