Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 24

Mollie, I saw, was dismayed. The triumph had been too complete. She could not keep up with it.

"I am sure that Lady Vera is very badly overwrought about something,"

she said. "She wanted particularly to be alone and she found us there, and it put her on edge." Actually she was trying to patch up his fallen angel for him.

"But she told me to wait there for her.--Sent me off to wait for her when those people came," said Clive. "It seems to me that it was you she minded finding. And yet she's been going on about your never coming to talk to her. She's been going on about it like anything." He caught himself up, blushing, and I saw that Vera was all revealed to him. I hardly needed to pluck another pinion from her, though I didn't resist the temptation to do so, saying:

"You see, Vera is rather jealous. She can't bear sharing things--her friends of her dream-garden. She liked to have you there, but she didn't like to have Mollie there. Did she tell you she wanted to make friends with Mollie? She's never taken any pains to show it, has she?"

"Oh, please, Judith!" Mollie implored.

"But he sees it all now, Mollie, so why shouldn't I say it?" I inquired.

"Her point has been, Captain Thornton, to keep you in and to keep Mollie out, and she very nearly succeeded in doing it."

"Please, Judith! It's not only that. She's been such a real friend to you, Clive! I'm sure she is overwrought about something, and it will be all right when you next meet her." But Mollie pleaded in vain.

"I'm hanged if it will be all right!" said Captain Thornton.

Vera made no attempt to reinstate herself. It was part of her strength never to try to recover what was lost. She kept up appearances, it is true, but that was for her own sake rather than in any hope, or even wish, to regain his good opinion. When we all met at tea, she came trailing in, with Chang under her arm, and as she sank into her place, diffusing the suavest unconsciousness, she said to Mrs. Travers-Cray:

"Charlie Carlton's been killed, have you heard? This war is something more than I can bear."

Charlie Carlton, as I knew, was a cousin of the recent callers and a most remote friend of Vera's; but it was the best that she could do for the occasion, and all that she was inclined to do, though a melancholy smile, as impersonal as it was impartial, was turned more than once on Captain Thornton and Mollie as she inquired whether they liked sugar in their tea or had enough cream. She had made their tea for six weeks now, and after the first week she had never forgotten that they both liked sugar and both disliked cream. But she thus washed her hands of intimacy while keeping up the graces of hostess-ship. They might have arrived that afternoon.

Mollie and her husband rose beautifully to the situation, for their last two days at Compton Dally; that is, Mollie rose, for the husband at such times has only to follow and be silent. I don't think that she could have shown a grace and a distance as achieved as Vera's had it not been for those charming clothes of hers. You must have something to rise from if you are to float serenely above people's heads; otherwise you merely stand on tiptoe, very uncomfortably. Mollie and Vera might have been two silken balloons, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing suavely in the dulcet summer air. And on the last day Vera's sense of dramatic fitness prompted her, evidently, to the most imperturbable _volte-face_: she showed to Mollie a marked tenderness. To Captain Thornton she was kind, perfectly kind, but that she found him rather dull was evident. It might have been Mollie with whom she had spent all those hours in the dream-garden.

"Must you really go, dear?" she asked.

Mollie said that she was afraid they must. She had heard from her aunt, who was waiting to take them in, and, owing to all Vera's kindness, Clive was now quite strong again. Vera did not insist.

"I've _so_ loved getting to know you!" she said, holding Mollie's hand at the door of the motor on the morning of their departure. "It's been _such_ a pleasure. You must often, often come to Compton Dally again.

_Good_-bye, dear!"

But Mollie knew, and Vera knew that she knew, that never again would they be asked to Compton Dally. Meanwhile, if the war isn't over and Jack hasn't come back, I'm to go and stay with them next spring on the chicken-farm.

[Ill.u.s.tration: decorative bar]

EVENING PRIMROSES

IT had been a hot day and there seemed to be thunder in the air, but she was afraid there would be no rain that night. The abandoned garden needed it sadly; though, as she reflected, rain would encourage weeds rather than the few remaining flowers. Poppies had sown themselves everywhere, degenerates of the Shirleys which, three years ago, had spread their silken cups in the large bed at the foot of the lawn. Their withered stalks cracked beneath her steps in the paths and glimmered under the unpruned branches of the cordon apple trees. There were thistles, too, sorrel, and tall nettles, a matted carpet of bindweed and groundsel in the little kitchen-garden, once so neat, and, of course, as poor Charlie had predicted, the Michaelmas daisies had eaten up nearly everything in the herbaceous border. That was one of the last questions he had written to her: "How are my pink phloxes? Have the Michaelmas daisies smothered them?" They had. It was the season at which the phloxes should be in fullest flower, but not one was to be seen; the dense, fine foliage of the daisies had advanced in a wall of green nearly to the border's edge.

It was still oppressively warm. A toad hopped indolently away and paused at the box edging, lying up against it, his front feet extended, as if so wearied by the heat that he took his chances of discovery. She stopped to look at the clumsy creature, in which so little of nature's accurate grace was expressed; and as she stood there, a sudden rustle in the box betrayed another inhabitant--this time a baby hedgehog which, too young for fear, moved busily about among the flat dandelion plants that rosetted the path, and even, encountering the tips of her shoes, stopped to examine them carefully before moving on again. The baby hedgehog would have amused Charlie. He had always been delightful about animals; he and the boys had always had that great interest in common.

Yes, the bird-boxes were still there. She could see one in the big apple tree and one fixed to the porch of the house, under the rose. How well she remembered the frantic delight that hailed the hatching of the first brood of t.i.ts. And the day when Charlie had deemed it prudent to withdraw the door for a peep at the beautifully fitted mosaic of bright little heads and bodies within, lifting up Giles in his holland pinafore for a long, blissful gaze. Six years ago that must have been.

The light was altering now, and when she turned at the end of the path, a great moon had risen across the lane and seemed to hang in the branches of the walnut tree that grew in the field beyond. A great, shining, heavy moon, and mournful, it seemed to her; her desolate thoughts, she was aware, lending their colour to everything. Heavy, mournful, desolate; that was the rhythm of her own steps pa.s.sing along in the twilight, pursued by the unformulated consciousness that lay behind all these pictures of the past; pausing at last, as if to let the d.o.g.g.i.ng sorrow overtake her, as she came to where, near the summer-house, against the wall, the evening primroses grew.

It was years since Charlie had first planted them there, and she had said to herself at the time that they would never be rid of them, tenacious, recurrent things, sowing themselves patiently, and coming up loyally even when there was no one to wish them well. She felt touched by their presence; for though she had always found them untidy and uninteresting, she saw, really now for the first time, that they could be beautiful. Homely, loyal flowers; yet--was it the invading sense of sorrow colouring them, too?--a little uncanny, showing at this neutral hour of mingled dusk and moonlight their pale, evident gold; becoming conscious, as it were, becoming personal at the time when other flowers became invisible. Not that it was a sinister uncanniness; not that of ghosts; of fairies, rather; the very strangeness, sadness, sweetness of the moon, to which, from them, she lifted her eyes. And they reminded her of something, but what, she could not say. Not of Charlie. There had never been anything strange or sad about Charlie, except the fact, pursuing her now in his deserted garden, that he was dead and would never see it again.

It was a year to-day since he had been killed, and she had come down to the country with the sense of commemoration. She wanted, alone in the little place so full of thoughts of him, to find him, to recall him; and she had been doing that at every turn. Yet the evening primroses shining there brought a pang deeper than any vision of him. They, though so homely, seemed to personify loneliness; they seemed to be missing something; and although she was desolate because Charlie was dead, because he would never again delight in his garden, it was, in a sense, for him rather than for herself that she sorrowed, and, in a sense, she did not miss him at all.

She stood still in the path, her hands clasped behind her, her head bent, a personification of widowhood in her thin black draperies, her intent, memorial poise. And she could have said of herself with truth that, during all this year, she had known only a widow's sad preoccupations. There had been the settling of business matters; lawyers and bankers to interview; planning for the boys, with school-masters to visit; and the tending of bereaved relations--Charlie's dear old parents clung to her. But now, on the day of his death, it was as if for the first time she had had leisure, at last, to realize that, with it all, she had never had the widow's heart. She had grieved over him; she had longed to do all for him that could be done--there was nothing new in that; but it was far worse than not being heartbroken: it was the sorry fact that she did not even miss him. He had left, as it were, no emptiness behind him.

She had lifted her head and looked round the garden, trying, in the physical fact of absence, to summon the spiritual void. How he had planned, dug, planted it; pruned his fruit trees; placed his anemones in leaf-mould, his bulbs on sand. She saw his kindly, handsome figure everywhere; his brown cheek, good grey eye, and close-cropped, tawny hair. A manly, simple creature; the salt of the earth, as honest as the day--oh, she saw it all; she had said it to herself a hundred times; and there had, indeed, been nothing one could say against Charlie. But then, as a wife, there had been nothing to say against her, either; he had been perfectly happy with her--the happiest creature, even in the manner of his death. He had been killed instantaneously, while walking, on a sunny day, beside his men along a road in France. Every letter she had had from his brother officers over there spoke of his gaiety and good spirits. The war itself had, on the whole, meant happiness to him, for all his gravity over certain of its tragedies. But he had been almost as grave over mischances with his Boy Scouts, and it had all remained for him an immense, magnificent form of boy-scouting.

Dear, good Charlie! Yet--was it possible that something of the old long-conquered exasperation could still, at this hour, thrust itself into her memories? He had not been quite boyish enough to justify his lightness and make it loveable. That had been the final fundamental trouble in their mistaken marriage; she had not been able to mother him.

He had not been appealing, beguiling, endearing, like a child. Not like a child; not boyish, fatherly, rather; even, playfully didactic, and a.s.suming always that theirs was a completely reciprocal marital intimacy. It had not been his fault, of course. She had been too clever ever to let him guess how stupid she found him. She felt the possessive arm laid about her shoulders for an evening stroll; saw the wag of his premonitory finger as he raised himself from a border to call out a jocose reprimand; heard the chaff with which, before friends, he counted her mistaken opinions.

And it had been when they were alone, especially at dinner,--Charlie across the table from her in his faultless black and white,--that the pressure of their distance had been most difficult to protect him from.

He talked then, and she had to answer adequately. He was fond of talk, and, while the most uncritical of Conservatives, was full of solutions for old ills. He took Trade-Unionists, Home-Rulers, and Dissenters playfully and held them up to kindly ridicule. "You can laugh most people out of their nonsense," was one of Charlie's maxims; and if they didn't respond to the treatment,--he had tried it unsuccessfully on the village cobbler who preached in the tin chapel on Sunday,--he suspected them of being rather wicked.

In the first year of their marriage she had paid him the compliment of disagreement, or, at least, discrimination. She had, until her marriage, thought of herself as a Conservative; to be counted one by Charlie disturbed her sense of rect.i.tude. But Charlie opposed, became puzzled, and finally aggrieved. He bothered and bothered and argued and argued, with the air of trying to bring an erring child to reason. "Now look at it in this light," he would say. Or, "Try to see the thing squarely, Rosamund"; and would turn upon her irrelevant batteries from the _Spectator_. She had at last the sensation of flying, battered and breathless, from his plat.i.tudes, and found, soon, her only refuge in duplicity. After that, through all the years of their married life, Charlie, she knew, thought of their evening hours alone together as exceedingly pleasant and successful. He wasn't one of your fellows who doze over the _Field_ with a cigar after dinner. He had a clever wife and he appreciated her and was proud--in spite of feminine aberrations affectionately recognized and checked--of what he called her "intellects." He called his father and mother his "respected progenitors" and his stomach was never other than "Little Mary." And while he talked and expounded and made his unexacting jests, Rosamund knew that her silences had no provocation, her smile no irony.

So it had gone on--so it might have gone on for the normal span of life.

The only insecurity that had threatened her careful edifice was the question of the boys. The boys were like herself, or, rather, like her adored and brilliant father--proud, sensitive, ardent little creatures, tender-hearted and frightfully intelligent. Physically, too, they were of a different race from Charlie, with thick brown locks, pa.s.sionate yet gentle eyes, and full, small, closely closing mouths. As boys, Charlie had fairly well understood them,--he got on well with the average boy,--as persons, never; and though as boys, at least as little boys, they got on beautifully with him, they had, as persons, almost at once understood him, even when they were too young to evade or hide from him.

If they had not been so young, they would, already, then, have hurt him often.

And for her the boys at once complicated everything. It had been easy, in one way, to yield in non-essentials, though she was woman enough to cry her eyes out when Charlie had taken Philip and Giles, at the earliest age, to have their dear Jeanne-d'Arc heads close-cropped in pursuit of the ideal of manliness; easy, comparatively, to steel her heart when timid little Philip, blanched with terror, was made to ride at six. Charlie had been right about that,--how glad she had been to own it!--for Philip had, in a week's time, forgotten his fears. But she and Charlie had come near quarrelling over Giles's rag-doll Bessie.

Giles was only three and adored Bessie, and Charlie had tossed her in the air, mocked her, and held her up by the toe while Giles sobbed convulsively.

"Do you really want our boys to be milksops, Rosamund?" he had asked, as, refusing to argue, she took the doll from him, placed her in Giles's arms, and kept them both on her lap, pressed within her arms, her head bent down over them so that she need not look at her husband. He had gone away vanquished, and Giles had kept his Bessie, until, in the course of nature, she had dropped away from him.

Worse than this came one day when Charlie had found Philip in a corner writing poetry. He had not been altogether pleased by the children's literary tastes. To grind dutifully at Latin and Greek was one thing, and he was fond of a tag from Tennyson. But he had never cared to read Keats and Sh.e.l.ley when he was a kid. He took the copy-book out of Philip's reluctant hands and, turning from page to page, read out, in mock-dramatic tones, the derivative, boyish efforts, which yet, to her ear, had every now and then their innocent, bird-like note of reality.

"And now this--'To a Skylark,'" said Charlie, laying a restraining, affectionate hand on Philip's shoulder, wishing him to rise superior to vanity and join in the fun, once it was pointed out to him.

"'Glad creature from the dew upspringing And through the sky your path upwinging!'

Up, up, pretty creature!"

Philip, twisting round under his father's arm, burst into tears of rage, tore the book from his hand and struck him.

It had been a terrible moment, and Rosamund, reduced as she almost was to Philip's condition, had never more admired her husband, who, turning only rather pale, had walked away, saying, "I think you'll be sorry for that when you think it over, old fellow." That he had been astonished, cut to the quick, she had seen, feeling it all for him at the moment of her deepest feeling for Philip.

"I'm not sorry! I'm not sorry!" Philip had sobbed, rushing to her arms and burying his head on her breast. "I'm not sorry! He's stupid! stupid!

stupid!"

"Hush, hush," she had said--what a horrid moment it had been! "That is wrong and conceited of you, Philip. You must learn to take a little chaffing. You know how your father loves you."

"It's not conceited! It's not conceited to care about what one tries to do. You know it's not. _You're_ not stupid!" the boy had sobbed.

Alas, it had been only four years ago; only a year before the war! Even then, at nine, Philip had been old enough, when he recovered from his weeping, to know that he had hurt her most, had made things difficult for her; and he had been sorry about his father, too, going to him bravely with a tremulous, "Please forgive me, father." "That's all right, old boy," Charlie had said. It _was_ all right, too, in a sense.

It left not a trace in the sweetness of Charlie's nature. It was Philip who had been shaken, frightened to the very core, by what his own outburst had revealed to himself and to her. The boy would always have felt affection for his father; but he, too, would soon have protected him; he, too, would hardly miss him.

The moon had now risen far up out of the walnut branches, and flooded the garden with sorrowful brightness. Poor, poor Charlie! was that all it came to, then, for him? this deserted garden and a wife and children who hardly missed him? Why, was it not the very heart of his tragedy for her to see that they would be happier without him? "And he _was_ a dear," she said to herself, remembering with an almost pa.s.sionate determination kind, trustful looks and the happy love of fifteen years ago.