4
Then upon the smooth sands of this quietude Terror planted his ugly hoof. Rosemary was seized with illness. Unaccountably, in spite of Sheila’s lavish care, she had caught a dangerous chill.
Sheila locked up the house, and ran, already feverish with anxiety, to Mrs. Boddy. She arrived breathless, to find that amiable woman with her arms up to the elbows in soapy water.
‘It’s Rosemary—she’s ill,’ gasped Sheila. ‘Please fetch someone quickly.’ She dropped into the nearest chair, breathing hard.
The red hands leaped out of the wash-tub and were rubbed on an immaculate white apron.
‘Pore lamb!’ cried Mrs. Boddy. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
Sheila was now upon her feet again, her breath recovered. ‘I don’t quite know. She caught cold yesterday. I doctored her as best I could. But this morning she’s worse—breathing badly and almost delirious. Please go at once. She’s alone in the house—I’m going back.’
The vision of the sick child calling in vain for its mother stabbed Sheila to an impossible speed. After running a few hundred yards she was overtaken and picked up by a man driving a trap.
Back in the cottage, ‘I must keep calm. I mustn’t lose control of myself,’ she urged upon her wildly beating heart; and she climbed the stairs trying not to be terrified by the deathly silence of the place. When she opened the bedroom door she could hear the sawing noise of the child’s breathing, and fear laid a cold finger on her brain: could that be what they called the death-rattle?
‘Ah,’ she said, half-aloud, ‘if I lose my nerve I shall be useless to her in her greatest need.’ And, deciding that she could do no more, she forced herself to sit down and await with iron patience the doctor’s coming. She wondered whether she would do wrong if she opened the window she had in her first panic shut. The room was unbearably stuffy. ‘Pure air must be better than bad,’ she told herself; and unfastened the catch. The garden seemed full of sunshine and birds and the smell of honeysuckle.
She turned her head at the sound of steps on the stairs. ‘At last!’
A commanding and resolute female figure appeared in the doorway: Edward’s sister, Hypatia.
‘Well, Sheila,’ said Hypatia, humorously grim. ‘You keep open house, I see.’
Sheila stared, unable and uncaring to hide her disappointment. ‘Oh, you mean my leaving the front door open. That’s for the doctor.’
Hypatia stepped into the room. ‘Something’s wrong.’ Her tone became gentle as her glance fell upon Rosemary. ‘Rosemary—she’s ill?’
‘Yes ... Rosemary.’ Sheila’s voice lingeringly caressed the name.
‘Poor little kid,’ Hypatia murmured. ‘What is it?’
In an undertone Sheila began repeating her simple story. ‘Oh, I do wish the doctor would come!’ she broke off. ‘It may be pneumonia or something even more dreadful.’
Instantly forgetting Hypatia, she paced to the door and began running downstairs. And at that moment a trap drew up outside the house, and the doctor entered, followed at a respectful distance by Mrs. Boddy. He was a tall curvilinear man with a stoop and an air of intense preoccupation. With a perfunctory response to Sheila’s eager greeting he followed her upstairs. Furtively, with eyes veiling mistrust, she watched him approach the bedside.
Twenty seconds later her feelings towards him had totally changed. He won her heart by the smile that flickered for a moment in his face at first sight of his patient, and by the gentleness with which he unclasped Rosemary’s fingers from the woolly bear that her arm embraced. Sheila gave herself to the answering of his professional questions.
Her fears a little stilled by the doctor’s reassurances, she surrendered to Hypatia’s importunity by withdrawing with her into the garden for a few moments.
‘Now, Sheila, my dear,’ Hypatia urged, taking her arm with a sisterly caressing, ‘you’re not to worry. Worry’s fatal. The kid’s going to get well quite soon.’
‘Do you really think so?’ asked Sheila, pathetically eager.
Hypatia feigned exasperated wonder. ‘Well, I’m dashed!’ she exclaimed, in the old school-girl tone of nearly forty years ago. ‘What’s the good of calling in a doctor and paying him ridiculous fees if you don’t believe what he tells you? Didn’t Mr. New Moon say she’d be out of bed in a fortnight?’
‘With care,’ supplemented Sheila, on whose brain the doctor’s words were indelibly written.
‘Of course, with care. Without care we should all come to grief.’
Sheila faintly smiled. ‘Do you remember when you so hotly denied the reality of sin, sickness, and death?’
‘Ah, that’s long ago,’ said Hypatia good-humouredly. ‘I’ve had a varied career since then. Still, we live and learn.’
‘What’s the latest?’ asked Sheila.
‘The latest?’
‘The latest religious nostrum.’
‘Back in the fold for a time.’ Hypatia seemed to enjoy the new-found pleasure of poking fun at herself. ‘Do you remember Herbert Spencer, Sheila? But one can’t rest there. For me it’s Woman Suffrage now. It’s got to come. And I’m reading Butler again. Good stuff. Life and Habit especially, and Unconscious Memory. Jumps on Darwin for having banished mind from the universe. But you haven’t asked me why I’ve come yet. Aren’t you surprised to see me?’
‘Why have you come?’ Sheila asked obediently. ‘I’m very glad you did come,’ she added.
‘I wonder if you are really,’ mused Hypatia. ‘We’ve been too polite to each other since we were married, Sheila, too polite to be quite good friends. Never mind. I came to say good-bye. Bunny’s got a job in Cairo. Something to do with irrigation. The sort of thing he wanted.’
‘Must I congratulate you?’ said Sheila. ‘No, I won’t. You two are going to Egypt, and I shall never see you again. How very unpleasant of you.’
‘I wish you could come too. But Edward couldn’t very well move his little pet idol The Iconoclast to Cairo.’
‘Oh, that wouldn’t matter to me.’ Sheila was too weary to maintain a pretence.
Hypatia raised her eyebrows. ‘You’ve quarrelled?’
‘My dear Hypatia, can you imagine Edward being so unreasonable as to quarrel? We could part without tears, I assure you. But that doesn’t mean I can come to Cairo with you. There’s Rosemary to consider.’
Hypatia smiled grimly. ‘That’s very thin. Go and pack your trunk for Egypt, Sheila.’
Conversation was cut short by the arrival of the doctor.
‘She is already a little more comfortable,’ he assured Sheila, ‘and sleeping.’ A fugitive smile crossed his face. ‘She is talking in her sleep about fire-irons, so far as I can make out. A certain poker....’
‘Oh, that’s Poker Morgan,’ interposed Sheila, happy at the sound of so friendly a name. ‘When will you come again?’
‘Mrs. Boddy is with the patient. An admirable person. I shall call again to-night. Now, Mrs. Fairfield, are you a sensible woman?’
Sheila, eagerly submissive, hoped that she was. ‘I’ll do anything for her that you tell me. She’s all I’ve got.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ he said. ‘But if you’re a sensible woman you’ll not be alarmed when I suggest taking a second professional opinion.’
‘Please do,’ begged Sheila, who had long made a secret determination to insist on such a precaution.
‘It’s not that I’m afraid about the child. But I’m a cautious man. And I’ve never held omniscience to be part of a physician’s equipment. She has had these chills before?’
‘Frequently, but never so badly.’
‘The nose and throat are affected,’ said the curving doctor. ‘She’s acutely susceptible to cold. Treacherous east winds about. Bad place, England, for a constitution like hers. You should take her to a warm climate: warm and dry.’
With a boyish air of having finished a necessary recital he raised his hat and began picking his way across the wilderness of paddock.
Sheila glanced at her friend’s face. Triumph danced in the eyes of Hypatia.
PART THE FOURTH
Evening of the Same Day
‘SLIP away while you can, and have a look at my Thought Forms,’ Mr. Bunnard had urged the agitated young man; and by politely acquiescing Stephen Redshawe’s son had condemned himself to suffer a two hours’ mystical monologue illustrated by coloured drawings. When they at last emerged from what the old gentleman termed, with accidental aptness, his den, the Egyptian dark had come, not at one stride yet swiftly, to envelop the house at Maadi.
But the darkness of this particular April evening was but a more exquisite light: day seen through a veil of mystery, purged of its glare. Moon shed her unearthly pallor over the piazza with its pattern in ochre and green, and silvered the leaves of the lebbek trees in the garden. The intense dark blue of the sky was numerously divided by the fine mesh of the mosquito netting that clung to the supporting white columns. When Rosemary left the piano and sat down in the deck-chair opposite Redshawe, only the incessant dry rattle of crickets remained to make the stillness musical. She came like cool rain; she seemed to bring with her a dewy grace that dispelled the languor wrought in him by the too-intoxicating syringa; and he reposed gratefully in the unmeasured comfort of her nearness.
Redshawe, dilettante in letters, groped in his mind for a phrase that should symbolize the baffling quality in her: a quality as indefinable as the fragrance of musk-roses. ‘Incarnate stillness’ hovered for his choosing; but the futility of his efforts becoming thereby so patent, he abandoned the search, quite reverently sighing. Stillness, silence, the very spirit of quietude, in her became personal. She had light brown hair and olive skin; she was perhaps twenty-five years old; but her unfathomable dark eyes gazed from an oval face absurdly angelic with the sublime gravity of a child. With Mrs. Bunnard rasping on one side of him and Mr. Bunnard chirping a high-pitched chorus part on the other, Redshawe strained his ears to catch Rosemary’s soft tones. In conversation she palpitated an innocent curiosity. She focussed those twin orbs of mystery upon his religious doubts; and not all the mature intelligence of her arguments could obscure for him the shining of her angel-infancy. That very phrase flashed on him while they talked, an echo from his reading, suggesting another, from the same source, that for a while almost satisfied his longing for an adequate symbol. ‘A white celestial thought.’ Yes: Rosemary herself was a white celestial thought.
‘The fundamental cause of reincarnation,’ said Mrs. Bunnard firmly, ‘is, as you know, the lust for sentient life. Once we have conquered that——’
‘We shall have reached a consummation,’ interpolated her husband, ‘much, as Shakespeare says, to be desired.’
‘The law of periodicity, Mr. Redshawe,’ Mrs. Bunnard assured him, ‘is perfectly obvious and understandable. Night and day, life and death, sleeping and waking—all these simple alternations are but manifestations of a universal rhythm.’
Not to be outdone, ‘The systole and diastole,’ cried Mr. Bunnard, deftly inserting a smile and a phrase into the manifest gap, ‘the systole and diastole of the Cosmic Heart.’
Desperately, like a goaded animal, ‘But what,’ asked Redshawe, ‘has all this God-throb....’
A surprising ripple of laughter arrested his question and drew his eyes back to Rosemary. Sheila came generously to the rescue and distracted to herself the enemy’s fire. In a little while Mrs. Bunnard withdrew to her bedroom with the announced intention of meditating; and the battle raged less furiously between the two remaining elders: so healingly less that Redshawe had a beatific sense of being alone in the universe with his divinity.
He plunged deeply into the cool waters of her elusive beauty, and they talked eagerly, yet with harmonious pauses ... until he chanced to see that on the third finger of her left hand she wore a plain gold ring.
Too desperately stricken to pay another moment’s homage to his ideal English reticence, he in effect ran like a hurt child to Rosemary’s mother by contriving an early opportunity of solitary speech with her. He the more readily exposed his wound to Sheila because he now perceived what until the shattering to bits of his fool’s paradise had been beyond his vision: that Sheila too was suffering.
‘She’s married!’ he protested to her.
‘Rosemary?’ she wearily answered him.
‘Rosemary, of course,’ he cried, forgetting both patience and ceremony. ‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I didn’t tell you?’ Sheila repeated in astonishment.
Flushed and gloomy, he made equine plunges towards the explanation he considered so superfluous.
‘Well, didn’t you know? Of course, you must have known. Yet how should you?’
‘Know!’ echoed Sheila. ‘Know that she was married?’
‘No, no.’ Impatiently he shook the suggestion away. ‘What it means to me—you must have known that?’
‘My poor boy! What does it mean to you?’
They stared at each other with troubled eyes.
‘Everything,’ answered his helpless gesture.
Her face contracted with pain. She bowed her head. With pain, swiftly, she bowed her head. For one terrible moment he thought she was going to weep.
He put his arm round her shoulders.
‘It must be much worse for you,’ he said vaguely, wishing to help. Already he knew dimly that he, being young, would forget some day.
She moved gently away from him. ‘But we mustn’t be tragic, must we?’ she said, trying to smile. ‘You don’t quite understand.’
‘I understand something,’ he pleaded, lest his sympathy should be repulsed. ‘So very little, but something. I’ve loved her for weeks ... but she must be infinitely more to you.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of Rosemary,’ said Sheila. ‘Please don’t look quite like that,’ she almost passionately added.
He trod the fringe of the incomprehensible. ‘Ah, you were thinking.... My way of speaking perhaps reminded you....’
‘I was thinking of Rosemary’s father,’ Sheila abruptly assured him. ‘And so you are in love with my daughter, are you?’ She spoke almost coldly. ‘Would you think me very bitter if I congratulated you on losing her?’
His face was all question.
‘She would have broken your heart. She is very hard to those that love her.’
‘Hard!’ His tone was almost scornful in its incredulity. ‘With the face of an angel and the wondering eyes of a child!’
‘Yes. Have you never seen a child pick wings off flies? Rosemary is still a child. Enchanting. Sweet beyond words. But with a child’s incapacity for love.’
‘But she’s married!’
‘Yes,’ Sheila answered, with dreadful serenity. ‘She was married this afternoon, when I supposed her to be at the Lodge with her aunt. She dropped in somewhere to be married, and picked up Hypatia on the way home.’
‘But....’ Redshawe was helpless.
‘Oh, I knew it must come soon. She had been engaged for some years.’
‘May I ask to whom?’
‘The Reverend Oliver Wendell Brunt, an American gentleman.’
Redshawe paced the room. ‘And where in thunder is he?’
‘On his knees, no doubt, invoking God’s blessing on his work in China. He is a missionary. They leave to-morrow together. They’ve just had the call from God and must obey at once. Rosemary has apologized very nicely for her eccentricity. She was afraid I might make a fuss, and cry at the ceremony; so she arranged it this way. And she just doesn’t understand what it all means to me.’
‘What an inhuman crowd they are!’ muttered Redshawe. And he gasped to recall Rosemary’s serene bearing, her untroubled beauty, her lucid reasoning, her faultless rendering of Scriabine, and the placid prattle of her uncle and aunt. An incredible household.
Silence fell between them.
‘Forgive me, Mrs. Fairfield,’ broke out Redshawe after a while. ‘I shouldn’t have blundered in with my self-pity. But mine isn’t a boyish fancy or any rot of that kind. To me she is just pure beauty. I’ve always worshipped beauty. I could have poured out my life like wine at her feet.’
‘And to me,’ said Sheila, ‘she was a little helpless thing that fumbled at my breasts. She’s been my whole life for twenty-six years. I waited for her coming as for the coming of God.... Let’s go in: they’ll be waiting supper for us!’
Sadly, ‘Life seems to promise so much,’ Redshawe began, with the unique solemnity of adolescence. ‘Beauty stands in the doorway and beckons ... and when we follow she’s vanished.’
‘Lucky boy!’ with a wan smile Sheila said to him. ‘You’ll be busy writing lyrics about this to-morrow.’
The door opened noiselessly, and in the doorway, two slender white fingers resting on the handle, stood Rosemary, lightly poised on her toes as though for celestial flight. Her eyes sparkled with an almost stellar radiance; her cheeks were delicately flushed, and her lips a little parted, like the petals of an awakening rosebud. Redshawe, abashed at the memory of having criticized her for inhumanity, worshipped once more her divinity, lapsed into mute adoration; and Sheila held her breath, telling herself: ‘I may never see her stand like that again.’
‘Supper’s ready, mother. I’m sure you’re both hungry.’ The words did but tremble in the air for a moment, and then became no more than an imperishable memory for mother and lover.
‘Do let me take you in, Mrs. Fairfield,’ said Redshawe, affectionately, compassionately gallant; and as Sheila, a little tremulous but gravely mistress of herself, took the arm he offered, ‘Thank you, my dear,’ she rewarded him. But in her heart she was saying: ‘The last supper.’
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.