“It’s curious,” Mrs. Tregaskis continued meditatively, “how quickly one ‘senses’ things, when it’s a question of a beloved child. I don’t think, though I do say it myself, that any suggestion or change of mine has jarred on Rosamund. You see, I can share in some of the associations. I fetched them away from here as little children—and I was here with them when their mother died—and now the place, in a sense, is mine as well as hers. You see it’s been a harbour of refuge for me, too, hasn’t it?”
“You don’t regret Cornwall?”
Bertha straightened herself slowly, and faced him.
“No,” she replied, deliberately, but very decisively. “The love of a place is a great thing—and I’m Cornish through and through, as you know—but, after all, other things matter more. Little Rosamund, for instance. Oh, it’s not only that she wanted me—wanted me to mother and shield and comfort her, as only a child that’s bought its own wilful experience can want one, but there’s the need of giving in her, too. You know that. I rather fancy that you, too, understand Rosamund.”
She looked at him rather enigmatically for a moment, but Ludovic was silent.
“Your mother told me once that she rather wondered if the whole thing would end in Rosamund’s becoming a Roman Catholic, too. She made friends with a woman at Francie’s convent.... But it won’t. Rosamund hasn’t the religious temperament, for one thing. All she needed was to find herself. A modern phrase, isn’t it—and one that I rather avoid, as a rule, but it’s expressive enough. The child had to learn proportion—and it was taught her through the strongest thing she knew—her love for Frances. Reality is the only medium for reality, after all. Her other emotions and phases weren’t real, you know—not even a sort of love affair that she had one year. But she had to get right down to bedrock to teach her what relative values are.”
Ludovic felt with an absolute conviction that Mrs. Tregaskis, as she had said, understood indeed.
He wondered deeply concerning Rosamund’s acceptance of such comprehension.
That the acceptance was almost matter of fact in its completeness was evident, but it was only after a time that he became aware of a deeper serenity underlying her tranquil receptivities. It was not the pale serenity of resignation, either, for he was conscious of a certain strength and hopefulness in her outlook that differed oddly from the atmosphere of unrest diffused by Rosamund Grantham as he had known her a few years earlier.
“I’m getting much happier,” she once said to him with laughing candour. “Not for any reason, you know, but just because I am.”