Part 9
Some women, I continued, even actually appreciate a little bullying, a little roughness; some must be continually re-wooed, taken on new honeymoons. The greatest mistake in marriage can be the limitation of honeymoons to one. As for Rose—he must remember that she was born and bred in the country: her early days had been spent in gardens; perhaps she was spoiling for the open air again. Oh, yes, I knew that Wilton Place was near the Park; but I meant something more open than that. She had a touch of the woods in her: something of the dryad, even the naiad. Surely he had noticed that?
No, he had not. I was thinking of her, doubtless, as a child, and he had known her as a woman and a mother. I must remember that. Nor could he quite agree that I had in the least accounted for anything more than a sudden wish for a holiday in the country. I had said nothing yet to explain her physical treachery—her infidelity.
“There,” said I, “I have no theory to propound.” Nor had I. I would not have propounded it for the world.
In that case, he said, he must fall back on what was at once the kindest and the most plausible theory—that Rose had lost her reason. Yes, that was it. Her mental balance was disturbed, and in her derangement he had become antipathetic to her, the author even of some imagined inconstancy; and in her nervous, unhinged condition she reverted, perhaps subconsciously, to her youthful days, and, thinking herself again the playmate of this boy, this soldier, she had automatically, as it were, resumed friendship with him, and he had been base enough to take advantage of her distraught state and had carried her off. That, he felt sure, was the explanation; yes, that was it.
He fell into a long silence, but I had no hope. He had now, I could see, given up all idea of his nocturnal walk. Nor could any movement of my own—adjusting the shutters, moving ashtrays, and so forth—deflect his thoughts.
What steps he intended to take, he went on, he could not say. He had not decided. All that he had decided was not to make the case public, and to go away. London had become unbearable; he shrank equally from the spoken condolence of his friends and from their tactful avoidance of the subject. He had long wanted to visit the Argentine, where his services were, as it chanced, in demand at the moment in connexion with some big dispute, and in the future of which he was a firm believer, and he should take this opportunity of throwing some of his care on to the bosom of the sea, the great simplifier.
But in order to do that with a comparatively assured mind Rose must be left in good hands.
This brought him to the purpose of his visit, which he could assure me had not been to force me to listen to his tale of woe at all. Would I, to put it briefly, would I let him leave Rose with me? He should feel absolutely at peace if I would. There was no one else whom he could trust in the same way. He had many relations, it is true, but—well, there it was. And somehow there was a kind of fitness in it. I had brought up his own Rose, who was the most beautiful creature he should ever meet—here he almost broke down and I admired him for it—and, well, and—here he broke down completely.
I confess to being deeply touched by the confidence implied in his request; and I shivered as I remembered my unfounded suspicion that he was likely to hold me to blame, at any rate in part, for his tragedy. It seemed to me as high a compliment as could be paid, that he, with his poor torn feelings and his pride all in rags, should be willing to place his daughter under the care of the man whose possible laxity had been responsible for her mother’s defection.
But the question would have to be considered very thoroughly. The responsibility would be very great, nor was I in some ways as well fitted to become a little girl’s foster-father as I had been, twenty years ago, when the other Rose had come to me. I was then young enough to be an active playmate and I was flexible. I had now become not only older but a man of fixed habits, many of which would have to be broken. Could I break them, and did I want to break them? For Rose’s child (could she have engineered so complicated a business as having one without the assistance of anyone else) I would do anything, but this was Rose’s-and-Eustace’s child, and that made so much difference. I could be sorry for Eustace, but never could I like him, and supposing that some of his least admirable characteristics manifested themselves now and then in his offspring, might I not become actively antipathetic? Human nature can be so unreasonable, so unjust, and I pretended to no immunity from illogical aversions.
Nor was I in any need of a constant companion. Since Rose’s marriage I had tended more and more to eremitical consolations—to my prints and gardening—whenever my patients permitted me. Nor was the personnel of the place of the kind that it had been when Rose’s mother had come “for good.” In those days, as I have told—and very likely told twice—I had old Hannah to help me. But Hannah was now a rheumatically crippled paying-guest at Lowestoft who could do nothing for me even if I again lured her forth. And the march of progress had established a cash chemist near enough to my rounds to lead me to give up dispensing, and so there was no longer Wellicum for the new Rose to help and hinder and besiege with questions. The same march, in another department of its attack upon the goodness and oldness of the days that are gone, had substituted a motor-car for my horses and traps, and so there was also no groom for Rose to help and hinder and besiege with questions. There was a chauffeur, it is true, but a man who has to do with machinery does not compare, as guide, philosopher and friend of small inquiring persons, with a man who has the care of horses.
A gardener I still had, though Briggs was dead; and neighbours, among them Mrs. O’Gorman, now getting on in years, but with all her faculties; and some kind of a spurious, inferior Hannah could be obtained; and if Rose liked animals she could be provided both with a pony and a boy to look after it. None the less, it was a great problem and I had very serious doubts; yet I knew I should say yes. And I should say it with the more confidence because of Suzanne. Suzanne was my sheet-anchor. It is true that I could not consider her attitude to the elopement very sound: it was indeed far too lenient; but I seemed to be surrounded by old women with advanced sympathies (perhaps all old women at heart side with love’s rebels?), and Suzanne’s profound affection for Rose’s mother could not but make her careful over the little girl.
But as we get older we become more self-protective; so I gave no promise, but shook hands with Eustace and said that I would think it all over and let him know in the morning what I decided. Upon this promise he permitted me, to my great joy, to go, at a very late hour to bed. My last waking thought was one of satisfaction that he had not, at any rate, said anything about band-beating.
* * * * *
If we are all to be arraigned at the Judgment Seat and put finally in our places, why not wait till then? Let God dispense favour and disfavour, rewards and punishments, that being His _métier_, and meanwhile let me be unjudicial and kind. That had been for so long my creed that I was staggered when, not long after, Ronnie’s father, with whom I had been on amicable, neighbourly terms for years, and with whose interior I was too intimately acquainted, cut me dead in the post office.
The next afternoon her ladyship, Ronnie’s mother, failed to acknowledge my salutation, and I knew that my disgrace was complete. Obviously it was I who was to blame for Rose’s wickedness.
That evening I received by hand a letter from Sir Edmund stating that after what had happened it was the wish of himself and his wife that I should never darken his door again. I remember the phrase distinctly—never darken his door: he must have carried it in his mind from a melodrama witnessed in his youth. Much as they had esteemed me in the past, the letter continued, and much even as they were indebted to me in my capacity as a doctor, they could never forget that their poor son’s affections had been basely stolen—all ill and weakened as he was—by a woman whom I had brought up. They did not say that it was the direct effect of my loose training, but that was the suggestion. Their hearts were broken, their heads were abashed, and they had lost their only child, the prop of their old age and declining years, and it could never have happened had not Rose been my ward and grown up in my house, in that village, as a neighbour of their own. Under the circumstances I must see that further intercourse between them and me was an impossibility. And the remark applied also to my assistant. The letter ended with a request for my account.
My answer was chiefly an acknowledgment, but I could not refrain from suggesting that while I had been bringing up the girl who had run away with their Ronnie, they had been bringing up the boy who had run away with my Rose. Were we not equally bereaved and distressed and even ashamed, they and I? But nothing but a cheque came in reply to this.
* * * * *
In due time I wrote to Eustace to say that I would take Rose while he was away and do my best to preserve her sweetness. And then I paid a visit to the wing of the house where Hannah had reigned, to see what was needed.
To my surprise, I found Suzanne busy with a polishing-cloth.
I asked her what she was doing there, so far from her own domain.
It amused her, she said, to keep it bright and make it toute prête.
Toute prête for what? I asked.
For la petite, she said.
But why should she do that? I asked, concealing my astonishment. How could so young a child be coming to live here, with all us old folks?
Suzanne resumed her polishing. It was in her heart, she said, that the little Rose was to make her home here. It was what her mother would have wished.
I never saw more pleasure written on the human countenance than lighted up Suzanne’s when I told her that she was right.
* * * * *
Mrs. O’Gorman was naturally the first person whom I officially told.
“I’m glad of it,” she said. “I was hoping you might.”
“Other critics won’t be so well satisfied,” I said.
“Don’t mind them,” said Mrs. O’Gorman. “But what an adoptive fellow you are! You’re a regular creche! No children of your own, O dear no!—nothing so vulgar as marrying and begetting—but if anyone has a daughter going begging you’re the boy to bring it up! It’s amazing. How old are you?”
I told her. And I may as well tell every one: when Rose the second came to me for good I was fifty-six.
“Fifty-six!” she said. “The prime of life. Uphill till you’re fifty; then the top of the hill till you’re sixty; then the steady decline. It’s a foolish world, Doctor; there’s no steadiness in it. We’re always hurrying to the churchyard: some of us unassisted, others being pushed by our medical men.”
I told her that that was too old a joke for her to crack. We looked to her for something original.
“Old jokes are best,” she said. “At any rate, there’s something very sound in that old one about the advantage of adopting a child rather than having one of your own. Those, it says, who adopt choose, whereas those who have a child in the ordinary manner must put up with what they get. You’re one of the clever ones, Doctor; you choose. And may Rose the second turn out as pretty and as sweet as that other one! Bring her to me quickly. There’s no time to waste; when one is nearly eighty one can’t postpone.”
* * * * *
Little Rose quickly became a comfort, and she was like enough to her mother for me to feel that a benign miracle had been performed and the clock set back twenty years. It is given to few persons to enjoy a second time on earth, and I think of myself as peculiarly fortunate in having twice been the most intimate companion of a child. For my first Rose, I shall always have, I imagine, the tenderer spot; but the second Rose did perhaps more to cheer me, for I was much older when Eustace left her in my charge, and she helped to keep me young. It is possible that but for her mother I might have made more of a life of my own, and even, it is possible, have been the father of Roses. No one can tell—nor am I suggesting resentment or even disappointment. I am probably better qualified to bring up other people’s children than my own, and the world is over- rather than under-populated. But the Devil’s advocate, who thought of this possible count against the first Rose, would be hopelessly dumb when called upon to indict the second.
The second Rose was a more active child than her mother had been—not restless but alert—and there was little that did not interest her. Her mother had made her own entertainment, but this Rose found most of hers in the visible world. Nothing escaped her notice.
In the excitement of her new life she did not miss her mother with any poignancy, and seemed to be satisfied with the explanation of her absence that she had gone across the sea. This was true. Ronnie had left the army and he and Rose were on their way to the Malay States, where he was to grow rubber. As for Eustace, the child never mentioned him at all. He had been one of those fathers who are seen only at breakfast and on Sundays.
Until a nurse was found—the Wilton Place nurse having refused to live in the country so far from the Knightsbridge barracks—Rose had a bed in my dressing-room.
One of her timidities was concerned with moths. For some odd reason those foolish gentle insects, who have never been known to harm anyone but themselves, terrified her, and often and often she would wake me in the night with the cry, “Dombeen, there’s a mawf in the room!” or “Come quick, Dombeen, there’s a little mawf somewhere.”
She grew out of her fears, of course, and in time occupied a more distant apartment; but for a long while I rarely got through the night without some such call—the little monkey even employing it as an appeal when there was no danger, as the boy called “Wolf! Wolf!” in the fable. But no matter how suspicious I may have been, I always went. “Dombeen, Dombeen, there’s a mawf in the room”—how I wish I could hear that now! “Little Mawf” became one of my names for her.
* * * * *
It was with the new Rose as with the old: my patients were intensely interested in her. Not many, however, were the same as those who had been so solicitous about her mother. Some had left the neighbourhood; some preferred my assistant; some were dead. Mrs. O’Gorman was, I think, Rose’s favourite, in spite of the years between them—the old lady now nearing the eighties and the child not yet six. Seventy years is a big dividing gulf, and yet when they were together there was little sign of it, such was the adaptability of both.
The first time that I took Rose to tea, Mrs. O’Gorman gave her two presents—a fearsome agate brooch (she had an early Victorian taste in ornaments) and a paint-box that had been her companion on sketching rambles when she was active. It was one of the old-fashioned boxes, with the colours in cakes and a drawer underneath with a porcelain palette in it and many fascinating accessories. The agate might as well have been thrown into the river, but the paint-box was a treasure beyond price, and it played a great part in Rose’s destiny, for it turned her thoughts to art, and some of her grandfather’s skill soon began to manifest itself.
Having this resource, Rose needed less entertaining than any child I ever knew. Give her a pencil and a piece of paper and she would be happy until the paper was covered on both sides. It is odd that her mother had no desire to draw and no aptitude: that the talent should skip a generation and manifest itself again in Theodore’s grandchild; but so it was. Rose the elder had beguiled her loneliness by telling herself stories; Rose the younger scribbled men and women and little girls and little boys and dogs and huntsmen and princesses and cats on the blank spaces of letters and the insides of envelopes or whatever scraps of paper could be found, from morn till dewy eve.
* * * * *
Ronnie’s people took too much delight in illness to be happy in their aloofness from me. Disregarding a certain solidarity in the medical profession, they had assumed that Dr. Vaughan in the next town would be only too willing to obey their capricious summonses whenever the slightest pain made itself felt in either of their systems. But Vaughan was a friend of mine by no means desirous of supplanting me anywhere or of getting a footing in the Hall. He therefore refused to go. Doctors, it is notorious, must obey calls of distress or bear the consequences, but not when other doctors are nearer, and, as he knew why I was not called and knew also that Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson knew that he knew why I was not called, he was in a very strong position—strengthened by the alliance of the telephone, which enabled him to make quite sure of his ground. Most telephone wires, could they be induced to repeat all that they have ever transmitted, would have some odd things to tell, and the conversations between Vaughan and myself while this feud was flourishing would not be least amusing. We had the great advantage of having been contemporaries at the same hospital, and it is, at bottom, only contemporaries who really understand each other. Old and young may meet, but contemporaries mingle.
In the face of the confederacy between Vaughan and myself the unhappy Fergussons, racked with gout, were forced to send for Vaughan’s rival, a young bumptious and climbing practitioner who had just set up in the place and was pulling every wire for social advancement, but who, for all his latest learning and diplomas, was wanting in the most important quality that a medical attendant can possess, the power to suggest confidence. There are patients who would languish under the care of the most brilliant physician in the world lacking the gift, and who would recover quickly though only a farrier, possessing it, should stand beside their bed. Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson were therefore very awkwardly placed.
Their next step was really rather Napoleonic and made Sir Edmund’s rise to wealth clear to me. They determined to bring down a new doctor who should be both agreeable to them and capable as a healer and establish him in our very village, not only as a constant attendant upon themselves, but as a menace and source of annoyance, and even loss, to me. But here they were baulked by the goodness of my friends. One cannot be a doctor in the same rural neighbourhood all one’s life, and succeed a father who also had been there for years and years, without setting up certain relationships that are thicker than water. I had made no effort to do so, but simply through being one’s more or less amiable self, and liking my work rather than not, I had done so. If I had consciously toiled to be popular, I might have failed; but I had just gone on my way, neglected no one, at any rate not scandalously, spoken my mind when it was asked for, and hurried, I hope and believe, very few of my neighbours under the turf. To have built up this structure of friendliness was my part in the frustration of Sir Edmund’s masterful campaign. His own contribution to his failure was his neglect to have become the owner of any property in the district except the Hall and its satellite cottages. The result was that when his nominee tried to rent a house in which to set up his rival practice, he could not get one. Anybody else could have had one—an avowed burglar even, with all his tools about him—but not a doctor!
The situation was not made any easier for the Fergussons by the palpitations of their cook—a very excellent cook—who, on being forbidden to visit me about her malady, at once gave notice. If she might not have the doctor she wished, she explained, she should certainly leave. Nor would she stay out the month either, she added, but would cheerfully forfeit her wages in order that she might the sooner submit her agitated heart to my examination. Good cooks having never grown on blackberry bushes, and this one being especially clever with chicken’s livers (one of Sir Edmund’s many culinary weaknesses), her departure was a very serious blow to him, in a very sensitive part.
To say that Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson’s aches and twinges multiplied under their disappointments is to state the case with parsimony. They increased to such an extent that the two old coddlers saw graves yawning for them on every hand, and longed with a consuming longing—which was not the less because each had to hide it from the other for pride’s sake—for the solicitude and knowledge of the only man who knew them through and through—a longing so constantly consuming that there was nothing for it but to go to London or to fly the flag of truce. They hated London, but to capitulate was too undignified; and so for a while the Hall was empty.
* * * * *
By what chance the news of Rose’s flight reached Mrs. Stratton I have no notion. But in course of time she heard it, and I hardly need say did not deprive me of an opportunity of learning what her feelings were. I cannot give the exact words of her letter, because I tore it up quickly, but its spirit remains with me.
It was largely a fantasia of triumph on the motif “I told you so.” What could be expected, it asked scornfully, of such a bringing-up as the poor girl had had? When children are handed over to cynical and irreverent bachelors we must look for trouble. What chance had Rose of living a sound life after so much careless familiarity with me and my friends? And so on. It all pointed to the importance of steady self-sacrificing home-training. We might sneer at the old-fashioned ways as much as we liked, but they were the best, after all. Her own girls, Mrs. Stratton was thankful to say, had been brought up to respect religion and do their duty, but their training had made no difference to their natural brightness and joy. It was not necessary to be superior to conventionality in order to be gay!
Poor Milly Stratton! What a Benjamin’s portion of humble-pie was hers not long after, and how careful we should be to discourage tendencies to self-righteousness! If there is a good little cherub that sits up aloft filled with benevolent protectiveness for the simple sailor-man, there is no less surely a mischievous little imp, infinitely more watchful, whose mission in life is to detect the complacently virtuous and make things hot for them. Milly Stratton came very quickly within his sphere of action, poor woman.
Driving up the road just before lunch I saw a strange figure in the garden and was instantaneously conscious that she was unhappy. Why the set of the shoulders, the movement of the arms, of an unknown visitor seen among rose bushes at a considerable distance, should convey an impression of mental disorder, I cannot explain; nor am I a particularly good observer. All I can say is that in a flash I received the suggestion; and, as it happened, it was right.
On reaching the house I found that the stranger was Mrs. Stratton, who turned a distraught face to me as I approached her.
“Dr. Greville,” she said, “I am come both to ask your forgiveness and your advice.”
“Forgiveness?” I exclaimed.
“Yes, forgiveness. I was very hard on you many years ago, in that room there, on the night of the reading of poor Theodore’s will, and I was very hard on you the other day in a letter which I wrote about Rose.”