Chapter VI: Part 6

We lost the Fergussons too, although not by death. They had not long remained at the Hall after the burial of the hatchet, even though my invaluable attendance was theirs once more. They had become restless and discontented. The Hall estate had been bought for Ronnie to succeed to; and of what use was it now? Sir Edmund had nothing to do—his interest in tree-planting and general improvements disappeared, and he gradually took a dislike to the place. The result was that they left for one of the Continental health resorts—Aix-les-Bains, I think it was. When they went I decided to take no new patients, and gradually allowed my practice to pass to others, and when Mrs. O’Gorman died I retired altogether.

* * * * *

I said something a little while back about Rose and her ignorance of her mother’s flight—or, at any rate, silence regarding it. That was when she was a child. But later, when she had reached the teens, references to her mother gradually came naturally into her conversation, and she would even ask me about her.

“Tell me about mother, Dombeen,” she would say. “Was she like me? Mrs. O’Gorman says that our voices are just the same.”

“Did you like her better than me?” She wanted to know this very badly.

I have no doubt that she had collected other views as well as mine and had a fairly sound idea of the situation.

“Of course it was naughty to run away from father,” she began once, after one of Eustace’s visits, “but—” Here she broke off with a suspicion of a chuckle.

I was careful not to ask her to finish the sentence.

Sometimes she propounded terrible posers, which were not made any simpler by being dropped from clear skies in the midst of talk on the most innocent of themes. I remember one evening I was pointing out the constellations.

I had just said, “That’s Orion’s Belt,” when she inquired, “Do you think, Dombeen, that husbands and wives, when they love other people, ought to go on living together?”

“But that has nothing to do with astronomy,” was my feeble reply.

Another time, after another of Eustace’s visits: “What do men look like when their hearts are broken?”

“If I found I had married the wrong man I should leave him,” was another announcement. (This was when she was sixteen.) “As a maffact, Dombeen, I expect I shall make a mistake like that. I don’t see how one can help it. I’ve always got tired of everything up to now, so why should it be different with a husband?”

This was the War virus working with a vengeance! We all had to adjust ourselves to that, we old people.

I don’t know how it is with my contemporaries, but the truth about me is that at thirty I was much surer of myself and of accepted dogma than I am at seventy. At thirty, if I had heard a young girl remark that chastity is absurdly overrated, I should have been shocked; to-day I find myself capable of wondering if it may not be true: if we do not, in protecting that shadow, allow much sound substance to deteriorate? Doctors see more than most spectators, and with these eyes I have watched many and many an open-natured girl shrivel into an old maid and her finer juices turn to gall—all because she was not wooed and had not the courage to defy convention and woo for herself. The older one grows, the smaller is the number of sins. I can enumerate very few now, and if I live much longer there will be only one, and that is meanness.

“Aren’t our bodies our own, to do as we like with?” is a question that may be said to be in the air in these days. And how explain to any young person, girl or boy, that the answer is No?

Rose was not, so far as I could tell, as modern as this. But of course I could not hope for complete knowledge of her, even if I had probed for it. December and April are not confidants: at most they can be sympathetic. Such insight as I had into her philosophy and creed of living had to be gathered from generalities: from her comments on the day’s news, from her selective readings aloud from the papers, from her attitude to local misdemeanour: whether lenient or censorious. Lenience was certainly her tendency. In the idiom of to-day she was “for” all insurrectionists; she could even find it in her heart to be sorry for miners. “I don’t wonder they strike, poor things. The mystery is how they can go on digging that horrid black stuff at all, in the pitch dark too, no matter how much you pay them.”

* * * * *

It was one afternoon when Rose was eighteen that I realized that she was no longer merely a girl. Suddenly the peace of the garden was invaded by a series of snorts and explosions, and a motor-car rushed up the drive—one of those absurd little cars, very small and low, like an important roller skate, with just room for two, and a naked nymph in silver and without shame poised over the bonnet by way of mascot. The kind of vehicle brought into existence to meet the demands of second-lieutenants. Immediately afterwards I was told that a gentleman wished to see me, and behold there he was, in the sitting-room—a tall young man with a tiny moustache exactly the same width as his nose, and purple socks. Although obviously not lacking in self-assurance, he advanced rather nervously.

“What can I do for you?” I asked. “You know I have retired from practice.”

“O, it isn’t about any old malady,” he explained. “Thank Heaven I’m as fit as a fiddle. The fact is, I wanted to ask your advice. It’s about—Miss, Miss Holt.”

“Yes?” I said. I knew instinctively what was coming, but it was no business of mine to make it any easier for the young bandits who proposed to carry off this treasure.

“Well,” he said, “the fact is, you know, she’s—there’s no one so topping; or perhaps you don’t know?”

“Why should I be ignorant?” I asked. “Because I’m so old?”

“Well, I don’t mean that,” he replied. “But you’re her guardian, aren’t you? And living here as she does. . .”

“Oh I see,” I said. “You mean that only strangers can discover how delightful people can be?”

“No, not exactly that,” he stammered, “although, as a matter of fact, you know, one does rather take one’s own people for granted. My sister Belle now—to me she’s the stodgiest kind of old thing, but you should see the fellows after her. Like flies. They’re not as keen as I am about Miss Holt, though.”

“Then I must suppose,” I said, “that Rose—Miss Holt—is much nicer away from home than she is when she is there.”

“Oh no!” he replied, “I didn’t mean that. I’m sure she’s always charming.”

“Well, if neither of these is the reason, I am bound,” I said, “to fall back on the theory that I am too old to recognize sweetness when I see it.”

He was in a hole now and showed it. I liked him for his confusion. I liked to think that any young man, particularly one who had been through a war so much more destructive of good manners and good morals and honest standards of living than of militarism, should still be capable of embarrassment.

“Do you mind,” he asked, “if I smoke?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Every one smokes now. Tobacco is the next thing to mother’s milk.”

He took a cigarette from a gold case and tapped it. “I’m afraid it’s only a gasper,” he explained.

“I’d rather it was a pipe,” I said.

“Pipes don’t appeal to me any more,” he replied. “I took to cigarettes in France and I’ve never gone back.”

A few whiffs seemed to give him courage. “I came to see you,” he said at last, “because I want to marry Miss Holt.”

I was silent for a minute, during which I was taking him all in, and reviewing Rose’s life, and seeing them together, and speculating on the future, and realizing how different this happy-go-lucky youth, with a touch of effrontery and few thoughts for anything but motoring and dancing, was from the husband I had been wishing for her. It is extraordinary what a lot can be thought about in sixty seconds. Meanwhile he puffed his gasper and nursed his little moustache and swung a leg with so much purple sock now exposed that a suspender was visible too.

“Do you live about here?” I asked at last. “I don’t seem to remember your face.”

“I’m staying with my uncle, Major Wilkinson,” he said. “My name’s Sibthorp.”

“And what do you do?”

“Well, I’m not doing anything at the moment. I’ve only just been demobbed. I may possibly go back to Oxford. But I’d rather make some money. There’s talk of the mater setting me up as a chicken-farmer. There’s a devil of a lot of eggs wanted.”

“And what did you do in the war?”

“I was in the Air Force. Jolly lucky too. I never had a scratch.”

“But you scratched a Hun or two, I hope?”

“I fancy I did,” he said.

“Any medals?” I said.

“I got the D.S.O.,” he replied simply.

“You must let me shake your hand,” I said, “but remember that it is entirely without prejudice to the other matter. Do you happen to know how Miss Holt feels about it?”

“O I think she thinks I’m a pretty decent sort,” he said.

“Why do you like her?” I asked. “She doesn’t rouge.”

“I loathe rouge,” he said warmly.

I shook him by the hand again—again warning him that it was without prejudice.

“Does she like you at all?” I asked.

“She likes jazzing with me, I know,” he assured me.

“Life isn’t a dance,” I replied.

“No, of course not,” he said. “I know that. I know it’s a jolly serious affair.”

“And you are proposing that Miss Holt should help you with the poultry?” I suggested.

“She’d love it,” he said. “It’s a great lark.”

“This means,” I said, “that you would have to live in the country, and give constant attention to the work. No more jazzing, and very little motoring except to the market? Do you think that’s an existence for a girl of brains and ambition and high spirits, who happens to be an artist too?”

His face took on an expression of perplexity.

“But—but—she’d be married,” he said.

“So you think that love in an isolated cottage surrounded by roosters and incubators, with only one human companion, is a sufficient paradise to offer her? Upon my word, you seem to me to be uncommonly sure of your fascination. She would have to be very fond of you to give up her present home and pursuits, even with the society of a very aged man occasionally thrust upon her, and take to chicken-farming. Doesn’t it occur to you that that would be a big sacrifice?”

“But—but one must begin,” he said. “The poultry business would only be a start. We might go on to much bigger things.”

“It will be time to talk about marriage,” I said, “when you have made some of that progress.”

“Then you refuse to consider me?” he asked ruefully.

“Not at all,” I said. “It is not for me to decide anything. Rose has a father. But I should certainly put what obstacles I could in your way, until you had something better to propose as a means of livelihood than a chicken-farm in the air.”

“But you don’t forbid me to see her, or anything like that?” he asked eagerly.

“Of course not. And I couldn’t if I wanted to. See as much of her as she wants.”

“And if she told you that I—if she ever said anything about marrying me—you wouldn’t put a spoke in the wheel, would you?”

“I should do nothing to discourage her,” I said—“not from any desire to see her marry you, but for the opposite reason. Old though I am, I have not forgotten that forbidden fruit is the most attractive. So I shouldn’t forbid you.”

“I say, that’s brainy,” he said, with genuine admiration. “I should never have thought of that.”

“May I ask,” I said, “if you have put your case to Miss Holt?”

“Not in so many words,” he replied. “I thought I would see you first.”

“That’s rather an unusual course nowadays, isn’t it?”

“Well, that’s how the mater felt, anyway. It was her idea.”

“You talked it over with your mother?”

“Yes.”

“So Rose is all ignorant of this visit?”

“Yes,” he said.

I shook hands with him again.

“You are a very remarkable young man,” I said. “You respect your mother’s wishes and you don’t like rouged girls. I most cordially hope you will succeed in the egg market. But as for Rose, I can tell you something. Rose is in love with nobody.”

“How can you tell?” he asked.

“I happen to know her fairly well,” I replied, “and to have kept her under a certain amount of observation.”

“But—but—”

“You mean, once more, that I am too old? Maybe; but I guess that on this particular subject I am right. I’ll tell her that you called. Good afternoon.”

“Oh, sir,” he said, “will you? Wouldn’t it be better to say nothing about it and let me see her first?”

“It might be,” I replied; “but that isn’t the way that Miss Holt and I do things. We put the cards on the table. Good afternoon.”

He walked moodily to his little runabout, cranked it, lighted another cigarette (although what use a cigarette can be in a thirty-mile gale such as he was about to create for himself, I have no notion) and was off.

He left me thinking that the chances are that if I live on another twenty years, to be ninety—which I trust may not happen, even with the assistance of the new monkey-gland treatment—and I still retain a few faculties of hearing and speech and the simulacrum of a sympathetic heart, some young spark of the future will endeavour to engage my interest to help him in his courtship of Rose’s daughter—some young spark not yet born, desiring a bride not yet born. That would seem to be my destiny. But perhaps by 1940 there will be no such tedious preliminaries: nothing but capture and possession—and awakening. Or will the rhythm of life have reasserted itself and old-fashioned prejudices have returned? We move in circles.

* * * * *

During dinner that evening I said to Rose: “There was a young fellow here this afternoon asking after you.”

“Archie Sebright, I suppose,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Some one who dances with you, and—”

“Reggie Saunderson, of course.”

“No.”

“Who was it, then?”

“He had a very small moustache,” I said, “and he came in an even smaller car.”

“Oh, Jack Nimmo.”

“No,” I said. “He had purple socks, with clocks, and showed too much of them.”

“That must have been Claude Musters.”

“No,” I said.

“You must tell me,” she insisted. “Why are you such a tease?”

“His name was Sibthorp,” I said.

“Oh!” Rose replied, “he’s staying with the Wilkinsons. He’s rather a nuisance, but he did well in the War, every one says. It’s terrible, the bores that did well in the War! What did he want?”

“Nothing much,” I said. “Only to marry you.”

Rose laughed. “Like his cheek,” she said.

“None the less,” I said, during our dessert—and I have some rather good Taylor 1880 which deserves to be sipped slowly—“this question of marriage is bound to crop up now and then.”

“Why?” Rose asked.

“Because you’re a not repellent young woman, and the neighbourhood appears to be infested by Claudes and Reggies, and Nature is always urgent.”

“But I don’t want to marry any of them,” she said, “or in fact anyone at all. Why can’t we go on as we are? Why is life always changing?”

“I wish it wasn’t,” I said; “but the law of life is change. We either go forward—or backward. Every quiet little time such as this that I spend with you, alone, talking and not (which is the true curse of Adam) getting ready to do anything else, I am full of fearfulness, just because I know that there is no standing still. They are all stolen. To you they may be dull; to me these moments are beautiful.”

Rose put her hand on mine. “They’re not dull,” she said. “I love them too.”

She glanced at the clock.

“There!” I said. “You’re spoiling it! It is exactly as I said. What do you look at the time for?”

“Well,” she replied, “I promised Claude I’d show him a new step to-night; but he’s not coming till half-past nine. We’ve got nearly a whole hour.”

I sighed. But what’s the use?

“Let’s go on talking about marriage,” she said, drawing her chair closer. “Why should I marry? Every girl doesn’t. Why should I? Some one in the paper said only the other day that there are many more women than men and therefore lots of them must be single. Why shouldn’t I be one?”

“If you want to, there’s no earthly reason why you shouldn’t,” I said. “But we can’t arrange these things. At any moment you may fall in love, and what then? Marriage has a way of following love.”

“Ye-e-s,” said Rose. “But one needn’t fall in love. Lots of people don’t. You never did—at any rate, if you did, marriage didn’t follow it.”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t. Nature marked me for a bachelor, and destiny made me a vicarious father. I have been more or less of a vicarious father, Rose, ever since I was twenty-seven, and now I’m sixty-eight: forty-one years of it! I’ve had no time to fall in love, your mother and you have kept me so busy. But tell me about this young warrior. Why should he want to marry you? Have you given him any encouragement?”

“No,” said Rose. “Except to listen to him and show him steps. They all want to talk and be shown steps.”

“It’s a country fit for heroes to dance in,” I said. “And what about the poultry farm?”

“O he told you that, did he?” Rose asked.

“Yes, he told me that. The demand for eggs is something priceless, what?”

“Let’s forget him,” said Rose. “Anyway,” she resumed a moment later, “why must there always be marriage? Marriages so often go wrong. Look at Dulcie Lenox—she’s left her husband already. Look at the divorce cases! Why can’t two people love and get the best of life and then go their own way again?”

“It’s for the sake of society,” I said, “the human family. We’ve all got to help to keep that together.”

“Why should we?” Rose asked. “We didn’t ask to be born.”

“No, but being born, we must play the game. It’s part of the contract. It’s our payment for the privilege of existing at all.”

“Just chivalry?”

“If you like to put it like that. But most of us are rather proud of the obligation.”

“And if we say no; that we don’t care a pin about the human family; all we care about is our own happiness, what then?”

“Well, then we’re traitors, that’s all. We’ve been found wanting.”

“It’s rather a shame, isn’t it, to force so much responsibility on people who never asked for it?”

“Yes, I think it is. But life without responsibility wouldn’t be worth anything. That’s a conclusion I’ve reached after sixty-eight years.”

“Oh, don’t count up! You’re much too proud of those figures. But when did you discover it? When you were eighteen, like me?”

“No, when I was eighteen I thought more or less as you do; only not quite so freely, because there had been no great war to break down our ideals and set up materialism and belief in the divine right of every individual to be selfish and anti-social.”

“Do you think that’s what we are?”

“Too many people are. But I’m quite conscious that they may be right and the others wrong. In fact, the older I grow, the more convinced I am that everyone, however wrong, has some right in him, and every one, however right, some wrong.”

“Well I’m not going to marry for years and years,” said Rose. “I’m going to paint first. Art will be my husband.”

“With a little dancing with human partners thrown in?” I suggested.

“Yes, of course.”

At this moment the bell rang, indicating that the pupil had arrived, and for the next hour my would-be Rosa Bonheur was showing steps.

* * * * *

How few things we should do if we had time to examine carefully every action and its possible consequences before we committed ourselves to it! I for one, probably—but one never knows—instead of encouraging Rose in her drawing and painting should have discouraged her; for it led straight to London, and when your children, your own or your foster-children, get to London, they are lost. New lives begin, with new parents—for London is father and mother too. Careers have to be, I suppose, and leading strings must be cut—but O! the severance of heart-strings that that operation involves as well!

Anyway, I had taken an immense interest in Rose’s sketches, and often sat with her while she made them, and marvelled—being a hopeless duffer at such work—as the swift deft touches transferred the landscape to the paper: sky and earth and water. She may not have been remarkable, but to my eyes she was as clever as anyone sketching nature need be. Her portraits were good too: at any rate, lifelike enough to provoke cries of delight from the villagers as they recognized their neighbours. She was a straightforward performer: she cubed nothing and abhorred a vortex; but artists are curiously impressionable people, visitors to this planet rather than dwellers upon it, and at any moment she might become as wild as the wildest. And I am not surprised: the power to splash colour about must naturally lead to experimentalism.

In those days, however, Rose was in the old and sober tradition, and the desire to paint filled her soul.

* * * * *

At last the go-fever broke out. She had been to London—that promoter of restlessness—to stay with a girl artist friend and show her work to some experts and see the exhibitions, and she came back glowing with excitement and plans. She returned with her hair intact too, to my great joy. I had nursed a terror that she might bob it.

“How much money have I got?” was one of the first things she said to me after dinner.

During the meal I had heard the story of her adventures. How she had stayed with her friend Vera Gray in her studio at Chelsea. It was on the Embankment, looking out on the river.

“And O!” she exclaimed, “the river is exactly what Whistler made it. I mean—exactly how he painted it.”

I interrupted her to say that no studied compliment could ever have pleased that painter so much as her hurried slip; but she didn’t want to hear me; she wanted to talk and tell.

They had slept in the studio, in a little gallery up a ladder, where there was also a bathroom. They had cooked their own breakfast, but had gone out for other meals. I had no idea what Vera’s coffee was like! And her cups and saucers and plates: all blue and white, from Portugal: it cost—well, I’d never guess how cheap it was.

I asked her if she had called on her father.

“No”

“Oughtn’t you to have done so?”

“I suppose I ought,” she answered, “but—well, as a maffact, he would probably have disapproved of Chelsea and made me stay with him. For another reason, I didn’t really think he wanted to see me. We’ve very little in common, you know, Dombeen.”

“It’s a wise child who knows when she doesn’t want her father to know she’s in town,” I said. “I’m afraid you’re right,” I added: “you haven’t much in common. But you oughtn’t to presume on that, ought you?”

“Why not?” she asked, and upon my word, I couldn’t reply. Why should children be dutiful any more than their parents?

If Eustace took no interest in Rose, why should Rose take interest in him? Logically, it is the older who should set the example: the more mature, the person who is responsible for the child’s existence. I doubt very much if there is any natural affinity between parents and children: pride of ownership on the one side and dependence on the other leads to the creation of a bond. Remove babies at birth and do not let them meet their mothers again until they are grown up, and (in spite of the romantic and sentimental novelists) I doubt if there would be any natural recognition, any calling of the deeps.

Vera, Rose went on, had done a little work—not much—and then they had gone out to visit other studios, where Vera’s friends lived. I could have no idea how jolly they all were. People talked about the jealousy of artists, but for her part she didn’t believe a word of it. There they were, all so keen and simple, wearing the most delightful old clothes, pleased to see each other, pleased to praise each other’s work—genuinely, too—absolutely genuinely—and then directly it was too dark to go on, or they didn’t feel in the mood, off they went to dinner at one of the Soho places, and then they either talked about painting, ever so interestingly, or danced or sang. It was the most wonderful life.

But I mustn’t think for a moment that they were slackers. Not a bit of it. As a maffact, they worked frightfully hard. But artists, I must remember, don’t divide up their lives into work and play as other people do—clerks and merchants and lawyers and so on: they mix the two together. That’s what makes them so delightful.

“They all have such charming things,” she said, looking round at my furniture—Victorian mostly, not old enough to be beautiful—with a kind of disdain. “No matter how poor they are, they always seem to have money for ‘bits.’ They’re always on the look-out for them, and they have such wonderful eyes. They can see things under inches of dust. Going about among the old furniture and old curiosity shops with Vera and her friends was an education, and such a lark too! You and I must go over to Lowcester, Dombeen, and rout about in the old shops there. I know so much more about things than I did a month ago. I know the difference between Heppelwhite and Chippendale and Spode and Crown Derby. And I mean to learn it all.”

She had been to the National Gallery three times, and to the Tate, and to several little exhibitions, and to the Café Royal one evening, and to two plays. But the most terrific thing of all was this—she had seen John.

“John who?” I asked.

“Not John anything,” she replied, shocked at my ignorance. “It’s his last name, but no one ever calls him anything else—John the artist: much the strongest painter we’ve got. Vera asked him to come and see my things, and he came and he likes them. He says I ought to make a real name if I study properly and go to a life class and devote myself to drawing for a while. It’s my drawing that’s weak, he says.”

It was then that Rose suddenly asked, after a brief silence, “How much money have I got?”

I told her that she had no money at all, unless her father chose to give her any. He reimbursed me more or less for what she cost me, and her school accounts and so forth had gone to him. It was all very irregular; of course she ought to have an allowance by this time. She was eighteen.

Her face lost its radiance. “Must I ask him?” she said.

“It depends on what you want it for,” I answered.

“I want to live in Chelsea,” she said, “and really learn to paint.”

“O!” I said. “If it had been for anything else I might have been able to contribute, but I can’t for that. That is too drastic. You must ask your father. Besides,” I said, “I could hardly bring myself to finance a scheme which leaves me so high and dry.”

“Poor Dombeen!” she said. “But you’d soon get used to being alone. And I’d come down often for the week-end. As a maffact, you’d hardly miss me.”

“Train up a child and away she goes,” I quoted.

“But you wouldn’t have me not be independent?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Everything is all right: just as it should be. An old man must expect to lose a young girl just when she is most companionable. But you must concede him a little melancholy. After all, it is a compliment to you, so concede it purely in that light. It’s as proper for me to regret your going as for you to want to go.”

“You dear old thing!” she said. “I hate to leave you, but what should one do? If you absolutely needed me, of course . . . but you don’t. You’re strong, you go about, you have your prints and your gardening.”

“And even if I hadn’t,” I said, “I should not allow you to stay. If I am to collapse, it shall not be an artist on the threshold of life with a passion to express herself in oils who shall bring my beef-tea. That would be too unfair. But you must understand that nothing can be done until your father consents.”

“I’ll write to him to-night,” she said. “Unless you will?”

“No,” I replied firmly. “I’ll go a long way to help you, but I won’t sign my own death warrant. No seaman beseeches to be marooned.”

* * * * *

Eustace replied that he thought he might be willing, but it would be well to discuss the matter properly. Would she stay with him for a few days and bring some of her work with her.

“How can I show it to him?” she asked.

“You must,” I said. “After all, he is your father.”

“But it’s so—so—personal,” she said.

* * * * *

“Well?” I asked, when she came back a few days later.

“I’ve bored him terribly,” she said.

“What makes you think so?”

“He never knew what to say. Besides, his habits are fixed. I ruined his breakfast because he couldn’t read the paper. I would much rather he had read it, but he was trying to behave so beautifully and he made conversation instead. This means that he never caught up with the news all day, and that’s a very serious thing. I made the awful mistake too of opening the paper before he did, before he came in—this was on the first morning—and no woman, it seems, must do that.

“O dear, I’m not right at all. As a maffact, Dombeen, you’ve spoilt me. And I’m too impulsive. You mustn’t be impulsive with men, except perhaps just one or two, and those only for a little while and when they’re very pleased with themselves.

“I did other terrible things too. I used the telephone frivolously. I even rang up the exchange once just to ask the time, and he heard me. I had done it often enough when he was out, because my watch had stopped and his clock was away being mended; but he came in just as I was ringing and I never saw anyone so pained.

“And O! I left the electric light burning in the hall all one night. He was perfectly nice and kind and polite, but I could see that every day something new was being inscribed on his heart, like Queen Mary’s. I don’t mean our Queen Mary. I mean the Queen Mary who lost Calais—the bloody one.

“He didn’t like my painting at all,” she went on, “but he was very gentle about it. He was always gentle—gentle and cool—and that is so depressing after a while. Disturbing, too. He took me to the Tate Gallery on Saturday afternoon, and to the National on Sunday, and showed me the pictures he likes best. He has two photogravures after Leader in his bedroom.”

“But have you decided anything?” I asked. It was all I wanted to know and she was postponing and postponing the moment of the verdict.

“Yes,” she said, but without much enthusiasm.

“Well?”

“Well, he won’t hear of independent rooms in Chelsea. He doesn’t like Chelsea. It’s too irresponsible, he says. But he agrees to a Hostel—he’s inquiring about them now—and the Slade, I may go to the Slade and live in a Hostel, for three years. It isn’t what I wanted, of course, but it’s the thin end of the wedge. I’ll be able to go to Chelsea to see Vera and the others pretty nearly whenever I like, and the Slade isn’t so bad. Orpen was there and John was there. What do you think?”

“When do you want to begin?” I asked dully.

“Well, the next term,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

* * * * *

It was our last evening. To-morrow the little mawf was to fly away towards those great flames, London, Art, and Independence, all capable of scorching very acutely. To Rose the hours were all a prelude to adventure; to me a promise of loneliness. For so long this graceful, gay enthusiast had been lighting up my house; and now I was to be forsaken. At seventy that is no particular joke.

To what extent Rose had pondered on what might lightly be called the selfishness of her programme, I cannot say. Perhaps not at all, but I think that very unlikely. My own attitude to her desertion, although I did my best to make it whimsical, must have turned her thoughts that way. But having pondered, might she not very properly have decided that such selfishness was her only course? Our duty is not always to others. Comparatively lost as I was going to be, I certainly did not want her to make the sacrifice of remaining. Why should she? What right has seventy to cramp the style of twenty? Too many young people are harnessed—more than harnessed, shackled—to the old, for me to be willing to add to their number. I have watched youthful lives being sapped and thwarted in this way ever since I have been in practice, and I had always vowed that never would I be guilty of a similar tyranny. And now here I was with the temptation!

But it was not the temptation that it might have been had Rose come to me and said, “Look here, Dombeen, I can’t leave you all alone. It isn’t fair. I’ll give up this London scheme and we’ll go on being happy together.” Even then, however, I hope I should have been strong enough to say No. In fact, I know I should; for what is the use of binding a girl of eighteen, or letting her bind herself? Art she might relinquish; but what would happen when Love appeared? How could I keep her to her promise then? Better face the music, take the fence, cut the knot now, and be brave about it.

* * * * *

We sat long after dinner on that last evening. Rose’s boxes were packed, her room at the Hostel and her easel at the Slade awaited her. She had said all her good-byes in the neighbourhood, and no doubt more than one of her dancing friends had her address in his pocket-book. In short, practically every boat was burnt. All our talk, therefore, was of the future. If Eustace was not too unwilling, she said, she should go to Paris after a while. As a maffact, Paris was, of course, the place. London was only a makeshift. She would probably go on to Paris anyway—father or no father. Because one must be thorough. London was looking up—everybody said so—Chelsea had produced some wonderful things—but for an artist Paris was the true Alma Mater. Even Chelsea had had to go to Paris first.

It was all a question of money. Surely when she was twenty-one her father would allow her something reasonable?

“Not for the purpose of doing anything of which he might disapprove,” I said.

O well, she would see. She would begin at the Slade, anyway, and make up her mind gradually. “But of course,” she repeated, “Paris is the place. Sooner or later I must be there. I can hear it calling all the while.”

Having said those words, Rose left the window where she had been standing and walked into the garden, whither no doubt she expected me to follow her.

I was about to do so when there was a knock at the door and Suzanne entered, with a curious excited flush on her face.

She stood there a moment, as though trying to speak, and then, stepping aside, made room for some one in a black dress and veil, and was gone.

“Dombeen!” cried the stranger, and buried her thin, tired face on my shoulder.

Of what I said I have no memory. I can remember only stroking her head and hushing her like a child.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” I may have murmured; but it was foolish, for tears were her best friends.

* * * * *

“Rose?” she asked at last. “Is she here?”

I nodded.

“If only I could see her without her seeing me!”

“Wait a moment,” I said, and went to the garden to look for Rose, but she had disappeared.

I returned to her mother and began to be practical. She had come in a car, and the first thing to do was to take her bag out and send it back. Then she consented to eat something, and while it was being prepared I had the story.

Ronnie and she had been on their way back to England. He had wanted to see his mother again, and his father’s executors too. But at Marseilles Ronnie had died. It was where her father had died thirty-six years before—how strange a coincidence!

Ronnie’s death followed up a chill, which he had taken, she feared, on a visit to Theodore’s grave. They had gone to see it directly after landing, and Ronnie now lay in the same cemetery, close by. Was not that remarkable?

Since then she had been travelling steadily towards her daughter and me. No one knew of her presence in England but Ronnie’s mother, living now permanently at Torquay, who had been written to.

It was at this point that Rose the other Rose—came back. I saw her across the lawn—her dress shone among the shadows—but her mother’s back being to the window, she could not see her too.

Making some excuse, I slipped out.

“Who is it?” Rose asked, with a startled look, and a voice almost of fear. “Is it—?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What has happened? Is—is he dead?”

“Yes,” I said.

She gave a little wailing cry and was gone.

“Rose! Rose!” I called, but she did not reply.

I went back to her mother and urged her to go to bed.

“Not yet,” she said, adding that she would not be able to sleep. “There is so much to say, so much to know.”

As she talked, dry-eyed now, for she had conquered her emotion—her tears were because she was at home at last, among old and happy associations once more—I was able to see how she had aged. But she did not look as though her life with Ronnie had been a failure. There was no careworn anxious suggestion; there was merely sadness in her loss, and fatigue. She was still beautiful.

I did not want to ask any questions, and the principal one was answered by her general demeanour with regard to Ronnie: they had been happy.

“I regret nothing,” her eyes seemed to say.

She had no plans. She did not know what she would do after leaving me. How was every one? Was Mrs. O’Gorman still living? No. She was sorry. She had been hoping to talk with her. How splendid, though, to find Suzanne!

She seemed to be shy of referring to Rose again. I could not help noticing it. Every silence seemed to be filled intensely with consideration of her relations with her child and her child’s attitude to her. She must have given endless thought to this matter, but to be so near brought it all back more vividly and critically.

“I suppose—” she began once and stopped, and I knew that the rest of the sentence would have been—“she knows”: meaning “she knows about me and Ronnie?” Did daughters, she must often have asked herself, forgive mothers who run away from them with other men?

Perhaps it was because her mind had travelled thus far that she suddenly said again, “Dombeen, remember this. No matter how sad I may seem to be, now and then, remember this: I regret nothing. Ronnie needed me more than anyone.”

Then she became gayer and smiled her old smile.

“And you?” she said. “How are you? What beautiful white hair!”

“I am seventy,” I said. “Nothing else is the matter. But I always maintain that white hair is beautiful only on the heads of others.”

She came at last to Rose again by a more direct route. “Those pictures”—looking at the walls—“are they hers?”

I said that they were. I had told her in my letters of Rose’s painting.

“Oh, but they’re very good,” she said. “I’m so glad. There should always be an artist in our family.”

Should I tell her of Rose’s career, due to begin to-morrow? My natural instinct, as always, was, at the moment, for fear of giving pain, to conceal it; but I remembered my lesson, learned both from Rose and Rose, and told her.

She was silent for some time. “But where is she?” she then asked.

“She has gone to bed,” I said, “most probably.”

“Without coming to say good night to you? Isn’t that strange?” She looked at me searchingly.

“She knew you were here,” I said.

“She knew! How?”

“She saw you with me, from the garden.”

“Oh!” said Rose. “Yes.” She was silent again. “I’ll go to bed now, I think,” she said, and I led her upstairs.

“To-morrow your old room will be ready for you,” I said. “It couldn’t be to-night.”

“I like this one,” she said. “It’s where you get the view between the two copper beeches. But Rose?” she went on. “I must just peep at her before I sleep.”

I advised against it. “To-morrow,” I said. “When you’re not so tired.”

No, now, or she could not rest.

I pointed out Rose’s door and she tiptoed in. In a moment she was on the landing again.

“It’s empty!” she exclaimed. “The bed is untouched.”

I tried to reassure her.

“But where is she? This is terrible,” she repeated. “We must find her.”

I told her not to be alarmed. Rose was probably walking off her disturbance of mind. The sudden appearance of her mother must, I know, have given her too much to think of, and she was doing what she often did in moments of high tension—she was fighting her perplexities under the open sky.

“Ah!” said Rose. “It would have been better for me not to have come back.”

“Don’t say so,” I replied. “Go to your room now. I’ll wait for Rose—perhaps I’ll go and look for her, but I don’t think that is necessary; these are safe parts. She is probably in the garden.”

“She hasn’t—you don’t think—she hasn’t gone away altogether?” her mother faltered.

“Good Heavens, no! She often does this, and with far less reason. I’ll knock and reassure you very soon now”; and thus I got her to retire. Rose came back some anxious hours later, at dawn. She was worn out.

It was as I had guessed. The poor child’s castle in the air having collapsed, she had been collecting energy for the rebuilding. But this time there was to be a less alluring site: the castle must be on the prosaic earth and the foundations dug by the dull spade, duty.

All this her tired face told me.

“O Dombeen!” she said as she seized my arm and clung to it.

“I know,” I said.

“Where is she?”

“In the Red Room.”

“I’ll go to her.”

“To-night? So late?” I said. “I was wondering if it would not be better in the morning.”

“No, now. For a moment only.”

I left her at her mother’s door.

* * * * *

I was up early the next day, but Rose—the younger Rose—for all her late hours, was before me.

I found her at the breakfast table dressed in her ordinary morning blue overall. She was wan.

“But what’s this?” I asked. “Why aren’t you ready for the train?”

“I’m not going,” she said. “I’ve sent some telegrams.”

“But—” I began.

“Please don’t make it more difficult,” Rose replied, and her eyes filled with tears.

“I hope you haven’t countermanded the car,” I said, after a few moments of swift thought; for I could see that something must be done.

“No—there was no hurry for that,” she mumbled brokenly.

“Because I’ve got to go to London anyway,” I said. “I was going with you,” I added, as a mendacious but brilliant afterthought, “but I was keeping it as a surprise. I’ll be back to-night.”

And it was thus that I got away. I had realized directly I heard Rose’s decision that this was no place for me. I was an interloper. Mother and daughter must solve their own problems, and solve them alone; they would be glad to be unobserved as they reconnoitred to ascertain each other’s position. I have stumbled upon that military phrase, but on second thoughts I recognize its fitness; for in a sense they were foes, as most women can be, and mother and daughter too often actually are. How they would have adjusted their relations had these fourteen estranging years not intervened, no one could say. They might have been happy; certainly they would often have been merry and care-free, for that was the natural tendency of both. Moreover, there might have been an extra bond—I have seen it often—in mutual refuge from the Master of the House. But between mothers and daughters a certain hostility, not unconnected with rivalry, is only too common, if not inevitable. For a mother, be she ever so sweet-natured and generous and proud of her daughter, is also a woman, and women love love, and hate the thought of the shelf, and resent the younger generation’s vista of triumphs. Not until they are much older than Rose do they consent to retire from the lists, forgive their successors, and take with serenity to gardening and cards.

* * * * *

Whether or no Rose knew I was lying, I had no notion; but she acquiesced naturally enough and waved me a wistful good-bye.

I too had plenty to think of as the train bore me Londonwards. For everything had changed—Rose’s return was a bomb-shell. Had she come back a day later when her daughter was established in her Hostel and the London machinery had begun, all would have been simpler. But now? I knew them both so well—the mother and the daughter equally determined on any course they undertook: the daughter, after her vigil, so bent upon sacrifice and capable even of extracting some pleasurable gall from it, and the mother so unwilling to cool young ardencies and spoil young hopes.

To which did I owe the greater allegiance? To the mother, of course. The girl was at the threshold and had youth and enthusiasm and purpose; the mother was broken and without a star. If the mother would come to me, how gladly would I open my arms once more! But would she? No. How could she, knowing what people would say, having to meet the cold eyes of the rector and his wife, and seeing children withdrawn from her presence? Wherever she made her home it could not be in my house.

But—the thought came later, in a flash—it could still be with me: if somewhere else! Somewhere where her story was not known. Why should I live all my days in one spot? It is true that I was devoted to it; but ought one to be so local, so parochial? It was a not too admirable line of least resistance. Here was the great world open to me, and I had cowered all my days in one corner. Mrs. O’Gorman had twitted me about it; and she was a wise woman. How helpful she would be to-day! I had a few years left, I hoped—why should I not move to London or—or anywhere? Then Rose and I could be happy together, once more, and the other Rose could have a room always ready for her. How gay we might all yet be!

But probably to join me again would not be the mother’s wish. She might prefer to be alone; she might fear that her melancholy would weigh upon me.

All day long as I moved about London, and even as I turned over the portfolios, I was picturing the drama in my house, a house that possibly I was to leave for ever. Rose-the-less, white and tense, passionately, bitterly determined to be her mother’s companion; her mother gently but firmly refusing to come into her life. And how would these scenes end? Would the girl lose all control, and accepting the repudiation rush angrily off? Might she not indeed be even now in London? Or would the mother acquiesce? Which was the weaker? I could not tell.

And what did they say of me? They might even fall out over me, each claiming a bigger share of their poor old foster-father. And, in the absence of Mrs. O’Gorman, no Solomon to consult! Perhaps I ought not to have come away after all?

The journey back was an agony, even with some purchases to gloat over, and my nervousness increased as I approached the house. What should I find? Would both be there? Would either?

* * * * *

I should have been more trustful of the kindly gods. For Rose and Rose were waiting for me at the door, smiling at me and at each other. Whatever solution they had reached satisfied both. I could see that in a flash, and seeing that, I was happy.

* * * * *

“Rose and I,” said Rose-the-first, later that evening when we were all cosy, “have had a great talk, haven’t we?”

“Tremendous,” said Rose, laying her hand on her mother’s and stroking it.

“And we’ve decided that nothing must interfere with Rose’s plans to become an artist.”

“You decided, you mean,” said Rose-the-second.

“We’ve decided,” her mother repeated, “and so Rose is going off almost directly to her Hostel, just as if no ghost had frightened her.”

“O mother!” said Rose reproachfully.

“And I’m going too,” Rose-the-first continued.

“Both going?” I exclaimed in alarm.

“Only to find a house,” she went on.

“A house?”

“Yes, I’ve only one desire in the world, and that is to have a house, and the reason I want a house is to be able to invite a guest.”

She paused a moment.

“Dearest Dombeen,” she said, “I want one guest only. You. My greatest wish is to find a house in some place that pleased you, where you would come, whenever you cared, to stay with me for a little, or,” she added with one of her radiant smiles, “if you liked, altogether.”

She placed her other hand on mine.

“Because, you know,” she went on, “I am quite a rich woman now. And we have been your guests so long, Rose and I. I was your guest for fourteen years; won’t you be mine in return? Rose has been your guest for fourteen years; won’t you let her mother put you up now and then just to show a little gratitude? Won’t you?”

“Yes, Dombeen, won’t you?” said Rose-the-second. “You oughtn’t to refuse us now. Because although you’re the youngest man in the world you’re not a boy any more, you know. You’re seventy, and you must be looked after. You had a horrid, frightening cold last winter.”

“But—” I began. I had no objections to urge, but I wanted to be pressed.

“No ‘buts,’” said Rose. “There’s only one thing that you can be permitted to say to stop the whole plan. Nothing else will serve.”

“And what is that?” I asked.

“That you’re tired of Roses.”

“Never!” I said.

* * * * *

And that is how it happens that I have left my old home for ever and am finishing this story in a house overlooking the sea.

But I hear Rose calling.