WHITE ROSES.
If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only.
Some one sent Dolly a great bunch of white roses that afternoon; they came in with a late breath of summer—shining white with dark leaves and stems—and, as Dolly bent her head over the soft zones, breathing their sweet breath, it seemed to carry her away into cool depths of fragrance. The roses seemed to come straight from some summer garden, from some tranquil place where all was peace and silence. As she stood, holding them in her two hands, the old garden at All Saints' came before her, and the day when Robert first told her that he loved her. How different things seemed already—the roses only were as sweet as she remembered them. Every one seemed changed since then—Robert himself most of all; and if she was herself disappointed, was she not as changed as the rest?
But these kind, dear roses had come to cheer her, and to remind her to be herself, of all that had gone before. How good of Robert to think of them! She wished they had come before he left, that she might have thanked him. She now remembered telling him, as they were driving down to the river, that no roses were left in their garden.
'Very pretty,' said her mother. 'Take them away, Dolly; they are quite overpowering. You know, Colonel Witherington, how much better people understand these things at Trincomalee: and what quantities of flowers I used to receive there. Even the Admiral once ordered in six dozen lemon-shrubs in tubs for my fête. As for the people in this country, they don't do things by halves, but by quarters, my dear Colonel.'
Mrs. Palmer was still agitated, nor did she regain her usual serenity until about six o'clock, when, in answer to a second note from Lady Sarah, the persecuted Duchess sent a blank card for Mrs. Palmer to fill up herself if she chose.
When Dolly came to say good-night to Lady Sarah she held her roses in her hand: some of the leaves shook down upon her full white skirts; it was late in the summer, and the sweet heads hung languid on their stalks. They were the last roses that Dolly wore for many and many a day.
'So you are going,' said Lady Sarah.
'Yes,' said Dolly, waiting for one word, one sign to show that she was forgiven: she stood with sun-gilt hair in the light of the western window. 'Dear Aunt Sarah, you are not well. You must not be left all alone,' she went on timidly.
'I am quite well—I shall not be alone,' said Lady Sarah. 'Mr. Tapeall is coming, and I am going to sign my will, Dolly,' and she looked her niece hard in the face. 'I shall not change it again whatever may happen. You will have no need in future to conceal anything from me, for the money is yours.' And Lady Sarah sighed, deeply hurt.
Dolly blushed up. 'Dear Aunt Sarah, I do not want your money,' she said. 'You could never have thought——'
'I can only judge people by their deeds,' said Lady Sarah, coldly still. 'You and George shall judge me by mine, whether or not I have loved you;' and the poor old voice failed a little, and the lips quivered as she held up her cheek for Dolly to kiss.
'Dear, dearest,' said Dolly, 'only forgive me too. If you mean that you are going to leave me money, I shall not be grateful. I have enough. What do I want? Only that you should love us always. Do you think I would marry Robert if he did not think so too?'
'Mademoiselle! Madame is ready,' cried Julie, coming to the door, and tapping.
'George, too, would say the same, you know he would,' Dolly went on, unheeding Julie's call. 'But if you give him what you meant for me, dear Aunt Sarah; indeed that would make me happiest, and then I should know you forgive me.'
The door creaked, opened, and Mrs. Palmer stood there impatient in her evening dress.
'My dear Dolly, what have you got to say to Aunt Sarah? We shall be dreadfully late, and Robert is fuming. Do pray come. Good-night, Sarah—so sorry to leave you.'
Rather than keep dinner waiting people break off their talk, their loves, their prayers. The Middletons' dinner was waiting, and Dolly had to come away. Some of the rose-leaves were lying on the floor after she had left, and the caressing fragrance still seemed to linger in the room.
Dolly left home unforgiven, so she thought. Aunt Sarah had not smiled nor spoken to her in her old voice once since that wretched morning scene.
But, in truth, Lady Sarah was clearer-sighted than people gave her credit for; she was bitterly hurt by Dolly's want of confidence, but she began to understand the struggle which had been going on in the girl's mind, and so far, things were not so sad as she had imagined at first. They were dismal enough.
When Marker came to tell Lady Sarah that Mr. Tapeall and his clerks were below, she got up from her chair wearily, and went down to meet the lawyer. What did she care now? She had saved, and pinched, and laid by (more of late than any one suspected), and Dolly was to benefit, and Dolly did not care; Robert only seemed to count upon the money. It is often the most cautious people who betray themselves most unexpectedly. Something in Henley's manner had annoyed Lady Sarah of late. He had spoken of George with constant disparagement. More than once Robert had let slip a word that showed how confidently he looked for Dolly's inheritance.
One day Mrs. Palmer had noticed Lady Sarah's eyes upon him, and immediately tried to cover his mistake. Not so Dolly, who said, 'Robert! what are you thinking of? How should we ever be able to afford a country-house if you go into Parliament?'
'Robert thinks he is marrying an heiress, I suppose,' said Lady Sarah.
'No, he doesn't,' Dolly answered; 'that would spoil it all.'
This was all the gratitude poor Lady Sarah had saved and pinched herself to win.
Lady Sarah, as I have said, might have been a money-lover, if her warm heart had not saved her. But she was human, and she could not help guessing at Robert's comfortable calculations, and she resented them. Did she not know what it was to be married, not for herself, but for what she could bring? Was that to be her Dolly's fate? Never, never! Who knows? Let her have her own way; it may be best after all, thought Lady Sarah, wearily. She was tired of battling. Let George inherit, if it so pleased them. To please them was all she had wished or hoped for, and now even the satisfaction of pleasing them in her own way was denied her. But her girl was true; this she felt. No sordid thoughts had ever come between them, and for this she thanked God in her heart.
'You may burn it, Mr. Tapeall,' said Lady Sarah, as the lawyer produced, a beautiful neatly-written parchment, where Miss Dorothea Vanborough's name was emblazoned many times. 'I want you to make me another. Yes, make it directly, and I will sign it at once, and old Sam can bear witness.'
'I shall be happy to receive any further instructions.' said the lawyer; 'I shall have to take the memorandum home with me to prepare——'
'I will sign the memorandum,' said Lady Sarah. 'You can have it copied, if you like, Mr. Tapeall; but I wish to have this business settled at once, and to hear no more of it. There is a pen and some ink on that table.'
'Where did you get your roses?' said Robert to Dolly. 'I thought you told me they were over.'
'Did not you send them?' said Dolly, disappointed. 'Who can have sent them? Not Colonel Witherington?'
'Mr. Raban is more likely,' said Mrs. Palmer. 'Julie tells me he came to the door this afternoon.'
'How kind of him!' cried Miss Vanborough.
'It was quite unnecessary,' said Robert. 'Nobody, in society, carries bouquets now.'
'Then I am not in society,' said Dolly, laughing; but although she laughed, she felt sad and depressed.
When the door opened and Mrs. Palmer, followed by her beautiful daughter and Henley, came into the room at Mrs. Middleton's, Colonel Witherington declared, upon his honour, they quite brightened up the party. White and gracious with many laces and twinklings, Mrs. Palmer advances, taking to society as a duck takes to the water, and not a little pleased with the sensation she is creating. Dolly follows, looking very handsome, but, it must be confessed, somewhat absent. Her mother had excellent taste, and had devised a most becoming costume, and if Dolly had only been herself she would certainly have done credit to it; but she had not responded to Mademoiselle Julie's efforts—a sudden fit of dull shyness seemed to overpower her. If Frank Raban had been there she would have liked to thank him for her flowers; but Mrs. Middleton began explaining to Robert how sorry she was that his friend Mr. Raban had been obliged to go off to Cambridge. Dolly was a little disappointed. The silvery folds of her dress fell each in juxtaposition; but Dolly sat silent and pale and far away, and for some time she scarcely spoke.
'That girl does not look happy,' said some one.
Robert overheard the speech, and was very much annoyed by it. These constant depressions were becoming a serious annoyance to him. He took Dolly down to dinner, but he devoted himself to a sprightly lady on his left hand, who, with many shrieks of laughter and wrigglings and twinklings of diamonds, spurred him on to a brilliance foreign to his nature. Young as he was, Robert was old for his age, and a capital diner-out, and he had the art of accommodating himself to his audience. Mrs. Palmer was radiant sitting between two white neckcloths: one belonged to the Viscount Portcullis, the other to the faithful Witherington; and she managed to talk to them both at once.
Dolly's right-hand neighbour was an upright, rather stern, soldierly-looking man, with a heavy white moustache.
He spoke to her, and she answered with an effort, for her thoughts were still far away, and she was preoccupied still. Dolly was haunted by the sense of coming evil; she was pained by Robert's manner. He was still displeased, and he took care to show that it was so. She was troubled about George; she was wondering what he was about. She had written to him at Cambridge that afternoon a loving, tender, sisterly little letter, begging him to write to his faithful sister Dolly. Again she told herself that it was absurd to be anxious, and wicked to be cross, and she tried to shake off her depression, and to speak to the courteous though rather alarming neighbour on her right hand.
It was a dinner-party just like any other. They are pretty festivals on the whole, although we affect to decry them. In the midst of the Middleton dinner-table was an erection of ice and ferns and cool green grass, and round about this circled the entertainment—flowers, dried fruit, processions of cut glass and china, with entrées, diversities of chicken and cutlet, and then ladies and gentlemen alternate, with a host at one end and a hostess at the other, and an outermost ring of attendants, pouring out gold and crimson juices into the crystal cups.
It is fortunate, perhaps, that other people are not silent always because we are sad. With all its objections—I have read this in some other book—there is a bracing atmosphere in society, a Spartan-like determination to leave cares at home, and to try to forget all the ills and woes and rubs to which we are subject, and to think only of the present and the neighbours fate has assigned for the time. Little by little, Dolly felt happier and more reassured. Where everything was so common-place and unquestioning, it seemed as if tragedy could not exist. Comedy seems much more real at times than tragedy. Three or four tragedies befall us in the course of our existence, and a hundred daily comedies pass before our eyes.
Dolly, hearing her mother's silver laugh and Robert's cheerful duet, was reassured, and she entered little by little into the tune of the hour, and once, glancing up shyly, she caught a very kind look in her neighbour's keen dark eyes.
He knew nothing of her, except a sweet girlish voice and a blush; but that was enough almost, for it was Dolly's good fortune to have a voice and a face that told of her as she was. There are some smiles and blushes that mean nothing at all, neither happy emotion nor quick response; and, again, are there not other well-loved faces which are but the homely disguises in which angels have come into our tents? Dolly's looks pleased her neighbour, nor was he disappointed when he came to talk to her; he felt a kindness towards the girl, and a real interest when he discovered her name. He had known her father in India many years before. 'Had she ever heard of David Fane?' Colonel Fane seemed pleased when Dolly brightened up and exclaimed. He went on to tell her that he was on his way to the Crimea: his regiment was at Southampton, waiting its orders to sail.
'And you are going to that dreadful war!' said Dolly in her girlish tones, after a few minutes' talk.
Colonel Fane looked very grave.
'Your father was a brave soldier,' he said; 'he would have told you that war is a cruel thing; but there are worse things than fighting for a good cause.'
'You mean not fighting,' said Dolly; 'but how can we who sit at home in peace and safety be brave for others?'
'I have never yet known a woman desert her post in the time of danger,' said Colonel Fane, speaking with gentle, old-fashioned courtesy. 'You have your own perils to affront: they find you out even in your homes. I saw a regiment of soldiers to-day,' he said, smiling, 'in white caps and aprons, who fight with some very deadly enemies. They are under the command of my sister, my brother's widow. She is a hospital-nurse, and has charge of a fever-ward at present.'
Then he went on to tell Dolly that his brother had died of small-pox not long before, and his wife had mourned him, not in sackcloth and ashes, but in pity and love and devotion to others. Dolly listened with an unconscious look of sympathy that touched Colonel Fane more than words.
'And is she quite alone now?' said Dolly.
'I should like you to know her some day,' he said, 'She is less alone than anybody I know. She lives near St. Barnabas' Hospital; and if you will go and see her sometime when she is at home and away from her sick, she will make, not acquaintance, but friends with you, I hope.'
Then he asked Dolly whether she was an only child, and the girl told him something—far more than she had any idea of—about George.
'I might have been able to be of some little use to your brother if he had chosen the army for a profession,' said Colonel Fane, guessing that something was amiss.
Dolly was surprised to find herself talking to Colonel Fane, as if she had known him all her life. A few minutes before he had been but a name. When he offered to help George, Dolly blushed up, and raised two grateful eyes.
There is something in life which is not love, but which plays as great a part almost—sympathy, quick response—I scarcely know what name to give it; at any moment, in the hour of need perhaps, a door opens, and some one comes into the room. It may be a common-place man in a shabby coat, a placid lady in a smart bonnet; does nothing tell us that this is one of the friends to be, whose hands are to help us over the stony places, whose kindly voices will sound to us hereafter voices out of the infinite. Life has, indeed, many phases, love has many a metempsychosis. Is it a lost love we are mourning—a lost hope? Only dim, distant stars, we say, where all was light. Lo, friendship comes dawning in generous and peaceful streams!
Before dinner was over, Colonel Fane said to Dolly, 'I hope to have another talk with you some day. I am not coming upstairs now; but, if you will let me do so, I shall ask my sister, Mrs. William Fane, to write to you when she is free.'
Robert was pleased to see Dolly getting on so well with her neighbour. He was a man of some mark, and a most desirable acquaintance for her. Robert was just going to introduce himself, when Mrs. Middleton bowed to Lady Portcullis, and the ladies began to leave the room.
'Good-by,' said Dolly's new friend, very kindly; 'I shall ask you not to forget your father's old companion. If I come back, one of my first visits shall be to you.'
Then Dolly stood up blushing, and then she said, 'Thank you, very much; I shall never forget you. I, too, am going away—to India—with——' and she looked at Henley, who was at that moment receiving the parting fire of the lively lady. There was no time to say more; she put out her hand with a grateful pressure. Colonel Fane watched Dolly as she walked away in the procession. For her sake he said a few civil words to Henley; but he was disappointed in him. 'I don't think poor Stan Vanborough would have approved of such a cut-and-dry son-in-law,' the Colonel said to himself as he lighted his cigar and came away into the open street.