“You’re so uncompromising, Mrs. O’Gorman,” I said. “And you put into speech what other people only dare to think, and sometimes not even that. It’s a great privilege to be Irish.”
“Well,” she said, “all I hope is that that poor child of yours is happier with her soldier than she ever was with her solicitor.”
“Barrister,” I corrected.
“Barrister,” she said. “I knew he was a barrister but I wanted to be alliterative. Don’t forget that my father was a scholar and a poet, and he taught us to make phrases.”
Rose—the older Rose—used to write regularly. They were living at Kwala Lumpur, in the Straits Settlements, and Ronnie was doing well with rubber. He would never be really strong again, but they seemed to be happy. I wrote regularly in reply and sent news of Rose the less, whose perplexity about her mother’s disappearance and the change of home was no longer acute. In the first instance Eustace had told her that her mother had gone away across the sea, and left it vaguely there. To a child of five such voyages may seem natural.
“What message shall I give to your mother?” I wanted to ask, but I never did; nor did Rose send any message to her daughter. It seemed better to let the tie relax and gradually cease to be. Rose was never one to ask for things “both ways.”
Eustace meanwhile was still in the Argentine, and it was three years before he returned to England. His work at Buenos Aires had led to various profitable ventures into which he had been glad to throw himself as he shrank more and more from the idea of resuming life in London. The house in Wilton Place being let furnished at a high rent, and Rose being safe with me, why should he return? The hymnist may ask, with an outraged wonderment in his voice, “Can a mother’s tender care cease towards the child she bare?” but my experience is that it can do so quite easily. I have watched it in the process. As for a father’s tender care for the child he engendered, that often never begins to exist at all. Eustace, at any rate, endured separation from his daughter with exemplary fortitude.
At the end of three years he was ready, however, to face the music again, and a letter arrived saying that he would come down for the week-end to see Rose and talk things over.
He duly arrived, very grey, but looking strong and hard and handsome. He watched Rose very carefully at lunch, but seemed to have no wish to be alone with her—almost a fear that he might have to be. Rose studied him gravely, too, but merely answered his questions and volunteered nothing. I have had all my life only one rule of conduct with regard to children, and that is to treat them as if they were grown up; I ask their advice, consult with them, even conspire; and great has been my reward in consequence. But Eustace was one of those men who too consciously come down a peg or two with the young, and Rose was made uneasy. She disappointed him by her ignorance of the Argentine and expressed no interest when her father told her that in sailors’ language Buenos Aires became Bows and Arrows.
I had been troubled by the fear that he would want to take Rose away and try the experiment of being a father to her: but it was a false alarm. Once again I had been guilty of the folly of anticipating disaster—a foible to which human nature is ever too prone.