Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 8

"But, mother," said Jack, and there were tears in his eyes, "you don't know, you don't realize. I mean--she's; a dear little thing--but you couldn't be happy with her. She'd get most frightfully on your nerves.

She's just--just a silly little dancer who has got into trouble."

Jack was clear-sighted. Every vestige of fairyland had vanished. And she was deeply thankful that they should see alike, while she answered, "It's not exactly a time for considering one's nerves, is it, Jack? I hope I shan't get on hers. I must just try and make her as happy as I can."

She made it all seem natural and almost sweet. The tears were in his eyes, yet he had to smile back at her when she said, "You know that I am good at managing people. I'll manage her. And perhaps when you come back, my darling, she won't be a silly little dancer."

They sat now for a little while in silence. While they had talked, a golden sunset, slowly, had illuminated the western sky. The river below them was golden, and the wintry woodlands bathed in light. Jack held her hands and gazed at her. Love could say no more than his eyes, in their trust and sorrow, said to her; she could never more completely possess her son. Sitting there with him, hand in hand, while the light slowly ebbed and twilight fell about them, she felt it to be, in its accepted sorrow, the culminating and transfiguring moment of her maternity.

When they at last rose to go it was the hour for Jack's departure, and it had become almost dark. Far away, through the trees, they could see the lighted windows of the house that waited for them, but to which she must return alone. With his arms around her shoulders, Jack paused a moment, looking about him. "Do you remember that day--when we first came here, mummy?" he asked.

She felt in him suddenly a sadness deeper than any he had yet shown her.

The burden of the past she had lifted from him; but he must bear now the burden of what he had done to her, to their life, to all the future.

And, protesting against his pain, her mother's heart strove still to shelter him while she answered, as if she did not feel his sadness, "Yes, dear, and do you remember the hepaticas on that day?"

"Like you," said Jack in a gentle voice. "I can hardly see the plants.

Are they all right?"

"They are doing beautifully."

"I wish the flowers were out," said Jack. "I wish it were the time for the flowers to be out, so that I could have seen you and them together, like that first day." And then, putting his head down on her shoulder, he murmured, "It will never be the same again. I've spoiled everything for you."

But he was not to go from her uncomforted. She found the firmest voice in which to answer him, stroking his hair and pressing him to her with the full rea.s.surance of her resolution. "Nothing is spoiled, Jack, nothing. You have never been so near me--so how can anything be spoiled?

And when you come back, darling, you'll find your son, perhaps; and the hepaticas may be in flower, waiting for you."

II

Mrs. Bradley and her daughter-in-law sat together in the drawing-room.

They sat opposite each other on the two chintz chesterfields placed at right angles to the pleasantly blazing fire, the chintz curtains drawn against a rainy evening. It was a long, low room, with panelled walls; and, like Mrs. Bradley's head, it had an air at once majestic, decorated, and old-fas.h.i.+oned. It was a rather crowded room, with many deep chairs and large couches, many tables with lamps and books and photographs upon them, many porcelains, prints, and pots of growing flowers. Mrs. Bradley, her tea-table before her, was in her evening black silk; lace ruffles rose about her throat; she wore her accustomed necklace of old enamel, blue, black, and white, set with small diamonds, and the enamel locket that had within it Jack's face on one side and his father's on the other; her white hands, moving gently among the teacups, showed an ancient cl.u.s.ter of diamonds above the slender wedding-ring.

From time to time she lifted her eyes and smiled quietly over at her daughter-in-law. It was the first time that she had really seen Dollie, that is, in any sense that meant contemplative observation. Dollie had spent her first week at Dorrington in bed, sodden with fatigue rather than ill. "What you need," Mrs. Bradley had said, "is to go to sleep for a fortnight"; and Dollie had almost literally carried out the prescription.

Stealing carefully into the darkened room, with its flowers and open windows and steadily glowing fire, Mrs. Bradley had stood and looked for long moments at all that she could see of her daughter-in-law,--a flushed, almost babyish face lying on the pillow between thick golden braids, sleeping so deeply, so unconsciously,--her sleep making her mother-in-law think of a little boat gliding slowly yet steadily on and on, between new sh.o.r.es; so that, when she was to awake and look about her, it would be as if, with no bewilderment or readjustment, she found herself transformed, a denizen of an altered world. That was what Mrs.

Bradley wanted, that Dollie should become an inmate of Dorrington with as little effort or consciousness for any of them as possible, and the drowsy days and nights of infantine slumbers seemed indeed to have brought her very near.

She and Pickering, the admirable woman who filled so skilfully the combined positions of lady's maid and parlourmaid in her little establishment, had braided Dollie's thick tresses, one on either side,--Mrs. Bradley laughing a little and both older women touched, almost happy in their sense of something so young and helpless to take care of. Pickering understood, nearly as well as Jack's mother, that Master Jack, as he had remained to her, had married very much beneath him; but at this time of tragic issues and primitive values, she, nearly as much as Jack's mother, felt only the claim, the pathos of youth and helplessness. It was as if they had a singularly appealing case of a refugee to take care of; social and even moral appraisals were inapplicable to such a case, and Mrs. Bradley felt that she had never so admired Pickering as when seeing that for her, too, they were in abeyance. It was a comfort to feel so fond of Pickering at a time when one was in need of any comfort one could get; and to feel that, creature of codes and discriminations as she was, to a degree that had made her mistress sometimes think of her as a sort of Samurai of service, a function rather than a person, she was even more fundamentally a kind and Christian woman. Between them, cook intelligently sustaining them from below and the housemaids helpful in their degree, they fed and tended and nursed Dollie, and by that eighth day she was more than ready to get up and go down and investigate her new surroundings.

She sat there now, in the pretty tea-gown her mother-in-law had bought for her, leaning back against her cus.h.i.+ons, one arm lying along the back of the couch and one foot in its patent-leather shoe, with its sparkling buckle and alarming heel, thrusting forward a carefully arched instep.

The att.i.tude made one realize, however completely tenderer preoccupations held the foreground of one's consciousness, how often and successfully she must have sat to theatrical photographers. Her way of smiling, too, very softly, yet with the effect of a calculated and dazzling display of pearly teeth, was impersonal, and directed, as it were, to the public _via_ the camera rather than to any individual interlocutor. Mrs. Bradley even imagined, unversed as she was in the methods of Dollie's world, that of allurement in its conscious and determined sense she was almost innocent. She placed herself, she adjusted her arm and her foot, and she smiled gently; intention hardly went further than that wish to look her best.

Pink and white and gold as she was, and draped there on the chesterfield in a profusion of youth and a frivolity that was yet all pa.s.sivity, she made her mother-in-law think, and with a certain sinking of the heart, of a Dorothy Perkins rose, a flower she had never cared for; and Dollie carried on the a.n.a.logy in the sense she gave that there were such myriads more just like her. On almost every page of every ill.u.s.trated weekly paper, one saw the ingenuous, limpid eyes, the display of eyelash, the lips, their outline emphasized by just that touch of rouge, those copious waves of hair. Like the Dorothy Perkins roses on their pergolas, so these pretty faces seemed--looped, draped, festooned--to climb over all the available s.p.a.ces of the modern press.

But this, Mrs. Bradley told herself, was to see Dollie with a dry, hard eye, was to see her superficially, from the social rather than from the human point of view. Under the photographic creature must lie the young, young girl,--so young, so harmless that it would be very possible to mould her, with all discretion, all tenderness, into some suitability as Jack's wife. Dollie, from the moment that she had found her, a sodden, battered rose indeed, in the London lodging-house, had shown herself grateful, even humble, and endlessly acquiescent. She had not shown herself at all abashed or apologetic, and that had been a relief; had counted for her, indeed, in her mother-in-law's eyes, as a sort of innocence, a sort of dignity. But if Dollie were contented with her new mother-in-law, and very grateful to her, she was also contented with herself; Mrs. Bradley had been aware of this at once; and she knew now that if she were being carefully and commendingly watched while she poured out the tea, this concentration did not imply unqualified approval. Dollie was the type of young woman to whom she herself stood as the type of the "perfect lady"; but with the appreciation went the proviso of the sharp little London mind,--versed in the whole ritual of smartness as it displayed itself at theatre or restaurant,--that she was a rather dowdy one. She was a lady, perfect but not smart, while, at the same time, the quality of her defect was, she imagined, a little bewildering and therefore a little impressive. Actually to awe Dollie and to make her shy, it would be necessary to be smart; but it was far more pleasant and perhaps as efficacious merely to impress her, and it was as well that Dollie should be impressed; for anything in the nature of an advantage that she could recognize would make it easier to direct, protect, and mould her.

She asked her a good many leisurely and unstressed questions on this first evening, and drew Dollie to ask her others in return; and she saw herself stooping thoughtfully over a flouris.h.i.+ng young plant that yet needed transplanting, softly moving the soil about its roots, softly finding out if there were any very deep tap-root that would have to be dealt with. But Dollie, so far as tastes and ideas went, hardly seemed to have any roots at all; so few that it was a question if any change of soil could affect a creature so shallow. She smiled, she was at ease; she showed her complete a.s.surance that a young lady so lavishly endowed with all the most significant gifts, need not occupy herself with mental adornments.

"You're a great one for books, I see," she commented, looking about the room; "I suppose you do a great deal of reading down here to keep from feeling too dull"; and she added that she herself, if there was "nothing doing," liked a good novel, especially if she had a box of sweets to eat while she read it.

"You shall have a box of sweets to-morrow," Mrs. Bradley told her, "with or without the novel, as you like."

And Dollie thanked her, watching her cut the cake, and, as the rain lashed against the windows, remarking on the bad weather and cheerfully hoping that "poor old Jack" wasn't in those horrid trenches. "I think war's a wicked thing, don't you, Mrs. Bradley?" she added.

When Dollie talked in this conventionally solicitous tone of Jack, her mother-in-law could but wish her upstairs again, merely young, merely the tired and battered refugee. She had not much tenderness for Jack, that was evident, nor much imaginativeness in regard to the feelings of Jack's mother. But she soon pa.s.sed from the theme of Jack and his danger. Her tea was finished and she got up and went to the piano, remarking that there was one thing she _could_ do. "Poor mother used to always say I was made of music. From the time I was a mere tot I could pick out anything on the piano." And placing herself, pressing down the patent-leather shoe on the loud pedal, she surged into a waltz as foolish and as conventionally alluring as her own eyes. Her inaccuracy was equalled only by her facility. Smiling, swaying over the keys with alternate speed and languor, she addressed her audience with altogether the easy mastery of a music-hall _artiste_: "It's a lovely thing--one of my favourites. I'll often play, Mrs. Bradley, and cheer us up. There is nothing like music for that, is there? it speaks so to the heart." And, whole-heartedly, indeed, she accompanied the melody by a pa.s.sionate humming.

The piano was Jack's and it was poor Jack who was made of music. How was he to bear it, his mother asked herself, as she sat listening. Dollie, after that initiation, spent many hours at the piano every day,--so many and such noisy hours, that her mother-in-law, unnoticed, could shut herself in the little morning-room that overlooked the brick wall at the front of the house and had the morning sun.

It was difficult to devise other occupations for Dollie. She earnestly disclaimed any wish to have proper music lessons, and when her mother-in-law, patiently persistent, arranged for a skilful mistress to come down twice a week from London, Dollie showed such apathy and dulness that any hope of developing such musical ability as she possessed had to be abandoned. She did not like walking, and the sober pageant of the winter days was a blank book to her. Sewing, she said, had always given her frightful fidgets; and it was with the strangest sense of a privilege, a joy, unhoped-for and now thrust upon her, that Mrs. Bradley sat alone working at the little garments that meant all her future and all Jack's. The baby seemed already more hers than Dollie's.

Sometimes, on a warm afternoon, Dollie, wrapped in her fur cloak, would emerge for a little while and watch her mother-in-law at work in her borders. The sight amused and surprised but hardly interested her, and she soon went tottering back to the house on the preposterous heels that Mrs. Bradley had, as yet, found no means of tactfully banis.h.i.+ng. And sometimes, when the piano again resounded, Mrs. Bradley would leave her borders and retreat to the hazel-copse, where, as she sat on the stone bench, she could hear, through the soft sound of the running water, hardly more than the distant beat and hum of Dollie's waltzes; and where, with more and more the sense of escape and safety, she could find a refuge from the sight and sound and scent of Dollie,--the thick, sweet, penetrating scent that was always to be indelibly a.s.sociated in her mind with this winter of foreboding, of hope, and of growing hopelessness.

In her letters to Jack, she found herself, involuntarily at first, and then deliberately, altering, suppressing, even falsifying. While Dollie had been in bed, when so much hope had been possible of a creature so unrevealed, she had written very tenderly, and she continued, now, to write tenderly, and it was not false to do that; she could feel no hardness or antagonism against poor Dollie. But she continued to write hopefully, as every day hope grew less.

Jack, himself, did not say much of Dollie, though there was always the affectionate message and the affectionate inquiry. But what was difficult to deal with were the hints of his anxiety and fear that stole among the terse, cheerful descriptions of his precarious days. What was she doing with herself? How were she and Dollie getting on? Did Dollie care about any of the things she cared about?

She told him that they got on excellently well, that Dollie spent a good deal of time at the piano, and that when they went out to tea people were perfectly nice and understanding. She knew, indeed, that she could depend on her friends to be that. They accepted Dollie on the terms she asked for her. From friends so near as Mrs. Crawley and Lady Wrexham she had not concealed the fact that Dollie was a misfortune; but if others thought so they were not to show it. She still hoped, by degrees, to make Dollie a figure easier to deal with at such neighbourly gatherings. She had abandoned any hope that Dollie would grow; anything so feeble and so foolish could not grow; there was no other girl under the little dancer; she was simply no more and no less than she showed herself to be; but, at this later stage of their relations.h.i.+p, Mrs.

Bradley essayed, now and then, a deliberate if kindly severity,--as to heels, as to scents, as to touches of rouge.

"Oh, but I'm as careful, just as careful, Mrs. Bradley!" Dollie protested. "I can't walk in lower heels. They hurt my instep. I've a very high instep and it needs support." She was genuinely amazed that any one could dislike her scent and that any one could think the rouge unbecoming. She seemed to acquiesce, but the acquiescence was followed by moods of mournfulness and even by tears. There was no capacity in her for temper or rebellion, and she was all unconscious of giving a warning as she sobbed, "It's nothing--really nothing, Mrs. Bradley. I'm sure you mean to be kind. Only--it's rather quiet and lonely here. I've always been used to so many people,--to having everything so bright and jolly."

She was not rapacious; she was not dissolute; she could be kept respectable and even contented if she were not made too aware of the contrast between her past existence and her present lot. With an air only of pensive pride she would sometimes point out to Mrs. Bradley, in the pages of those same ill.u.s.trated weeklies with which her mother-in-law a.s.sociated her, the face of some former companion. One of these young ladies had recently married the son of a peer. "She _is_ in luck, Floss," said Dollie. "We always thought it would come to that.

He's been gone on her for ages, but his people were horrid."

Mrs. Bradley felt that, at all events, Dollie had no ground for thinking her "horrid"; yet she imagined that there lay drowsing at the back of her mind a plaintive little sense of being caught and imprisoned. Floss had stepped, triumphant, from the footlights to the registrar's office, and apparently had succeeded in uniting the radiance of her past and present status. No, Dollie could be kept respectable and contented only if the pressure were of the lightest. She could not change, she could only s.h.i.+ft; and although Mrs. Bradley felt that for herself, her life behind her, her story told, she could manage to put up with a merely s.h.i.+fted Dollie, she could not see how Jack was to manage it. What was Jack to do with her? was the thought that pressed with a growing weight on her heart. She could never be of Jack's life; yet here she was, in it, planted there by his own generous yet inevitable act, and by hers,--in its very centre, and not to be evaded or forgotten.

And the contrast between what Jack's life might have been and what it now must be was made more poignantly apparent to her when Frances Graham came down to stay from a Sat.u.r.day to Monday; Frances in her black, tired and thin from Red-Cross work in London; bereaved in more, her old friend knew, than dear Toppie's death; yet with her leisurely, unstressed cheerfulness almost unaltered, the lightness that went with so much tenderness, the drollery that went with so much depth. Dearest, most charming of girls--but for Jack's wretched stumble into "fairyland" last summer, destined obviously to be his wife,--could any presence have shown more disastrously, in its contrast with poor Dollie, how Jack had done for himself? She watched the two together that evening, Frances with her thick crinkled hair and clearly curved brow and her merry, steady eyes, leaning, elbow on knee, to talk and listen to Dollie; and Dollie, poor Dollie, flushed, touched with an unbecoming sulkiness, aware, swiftly and unerringly, of a rival type. Frances was of the type that young men married when they did not "do for themselves." There was now no gulf of age or habit to veil from Dollie her disadvantage. She answered shortly, with now and then a dry, ironic little laugh; and, getting up at last, she went to the piano and loudly played.

"He couldn't have done differently. It was the only thing he could do,"

Frances said that night before her bedroom fire. She did not hide her recognition of Jack's plight, but she was staunch.

"I wouldn't have had him do differently. But it will ruin his life,"

said the mother. "If he comes back it will ruin his life."

"No, no," said Frances, looking at the flames. "Why should it? A man doesn't depend on his marriage like that. He has his career."

"Yes. He has his career. A career isn't a life."

"Isn't it?" The girl gazed down. "But it's what so many people have to put up with. And so many haven't even a career." Something came into her voice and she turned from it quickly. "He's crippled, in a sense, of course. But you are here. He will have you to come back to always."

"I shall soon be old, dear, and she will always be here. That's inevitable. Some day I shall have to leave her to Jack to bear with alone."

"She may become more of a companion."

"No; no, she won't." The bitterness of the mother's heart expressed itself in the dry, light utterance. It was a comfort to express bitterness, for once, to somebody.

"She is a harmless little thing," Frances offered after a moment.

"Harmless?" Mrs. Bradley turned it over drily and lightly. "I can't feel her that. I feel her blameless if you like. And it will be easy to keep her contented. That is really the best that one can say of poor Dollie.

And then there will be the child. I am pinning all my hopes to the child, Frances."