Christmas Roses and Other Stories

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“I wish her joy of Crofts! She’s a complete woman of the world, of course, and she knows how to put up with all sorts and conditions of bores. She’s taken on Lady Sophy because she’s your friend. It’s pitiful—it’s unbelievable to see her so misjudged!—Take me from you! I’ve never gone there but she’s asked me why you didn’t come. She still sends you flowers pretty well every day. Those are hers, I see. I’m glad that you’ve deigned to put them in water.”

The tall sheaf of carnations, white and rose and yellow, that stood in a jug on a shelf in the studio must, evidently, have come from Mrs. Dallas’s garden. No other person grew such carnations. The garden at Ashleigh Lodge, this pleasant country house that they had taken for the six summer months, was not its strong point, and Mrs. Dallas had kept them reinforced from her abundance. Rupert associated the carnations, their soft and glowing colours, their formal grace and spicy sweetness, with the whole growth of his devotion to Mrs. Dallas. He fixed his indignant eyes on them now.

“Of course I put them into water. I am going to arrange them and take them into the drawing-room presently,” said Marian with her hateful calm. “But they give me no more pleasure. Nor does she. She is like them. They are heartless flowers and she is a heartless woman. I see quite plainly now what I didn’t see before. She’s that type,—the smiling, calculating siren. She lives for admiration; she’s herself only when she has someone at her feet, and she’s seen to it that you should be,—though I’m bound to say that you haven’t made it difficult for her. It fits in with all the stories.”

Rupert, at this, turned away and went out. He thrust his hat firmly down on his fair locks and swung his stick as he strode by the little footpath through the woods. Bitter disappointment with Marian surged in him, and hot anger, but above all an atoning tenderness that seemed almost to break his heart in its longing to protect and justify the woman so traduced by her. His head throbbed and drummed as he went. To have it come to this! To have such hands laid on it—their love! their silent, hidden love! That Mrs. Dallas returned his love he seemed to see, with many other things, clearly, rapturously, if with trembling, for the first time to-day. He saw it with Marian’s unworthiness; Marian’s unworthiness had shown it to him; and now, exulting, he claimed it. She loved him, veiling the depth in her vagueness, her aloofness, her indulgent irony. His mind retraced, with yearning gratitude, the steps of their relationship. No one had ever been to him what she was. How she helped and lifted him! How juvenile and undiscriminating in their happy acceptances were Marian’s appreciations of his work beside Mrs. Dallas’s half-idle comments. He had read through to her, in manuscript, all his last novel; and Marian had not seen it yet. He had not wanted to read it to Marian; and she, besides, had been very busy with her painting.

Mrs. Dallas had listened to the novel almost every day, sitting in the shade of her veranda, in her white dress, with the hands that, unless she were gardening, seemed always exquisitely idle, yet that in their idleness seemed to dream and smile;—he could see the white skin, the delicate finger-tips, the pearls and rubies slipping down, and his heart contracted with a pang and ecstasy as he saw himself holding her hand, kissing it. He must kiss it, to-day, and he must tell her. For she needed him; he was sure of it. She needed him terribly. If she lifted him, yet how much, too, he could lift her, out of the lethargic shallows and sullen quagmires of her life.

She could not be happy with her husband. He felt himself shut his eyes before the retrospect of what the disenchantments and disasters must be that lay behind her. If she had taken great risks, with that heart of highest courage he divined in her, if she had faced great sacrifices for her present husband, what wonder that her loveliness was now clouded by that irony and languor? She was not kind to Colonel Dallas; he could not hide from himself that she was not kind to him; but, as he owned it, he yearned over her with a deeper comprehension of tenderness, feeling his rights the greater. How could she be kind to the selfish, complaining, elegant old man?—for, to Rupert, Colonel Dallas’s fifty-five years seemed old. She never said anything actually sharp or disagreeable to him—even when he was at his most fretful and tiresome; but when he was least so she was not any the kinder, and by her glances, by the inflections of her cool and indolent voice in answering him, she displayed to the full, to others and to himself, did he take the pains to see it, how dull and how tiresome she found him. No; she was like a weary, naughty child in this; and seeing her as a child, with a child’s faults—and did it not prove how unblinded his love must be that he should see it?—he felt himself fold her to his heart in a tenderness more than a lover’s; a paternal passion was in it; he had known that it must be in true love; he had said so in one of his books. How his books would grow from his knowledge of her!

II

HE had now passed through the woods and crossed the road and entered the footpath that ran down to Woodlands, the small house encircled by birch and fir woods where, for now some four or five years, the Dallases had pitched their errant tent. One could reach it, also, by the road; but Rupert always took this short cut that brought him out at a little gate opening on the upper lawn. There was an upper and a lower lawn at Woodlands; on the upper Colonel Dallas had a putting-green; the lower was a tiny square surrounded by Mrs. Dallas’s beds of carnations. Rupert, when he emerged upon the putting-green, could look down past the red-tiled roofs and the white rough-cast walls of the house at the carnations, massed in their appointed colours—from deep to palest rose, from fawn and citron to snowy white—among flagged paths.

Mrs. Dallas had told him, in one of her infrequent moments of communicativeness, that during years of wandering as a soldier’s wife—her first husband, also, had been a soldier—she had come to be known as the woman who could make things grow anywhere. She had grown flowers in sands and marshes. She had snatched it might be but the one season of fulfilment from the most temporary of sojournings—in China, in India, in Africa. Sometimes only bulbs would grow; sometimes only roses; but what she tried for, always, and had never attained in more perfection than at Woodlands, was carnations. They were her favourite flower and they atoned to her here, she said, for living in a house that made her always think of an ornamental bottle of some popular dentifrice, so red and white, so fresh and spick and span, and with such a well-advertised air, was Woodlands. Her carnations were the only things of which he had ever heard her speak with feeling. Rupert, as he looked down at them from the upper lawn and descended the stone steps, felt his heart beating violently.

A veranda ran along the front of Woodlands, and Mrs. Dallas was sitting on it, just outside her drawing-room windows. The shaded depths of the room behind her glimmered here and there with the half-drowned brightness of crystal, porcelain, lacquer,—the things, none very good but all rather charming, that she had picked up for a song in the course of her wanderings; and she sat there, rather like a siren indeed, at the mouth of her cavern, its treasures seeming to shine in the translucent darkness behind her as if through water. Rupert, remembering and accepting the simile, saw her as a siren, a creature of poetry and romance, though he recognized that her poetry, like her romance, was hidden from the ordinary observer. Even to his eyes she always appeared first and foremost as a woman of extreme fashion, and his other perceptions of her were tinged with the half-tormenting, half-delicious pungency of this one, for Rupert had known till now no women of fashion. He had passed his youth, until going to Oxford, in a provincial town, where his father, an admirable and sagacious man, was a hard-worked doctor; and his only glimpses of society had been in his encounters, always displeasing to him, with Marian’s tiresome and conventional kinsfolk and the few haphazard contacts in London that came in the way of a young writer. Mrs. Dallas might embody poetry and romance, but she also embodied luxury and the exercised and competent economy that made it possible. She might have to live in small, gimcrack Woodlands and do without a motor; but she had her maid. The slices of bacon at breakfast were carefully computed; but the coffee was of the best and blackest.