He cared nothing for flowers, but he had recognized clearly how markedly the three women he had adored (for it had amounted to that) had resembled each a blossom. His mother had been like a “red, red rose that blooms in June”—a Jacqueminot or a Xavier Olibo. And it was from her he had inherited the vivid personality of his youth. She had died suddenly—when he had been in the City, chained even then to the great business he was creating—boy of twenty-three though he was—and his hot young heart was almost broken; but not quite, for Alice, his wife, had crept into it then, a graceful tea-rose-like creature, white, pink-flushed, head-heavy with perfume. Violet, his only sister, had been a pale, pretty thing, modest and sweet as the flower of her name. Helen he thought was like some rare orchid, with her elusive piquant features, her copper-red hair, her snow face, her curved crimson lips, her intangible, indescribable charm—irregular, baffling.
Alice had died at Helen’s birth, but he blamed God and turned from Him, blamed not or turned from the small plaintive destroyer who laughed and wailed in its unmothered cradle. The young wife’s death had unnerved, and had hardened him too. It injured him soul-side and body: and the hurt to his physical self threatened to be as lasting and the more baneful. A slight cardiac miscarriage caught young Dr. Latham’s trained eye on the very day of Alice Bransby’s death—and the disturbance it caused, controlled for six silent years by the one man’s will and the other man’s skill, had not disappeared or abated. Very slowly it grimly gained slight ground, and presaged to them both the possibility of worse to come.
Only yesterday Richard Bransby had taken little Helen on his knee, and holding her sunny head close to his heart had talked to her of her mother. He often held the child so—but he rarely spoke to her of the mother—and of that mother to no one else did he ever speak. Only his own angry heart and the long hungry nights knew what she had been to him—only they and his God. God! who must be divine in pity and forgiveness towards the rebel rage of husbands so sore and so faithful.
Yesterday, too, he had told the child of how like a flower his Alice, her mother, had been, and seeing how she caught at the fancy (odd in so prosaic a man) and liked it, he had gone on to speak of his own mother, her “granny,” for all the world like a deep, very red rose, and of Violet, her aunt.
Helen wriggled her glowing head from the tender prison of his hands, looked up into his sharp, tired face, clapped her own petal-like little palms, and said with a gurgling laugh and a dancing wink of her fearless blue eyes, “And you—Daddy—are just like a flower, too!”
He shook her and called her “Miss Impudence.”
“Oh! but yes, you are. I’ll tell you, you are that tall ugly cactus that Simmons says came from Mexicur—all big prickles and one poor little lonely flower ’way up at the top by itself, grown out of the ugly leaves and the ugly thorns, and not pretty either.”
Bransby sighed, and caught her quickly closer to him again—one poor insignificant attempt of a blossom lonely, alone; solitary but for thorns, and only desirable in comparison with them, and because it was the flowering—such as it was—of a plant exotic and costly: a magenta rag of a flower that stood for much money, and for nothing else!
The baby went on with the parable—pretty as he had made it, grotesqued now by her. “An’ Aunt Carline’s anover flower, too. She’s a daleeah.”
Bransby laughed. Caroline Leavitt was rather like a dahlia; neat, geometrically regular, handsome, cut and built by rule, fashionable, prim but gorgeous, as far from poetry and sentiment as anything a flower could be.