Rose and Rose

by E. V. Lucas

I hardly need say that many of my patients, even the serious ones, took the liveliest interest in Rose, and since nothing is so vexing to the matron and even the spinster as the spectacle of a single man bringing up a young girl, I was naturally well supplied with advice. All my patients asked about her, but as for the hypochondriacs, they made Rose a staple of conversation—conversation being their principal requirement from a doctor. Having reported on the progress of their hypothetical maladies, they got to work at once on Rose’s progress. What was she doing? What was she reading? Had I any new amusing remarks of hers to repeat?

I must not give the impression that I was wilfully taking fees from these people for nothing. They had just enough discomfort or fear of illness to warrant the request that I should add them to my visiting list, and I was never an Abernethy, to call them humbugs and refuse to waste my time under their roofs; but with less money or more to do they would have forgotten my existence. Indolence and riches, in others, are the medical profession’s best friends.

A country doctor in those days was valued for his sociability as much almost as for his skill, and there are cases when a pleasantry or two can do more good than the whole pharmacopoeia. If he can see the opportunity of being useful as a mind-doctor as well as the ordinary repairer of disordered bodies, I think that the practitioner should embrace it and take a fee for it without a blush.

My own circle of semi-friendly patients was large. There was Mrs. O’Gorman, for instance. Mrs. O’Gorman was the widow of an Irish landlord, a little lady, then between fifty and sixty, with a great gift of shrewdness and no belief in mincing her words, who was just sufficiently rheumatic to get three half-hours a week of my society, and perhaps an extra one if I chanced to be passing that way on an irregular day. She lived in luxury in a big house, with a companion called Julia, and read everything that was published both in books and periodicals; and everything that she read reminded her of something. You know the elusive Irish mind leaping from branch to branch; well, she had that, and a marvellous memory at the back of it. But whatever might be her theme, she always came back to Rose, who now and then was deposited at her house by me in the morning and picked up on my return from my rounds, replete with exotic food and burdened with gifts.

“And how’s the colleen to-day?” Mrs. O’Gorman would say, after the latest ravages wrought by uric acid on her system had been carefully described. “Damn the stuff! What’s it for, anyway? Just to keep doctors in affluence, I suppose. If the good God had asked me to help Him in making the world, which I’d take shame to put my signature to as it is, I’d have left uric acid out of it. Yes, and doctors too! Every doctor is a confession of failure on the Creator’s part.

“Have you read the article in the ‘Nineteenth Century’ on Genesis? Is it the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ Julia, or the ‘Contemporary’? It doesn’t matter which, they’re both half a crown and not worth it. The man sweeps away the Garden of Eden like dust on a piano. And that reminds me, we’re going to London to hear Arpeggio. They say he’s better than Liszt, although he has short hair. But he’s a devil among the ladies, just the same.

“It’s odd, isn’t it, how these musicians—Julia, go and get the Doctor a glass of sherry and some cake—it’s odd, isn’t it, that no woman can resist them? Now, a fiddler I can understand. He stands up to it and makes those fine movements with his delicate hands; but a pianist, all bent over the box, banging away—what can they see in him?

“And tell me, what are you doing about Rose’s music? She ought to be taking lessons. A girl’s out of it if she can’t play some instrument, and it’s useful too if a dance should be improvised. Let’s see—has she good arms? If she has, she ought to play the fiddle, or the harp, only the harp’s so clumsy to take about. You want a cab every time. But it’s a lovely instrument. I heard Jenny Lind sing to a harp—the sweetest voice. There’s some fellow in the ‘Saturday Review’ this week says that Patti has never been approached: but Jenny Lind was worth a thousand of her. Patti has too much art: you notice it; Jenny Lind made you forget everything but the music. Has Rose any voice? I must get her to sing to me when you bring her over next. But you bring her so seldom.

“There’s no need to be jealous of me, you know, I’m only an old woman. But you’ll be getting jealous of all the men directly; you won’t be able to help it. Every day she’s growing up, you know, and every day some boy you’ve probably never heard of is growing up too—you don’t know where he is, and Rose doesn’t know, and he’s never heard of Rose. There he is, somewhere, in his little Eton jacket, with big ears and a snub nose as likely as not, and every minute he’s drawing nearer to Rose and she’s drawing nearer to him. And neither of them knowing a thing about it! Isn’t that terrible? Just Fate arranging everything and we all out in the cold; and no one so out in the cold as the parents and guardians!

“And what about yourself,” she went on, for she was remorseless where the relations of the sexes were concerned. “How old are you? Thirty-five, shall we say? And Rose is seven. Ah! Then when she’s twenty you’ll be forty-eight—the dangerous age! That’s the time for you to look out, Doctor. You’ll want all your strength of mind then, because we mustn’t marry our wards, you know.”