Christmas roses : and other stories

Front matter

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Contents

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Pink FoxGLoves CARNATIONS STAKING A LARKSPUR EVENING PRIMROSES AUTUMN CROCUSES

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II

WHEN, in the second year of the war, poor Tim and Frances, dusty, jaded, nearly shattered, but appeased at last, were able to announce the engagement of their daughter Rhoda to the unexceptionable Niel Quentyn, Mrs. Delafield’s special function seemed ended; but, looking back over her long intercourse with her niece, she knew that Rhoda had felt her a relief rather than an influence; that she had made things easier rather than more difhcult to her; that, in short, she had always successfully appealed to the girl’s intelligence rather than to what poor Tim and Frances called her better self; and it was of Rhoda’s intelligence, and of what possible pressure she might be able to bring to bear upon it, that she thought finally, as she worked at her border and waited for the fly that was to bring Rhoda’s baby and its nurse from the station. :

She had not been able to rejoice with her brother and his wife over Rhoda’s match. She who had measured, during her years of acquaintanceship with her, her niece’s force, had measured accurately, in her first glance at him, Niel’s insignificance. He was good-looking, good-tempered, and very much in love; but caste, clothes, code, and the emotion of his age and situation summed him up. He had money, too, and could give Rhoda, together with a little handle to her name, the dim, rich, startling drawing-room in which her taste at once expressed itself, and a pleasant country house, where, as he confided to Mrs. Delafield, he hoped to inspire her, when the war was over, with his own ardour for hunting.

Rhoda was far too clever to quarrel with such excellent bread and butter; but what could he give her more? for Rhoda would want more than bread and butter; what food for excitement and adventure could he offer her indolent yet eager mind and her nature, at once so greedy and so fastidious? Mrs. Delafield asked herself the question, even while she watched Rhoda’s wonderful white form move up the nave at her splendid, martial wedding; even while poor Frances wept for joy and “The Voice that breathed o’er Eden” surged from the organ; and she feared that Niel was getting far more than he had bargained for and Rhoda far less.

The first year, it was true, passed successfully. Poor Frances, who had, fortunately, died at the end of it, had known no reason for abated rejoicing. She lived long enough to see the baby, little Jane Amoret, as Rhoda*persisted in calling the child; and she had welcomed Niel home once on leave — Niel as much infatuated as ever and trying to take an intelligent interest in Picasso. It was since then, during the past year, that ‘Tim’s letters had expressed a growing presage and appeal. Moved by the latter, and only a short time before her own grief had overtaken her, she had gone up to London and stayed with him for a few days, and had taken tea with Rhoda. ' .. -

At Rhoda’s it had been exactly as she expected. The drawing-room was worthy of its fame; so worthy that Mrs. Delafield wondered how Niel afforded it — and in war-time, too. Rhoda, as she often announced, was clever at picking up things, and many of the objects with which she had surrounded herself were undoubted trophies of her resource and knowledge. But all the taste and skill in the world did n’t give one that air of pervading splendour, as of the setting for a Russian ballet, in which the red lacquer and the Chinese screens, the blacks and golds and rich, dim whites were, like Rhoda herself, sunken with her customary air of gloomy mirth in the deepest cushions and surpassingly dressed, merged in the soft, unstressed, yet magnificent atmosphere. It was the practical side of matters — the depth of good, dull Niel’s purse measured against the depth of Rhoda’s atmosphere — that alarmed Mrs. Delafield, rather than Rhoda herself and Rhoda’s friends, of whom poor Tim had so distressingly written.

There were many suave and merry young men, mainly in khaki, and various ladies, acute or languorous, who had the air of being as carefully selected as the chairs and china. There were tea and cigarettes, and an abundance of wonderful talk that showed no sign of mitigation on account of her mid-Victorian presence; though, as Mrs. Delafield reflected, musing on the young people about her, . no one could say, except their clever selves, how much mitigation there might not be. Like Rhoda, no doubt, they felt her reality through her mid- Victorianism. Her small black bonnet with its velvet strings, and her long, loose jacket trimmed with fringe, would not restrain them beyond a certain point. Yet she suspected that they had a point, and she wondered, though the question did not alarm her, where it could be placed.

They talked, at all events, and she listened; at times she even smiled; and since by no possibility could her smiles be taken as complicities, she was willing that they should be taken as comprehensions. Rhoda’s friends, though so young, were chill and arid, and the enthusiasms they allowed themselves had the ring of provocation rather than of ardour. Yet she did not dislike them; they were none of them like Mr. Dell; and, though so with-

ered by sophistication, they had at moments

eee of an uncanny, almost an ingenuous wisom. ,

The occasion had not alarmed her, and she had found but one moment oppressive, that of the appearance — the displayal, as of a Chinese idol, indeed, or a Pekinese spaniel (Rhoda had three of these) — of poor little Jane Amoret. She rarely disliked her niece, even when feeling her most naughty; but she found herself disliking her calculated maternity, with its kisses, embraces and reiterated ‘‘darlings.”” Jane Amoret had eyed her gravely and, as gravely, had held out her arms to her nurse to be taken back when the spectacle was over. Jane Amoret’s attire was quite as strange as her mother’s drawing-room, and Rhoda had contrived to make her look like a cross between an Aubrey Beardsley and a gorgeous, dressed-up doll Madonna in a Spanish cathedral.

On returning to Tim, Mrs. Delafield found that she could not completely reassure him, but she laid stress, knowing it would be, comparatively, a comfort, on Rhoda’s extravagance, eliciting from him a groan of “I know! — I know! — Poor Niel’s been ° writing to me about it! — Dances; dinners; gowns. One would say she had no conscience at all — and at a time like this!” But he went on, “‘That’s nothing, though. That can be managed when Niel gets back —if he ever does, poor fellow! — and can put his foot down on the spot. You did n’t see him, then? He was n’t there — the young man?”

Tim had never before spoken definitely of a young man.

“The young man?” she questioned. ‘“‘There were a dozen of them. Of course, she’ll have a special one: that’s part of the convention. Rhoda may cultivate — like all the rest of them — every appearance of lawless attachment; but you may be sure, dear Tim, that it’s only a pose, a formula, like the painted lips and dyed hair, which does n’t in the least mean they are demi-mondaines.”

“Painted lips? Dyed hair? Demi-mondaines?”’ Tim had wanly eehoed. ‘‘Do you really mean, Isabel, that Rhoda paints and dyes?”

“Not her hair. It’s too lovely to be dyed. But her lips, — why, have n’t you seen it? — ever since she was eighteen. It is all, as I say, a pose; a formula. They are all afraid of nothing so muchas of seeming respectable. I imagine that there’s just as much maarital virtue at large in the world nowadays as when we were young. — Who is the young man?” she had, nevertheless, ended.

“My dear, don’t ask me!” Tim had moaned, blanched and battered in his invalid’s chair. (Why would n’t he come down and live with her? Why, indeed, except that, since Frances’s death, he had felt that he must stand by, in London, and watch over Rhoda.) “I only know what I’ve heard. Amy has talked and talked. And everybody else is talking, according to her.” Amy was Frances’s sister, a well-meaning, but disturbing woman, with a large family of well-conducted, well-married, unpainted, and unfashionable daughters. “She is here every day about it. They are always together. He is always there. The poet — the new young poet. He has a heart or a chest or a stomach — something that has sent him home and that keeps him safe at Whitehall, while poor Niel fights in France. Surely, Isabel, you’ve heard of Christofara)

pher Darley? Was n’t he there? Young. Younger than Rhoda. Black hair. Big eyes. Silent.”

Silent. — Yes, there had been, beside Jane Amoret, one silent person in Rhoda’s drawing-room. And she had been aware of him constantly, though, till now, unconsciously. Very young; very pale; aloof, near a window, with an uncalculated aloofness. She reconstructed an impression that became deeper the further she went into it. Thick backward locks that had given his forehead a wind-blown look, and a gaze now and then directed on herself, a gaze grave, withdrawing, yet scrutinizing, too.

“Yes; I think, now that you describe him, I must have seen him,” she murmured; while a curious alarm mounted in her, an alarm that none of Rhoda’s more characteristic circle had aroused. “‘He was n’t living by a formula of freedom,” she reflected. “And he was n’t arid.” Aloud she said, ‘‘He looked a nice young creature, I remember.”

““He writes horrible poems, Amy says; blasphemous. There they are. I can’t understand them. He casts down everything; has no beliefs of any kind. Nice? I should think that’s the last adjective that would describe him.”

She had picked up the unobtrusive volume and found herself arrested; not as she had been by the memory of the young man’s gaze, nor yet in the manner that Tim’s account indicated; but still arrested. Very young — but austere, dignified, and strange, genuinely and effortlessly strange. So a young priest might have written, seeking in closepressed metaphysical analogies to find expression for spiritual passion. She stood, puzzled and absorbed.

“No, it is n’t blasphemous,” she said presently.

Pera

‘And he has beliefs. But surely, Tim dear, surely this young man can’t care for Rhoda.”

How could a young man who wrote like that about the mystic vision care for Rhoda?

“Not care for Rhoda!” 'Tim’s voice had now the quaintest ring of paternal resentment. ‘The most beautiful young woman in London! Why, he’s head over heels in love with her. And the worst of it is that, from what Amy sees and hears, she cares for him.”

“It’s curious,” Mrs. Delafield said, laying down the book. “‘I should n’t have thought he’d care about beautiful young women.”

And now Tim’s letter, on this December morning, announced that Rhoda had gone off with Christopher Darley; and Mrs. Delafield could find it in her heart, as she worked and pondered, to wish that her dear ‘Tim had followed Frances before this catastrophe overtook him.

“Good heavens!” she heard herself muttering, “if only she’d been meaner, more cowardly, and stayed and lied — as women of her kind are supposed to do. If only she’d let him die in peace; he can’t have many years.”

But no: it had been done with le beau geste. Tim had known nothing, and poor Niel, home for his first peace leave, had come to him, bewildered and aghast, with the news. He had found a letter waiting for him, sent from the country. Tim copied the letter for her: —

Dear NIEL:

I’m sure you felt, too, that our life could n’t go on. It had become too unsatisfactory for both of us. Luckily we are sensible people nowadays, and such mistakes can be remedied.’ You must mend your life as 1am mending mine. I am leaving you, with Christopher Darley. I am so sorry if it seems sudden; but I felt it better that we should not meet again.

Yours affectionately RHODA

“Tf only the poet had n’t had money, too!” Mrs. Delafield had thought. For this fact she had learned about Mr. Darley in London. Rhoda would never have abandoned that drawing-room had she not been secure of another as good.

Tim wrote that nothing could have been manlier, more generous, than Niel’s behaviour. He was willing, for the sake of the child, to take Rhoda back, reinstate her, and protect her from the consequences of her act; and what Tim now begged of his sister was that she should see Rhoda, see if, confronting her, she could not induce her to return to her husband. Meanwhile Jane Amoret would be dispatched at once with her nurse to Fernleigh. Tim had written to his child in her retreat, and had implored her to go to her aunt. “I told her that you would receive her, Isabel,’ so Tim’s letter ended; “‘and I trust you now to save us — as far as we can be saved. Tell her that her husband will forgive, and that I forgive, if she will return. Let her see the child. Let that be your appeal.”

Poor, darling Tim! Very mid-Victorian. “ Forgive.” Would “‘ receive” her. The words had an antediluvian ring. With what battledore and shuttlecock of mirth and repartee they would be sent sailing and spinning in Rhoda’s world. All the same, she, who was mid-Victorian in seeming rather than in reality, would make other appeals, if Rhoda came. Already she could almost count the steady heads of her intentions thrusting up as if through the ground. Even in Rhoda’s world repartee and mirth might be displayed rather than acted upon, and Rhoda might find herself, as a result of le beau geste, less favourably placed for the creation of another drawing-room than she imagined. That, of course, was the line to take with Rhoda; and as she reflected, carefully now, on what she would say to her, — as she determined that Rhoda should not leave her until she had turned her face firmly homeward, — the sound of wheels came up the road, and outside the high walls she heard the station fly drawing up at her gates. In another moment she was welcoming Jane Amoret and her nurse.

Til

Sue had not seen the child for five months now, and her first glance at her, for all its sweetness, brought something of a shock, revealing as it did how deeply she cared for the little creature. She was not a child-lover, not undiscriminatingly fond of all examples of the undeveloped, though her kind solicitude might have given her that appearance. Children had always affected her, from the cradle, as personalities; and some, like the mature, were lovable and some the reverse. Jane Amoret had already paid her more than one visit — she had been more than willing that Rhoda should find her a convenience in this respect; and she had, from the first, found her lovable. But the five months had brought much more to the mere charm of babyhood. She was now potent and arresting in

Rares her appeal and dignity. She sat in her nurse’s arms, her eyes fixed on her great-aunt, and, as Mrs. Delafield held out her hands to her, she unhesitatingly, if unsmilingly, answered, leaning forward to be taken.

She was a pale, delicate baby, her narrow little face framed in straightly cut dark hair, her mournful little lips only tinted with a rosy mauve; and, under long, fine brows, her great eyes were full of meditativeness. Rhoda, though now so richly a brunette, had, as a baby, been ruddy-haired and rosy-cheeked, with eyes of a velvety, submerging darkness. Jane Amoret’s grey iris rayed out from the expanded pupil like the corolla of a flower. There was no likeness between the child and her mother. Nor was there anything of Niel’s sleepy young countenance, with its air of still waters running shallow.

Mrs. Delafield, something of a student of heredity, saw in the little face an almost uncanny modern replica of her own paternal grandmother, whose pensive gaze, under high-dressed powdered hair, had followed her down the drawing-room in the home of her childhood. In Jane Amoret she recovered the sense of that forgotten romance of her youth — the wonderful, beautiful great-grandmother with the following eyes. Had they not, even then, been asking something of her?

“It is n’t every one she’ll go to, ma’am,” said the nurse, a3 they went up the path to the house, Mrs. Delaficid carrying Jane Amoret.

Nurse was a highly efficient example of her type — crisp, cheerful, a little glib. Mrs. Delafield had never warmly liked her, and felt convinced now, that in spite of her decorous veneer of reticence, the servants’ hall would be enlightened as to the whole story before many hours were over. Well, it could not be helped.

They went up to the big nursery overlooking the walled garden at the back of the house, where, since the morning’s post and its announcements, a great fire of logs had been blazing. Nurse made but one respectful, passing reference to Rhoda. The country air would do Lady Quentyn good. She had, nurse thought, over-tired herself of late. What else she thought, Parton and the others were soon to hear hinted. And as Rhoda’s calculated maternity had chilled her aunt on that day five months ago, so she was chilled now to think that Rhoda should have had more taste in the choice of her drawing-room than in that of her baby’s nurse.

While, in the next room, the unpleasing woman was unpacking her own and Jane Amoret’s effects, Mrs. Delafield was left alone with the child. She had found, on a shelf, a box of well-worn blocks, and seating herself in the low, chintz-covered wicker chair beside the fire, she placed them, one by one, before Jane Amoret, who, on her white wool rug, gave them a gentle attention. She had been too young for blocks on her last visit.

The old chair, as Mrs. Delafield moved in it, leaning down, creaked softly, and she remembered, a curious excitement stirring under all these recoveries of the past, that it had been condemned as really too decrepit when Peggy had been a baby. Yet the threat had never been carried out. It had gone on through Peggy’s babyhood and through the babyhood of Peggy’s children, and, unused for all these years, here it gave forth again just the plaintive yet comfortable sounds which, even more, it seemed, than another baby’s presence, evoked Peggy and her own young maternity.

The chair, the blocks, the firelight playing on the happy walls, with their framed Caldecotts and Cherry Ripes and Bubbles, all evoked that past, filling her with the mingled acquiescence and yearning of old age. And Jane Amoret evoked a past far, far more distant. Peggy had not been like the great-grandmother. None of them had ever reincarnated that vanished loveliness. But here, mysterious and appealing, it was before her; and it seemed to brush across her very heartstrings every time that, from the blocks, the child lifted the meditative grey of her eyes to her great-aunt’s face.

Far too mysterious, far too lovely, far too gentle, this frail potentiality, for any uses ever to be made of it by Rhoda, by Niel, or by nurse. And the yearning became a yearning over Jane Amoret. Yes, there the edifice rose, block by block — her

deft, deliberate fingers placed them one after the other, under Jane Amoret’s eyes, absorbed in this towering achievement. The miniature Alhambra finished, she sat and gazed, and her little chest lifted in a great sigh of wonder and appeasement. Then, her baby interest dropping, she looked round at the flames, and, for a little time, gazed at them, while her great-aunt’s hand moved softly to rest upon her head. It seemed then, as if in answer to the rapt and tender look bent above her, that Jane Amoret’s eyes were again raised and that she stretched up her arms to be taken.

“She really loves me,” said Mrs. Delafield, as touched and trembling as a young lover. She lifted her, pressing the little body against her breast; and, as Jane Amoret gave herself to the enfolding, a thought that was as sharp and as sudden as a pang flashed through her great-aunt’s mind. ‘‘I can never give her up.”

What came to her first, as she sat there, Jane Amoret’s head leaning against her, was the thought of Christmas roses. It was a gift, a miracle. And to what depths of loneliness the gift had been given; with what depths of life she answered it! But she was breathless while she tried to think, knowing something terrible in her own swift acceptance; seeing for the first time something lawless and perilous in her own nature. Never in her life had she betrayed a trust; never broken a law. Yet often, through the years, she had paused, contemplative and questioning, to gaze at something her mirror showed her, an implication that only she could see, a capacity never realized. And what she saw sometimes, with discomfort and shrinking, in those freaked eyes, those firm lips, was an untamed wildness that had come to her from much further back than a great-grandmother; something predatory and reckless, perhaps from the days of border robbers, and Highland chiefs whose only law was their own will.

She knew now what were the faces waiting to seize upon her accusingly. Not Rhoda’s. She swept Rhoda and her forfeited claim aside. Let her stay with her poet, since that was what she had chosen. It was Niel and poor Tim who looked at her aghast. But another face hovered softly and effacingly before them; a pale young face with rosymauve lips and following eyes that said, “They will never understand me. This is what I was trying to tell you, always. I knew that I was coming back. This is what I was asking you to do.”

It was superstition; it did not deceive her for a moment. Desire dressing itself in a supernatural appeal. Absurd and discreditable. But, in all truth and honour, was n’t there something in it? Was n’t there a time, once in a blue moon, for lawlessness, when it came as a miracle? Whom would she harm, really? What could his paternity mean, really, to drowsy young Niel? And could she not salve Tim’s wounds?

The only thing that could count, — she came to that at last, feeling the child, with sleeping, drooping head and little hands held within her hand, al- ' ready so profoundly her own, — the only thing was Jane Amoret herself. Had she a right to keep her from what was, perhaps, her chance of the normal, even if the defective, life? Was n’t even a bad and foolish mother better than no mother at all, and an untarnished name supremely desirable? She struggled, her eyes fixed on the fire, her hand unconsciously closing fast on the little intertwined hands within it. And with the face of the great-grandmother came again the thought of the Christmas roses, of the gift, the miracle.

She had not sought anything. She had not even chosen. It was rather as if Jane Amoret had chosen her. She need not make an effort to keep the gift. She need merely make no effort to give it back. If Rhoda came (oh, she could but pray that Rhoda would not come!), she need not find the right words for her. She had only to remain the passive spectator of Rhoda’s enterprise and not put out a hand to withdraw her from it. And, thrusting, feverishly, | final decisions from her, her mind sprang out into far projects and promises. She could, with a will, live for twenty more years yet and fill them full for

Jane Amoret. Niel must not lose his child, evidently. She would arrange with Niel. He had always liked her and turned to her. Let this be his home, and welcome. But of course, he would marry again. She could persuade him not to take Jane Amoret from her to give to a step-mother. Niel would be easy.

And Tim, now, must come, of course. Tim should, with her, enjoy Jane Amoret to the full. What a happy childhood she could make it! It was, to begin with, quite the happiest nursery she knew, this long-empty nursery of hers. In a few years’ time Jane Amoret would be old enough to have her own little plot in the garden — Peggy’s plot; and a pony like Peggy’s should come to the empty stables. She saw already the merry, instructed girl she would choose as Jane Amoret’s governess: some one young enough to play out of lesson hours; some one who would teach her to know birds and flowers as well as history and Latin. She would keep Jane Amoret’s hair cut like this, — it was the only point in the child’s array in which her taste was Rhoda’s, — straight across the forehead and straight across the neck, until she was fifteen, and she should wear smocked blue linen for morning and white for afternoon, as her own children had done. With good luck, she might even see Jane Amoret married.

Actually, she was thinking about Jane Amoret’s marriage, actually wondering about the nice little eldest boy at the manor, — while her arms tightened in instinctive maternal anxiety around the sleeping baby, — when Parton, doing her best not to look round-eyed, announced Lady Quentyn.

IV

SHE knew, as she waited for Rhoda to come up, that something she had forgotten during this last half-hour — perhaps it was her conscience — steeled her suddenly to the endurance of a test. Tim had worded it, ‘‘Let her see the child. Let that be your appeal: Would it not appease her conscience to stand or fall by that? It should be her appeal. But the only one. | | Jane Amoret had waked, and now, dazed but unfretful, suffered herself to be placed again on the rug among the blocks, one of which Mrs. Delafield put into her hands, bidding her build a beautiful big house, as great-aunt had done. The anguish of her own suspense was made manifest to her in the restless gesture with which, after that, and while she waited, she bent to put another log on the fire. Rhoda’s soft, deliberate rustle was outside. In another moment she had entered, and the effect that Mrs. Delafield dreaded seemed produced on the spot; for, arrested at the very threshold, almost before her eyes had sought her aunt’s, Rhoda stared down at the child with knotted, with even incredulous brows. ae “Oh! He’s sent her already, then!” she exclaimed. What did the stare, the exclamation, portend? “Yes. He sent her, of course, as soon as he came back.” es “But why? — until our interview is over?” “Why not? She’d been alone for a week.” Mrs. Delafield spoke with the mildness which, she determined, should not leave her. “Niel, of course, wanted to have her cared for.”

Rhoda, during this little interchange, had remained near the door; but now, perceiving, perhaps, that she had come near to giving herself away, she cleared her brows of their perplexity and moved forward to the fire, where, leaning her velvet elbow on the mantelpiece, she answered, drily laughing; “Oh! Niel’s care! He would n’t know whether the child were fed on suet-pudding or cold ham! She’s not alone, with nurse. There’s no one who can take such care of her as nurse. I knew that.” And she went on immediately, putting the question of Jane Amoret’s presence behind her with decision, “Well, poor Aunt Isabel, what have you to say to me? Father wrote that you would consent to be the go-between. He absolutely implored me to come, and it’s to satisfy him I’m here, for I really can’t imagine what good it can do.”

No; Mrs. Delafield had grasped her own security and her own danger. It had not been in remorse or tenderness that Rhoda’s eyes had fixed themselves upon her child, it had been in anxiety, lest Jane Amoret’s presence should be the signal of some final verdict against her. She had come because she hoped to be taken back; and if there was all the needed justification in Rhoda’s callousness, there was an undreamed-of danger in her expectation.

“Well, we must see,”’ Mrs. Delafield remarked; and already she was measuring the necessities of Rhoda’s pride against the urgencies of Rhoda’s disenchantment. It was Rhoda’s pride that she must hold to. Rhoda, even if she had come, had only come to make her own terms.