Christmas Roses and Other Stories

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Captain Thornton, I saw at once, as she did,—for she saw most things,—was not stupid; but he was very simple. There was a certain bewilderment on his handsome, sturdy face, wistfulness rather than delight, such as a soul newly arrived in Paradise might feel, unable to forget the passes of death and the companions left behind in suffering. He wasn’t forgetting; I felt that as I looked at him. So many of them forget. Vera, I am sure, hardly ever remembers what it all really means—all these wounded heroes. Perhaps it is natural that she shouldn’t; she has no one near in it.

Captain Thornton gazed about him quietly, and from the garden looked back at the angel who had led him there. Of course Vera must have looked like an angel to him. I haven’t described Vera, and she is difficult to describe. To say that she is pale and dark, with attenuated features and dwelling, melancholy eyes, is only the beginning of it. Of course she is getting on now,—she is nearing forty-five,—but she’s still lovely; her smile makes me think of a pearl dropped in wine, and behind the melancholy of her eyes is that well of waiting irony. She looks as soft, as tenderly encompassing, as a summer night; but she is really sharp, sharp, sharp. Thwart or vex her, and out leaps the stiletto; or, rather, it would be more exact to say, out come the claws. But women of the Vera type will always, to young men like Captain Thornton, be angels pure and simple. I don’t suppose, for one thing, that he’d ever talked intimately with any one quite like her. He came, I was to learn, from a remote country rectory where the great ladies of the neighbourhood had been unfashionable, matter of fact, and clothed for the most part in tweed and leather, and none of them would have been likely to make much, before the war, of a young soldier. Vera was making much of him, and a fashionable angel is an angel doubly equipped. He would not know what it was that made her so strange in her sweetness; but fashion of that achieved and recondite kind is like a soft incense wafted around a woman. She is first, everywhere, always, without an effort; and people who are first, if they also look like angels, win hearts as easily as they run and twist their fingers among their ropes of pearls, as Vera was doing now. She always wore her pearls; they fell together in a milky heap in her lap, and long earrings glimmered in the shadows of her hair.

Vera’s way of talking, too, is like a spell. Her voice is rather like the fountain, so low, so inarticulate, yet so expressive. She murmurs rather than speaks, with now and then a pause that is almost a soft gurgle. Sometimes it exasperates me to hear her, but sometimes even cross-grained I am charmed.

The voice purled and rippled and gurgled over Captain Thornton now. He sat on Vera’s farther hand, and Mrs. Thornton sat between Vera and me. Already, at tea-time, Mrs. Thornton had interested me. She had remained silent without seeming shy. Superficially, no doubt, she was dowdy, and superficially she looked dull, or, as I saw it, dulled; and dull and dowdy is what at tea they all put her down for. It’s curious, how in a group of highly civilized people, a newcomer, without a word or glance exchanged between them, is in a moment assessed and placed and relegated. Everybody was going to be very kind to Mrs. Thornton, that I saw, and everybody was going to relegate her; only the highly civilized can manage the combination.

Mrs. Thornton, from one point of view, had a pallid, podgy little face, with wide lips and short nose and a broad, infantile brow above eyes singularly far apart. All the same, and the more I looked at her the more I saw it, it was a delicious face; squared here, stubborn there, sweet by turns and glances. And she was of the loveliest colour, with a skin silver-white, and thick, shining, pale-gold hair, and eyes of a deep, dense, meditative blue. All her attributes, however, were invisible to Vera, and I was fully prepared for the glance with which, over Mrs. Thornton’s imitation Panama, she presently said to me: “Darling, do take Mrs. Thornton round the water-garden. It’s so lovely at this hour. Captain Thornton must wait for it till to-morrow. He’s too tired to go farther now.”

Mrs. Thornton got up at once, with her air of vague acquiescence in anything proposed, and I led her up and out and down the lime-tree alley and through the copse, where Vera, in spring, has her wild garden, to the banks of the river, the clear, wandering little stream, bridged and islanded, golden in the afternoon light under its willows and reflecting irises and meadow-sweet.

“Now we can sit down,” I said, and on a bench under a willow we did sit, Mrs. Thornton with an involuntary sigh of weariness. “I expect your husband will soon get all right here,” I said presently. “It’s such good air. Is his leg badly damaged?”

“Well, you see, he can already get about quite well with it,” said Mrs. Thornton; “but I’m afraid he’ll never be able to do any of the things he most cares for again—riding and cricket, and his soldiering, of course. He will have to give up the army. I am afraid it’s afterwards one will begin to feel all the things that one must give up. Just now all that I can think about is that he has come back alive. Have you any one out there?” she asked.

I told her about Jack and how he had got a commission at the beginning of the war and gone out in January.

“It must be even more of a wrench to have them go when they aren’t already in the army,” said Mrs. Thornton. “A soldier’s wife ought not to feel it so much of a wrench. I’m afraid I did, though.”