Part 2

“Even if my brother had not been at the moment so ill as to be mentally unhinged,” said Mrs. Stratton, “you must agree that the case is most peculiar. Here am I, his own sister, with children of my own more or less of Rose’s age, the properly equipped and natural person to bring up this motherless and fatherless child, and instead she is left to the tender mercies of a young man—and an unmarried man—whose only claim is that he lived next door.”

“Not his only claim,” I suggested. “It is something to have known the family for many years and to have brought the child into the world.”

“Mere accidents of adjacency and profession,” said Mrs. Stratton.

I granted that, but added that chance could rarely be separated from destiny.

Mrs. Stratton hastened to assure me that she had no patience with mystical balderdash. In any case it was absurd that a busy unmarried doctor should be selected to train an orphan—and a female orphan at that—when the orphan’s own aunt was not only ready to take over the duty but had been in the dead man’s mind. She was convinced that ninety-nine out of every hundred men in my position would have the grace—the humanity—to stand aside and give close relationship precedence. She was also convinced that no decently-honest judge, if there were such a person, would hesitate to set the will aside and give her the custody of her own flesh and blood.

I doubted if the phrase “own flesh and blood” could be applied properly to nieces.

“It’s near enough,” said Mrs. Stratton. “There’s no need to quibble about it. But to return to the question of a girl being entrusted to a young unmarried man, I consider it unsuitable in every way. It’s not nice,” she went on. “It’s not proper. It’s a kind of a scandal. The idea of a bachelor bringing up a girl!”

I pointed out that I was a little different from most men in being a doctor.

“A doctor!” she exclaimed, as though annihilating at one sniff not only every pretension I might have cherished to know anything of the healing art, but every vestige of discretion too, and all my predecessors from Galen onwards.

“At any rate,” I said mildly, “I have been practising in this neighbourhood for a good many years and I succeeded a highly-esteemed father.”

“And not without your reward,” she returned. “It was worth having one of your patients, at any rate, if you could induce him to leave you his daughter and a nice little sum to play with.”

“My dear!” said George from the sofa. “My dear!”

“I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Stratton. “I didn’t mean to say that. You must excuse the feelings of a sister and—and an aunt. But,” she continued, wasting no time in the nuances of regret, “at any rate you wouldn’t think of accepting this trust if you didn’t marry? You must realize that my poor brother had your marriage in mind when he made this preposterous will.”

This was a new idea to me, and it assorted ill with Allinson’s expressed views as to the matrimonial state.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“I know,” she replied.

“But,” I said, “I saw him more often and knew him more intimately in his latter days than you could have done. He gave me no hint of wishing to see me married. I could even give you a proof to the contrary, only I should not wish to run the risk of offending you.”

Mrs. Stratton intimated that she should like to hear anything that her poor brother had said.

“Very well then,” I replied. “He has often remarked what a relief it was to be able to come over to me in the evening, to a house where there were no women about to have to be polite to.”

“Disgraceful!” said Mrs. Stratton. “But his own dislike of refinement and the convenances is one thing; the bringing up of his daughter is another. I repeat that not even he would wish to leave his only child to the mercies of a bachelor. I claim to know something of his character,” she went on: “we were girl and boy together. He would have added the clause to the will if he had been more himself. I am convinced of that.”

“But he didn’t,” I pointed out. “One can take wills only as they are framed. Isn’t that so, Stratton?”

“Except in very exceptional cases, yes,” said George, with an heroic effort.

Mrs. Stratton became tearful and turned on her husband. “You never support me,” she complained. “You allow any one to override me. As if I didn’t know my own brother better than strangers could! His wish—more, his decision—would be that Dr. Greville should marry if he accepted the care of Rose. Of course you must marry,” she added, to me. “How old are you?—you look about thirty—every man of thirty should be married. There’s always something wrong with bachelors. We can’t allow—can we, George?—our niece to be brought up by a bachelor of thirty.”

“Many good men have been bachelors,” I said.

“Tell me one,” she replied, “and I shall be surprised.”

“Very well then,” I rejoined: “our Lord.”

“Don’t be blasphemous,” she said.

“I was merely being historical,” I explained meekly.

“You have no right to compare yourself with Him,” she said. “It all helps to confirm my worst fears. I didn’t intend to pass on to other matters connected with this deplorable affair; but that remark of yours has forced me to. Not only are you young and unmarried, but you treat sacred things with levity. I have not been prying, though you may think so—I should scorn the action—I have not been prying or asking questions, but I have learned that you are not a churchgoer. And not just because you’re a doctor either,” she added.

“It was not an excuse that I was about to make,” I replied. “I should not be a churchgoer whatever happened. It would involve suggestions of belief that I could not make and should not like to be dishonest about.”

“An agnostic!” she said. “How terrible! O my poor Rose!” She began to be tearful.

“There are more agnostics than you know of,” I said. “In this country, where religious questions are rarely asked and more rarely answered, no census of them could ever be taken. You probably not only know but esteem and trust scores of them.”

To this she made no verbal reply, but settled down steadily to sob.

“My dear Mrs. Stratton,” I said. “You are taking the gloomiest view without the faintest reason. You might just as well look on the case brightly.”

“Yes, yes,” said George, who had gone to his wife’s side and was stroking her with reassuring movements.

“You!” she said. “You’re always siding against me! Come away. It is no use staying here or talking any more. Such selfishness I never saw in all my life. But no good will come of it, I feel that. My poor little Rose, my poor little Rose!”

She returned to look at me with an intense yearning in her exceedingly damp features.

“I will not decide to-night,” I said.

“I shall pray that you may have the best guidance,” she assured me.

I thanked her.

“You shall know in the morning, early,” I said, “how your prayers have been answered”; and she stumbled away, blind with tears.

George followed her, pausing only for a moment to inflict upon me one of those grasps in which man assures man of understanding and allegiance, and re-states the solidarity of sex. It hurt horribly, and I nursed my hand for some moments; but it was comforting too.

It was late when I went to bed, for there was much to do and plan. I was not too happy about the future and my new responsibilities, but one thought as I turned out the gas gave me the purest joy—and that was that I was not George Stratton.

* * * * *

Allinson had asked a great deal. It meant a kind of bondage for thirteen years—and the years between thirty-four, my present age, and forty-seven ought to be good ones. Should a young man dedicate them to a child not his own? Ordinarily a young man would not, but my case was not quite ordinary. A doctor automatically surrenders to his profession much of his youthfulness. Some one has said that the roystering medical student must be forgiven all when it is remembered how suddenly and completely he has, on qualification, to be changed into a staid, sober and punctual servant of the public for the rest of his days—yes, and his nights. And I had always been a little old-fashioned, as we say, and the circumstance of succeeding to so big a practice so early, and being accepted favourably by so many of my father’s patients, had not impaired this characteristic. I was therefore both by nature and by profession more of a predestined guardian of another man’s child than most men even of forty-four are.

All the same, it was a tremendous responsibility, and it might result—I came back to this again and again—in a tremendous sacrifice. Because if I agreed to be Rose’s foster-father, I should have to be thorough and absolute. She might in time go to school, but while she was my child she would be mine and no one else’s. I could not share the duty of bringing her up. This means that the marriage upon which Mrs. Stratton had set her mind would not materialize. Whether or not celibacy was going to involve any kind of martyrdom for me I did not know; certainly up to the present time I had not fallen in love or felt in danger of doing so; and that is a good deal to say at thirty-four. But there were years ahead famous for their susceptibility.

And then, as to education, a girl, even when one can give her adequate attention, is a disquieting creature. One never knows of what she is thinking, as she sits there, knitting, or apparently poring over a book, or arranging flowers without a sound: more than thinking, plotting even. A boy is simpler. To begin with, he is rarely being still, and for the most part he wears his thoughts outside. As for a boy, if I had one to bring up I don’t quite know what I should teach him, except that he must not step away from fast bowling, and that it isn’t fair to get into a railway compartment where the only other passengers are a pair of lovers.

During a wakeful night my thoughts traversed the ground again and again, in unprogressive circles; but amid the dubieties that crowded on me this steady question periodically challenged me—Could you let her be brought up by that Stratton woman? Then, for the moment, I saw my course clear and shining: only however to lose it again when the gigantic difficulties of the task of education—made infinitely greater and more difficult by the fact that I was considering them in the small hours, when no man’s judgment is well-balanced—arose to darken the future.

Thus pondering and fearing, I fell asleep.

How long I should have overslept, as the result of this earlier restlessness, had not some gravel rattled on the window, I cannot say. I hastened to it and peered out. The sun was high, the scent of the garden came up warm and fresh, and just below me was Rose herself, all strange and pathetic in her stiff black clothes, lifting her transparent little face upwards and calling “Dombeen, Dombeen. Oh, I do want you so.”

How could I have disregarded such a sign? Was it not an answer to Mrs. Stratton’s prayer?

“I have decided finally to take charge of Rose, as her father wished,” I wrote to Mrs. Stratton before she left for her own home.

* * * * *

My first duty now was to secure Hannah Banks; because it would be necessary for Rose to have a nurse and steady companion, and I had never cared greatly for the one in Allinson’s employ.

Hannah Banks, who years before had been my own nurse, was now in retirement at Lowestoft, living with a married niece on the annuity that my father had left her; but she expressed her willingness to re-enter service, and a day or so later her motherly old face beamed once more upon me.

“To think of you,” said Hannah, “bringing up a child—and a little girl at that—without anyone to help! The idea! Of course I came. I’m not as strong as I used to be, but thank God, I’m tough.”

Rose took to her instantly, and they established themselves in a wing of the house, which, for too long much too big for me, was now becoming human again. Hannah was vigilant but not fussy: her especial qualities were a kind heart and an unsleeping thoughtfulness. She could hardly write her own name, and her reading was confined to the simplest words; but what are reading and writing compared with the conduct of life? What I wanted from Hannah was wholesome solicitude and old English simplicity; I could supply the rest myself, and later on there would be some regular lessons.

The fact that Hannah had stood in the relation of nurse also to me made her a little contemptuous of my present parental airs. You can’t bring up a boy from the cradle to boarding-school without detecting lapses from the god, and these can be remembered even when he is adult and your employer. Nor, after bringing up a boy like that, can you ever quite lose the feeling that he is still something of an infant. Since, to nice women, all men are still something of infants (and, if sensible, willing to be so), this does not ordinarily matter; but the attitude may lead to embarrassing results when one is endeavouring to cut a figure of authority, with a child of one’s own or in one’s own charge. How can a lecture on hygiene be effective when in the middle of it an officious old lady crosses the lawn with a pair of goloshes in her hands, and says: “Now, Master Julius, put these on directly. The grass is wringing wet!” For I was still Master Julius to Hannah.

* * * * *

There was, besides Hannah, Suzanne. It was one of my peculiarities—and how the countryside came to forgive it I never understood—to employ a French cook. I had found her on a walking tour with Theodore Allinson in Normandy in 1880; she was keeping a wayside inn near Lillebonne, and her husband having just died, and there being no children, she longed to get away to a totally new environment. She was then about thirty-two. Since she made wonderful soups out of nothing and could set a perfect omelette before you almost before the order was given, I suggested that she might like to try England and take service with me; and she jumped at the idea; and with me she remained, capable, quick and amusing.

Her French was far from the French of Paris, but she had the rapid Parisian gift of commentary, with a homely provincial sagacity added. The acquirement of English she disdained, but just as sailors go round the world on the one word “savvy,” so did she, with a similar economy, contrive to make herself understood in the house and the village. Indeed, she went farther than to refuse to acquire English, she forced French on us, so that, for example, we entirely gave up “going to bed”: we used instead to “alley coshy.”

Rose was devoted to Suzanne and she assimilated a large number of her phrases—all of which, I knew only too well, would have to be unlearned when she came under the control of a real Mademoiselle. But for the present it was more important that the child should be happy with this broad-bosomed kindly Norman, and whatever bad pronunciation she was getting was more than compensated for by the attainment of certain secrets of the cuisine. Suzanne could not read a word, but the last atom of flavour was conserved in every dish that she sent to table; and what is literature compared with cooking? One is shadow and the other is substance. She had no culture. In vain for her had her fellow Norman, Gustave Flaubert (whose statue she had no doubt seen in Rouen), toiled all his life after the elusive epithet; but her apple-jelly was more than novels and her salads were works of art. I used to look at her, serene among her pots and pans or gathering lettuces in the garden, and reflect again how little education has to do with the real progress of the world or the happiness of mankind.

Naturally enough, Hannah did not appreciate Suzanne. Like a good rural Englishwoman, she mistrusted all foreigners in general, and in the present case the feeling was aggravated by jealousy, and by pique that her own darling Rose could understand the foreigner’s gibberish where she herself could not. But the house was so managed that the two women seldom met. Hannah ate in her and Rose’s own rooms, while Suzanne rarely left the kitchen.

* * * * *

I have said something of Rose’s infirmary for crippled animals. With these creatures and Hannah and Suzanne and the maids and Briggs and myself, she would have had company enough; but there were others always ready to listen to her. There was, for instance, Mr. Wellicum.

In those primitive days I not only prescribed medicines but supplied them, and Mr. Wellicum was my dispenser, as he had been my father’s before me. He had seemed an old man when I was Rose’s age and ventured into his aromatic domain, and to her therefore he must have worn an air of extreme antiquity. There was this difference in his attitude to the two of us: he had disliked, or at any rate discouraged, my visits, but he rejoiced to have Rose about him. He was a short, bow-legged, grizzled man, very hairy and ursine, known to the villagers as “Crusty Bob,” and by playing tricks on him the boys increased his bearishness; but to Rose he was the mildest and most subservient slave. Others, including myself, his timid employer, were allowed in the dispensary itself only with ungracious reluctance—the lobby by the trap-door in the window being the place of the public—but Rose could do as she wished there, always on the one condition that she must not taste. He even permitted her to help in pill rolling, and not a few of the village children have been known to beg her collusion in seeing that their physic was made less nasty.

* * * * *

Those were the days before motor-cars—I did not see a motor-car until I was well over forty or own one until I was fifty—when a country doctor and his horse were allies and friends. I rode a little, but mostly drove, and Silver and I were on terms of the closest intimacy. She was a chestnut mare with a whitey-grey mane and tail: hence her name.

Speed, no doubt, is a great asset, especially for a busy doctor in a straggling district, but I shall always hold that we lost spiritually more than we gained materially when we substituted machinery for the horse. The horse, the school-book used to tell us, is the friend of man; and man needs friends. Petrol is his servant or his master, even his tyrant; petrol smoothes no difficulties, heals no wounds, restores no vitality, as a horse could do. On the other hand, justice compels me to admit that it has taken me to many a sick-bed at a pace that Silver would have thought unjust and have found impossible. In addition to Silver I had a bay mare named Jenny, as a second string. Both were affectionate and gentle, and Rose adored them and took astonishing and terrifying liberties with them. Some part of the ritual of grooming, in which she was proud to assist, she even carried into her own toilet. The peculiar hissing sound which ostlers make when they are curry-combing, Rose used to imitate (Hannah told me, with tears of mirth) as she brushed her hair.

That part of the ancient Persians’ simple system of education for their sons which bore upon the management of a horse (to shoot straight, manage a horse, and tell the truth, was the complete curriculum) is being missed to-day. I don’t pretend that Rose could manage one in the full sense of the word, but she had the qualities which such mastery demands—courage and confidence, mental quickness and sympathy, and a steady hand. It is not to a country’s good when the horse disappears and oil and metal take its place, for the management of a car is far less educative. To-day, roughly speaking, only farm-boys and stable-lads are being taught as the wise old Persians would wish.

* * * * *

Then there were the neighbours: the Rector and his family; Colonel Westerley and his wife; the old people at the post office, and the butcher and the baker, and, what is more to the point, the butcher’s and the baker’s errand boys. Rose was on the best of terms with all of these.

Some were too anxious to share in her upbringing. I exempt the butcher’s boy and the baker’s boy from this charge, and the old couple at the post office are honourably acquitted—or as honourably as persons can be who repeat telegrams to the whole village—but the Rector’s wife longed for Rose to join her two daughters in their lessons, and Mrs. Westerley was consumed by a desire to transform her into a pianist. The rectory offer I declined, but Rose sat for a while at Mrs. Westerley’s instrument, until it was decided that whatever genius she might possess lay in some other direction than music.

Mrs. Westerley, whose garden marched with mine on the other side, we could do without; but Colonel Westerley was one of Rose’s special intimates. And when I say Colonel, I mean Colonel. I mean an elderly upright man with a white moustache and courtly manners, who took the chair at meetings, and played a good game of croquet, and acted as sidesman on Sundays; the kind of army aristocrat who, by presenting the plate with a certain military éclat, made it a double privilege for the worshipper to drop in a shilling for God. I have to explain and amplify in this way because now, after the War, when I am writing, the word Colonel means nothing of the kind. Mere youths are colonels. A major called on me yesterday with a smooth-shaven white face and a baggy umbrella, to ask for my signature to some teetotal appeal. If I had trodden on his toe he would very likely have said that it was his fault. The word “Gad” has quitted the language.

Colonel Westerley had all the mildness and Christianity that, in some odd way, can seed in the composition of a certain kind of army man, to blossom forth in his retirement. One does not notice the seeding, but the flowers are very visible. He had been in India most of his life: had quelled border insurgencies and killed his country’s foes without a tremor; but now, among the croquet hoops and William Allen Richardsons, he was the soul of gentle courtesy and the Rector’s right-hand layman. The Colonel took over my “Times” at half-price at three o’clock every afternoon, and we shared a library subscription. Mrs. Westerley knitted continually for bazaars, and read aloud every evening until it was time for Patience and then bed.

Rose and the Colonel were great friends. I used to see her watching him as he pruned and grafted, and asking him searching questions as to the perils of life in India. When he corroborated her suspicions and stated that it was really true that snakes got into the bath through the hole that lets the water out, she instituted a hostility to enter that receptacle and be washed all over that was very distressing to her nurse. The Colonel’s stories of man-eating tigers had less serious results. The very good case which he made for himself as an intrepid fighting man and terror of the jungle deteriorated, however, when Rose discovered one day that he had not a single Indian coin to display to her. To see a rupee in the flesh, so to speak, had suddenly become a necessity, second only to that of beholding a real live anna, which she associated in some curious way with Hannah Banks; and the incompetent old warrior had neither. How one could leave India and not bring any such souvenirs away, Rose could not comprehend. An ivory model of the Taj Mahal, proffered in lieu of coinage, had no effect whatever, not even when fortified by the Colonel’s word-picture of the original by moonlight.

* * * * *