Chapter III: Part 3

Hitherto I had not much to reproach myself with; but I now saw that the real testing-time was on us. The real breaking-point too, for every day Rose, as she ripened and matured and became more conscious of adult things, would be growing towards her own life, her own mate, and consequently away from my life and me. Once again I realized how like ashes in the mouth the fruits of parenthood can be. The new generation is always receding from the old; the old pathetically trying to catch up and understand. The metaphor of a stream rushing between the two occurred to me: almost none able to swim and so few bridges!

Once again I realized how pitiless life is, in its unresting urgency: moving ever on and on, no matter from what contentment, from what joy: the next moment always more important than this one!

* * * * *

Rose came back a woman grown. Not short, not tall—the right height—and to my eyes so sweet, so desirable, that I could not understand how any young man could fail to succumb, and I dreaded the time when Ronnie and she would meet.

But I need not have done so, for when that moment arrived it was not fraught with passion; indeed, they seemed a little constrained, Ronnie in particular, and it was not until two or three days had passed that the shyness wore off. Whatever Ronnie may have felt, he did not seek Rose’s society unduly.

I had proof that, so far as Rose was concerned, there was nothing serious, a little while after, when, regardless of Mrs. Stratton’s nastiness, we had settled down to a very delightful routine _à deux_. During one of our talks Rose was frank about her plan of life.

“Of course, Dombeen,” she said, “I don’t want to leave you before I must, but I want to marry some day; I think every girl who is healthy ought to, and have children.”

She stopped and looked into an unfathomable distance.

“Boys,” she said. “I don’t want girls. I should love to have a boy in the Navy, and see him in his bright buttons, with sun-burned hair, and freckles. But it would have to be the right man, of course.”

“What kind of a man would that be?” I asked, a little wistfully, I fear.

“Don’t be unhappy,” Rose said, with one of her gay smiles and a touch on my arm. “It won’t be yet, anyway. We’ll have lots more good times together before then.”

“You never can tell,” I said. “He may be just round the corner at this moment. In any case I should like to know what kind of man you are thinking of. I might”—here I made an effort to laugh lightly—“I might be able to find him for you.”

“It’s difficult,” she said.

“How old?” I asked. “Do you want him to be your own age?”

“Pretty nearly,” she said. “I want to have fun as well. Older men are rather nice, I know, but they’re rather grave too. I should hate to be tied to a stodge. Some one who could go long walks, and climb a tree if necessary, and ride, and be silly at parties. But not really silly underneath, of course; and yet,” she added, “older men are very attractive, aren’t they?”

“I hope so,” I said: “now and then.”

“Oh, you vain thing!” she replied. “No,” she went on, “he should be older than I am, anyway.”

“A fellow like young Fortescue?” I hazarded.

“Oh no. He thinks too much about his clothes.”

“But he’s very good-looking.”

“Yes, in a way. And I should want him to be handsome. I want my boys to be handsome, you see. But not like Harry Fortescue: he’s too pretty.”

“Very well then. Young Somers-Flint?”

“No, he’s too noisy. He has that terrible laugh. I should want him to be amusing, of course, and see all the funny things in life, but more quietly. Besides, I can’t stand men with thin noses. His nose is absurd.”

“If you want big noses,” I said, “what about Harold Swain?”

“Oh, but that’s just the other extreme,” she said. “The man’s a—what do you call those birds at the Zoo, all colours with little eyes set like jewels and enormous beaks? I know—toucans. The man’s a toucan.”

“But he’s over six feet and a first-class cricketer,” I said.

“Yes, I like that,” she said. “I should like him to be good at games. But he mustn’t be grotesque.”

“Surely you can mention some one who comes at any rate nearer your ideal? What about”—I did my best to make my voice sound natural—“what about Ronnie?”

I did not look at her, so I cannot say whether Rose blushed or not.

“Ronnie,” she said meditatively. “Yes, I like Ronnie. Ronnie is a dear. But—”

“Yes?”

“Ronnie is to play with,” she said. “He’s not for a husband. I should want my husband to be stronger than that.”

“And then,” I said, quite normal again, “there are other things besides looks and character. There’s employment, for example. Do you want him to be rich and idle or do you want him to be busy? And if busy, what do you want him to do?”

“Yes,” said Rose, “I want him to be busy. I want him to be away all the day, so that his return will be an event to both of us. I don’t believe in husbands muddling about at home between breakfast and dinner. I’m sure father would have been happier if his studio had been somewhere else and he had to go away to it and remain away. He got tired of the house—I can see now, although I didn’t know then—instead of looking on it as a harbour of refuge after his work was done. That’s what made him so restless and forced him to go away so much: that and his love of seeing new and beautiful things.

“It must be dreadful,” she mused, “to be an artist and have such a keen eye for lovely effects and know that they can never be really reproduced in paint. I wish we knew more about Turner and what he felt. He came nearer getting it than anyone, I suppose; but he must have suffered agonies of disappointment and failure. The worst of it is, he seemed never to let anyone know him, so we have no evidence.”

“Well, don’t go to the opposite extreme,” I said, “and marry a sailor, for you’d hardly see him at all.”

“Oh no,” she said, “I shouldn’t do that. I should want him to come back every evening, and stay back.”

“Then no doctor need apply,” I said.

“No, I’m afraid not,” said Rose. “I want all his attention when he has finished with business. That’s an essential. And a steady home that I can make like a home, and go on improving. With a big nursery.”

“In the country, or London?” I asked.

“In the country,” said Rose. “But not too far out. A place where you can hear the train come in, and go a little way across the fields to meet him and take away the fish basket.”

“Ah!” I said, “now I know. He’s something in the city.”

“I don’t mind if he is,” said Rose, “so long as he comes back every evening, and loves me, and makes enough money for me to have a hansom everywhere when I go to town, and to take the children to the sea in the summer. That’s my idea of a husband.”

“I hope you may find him,” I said, “and having found him, keep him simple and deeply rooted. And you must make me a promise. Will you?”

“Of course.”

“Let no one but me supply that big nursery with its rocking-horse.”

So we talked; not once but many times. And this Prince Charming in the guise of a businessman with a tall hat, catching the 9.15 up and the 5.46 down, became a joke with us: one of us at any rate, in the English way, which avoids facing facts, making haste to joke for fear of having to cry.

For a while it seemed as though the alarms about the censorious world were false; but I could rid myself very rarely, and then only for a few moments, of my fool’s paradise convictions. During the moments that were free from this haunting, our new united life went along happily. Rose had taken over the housekeeping by way of experience; we entertained; a school-fellow came on a visit; we walked over to Mrs. O’Gorman’s fairly often; there were parties here and there; and no serpent in the form of a successful lover entered Eden.

I was more than ever struck by Rose’s quiet detachment. She had no absorbing interests: most things found her ready to scrutinize them, but nothing captured her. Most young Britons of both sexes have their hobbies and overwork them, but Rose moved serenely through the days, getting everything done and apparently having time to turn aside if occasion called. I admired this gift immensely. My own tendency is to concentrate almost too exclusively. If she had a hobby it was the arranging of flowers, and I think that her skill and taste in this charming and neglected branch of domestic art amounted to genius.

* * * * *

And then, further refusals being no longer possible, Rose accepted an invitation to her Aunt Stratton’s, and nothing was ever the same again. O that woman!

I could see that something was wrong directly Rose came back. We were sufficiently on terms of intimacy for wireless to be established between us: at any rate from her to me. She did not exactly exhibit constraint, but there was something, as we say, on her mind. I was conscious of that. She talked freely enough; gathered up the strings of local life in her absence; told me something of the Strattons, the only one of whom that she really cared for being Angelica, the youngest, a girl of about twelve. Her Uncle George she liked, in a negative way; perhaps, more accurately, was sorry for. The others we didn’t discuss.

“That’s over anyway,” she said; “and nothing would get me to go abroad with them. But—” and then she stopped.

I waited for the rest of the sentence, but it never came. Instead, she asked some question about our own neighbourhood and we passed on to other interests.

But I guessed then what she was meaning to say and later discovered that I was right.

“But,”—she was thinking—“although the visit to the Strattons is over, I shall have to be away a good deal, if not altogether, because it’s not suitable for Dombeen and me to be alone in this house. People are going to talk—and I couldn’t allow Dombeen to have to suffer from that.” Such were her thoughts—the fruit of Milly Stratton’s insinuations. That she herself would suffer did not matter. Eighteen can look after itself, but forty-five must be carefully guarded—that is how she would have argued. Eighteen is too immature, but forty-five, although, of course, an incredibly advanced age, lends itself to scandal, and doctors must have sound reputations.

Then set in a broken period which I look back upon without pleasure. All parents, I suppose, have to go through similar seasons, when misunderstandings or a want of sympathy alienate them from their children, or their children from them. During the time of dependence things can be all right, and again after independence is attained; but when the wings are beginning to sprout, sons and daughters have it in them to be more than difficult. How much of it have I seen! I was no parent myself, and Rose was not pining for independence; but she was restless and disturbed because of me: she did not want to go away, but thought that she ought to, knowing that I could not.

At last I could stand it no longer. “Look here, Rose,” I said, “what’s the matter? You’re not happy. Tell me why.”

“It’s difficult to explain,” she said.

“Then I will,” I said. “You are persuaded that it is unsuitable for us to be together here alone. Your dear Aunt Milly suggested the idea, and you can’t forget it. You think people will talk.”

“Oh! Dombeen,” she said, “when did you take to clairvoyance?”

“When your pretty head became transparent,” I replied. “Well, what is to be done? If you feel like that you must go away—or—”

“Yes—or what?”

“Well, if you were to become engaged I suppose that everybody would be satisfied and we could go on as we are. Our only saviour is that punctual husband, with the tall hat and the fish-basket. And he’s not yet on the horizon.”

“No,” she said.

* * * * *

I soon began to have proofs of the accuracy of the Stratton prediction. It is extraordinary—especially in a country district where no one in easy circumstances has enough to do—how intensely interesting the affairs of other people, neighbours chiefly, can be, and how difficult it is not to be inquisitive and censorious. I don’t suggest that in a city there are no meddlesome onlookers, with fingers sharpened for pies that do not belong to them; but in a city there are more distractions and there are also certain impediments to familiarity. In the country you are bound, unless there has been a feud, to know your neighbours; but one may live at No. 5 in a London terrace for half a century and never meet the occupants of No. 4 and No. 6.

Hitherto I had been on terms of pleasant and easy intimacy with most of my patients; and where there was less cordiality it was probably not my fault. A certain interest in my affairs had been shown—there had been questions as to my biggest break recently, as to what I was sending to the Flower Show, the size of marrows, the chance of the Isle of Wight disease among the hives, and, of course, inquiries after Rose. But no more. No one had ventured to give advice. But now I began to detect admonitory symptoms, fumblings towards counsel as to conduct.

Lady Fergusson, for example, Ronnie’s mother, after a long talk about pelargoniums, wondered if it were true that dear Rose was going to the Riviera with the Strattons. So nice for her to be with young people. So nice to be able to go away. It was much to be hoped that nothing would interfere. How fortunate some girls were! In her youth there had been no such gadding about. And so forth.

Then the rector’s wife, Mrs. Cumnor, a good enough woman in her way but overburdened with family cares—not however so overburdened that she had no time or strength left to take on the cares of others as well: mine and Rose’s, for instance; she too began to cut in.

Rose, she said one morning, after I had finished with her second daughter’s pulse, chest and temperature, was, she knew, never ill. How enviable a state! And so active and clever too. Now that she had finished with school she would, of course, with such a constitution, go out into the world.

“Might not her vocation be at home?” I asked.

“Of course it would be hard for you to have to lose her,” Mrs. Cumnor conceded, “terribly hard; but—” and then she changed the subject.

Her husband, who had clearly been put up by his wife to contribute something to the campaign, was more jovial about it: wondering if any young men would dare to propose to a girl who was always in the company of such a handsome guardian. Was it fair to Rose to have a resident spoilsport? And so on—with plenty of hearty laughter as an ameliorative.

Mrs. O’Gorman confirmed my fears as to the neighbourhood’s determination.

“The whole pack’s in full cry after you,” she said. “You’re too happy for them: they can’t bear the sight of it. You’re free too—and so many of them are shackled for life and full of nasty envy. It’s not the best possible world! And yet,” she went on, “it’s the only one I want. Perfection would be very boring.”

“What shall we do?” I asked. “We are beaten.”

“Yes, I’m afraid you’re beaten. The pack has won. But it’s only anticipating your fate by a few months. All parents have to lose their children, and you’ve been luckier than most. Rose is certain sure to marry, and marry young too, so you’d have lost her at twenty any way, if not before. She’s on the road to nineteen now, and you mustn’t grumble.”

“And what is there left for me?” I asked.

“You?—why that doesn’t matter, because you don’t matter. You’re a sterile old stick. Sterility has no vote. You’ll just rub along, getting through the days, till the end. You’ve had your chance and lost it.”

“You don’t give me much encouragement,” I complained.

“Why should I?” she replied. “The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do. But you might marry yet?”

“Never,” I said.

“Very well then, you must rust and bear it.”

Cold comfort indeed!

* * * * *

If ever there were two people on this planet who might have been let alone, and wanted to be let alone, and deserved to be let alone, they were Rose and I. But it was not to be.

While with the Strattons, at some “At Home,” Rose had met a Mrs. Lovell, who was about to go into business as a florist, and she had offered Rose a post. It was to be a florist’s of a new kind, for not only were flowers to be sold but they were to be arranged too. The staff was to include flower-arrangers who on the evenings of dinner-parties would go out to decorate the tables. Premises had been taken, just off the Brompton Road, and already a connection was being formed. If Mrs. Lovell still had room for her, said Rose, she would go. It was not what she had dreamed of, but it was something definite, a start.

“There is so little for an untrained girl to do,” she said. “It isn’t as if I was brought up to have to earn my own living. I’m going to be fairly well off, aren’t I?”

“Fairly,” I said, “when you’re twenty.”

“There you are!” she said. “But at the moment, if I have to go, I should like to try to be independent. And of course, I have to go,” she added: “it was cowardly to say ‘if.’ I can’t teach: I don’t know anything. I can’t type or do shorthand. I don’t want to be a companion to an old lady—unless it were to Mrs. O’Gorman; but she’s got Julia. But I like being among flowers, even though they’re cut, and I like Mrs. Lovell, and I think that’s a Heaven-sent opening. Almost no one arranges flowers as a profession now. The only one I’ve heard of is a little Japanese man. So we shall have the field to ourselves. It’s fun to be doing something original.”

And soon afterwards she went.

Of this part of Rose’s life I have little to say. I can tell only what I know at first hand. Whenever I was in London—but that was very seldom—I called at the florist’s; and Rose came down for Sundays now and then. She seemed to be happy and uncomplicated. Whether her association with me—whether my general tutelary influence in her earlier years—was being of any use to her I had no means of judging. She might have been equally capable without it. Educationalists never know.

The flower scheme failed to prosper, but Rose did not give up London. Even if there were not the same objection to returning to live with me, she had probably lost the wish to do so. I am sure that she was fond of me, but she had made new friends. London was full of variety and attraction, and she had contracted the habit of employment and liked it. I don’t know anything about the economics of a florist’s business, except that to me the thought of having to pay money for flowers is repellent: flowers, one feels, should be free to all; but Mrs. Lovell had not enough experience and Rose was quite capable of giving a bunch of daffodils away rather than haggle over the price. Moreover, the time was not ripe for the professional arranger. I do not know that it is even yet.

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.

And so Rose Allinson became Rose Holt, and those of us who were nearest the young couple in kin or intimacy followed them into the vestry to wish them joy and sign the register. Having kissed my darling and written my name, I slipped away. I could not endure more. The vestry had a back door and I slipped through it, pocketed my button-hole carnation, and, after lunch, went to a sale of mezzotints at Christie’s, where I endeavoured to soothe my feelings by buying two Valentine Greens which (unless I was to die next week, when one can afford anything) I couldn’t afford. And so far as I could see then, there was no particular reason why I should not die next week—nothing, I mean, important enough to call for my continued existence.

* * * * *

Mrs. Eustace Holt was, I think, fairly happy in her early married life. I saw her now and then, and was not conscious of anything very wrong. She seemed to have lost tone: that was all; but I put that down largely to living in London, cooped up by bricks and mortar instead of her old free garden life. Also Eustace was not exciting. But I think she was fond of him, and I know that he was very proud of her, perhaps even to tiring her by exhibiting her too much to his friends. She was too candid to be a very easy diner-out, and too courteous not to make the effort.

And then came the tragedy. Rose’s first child died at the end of only three weeks of life. You remember what she said about wanting boys. Well, this was a boy, and Rose was in the seventh heaven of delight. She squandered herself on it. No other young mother, the nurse told me on that sad day when we buried the poor little creature, had, in her experience, been so happy. “And that, as you know,” she added to me, “is a big thing to say.”

I found my poor child inconsolable; in a kind of stupor of bewilderment and revolt against the blind stupidities of fate. To let this perfect little being fade into nothingness and allow the ugly, blundering world to go on!

She was long in recovering and longer still before she was herself again. I did all I could to get Eustace to let her come to me to convalesce, but he would not let her out of his sight, and took her to this and that health resort, and even for one winter to the Riviera.

* * * * *

It was nearly two years before I saw her again, and then I went up to dine and spend the night by way of celebrating my fiftieth birthday. That was in 1900.

* * * * *

Every doctor is asked for advice in matrimonial differences, or at any rate is made a confidant. One can have too many of such confidences; but I defy any general practitioner, however brusque and curmudgeonly, to escape them altogether. Most of us have seen so many couples that we can tell at a glance what is wrong—which brand of incompatibility is in use. For there are so many. Temper is supposed to have a monopoly in this matter, but that is far from the case. There can be incompatibility in other matters, apparently trifling, and trifling in fact unless lifelong fetters are involved. Incompatibility of temperature, for example, where the lute is rifted because the wife wants all the fresh air that windows and doors can let in, and the husband rejoices only in a vacuum. A doctor sees so many of such antipodal house-mates—I don’t say that all are married people—that he comes to divide the world into those who are healthily disposed and those whose only idea of a window is a thing to shut.

It is a truism that wedded felicity is a very fragile craft, liable to be swamped by any unforeseen wave, and it requires the most delicate seamanship, both at the helm and at the sail. I have seen marriages ruined by so pleasant a spice to ordinary intercourse as irony. Irony in a husband, and a tendency in a wife to depreciate her husband or make him a butt in public—these have much misery to answer for. Absence of mind in a husband can be fatal: an inability to look ahead, to reserve seats, to order a cab, to remember theatre tickets. And then, again, over-much presence of mind can be fatal too: an insistence on punctuality and too much officiousness about the house.

I could not tell which was the cause of the want of sympathy between Rose and Eustace, but I felt something was wrong almost directly I entered their door. Outwardly they were pleasant enough together; but there was no warmth in the air, no electricity. Rose Holt was not Rose Allinson—very far from it. But she was sweeter than ever to me; almost I could bring myself to be glad that all was not well, for it made her so tender, so thoughtfully attentive, to her old friend. It was the Rose of the middle teens over again, but with a richness and maturity added. Eustace was courteous, a solicitous host, and I felt spoilt between them. But there was something wrong. When their eyes met across the table no light kindled.

It was a comfortable, distinguished house. The furniture was good. The right books were scattered about, some in French; the right periodicals. Photographs after the Old Masters. In Rose’s little boudoir were water colours.

After dinner Eustace left us. He had some difficult papers to go through and master, and we were left alone.

Rose established me by the fire and sat beside me on a cushion.

“Is all well with my child?” I asked.

She did not reply.

For a long while we were silent. I could not ask her to tell me more; and she would not volunteer because only half the secret was hers.

“When are you coming to stay with me?” I asked at last.

“Oh, Dombeen, I should love to,” she said. “But it’s impossible. Eustace doesn’t like me to be away, ever. He counts so on my presence here.”

“But he could come too,” I said.

“Oh, no,” she replied. “No. He doesn’t like the house to be left. No, it can’t be done.”

I had no right to press the case. But I could not refrain from saying—“Then you are never to visit me at all?”

“Of course: some day,” she said. “But not yet. It couldn’t be for a long while. You see. . .”

And then I learned that she was again to become a mother.

How the world rushes on! A child grows to be a girl, and a girl a wife, before one can turn round. And then there is another child and the same restless urgency sets in once more. I thought of some lines I had read years and years ago that had stuck in my mind: