Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 19

"I didn't imagine you'd stoop to feign interest. I didn't imagine you'd take such pains to allure and flatter a commonplace young _pere de famille_."

"Did I take pains to allure and flatter him?"

"From the first!--From the very first!--That day we met!--My G.o.d!" Even now he could not help feeling himself, seeing himself, as one of his own heroes; and, for a moment, he bent his head upon his hands--as they would have done had a calamity as unimaginable as this befallen them.

"That first day!--The apple-blossoms framing you! You stood under your white parasol in our orchard--and you smiled at me!"

"I generally do at agreeable-looking young men when I see that they admire me," Mrs. Dallas commented.

"Oh, don't pretend!--Don't hide and s.h.i.+ft!" He lifted fierce eyes; "It wasn't only that. You seemed to care. You seemed to need me. You made it easy--inevitable. You came--and came; and you asked me here again and again."

"Not 'me,'--'us,'" Mrs. Dallas amended suavely. She was looking at him, all this time, with that thoughtful, poisonous curiosity; and as he now sat, finding for the moment no words, his fury baffled by her quiet checkmating, she went on, "And afterwards I let you come alone because I saw that you admired me, and that is always pleasant to me. When, at first, as you say, I showed myself so affable, it was because I liked Marian. I do still like her; more than I ever liked you, my dear Rupert; if you are good-hearted and intelligent, she is more so, and she has more sense of humour than you have, and doesn't take herself so seriously. And, to be quite frank, since we are talking it all out like this, I not only liked Marian, but saw that she could be of use to me.

I've had, in some ways, a tiresome, tangled life, and things haven't always gone as I wanted them to go, so that I don't let opportunities for strengthening and straightening here and there pa.s.s me by. Through Marian I met several people I wanted to meet and make sure of. People useful to me. I think Marian quite understood and quite wanted to help.

She would. She is of my world in a sense you aren't, you know, my dear Rupert. And, in my idle way, I did take a good deal of trouble to be agreeable to her. It all turned out exceedingly well and I was very grateful to Marian. That's one reason, you see, why I felt to-day that our little flirtation was going too far and must be put a stop to. I don't want Marian to be jealous of me; it would be distinctly inconvenient. But there is more in it than that. I wouldn't have put myself to this bother and talked things out like this if it hadn't been because of my liking for Marian. It makes me angry to see that you don't know how lucky you are to have such a wife. I want you to see how very lucky you are. I want you to see yourself as others see you,--a very unimportant young man, without position and without money, married to a quite unusually delightful girl who has both. This isn't the young man's fault, of course; one wouldn't like him the less for it; but one does expect him to be aware of his own felicity. One does expect him to feel that, at present, his wife is too good for him. I don't mean in the conventional sense; one wouldn't ask him to recognize that; but in the sense of worth and charm and distinction, for those are the things he supposes himself to care for."

She had, while she spoke of the "young man" thus impartially, turned her eyes from him, and they rested again on the beds of carnations. The sun had sunk behind the hill, and though the bright soft colours were unshadowed, they all lay in a different light and seemed to glow coolly in their own radiance, like jewels.

Rupert rose. His anger had pa.s.sed from him. He no longer felt Mrs.

Dallas to be an antagonist; but he felt her to be a stranger; and he felt himself to be a stranger. A sense of fear and loneliness and disembodiment had fallen upon him while he listened to her. He held out his hand to her. "Good-bye," he said. "I think I must be going."

She took his hand and looked up at him with the gaze so remote, so irrevocable. "Good-bye," she said; "I hope to see you and Marian some day soon, perhaps."

The words, with their quiet relapse on convention, made him feel himself in a new world. He had been thinking of final, fatal things, things dark and trenchant; she showed him compromise, continuity, commonplace good sense; and, dispossessed, bereft as he was, something in him struggled to place itself beside her in this alien atmosphere, to make itself a denizen of the new since he had forever lost the old world.

"Oh yes, I'll tell her," he said. And as he released her hand he found, "Thank you. I'm sure you meant it all most kindly."

"It's very nice of you to say so," said Mrs. Dallas, smiling.

It was the world of convention; yet with all his bewildered groping for clues and footholds, he felt, dimly, as a glimmer before his eyes or a frail thread in his hands, that the smile was perhaps the most sincerely sweet that he had ever had from Mrs. Dallas. It was as if she saw his struggle and commended it.

III

He walked away, up the steps, across the putting-green and out into the woods. He went slowly as he began the gradual ascent. He felt very tired, as though he had been beaten with rods, and there was in him a curious mingling of confusion and lucidity, of pain and contemplation.

The present and the future were curtained with shame, uncertainty, and dismay; but the past was vivid, and, like a singular, outgrown husk, he seemed to look back at that Rupert on the veranda, so blind, so bland, so fatuous, and to see him as Mrs. Dallas had seen him.

Beyond the curtain was Marian. He knew that he went towards Marian as if towards safety and succour; yet all was opaque before his eyes, for who was it that Marian was to succour but that fatuous Rupert? and was it for such as he that he could seek support? How could he go to Marian and say, "I have been given eyes to see you as you are; help me, now, to be blind again to what I am." No; he could not, if he were to follow his glimmer and hold his thread, seek succour from Marian.

When he reached the house he went into the drawing-room and found her sitting there in a cool dress, a book upon her knee. She did not see him as he entered quietly and he stood for some moments in the doorway looking at her.

She had been crying; her cheeks were white and her eyelids heavy; but though this perception came to him with a blow of feeling, it did not, for the moment, move him from his contemplation of her, with all that it brought of new and strange to the familiar.

She was strange, though she was not a stranger, as he had become to himself. He noted the black curves of her hair, the ample line of her bosom, the gentle, white maternal hand laid along the book. On a cabinet, above her head, he saw that she had very beautifully arranged the white, rose and yellow carnations. It was like her to do this justice to her rival's gift; like her to place them there not only faithfully but beautifully. And as she sat, unaware of him, in the luminous evening air, he felt her to be full of enchantment and this enchantment to centre in the hand laid along the book. His eyes fixed themselves on the hand. It seemed a symbol of the Marian of grace and girlhood whom he had loved with such ardent presage of eternal faith, and of this Marian sitting quietly in her saddened and accepted life, not changed except in so far as she was yet more worthy of fidelity. He saw that she had pa.s.sed through her ordeal and transcended it; he saw that she would never again show him jealousy; and he saw that as the old Marian he had, perhaps, forever lost her. A lover must always show jealousy. This was a wife, maternal and aloof.

He came into the room and she looked round at him. Her eyes, altered by weeping, were mild and alien. They were without hostility, without accusation; deliberating, gentle; the eyes of a wife. "Did you have a nice afternoon?" she asked laying down her book. "It's been delicious, hasn't it?"

Quite as irrevocably as Mrs. Dallas she made the world that he must enter. She, too, in her different way, a way founded on acceptance rather than rejection, showed him compromise and continuity. And nothing that Mrs. Dallas had said to him cut into him so horribly as to see Marian show him this new world.

An impulse came to fall on his knees beside her, bury his head in her lap, and pour out all his griefs. But already, and for Marian's sake, now, he had learned a better wisdom. To fall and weep and confess would be, again, to act like one of his own heroes; and Marian, in her heart, knew all that there was to know of that old Rupert. He must make her now know, and make himself know, a new Rupert.

He sat down opposite her and, smiling a little, he said, "Mrs. Dallas has done with me."

"Done with you!" Marian repeated. Her faint colour rose.

"Quite," said Rupert, nodding; "in any way I'd thought she had me."

"Do you mean," said Marian, after a moment, "that she's been horrid to you?"

"Not in the least, though it felt horrid. She merely let me see that I'd been mistaken."

"Mistaken? In what way?"

"In almost every way. In my ideas about myself, and about life, and about her.--It wasn't, for one thing, me she liked in particular, at all. It was you."

Marian's flush had deepened. "She seemed to like you very much indeed."

"Only frivolously; not seriously. She showed me to-day how silly I'd been to think it anything but frivolous. She made me see that I'd been a serious a.s.s."

Marian sat looking at him. She was startled, and on his behalf--wonderful maternal instinct!--she was angry; yet--he saw it all in the sweet, subtle alteration of her face--she was happy, half incredulously yet marvelously happy. And as he saw her happiness, tears came to Rupert's eyes and he felt himself, deeply and inarticulately, blessing Mrs. Dallas. She had been right. This was something "even better."

"She's an exceedingly clever woman," he said, smiling at Marian, though she must see the tears. "And an exceedingly first-rate woman, too. And I'll always be grateful to her. The question is,"--he got up and came and stood over his wife,--"I've been such an a.s.s, darling. Can you forgive me?"

He had found her hand as he questioned her and he held it now up to his cheek closing his eyes, how differently!

IV

Mrs. Dallas, after her young friend had left her, sat on for quite a long while on the veranda. The concentration of her recent enterprise effaced itself from her eyes and lips. Her glance, steeping itself again in indolent and melancholy retrospects, fell into a reverie. Once or twice, putting up a languid hand, she yawned.

When the whole garden lay in coolness, she went in and got her gardening ap.r.o.n and gloves and basket of implements. It was an ideal moment for layering her carnations. Tripping out again on her little high-heeled shoes, she placed her kneeling-mat before a splendid plant and set to work. She scorned complicated aids. A box of long hairpins were her chief allies, and a sharp knife. Deftly she selected a blue-gray shoot and stripped the narrow leaves, sharply cut a transverse slit into the tender stalk, firmly bent and pinned the half-severed spray into the heaped earth where it was to make new roots and establish itself in a new life. And, as she did so, her mind reverting to thoughts of Rupert and of her rough usage of him, a simile came to her that made her smile, her hard and not unkindly smile. She did not regret it, though unquestionably she had had her own moment of reluctance and of loss. It had hurt him terribly, no doubt, as, if they had feeling, it must now hurt her carnations to be cut and bent and pinned. But "It might be the making of him," Mrs. Dallas thought.

[Ill.u.s.tration: decorative bar]

STAKING A LARKSPUR

AS a matter of fact (one has often to take one's stand on fact when thinking about Vera), it's I who am the gardener; it's I, that is to say, who draw the plans and compute the cost and give the orders and see that the men carry them out. I often lend a hand at carrying them out, too, for I love planting seedlings and staking plants and tweaking out weeds here and there when I've the chance. That wonderful blue border Vera had on the south terrace last summer,--it was just going over when the war broke out,--I put in all the new blue larkspurs myself, three hundred of them,--the larkspurs that Mrs. Thornton was to remind me of,--and I designed and planted and with my own hands helped to lay out the dream-garden, Vera's special garden. It was she, certainly, who had had the idea, standing on the site of the little, old, abandoned sunken garden in its circle of stone wall and cypresses, and saying, "I see a dream-garden here, Judith; a place where one can come and sit alone and dream dreams." She often has charming ideas, Vera, but she knows nothing about gardening. I sound already as if I were crabbing her, I know; and perhaps I am. Certainly I never think of her relation to her garden without a touch of irony, and this story, which begins in the dream-garden, isn't to her advantage. It was there that I felt my first definite irascibility in regard to Vera and little Mrs. Thornton, and felt the impulse, as far as I was able, to take Mrs. Thornton under my wing.

It's a rather clipped and confined wing, and yet I can do pretty much as I choose at Compton Dally; I don't quite know why, for Vera doesn't exactly like me. Still, she doesn't dislike me, and I think she's a little bit afraid of me; for I am as definite and determined as a pair of garden shears, and my silence is often only the good manners of the dependant, and Vera knows it.

I am her cousin, an impecunious cousin, my mother a sister of her father's, old Lord Charleyford, who died last year. Vera herself was very impecunious until she married Percival Dixon; impecunious, but always very lovely and very clever, and she was on the crest of every wave, always, and never missed anything, except ready money and a really good offer, even before Percival Dixon came along--he came _via_ South Africa--and gave her all the money that even she could spend, and bought back Compton Dally for her. Compton Dally had been in the family for hundreds of years, and it was our grandfather, Vera's and mine, who had ruined us all and finally sold it. It was everything for Vera to get it back, even if she had to take Percival Dixon with it; and I confess that for Compton Dally I could almost have taken Percival Dixon myself; but not quite, even for Compton Dally.

Well, she has always been fairly decent to me; not as decent as she might have been, certainly, but more decent than I, at all events, expected, whatever may have been poor mother's hopes and indignations. I always thought mother unfair; there was no reason why Vera should go out of her way to give me a good time, and it showed some real consideration in her to have suggested, when mother died and while Jack was reading for the bar, that, until he and I could set up housekeeping in London together, I should come and be her companion and secretary and general odd-job woman; and for people like Vera to show any consideration is creditable to them. I am five years older than Jack, and our plan has always been to live together. I intend, of course,--though Jack at present doesn't, dear lamb!--that he shall marry; but until then I'm to live with him and take care of him and help him with his work. All this if he ever comes back again. He is fighting at the front as I write, so that it remains to be seen whether I'm to go on always with Vera. If Jack doesn't come back I shan't find it more difficult than anything else. We have always been all in all to each other, he and I; but that is quite another story and one that will never be written. This one is neither about Jack nor me, but about Vera and her garden and little Mrs.

Thornton and her husband and her clothes.

Vera had thrown open Compton Dally to wounded Tommies and wounded officers, and the Thorntons came in that way. He'd only been back from the Boulogne hospital for a week, was badly crippled, and had a very gallant record. Most of Vera's officers before this had been colonials who had no homes to go to. The Thorntons weren't colonials, but they had no home and were very poor, so that the arrangement for them to spend six weeks or two months at Compton Dally while Captain Thornton got back his strength--as far as he was able to get it back, poor man!--seemed an admirable one.