Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 16

It's the thing I have most of all to say to the world. Love isn't a measured, limited thing; its nature is to grow and give. My love for Mrs. Dallas doesn't touch your and my relation; it enriches it rather."

Marian sc.r.a.ped her palette and said nothing. He could see her cheek, the cheek that ran too ma.s.sively into her neck. Marian's skin was white and fine; a faint colour now rose to it; a faint colour was, in Marian, a deep blush.

To see her blush like that gave him an odd sensation. It was as if the blush were echoed in his heart; he felt it grow and melt softly, and there drifted through his mind a thought of Mrs. Dallas and of her magic.

Through the studio window, draped with its summer creepers, he could see the two perambulators moored in the shade of the lime tree on the lawn.

The babies were having their afternoon sleep. He was very fond of his children; and to feel, now, mingling with the strange, yearning glow, this pause of contemplative fondness, was to feel himself justified anew and anew aggrieved. The glow of tenderness seemed to envelope the babies as well as Mrs. Dallas. And it shut out Marian.

What had she to complain of? Was he not a tender husband and a loving father? Could she suspect his love for Mrs. Dallas--it was she herself who had forced him to use that word--of grossness or vulgarity? It was as high and as pure as his love for her.

His love for Marian had evolved into the perambulators, and this recognition, flitting unseasonably, vexed him with a sense of slight confusion that made him feel more injured than before. It was true that, theoretically, he held views so advanced as to justify, in true, self-dedicating pa.s.sion, all manifestations. Practice and theory in his young life had been far apart; but the thought of pa.s.sion, in connection with Mrs. Dallas, had, as it were, been made visible by Marian's blush; and, slightly swinging his hat, slightly knotting his brows as he looked at the matronly Marian, he groped for some new formulation of his creed, since it was evident that however much he might love Marian it was no longer pa.s.sion he felt for her. One must perhaps allow that pa.s.sions could not be contemporaneous; but he had always combated this shackling view.

He stood there, gazing, trying to think it out,--a tall young man, well made yet slightly uncouth, with ruffled, heavy locks and large intent eyes. Something of the look of a not quite purely bred Saint Bernard puppy he had; confiding, young and foolish, with his knotted brow and nose a little overlong. And as he found himself unable to think it out and as Marian still stood silent, sc.r.a.ping, sc.r.a.ping away at the palette in an exasperating fas.h.i.+on, he said,--and now in an openly aggrieved voice,--"I thought you liked her yourself; I thought you quite loved her. You seemed to."

Now that he was losing his temper, Marian was regaining hers. Her voice had all the advantage of quiet intentions as she answered, "I did like her; I thought her very charming. I don't dislike her now. But I'm sorry to see a woman of her age behaving with so little dignity."

"A woman of her age! Dignity!"

"She is at least forty-five."

"I don't follow your meaning. Is a woman of forty-five cut off from human relations.h.i.+ps?"

"From some, certainly; if she has any regard, as I say, for her dignity.

And a woman in Mrs. Dallas's position ought to be particularly careful."

"Mrs. Dallas's position!" She really reduced him to disgusted exclamations.

"You know, Rupert, that there are all sorts of stories about her. You know that Mrs. Trotter told us that her first husband divorced her on account of Colonel Dallas.--Other stories, too."

"Upon my word! You astonish me, Marian! You heard all these vile tales when we first came here,--from people, too, who you'll observe, run to Mrs. Dallas's dinner-parties whenever they have the chance,--and you didn't seem to mind them much when you were going there almost every day--and taking every one you knew to see her. What about your Aunt Sophy--if you believed these stories?--An old dragon of conventionality like your Aunt Sophy! You took her again and again, and arranged that luncheon in London with her when you and Mrs. Dallas went up--so that they should have another chance really to make friends. I remember you used the expression, 'really make friends.' It's odd to hear you talking of stories at this late hour."

"I only talk of them because Mrs. Dallas has made me remember them. I am quite as open-minded as you are about such things. I was just as ready to think well of her--even if they were true. Why do you call them vile?

You wouldn't think it wrong for a woman to leave her husband if she didn't love him, and to go with a man she did love. If Mrs. Dallas did that, why is it vile to say so?--Aunt Sophy, as a matter of fact, said it was a different story. And she was charmed with Mrs. Dallas, just as I'd determined she should be, stories or no stories. I did all I could for her, because I counted myself her friend and thought it a shame that any one so charming should be handicapped in any way. But I didn't imagine that a friend would try to take my husband from me." Marian spoke with severe and deliberate calm.

"I like that! I really do like that!" said Rupert, laughing bitterly.

"It's really funny to hear you talk as if Mrs. Dallas could owe you anything! I wish she could hear you! I wish we could have her dispa.s.sionate opinion of that hideous old bore of an Aunt Sophy. It was obvious enough that she put up with her simply and solely through friends.h.i.+p for you. Do all you could for her! A woman who has hordes of friends--charming, finished, cosmopolitan people of the world! Why, my dear girl, it's she, let me tell you, who has given you more chances than you ever had in your life for meeting really interesting people!

They're not the sort you'd be likely to meet at your Aunt Sophy's, certainly. They'd perish in her _milieu_!"

"Mrs. Dallas doesn't perish in it," Marian coldly commented. "On the contrary, I never saw her more alert. She didn't seem to find Aunt Sophy in the least a bore. She was very much pleased indeed to lunch there and she has looked her up every time she's gone to London since; moreover, she's going to stay with her at Crofts this autumn. It doesn't look like boredom."

"I wish her joy of Crofts! She's a complete woman of the world, of course, and she knows how to put up with all sorts and conditions of bores. She's taken on Lady Sophy because she's your friend. It's pitiful--it's unbelievable to see her so misjudged!--Take me from you!

I've never gone there but she's asked me why you didn't come. She still sends you flowers pretty well every day. Those are hers, I see. I'm glad that you've deigned to put them in water."

The tall sheaf of carnations, white and rose and yellow, that stood in a jug on a shelf in the studio must, evidently, have come from Mrs.

Dallas's garden. No other person grew such carnations. The garden at Ashleigh Lodge, this pleasant country house that they had taken for the six summer months, was not its strong point, and Mrs. Dallas had kept them reinforced from her abundance. Rupert a.s.sociated the carnations, their soft and glowing colours, their formal grace and spicy sweetness, with the whole growth of his devotion to Mrs. Dallas. He fixed his indignant eyes on them now.

"Of course I put them into water. I am going to arrange them and take them into the drawing-room presently," said Marian with her hateful calm. "But they give me no more pleasure. Nor does she. She is like them. They are heartless flowers and she is a heartless woman. I see quite plainly now what I didn't see before. She's that type,--the smiling, calculating siren. She lives for admiration; she's herself only when she has someone at her feet, and she's seen to it that you should be,--though I'm bound to say that you haven't made it difficult for her.

It fits in with all the stories."

Rupert, at this, turned away and went out. He thrust his hat firmly down on his fair locks and swung his stick as he strode by the little footpath through the woods. Bitter disappointment with Marian surged in him, and hot anger, but above all an atoning tenderness that seemed almost to break his heart in its longing to protect and justify the woman so traduced by her. His head throbbed and drummed as he went. To have it come to this! To have such hands laid on it--their love! their silent, hidden love! That Mrs. Dallas returned his love he seemed to see, with many other things, clearly, rapturously, if with trembling, for the first time to-day. He saw it with Marian's unworthiness; Marian's unworthiness had shown it to him; and now, exulting, he claimed it. She loved him, veiling the depth in her vagueness, her aloofness, her indulgent irony. His mind retraced, with yearning grat.i.tude, the steps of their relations.h.i.+p. No one had ever been to him what she was.

How she helped and lifted him! How juvenile and undiscriminating in their happy acceptances were Marian's appreciations of his work beside Mrs. Dallas's half-idle comments. He had read through to her, in ma.n.u.script, all his last novel; and Marian had not seen it yet. He had not wanted to read it to Marian; and she, besides, had been very busy with her painting.

Mrs. Dallas had listened to the novel almost every day, sitting in the shade of her veranda, in her white dress, with the hands that, unless she were gardening, seemed always exquisitely idle, yet that in their idleness seemed to dream and smile;--he could see the white skin, the delicate finger-tips, the pearls and rubies slipping down, and his heart contracted with a pang and ecstasy as he saw himself holding her hand, kissing it. He must kiss it, to-day, and he must tell her. For she needed him; he was sure of it. She needed him terribly. If she lifted him, yet how much, too, he could lift her, out of the lethargic shallows and sullen quagmires of her life.

She could not be happy with her husband. He felt himself shut his eyes before the retrospect of what the disenchantments and disasters must be that lay behind her. If she had taken great risks, with that heart of highest courage he divined in her, if she had faced great sacrifices for her present husband, what wonder that her loveliness was now clouded by that irony and languor? She was not kind to Colonel Dallas; he could not hide from himself that she was not kind to him; but, as he owned it, he yearned over her with a deeper comprehension of tenderness, feeling his rights the greater. How could she be kind to the selfish, complaining, elegant old man?--for, to Rupert, Colonel Dallas's fifty-five years seemed old. She never said anything actually sharp or disagreeable to him--even when he was at his most fretful and tiresome; but when he was least so she was not any the kinder, and by her glances, by the inflections of her cool and indolent voice in answering him, she displayed to the full, to others and to himself, did he take the pains to see it, how dull and how tiresome she found him. No; she was like a weary, naughty child in this; and seeing her as a child, with a child's faults--and did it not prove how unblinded his love must be that he should see it?--he felt himself fold her to his heart in a tenderness more than a lover's; a paternal pa.s.sion was in it; he had known that it must be in true love; he had said so in one of his books. How his books would grow from his knowledge of her!

II

He had now pa.s.sed through the woods and crossed the road and entered the footpath that ran down to Woodlands, the small house encircled by birch and fir woods where, for now some four or five years, the Dallases had pitched their errant tent. One could reach it, also, by the road; but Rupert always took this short cut that brought him out at a little gate opening on the upper lawn. There was an upper and a lower lawn at Woodlands; on the upper Colonel Dallas had a putting-green; the lower was a tiny square surrounded by Mrs. Dallas's beds of carnations.

Rupert, when he emerged upon the putting-green, could look down past the red-tiled roofs and the white rough-cast walls of the house at the carnations, ma.s.sed in their appointed colours--from deep to palest rose, from fawn and citron to snowy white--among flagged paths.

Mrs. Dallas had told him, in one of her infrequent moments of communicativeness, that during years of wandering as a soldier's wife--her first husband, also, had been a soldier--she had come to be known as the woman who could make things grow anywhere. She had grown flowers in sands and marshes. She had s.n.a.t.c.hed it might be but the one season of fulfilment from the most temporary of sojournings--in China, in India, in Africa. Sometimes only bulbs would grow; sometimes only roses; but what she tried for, always, and had never attained in more perfection than at Woodlands, was carnations. They were her favourite flower and they atoned to her here, she said, for living in a house that made her always think of an ornamental bottle of some popular dentifrice, so red and white, so fresh and spick and span, and with such a well-advertised air, was Woodlands. Her carnations were the only things of which he had ever heard her speak with feeling. Rupert, as he looked down at them from the upper lawn and descended the stone steps, felt his heart beating violently.

A veranda ran along the front of Woodlands, and Mrs. Dallas was sitting on it, just outside her drawing-room windows. The shaded depths of the room behind her glimmered here and there with the half-drowned brightness of crystal, porcelain, lacquer,--the things, none very good but all rather charming, that she had picked up for a song in the course of her wanderings; and she sat there, rather like a siren indeed, at the mouth of her cavern, its treasures seeming to s.h.i.+ne in the translucent darkness behind her as if through water. Rupert, remembering and accepting the simile, saw her as a siren, a creature of poetry and romance, though he recognized that her poetry, like her romance, was hidden from the ordinary observer. Even to his eyes she always appeared first and foremost as a woman of extreme fas.h.i.+on, and his other perceptions of her were tinged with the half-tormenting, half-delicious pungency of this one, for Rupert had known till now no women of fas.h.i.+on. He had pa.s.sed his youth, until going to Oxford, in a provincial town, where his father, an admirable and sagacious man, was a hard-worked doctor; and his only glimpses of society had been in his encounters, always displeasing to him, with Marian's tiresome and conventional kinsfolk and the few haphazard contacts in London that came in the way of a young writer. Mrs. Dallas might embody poetry and romance, but she also embodied luxury and the exercised and competent economy that made it possible. She might have to live in small, gimcrack Woodlands and do without a motor; but she had her maid. The slices of bacon at breakfast were carefully computed; but the coffee was of the best and blackest.

To-day, as always when he had seen her, she seemed ready for any possible social emergency. She could have stepped from her veranda, with those wonderfully cut little white shoes, into the smartest of garden-parties, or have received in her s.h.i.+mmering cavern the unexpected visit of a royal personage; and her soft white linen with its heavy Italian embroideries clotted, like thick cream, about the hem and wrists and breast, would have been as exquisitely appropriate as it was to this empty afternoon of reverie.

She was a small, very shapely woman, soft and curved and compact. Her coiffure would have looked old-fas.h.i.+oned in its artifice and elegance, and with its "royal fringe," were it not for its air of a rightness as unquestionable as that of some foreign princess's, who kept and did not follow fas.h.i.+ons. Mrs. Dallas's face, too, was small and colourless and slightly faded; her hair was of a lighter brown than her arched eyebrows and her melancholy and dissatisfied eyes; her eyelids, tinged with a dusky mauve, drooped heavily and made her always look a little sleepy; the smiling line of her full-lipped yet minute mouth was ironic rather than mirthful. To have called it a bewitching or an alluring face would have been to imply a mobility it did not possess; but it was potent through its very pa.s.sivity; it was provocative through its profound and slumbrous indifference.

There was certainly no hint of allurement in the glance she turned on Rupert Wilson as he came round the corner of the veranda; it was, indeed, even to his rapt preoccupation, a little harder in its quiet attentiveness than usual; yet she smiled at him, and her smile was always sweet, holding out a languid hand in silence and leaving it to him to say, "You expected me."

It was hardly a question, and Mrs. Dallas gave it no answer. He had, indeed, come to see her every day for many weeks now. But yesterday had finished the novel, and to-day was almost the first they had had without some definite programme of reading.

Rupert sat down on the steps of the veranda at her feet and took off his hat and looked out across the carnations; and since she said nothing, he, too, was silent, and to his trembling young heart the silence was full of new avowals.

Colonel Dallas's smoking-room also opened on the veranda, and as they sat there he came out. He was a tall, heavy man, with large pale cheeks drooping on either side of a white moustache, and a gloomy eye that could become fretful. He cast now a glance that was only gloomy at his wife and her companion.

"Beastly hot day," he said, to her rather than to Rupert. "It's worse in the house than out, I think."

"Are you going over to the Trotters' for tea and croquet?" his wife inquired.

"To the Trotters'? Why should I go to the Trotters'?"

"They asked you, and you accepted."

"Well, I certainly don't feel inclined to endure that broiling walk for the sake of _les beaux yeux_ of Madame Trotter _et filles_. It's a dull neighbourhood, this, but the Trotters are, perhaps, when all's done and told, the dullest people in it."

"You've always seemed to get on particularly well with them, I've thought," said Mrs. Dallas, in the voice that when it seemed considerate could contrive to be most disparaging. "It's a pity not to go. You need a walk. You can't afford Carlsbad this year, you know."

"I need hardly be reminded of that," said Colonel Dallas, and now it was fretfully. "To run the risk of apoplexy on the road and to drink the Trotters' foul Indian tea is hardly an equivalent. No; I shall practise some putting shots, and perhaps, if it gets cooler towards evening, I'll go over to the links. The Trotters can manage without me.--What time do the Varleys arrive?"

"At seven-thirty. There's no other train they could arrive by, as far as I'm aware."

The colonel looked at his watch, drew his hat down over his eyes, and went slowly away round the corner of the house.

His wife's eyes did not follow him, nor, it was evident, her thoughts.

"It has been rather oppressive, hasn't it?" said Rupert, glancing up at her. "You haven't been feeling it too much, I hope."