Rose and Rose

by E. V. Lucas

But how often we are in error in our notion of what other people are feeling! And how difficult it is to learn not to continue to make such mistakes! Eustace was harbouring no such grudge; he held me innocent; he even went so far as to wonder, when we were alone, if he himself might not somehow have been to blame. He could lay nothing specific to his charge; and yet. . . . But no, it could not be through fault of his own. Try as he might—and he had passed sleepless nights in reviewing the past—he could not recall ever having failed in any direction whatever in his duty as an affectionate and solicitous husband.

The letter that Rose had left for him, he averred, when it came to essentials, said nothing. He did not show it to me but gave me the sense. It expressed sorrow at her failure to make him a worthy wife, regret at the collapse of their dream, and then said that she was sure that when he thought it all over he would understand, and, understanding, forgive. But if he could not forgive he would forget.

“Forget!” Eustace exclaimed. How could he forget? How could he ever forget? The shame of it too.

But he must not inflict his misery on me. That would be unfair, and I naturally had my own disappointment and grief to dispel.

We were sitting over our tobacco, late—too late for me, for I was very tired and the contemplation of spilt milk has never much attracted me. Would I tell him, he asked, of my own affairs? What was the health of the neighbourhood? Good? All the same, I must agree that it was extraordinary, incredible even, that his wife, the mother of his child, should find it possible to do this—this—he hated to be hard on her—but he was bound to call it, this scandalous thing? To leave her home in Wilton Place, one of the most charming and convenient houses in London, every one said: to leave her circle of friends, hers and his—was not that all amazing and beyond credence? As for himself, he would say nothing, except that barristers, by the very nature of their calling, are peculiarly in a position to be protected by their wives rather than made by them to look foolish if not despicable. How thankful he was that when he was called to the Bar he had decided to specialize and not take up advocacy. The spectacle of a leading divorce court counsel himself unable to retain his wife’s affections would be too ludicrous; his career would be finished. As it was—but his mind was in a whirl on the whole question of his future.

That I felt sorry for him as he laid bare his wounded ego, I need not say. No one could have failed to pity him. But to see him so blind to any but his own misfortune, so incapable of putting himself for an instant into Rose’s place, or to realize that such a woman must have suffered much and long before she could take such a step, was to withhold a certain measure of sympathy.

He would not, he began again, inflict any more of his perplexities on me. It was not that that he had come for. Would I mind if he took the key and went for a walk? He had no desire for bed and I must be weary.

I was rising to comply with this exceedingly welcome suggestion when he began again. What was not the least extraordinary part of the whole mystery, he said, was the circumstance—mark this!—that Rose had never given the faintest indication of unrest, dissatisfaction. How could one account for it? It was not as if he had been cool or careless or in the slightest respect neglectful. He taxed his memory in vain in the attempt to collect a single instance. As to his having given any of the ordinary causes for jealousy that was laughably out of the question.

He laughed now, to illustrate the impossibility, and his hollow travesty of mirth gave me deeper knowledge of the poor fellow than all his words. If he had only known that such complete failure to provide a wife with cause for jealousy is no surety of married bliss.

None the less, he went on, guiltless as he held himself to be, he could not keep at bay the suspicion, the reflection, that a man is not deserted by his wife without some reason. What it could be passed his comprehension, but he had the gnawing fear that it existed. Could I offer any suggestion? I had known Rose longer than anyone else, even though she was an immature girl when she left me.