“I see,” Rose said. “Was that long ago?”
“Only three months. I think we both fell in love at the same minute, and that’s nice, isn’t it? I know I’m going to be happy, but I do hope I shan’t be dull. We’re a big family at home. I’m English,” she added a little anxiously, “but my father settled there.”
“I don’t think you should be dull,” Rose said. “Everybody in Radstowe will call on you, and there are lots of parties. And then there’s hunting.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Sales. Her eyes left Rose’s face, to return a little wider, a little warier. “Do you hunt too?”
“As often as I can. I only have one horse.”
“Francis says I am to have two.”
“And they will be good ones. He likes hunting and horses better than anything else, I suppose.”
“But he mustn’t neglect the farm,” his wife said firmly, and she added slowly, “I don’t know that I need two horses, really. I haven’t ridden much, and there’s a lot to do in the house. I don’t believe in people being out all day.”
“Well, you can’t hunt all the year round, you know.”
Mrs. Sales let out a sigh so faint that most people would have missed it. “It will be beginning soon, won’t it?”
“It feels a long way off in weather like this,” Rose said. “But they are getting into the carriage. I must go.”
Mrs. Sales lingered for an instant. “I do hope we’re going to be friends.” This was more than a statement, it was a request, and Rose shrank from it; but she said lightly, “We shall be meeting often. You will see more of us than you will care for, I’m afraid. The Malletts are rather ubiquitous in Radstowe. It’s fortunate for us, or Caroline would die of boredom, but I don’t know how it appears to other people.”
She was going down the shallow stairs and the voice of Mrs. Sales followed her sadly: “He hasn’t told me anything about any of his friends.”
“In three months? He hasn’t had time, with you to think about!” A laugh, pleased and self-conscious, reached her ears. “No, but it’s rather lonely in this old house. We’re a big family at home—and so lively. There was always something going on. I wished we lived nearer Radstowe.”
“And I envy you here. It’s peaceful.”
“Yes, it’s that,” Mrs. Sales agreed.
“I’m a good deal older than you, you see,” Rose elaborated.
“That’s just it,” said Mrs. Sales.
Rose laughed, and Francis, standing at the door, turned at the sound in time to catch the end of Rose’s smile.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Mrs. Sales’s candour.”
“Oh, was I rude?”
“No. Good-bye. I liked it.” Yet, as she settled herself in her place, she was not more than half pleased. She liked her superior age only because it marked a difference between her and the wife of Francis Sales.
“H’m!” Caroline said when the carriage had turned into the road and the figures in the doorway had disappeared. “Pretty, but unformed.”
“They seem very happy,” Sophia said, “but I do think she ought to have been wearing black. Her father-in-law has only been dead six months, and even Francis was not wearing a black tie.”
But if Caroline condemned men in general, she supported them in particular. “Quite right, too. Men don’t think of these things—and a black tie with those tweeds! Sophia, don’t be silly and sentimental; but you always were, you always will be.”
“She might have had a white frock with a black ribbon,” Sophia persisted. “Why, Rose looked more like our old friend’s daughter-in-law.”
“But hardly like a bride,” Rose said. “And you see, pink is her colour.”
“So it is, dear. One could see that. Pink and blue, just as they were mine.” She corrected herself. “Are mine. Our complexions are very much alike; in fact, she reminded me a little of myself.”
“Nonsense, Sophia! If you had been like that I should have disowned you. However, she will do well enough for Sales Hall.”
Rose bent forward slightly. “I like her,” she said distinctly. “And she’s lonely.”
“Well, my dear, she’ll soon have half a dozen children to keep her lively.”
“Hush, Caroline! The man will hear you.”
Caroline addressed Rose. “Sophia’s modesty is indecent. I’ve done what I could for her.”
“Please listen to me,” Rose said. “You are not to belittle Mrs. Sales to people, Caroline. You can be a powerful friend, if you choose, and if you sing her praises there will be a mighty chorus.”
“That’s true,” Caroline said.
“Yes, that’s true, dear Caroline,” Sophia echoed. “And I think you’re taking this very sweetly, Rose.”
“Sweetly? Why?”
Caroline pricked up her ears. “What’s this? I’m out of this. Oh, that old rubbish! She will have it you and Francis should have married. My dear Sophia, Rose could have married anybody if she’d wanted to. You’ll admit that? Yes? Then can’t you see”—she tapped Sophia’s knee—“then can’t you see that Rose didn’t want him? That’s logic—and something you lack.”
“Yes, dear,” Sophia said with the meekness of the unconvinced. “And of course it’s wrong to think of it now that he’s married to another.”
Caroline guffawed her loudest, and the astonished horse quickened his pace. The driver cast a look over his shoulder to see that all was well, for he had a sister who made strange noises in her fits; and Sophia, sitting in her drooping fashion, as though her head with its great knob of fair hair, in which the silver was just beginning to show, were too heavy for her body, had to listen to the old gibes which had never made and never would make any impression on her, though she would have felt forlorn without them. She was the only puritanical Mallett in history, Caroline said. Oh, yes, the General had been great at family prayers, but he was trying to make up for lost time. It was difficult to believe that Sophia and Reginald were the same flesh and blood.
Sophia interrupted. She was fond of Reginald, but she had no desire to be like him, and Caroline knew he was a disgrace. They argued for some time, and Rose closed her eyes until the talk, never really acrimonious, drifted into reminiscences of their childhood and Reginald’s.
It was strange that they should have chosen that day to speak so much of him, for when they reached home they found a letter addressed in an unfamiliar hand.
“What’s this?” Caroline said.
It was a thin, cheap envelope bearing a London postmark, and Caroline drew out a flimsy sheet of paper.
“I must get my glasses,” she said. Her voice was agitated. “No, no, I can manage without them. The writing is immense, but faint. It’s from that woman.” She looked up, showing a face drawn and blotched with ugly colour. “It’s to say that Reginald is dead.”
Mrs. Reginald Mallett had written the letter on the day of her husband’s funeral, and Caroline’s tears for her brother were stemmed by her indignation with his wife. She had purposely made it impossible for his relatives to attend the ceremony.
“No,” Sophia said, “the poor thing was distressed. We mustn’t blame her.”
“And such a letter!” Caroline flicked it with a disdainful finger.
Rose picked up the sheet. “I don’t see what else she could have said. I think it’s dignified—a plain statement. Why should you expect more? You have never taken any notice of her.”
“Certainly not! And Reginald never suggested it. Of course he was ashamed, poor boy. However, I am now going to write to her, asking if she is in need, and enclosing a cheque. I feel some responsibility for the child. She is half a Mallett, and the Malletts have always been loyal to the family.”
“Yes, dear, we’ll send a cheque, and—shouldn’t we?—a few kind words. She will value them.”
“She’ll value the money more,” Caroline said grimly.
Here she was wrong, for the cheque was immediately returned. Mrs. Mallett and her daughter were able to support themselves without help.
“Then we need think no more about them,” Caroline said, concealing her annoyance, “and I shall be able to afford a new dinner dress. Black sequins, I thought, Sophia—and we must give a dinner for the Sales.”
“Caroline, no, you forget. We mustn’t entertain for a little while.”
“Upon my word, I did forget. But it’s no use pretending. It really isn’t quite like a death in the family, is it? Poor dear Reginald! I was very fond of him, but half our friends believe he has been dead for years. I shall wear black for three months, of course, but a little dinner to the Sales would not be out of place. We have a duty to the living as well as to the dead.”
Leaving her stepsisters to argue this point, Rose went upstairs and looked into Reginald’s old room. She had known very little of him, but she was sorry he was dead, sorry there was no longer a chance of his presence in the house, of meeting him on the stairs, very late for breakfast and quite oblivious of the inconvenience he was causing, and on his lips some remark which no one else would have made.
His room had not been occupied for some time, but it seemed emptier than before; the mirror gave back a reflection of polished furniture and vacancy; the bed looked smooth and cold enough for a corpse. No personal possessions were strewn about, and the room itself felt chilly.
She was glad to enter her own, where beauty and luxury lived together. The carpet was soft to her feet, a small wood fire burned in the grate, for the evening promised to be cold, and the severe lines of the furniture were clean and exquisite against the white walls. A pale soft dressing-gown hung across a chair, a little handkerchief, as fine as lace, lay crumpled on a table, there was a discreet gleam of silver and tortoiseshell. This, at least, was the room of a living person. Yet, as she stood before the cheval-glass, studying herself after the habit of the Malletts, she thought perhaps she was less truly living than Reginald in his grave. He left a memory of animation, of sin, of charm; he had injured other people all his life, but they regretted him and, presumably, he had had his pleasure out of their pain. And what was she, standing there? A negatively virtuous young woman, without enough desire of any kind to impel her to trample over feelings, creeds and codes. If she died that moment, it would be said of her that she was beautiful, and that was all. Reginald, with his greed, his heartlessness, his indifference to all that did not serve him, would not be forgotten: people would sigh and smile at the mention of his name, hate him and wish him back. She envied him; she wished she could feel in swift, passionate gusts as he had done, with the force and the forgetfulness of a passing wind. His life, flecked with disgrace, must also have been rich with temporary but memorable beauty. The exterior of her own was all beauty, of person and surroundings, but within there seemed to be only a cold waste.
She had been tempted the other afternoon, and she had resisted with what seemed to her a despicable ease: she had not really cared, and she felt that the necessity to struggle, even the collapse of her resistance, would have argued better for her than her self-possession. And for a moment she wished she had married Francis Sales. She would at least have had some definite work in the world; she could have kept him to his farming, as Mrs. Sales had set herself to do; she would have had a home to see to and daily interviews with the cook! She laughed at this decline in her ambition; she no longer expected the advent of the colossal figure of her young dreams; and she knew this was the hour when she ought to strike out a new way for herself, to leave this place which offered her nothing but ease and a continuous, foredoomed effort after enjoyment; but she also knew that she would not go. She had not the energy nor the desire. She would drift on, never submerged by any passion, keeping her head calmly above water, looking coldly at the interminable sea. This was her conviction, but she was not without a secret hope that she might at last be carried to some unknown island, odorous, surprising and her own, where she would, for the first time, experience some kind of excess.
§ 4
The little dinner was duly given to the Sales. The Sales returned the compliment; and Mrs. Batty, not to be outdone, offered what could only adequately be described as a banquet in honour of the bride; there was a general revival of hospitality, and the Malletts were at every function. This was Caroline’s reward for her instructed enthusiasm for Christabel Sales, and before long the black sequin dress gave way to a grey brocade and a purple satin, and the period of mourning was at an end. For Rose, these entertainments were only interesting because the Sales were there, and she hardly knew at what moment annoyance began to mingle definitely with her pity for the little lady with the wary eyes, or when the annoyance almost overcame the pity.
It might have been at a dinner-party when Christabel, seated at the right hand of a particularly facetious host, let out her high chromatic laughter incessantly, and the hostess, leaning towards Francis, told him with the tenderness of an elderly woman whose own romance lies far behind her, that it was a pleasure to see Mrs. Sales so happy. He murmured something in response and, as he looked up and met the gaze of Rose, she smiled at him and saw his eyes darken with feeling, or with thought.
After dinner he sought her out. She had known that would happen: she had been avoiding it for weeks, but it was useless to play at hide-and-seek with the inevitable, and she calmly watched him approach.
“Why did you laugh?” he asked at once, in his old, angry fashion. “You were laughing at me.”
“No, I smiled.”
“Ah, you’re not so free with your smiles that they have no meaning.”
“Perhaps not, but I don’t know what the meaning was.”
“I believe you’ve been laughing at me ever since I came back.”
“Indeed, I haven’t. Why should I?”
“God knows,” he answered with a shrug; “I never do understand what people laugh at.”
“You’re too self-conscious, Francis.”
“Only with you,” he said.
“Somebody is going to sing,” she warned him as a gaunt girl went towards the piano; and sinking on to a convenient and sheltered couch, they resigned themselves to listen—or to endure. From that corner Rose had a view of the long room, mediocre in its decoration, mediocre in its occupants. She could see her host standing before the fire, swinging his eyeglasses on a cord and gazing at the cornice as the song proceeded. She could see Christabel’s neck and shoulders and the back of her fair head. Beside her a plump matron had her face suitably composed; three bored young men were leaning against a wall.
The music jangled, the voice shrieked a false emotion, and Rose’s eyebrows rose with the voice. It was dull, it was dreary, it was a waste of time, yet what else, Rose questioned, could she do with time, of which there was so much? She could not find an answer, and there rose at that moment a chorus of thanks and a gentle clapping of hands. The gaunt girl had finished her song and, poking her chin, returned to her seat. The room buzzed with chatter; it seemed that only Francis and Rose were silent. She turned to look at him.
“This is awful,” he said.
“No worse than usual.”
“When do you think we shall have exhausted Radstowe hospitality? And the worst of it is we have to give dinners ourselves, and the same things happen every time.”
“I find it soporific,” said Rose.
“I’d rather be soporific in an arm-chair with a pipe.”
“This is one of the penalties of marriage,” Rose said lightly.
“Look here, I’m giving Christabel another jumping lesson to-morrow. I’ve put some hurdles up. Will you come? She’s getting on very well. I’ll take her hunting before long.”
“Does she like it?”
“Oh, rather! My word, it would have been a catastrophe if she hadn’t taken to it.” He paused, considering the terrible situation from which he had been saved. “Can’t imagine what I should have done. But she’s never satisfied. She’s beginning to jeer at the old brown horse. I’ve seen a grey mare that might do for her,” and he went on to enumerate the animal’s points.
Rose said, “Why don’t you let her have her first season with the old horse? He knows his business. He’ll take care of her.”
“She wouldn’t approve of that. I tell you, she’s ambitious. I’ll go and fetch her and you’ll hear for yourself.”
She watched him bending over his wife, and saw Christabel rise and slip a hand under his arm. The action was a little like that of a young woman taking a walk with her young man, but it betokened a confidence which roused a slight feeling of envy and sadness in Rose’s heart.
“We have been talking about hunting,” she began at once.
“Oh, yes,” Christabel said. She looked warily from one to the other.
“I’m recommending you to stick to the old brown horse, but Francis says you laugh at him.”
“Would you ride him yourself?” Christabel asked.
“Not if I could get something better.”
“Well, then—” Christabel’s tone was final.
But Rose persisted, saying, “But, you see, this isn’t my first season. Stick to the old horse for a little while.”
“No,” Christabel said firmly. “If Francis thinks I can ride the mare, I should like to have her.”
Rose laughed, but she felt uneasy, and Francis said, “I told you so. She has any amount of pluck. You come and watch.”
“No, I can’t come to-morrow. I think I’ll see her first in all her glory on the grey mare.”
“All the same,” Christabel added, “if she’s very expensive, I don’t want her. Francis is extravagant over horses, and we have to be careful.”
“We’ll economize somewhere else,” he said. “The mare is yours.”
She suppressed a sigh. Rose was sure of it, and in after days she was to ask herself many times if she had been to blame in not interpreting that sigh to Francis. But she had to give Christabel, and Christabel especially, the loyalty of one woman to another. She would not wrench from her in a few words the pride Francis took in her, to which she sacrificed her fears. Rose had the astuteness of a jealousy she would not own, of a sense of possession she could not discard, and she had known, from the first moment, that Christabel was afraid of horses and dreaded the very name of hunting. And Rose divined, too, that if she herself had not been a horsewoman of some repute, Christabel would have been less ambitious; she would have been contented with the old brown horse; but Christabel, too, had an astuteness. No, she could not have interfered; yet when she first saw Christabel on the mare she was alarmed to the point of saying:
“Are you sure she’s all right? You’d better keep beside her, Francis.”
The mare was fidgety and hot-headed. Christabel’s hands were unsteady, her face was pale, her lips were tight; but she was gay, and Francis was proud to have her and her mount admired.
Rose looked round in despair. Could no one else see what was so plain to her? She was tempted to go home. She felt she could not bear the strain of watching that little figure perched on the grey beast that looked like a wraith, like a warning. But she did not go, and she learnt to be glad to have shared with Francis the horror of the moment when the mare, out of control and mad with excitement, tried a fence topping a bank, failed, and fell with Christabel beneath her.
On the ground there was a flurry of white and black, and then stillness, while over the fields the hounds and the foremost riders went like things seen in a dream, with the same callousness, the same speed.
Rose saw men dismount and run towards the queer, ugly muddle on the grass. She dismounted, too, and gave her horse to somebody to hold, but she did nothing. Other, more capable people were before her, and it struck her at that moment, while a bird in a bare hedge set up a short chirrup of surprise, how little used she was to action. She seemed to be standing alone in the big field: the rest was a picture with which she had nothing to do. There was a busy group near the fence, some men came running with a door, and then the sound of a shot broke through her numbness. The mare had been put out of her pain; but what of Christabel?
She hurried forward; she heard some one say, “Ah, here’s Miss Mallett,” and she answered vaguely, “Men are gentler.” But as they lifted Christabel, Rose held one of her hands. It felt lifeless; she looked small and broken; she made no sound.
“She’s not conscious,” a man said, and at that she opened her eyes.
“My God, she’s got some pluck!” Francis said. “My God—”
She smiled at him, and he dropped behind with a gesture of despair.
“You were right,” he said to Rose, “she wasn’t equal to that brute.” He turned angrily. “Why didn’t you make me see?”
She made no answer then, or afterwards, to him, but over and over again, with the awful reiteration of the conscience-smitten, she set out her reasons for her silence. She might have told him that of these he was the chief. If he had looked at her less persistently on her visits to Sales Hall, if he had married another kind of woman, she would not have been afraid to speak, but she had tried not to extinguish what little flame of love still flickered in his heart for Christabel and she had succeeded in almost extinguishing her life, in reducing her to permanent helplessness.
This was Rose’s first experience of how evil comes out of good. What would happen to that love, Rose did not know. For a time it burned more brightly, fanned by Christabel’s heroism and Francis’s remorse, but heroism can become monotonous to the spectator and poignant remorse cannot be endured for ever. Christabel’s plight was pitiful, but Rose was sorrier for Francis. He had, as it were, engaged her compassion years ago, he had a prior claim, and as time went on, her pity for Christabel changed at moments to annoyance. It was cruel, but Rose had no fund of patience. She disliked illness as she did deformity, and though Christabel never complained of her constant pain, she developed the exactions of an invalid, and the suspicions. In those blue eyes, bluer, and more than ever wary, Rose saw the questions which were never asked.
In the bedroom which, with the boudoir, had been furnished and decorated by the best shop in Radstowe, for a surprise, Christabel lay on a couch near the window, with a nurse in attendance, the puppy and the kitten, both growing staid, for company. It tired her to use her hands, she had never cared for reading and she lay there with little for consolation but her pride in stoically bearing pain.
Often, and with many interruptions, she made Rose repeat the details of the accident.
“I was riding well, wasn’t I?” she would ask. “Francis was pleased with me. He said so. It wasn’t my fault, was it? And then, when they were carrying me home did you hear what he said? Tell me what he said.”
And Rose told her: “He said, ‘My God, she has got pluck!’ Oh, Christabel, don’t talk about it.”
“I like to,” she replied, but the day came when she insisted on this subject for the last time.
“Tell me what you thought when you saw me on the mare,” she said, and Rose, careless for once, answered immediately, “I thought she wasn’t fit for you to ride.”
“Ah,” Christabel said slowly, “did you? Did you? But you didn’t say anything. That was—queer.”
Rose said nothing. She was frozen dumb and there was no possible reply to such an implication; but she rose and drew on her gloves. She looked tall and straight in her habit, and formidable.
“Are you going? But you must have tea with Francis. He’s expecting you.”
“I won’t stay to-day,” Rose said. She was shaking with the anger she suppressed.
“But if you don’t,” Christabel cried, “he’ll want to know why. He’ll ask me!”
“I can’t help that,” Rose said.
Tears came into Christabel’s eyes. “You might at least do that for me.”
“Very well. Because you ask me.”
“And you’ll come again soon?”
The sternness of Rose’s face was broken by an ironic smile. “Of course! If you are sure you want me!”
She went downstairs and, as usual, Francis was waiting for her in the matted hall. He did not greet her with a word or a smile. He watched her descend the shallow flight, and together they went down the passage to the clear drawing-room, where the faded water-colours looked unreal and innocent and ignorant of tragedy.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She looked into the oval mirror which had so often reflected his mother’s placid face. “My hat’s a little crooked,” she said.
He laughed without mirth. “Never in its life. Has Christabel been worrying you?”
“Worrying me? Poor child—”
“Yes, it’s damnable, but she does worry one—and you look odd.”
“I’m getting old,” she murmured, not seeking reassurance but stating a fact plain to her.
“You’re exactly the same!” he said. “Exactly the same!” He swept his face with his hands, and at that sight a new sensation seized her delicately, delightfully, as though a firm hand held her for an instant above the earth, high in the air, free from care, from restrictions, from the necessity for thought—but only for an instant. She was set down again, inwardly swaying, apparently unmoved, but conscious of the carpet under her feet, the chairs with twisted legs, the primrose curtains, the spring afternoon outside.
“Let us have tea,” she said. She handled the pretty flowered cups and under her astonished eyes the painted flowers were like a little garden, gay and sweet and gilded. She seemed to smell them and the hiss of the kettle was like a song. Then, as she handed him his cup and looked into his wretched face and remembered the bitter reality of things, she still could not lose all sense of sweetness.
“Don’t say any more!” she said quickly. “Don’t say another word.”
“I won’t, if you’re sure you know everything. Do you?”
“Every single thing.”
“And you care?”
“Yes.” She drew a breath. “I care—beyond speaking of it. Francis, not a word!”
It was extraordinary, it was inexplicable, but it was true and happily beyond the region of regrets, for if she had married him years ago she would never have loved him in this miraculous, sudden way, with this passion of tenderness, this desire to make him happy, this terrible conviction that she could not do it, this promise of suffering for herself. And the wonder of it was that he had no likeness to that absurd Francis of whom she had dreamed and whom she had not loved; no likeness, either, to the colossal tyrant. The man she loved was in some ways weak, he was petulant, he was a baby, but he needed her and, for a romantic and sentimental moment, she saw herself as his refuge, his strength. She could not, must not communicate those thoughts. She began to talk happily and serenely about ordinary things until she remembered that she had lingered past her usual hour and that upstairs Christabel must be listening for the sound of her horse’s hoofs. She started up.
“Will you fetch Peter for me?”
“If you will tell me when you are coming again.”
“One day next week.”
He kissed her hand, and held it.
“Francis, don’t. You mustn’t spoil things.”
“I haven’t said a word.”
“Silence is good,” she said.
§ 5
And she knew she could be silent for ever. Restraint and a love of danger lived together in her nature and these two qualities were fed by the position in which she found herself, nor would she have had the position changed. It supplied her with the emotion she had wanted. She had the privilege of feeling deeply and dangerously and yet of preserving her pride.
There was irony in the fact that Christabel, hinting at suspicions for which, in Rose’s mind, there was at first no cause, had at last actually brought about what she feared, and if Rose had looked for justification, she might have found it there. But she did not look for it any more than Reginald would have done; she was like him there, but where she differed was in loyalty to an idea. She saw love as something noble and inspiring, worthy of sacrifice and, more concretely, she was determined not to increase the disaster which had befallen Christabel. Sooner or later, in normal conditions, her marriage must have been recognized as a failure, but in these abnormal ones it had to be sustained as a success, and it seemed to Rose that civilized beings could love, and live in the knowledge of their love, without injuring some one already cruelly unfortunate.
But, as the months went by, she found she had to reckon with two difficult people, or rather with two people, ordinary in themselves, cast by fate into a difficult situation. There was Christabel, with her countless idle hours in which to formulate theories, to lay traps, to realize that the devotion of Francis became less obvious; and there was Francis, breaking the spirit of their contract with his looks, and sometimes the letter, with his complaints and pleadings.
He could not go on like this for ever, he said. He saw her once a week for a few minutes, if he was lucky: how could she expect him to be satisfied with that? It was little enough, she owned, but more than it might have been. She could never make him admit, perhaps because he did not feel, how greatly they were blessed; but she saw herself as the guardian of a temple: she stood in the doorway forbidding him to enter less the place should be defiled, yet forbidding him in such a way that he should not love her less. Yet constantly saying “No,” constantly shaking the head and smiling propitiatingly the while is not to appease; and those short hours of companionship in which they had once managed to be happy became times of strain, of disappointment, of barely kept control.
“I wish I could stop loving you,” he broke out one day, “but I can’t. You’re the kind one doesn’t forget. I thought I’d done it once, for a few months, but you came back—you, came back.”
She smiled, seeming aloof and full of some wisdom unknown to him. She knew he could not do without her, still more she knew he must not do without her, and these certainties became the main fabric of her love. She had to keep him, less for her own sake than for that of her idea, but gradually the severe rules she had made became relaxed.
They were not to meet except on that one day a week demanded by Christabel, who also had to keep Francis happy and who would have welcomed the powers of darkness to relieve the monotony of her own life; but Rose could hardly take a ride without meeting Francis, also riding; or he would appear, on foot, out of a wood, out of a side road, and waylay her. He seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of her presence, and they would have a few minutes of conversation, or of a silence which was no longer beautiful, but terrible with effort, with possibilities and with dread.
She ought, she knew, to have kept to her own side of the bridge, to have ridden on the high Downs inviting to a rider, but she loved the farther country where the air was blue and soft, where little orchards broke oddly into great fields, where brooks ran across the lanes and pink-washed cottages were fronted by little gardens full of homely flowers and clothes drying on the bushes. There was a smell of fruit and wood fires and damp earth; there was a veil of magic over the whole landscape and, far off, the shining line of the channel seemed to be washing the feet of the blue hills. The country had the charm of home with the allurement of the unknown and, within sound of the steamers hooting in the river, almost within sight of the city lying, red-roofed and smoky with factories, round the docks and mounting in terraces to the heights of Upper Radstowe, there was an expectation of mystery, of secrets kept for countless centuries by the earth which was rich and fecund and alive. She could not deny herself the sight of this country. It had become dearer to her since her awakened feelings had brought with them the complexities of new thoughts. It soothed her though it solved nothing. It did not wish to solve anything. It lay before her with its fields, its woods, its patches of heathy land, its bones of grey limestone showing where the flesh of the red earth had fallen away, its dips and hollows, its steep lanes, like the wide eye of a being too full of understanding to attempt elucidations; it would not explain; it knew but it would not impart the knowledge which must be gained through the experience of years, of storms, of sunshine, of calamity and joy.
And sometimes the presence of Francis with his personal claims and his complaints was an intrusion, almost an anachronism. He was of his own time, and the end of that was almost within sight, while the earth, immensely old, had a youth of its own, something which Francis would never have again. But perhaps, because he was essentially simple, he would have fitted in well enough if he had been less ready to voice his grievances and ruffle the calm which she so carefully preserved, which he called coldness and for which he reproached her often.
“I have no peace,” he grumbled.
“You would get it if you would accept things as they are. You have to, in the end, so why not now?”
She longed to give peace to him, but her tenderness was sane and she found a strange pleasure in the pain of knowing him to be irritable and childish. It made of her love a better thing, without the hope of any reward but the continuance of service.
“It’s easier for you,” he said, and she answered, “Is it?” in the way that angered him and yet held him, and she thought, without bitterness, that he had never suffered anything without physical or mental tears. “Yes, you have peace at home, but I go back to misery.”
“It’s her misery.”
“That doesn’t make it any better,” he retorted justly.
“I know.” She touched his sleeve and, feeling his arm stiffen, removed her hand.
“And I feel a brute because I can’t care enough. If it were you now—”
Almost imperceptibly Rose shook her head. She had no illusions, but she said, “Then why not pretend it’s me. Tell her all you do. Ask her advice—you needn’t take it.”
“And it’s all a lie,” he growled.
She said serenely, “It has to be, but there are good lies.”
She wished, with an intensity she rarely allowed herself, that he would be quiet and controlled. Though half her occupation would be gone, she would feel for him a respect which would rebound on her and make her admirable to herself, but she knew that life cannot be too lavish of its gifts or death would always have the victory. This was not what she had looked for, but it was good enough; she was necessary to him and always would be; she was sure of that, yet she constantly repeated it; moreover, she loved his bigness and his physical strength and the way the lines round his eyes wrinkled when he smiled; she knew how to make him smile and now and then they had happy interludes when they talked about crops and horses, profit and loss, the buying and selling of stock, and felt their friendship for each other like a mantle shared.
At the worst, she consoled herself, after a time of strain, it was like riding a restive horse. There was danger which she loved: there was need of skill and a light hand, of sympathy and tact, and she never regretted the superman who was to have ruled her with a fatiguing rod of iron. Here there was give and take; she had to let him have his head and pull him up at the right moment and reward docility with kindness; she even found a kind of pleasure, streaked with disgust, in dealing with Christabel’s suspicions, half expressed, but present like shadowy people in her room.
Of these she never spoke to Francis, but she had a malicious affection for them; they had, as it were, done her a good turn, and though they hid like secret enemies in the corners, she recognized them as allies. And they looked so much worse than they were. She imagined them showing very ugly faces to Christabel, who could only judge them by their looks, and though it was cruel that she should be frightened by them, it was impossible to drive them away. Rose could only sit calmly in their presence and try to create an atmosphere of safety. She knew she ought to feel hypocritical in this attendance on her lover’s wife, but it was not of her choosing. She did not like Christabel, she would have been glad never to see her again and, terrible as her situation was, it appealed to Rose less then it would have done if she had not herself come of people whose tradition was one of stoicism in trouble, of pride which refused to reveal its distress. Physically, Christabel had those qualities, but mentally she lacked them; it was chiefly to Rose that she betrayed herself, and at each farewell she exacted the promise of another visit soon. Was she fascinated by the sight of the woman Francis loved? And when had that love been discovered? And was she sure of it even now? She certainly had her sole excitement in her search for evidence.
In that bedroom, gaily decorated for a bride, she lay heroically bearing pain, lacking the devotion she should have had, finding her reward in the memory of her husband’s appreciation of her courage, and her occupation, perhaps her pleasure, in a refinement of self-torture.
As soon as Rose entered the room she was aware of the scrutiny of those wary eyes, very wide open, as blue as flowers, and she knew that her own face was like a mask. The little dog wagged his tail, the cat made no sign, the nurse, after a cheerful greeting, went out of the room and Rose took her accustomed place beside the window. It had a view of the garden, the avenue of elms in which the rooks cawed continuously, the hedge separating the fields from the high-road where two-wheeled carts, laden with farm produce, jogged into Radstowe, driven by an old man or a stout woman, and returned some hours later with the day’s shopping—kitchen utensils inadequately wrapped up and glistening in the sunshine, a flimsy parcel of drapery, a box of groceries. The old man smoked his pipe, the stout woman shook the reins on the pony’s back; the pony, regardless, went at his own pace. Heavy farm carts creaked past, motor-cars whizzed by, the Sales Hall dairy cows were driven in for milking, and then for a whole half hour there might be nothing on the road. The country slept in the sunshine or patiently endured the rain.
For a member of a large and lively family this prospect, seen from a permanent couch, was not exhilarating, but Christabel did not complain: she took advantage of every incident and made the most of it, but she never expressed a desire for more. She had, for so frail and shattered a body, an amazing capacity for endurance, as though she were upheld by some spiritual force. It might have been religion or love, or the desire to perpetuate Francis’s admiration, but Rose believed, and hated herself for believing, that it was partly antagonism and a feverish curiosity. She had been cheated of her youth and strength, and here, with a beautiful, impassive face, was the woman who might have saved her, a woman with a body strongly slim in her dark habit, and firm white hands skilled in managing a horse. She had read the grey mare’s mind, and now Christabel, delicately blue and pink and white, in a wrapper of silk and lace, her hands fidgeting each other as they had fidgeted the mare’s mouth, thought she was reading the mind of Rose. She stared at her, fascinated but not afraid. There were things she must find out.
She asked one day, and it was nearly two years since the accident, “Did they kill the mare?” And Rose, aware that Christabel had known all the time, answered, “Yes, at once. Her leg was broken.”
“What a pity!”
Waiting for what would come next, Rose smiled and looked out of the window at the swaying elm tops.
“Such a useful animal!” Christabel said.
“Very dangerous,” Rose remarked, slipping deliberately into the trap.
“That’s what I mean. But not quite dangerous enough. Poor Francis! He didn’t know. He doesn’t know now, does he? But of course not.”
Rose had a great horror of a debt and she owed something to Christabel, but now she felt she had paid it off, with interest. She breathed deeply, without a sound. Her tone was light.
“He knows all that is good for him.”
“You mean that is good for you.”
Rose stood up, pulled on her washleather gloves, sat down again. The hands on the silk coverlet were shaking.
“You are making yourself ill,” Rose said. She was tempted to take those poor fluttering hands into her own and steady them, but her flesh shrank from the contact. She was tempted, too, to tell Christabel the truth, but pride forbade her, and in a moment the impulse was gone, and with its departure came the belief that the truth would be annihilating. It would rob her of her glorious uncertainty, she would be destroyed by the knowledge that Rose had seen her fear, seen and tried to strengthen the slender hold she had on her husband’s love. It was better to play the part of the wicked woman, the murderess, the stealer of hearts: and perhaps she was wicked; she had not thought of that before; the Malletts did not criticize their actions or analyse their minds and she had no intention of breaking their habits. She stood up again and said:
“Shall I call the nurse?”
“You’re not going yet? You’ve only been here a few minutes.”
“Long enough,” Rose said cheerfully.
Tears came into Christabel’s eyes. “And Francis is out. If he doesn’t see you he’ll be angry, he’ll ask me why.”
“You can tell him.”
“But,” the tone changed, “perhaps you’ll see him on your way home.”
“Yes, and then I can tell him instead.”
The tears overflowed, she was helplessly angry, she sobbed.
“Be quiet,” Rose said sternly. “I shall tell him nothing. You know that. You are quite safe, whatever you choose to say to me. Perfectly safe.”
“I know. I can’t help it. I lie here and think. What would you do in my place?”
“The same thing, I suppose,” Rose said.
“And you won’t go?”
“Yes, I’m going. You can tell Francis I was obliged to get home early.”
“But you’ll come again?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll come again.”
“You don’t want to.”
“No, I don’t want to.”
“But you’re always riding over here, aren’t you?”
“Nearly every day.”
“Oh, then—” The words lingered meaningly until Rose reached the door and then Christabel said, “I wish you’d ask your sisters to come and see me. They would tell me all the news.”
Rose went downstairs laughing at Christabel’s capacity for mingling tragedy with the commonplace and sordid accusations with social desires, but though she laughed she was strangely tired and, stretching before her, she saw more weariness, more struggling, more effort without result.
She stood in the masculine, matted hall, with the usual worn pair of slippers in the corner, a stick lying across a chair, a collection of coats and hats on the pegs, and she felt she would be glad if she were never to see all this again, and for the first time she thought seriously of desertion. She wished she could go to some unfamiliar country where the people would all have new faces, where the language would be strange, the sights different, the smells unlike those which were wafted through the open door. She wanted a fresh body and a new world, but she knew that she would not get them, for leaving Francis would be like leaving a child. So she told herself, but at the back of her mind was the certainty that if she went he would soon attach himself to another’s strength—or weakness: yes, to another’s weakness, and she found she could not contemplate that event, less because she clung to him than because her pride could not tolerate a substitution which would be an admission of her likeness to other women. Yet in that very lack of toleration her pride was lowered, and if she was not clinging to him for her own sake, she was holding on to her place, her uniqueness, refusing the possibility that another woman could serve him, as she had served him with pain, with suffering. She was like a queen who does not love her throne supremely but will not abdicate, who would rather fail in her appointed place than see another succeed in it.
For a minute Rose Mallett sat down on the edge of the chair already occupied by the stick and she pressed both hands against her forehead, driving back her thoughts. Thinking was dangerous and a folly: it was a concession to circumstances, and she would concede nothing. She stood up, looked round for a mirror, remembered there was not one in the hall, and with little, meticulous touches to her hat, her hair and the white stock round her neck, she left the house.
She returned to a drawing-room occupied by Caroline and Sophia, yet strangely silent. There was not a sound but what came from the birds in the garden. Caroline’s spectacles were on her nose and, though she was not reading the letter on her knee, she had forgotten to take them off, an ominous sign. Sophia’s face was flushed with agitation, her head drooped more than usual, but she lifted it with a sigh of relief at Rose’s entrance.
“We’re in such trouble, dear,” she said.
“Trouble! Nonsense! No trouble at all! Look here, Rose, that woman has died now.” She shook the letter threateningly. “Read this! Reginald’s wife! I suppose she was his wife. I dare say he had dozens.”
“Caroline!” Sophia remonstrated.
Rose took the letter and read what Mrs. Reginald Mallett, believing herself about to die, had written in her big, sprawling hand. The letter was only to be posted after her death and she made no apology for asking the Malletts to see that her daughter had the chance of earning her living suitably. “She is a good girl,” she wrote, “but when I am gone her only friend will be the landlady of this house and there are young men about the place who are not the right kind. I am telling my dear girl that I wish her to accept any offer of help she gets from you, and she will do what I ask.”
“So, you see,” Caroline said as Rose looked up, “we’re not done with Reginald yet, and what I propose is that we send Susan for the girl to-morrow.”
“Yes, to-morrow,” Sophia echoed.
“Shall I go?” Rose asked. Sophia murmured gratitude, Caroline snorted doubt, and Rose added, “No, I think not. She wouldn’t like it. Susan would be better—but not to-morrow. You must write to the child— what’s her name? Henrietta—”
“Yes, Henrietta, after our grandmother—the idea! I don’t know how Reginald dared.”
“Is she a sacred character?” Rose asked dryly. “Write to her, Caroline, and say Susan will come on the day that suits her best. You can’t drag her away without warning. Let’s treat her courteously, please.”
“Oh, Rose, dear, I think we are always courteous,” Sophia protested.
Caroline merely said, “Bah!” and added, “And what are we going to do with her when we get her? She’ll giggle, she’ll have a dreadful accent, Sophia will blush for her. I shan’t. I never blush for anybody, even myself, but I shall be bored. That’s worse, and if you think I’m going to edit my stories for her benefit, Sophia, you’re mistaken. I never managed to do that, even for the General, and I’m too old to begin.” She removed her spectacles hastily. “Too old for that, anyhow.”
Rose smiled. She thought that probably the child of Reginald Mallett, living from hand to mouth in boarding houses, the sharer of his sinking fortunes, the witness of his passions and despairs and infidelities, would find Caroline’s stories innocent enough. Her hope was that Henrietta would not try to cap them, but the chances were that she would be a terrible young person, that she would find herself adrift in the respectability of Radstowe where she was unlikely to meet those young men, not of the right kind, to whom she was accustomed.
“She must have her father’s room,” Sophia said. She was trying to conceal her excitement. “We must put some flowers there. I think I’ll just go upstairs and see if there’s any little improvement we could make.”
They all went upstairs and stood in that room devoted to the memory of the scapegrace, but they made no alterations, Sophia expressing the belief that Henrietta would prefer it as it was; and Caroline, as she wiped away two slow tears, saying that Reginald was a wretch and she could not see why they should put themselves to any trouble for his daughter.