Rose and Rose

by E. V. Lucas

The three Sturgis sisters—though none of them was destined to soar to the realms of bliss as Mrs. Julius Greville—fulfilled part of the destiny that the other Rose, all unconsciously, had planned for them, by becoming the most solicitous foster-mothers to her daughter. Out of their unselfishness and their leisure they suggested that Rose should go to them for lessons: a proposal that I was very glad to accept; and so it came about that the eldest gave Rose an hour a day with pencil and paint brushes in the studio (Rose’s grandfather’s studio), and the other two each an hour in more general instruction. Having a full measure of the Quaker placidity to keep them contented with their lot, they had no wish to roam, and were thus ever to be depended upon.

Not that their lot was to be despised, for they had turned Theodore’s house into a very beautiful serene place. It was a Georgian house, panelled in white, with many recesses; and the three sisters had filled these with blue china. The gods dispense their gifts capriciously, and upon these descendants of a sect vowed to hostility to the arts and graces they had conferred the most exquisite taste. A series of provident ancestors had put them into a position to gratify most of their wishes, and their home kept pace with modern culture in all its quieter aspects.

Rose, you see, if she had not many friends, had very good ones. Her chief lack was the chief lack of many only children—contemporaries. How much happier she would have been had she playmates of her own age, I cannot say; but it is absurd to pretend that without them she was unhappy.

And this I can say with certainty: she kept me young. She did not actually transform me into a contemporary, but she so arranged it that there was very little awkwardness or fear between us. I am not pretending to have been in her complete confidence, I am merely stating the fact that we were under very little constraint together.

Even had we been real contemporaries, how could we really have known each other! A man may guess at a man’s thoughts, may fairly safely measure him by himself; but how can a man guess at a girl’s thoughts? Speech reveals so few of them. If while one is speaking twenty words one can be thinking of a hundred different things, what of the silent pauses? How they must teem! Where was my Rose when her blue eyes looked through their black lashes into space? How could I follow her unaided? Or would she have aided me? Not would, but could. Could she have told me? Could any of us tell all our thoughts in any given hour? Even if ships that passed in the night signalled to each other the whole passenger list there would always be a few of the steerage and some of the crew unnamed. And if those were revealed, there would still be a stowaway!

One matter never mentioned between Rose and me was her mother’s faux pas. What the child knew about this I did not discover, or wish to. I am old-fashioned enough to prefer to talk of grown-up matters only with grown-up people. The longer the gaiety and happiness of children can be unclouded by knowledge of the difficulties and disasters which can proceed from our emotional instincts, the better. So far as I was concerned Rose was ignorant of her mother’s rebellion. We talked about her as a child, but we did not touch on recent history. English families are marvellous in their capacity to regulate conversational reservations.

One funny little pet turn of speech to which Rose was addicted comes back to me very vividly as I write. Every one has favourite locutions, and Rose had the habit of prefacing many of her remarks with the phrase “As a matter of fact”; only, being mostly in a hurry to express herself, she used to contract the last three words to one: “As a maffact.” Very few minutes could pass, when we were together and she was unburdening herself on this or that question, without her beginning a sentence: “As a maffact, Dombeen.”

When the War came Rose was thirteen and I was sixty-five; and we were therefore both non-combatants. But it did not leave us—any more than anyone else—untouched; for I was old enough to be saddened and shocked by the calamities that it bred; and Rose was young enough to be ripe for the new Hedonism which the peace inaugurated and which is still in full swing. Ronnie, the other Rose told me, longed to be in it, but was too delicate, and they remained on their estate throughout its lengthy course.

The War found the old Colonel still living, but he did not long survive. He was not of the kind that spends its breath in lamenting the decadence of the Army in present times—I never heard him couple the Service and the dogs—but he had had his little autobiographical weaknesses, in which border skirmishes played no inconspicuous part, and in the presence of the gigantic drama in Belgium and France he found his occupation gone. No one wanted to listen to him any more; and he was too aged and infirm to be of any use. The War must have hit countless other retired officers in this way and in a moment have dried up their streams of reminiscence and emptied all their boasts. The Colonel was, however, a rural gentleman and not a frequenter of clubs, and his lot was comparatively easy; but I saw a steady decline in his strength, and he did not long survive the death of two of his grandsons in the Battle of Mons.

The Colonel was not our only loss. Mrs. O’Gorman had been declining for some time, and in the early spring she also left us.