Part 18

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 assuming 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 rectitude. 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 platitudes, 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, passionate 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 Shelley 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 passionate determination kind, trustful looks and the happy love of fifteen years ago.

She had been standing still all this while, near the evening primroses; but now, with the great sigh that lifted her breast, she moved forward again, and a bird, disturbed in its rest, flew out from the thick tangle of honeysuckle at the entrance to the summer-house, startling her. As she stopped, her eyes drawn to the spot, she saw, suddenly, that a pale figure was sitting in the summer-house, closely shrunken to one side; hoping in its stillness,--that was apparent,--to remain undiscovered. Ever since she had entered the garden it must have been sitting there; and ever since she had entered the garden it must have been watching her. But why? How strange!

Dispelling a momentary qualm, she stooped her head under the honeysuckle and entered; and then, clearly visible, with her pale hair and face,--as pale, as evident as an evening’s primrose,--the girl sitting there, wide-eyed, revealed, with her identity, that haunting analogy of a little while ago. Of course, it came in a flash now, that was what they reminded her of. Long ago she had thought--conceding them their most lovable association--that Pamela Braithwaite looked like an evening primrose.

“My dear Pamela,” she said, almost as gently as she would have said it to a somnambulist; for, like the flowers, again, she was sad, even uncanny; although Pamela’s uncanniness too,--sweet, homely creature,--could never be sinister. She put a hand upon her arm, for the girl had started to her feet.

“Oh--do forgive me, Mrs. Hayward!” Pamela gasped. Sad? It was more than that. She was broken, spent with weeping. “I didn’t know you were coming. I sit here sometimes in the evenings. I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

“My dear child, why should I mind? I’m thankful to you for coming to the sad little place. It’s much less lonely to think about, for you have always been so much of our life here.”

This, she knew, was an exaggeration; but she must be more than kind to such grief as this: she must find some comfort, if that were possible.

And to feel herself accepted, welcomed, did give comfort; for, sinking again on the seat, bending her face on her hands, Pamela sobbed, “Oh, how kind you are!”

“Poor child, poor, poor child!” said Rosamund. She was only five years older, but she felt as a mother might feel towards the stricken girl. She put an arm around her, murmuring, “Can you tell me what it is? Don’t cry so, dear Pamela.”

Pamela Braithwaite had been a girl of eighteen when they had come, in the first year of their marriage, to Crossfields. The Braithwaites lived a mile away, near the river, a large, affectionate, desultory family, in a large, dilapidated house. Already Pamela mothered the younger brood, and mothered the widowed father as well--a retired tea-planter, who had brought from Ceylon some undefined but convenient complaint that enabled him to pass the rest of his days wrapped in a number of coats, eating very heartily, and, as he expressed it, “sitting about.” A peaceful, idle man, legs outstretched in sun or firelight, hat-brim turned down over his eyes (he had a curious way, even in the house, of almost always wearing his hat), pipe between his teeth; good-looking, too, tall and fair, like his daughters, and with a touch in his appearance, though not in his character, of amicable distinction.

Pamela, except for a brother already married and in Ceylon, was the eldest, with a long gap between her and the group of younger brothers, of whom Rosamund thought mainly as a reservoir of Boy Scouts until they had had to be thought of as a reservoir of volunteers. There were three or four younger sisters, too, some of whom had married and some of whom had gone forth into the world--always with an extreme light-heartedness and confidence--as companions or secretaries. These again were hardly individualized in Rosamund’s recollection, except for the fact that, since Pamela was always making blouses or trimming hats for them, she had become aware that it was Phyllis who wore pink and Marjory blue.

But whoever went, Pamela always stayed; and even when the war broke upon the world, with Frank, the Braithwaite baby, just old enough to enlist, and Phyllis and Marjory at once enrolling themselves as V.A.D.'s, Pamela remained rooted. Who, indeed, had she gone, would have taken care of Mr. Braithwaite, and of the brothers and sisters home on leave, and of the garden earnestly dedicated to potatoes, or the small family of Ceylon nephews and nieces deposited continually in her charge by their parents?

Poor little Pamela! She had had a burdened life; the assiduities of maternity and none of its initial romance. With her large, clear eyes, very far apart, she had always a wistful look; but it was that of a child watching a game and waiting for its turn to come in, and no creature could have given less the impression of weariness or routine. For she had remained, even at thirty-three, the merely bigger sister; an atmosphere of schoolroom tea and the nurture of rabbits and guinea-pigs still hanging about her; her resource and cheerfulness seeming concerned always with the organizing of games, the care of pets, and the soothing of unimportant distresses. Tall, in her scant tweed skirts, her much-repaired white blouse, her slender feet laced into heavy boots, gardening gloves on her hands, so Rosamund had last seen her, a year ago, just before Charlie had been killed, when she had straightened herself from moulding potatoes in the lawn borders and had come forward with her pretty smile to greet her visitor and take her in to tea. Frank had been killed since then, as well as Charlie, but at that time, for both households, the war was splendid adventure rather than sorrow.

Mr. Braithwaite, in the sunny, shabby drawing-room, had stumbled up among his wrappings, to point out to her his accurate flags, advancing or retreating on the many maps that were pinned upon the walls. Frank’s last letter had been read to her, and Dick’s and Eustace’s; and Pamela had come in and out, helping the maid with the tea (the Braithwaite maids were always as cheerful and desultory as the family, and Rosamund never remembered seeing one of them who had not her cap askew or her cuffs untied), standing to butter the bread herself, the side of the loaf before cutting the slice, after her old schoolroom fashion; her discreet yet generous use of the butter--the crust covered to a nicety and no lumps on the crumb--seeming to express her, as did the pouring out of the excellent tea, drawn to a point and never over, and the pleasant, capacious cups with their gilt rims and the immersed rose which, as one drank, discovered itself at the bottom.

A sweet, old-fashioned, homely creature; like the evening primroses; like them, obliterated, unnoticed in daylight; and like them now, becoming visible, becoming personal, even becoming tragic at this nocturnal hour; for was this really Pamela, sweet, prosaic Pamela, sobbing so broken-heartedly beside her? How meagre, intellectual, and unsubstantial her own grief seemed to Rosamund as she listened, almost aghast, her arm about Pamela’s shoulders; and her instinct told her: “It is a man. It is some one she loves--not Frank, but some one she loves far more--who is dead. It is something final and fatal that has broken her down like this.” And aloud she repeated: “Can you tell me, Pamela dear? Please try to tell me. It may help you to tell.” Her own heart was shaken and tears were in her own eyes.

Between her sobs Pamela answered, “I love him--I love him so much. He is dead. And sometimes I can’t bear it.”

Rosamund had never heard of a love-affair. But these years of war had done many things, had found out even the hidden Pamelas.

“I didn’t know.--My poor child!--I never heard. Were you engaged?”

She had Pamela’s ringless hand in hers.

“No! No! It wasn’t that. No--I’ve never had any one like that. No one ever knew. He never knew.” Pamela lifted her head. Her face seemed now only a message emerging from the darkness; shadowed light upon the shadow, it was expression rather than form. “May I tell you?” she said. “Can you forgive my telling you--here and now,--and to-night, when you’ve come to be with him? It was Mr. Hayward I loved. I’ve always loved him. He has been all my life. Ever since you first came here to live.”

Rosamund gazed at her, and through all her astonishment there ran an undertone of accomplished presage. Yes, that was it, of course. Had she not been feeling it, seeking it all the evening?--or had it not been seeking her? Here it was, then, the lacking emptiness. Desolate voids seemed to open upon her in Pamela’s shadowy eyes. She tightly held the ringless hand and felt, presently, that she pressed it against her heart where something pierced her. Was it pity for Pamela? or for Charlie? This was his; had always been his. And Pamela, who had had nothing, had lost everything. “My dear!” she murmured.

“Oh, how kind you are!” said Pamela. She sat quiet, looking down at their two hands held against Rosamund’s heart. And with all the austerity of her grief she had never been more childlike in Rosamund’s eyes. Like a child, once the barriers of shyness were down and trust established, she would confide everything.

Rosamund knew how it must help her to confide. “Tell me if you will,” she said. “I am glad you loved him, if it has not hurt you too much. You understand, don’t you, that I must be glad--for him?”

“Yes, oh, yes; I understand. How beautiful of you to see it all!--Even though it’s so little, it is his; something he did; and so you must care. But I don’t think there’s much to tell; nothing about him that you don’t know.”

“About you, then. About what he was to you.”

“That would simply be my whole life,” said Pamela. “It’s so wonderful of you to understand and not to blame me. So many people would have thought it wrong; but it came before I knew what it was going to be, and I never can feel that it was wrong. He never knew. And even if he had, it couldn’t have made any difference. It must be because of that that I can tell you. If you hadn’t been so happy, if it hadn’t been so perfect--for you and him--I don’t think that I could have told. I should just have rushed away when you came in and hidden from you.”

“Why?” asked Rosamund after a moment. She heard something in her own voice that Pamela would not hear.

“I don’t quite know why,” said Pamela; “but don’t you feel it too? Perhaps if it hadn’t been so perfect, even my little outside love might have hurt you--or troubled you--to hear about. But I see now that you are the only person in the world who could care to hear. It is a comfort to tell you. I am so glad you came.” Pamela turned her eyes upon her and it was almost with her smile. “When I see you like this I can believe that he is here, listening with you, and sorry for me, too.”

How like an evening primrose she was! Rosamund could see her clearly now: the candid oval of the face, the eyes, the innocent, child forehead with thick, fair hair falling across it.

“Yes. Go on,” she said, smiling back.

She was not worthy of Pamela, and poor Charlie was not worthy of her; but no human being is worthy of a flower. And though so innocent, she was not stupid; subtlety like a fragrance was about her as she said, “You can comfort me because you have so much to comfort with.”

“So much grief, or so much remembered happiness?”

“They go together, don’t they?” said Pamela. “Every sort of fulness. But I needn’t try to get it clear. You understand. I always thought that perhaps people who had fulness couldn’t; now I see that I was mistaken.”

“Have you been very unhappy, dear child?”