The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

However in the end she fell ill—very ill; then the secret weaknesses revealed themselves, and the doctor shook his head over them. We saw that governessing days were over, and her relatives were communicated with. Her father sent out money for her needs and for a first-class passage, and when she seemed able to travel we sent her back to him in the care of a trained nurse. The doctor thought she might live to reach her home, but he was not sanguine.

Well, she did, and is there still, bless her heart. At any rate I trust so, she was a few weeks ago. Although the secret weaknesses seem permanent and she risks her life every winter that she spends in England—unfortunately, the Riviera, substitute for the more beneficial and beloved Australia, is not always practicable—I anticipate that she will be a hale old woman for many years after I am gone.

Through all the long interval between her parting with us at B—— and my meeting with her again, she kept up a loving correspondence, and every letter was a sigh for me to come home or a sigh to be back herself in the sunny land where she had been "so well and happy." I had not the leisure to answer half her letters, but when I was suddenly confronted with the opportunity of my life, and sat down to inform my English friends of the treat in store for them, it was with special satisfaction that I wrote to the one who, I knew, would hail the news with more genuine joy than anybody.

It was not until September that I found time to pay my first visit to her. She lived in Kent, not a hundred miles from Maidstone, to which town she journeyed to meet me—all in the wind and rain which were so bad for the secret weaknesses. Partridges being the only living creatures that my husband was then interested in—they had been available to the gun three days—I went alone. Later on, just before we sailed for home, I went down to her for a last week-end, and he followed to fetch me and to shake hands with her before we left.

On that 4th September when I met her first after the long absence a leading London newspaper made what now seems to me an astounding statement. It declared that "we" had had "the most depressing August ever known in England." All I can say is (and I trust I am not giving a pair of rose-coloured spectacles away) that I have no recollection of the circumstance. It was not a depressing August to me—I can swear to that—and newspapers are notoriously sensational. "Ever known in England" is absurd on the face of it, as the utterance of a probably young man, and certainly of a man whose memory would not reach even as far as the Coronation of Queen Victoria. But I do remember, and frankly admit, that it was a wet day when I went to Kent for the first time. Not only wet, but cold.

But that only made the home-coming to C.'s hearth and heart the warmer.

Warm I knew it would be, but even the loving correspondence, undiscouraged by its frequent onesidedness, had not prepared me for the discovery I made of my peculiar and permanent place in her regard. Of the many happy experiences of life, few can match that of finding you have been one of the deities of a faithful heart for over twenty years of absence without knowing it. But that was only one of the surprises of the day. Having stupidly missed the significance of first-class passages and frequent Riviera winters, I had supposed myself bound for the sort of home that you assume your nursery governess comes from, whereas I arrived at a good country house, with fifty acres of estate to it, the property of her family for generations, and now belonging to her and three sisters jointly; an unpretentious establishment certainly, but handsomely appointed and correctly administered—not like the bush parsonage into which she had fitted herself so unassumingly. When packing in the morning I had rejoiced in the innocence of my heart that, for once, I need not bother myself with a lot of luggage; and I took for my week-end a bag which at a pinch I could have carried in my own hand. When evening came, and a bare-armed and bare-shouldered guest to meet me, and I had nothing but a short cloth skirt and a high-necked blouse to make a toilet of, I thought of something that an experienced globetrotter, fresh from the West African wilds, had once told me. "One thing I have found," said he: "wherever you go, if you haven't been there before," and he was speaking of the least likely places, "it is never safe to go without your evening clothes." I shall not forget that in future. The irony of fate was in it when C. offered me a black satin dinner-gown of her own. Sad—indeed, wild—as I was to be the one to seem to show disrespect to her house, it was something of a comfort to me to find that I had grown so fat in England (from seven stone five on landing to eight stone two the day before this day) that I could not make it meet by inches. I would sooner go to dinner in my petticoat than wear a stitch of anybody else's—even hers, like a daughter as she was; but I could not damp her loving solicitude by saying so.

She heaped luxuries upon me, even luxuries that she could not afford (because I know just how far a quarter of the income of even a nice estate as this was, in the chronic bad times of British agriculture, would go, and that she supplemented it by selling plants from her garden, and sometimes in other ways). When, after our great gossip over our tea by the drawing-room fire, I went upstairs to make bricks without straw, as it were, in my preparation for dinner, I found my pretty bedroom, in which the fine old mahogany shone like glass, exhaling her thoughtfulness all over it. In Australia, where your friends' buggies are also their luggage carts, and where railway porters are so precarious, you get into the habit of reducing your travelling kit to the minimum, and a bulky dressing-gown is one of the things that can be done without for a day or two, if you have an overcoat with you. I had left mine behind, and lo! there hung from a chair by my warm fireside a gorgeous robe of silk, embroidered outside, padded within, and beside it a pair of quilted satin shoes to match—to go to my bath with, although assuredly not meant for such humble use. That was the sort of thing. When a carriage was had all the way from Maidstone, and kept with no regard for the expense of wasted hours, I used the privilege of an old friend and mother to remonstrate with her.

"Oh, don't!" her face and voice checked me from doing it again. "If you only knew what this is to me!" Well, I did know, and it was knowledge to make one bless one's luck. How little we are aware of it when we are setting bread upon the waters! I had been absolutely unconscious of responsibility for this which came back to me after so many years.

It was only from Friday afternoon to Tuesday morning that I could stay with her on this occasion. But the best was made of that short time as far as she could manage it. I saw as much as possible of the famed Garden of England. Two months later, when I paid her the second visit, I saw a great deal more. Both times my luck in English weather was "in." My very first morning in Kent dawned bright and beautiful—after that cold and rainy eve—and the day was all delightful.