Rose and Rose

by E. V. Lucas

Until a nurse was found—the Wilton Place nurse having refused to live in the country so far from the Knightsbridge barracks—Rose had a bed in my dressing-room.

One of her timidities was concerned with moths. For some odd reason those foolish gentle insects, who have never been known to harm anyone but themselves, terrified her, and often and often she would wake me in the night with the cry, “Dombeen, there’s a mawf in the room!” or “Come quick, Dombeen, there’s a little mawf somewhere.”

She grew out of her fears, of course, and in time occupied a more distant apartment; but for a long while I rarely got through the night without some such call—the little monkey even employing it as an appeal when there was no danger, as the boy called “Wolf! Wolf!” in the fable. But no matter how suspicious I may have been, I always went. “Dombeen, Dombeen, there’s a mawf in the room”—how I wish I could hear that now! “Little Mawf” became one of my names for her.

It was with the new Rose as with the old: my patients were intensely interested in her. Not many, however, were the same as those who had been so solicitous about her mother. Some had left the neighbourhood; some preferred my assistant; some were dead. Mrs. O’Gorman was, I think, Rose’s favourite, in spite of the years between them—the old lady now nearing the eighties and the child not yet six. Seventy years is a big dividing gulf, and yet when they were together there was little sign of it, such was the adaptability of both.

The first time that I took Rose to tea, Mrs. O’Gorman gave her two presents—a fearsome agate brooch (she had an early Victorian taste in ornaments) and a paint-box that had been her companion on sketching rambles when she was active. It was one of the old-fashioned boxes, with the colours in cakes and a drawer underneath with a porcelain palette in it and many fascinating accessories. The agate might as well have been thrown into the river, but the paint-box was a treasure beyond price, and it played a great part in Rose’s destiny, for it turned her thoughts to art, and some of her grandfather’s skill soon began to manifest itself.

Having this resource, Rose needed less entertaining than any child I ever knew. Give her a pencil and a piece of paper and she would be happy until the paper was covered on both sides. It is odd that her mother had no desire to draw and no aptitude: that the talent should skip a generation and manifest itself again in Theodore’s grandchild; but so it was. Rose the elder had beguiled her loneliness by telling herself stories; Rose the younger scribbled men and women and little girls and little boys and dogs and huntsmen and princesses and cats on the blank spaces of letters and the insides of envelopes or whatever scraps of paper could be found, from morn till dewy eve.

Ronnie’s people took too much delight in illness to be happy in their aloofness from me. Disregarding a certain solidarity in the medical profession, they had assumed that Dr. Vaughan in the next town would be only too willing to obey their capricious summonses whenever the slightest pain made itself felt in either of their systems. But Vaughan was a friend of mine by no means desirous of supplanting me anywhere or of getting a footing in the Hall. He therefore refused to go. Doctors, it is notorious, must obey calls of distress or bear the consequences, but not when other doctors are nearer, and, as he knew why I was not called and knew also that Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson knew that he knew why I was not called, he was in a very strong position—strengthened by the alliance of the telephone, which enabled him to make quite sure of his ground. Most telephone wires, could they be induced to repeat all that they have ever transmitted, would have some odd things to tell, and the conversations between Vaughan and myself while this feud was flourishing would not be least amusing. We had the great advantage of having been contemporaries at the same hospital, and it is, at bottom, only contemporaries who really understand each other. Old and young may meet, but contemporaries mingle.

In the face of the confederacy between Vaughan and myself the unhappy Fergussons, racked with gout, were forced to send for Vaughan’s rival, a young bumptious and climbing practitioner who had just set up in the place and was pulling every wire for social advancement, but who, for all his latest learning and diplomas, was wanting in the most important quality that a medical attendant can possess, the power to suggest confidence. There are patients who would languish under the care of the most brilliant physician in the world lacking the gift, and who would recover quickly though only a farrier, possessing it, should stand beside their bed. Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson were therefore very awkwardly placed.

Their next step was really rather Napoleonic and made Sir Edmund’s rise to wealth clear to me. They determined to bring down a new doctor who should be both agreeable to them and capable as a healer and establish him in our very village, not only as a constant attendant upon themselves, but as a menace and source of annoyance, and even loss, to me. But here they were baulked by the goodness of my friends. One cannot be a doctor in the same rural neighbourhood all one’s life, and succeed a father who also had been there for years and years, without setting up certain relationships that are thicker than water. I had made no effort to do so, but simply through being one’s more or less amiable self, and liking my work rather than not, I had done so. If I had consciously toiled to be popular, I might have failed; but I had just gone on my way, neglected no one, at any rate not scandalously, spoken my mind when it was asked for, and hurried, I hope and believe, very few of my neighbours under the turf. To have built up this structure of friendliness was my part in the frustration of Sir Edmund’s masterful campaign. His own contribution to his failure was his neglect to have become the owner of any property in the district except the Hall and its satellite cottages. The result was that when his nominee tried to rent a house in which to set up his rival practice, he could not get one. Anybody else could have had one—an avowed burglar even, with all his tools about him—but not a doctor!

The situation was not made any easier for the Fergussons by the palpitations of their cook—a very excellent cook—who, on being forbidden to visit me about her malady, at once gave notice. If she might not have the doctor she wished, she explained, she should certainly leave. Nor would she stay out the month either, she added, but would cheerfully forfeit her wages in order that she might the sooner submit her agitated heart to my examination. Good cooks having never grown on blackberry bushes, and this one being especially clever with chicken’s livers (one of Sir Edmund’s many culinary weaknesses), her departure was a very serious blow to him, in a very sensitive part.