Chapter IV: Part 4

There is so much we ne’er can know—
No time, no time!
We seem to only come—to go.

* * * * *

I went back feeling all out of tune and dissatisfied. This may be a common experience with parents after their first visit to their married daughters; but I had not even thought of it before. True, I had set out with some vague misgivings, but so often—it is almost the rule—the realization is better than our fears for it, that I had discounted the premonition. And now I knew that my girl had made a mistake. It was not so much that she was unhappy as that she had lost her old habit of happiness. She had become passive where she had been vividly active. Instead of joy she had found resignation. I don’t mean that she was broken-spirited in any way: but she was too quiet. If I were God I should be very much ashamed of having added resignation to young wives’ armouries.

Rose’s second baby was a girl. Eustace sent me a telegram to that effect, and I wondered much on her feelings toward it. There had been no joy in her voice when she had told me of its coming.

I went up to see them when Rose the second—for the child was named after her mother—was two weeks old, and was led into the room by Eustace.

Much could be written on the different demeanour of husbands on such occasions, for some behave like impresarios and some like trespassers, some are boisterous and some are perplexed, but none, however much they want to disguise it, are totally without pride. Even those husbands who are as much embarrassed and hampered by their wives presenting them with a son or a daughter as they would be if their valets were to lose an arm, cannot wholly conceal their triumph. Eustace, although with cool reserve, belonged to the impresario class.

How often does one hear well-meaning people say, when discussing the marriages of others (and of course discussion is superfluous and insipid when marriages are satisfactory), “Ah, if only they had had a child, what a difference it would have made!” But in my experience children can divide parents quite as much as they can unite them. I may have entertained some hope that the little pink creature with the dark silky hair in Rose’s arms was to bring Rose and Eustace closer; but there was no indication of it. Again when their eyes met no light was kindled. How that other child, that boy of her desire, would have affected the love of husband and wife it was not now possible to say; but this little helpless mite in its mother’s arms obviously was without any federating gift.

Eustace said a few nice things to Rose, and something about new-born infants being no novelties to me, and left us.

“I suppose she’s perfect!” I said.

“Poor little pet, she’s so warm and dependent,” said her mother.

“A nice doctor?” I asked.

“Quite,” she said, “and the kindest nurse possible.”

“Then you’re happy,” I said, but I knew that she wasn’t.

The unwanted children—are they not tragic figures? And their name is legion. Every doctor can give you a list!

I don’t say that this minute Rose was exactly unwanted. Rose—my Rose—was incapable of coldness to anything young and soft and helpless, least of all a baby; and Eustace, I could see, liked being a father. But the Rose who had given birth to that little boy, and Rose the mother of this little girl, were worlds asunder. This Rose was affectionate, thoughtful, dutiful, protective; that other had been transfigured by maternal ecstasy and pride.

Eustace and I lunched alone, and I did my best to penetrate his armour, but in vain. How did he think of his wife? What kind of need of her had he? Was he disappointed or was all going as he had expected and wished? Why on earth had she found him attractive and how had he lost his hold on her? A hint of the possible reason of his own attitude was offered when, to my question, Didn’t he find himself a little at sea domestically when Rose was upstairs like this? he replied, No. It seemed that the direction of the household was his hobby. He arranged the meals in advance, scrutinized and paid the books, interviewed the servants. He had done this as a bachelor and liked to know how his money was being spent.

“With all my worldly goods I thee endow”—the words came back to me as he talked.

So Rose was not even mistress of her house, had no realm to queen it in. “What women want is a home” is an old-fashioned saying in which I am a believer; and Rose was without one. All that she had was a footing in Mr. Holt’s.

How I longed for some of Mrs. O’Gorman’s trenchancy and candour to tell him of his mistake! But I had none. I could observe and deduce, but I had not the courage, or arrogance, to censure.

* * * * *

I went back to my great empty house with a grudge against the universe. The grudge passed, for I do not dwell on injustice, but the emptiness remained. And so the next few years went on, and I grew older and probably more mannered and narrow. I also took an assistant, who was in time to be a successor. Meanwhile Eustace prospered and Rose brought up her little girl in Wilton Place, and I saw them only on rare occasions. One of the strangest things in life is the ease with which people who are fond of each other do not meet. Our tendency is to run in grooves and find it difficult to leave them. Or to change the metaphor, no matter how big the world is, most of us are at heart villagers.

Rose’s letters were regular and, up to a point, informative; and I wrote with equal regularity. But the written word, no less than the spoken, often merely conceals the truth; and I got very little inner information as to the Holt ménage. My deduction was that routine had completely taken the place of romance (if ever there had been any worth the name). Rose never complained, but also she never rejoiced. Her truth-telling impulses were checked by the fact that only half the story belonged to her. To tell more was to tell Eustace’s share too; and that was not playing the game.

* * * * *

One afternoon, when Rose the second was five, a message arrived from the Hall to ask me to come at once to see Master Ronnie.

“Master Ronnie! What is he doing here?” I asked in surprise. When last I had heard of him he was a soldier in a responsible post in India. I think it was at Poona; his mother had read me from time to time little bits in his letters. How old would he be now? Let me see, he was a year older than Rose, and Rose was twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. So far as I could recollect, he had never married. His mother had regretted this, but was always counting on some nice girl attracting him during his next leave. She did not want him to be caught by any of those Anglo-Indians!

And now here he was, and ill. Ronnie and illness were contradictions in terms, and I asked the messenger what was wrong. An accident, I presumed. But it was worse than that. He had had bad fever and could not get it out of his bones. Ordered home for a long rest and treatment. Was very thin and white and didn’t seem to relish anything.

When had he arrived?

Three days ago, but he wouldn’t let them send for me before; hated to be coddled.

I found him in a very poor state. Some malarial poison in his system and his spirits low. Poor boy, he was only the shadow of his old self. But, in a way, more attractive still, for his illness had given delicacy to his candid, merry face, and his charm of manner was unimpaired; while one’s pity for his condition increased one’s affection for him. When the admired strong become suddenly the dependent weak there can be a strengthening of their adherents.

It was while Ronnie was slowly mending, but still only the shadow of his normal self, that Rose and her little daughter came to stay with me. Rose had proposed the visit and I was only too glad to have them. Eustace, she said, was in Paris, on some commission of inquiry.

I had seen Rose-the-less occasionally, but only in London and on her best behaviour. Playing on my lawn she was more natural, and I delighted in her straight little body, her quick movements and her eager ways. She was like her mother, but unlike too—she had a hint of elfishness, which her mother lacked: she was less essentially womanly; and she had an imperious touch. She knew what she wanted and her enjoyment came largely through getting it, whereas her mother as a child had found things delectable as they came and had not chosen and demanded. But there was nothing unattractive in the child’s selective impulses: they did not suggest any kind of rapacity. For the rest, she was very like that earlier Rose. She made friends as quickly, she asked as many questions and she was happy all the time.

“Why does mother call you Dombeen?” was one of the first things she wanted to know.

I explained her difficulties with the word Greville.

“May I call you Dombeen too?” she asked.

I said that I should like nothing better.

Rose—my own Rose—I found older and graver. She could laugh still, and as her visit was prolonged she laughed oftener and gradually gave up the new habit of thinking visibly before she spoke. Her impulses being always gay or cordial or merrily mischievous, she need never have become cautious. But I could see that she had. It is melancholy indeed when a natural self-unconsciousness is destroyed: and that is what had happened. And how often I have seen it happen elsewhere! One of the prevailing superstitions of English husbands is that wives are better for being de-individualized.

One thing that a little perplexed me was Rose’s attitude to her daughter, which appeared to me curiously detached. I wondered sometimes if there were not some defective sympathy between them, as between Rose and the child’s father. Rose was kind and gentle and a delightful companion to the little girl; but no fierce maternal flame was discernible. I could have wished for a glimpse of such a fire: but there was none. It seemed to me a trifle hard on the mite that she should be at all out in the cold on account of other people’s affairs; but on the other hand she never seemed unhappy, or less happy than might be; and Rose had no intention of unfairness. Besides, human nature can’t be logical.

As Ronnie got better he came oftener and oftener to us, to lie in a deck-chair in the garden. Rose used to sit by him there and sometimes read to him, or he told little Rose about India, very much as the old Colonel had talked to her mother, but with additional modern piquancies. Now and then Rose and Ronnie returned to their battleground in the billiard-room; but he was not strong enough for a long game. Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson would now and then walk over to accompany him back or push his wheeled chair.

Remembering the episode at St. Moritz, I was a little uneasy to see Ronnie and Rose so much together. But I did not feel strongly enough about it to interfere, even if interference had ever been my long suit. Besides, I was so glad to see Rose happy again. Moreover, Rose was grown up and a mother; Ronnie was grown up and ill. Not that being grown up adds anything to power of resistance when emotional temptations offer.

Perhaps to say that I was uneasy is too strong. Rather was I not unconscious that that popular plaything, fire, was adjacent, and yet not conscious enough to be really apprehensive. It was always possible that Ronnie’s state of dependence and fragility was the only cause of Rose’s solicitude; while it was natural enough for a convalescing soldier, such as he was, to sun himself in the company of an old playmate.

I forget how long Rose and Rose stayed with me on that occasion. But after Ronnie had been taken off to some seaside resort they returned to London and I was more alone than ever. That must have been the early summer of 1906.

* * * * *

The next period of importance in this rambling narrative is October of the same year, and I can place the day exactly, because on my way toward home I was stopped by some one running out of the “Crown Inn” to say that old Pritchard, the host, had had some kind of a stroke. I found him pretty bad, the result of some extra conviviality on a life of excessive and chronic alcoholism, the occasion for which—and this is how I remember the date so distinctly—was his good fortune over the Cambridgeshire, which that year was won by Polymelus.

Having done what I could to patch him up, I returned home. While I had been in the “Crown” a tempest of cold rain had set in, bringing with it a dreary consciousness of the end of fine weather. One had the feeling that the year could never recover: winter was our fate and winter to a country doctor means too much to do and a great deal of discomfort, with too few of the roadside compensations which he gathers as he drives about in the summer and the spring.

My thoughts went naturally to Rose, whose susceptibility to weather had always been so acute; in whose world, could she plan it, rain would fall only at night. I was still thinking of her as I left the car at the garage door and walked into the house.

On the hall table was an envelope addressed to me in Rose’s writing, but it had not passed through the post. I took it up with misgivings which all too soon were to be justified.

“Dearest Dombeen” (it ran), “I have gone away with Ronnie. He needs me more than anyone else does, or at least I believe so. Eustace will understand why I have gone when he begins to think.” So far it was written clearly and directly. But then came some broken sentences. “As for Rose,” she had begun, and then had stopped. “Rose is my only” she had begun again and again had stopped. “Will you” was another false start and was also scored through. The letter finished merely like this. “Dearest Dombeen, think your kindliest of me. Good-bye. Rose.”

How long I held the paper in my hand I cannot say; but I then rang to know how it had got there at all.

Suzanne answered the summons.

I asked her what she knew.

She was crying softly as she told me. Mademoiselle Rose—Madame Holt, she should say--had rushed in “toute émotionnée.” She could not wait for me. She had come in a car. She had written the note and was gone again.

Did Suzanne know what the note was about?

Ah, yes. Quel dommage! But la vie cannot be kept within fixed bounds. Pots boil over. All this in her hard Norman speech. She was fatalistic, but still she wiped her eyes.

Monsieur would not think less of Madame Holt because of this, would he?

I assured her that I was not a judge.

“La pauvre petite!” Suzanne exclaimed, with a sob.

She had been so assiduous in spoiling Rose’s daughter when they were with me that I naturally thought these words referred to the younger of them. But I was wrong. It was of the older Rose that she was still thinking, for she went on more brightly: “Mais, c’est bon. Maintenant elle sera heureuse.”

“Will she?” I asked.

Mais oui. Suzanne was certain of it. Madame Holt would not have taken so great a step if she were not to be happier for it.

I was astounded at her confidence.

My first impulse was to hasten after the fugitives and try to bring them to reason. But reflection showed me that this was impracticable. I had no notion where they had gone or even when; probably not by train, but all the way in the motor, and there has never been such an ally of runaways as petrol. In the old days there was some chance, even though faint, of tracking and overtaking a pair of horses; but motor-cars vanish into thin air, leaving rainbow splashes in the roadway to mock the pursuer in every hue.

Then I wondered if Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson knew. For Rose to tell me at once was natural; but would not Ronnie wish to let a little time elapse before breaking the news? I guessed so. At any rate, it was not for me to be the bearer of such ill tidings. If it was for anyone to storm the citadel, that person was the wronged Eustace.

Eustace? Yes. And what of him? He had been told as well as I, I supposed. Rose had never done anything underhand or secretive in her life, and she would have made it a point of honour to let her husband know that she had cut the knot. At this moment he was probably sitting, stunned, in his library, or perhaps with his little Rose in her nursery, and most likely harbouring evil thoughts of me.

* * * * *

In my dismay and distress I put off dinner for an hour or so, and walked out into the rain to Mrs. O’Gorman’s. It seemed an occasion for the old Irish lady’s pitiless candour. The equally pitiless downpour would, I felt, help too. There are times when one welcomes a storm to fight one’s way through.

My thoughts were not idle as I stumbled against the torrents. No aspect of the case did they neglect. I can tell only of what I know, and I have no information as to Ronnie’s hold on Rose after his return and what steps preceded her decision to run off with him. But it is not difficult to realize, at any rate, the temptation. Here was the old friend of her happiest days once more—free and I don’t doubt more than rejoiced to see her again. He had been in strange countries, and probably had carried her image with him through all his wanderings and loneliness. He had never been articulately in love with her when they were youthful together; he had not proposed after that accident—I am sure she would have told me if he had, because she knew that I liked him. When she used to talk to me about her marriage and all those nice boys who were to gallop about the nursery, I had thought naturally of Ronnie as their father. One visualizes a figure on such occasions, and Ronnie sprang into being. But, as it happened, I was wrong. Rose had not thought of Ronnie like this: she had merely liked him, automatically so to speak, and when Eustace came along there was no earlier occupant of her heart to eject. Eustace found it all too easy.

But after her marriage so much had happened. And it must never be forgotten that Ronnie compelled interest, all unconsciously maybe, by the force of personality. He was quite ordinary in everything but personality, which in his case was physical more than spiritual. His ready smile, his white teeth, his gaiety, his good humour, his general friendliness and out-for-funnishness won him an easy way into the good graces of the world. He was popular almost universally. Rose, as I have said, had never to my knowledge, or even to my suspicion, been in love with him; nor he with her in any but a superficial degree, even if that; but there was always that intimate experience in Switzerland in the background; and each had since had too much time to think about the past and to speculate upon the might-have-been: Rose in the watches of the night taking stock of her marriage and its disenchantments, and Ronnie in a foreign land sick of a fever.

Both were older too—not so much older in years, but older through what had happened: the passage of time being often almost negligible in influence compared with certain experiences. A woman grows mature so swiftly: a three weeks’ honeymoon can do it, a night can do it; the birth of her first child always does it. It may be only in compartments, but maturity is there somewhere. And Rose’s child was five years of age. As for Ronnie, I suspect that such adventures among women as had fallen to him—and a handsome young officer in India has many admirers—had chiefly thrown his thoughts back, in comparison, to Rose. When he might have won her he had not; after, when he wished he had, she was another’s. I don’t say that he had brooded on this, but he probably recurred to it when least happy; and regret, like love, never stands still: it increases or it diminishes.

And her disenchantment, her starvation! Eustace’s frigid decorum, his supervision of the housekeeping books, his morbid interest in her minutest personal expenditure, his tendency to relapse into the tutor and shape her mind wholly by his, so that instead of the home containing a rising barrister and an impulsive, warm-hearted, generous woman it should contain merely a rising barrister and his female derivative—all this had surprised her and depressed her. Marriage, she had known—being a normal creature, full of the instinct of her sex, and not only the instinct but her sex’s capacity to endure—was necessarily a matter of adjustments. Any two persons agreeing to live together have to learn each other’s ways and make allowances: even two men and two women. How much more so then when the two persons suddenly thus beginning a new and intimate co-habitation are a man and a woman, natural enemies—or, at any rate, natural censors of each other, naturally jealous of each other, naturally misunderstanding each other! Perhaps the word enemies may stand.

In the case of her own marriage Rose quickly learned that the adjustments were all to be hers. The only change that Eustace made was to add a wife to his house: he kept the same habits: he played his golf at the Old Deer Park just as he had always done; he read the books from the London Library; he took her, regardless of her taste in music, to concerts. But he had never really loved; he had been attracted by Rose’s gaiety and vividness, even if he had neglected to cherish those qualities after they had passed into his keeping; he had known that rising barristers are usually furnished with wives, and that they do not rise the less because those wives are beautiful. He had known also that marriage is a natural state; that the duty of a good citizen is to have children; that wives can be more comfortable than housekeepers; and so on. I don’t say that he had put any of these thoughts into words: they were merely the outcome of common knowledge. Nor do I want to be unfair to him or to suggest that he was not proud and affectionate. I think that he was. But again I say that he had no imagination: he took things for granted, and directly a husband does that he is doomed.

Eustace’s refined and comfortable home in Wilton Place was never disgraced by anything so unseemly as passion or even eagerness. Returning from his chambers he had never upset furniture in his desire to get to her. When he brought flowers to her and she crushed them to her bosom in an ecstasy of enjoyment, a spasmodic return to nature, he warned her that she was in danger of breaking the stalks. He had brought the flowers though. That is the trouble: he was always nice and handsome and courteous. But there it stopped. Having no imagination, no instinctive knowledge of women, no sexual shorthand, he was unaware that nice men are negligible. What women want is not niceness but devotion, not courtesy but worship.

And then—I was still fumbling towards an explanation of Rose’s desperate act—then there was the disappointment about the boys. Rose, as I have said, had set her heart on being a mother, and the mother of sons, and there was only one surviving child and that was a girl. I have brought enough children into the world to know something about the part that they play in married life, and I can set it down firmly as a fact that it is all to the bad when the sex of the child is not that which the parents had desired. The girl who ought to have been a boy has to suffer for it; and so, though in a less degree, does the boy who ought to have been a girl, but he is not a common figure. Has it ever been suggested, I wonder, that some of the traditional alleged untrustworthiness of women is due to the fact that they were not wanted. I don’t say that I agree as to this inferiority of the sex, but proverbial lore, which is the wisdom of many and the wit of one, has decided that they are false and fickle, unstable, coy and hard to please, and so forth: and that may be a cause. Certain it is that the nurse who announces that the little pet is a girl is rarely treated as a bringer of good news; whereas if she can say it’s the finest boy she ever had in her arms she is, for the moment, an angel. Why should an unwanted child trouble to be constant and true and without caprice? Some revenge it is entitled to.

Rose, however, does not come within the category of the unwanted, for her sex had been determined by her father and mother months before I assisted at her début, and her name had long been chosen. Why they should have desired a girl instead of another of the lords of creation, I cannot say: probably because the father was an artist, and artists are notoriously eccentric. But there it was: they wanted a girl and they had one, whereas that girl, when her own time of fulfilment came, wanted not only a boy but many boys, and could not bring up one. Rose, I am sure, had a feeling of resentment for the girl who had lived where the boy had died. With that tiny boy baby much of her joy in life was buried. He had lived long enough in the actual world for her to make a little god of him; and before that life had been there was the life he had lived under her heart.

To say that she was not fond of Rose would be to tell an absolute falsehood—she took a grave pleasure in her, although treating her perhaps more as a toy than a daughter, as a wonderful doll whose capacities she never tired of studying—but she was steeped in a deeper rapture when her breast nurtured a son. That is all.

To put it in another way, I don’t believe that when Ronnie arrived and opened the door upon whatever fair prospect he displayed to her or she imagined she saw—whatever avenue of escape—Rose would have stepped through had the child she was to leave behind her been a little boy of five instead of a little girl.

Who knows what women feel? We may guess, but they will never tell us. They won’t even tell each other. As regards Rose and Ronnie, my guess is that his pathetic collapse attracted more than his radiant vigour would have done. Had she found him triumphant, as of old, she would have remained unscathed. Strong and masterful he might have called to her in vain, for she was never a sensualist. It was his dependence that swayed her and decided her. It was the boy Ronnie needing tenderness and care.

Involved and fantastic as it may sound, I have the belief that it was the mother instinct that took Rose off with Ronnie more than love. What I mean is that she did not go with him as most women go with men, through ordinary passion, but because he was fragile and in need of protection and she thought of him as her own, or—subconsciously of course—even as one of those unborn sons which he himself would have begotten. So mystical can women be!

But of course the wild hope of escape was present too: the wish to live a little more fully while there was yet time; the feeling that to endure another moment with Eustace was impossible and wrong.

And again Theodore’s wish came back to me. Was this “beating the band”? Could anything be farther from the ordinary conception of that successful and honourable act than running off with another man and leaving husband and child? And yet, it had required courage, devotion, disregard of the world’s censure—all the things that properly-brought-up and even universally respected people need not possess. What a muddle is our civilization!

* * * * *

“You must forgive this untimely and unprofessional visit,” I said, as I was shown into Mrs. O’Gorman’s over-furnished sitting-room.

“Don’t be foolish, Doctor,” she replied. “Have done with your politeness. Don’t I know why you’re here?”

“You do?” I exclaimed.

“Of course I do,” she said. “It’s about Rose. She’s bolted.”

“But surely the villagers aren’t talking?” I said in a panic of alarm. “You don’t mean to say it’s not a secret!”

“No one knows but you and me,” said the old lady.

“And Suzanne,” I corrected:

“O, Suzanne! She doesn’t matter. She’s an ally. But no one else knows. I know because I had a letter to-day. Rose took me some way into her confidence when she was staying with you. Old people often get told things. But don’t worry; it’s all right.”

“All right?” I echoed. “What do you mean? Do you want young wives to behave like this?”

“When they’re like Rose—yes,” she said. “The poor lamb was miserable. That iceberg of hers was no good except to freeze her. She wants life, love, human emotions, and she’ll get them with the young Captain.”

“But—” I exclaimed, aghast at this Bolshevism. “You talk as if people had the right to do as they please—break laws—anything.”

“Not all of them by any means, the idiots,” she replied. “But Rose—yes. Rose ought to have all she wants. I advised her to. It’s—no don’t interrupt me—it’s your own doing very largely. You brought her up to be happy and true to herself. She saw you always at work ministering to other people—Oh! I know you were paid for it—I’ve paid you myself—money thrown away too, for I only get worse—but that doesn’t matter: you’re a soft old thing at heart. Anyway, there was Rose, the apple of your eye, with a natural sweet disposition, and the centre of your circle of friends, and the mistress of your easy-going prosperous house, and she gets into kindly humane habits. Then she marries this refrigerator K.C., or whatever he is, and begins to miss everything that she had been used to. He’s a stupid fellow—he hasn’t even the sense to be ill and touch her heart that way—he can’t lose his temper—can’t swear—only be politely rasping now and then—and he gradually wore her down, diluted her sweetness, crushed her nice impulses, made her live according to Cocker.”

Wonderful, I thought, what a lot the old lady had divined, for I’m sure Rose never told her in words.

“There was no doubt about his selfishness,” I said.

“As for selfishness,” said Mrs. O’Gorman, “I don’t mind that. That hasn’t necessarily anything to do with it. All the most attractive men are selfish, even if the most selfish men are not the most attractive.”

“I wonder if that’s true,” I said.

“Think about the unselfish men you know and you’ll soon realize its truth,” she replied. “Unselfish men don’t give us any fun at all—I’m talking as a woman, remember—they make it too easy. The selfish ones keep us thinking, and when they forget themselves it’s delicious: I mean, it used to be.” She sighed and laughed. “But it’s about Rose we’re talking,” she continued. “Having got rid for a while of her husband, she comes down here and finds that poor boy, her old friend, ill and miserable, and all the love she ought to have felt for him years ago suddenly materialized, but a million times stronger, and there you are. ‘Bolt, my lamb,’ that’s what I said to her, although she never asked for my advice. ‘Bolt, my lamb, and be happy while you can.’”

“Well, I’m—” I began.

“Say it,” she said. “Say you’re damned. Nobody minds. But you’re not so damned as that poor child would have been if she’d gone back to the Arctic Zone. I’m old enough to believe that the whole purpose of unhappy people’s lives is not endurance. I’ve seen too much of it. And so has every one, especially you doctors. Endurance? No. Let revolt and escape have a chance too. That is, if people really want them. The trouble is that really wanting things is so rare. It’s a lukewarm world!”

“Anyway,” I said, “I’m amazed that you could dare to advise anything so revolutionary to Rose. It’s a terrible responsibility.”

“We look at it differently,” she replied. “I’m twenty years older than you, and, being a woman, perhaps I feel more bitterly for Rose. Besides, I’m a rebel and you’re not. I’m a believer in cutting knots, and you—although you’re more sympathetic than most—are still in favour of ‘endurance vile.’ Let those endure that enjoy it, say I, but let the others try for a second innings and a happier. If Rose had remained it would have been for what purpose? To pander to her husband’s respectability. Do you defend that? Is that your idea of a sound motive?”

“Everything can be put up with,” I said feebly. “Ever since I began to practise I have been watching couples putting up with bad jobs.”

“And admiring them?”

“In a way—yes,” I said.

“And wanting the same kind of death-in-life for your own girl?”

“Well—” I began.

“You must answer that question, yes or no,” she insisted.

“No,” I said.

* * * * *

“And then,” I began again, “there’s the child. What about her? Left motherless.”

“Well, and what about Rose herself?” Mrs. O’Gorman retorted. “She was motherless and fatherless too, and she grew into happiness and became a beautiful woman, thanks in some degree to some one who shall be nameless.”

“But who,” I said, “might possibly be feeling not a little guilty over the way that things are turning out.”

“But who, if he did so,” Mrs. O’Gorman added, “would be a very silly old boy.”

“Do you hold me absolutely innocent then?” I asked.

“Innocent of harm—yes,” she said. “Because there’s not the harm you seem to think. There’s social shipwreck, of course, but that’s nothing, because they’ll live abroad. There’s the Iceberg’s grief, but that doesn’t matter because he was never really in love. There’s little Rose—but she’s only five and will adjust herself. No, the only real sufferers will be the Captain’s father and mother, who, like all _nouveaux riches_, were thinking of a grand match for him. They’ll be very sore, and not unnaturally. But the world isn’t for fathers and mothers: it’s for sons and daughters.”

“You are a cynical old woman,” I said, “and I’m ashamed of you. I’m almost sorry I’ve kept you alive so long.”

“You didn’t,” she said. “If I’ve survived it’s been in spite of you.”

“But what of Rose herself?” I asked. “How can this be any but harm to her?”

“Because she’s happy,” she said. “She’s happy now—to-day—and she’s going to be happier once she’s on the sea, sailing away with her boy to make a new home together. She’s got something to squander herself on, and that’s happiness, even when the something isn’t worth it.”

“But her child?” I returned to the point.

“Her child will be all right, too. You—or some one else—will bring her up.”

“I don’t say that it is so in Rose’s case,” the ruthless old commentator added, “but lots of girls are better away from their mothers than with them, and lots of mothers better away from their girls. Children often enough would be the better if they were brought up by other people and not their parents. I’m sure I should have been. My mother and I were like Kilkenny cats most of the time.”

* * * * *

To my intense surprise, who should arrive the next day but Eustace, leading his little girl by the hand. I had expected to hear from him; but I had never thought to have him again under my roof. Vaguely I had guessed that he might associate me in some way with his wife’s action; unjustly, of course, but people are oftener unjust than not, and he was wounded to the quick and in no position to be too fair and reasonable. Besides, it was while Rose was visiting me that she had met Ronnie again, and it was the news of his return and illness in one of my letters to her that (I now saw) had determined her to come just at that time on a visit to her early home. I had touched an old chord and set it vibrating. All this Eustace, I thought, knew, and I was taking his resentfulness, however ill-founded, for granted.

But how often we are in error in our notion of what other people are feeling! And how difficult it is to learn not to continue to make such mistakes! Eustace was harbouring no such grudge; he held me innocent; he even went so far as to wonder, when we were alone, if he himself might not somehow have been to blame. He could lay nothing specific to his charge; and yet. . . . But no, it could not be through fault of his own. Try as he might—and he had passed sleepless nights in reviewing the past—he could not recall ever having failed in any direction whatever in his duty as an affectionate and solicitous husband.

The letter that Rose had left for him, he averred, when it came to essentials, said nothing. He did not show it to me but gave me the sense. It expressed sorrow at her failure to make him a worthy wife, regret at the collapse of their dream, and then said that she was sure that when he thought it all over he would understand, and, understanding, forgive. But if he could not forgive he would forget.

“Forget!” Eustace exclaimed. How could he forget? How could he ever forget? The shame of it too.

But he must not inflict his misery on me. That would be unfair, and I naturally had my own disappointment and grief to dispel.

We were sitting over our tobacco, late—too late for me, for I was very tired and the contemplation of spilt milk has never much attracted me. Would I tell him, he asked, of my own affairs? What was the health of the neighbourhood? Good? All the same, I must agree that it was extraordinary, incredible even, that his wife, the mother of his child, should find it possible to do this—this—he hated to be hard on her—but he was bound to call it, this scandalous thing? To leave her home in Wilton Place, one of the most charming and convenient houses in London, every one said: to leave her circle of friends, hers and his—was not that all amazing and beyond credence? As for himself, he would say nothing, except that barristers, by the very nature of their calling, are peculiarly in a position to be protected by their wives rather than made by them to look foolish if not despicable. How thankful he was that when he was called to the Bar he had decided to specialize and not take up advocacy. The spectacle of a leading divorce court counsel himself unable to retain his wife’s affections would be too ludicrous; his career would be finished. As it was—but his mind was in a whirl on the whole question of his future.

That I felt sorry for him as he laid bare his wounded ego, I need not say. No one could have failed to pity him. But to see him so blind to any but his own misfortune, so incapable of putting himself for an instant into Rose’s place, or to realize that such a woman must have suffered much and long before she could take such a step, was to withhold a certain measure of sympathy.

He would not, he began again, inflict any more of his perplexities on me. It was not that that he had come for. Would I mind if he took the key and went for a walk? He had no desire for bed and I must be weary.

I was rising to comply with this exceedingly welcome suggestion when he began again. What was not the least extraordinary part of the whole mystery, he said, was the circumstance—mark this!—that Rose had never given the faintest indication of unrest, dissatisfaction. How could one account for it? It was not as if he had been cool or careless or in the slightest respect neglectful. He taxed his memory in vain in the attempt to collect a single instance. As to his having given any of the ordinary causes for jealousy that was laughably out of the question.

He laughed now, to illustrate the impossibility, and his hollow travesty of mirth gave me deeper knowledge of the poor fellow than all his words. If he had only known that such complete failure to provide a wife with cause for jealousy is no surety of married bliss.

None the less, he went on, guiltless as he held himself to be, he could not keep at bay the suspicion, the reflection, that a man is not deserted by his wife without some reason. What it could be passed his comprehension, but he had the gnawing fear that it existed. Could I offer any suggestion? I had known Rose longer than anyone else, even though she was an immature girl when she left me.

I said that there must of course be some reason. Was it not possible—women are strange creatures—that Rose needed something more than a good home, a circle of London friends none of whom had she known before marriage, unintermittent courtesy from her husband?

“Women are not like us,” I went on: “women are capricious—it is a commonplace of the dramatists and novelists, who are supposed to know—look at Shakespeare, Browning, Hardy, every one—they are capricious, incalculable, they have odd whimsies, desires—every doctor can tell you about them—they take sudden dislikes. In short,” I said, “they are women.”

He agreed heartily.

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.