Christmas Roses and Other Stories

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“How much have you seen, my dear Aubrey, of this young lady?” she enquired.

He said, faltering, that he had seen a good deal of Miss Pickering during this spring and summer. Mrs. Pickering had been very kind, had asked him there quite often for tennis; and Miss Pickering had been far more kind, for she had played with him and he was a wretched player, though he was so fond of the game. “And we’ve had one or two little walks. She came with me to the woods this spring and helped me to dig anemone roots. Oh! I don’t pretend it’s anything at all; it’s only, I know, her kindness; I never thought it anything else. But—if you really don’t think me absurd for dreaming of it—?” He faltered to a long gazing question.

Mrs. Pomfrey now rose. She stood looking away from him, then moved towards the door. “My dear Aubrey,” she said, “I think of you what anybody who knows you must think—that the woman who wins your love is one of the most fortunate of women. Whether you are the kind of man that a girl like Miss Pickering could love, I cannot say. I’ve really seen very little of her. All that I know of her is that she is very pretty and has nice quiet manners. If she marries you, she is, as I say, the most fortunate of women.”

Mrs. Pomfrey stepped out into the little square, flagged hall. He accompanied her to the garden gate, following her speechless, while, lifting up her skirts, displaying large, flat-heeled shoes, she stepped down from terrace to terrace. She paused at the last.

“Your Alpine phlox is doing very nicely. You’ll find that by next year it will have spread to a foot across,” she said. He had put in the Alpine phlox the autumn before under her supervision. She added at the gate, “By that time there may be a Mrs. Westmacott at Meadows.”

Pale, almost tearful, he pressed her hand over the gate. “I can’t say how I thank you,” he murmured.

After a little while he was able to compose his thoughts and write his notes. Thompson took them round, and before lunch he had his answers. They could all come, except Mr. Barton, the dapper, fussy, kindly, pepper-and-salt little squire, who lived in the beautiful big house just over the nearest hill; he had gone up to London for the day.

Aubrey very much enjoyed giving little tea-parties at Meadows. In London he had not enjoyed them at all. He had given them when duty required it, and he had sometimes been very extravagant and had taken a couple of young girl cousins, up for the season, to a restaurant and a play. But he had never enjoyed these occasions. He was shy and a poor talker, and in London the demands upon one’s personality were too heavy to make his entertaining a success. The demands upon one’s personality in the country were so small and so easily satisfied; a garden talked for one and entertained for one. All his neighbours, except Mrs. Pickering, whose formal beds did not count, had gardens and were profoundly interested in them. The mild, middle-aged Carews were authorities, and to-day he remembered, with all the pressure of his new preoccupations, that he must question them about that matter of mulching.

At four-thirty he saw two parasols approaching along his box hedges—one was black and one was rose-colour; his heart stood still when he saw it. She would be wearing, then, the dress that made her look more than ever like a pink foxglove. He went down the terraces to greet mother and daughter at the gate.

Mrs. Pickering was short and stout and blonde, her slightly rapacious features—small aquiline nose, small smiling mouth, and small projecting chin—embedded and muffled, as it were, in powdery expanses of cheek and throat. She had an unsmiling, steel-blue eye, appraising, determined, deliberate, under its level bar of dark eyebrow. She did not please Aubrey. Her voice in especial, metallic yet glossy, as if with a careful veneer, disturbed him. A gossiping lady of the neighbourhood had informed him that Mrs. Pickering’s origins were quite lacking in distinction and that in her handsome girlhood she had stalked the stupid Colonel—of a quite good family—and had brought him down, resistless, at the first shot. These stories, for which he had not liked his informant the more, seemed to hover in Mrs. Pickering’s glance and smile, and her voice to preserve the flavour of many strategies and triumphs. But Aubrey did not look for long at Mrs. Pickering. She rustled in, dressed in her fashionable black and white, a long chain of steel and brilliants crossing her buttressed bosom, a crest of plumes, black and white, waving upon her head.