Then Constance’s fingers flitted back to a past page, and she read aloud a touching little entry about Joan of Posenhall, a fair maiden of twenty-two years, who, it was believed, “died of a canker in the mouth, which disease her father ascribed to the smelling of rose flowers.”
“Could it have been a poisoned rose?” I asked, for in those days many and subtle were the poisons used to get rid of a fair rival.
But Bess could not understand how a rose by its scent could injure any one. “In my true fairy-stories,” she said, “roses can only do good. They are only good fairies’ gifts, and I know they can only come out of the mouths of good girls—real good girls,” Bess repeated, “so I don’t see how a rose could have hurt poor Joan.”
Whereupon I explained matters to my little maid. After a pause Bess exclaimed—
“Well, I think ’tis best to live now, for anyhow we’ve only doctors to kill us.”
“To save us,” laughed Constance.
But Bess would not allow this. “To kill us is what Mrs. Burbidge says; and Nana says she won’t have a doctor in at no price for herself.”
Then Bess jumped up from her chair, and declared inconsequently that it was time to feed her puppy, and darted out of the room, and Constance and I were left alone. Upon which we fell to chatting about the great quilt. “I have chosen the flowers, as you know,” she said. And she enumerated one after another their old-world musical names. “And now I want charming words about sleep,” she added.
I suggested from Sir Thomas Browne’s “Religio Medici”: “Make my sleep a holy trance,” or “On my temples sentry keep,” again from the same author “Come as thou wilt, or what thou wilt bequeath,” from Drummond of Hawthornden, or again, “Men like visions are, Time all doth claim,” or “He lives who dies to win a lasting fame.”
“You must not also,” I said, “forget a beautiful line from Mrs. Barrett Browning: ‘He giveth His beloved sleep.’”