Part 6

To Mrs. Lovell, however, Rose remained true, and therefore continued with her as an ally in her next scheme, which was an old curiosity shop. Not an old curiosity shop where oddity was the prevailing note, but an old curiosity shop where everything had some beauty, either of shape or colour, or was picturesquely obsolete. Such shops, I have observed on my London expeditions, are now very numerous, but Mrs. Lovell’s was one of the first. They are usually directed by women. Just as a man may sell wine or be secretary to a golf club and lose no caste, so may what we call ladies keep these shops. Blue and green and purple glass; old stuff for patchwork quilts; spinning wheels; Stafford and Leeds jugs; lace; amber necklaces; beads; brass pestles and mortars; painted rolling-pins; early Victorian dolls—the place was full of things of that kind, and Rose, in a charming smock, was standing in the midst of it on the day that I unexpectedly looked in, smilingly engaged in the task—an easy one—of selling a very young and obviously adoring curate a warming-pan: not, as he was explaining, for use, but for decoration. On seeing me she blushed very becomingly and nearly broke the little divine’s heart by her too apparent eagerness to turn to the new customer.

Rose begged the afternoon off—and it was the kind of shop that did itself very little harm by shutting up for the whole day now and then—and we met for lunch and then loitered about in Kew Gardens.

“Has that little curate proposed to you yet?” I asked.

“Not yet,” said Rose.

“Any one else?”

“One or two,” she replied.

“I suppose a great many men come to that shop?” I said.

“Oh yes. They’re very jolly too, some of them, until they fall in love; and then they’re so dull. Isn’t it funny what a difference it makes? And then they propose and I lose them.”

And I, I thought to myself, have lost Rose! Is loss the rule of life? It seems to be.

* * * * *

It was on one of Rose’s week-end visits just before she was twenty that she took out a photograph and handed it to me. The photograph was an amateur snapshot of a group on a lawn, among whom was Rose.

“Quite good of you,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t me that I wanted you to look at, but the man behind me.”

It is strange what effect the most ordinary words can sometimes have! Rose’s were casual enough, but my heart absolutely stopped for a moment and a mist crossed my brain. God knows I did not want to keep this child from marriage; her engagement would even be a blessing in disguise, for it would bring her back to her home; but her remark none the less was like a knell.

And yet she had told me nothing! Nothing—and to the fearful swift apprehension of a jealous foster-father, everything!

I pulled myself together and examined the man: tall, regular-featured, with a high forehead due more to thinning hair than to formation of skull. Eyeglasses. His general expression suggested a somewhat condescending benignity, with assurance. I didn’t like him.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“His name is Eustace Holt,” Rose said. “He wants me to marry him.”

“Yes?” I heard my voice say.

“I rather think I shall.”

I had no more words. I drew her to me and kissed her hair. The action, I suppose, implied a kind of possessive protectiveness. I had wondered vaguely how I should behave when the news broke: and this was the way!

After a long silence Rose went on to say that he was a barrister; had been a private tutor for a while after leaving Oxford, but was now at the Bar and beginning to do well in chamber practice. Not an advocate.

I looked at the photograph again. Probably I should have been cool about any young man who had captured Rose’s heart, knowing so well that none could be worthy; but to this one I felt positive hostility. He had the effect of filling me with a sudden warm rush of affection for Ronnie.

“Well?” Rose said.

She knew me sufficiently to discern a want of sympathy; but I hope that I succeeded in concealing the greater part of my antagonism. You see, I was still a liar. Not all my intimacy with Rose and admiration for her candour had cured me. Perhaps had I said, “My dear, I hate the sight of the man: he looks priggish: do promise me to do nothing about it for six months,” it might have changed her life. At any rate it could have done no harm, and it would have had the additional merit of expressing a truth. But I couldn’t. For one thing, I had not the courage to be destructive about her own choice, when the romance was still so young; for another, I had not the right. She had seen the man and loved the man, or thought she did; and all the ground for my sudden prejudice was a tiny snapshot.

“Well?” said Rose.

“He’s not what I was expecting for you or hoping for you,” I replied. “At any rate, not in appearance. He’s—well, he’s too—too urban. Too prim. In spite of what I said about the fish-basket, I have always thought of your husband as more careless, easy-going, gayer than this. I had thought of him as having something of Nature—more of the open air or the sea—but this man’s from the Squares. He travels in the Tube. He carries an umbrella.”

“My dear Dombeen,” said Rose, “how can you know things like that? I’m sure I don’t, and I’ve seen quite a lot of him. He may be a Londoner, but that’s nothing. Barristers must live in London. I wish I hadn’t shown you that foolish picture. He’s really very distinguished looking, he has a most delightful voice, he does everything well. He’s a plus man at golf.”

“I can believe it,” I said. “But that isn’t the point. The point is not, is he a remarkable man, but is he fitted to be Rose’s husband? I’ve known you for as many years as you have been on this earth, and I’ve watched you grow up in body and mind, and perhaps I’ve been able to help you in both—and when we help people we learn about them—and I’ve thought often of the best kind of man to carry you away from me when the time came, but never was it a polished Londoner marked out for professional eminence. Where—just to mention one trifling matter—where are his jokes?”

“Jokes aren’t everything. But any way he can be quite amusing.”

“Jokes go a long way,” I said; “and you especially would be very dull without them. As for his golf, that’s nothing. Golf isn’t really a game, nor does it really carry any open-air love with it. How old is he?”

“He’s thirty-four,” said Rose.

“Thirty-four, thinning at the top, once a tutor, now a barrister, and going to marry this uncalculating child! O my dear!” I said.

* * * * *

It was of course absurd of me to be shocked by Rose’s choice of a husband. I suppose that there never was a girl yet whose selection did not cause surprise. The strange thing to male observers of these matches is the want of fastidiousness that even the nicest women can display. Rose had not erred in that respect, but it is notorious among men that most women do.

I took my disappointment to Mrs. O’Gorman, but she had no sympathy for me. All that she did was to laugh.

“I told you so,” she said.

“How can you be so elementary as to make use of that paltry phrase?” I replied.

She laughed again.

“Didn’t I tell you so?” she asked. “Years ago. And often since.”

“I suppose you did,” I conceded.

“Very well then, let a poor lonely old woman full of uric acid, with an extremely incompetent medical adviser, enjoy her little triumph! If poor human nature couldn’t say ‘I told you so’ now and then, we’d hardly have the courage to keep on at all at all.”

“Very well then,” I said. “You are one of the most remarkable of far-sighted women. Deborah the prophetess was a blind mute compared with you; Mother Shipton was an Aunt Sally. I give you all the praise and glory. But meanwhile, what is to be done? I’m sure that Rose is making a mistake.”

“Most people who marry do,” said this monstrous old woman.

“Then can’t it be stopped?” I asked.

“I don’t see how. Surely you’ve heard the remark—I’m not very original this afternoon, I’m afraid—’Marriage is a lottery’?”

“Well?”

“Well, then there’s nothing for you to do. It may be all right. You say that he’s respectable, a barrister, not poor, not deformed. How then can you stop it? You’ve got nothing to go on, no valid excuse. If he were a dwarf you might do something; or a tenor with long hair. But I don’t see how you could stop her even then, because in marriage the promising matches often go wrong and the apparently ill-assorted have a very good time. Besides, she’s only a few months from being her own mistress. You can grumble, but you can’t prevent.”

And that’s all the comfort that I got from Mrs. O’Gorman.

* * * * *

But there was one drop of sweetness in this bitter draught. Rose’s engagement meant that she returned to me; she gave up her work almost at once.

Nothing, however, was as it had been. (Nothing, says the cynic, ever is.) Our old frank intimacy was over. We had our talks and our walks and our fun still; but there was a skeleton at the feast, and he was a rising barrister. Rose didn’t mention him much, nor did I. But she wrote long letters, and received long letters, and I had no doubt that Eustace Holt received those that she wrote and signed those that she received. And then one evening she suggested that he should be asked down.

“You’ll have to see him sooner or later,” she added.

“Then it’s still on?” I inquired.

“Of course,” said Rose. “I should have told you if it hadn’t been. When you meet him you’ll like him. Or you would if you hadn’t made up your mind not to, and haven’t got the pluck to eat humble pie.”

I never liked him, but it would have been difficult to say why. He was tall, comely, well-mannered, deferential, thoughtful about details, protective of Rose (perhaps that was his real offence), uniformly quiet and easy. What he lacked most conspicuously was any exaggerated characteristic. He conversed fluently and with some knowledge upon all the cultured topics—he knew about pictures and music, as a frequenter of the National Gallery and the Crystal Palace concerts; he belonged to the London Library; he played golf at the Old Deer Park; he had good nails. He dressed well. His suit case was of the solidest leather. In fact, he was all that he should have been and—alas!—nothing that he should not. He reminded me of a well-bound book in a gentleman’s library—the kind of book that no gentleman’s library should be without, but which makes no appeal to be read.

I am not one of those who fling up their hands in despair and wonder what on earth a sensible girl like So-and-So can see in that fellow she’s going to marry. But even when one admits that the deeps that call to deeps in engaged people are and should be invisible to the rest of the world, it is permissible to parents and guardians to deplore the reciprocity. The deeps are not all: in fact the attraction of the deeps can be the least permanent and admirable element in marriage.

I knew enough of Rose’s spirit, her vividness, her dependence upon impulse, her love of life, to realize that she was doomed to spend far too much time alone. Eustace had all the virtues, but he had no imagination. He was also fixed where Rose was fluid. He had his eye on the goal success; whereas all that Rose asked from life was a gay serenity. She was in the habit of watching faces light up at her approach: “People,” you might have written on her tombstone as sufficient epitaph, “were pleased to see her”; and all of that was doomed to pass, not because she would be less liked but because she would not be free: she was to be reincarnated as the property of another, as Mrs. Eustace Holt.

Still, there is more than one kind of happiness; there is even, I have observed, a happiness to be derived from misery: all doctors would testify to this; and Rose might find, in her home duties and the practice of wifeliness, a complacency that would take the place of the old radiating freedom. I use the word “might” with emphasis: it is all that is possible to parents and guardians who are threatened with the loss of their treasure and have gloomy prevision.

In my case I was truly hoping against hope, because I had had a shock. On one of Eustace’s visits I made a discovery about him which filled me with the darkest forebodings. I had found him one afternoon just before post time seated in the library steaming a stamp off a postcard. Rose, it appears, had had occasion to write a rapid order to some shop and, having no halfpenny stamp (for those were the days before the blessings of peace had sent up the postcard rate), she had characteristically stuck on a twopenny-halfpenny one from a store which I kept for foreign correspondence; and Eustace had been entrusted with the card for the post. But his careful eye had detected the extravagance, and when I came upon him he was removing the twopenny-halfpenny stamp and substituting a halfpenny one from his own pocket. Knowing Rose as I did, I would rather have found him burgling my safe or even kissing one of the maids; for the action argued a passion for thrift which would lead in time to the sternest censure of the unthinking carelessness in money matters and the constant generosities which were among her most striking characteristics.

The worst of it was that he did not pale or start when I caught him: he merely expressed his satisfaction at having been able to correct Rose’s folly in time. He then dried the foreign stamp, handed it gravely to me for future use (“It will need a little gum,” he said) and hastened to the post. If ever a home-wrecker was saturated with innocence it was he.

* * * * *

I was in hopes that Rose’s formal visit to Eustace’s people might have the effect of implanting some misgivings in her. Such expeditions have had that effect in the past, when the impact of the “people” has been so startling as to cause a complete revision of the affections. But not so in Rose’s case, and she came back still an engaged woman. (By the way, I did not approve of the ring which Eustace had given her: it was not the superlatively beautiful thing that she ought to have had. Rose should have had some great noble stone in an invisible setting—a ruby or an emerald—but Eustace had chosen and sent her a muddle of little pearls and diamonds.)

Eustace’s father was a clergyman in Berkshire, a rather querulous man, Rose said, but hospitable and kindly to her. Mrs. Holt was more difficult. “But then,” Rose added, “mothers always must be critical of their future daughters-in-law. No girl can be good enough for their darling sons!”

Eustace being the only son, the mother was, of course, additionally hard to please.

“How did you leave her?” I asked.

“Resigned rather than rapturous,” said Rose. “I did nothing very terrible, but I fancy that she suspects you as a trainer of youth.”

“Not so much as I suspect her,” I said, “as a judge of brides.”

The whole thing infuriated me.

Another cause of vexation at this time was Mrs. O’Gorman.

We are annoyed when our old friends like our new friends too much; but we are even more annoyed when our old friends refuse to share our antipathies to new acquaintances. Mrs. O’Gorman disappointed me deeply by not finding Eustace as unsuitable as I did. Perhaps she was only being wilfully provocative, but the effect on me was the same.

“A very intelligent old lady,” Eustace called her, to me. Perhaps a little too outspoken, a little lacking in taste. But very refreshing. A character, in fact. No one enjoyed studying a character more than he. And there were so few of them!

I have just said that few things are more annoying than an old friend’s approval of a new acquaintance that we dislike. But I think that to hear an old friend patronizingly appraised by an incompetent critic is almost worse. Mrs. O’Gorman was a character: there was no doubt about that; but Eustace had only a glimmering of that fact.

My peace of mind was further impaired by Rose’s tendency to play with the joke that I also must marry. It was not a new idea; but hitherto she had been very light with me.

“What we must do, Dombeen,” she had said to me one day not long after her decision to go to London to Mrs. Lovell, “is to get you settled.”

“What on earth do you mean?” I had asked.

“A wife,” she said, laughing. “You mustn’t be left all alone.”

“I like being alone,” I said: “that is, when you’re not here.”

“But you ought to marry,” Rose said. “Every one says so.”

“Who says so?”

“Well, Mrs. Cumnor says so.”

“I don’t pay any attention to the wives of the clergy,” I replied.

“Aunt Milly says so.”

“Oh, Aunt Milly! Of course. She has never wished me anything but ill.”

“I should feel much happier in London if I thought you were not alone,” Rose said.

“That’s absurd,” I replied. “You were not unhappy at school, and I was alone then.”

But now Rose went on to select actual wives! I used to wonder what she really thought about it all, but never discovered. It was not like her to be so persistent with a theme. She usually touched and passed on. Could it be that we were out of harmony in graver matters, and she jested to keep free of them?

She would come back to lunch, after being in the village, with new and fantastic plans for my marriage. Every spinster and widow within a five mile radius was weighed as a possible Mrs. Greville. Rose dismissed Mrs. O’Gorman as too old, but her faithful Julia came under the lens.

“But no,” she was kind enough to say, “I couldn’t let you marry her. A woman must have some spirit.”

Three unmarried sisters—the Misses Sturgis—had recently taken the Allinsons’ old house—after one or two fleeting and unattractive tenants. Rose saw a good deal of them just now, and I was on more or less familiar terms both as a doctor and a neighbour.

The sisters, who were refined and affluent, had been brought up as Quakers, but they quaked no more nor did they harbour any resentment against our “steeple-house”; they had become indeed useful members of the congregation, receiving from the rector the preferential treatment meted out to this particular sect even when it retains its nonconformity.

Rose was never tired of analysing each—Miss Sturgis, Miss Hester and Miss Honor—as a possible wife for me.

“I was looking at Hester Sturgis again this morning,” she said. “Really she’s very nice. She has very pretty hair, don’t you think? She is writing an essay on Walter Pater for the next meeting of the Lowcester Literary Society. She particularly hoped that you wouldn’t be there, Dombeen. She says you’re so critical, she’d be terrified.”

I gave Rose the assurance that I should not be there.

“I wonder if wives ought to be afraid of their husbands,” the minx went on. “I mean, of their intellects?”

I made no sign of comprehension.

“Honor Sturgis is extraordinarily nice too, isn’t she?” Rose continued. “Don’t you like the way she talks? She has the kind of voice that reminds you of that speech in _King Lear_. Don’t you love gentle voices, Dombeen? She is tall, too. I believe she’s only an inch shorter than you. It’s absurd when husbands are immense and their wives little, isn’t it?”

You see what an imp she could be!

“Honor is writing a description of a visit to Chamounix,” Rose went on. “I don’t know what the Lowcester Literary Society would do if the Sturgises hadn’t come to liven it up.”

“We got on very well before they arrived,” I replied.

“Miss Sturgis was in the garden,” Rose continued. “She’s wonderful with flowers, they say. If she just put a walking-stick into the ground it would grow. I expect that you and she together would have the most stunning garden in the world. And she’s not really old, not more than thirty-eight. Don’t you think that married people should be nearly of an age? Some day, when I have enough courage, I shall ask Honor—she’s the easiest, I think—why they’ve never married. With all their money, too! But Quaker girls often don’t, I believe. It’s funny, because I should think they’d make wonderful wives, so placid and sensible, don’t you know. What do you think, Dombeen?”

“I’m sick of the whole subject,” I replied.

* * * * *

Eustace was exhibited not only to me—and, I am aware that, to ordinary prospective bridegrooms, these probationary visits (probationary, but too late for remedy) must be a very trying ordeal and we ought not to be too hard—but to the Strattons. What Rose’s cousins thought of him I have no means of knowing, but I suppose that girls are as critical of other girls’ fiancés as we can be of the young women whom our friends so mistakenly believe to be Minervas or Venuses. But Mrs. Stratton, even if she may have had a touch of envious regret that Eustace had not first seen her daughters and fallen to one of them, was pleased with her new nephew. Or so I gathered from a letter to me in which she congratulated me upon Rose’s alliance with so promising a counsel and so worthy and seemly a man, and went on to refer with satisfaction to the cessation of unfortunate rumours which the engagement would bring about.

Eustace, I found, liked her, and had remonstrated with Rose, but with infinite patience, about her antipathy to the lady. It was her first disappointment in him.

Mrs. Stratton had expressed herself as eager that Rose should be married from her house, and Rose was willing. I was glad that she was, for many reasons: I did not, for instance, want the wedding in our church, or the reception in our house, with Eustace’s people all about; I did not want to see Rose’s husband driving away with her into a new life, alien to me, from my door, her door. I could not bear the idea of continuing to entertain the crowd after their departure, when any decent man would wish to be alone. These were selfish enough reasons, but also natural. I deny that they lay me open to any very severe censure.

At the same time I should have liked it had Rose said that only from her true home would she be married. But she did not. Not improbably she had that desire, but was anxious to spare my feelings. She knew that Eustace could never be congenial to me, and least of all as her captor.

* * * * *

I went to the wedding, of course; and I have never been more miserable. It was enough that my Rose was standing there at the chancel steps; but there was more. This was my first wedding for many years, and I was startled by the service. The gravity and solemnity of the promises exacted from each—such promises as not even angels are asked to make and keep, for there is notoriously no marriage or giving in marriage among them—filled me with gloom and foreboding and a sense of injustice. It seemed wrong to ask any human beings—and particularly boys and girls—to commit themselves in this way. I wondered if barristers when being married have thoughts of the Divorce Court in their minds—that overworked department of the profession where the morbid and inquisitive assemble day after day to gloat over the fragments that remain when all these sacred bonds and assurances have been broken. “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” I heard Eustace repeat after the clergyman. But did he? Does any husband? What would be a husband’s attitude if the next morning his wife said that she wanted his property—all the worldly goods with which he had publicly endowed her—at once? The commonest cause of married unhappiness that I know of is the refusal of husbands to give their wives even a requisite fraction of their worldly goods for current household expenses. But the words will go on being repeated at the chancel steps for many a year yet.

“In sickness and in health”—doctors know something about the value of that undertaking, too, and how it is honoured.