Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 20

They came on a hot June afternoon both very tired, while we were all having tea on the west terrace. The Tommies--there were over a dozen of them, with two Red Cross nurses to take care of them--had their tea in the billiard-room, which is made over to them for their games and meals and almost constant gramophone, and the accurate laughter of Harry Lauder is wafted out to us on various music-hall strains at most hours of the day. He was laughing loudly and richly as the Thorntons arrived.

After tea Vera led them about the garden. Vera's garden is merely a part of her toilette, and plays almost as important a part as her clothes in her general introduction of herself; and that she intended to introduce herself gracefully to Captain Thornton was evident; and that I was to pilot Mrs. Thornton, I had known after Vera's glance at her imitation Panama hat, her blue linen skirt, of an obsolete cut and a bad one at that, and her white blouse, shrunken in washing. Vera placed her swiftly as dull and dowdy, and it was my part, always, to pilot the dowdy and the dull.

I don't mind that, however; even now, after three years of it, I always enjoy going over Compton Dally and the gardens with newcomers. It's such a beautiful old place, so grave and so serene, its splendid Tudor front lifted high on stone terraces, and its courts and corners behind breaking out into all sorts of unexpected and enchanting antiquities. It symbolizes, if you begin with the Saxon arches in the cellars, the whole history of England, and means so much more than any person who has ever lived there, or who ever will live there, can ever mean. It's worth the sacrifice of generations of younger sons and myriads of marriageable daughters. What could they all do better than to keep it going? I always recalled this when I wondered how Vera could have married Percival Dixon, and felt almost as much satisfaction as she could feel in the fact that two robust little boys, still at their preparatory school, stood rea.s.suringly behind her and Percival; the elder, too, a thorough Compton, with hardly a trail of Dixon apparent on his ingenuous young countenance. I have the whole history of Compton Dally at the tips of my fingers, and if people give me an opening and show that they care about it, I can talk to them for hours as I take them round, feeling, for my little part and share in it, that, even if Vera weren't as decent as she is, I should put up with a great deal to stay in it and take care of it.

We didn't go about the house to-day. The Thorntons saw the big herbaceous border and the rose-garden, the rock-garden, tinkling with its little rivulet, the moat, and the lime-tree alley; and then Vera, trailing her gossamer draperies along the flagged path between the cypresses,--for Vera, even at this epoch of shortened petticoats, manages always to trail,--murmured, as I've heard her murmur, when she's at Compton Dally, at least once a week, "And this is my dream-garden, where I come and sit alone and dream dreams."

She led Captain Thornton down among the cypress boughs. He had a splinted leg and an unaccustomed crutch, and found the steps a difficulty; but Vera put a hand under his elbow and let him lean heavily on her shoulder, and he reached the dream-garden without, I hope, too many twinges.

It is really very lovely. I don't like hearing it called a dream-garden, naturally; but I do feel always, when I come into it, that it is like sinking into the stillness and magic of a happy dream. The gypsophila wasn't out yet, but it made a mist, like drowsiness; white peonies, grey santolina, white roses and silver sea-thistle, the dreamy spires of white foxgloves, low, purple pansies, and tall irises, white and grey and purple--these, in their twilight colours, were ma.s.sed against the grey stone walls, and there were four bay-trees in stone urns at the corners. The beautiful old stone seat (I found it in Brompton Road, but it might have been made for Compton Dally three hundred years ago in Italy) was heaped with grey and purple cushions. In the centre rose the fluent shaft of the fountain, falling, with a musical rustle and murmur into the stone basin where pale goldfish move among the water-lilies.

We sat down, and Vera went on to say, as always:

"The other gardens are for friends. I plan them for them. I see them there. This is for loneliness, for my very self; and to me it is the heart of the whole, as solitude should be the heart of life."

Vera, as a matter of fact (you see, the phrase recurs constantly), is never alone. If she is wan and strange and wistful, it isn't from dreaming dreams, but from not having enough sleep and doing five times too many things and seeing five times too many people in the day. Vera, too, I may say it here, isn't in the least an a.s.s, though she may, on occasions she finds suitable, talk like one. Occasions are often suitable, so that, as I once told her, she's in danger of making a habit of it. She looked at me, when I told her this, with the pausing, penetrating, ironic gaze she is so capable of, and finally, with a slight grimace, said, "I'll be careful, Judith."

I have moments of feeling fond of her and this was one of them. She is careful; I've very rarely heard her talk like an a.s.s when the occasion was unsuitable; but so many people are stupid that these are rare, and I foresee that, as she gets on and sinks by degrees into the automatism that overtakes so many artificial people, it may become a habit, just as the touch of rouge on her pale lips is already becoming more emphasized.

Captain Thornton, I saw at once, as she did,--for she saw most things,--was not stupid; but he was very simple. There was a certain bewilderment on his handsome, st.u.r.dy face, wistfulness rather than delight, such as a soul newly arrived in Paradise might feel, unable to forget the pa.s.ses of death and the companions left behind in suffering.

He wasn't forgetting; I felt that as I looked at him. So many of them forget. Vera, I am sure, hardly ever remembers what it all really means--all these wounded heroes. Perhaps it is natural that she shouldn't; she has no one near in it.

Captain Thornton gazed about him quietly, and from the garden looked back at the angel who had led him there. Of course Vera must have looked like an angel to him. I haven't described Vera, and she is difficult to describe. To say that she is pale and dark, with attenuated features and dwelling, melancholy eyes, is only the beginning of it. Of course she is getting on now,--she is nearing forty-five,--but she's still lovely; her smile makes me think of a pearl dropped in wine, and behind the melancholy of her eyes is that well of waiting irony. She looks as soft, as tenderly encompa.s.sing, as a summer night; but she is really sharp, sharp, sharp. Thwart or vex her, and out leaps the stiletto; or, rather, it would be more exact to say, out come the claws. But women of the Vera type will always, to young men like Captain Thornton, be angels pure and simple. I don't suppose, for one thing, that he'd ever talked intimately with any one quite like her. He came, I was to learn, from a remote country rectory where the great ladies of the neighbourhood had been unfashionable, matter of fact, and clothed for the most part in tweed and leather, and none of them would have been likely to make much, before the war, of a young soldier. Vera was making much of him, and a fashionable angel is an angel doubly equipped. He would not know what it was that made her so strange in her sweetness; but fashion of that achieved and recondite kind is like a soft incense wafted around a woman. She is first, everywhere, always, without an effort; and people who are first, if they also look like angels, win hearts as easily as they run and twist their fingers among their ropes of pearls, as Vera was doing now. She always wore her pearls; they fell together in a milky heap in her lap, and long earrings glimmered in the shadows of her hair.

Vera's way of talking, too, is like a spell. Her voice is rather like the fountain, so low, so inarticulate, yet so expressive. She murmurs rather than speaks, with now and then a pause that is almost a soft gurgle. Sometimes it exasperates me to hear her, but sometimes even cross-grained I am charmed.

The voice purled and rippled and gurgled over Captain Thornton now. He sat on Vera's farther hand, and Mrs. Thornton sat between Vera and me.

Already, at tea-time, Mrs. Thornton had interested me. She had remained silent without seeming shy. Superficially, no doubt, she was dowdy, and superficially she looked dull, or, as I saw it, dulled; and dull and dowdy is what at tea they all put her down for. It's curious, how in a group of highly civilized people, a newcomer, without a word or glance exchanged between them, is in a moment a.s.sessed and placed and relegated. Everybody was going to be very kind to Mrs. Thornton, that I saw, and everybody was going to relegate her; only the highly civilized can manage the combination.

Mrs. Thornton, from one point of view, had a pallid, podgy little face, with wide lips and short nose and a broad, infantile brow above eyes singularly far apart. All the same, and the more I looked at her the more I saw it, it was a delicious face; squared here, stubborn there, sweet by turns and glances. And she was of the loveliest colour, with a skin silver-white, and thick, shining, pale-gold hair, and eyes of a deep, dense, meditative blue. All her attributes, however, were invisible to Vera, and I was fully prepared for the glance with which, over Mrs. Thornton's imitation Panama, she presently said to me:

"Darling, do take Mrs. Thornton round the water-garden. It's so lovely at this hour. Captain Thornton must wait for it till to-morrow. He's too tired to go farther now."

Mrs. Thornton got up at once, with her air of vague acquiescence in anything proposed, and I led her up and out and down the lime-tree alley and through the copse, where Vera, in spring, has her wild garden, to the banks of the river, the clear, wandering little stream, bridged and islanded, golden in the afternoon light under its willows and reflecting irises and meadow-sweet.

"Now we can sit down," I said, and on a bench under a willow we did sit, Mrs. Thornton with an involuntary sigh of weariness. "I expect your husband will soon get all right here," I said presently. "It's such good air. Is his leg badly damaged?"

"Well, you see, he can already get about quite well with it," said Mrs.

Thornton; "but I'm afraid he'll never be able to do any of the things he most cares for again--riding and cricket, and his soldiering, of course.

He will have to give up the army. I am afraid it's afterwards one will begin to feel all the things that one must give up. Just now all that I can think about is that he has come back alive. Have you any one out there?" she asked.

I told her about Jack and how he had got a commission at the beginning of the war and gone out in January.

"It must be even more of a wrench to have them go when they aren't already in the army," said Mrs. Thornton. "A soldier's wife ought not to feel it so much of a wrench. I'm afraid I did, though."

I saw already that Mrs. Thornton had taken to me. It was natural that she should. I had taken to her quite tremendously, and she must have felt it; and, besides, a great many women do feel confidence in me at once. I, to be sure, look like anything but an angel, though I, like Vera, have small, pale features and dark hair. But mine's not a melancholy or mysterious face. My eyebrows dip together over my nose, and my mouth is at once placid and irascible. I look, in my straight, austere clothes,--the silver buckles on my shoes and the fob of old trinkets at my waist for all adornment,--like a cross between a young priest in his soutane and a Blue-Coat boy; and I think it is the boyish woman, curt and kind and impersonal, who gains the confidence of others of her s.e.x.

"I don't know that it was more of a wrench," I said. "I expect that you and I felt pretty much the same sort of thing on that Victoria platform when we said good-bye to them. What do you and your husband intend doing, now that he has to give up his profession?"

"Well, we had thought of having a chicken-farm somewhere. We are both so fond of the country, and I've a cousin who has a chicken-farm, and I've helped her with it, and she has made it pay. Even if Clive's leg stays so bad, I am very strong. But we've had, really, no time yet to talk things over."

"You don't look very strong," I observed, "but that may be because you are over-tired. You look very tired. I should say that you got up at six this morning, and raced around London shopping in the heat, and packed, and had no lunch, and a journey on top of it all. So no wonder you are tired."

"How clever of you!" Mrs. Thornton cried, laughing. "That is exactly what I have been doing. And I've been in a Belgian refugee hostel ever since Clive went, and that is tiring, though it keeps one going, too.

Don't you find it difficult just to go on from day to day?" She was leaning forward on her knee now to look up into my face while I knitted.

"I mean, when one wakes in the morning, for instance, to think that one has to get up and brush one's teeth and do one's hair and all the rest of it. It seems impossible when what one is feeling is that one wants to be chloroformed till it is all over. It was then that the hostel was so sustaining; one had to get up whether one felt like it or not."

"I know; yes," I said, nodding. "I've work, too, though it's not so sustaining as a hostel. I'm my cousin's secretary, and we have all these Tommies now; they take up a good deal of time. It must be curious, having it all over, all that weight of anxiety."

"It is, it is," said little Mrs. Thornton, eagerly, with her look of grat.i.tude for finding some one with whom to talk about it. "It's almost like losing a limb. I feel crippled, as well as Clive. Isn't it absurd?

But it's almost like loss. And one is dazed with the relief of it."

"How long have you been married?" I asked.

"Only a year and a half," she told me, and that Clive's mother and hers had been great friends, and that she had often gone to stay with his people in the country, so that she had always known him. Her mother had died when she was a child and her father only two years ago. She had lived in London with her father, who had been an artist. She was just twenty. And after she had told me about herself, she asked me about Jack, and I found myself telling her all about him and about those plans of ours for living together in London if he ever comes back.

The party at Compton Dally was small, and they were all there (except Sir Francis who was an old family friend and who was paying a long visit), to help Vera with her Tommies. The only other officer besides Captain Thornton was poor Colonel Appleby, a pale, frightened, middle-aged man invalided home with nervous shock. At dinner that night Lady Dighton, who is the embodiment of la.s.situde and acquiescence, had him, and Mrs. Travers-Cray had Sir Francis, and Vera had Captain Thornton, so that Percival fell to the share of Mollie Thornton, and I wondered how she liked him. If she was already feeling herself out of it, to have Percival at dinner wouldn't make her feel herself in; quite the reverse. Percival's appearance is always summed up to me by the back of his head: the wedge of fat, red neck above his high collar, the sleek, glittering black hair, and the rims of his red ears curving forward on each side. The back of his head seems really as characteristic as the front, though that is jovial and not unkindly.

Percival looks sly over his food, and looks over his wine like the sort of man who is going to tell a story that no one else will find at all amusing. He told Mollie several such stories that night, I inferred, though she was evidently neither shy nor shocked; it was in the quality of her smile that I read her kindly endurance.

Milly, Vera's girl, just seventeen and just promoted to late dinner, sat on Mollie's other hand and did not, as far as I observed, address her once during the meal. But, then, Milly never makes efforts unless they are plainly useful. All Vera's beauty had been spoiled in her by the Dixon admixture, and yet she is a most engaging-looking little minx, with broad, bold, black, idle eyes and a blunted nose, auburn hair and a skin of roses and carnations. Vera had seen to that. Poor Vera is quite fond of the child, a half-vexed, half-ironic constantly rebuffed tenderness. But Milly says to me, "Mother is such a bore, you know," and likes me far better, who make no claim upon her and who, she must feel, like her very little. She will soon take flight, however, when a sufficiently advantageous occasion presents itself. The war has been a sad blow to her projects, and what I like in Milly is the fact that she has never uttered a word of complaint as to the shattering of her girlish gaieties. However, to get back to Mollie Thornton, I don't think she could have enjoyed her companions at dinner.

After dinner I go and amuse the Tommies and talk to the nurses until bedtime, but, before I went, I observed that Vera, after her wont with the detrimental belongings of a guest, had placed Mollie in a corner with a book and the urgent, smiling murmur: "By a friend of mine. Quite, quite beautiful. I know you'll love it." It is a book called "Spiritual Control," with a portrait of its author, who is a stock-broker, a sleek, stalwart, satisfied person whom Vera characterizes, why I can't think, except that she had him once to stay after hearing his lecture, as her "friend." A great many people find the book inspiring; Vera, as a matter of fact, doesn't, and she found Mr. Cuthbert Dawson a terrible bore. It was plain from her giving poor Mrs. Thornton "Spiritual Control" to read, where she placed her.

When I came back an hour later she was still in her corner with "Spiritual Control," but she wasn't reading it. She had drawn the curtain at the window where she sat, and was looking out at the splendid, dramatic moonlight. Sir Francis and Colonel Appleby were reading the evening papers, Lady Dighton and Leila Travers-Cray talked together while they knitted, Milly had disappeared, and at the farthest end of the great room, on its farthest sofa, Vera, pale and pearly, was talking to Captain Thornton.

"Well," I said, "how is your spirit? Is it more controlled?"

Mrs. Thornton looked up at me, and after a moment her smile of understanding merged into one of friendly enjoyment.

"How do you manage," she said, "to be so austere in the daytime and so splendid at night? You make me think of a Venetian princess in that brocade."

"It is nice, isn't it?" I said. "And made by the littlest of dressmakers. I'm clever at clothes. But tell me how you like Mr.

Cuthbert Dawson."

"Well, he is very cheerful and sincere," said Mrs. Thornton, kindly; "but I don't seem to get much out of it. I'm really too tired and stupid to read to-night."

"And it's time your husband was in bed," I said. "One of the nurses is coming for him."

Mrs. Thornton looked down the long room at her husband.

"If only I'd had the Red Cross training," she said, "I could have taken care of his leg then. I suppose I mustn't ask to be allowed to. Isn't it quite early?" she added. "He's enjoying the talk with Lady Vera."

"It's half-past ten, and we are strict with our invalids. Here is nurse now. I'll come up with you and see that you are comfortable."

No one could have said that there was any creature comfort lacking in Mrs. Thornton's reception at Compton Dally. Captain Thornton, as the invalid, had a larger room, but Mrs. Thornton's room, next it, was quite as charming a one, pink and grey, with old French prints and hangings of _toile de Jouy_. She went up to the prints for a moment of silent appreciation before turning to me with a sigh, half pleasure and half wistfulness.

"How lovely everything is here! Papa would have been in rapture over those Cochins. I shall enjoy my sleep to-night." And then,--it was her only sign of awareness,--"I suppose I'm to be allowed to go and say good-night to Clive when nurse has done with him."