Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 30

The ripples stayed themselves. He looked down at the crocuses and saw Mrs. Baldwin's white shoes standing still among them. Lifting his eyes, which felt heavy, he found her looking at him with attention, with anxiety.

"It's nothing," he tried to smile. "Nothing at all. I mean--you've done me good." He saw that she hadn't an idea of how she had done it.

"Do take my arm," she said. "I ought to have remembered that you are not strong yet."

He took her arm. Perhaps he needed it. His normal consciousness was gathering about him once again, but no longer with the old close texture. It was all more permeable to light--that was how he tried to put it. And he heard his voice go on, "You see--what it all amounts to--oh, I'm not thinking about the poems, I know that you must be right--it's not what you say, is it? It's something far more right than what you say. But I love you. That's why you can do it to me. I wonder I didn't see it before. You made me angry with your peacefulness. I didn't understand. I needed your peace. You, you were what I needed. You will forgive my speaking? Surely you'll understand. Perhaps you feel you hardly know me, while you are like my life. Is it possible that some day you might love me back and marry me?"

He had used the words that came. They were the words of the normal consciousness. How else could he ask her to keep him always near her so that he might never lose that sense of paradise?

But she had stopped still and had drawn her arm from his. Was it possible that after what she had done to him, for him, she could see him only thus? "Oh, no," she said. "No. No." Never had he seen a human face express with such ineffable gentleness such repudiation. And she repeated it, as if he had given her too much to bear; as if for her own rea.s.surance; as if to efface even the memory of his words: "No; no; no!" She began again to walk towards the house.

Had it not been for the initiation that had pa.s.sed he knew so clearly now, in all unawareness from her spirit to his, he would have felt to the full the shame of his rejection, the deserved shame. For he was a stranger and she had given him no right to believe that she even liked him. But he could feel no shame. Had he really thought that she could love him? Had it not been only that he wanted to tell her that he loved her, and had wanted her, as it were, to keep him safe? He found himself trying to explain this to her,--not pleading,--only so that she should not be angry. "I had to tell you. You'd done me so much good. Everything came different. Really, I'm not so presumptuous. I never meant to ask anything."

But she was not angry. "Forgive me," she said. "I hardly know what I am saying. You so astonished me. Forgive me. But I don't feel as if I knew you at all. Please don't think me reproaching you. I begin to understand. You are not at all strong. It was like the other day when you cried, I mean--I feel sure you think you care for me; but you couldn't have said it, when we know each other so little, if you had been well."

She was putting it aside, for his sake, as an aberration, and he really smiled a little as he shook his head. "No; really, really, it's not that; not because I've been on edge and ill. It was something that came to me from what you are; something that's been coming ever since I saw you. I know that I am nothing to you; but for a moment, just now, it seemed, when I had received so much, that you must know what you had given; it seemed that a person to whom so much could be given, could not be so far away. But even then I saw quite clearly what you saw in me; a vain, pretentious, emotional creature; insincere, too, and proud of my suffering. I am that. But I had never seen it before. And when it came to me from you and, instead of crushing me, lifted me up, I knew that I loved you.--No; I won't try to explain. Only you do forgive me?

You will let me go on as if it hadn't happened? I promise you that I'll never trouble you again."

Oh, the gentleness, the heavenly gentleness! It breathed through him like the colour of the crocuses, although she was as impersonal, as untouched, and as mysterious as they. He was nothing to her--nothing; but she stood before him, looking at him, and though she gave nothing but the gentleness, he knew that he received all that he needed. It was enough that she was there.

"But it's _I_ to be forgiven--_I_," she repeated. "Of course we will go on. Oh, you look very tired. Please take my arm again. I spoke so strangely to you. But--but--" She had flushed: for the first time he saw the colour darken her face as if with a veil of pain, and in her voice was the pa.s.sion, deeper, stiller, that he had heard a little while ago and that had enfranchised him. "I am married--I mean, my husband is dead, but I am married. Perhaps you don't understand. Perhaps you will some day, if you should lose some one you love and feel them still your very life. We were like that. He is always with me."

They had said nothing more as they walked up the meadow to the house, his arm in hers. He had no sense of loss; rather, from her last words to him, came a sense of further gain. She would be like that. He saw now that her peace, against which he had pressed and protested, was something won, was depth, not emptiness. She, too, had lost and suffered. She was made dearer to him, more sacred. As for his love, it did not belong--he had seen this even before she told him why--to this everyday world to which he had returned. But it was everything to have found it, with that other world, and to know that there it had its being, its reality, forever. What was it that had enlarged, transformed his life, but that very cert.i.tude of an eternity where all good was secure? He could not explain it to himself in any words. Words were the keys of temporality. But he had seen, if only for the few shining moments, that Ronnie was not lost; that nothing had been in vain.

If he found no difficulty, it was evident to him that Mrs. Baldwin felt none, and he was glad to believe that this might be because he showed her so completely, in his candid contentment, that he would never trouble her again. She was not more kind to him; but she took, perhaps, even more care, as if feeling that she had miscalculated something in his recovery. She inaugurated a gla.s.s of hot milk, instead of spiced hot water, at bedtime, and a rest on the sofa, with a rug, before the midday dinner. "You will look so much better when you go back than when you came," she said.

For the time of going back drew near, and he did not dread it, though loving Thatches and all it meant more and more with every day. But of course, even in the temporal world, he was not to lose Thatches. That was quite understood between them. The P.G. would be welcome whenever he cared to come.

V

He was playing chess on the afternoon before his departure. Tea was over and Mrs. Baldwin had gone out. Guy had noticed that she had been perhaps a little stiller than usual that day, when he had seen her, and that he had seen her little. The game did not go very well; they were neither of them keen on it; and when the old gentleman had won an easy victory, he leaned back in his chair, the board still on its little table between them, and said, "Poor Effie! She's still in the church, or in the churchyard, I expect."

Guy felt the shock of a great surprise. Strangely enough, though Mrs.

Baldwin had spoken of her husband and of his death, and though his books were there, he did not a.s.sociate him with Thatches, nor with the churchyard. And with the word, "churchyard," a painful anxiety rose in him.

"Is it an anniversary?" he asked.

"Yes," Mr. Haseltine nodded, sighing and rubbing his hand over his head.

"September twenty-ninth. I'd forgotten myself till just a little while ago. Oliver died on this day. Her husband. Poor Effie!"

"They lived here?" Guy asked. He had imagined that it had been after her bereavement that she and her father had found and made a home of Thatches.

"Oh, yes. They lived here. All their married life," said Mr. Haseltine.

"Ten years or so. It was a great love-match. They were very happy. I never saw a happier couple--until the end."

"Did anything part them?"

Mr. Haseltine had put his hands into his pockets and was gazing at the board as if with a painful concentration, and though he shook his head he answered, "It was the malady. Cancer, you know. Cancer of the face.

Such a handsome fellow, too: beautiful, bright, smiling eyes; beautiful mouth. All gone. All disfigured, cruelly disfigured, and with horrible suffering."

Guy felt his breath coming thickly. "Was it long?" he asked.

"Yes. Long. Eighteen months, I think. Morphia did little good at last.

He couldn't swallow; could hardly speak; begged to be killed and put out of his torment. She was with him in it all. She never left him, day or night; nor could he have borne it if she had. Nothing quieted him except her hand in his. But at the end," said Mr. Haseltine, pushing away the table and rising, "at the end, it attacked his brain and then he raved at her. She couldn't go into the room at the last."

The old man, with step lagging, as if weighted, walked away to the window and stood looking out, while Guy, at the table, felt his heart turn to stone.

"Poor Effie!" Mr. Haseltine repeated after a little while. He came back into the room and moved up and down, pausing to look at the books and pictures. "She has never been the same since. For a long while we were afraid she couldn't live. She hardly slept for months; and when she did sleep, she used to wake crying, crying, always for him. When she became stronger, she used to walk up and down those meadows, sometimes for hours at a time. Very gentle; no complaint; always ready to talk to people, to go on with things as best she could; but changed; completely changed. We speak very little of him; but when we do, it's quite naturally. She goes to the church sometimes, and there are always flowers on his grave; but I don't think she has any orthodox beliefs; I don't know that she has any beliefs at all. Still, she seems helped. She is a very dear, unselfish woman; a dreamer, she was always a dreamer; but always meaning well; and she does good in her quiet way. And I think she likes this plan of having people come and stay and seeing after them; especially now that they are so often people who have had a bad time. Dear me, dear me!" Mr. Haseltine again shook his head, stationed again at the window and looking out. "You would hardly have recognized her had you seen her ten years ago. She had bright hair and a charming colour; and full of gaiety and mischief. You'd hardly believe it now."

"I'm so sorry," Guy heard himself saying. He remembered that those were the words Mrs. Baldwin had used to him about Ronnie.

"Yes, it's very sad," said Mr. Haseltine. "Life is certainly very difficult for some of us, and Effie has had her share. Somehow one doesn't remember it when one is with her. I only recalled the day by chance."

Guy was walking in the meadows when Mrs. Baldwin returned. He saw her in the garden, reading the letters that the evening post had brought, and his first impulse was to remove himself as speedily as might be from her sight, to cross the bridge and the farther meadow, and turn into the lane that led away from it. But then he saw, as he stood irresolute, that she was coming down to him, and he stood there, helpless, watching her approach in the soft radiance of the late afternoon. She wore one of the lavender-coloured dresses and the little knitted jacket. In her hand were the opened letters. Her face was tranquil. She was, of course, unaware of what had happened to him.

She joined him. "You are having your last look at the crocuses?"

It was their last look together. That, of course, was why she had come, full of care and of kindness.

"Yes. Yes. My last look for the year." He heard that his voice was strange. And his heart seemed to lie like a cold hard block in his side.

"Aren't you feeling well?" she asked.

He walked beside her in silence. What could he say? But how was it possible not to tell her?

They had turned towards the sunset and came now to the bridge. She was looking at him, with solicitude. He stopped before they crossed.

"I must say something to you," broke from him. "I must. I can't go away without your knowing--my shame--my unutterable remorse."

She looked at him with the look he knew so well. Kindly, firmly, if with anxiety, she prepared to hear him thrust some new torment upon her.

"Shame? Remorse?" she murmured.

"About my poems. About my griefs. What I've said to you. What I've given you to bear. I thought I'd borne so much. I thought you unfeeling, without experience. I thought I'd been set apart--that all of us had been set apart, who suffered in the war. Stop me at once if you won't hear it from me. But your father told me, just now, about your husband's death."

She became very pale. She looked away from him, but she said nothing.

"That's all," said Guy after a long silence. He saw that there was nothing more to tell her. She had understood.

"Let us walk up and down," said Mrs. Baldwin.

They crossed the bridge. He saw the stream sliding brightly below them between the old, black planks. In the farther meadows the crocuses grew more thickly and opened widely their pale purple chalices.

"We have all suffered," said Mrs. Baldwin. "You mustn't have remorse or shame. Nothing is harmed between us."

The horrible stricture around his heart relaxed, and as they went very slowly up and down he felt his throat tighten and tears rising, rising to his eyes. He could not keep them back. He wasn't really quite strong enough for this. They fell and fell, and from time to time he put up his hand to brush them away.