Rose and Rose

by E. V. Lucas

You see what an imp she could be!

“Honor is writing a description of a visit to Chamounix,” Rose went on. “I don’t know what the Lowcester Literary Society would do if the Sturgises hadn’t come to liven it up.”

“We got on very well before they arrived,” I replied.

“Miss Sturgis was in the garden,” Rose continued. “She’s wonderful with flowers, they say. If she just put a walking-stick into the ground it would grow. I expect that you and she together would have the most stunning garden in the world. And she’s not really old, not more than thirty-eight. Don’t you think that married people should be nearly of an age? Some day, when I have enough courage, I shall ask Honor—she’s the easiest, I think—why they’ve never married. With all their money, too! But Quaker girls often don’t, I believe. It’s funny, because I should think they’d make wonderful wives, so placid and sensible, don’t you know. What do you think, Dombeen?”

“I’m sick of the whole subject,” I replied.

Eustace was exhibited not only to me—and, I am aware that, to ordinary prospective bridegrooms, these probationary visits (probationary, but too late for remedy) must be a very trying ordeal and we ought not to be too hard—but to the Strattons. What Rose’s cousins thought of him I have no means of knowing, but I suppose that girls are as critical of other girls’ fiancés as we can be of the young women whom our friends so mistakenly believe to be Minervas or Venuses. But Mrs. Stratton, even if she may have had a touch of envious regret that Eustace had not first seen her daughters and fallen to one of them, was pleased with her new nephew. Or so I gathered from a letter to me in which she congratulated me upon Rose’s alliance with so promising a counsel and so worthy and seemly a man, and went on to refer with satisfaction to the cessation of unfortunate rumours which the engagement would bring about.

Eustace, I found, liked her, and had remonstrated with Rose, but with infinite patience, about her antipathy to the lady. It was her first disappointment in him.

Mrs. Stratton had expressed herself as eager that Rose should be married from her house, and Rose was willing. I was glad that she was, for many reasons: I did not, for instance, want the wedding in our church, or the reception in our house, with Eustace’s people all about; I did not want to see Rose’s husband driving away with her into a new life, alien to me, from my door, her door. I could not bear the idea of continuing to entertain the crowd after their departure, when any decent man would wish to be alone. These were selfish enough reasons, but also natural. I deny that they lay me open to any very severe censure.

At the same time I should have liked it had Rose said that only from her true home would she be married. But she did not. Not improbably she had that desire, but was anxious to spare my feelings. She knew that Eustace could never be congenial to me, and least of all as her captor.

I went to the wedding, of course; and I have never been more miserable. It was enough that my Rose was standing there at the chancel steps; but there was more. This was my first wedding for many years, and I was startled by the service. The gravity and solemnity of the promises exacted from each—such promises as not even angels are asked to make and keep, for there is notoriously no marriage or giving in marriage among them—filled me with gloom and foreboding and a sense of injustice. It seemed wrong to ask any human beings—and particularly boys and girls—to commit themselves in this way. I wondered if barristers when being married have thoughts of the Divorce Court in their minds—that overworked department of the profession where the morbid and inquisitive assemble day after day to gloat over the fragments that remain when all these sacred bonds and assurances have been broken. “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” I heard Eustace repeat after the clergyman. But did he? Does any husband? What would be a husband’s attitude if the next morning his wife said that she wanted his property—all the worldly goods with which he had publicly endowed her—at once? The commonest cause of married unhappiness that I know of is the refusal of husbands to give their wives even a requisite fraction of their worldly goods for current household expenses. But the words will go on being repeated at the chancel steps for many a year yet.