Grey Roses

by Henry Harland

II.

Mrs Sandryl-Kempton sat before the fire in her wide, airy, faded drawing-room, and thought of the Theodore Vellan of old days, and wondered what the present Lord Vellan would be like. She had got a note from him that morning, despatched from Southampton the day before, announcing, 'I shall be in town to-morrow—at Bowden's Hotel, in Cork Street,' and asking when he might come to her. She had answered by telegraph, 'Come and dine at eight to-night,' to which he had wired back an acceptance. Thereupon, she had told her son that he must dine at his club; and now she was seated before her fire, waiting for Theodore Vellan to arrive, and thinking of thirty years ago.

She was a bride then, and her husband, her brother Paul, and Theodore Vellan were bound in a league of ardent young-mannish friendship, a friendship that dated from the time when they had been undergraduates together at Oxford. She thought of the three handsome, happy, highly-endowed young men, and of the brilliant future she had foreseen for each of them: her husband at the Bar, her brother in the Church, and Vellan—not in politics, she could never understand his political aspirations, they seemed quite at odds with the rest of his character—but in literature, as a poet, for he wrote verse which she considered very unusual and pleasing. She thought of this, and then she remembered that her husband was dead, that her brother was dead, and that Theodore Vellan had been dead to his world, at all events, for thirty years. Not one of them had in any way distinguished himself; not one had in any measure fulfilled the promise of his youth.

Her memories were sweet and bitter; they made her heart glow and ache. Vellan, as she recalled him, had been, before all things, gentle. He was witty, he had humour, he had imagination; but he was, before all things, gentle—with the gentlest voice, the gentlest eyes, the gentlest manners. His gentleness, she told herself, was the chief element of his charm—his gentleness, which was really a phase of his modesty. 'He was very gentle, he was very modest, he was very graceful and kind,' she said; and she remembered a hundred instances of his gentleness, his modesty, his kindness. Oh, but he was no milksop. He had plenty of spirit, plenty of fun; he was boyish, he could romp. And at that, a scene repeated itself to her mind, a scene that had passed in this same drawing-room more than thirty years ago. It was tea-time, and on the tea-table lay a dish of pearl biscuits, and she and her husband and Vellan were alone. Her husband took a handful of pearl biscuits, and tossed them one by one into the air, while Vellan threw back his head, and caught them in his mouth as they came down—that was one of his accomplishments. She smiled as she remembered it, but at the same time she put her handkerchief to her eyes.

'Why did he go away? What could it have been?' she wondered, her old bewilderment at his conduct, her old longing to comprehend it, reviving with something of the old force. 'Could it have been...? Could it have been...?' And an old guess, an old theory, one she had never spoken to anybody, but had pondered much in silence, again presented itself interrogatively to her mind.

The door opened; the butler mumbled a name; and she saw a tall, white-haired, pale old man smiling at her and holding out his hands. It took her a little while to realise who it was. With an unthinking disallowance for the action of time, she had been expecting a young fellow of eight-and-twenty, brown-haired and ruddy.

Perhaps he, on his side, was taken aback a little to meet a middle-aged lady in a cap.

III.

After dinner he would not let her leave him, but returned with her to the drawing-room, and she said that he might smoke. He smoked odd little Cuban cigarettes, whereof the odour was delicate and aromatic. They had talked of everything; they had laughed and sighed over their ancient joys and sorrows. We know how, in the Courts of Memory, Mirth and Melancholy wander hand in hand. She had cried a little when her husband and her brother were first spoken of, but at some comic reminiscence of them, a moment afterwards, she was smiling through her tears. 'Do you remember so-and-so?' and 'What has become of such-a-one?' were types of the questions they asked each other, conjuring up old friends and enemies like ghosts out of the past. Incidentally, he had described Porto Rico and its negroes and its Spaniards, its climate, its fauna and its flora.

In the drawing-room they sat on opposite sides of the fire, and were silent for a bit. Profiting by the permission she had given him, he produced one of his Cuban cigarettes, opened it at its ends, unrolled it, rolled it up again, and lit it.