Rose and Rose

by E. V. Lucas

This brought him to the purpose of his visit, which he could assure me had not been to force me to listen to his tale of woe at all. Would I, to put it briefly, would I let him leave Rose with me? He should feel absolutely at peace if I would. There was no one else whom he could trust in the same way. He had many relations, it is true, but—well, there it was. And somehow there was a kind of fitness in it. I had brought up his own Rose, who was the most beautiful creature he should ever meet—here he almost broke down and I admired him for it—and, well, and—here he broke down completely.

I confess to being deeply touched by the confidence implied in his request; and I shivered as I remembered my unfounded suspicion that he was likely to hold me to blame, at any rate in part, for his tragedy. It seemed to me as high a compliment as could be paid, that he, with his poor torn feelings and his pride all in rags, should be willing to place his daughter under the care of the man whose possible laxity had been responsible for her mother’s defection.

But the question would have to be considered very thoroughly. The responsibility would be very great, nor was I in some ways as well fitted to become a little girl’s foster-father as I had been, twenty years ago, when the other Rose had come to me. I was then young enough to be an active playmate and I was flexible. I had now become not only older but a man of fixed habits, many of which would have to be broken. Could I break them, and did I want to break them? For Rose’s child (could she have engineered so complicated a business as having one without the assistance of anyone else) I would do anything, but this was Rose’s-and-Eustace’s child, and that made so much difference. I could be sorry for Eustace, but never could I like him, and supposing that some of his least admirable characteristics manifested themselves now and then in his offspring, might I not become actively antipathetic? Human nature can be so unreasonable, so unjust, and I pretended to no immunity from illogical aversions.

Nor was I in any need of a constant companion. Since Rose’s marriage I had tended more and more to eremitical consolations—to my prints and gardening—whenever my patients permitted me. Nor was the personnel of the place of the kind that it had been when Rose’s mother had come “for good.” In those days, as I have told—and very likely told twice—I had old Hannah to help me. But Hannah was now a rheumatically crippled paying-guest at Lowestoft who could do nothing for me even if I again lured her forth. And the march of progress had established a cash chemist near enough to my rounds to lead me to give up dispensing, and so there was no longer Wellicum for the new Rose to help and hinder and besiege with questions. The same march, in another department of its attack upon the goodness and oldness of the days that are gone, had substituted a motor-car for my horses and traps, and so there was also no groom for Rose to help and hinder and besiege with questions. There was a chauffeur, it is true, but a man who has to do with machinery does not compare, as guide, philosopher and friend of small inquiring persons, with a man who has the care of horses.

A gardener I still had, though Briggs was dead; and neighbours, among them Mrs. O’Gorman, now getting on in years, but with all her faculties; and some kind of a spurious, inferior Hannah could be obtained; and if Rose liked animals she could be provided both with a pony and a boy to look after it. None the less, it was a great problem and I had very serious doubts; yet I knew I should say yes. And I should say it with the more confidence because of Suzanne. Suzanne was my sheet-anchor. It is true that I could not consider her attitude to the elopement very sound: it was indeed far too lenient; but I seemed to be surrounded by old women with advanced sympathies (perhaps all old women at heart side with love’s rebels?), and Suzanne’s profound affection for Rose’s mother could not but make her careful over the little girl.

But as we get older we become more self-protective; so I gave no promise, but shook hands with Eustace and said that I would think it all over and let him know in the morning what I decided. Upon this promise he permitted me, to my great joy, to go, at a very late hour to bed. My last waking thought was one of satisfaction that he had not, at any rate, said anything about band-beating.

If we are all to be arraigned at the Judgment Seat and put finally in our places, why not wait till then? Let God dispense favour and disfavour, rewards and punishments, that being His métier, and meanwhile let me be unjudicial and kind. That had been for so long my creed that I was staggered when, not long after, Ronnie’s father, with whom I had been on amicable, neighbourly terms for years, and with whose interior I was too intimately acquainted, cut me dead in the post office.

The next afternoon her ladyship, Ronnie’s mother, failed to acknowledge my salutation, and I knew that my disgrace was complete. Obviously it was I who was to blame for Rose’s wickedness.

That evening I received by hand a letter from Sir Edmund stating that after what had happened it was the wish of himself and his wife that I should never darken his door again. I remember the phrase distinctly—never darken his door: he must have carried it in his mind from a melodrama witnessed in his youth. Much as they had esteemed me in the past, the letter continued, and much even as they were indebted to me in my capacity as a doctor, they could never forget that their poor son’s affections had been basely stolen—all ill and weakened as he was—by a woman whom I had brought up. They did not say that it was the direct effect of my loose training, but that was the suggestion. Their hearts were broken, their heads were abashed, and they had lost their only child, the prop of their old age and declining years, and it could never have happened had not Rose been my ward and grown up in my house, in that village, as a neighbour of their own. Under the circumstances I must see that further intercourse between them and me was an impossibility. And the remark applied also to my assistant. The letter ended with a request for my account.

My answer was chiefly an acknowledgment, but I could not refrain from suggesting that while I had been bringing up the girl who had run away with their Ronnie, they had been bringing up the boy who had run away with my Rose. Were we not equally bereaved and distressed and even ashamed, they and I? But nothing but a cheque came in reply to this.