Rose and Rose

by E. V. Lucas

“In sickness and in health”—doctors know something about the value of that undertaking, too, and how it is honoured.

And so Rose Allinson became Rose Holt, and those of us who were nearest the young couple in kin or intimacy followed them into the vestry to wish them joy and sign the register. Having kissed my darling and written my name, I slipped away. I could not endure more. The vestry had a back door and I slipped through it, pocketed my button-hole carnation, and, after lunch, went to a sale of mezzotints at Christie’s, where I endeavoured to soothe my feelings by buying two Valentine Greens which (unless I was to die next week, when one can afford anything) I couldn’t afford. And so far as I could see then, there was no particular reason why I should not die next week—nothing, I mean, important enough to call for my continued existence.

Mrs. Eustace Holt was, I think, fairly happy in her early married life. I saw her now and then, and was not conscious of anything very wrong. She seemed to have lost tone: that was all; but I put that down largely to living in London, cooped up by bricks and mortar instead of her old free garden life. Also Eustace was not exciting. But I think she was fond of him, and I know that he was very proud of her, perhaps even to tiring her by exhibiting her too much to his friends. She was too candid to be a very easy diner-out, and too courteous not to make the effort.

And then came the tragedy. Rose’s first child died at the end of only three weeks of life. You remember what she said about wanting boys. Well, this was a boy, and Rose was in the seventh heaven of delight. She squandered herself on it. No other young mother, the nurse told me on that sad day when we buried the poor little creature, had, in her experience, been so happy. “And that, as you know,” she added to me, “is a big thing to say.”

I found my poor child inconsolable; in a kind of stupor of bewilderment and revolt against the blind stupidities of fate. To let this perfect little being fade into nothingness and allow the ugly, blundering world to go on!

She was long in recovering and longer still before she was herself again. I did all I could to get Eustace to let her come to me to convalesce, but he would not let her out of his sight, and took her to this and that health resort, and even for one winter to the Riviera.

It was nearly two years before I saw her again, and then I went up to dine and spend the night by way of celebrating my fiftieth birthday. That was in 1900.

Every doctor is asked for advice in matrimonial differences, or at any rate is made a confidant. One can have too many of such confidences; but I defy any general practitioner, however brusque and curmudgeonly, to escape them altogether. Most of us have seen so many couples that we can tell at a glance what is wrong—which brand of incompatibility is in use. For there are so many. Temper is supposed to have a monopoly in this matter, but that is far from the case. There can be incompatibility in other matters, apparently trifling, and trifling in fact unless lifelong fetters are involved. Incompatibility of temperature, for example, where the lute is rifted because the wife wants all the fresh air that windows and doors can let in, and the husband rejoices only in a vacuum. A doctor sees so many of such antipodal house-mates—I don’t say that all are married people—that he comes to divide the world into those who are healthily disposed and those whose only idea of a window is a thing to shut.

It is a truism that wedded felicity is a very fragile craft, liable to be swamped by any unforeseen wave, and it requires the most delicate seamanship, both at the helm and at the sail. I have seen marriages ruined by so pleasant a spice to ordinary intercourse as irony. Irony in a husband, and a tendency in a wife to depreciate her husband or make him a butt in public—these have much misery to answer for. Absence of mind in a husband can be fatal: an inability to look ahead, to reserve seats, to order a cab, to remember theatre tickets. And then, again, over-much presence of mind can be fatal too: an insistence on punctuality and too much officiousness about the house.

I could not tell which was the cause of the want of sympathy between Rose and Eustace, but I felt something was wrong almost directly I entered their door. Outwardly they were pleasant enough together; but there was no warmth in the air, no electricity. Rose Holt was not Rose Allinson—very far from it. But she was sweeter than ever to me; almost I could bring myself to be glad that all was not well, for it made her so tender, so thoughtfully attentive, to her old friend. It was the Rose of the middle teens over again, but with a richness and maturity added. Eustace was courteous, a solicitous host, and I felt spoilt between them. But there was something wrong. When their eyes met across the table no light kindled.