“Any more than it’s in you,” Rosalie said, with a flash of intuition.
“I’m a man, not a woman,” Fred retorted.
“But Lucy’s different. He wants this to be for always.”
“Well, it won’t be—with you,” Fred said brutally. “You’ll break Lucy’s heart before you’ve done with him, and you won’t be able to help it.”
“I will help it.”
“No. It isn’t your fault. You’ll always attract love, and you’ll give it—though never as much as you get.”
Fred pushed back his chair and got up.
“That’s enough talking. I don’t know what I’ve said such a lot for. I don’t, as a rule. Come out into the woods.”
“Are there woods?”
“Yes.”
“I’d rather stay here,” said Rosalie faintly.
“That’s not true.”
“I suppose it isn’t. And it’s only this one evening in all our lives. You do know that, don’t you?”
“I only know one thing,” said Fred, and his voice—suddenly gentle—might have been his brother’s.
Rosalie, likewise, only knew one thing—and it was like a tidal wave, towering and powerful and inescapable, before her. She did not, indeed, know whether she had any wish to escape it, but before allowing herself to be engulfed she made her last stand.
“You know we’re mad—we ought not to be doing this—we ought not to be here together at all. Think of Lucy.”
“You’re not going to think of anybody but me,” said Fred.
His eyes and his voice and his touch alike compelled her.
“Very well,” said Rosalie, suddenly reckless.
The moment the decision was taken, she characteristically lost every thought except. that of the immediate present.
An insane happiness possessed her.
She forgot Lucy, and her own scruples, and there was no thought in her mind of the future, so inescapably rooted in the present.
(7)
John Meredith, on the return of his wife and daughter from London, grumbled that Rosalie looked washed-out and tired to death.
“It can’t be helped,” his wife told him. “Girls have a very tiring time, just before their wedding, always. Clothes and things. Besides, it was terribly hot in London.”
“I suppose you know what you’re talking about,” Meredith said doubtfully.
Rosalie, in reply to enquiries, answered that she was rather tired but that of course there was nothing the matter.
Her father believed her without question, her mother because she wanted to do so. Secretly, she thought that perhaps Rosalie was afraid of marriage and its unknown implications, and wondered whether she ought to talk to her.
She could not make up her mind to do so, and the days before the wedding slipped by.
Fred Lemprière had not returned from London, but Fanny and Tom Ballantyne were again at The Grove—Fanny constantly offering precedents for the wedding arrangements from her own experience, and being always either contradicted or ignored by her mother.
Kate had long since returned from her visit to the Newtons. She was very quiet, now, and helpful. Anyone noticing her specially might have seen that a new and curious uncertainty was gaining upon her almost daily and all her young, natural self-confidence slowly seeping from her. But no one, actually, was noticing Kate in any special way.
She was gentle and rather timidly affectionate towards Rosalie, but never claimed any of her time or made the old impetuous, imperative demands upon her. It was rather Rosalie who seemed to seek Kate, although she exchanged no confidences with her, but talked about the wedding preparations, and Kate’s bridesmaid’s frock, and the people who were to be invited by Cecilia to The Grove before the wedding day to see the presents, since there would be no room for the display in the Merediths’ little house.
Rosalie’s relationship with Lucy had, to all appearances, altered not at all. They spent as much time together as possible, riding, and sometimes walking with hands intertwined along the dusty, quiet lanes, where nothing was ever to be met with but an occasional farm-cart or a labourer trudging home from work.
Lucy was passionately in love, and Rosalie responded to his love-making because response was instinctive to her, and because he could rouse her emotionally and make her forget, as she was always ready to do, everything but the moment.
Once or twice he fixed on her the half-sad, half-ironic gaze of his light hazel eyes, one eyebrow lifted and a wholly unamused smile on his lips.
At those moments, Rosalie felt certain that he knew at least something of the conflicting feelings that she was trying all the time to stifle within herself.
But neither of them said anything.
On the eve of the wedding, Fred came down from London to The Grove.
Cecilia had been furiously bemoaning the West Indies business that she declared had been keeping him away.
On the same morning, a registered packet arrived for Rosalie through the post, containing his wedding present—a startlingly magnificent bracelet of twined rubies, diamonds and pearls. Enclosed with it was Fred’s card, bearing only his initials and a date—that of a fortnight earlier.
Rosalie thrust the card into the bottom of the old trinket-box that she had had ever since her fourteenth birthday, but the bracelet was displayed with the other presents.
“It’s perfectly magnificent! “cried the irrepressible and exultant Aunt Maude. “The finest thing you’ve got—except the bridegroom’s pearl necklace. Really, these Nabobs——!”
“West Indian taste,” observed John Meredith.
Lucy, when he saw the extravagant jewel, only lifted his eyebrow higher than ever.
Rosalie did not go down to The Grove again after Cecilia’s party, which preceded the wedding by two days.
On the last afternoon of her girlhood, she asked Kate to come up to St. Brinvels, and Kate came.
“I wanted you to spend it with me,” said Rosalie.
She looked very pale and the temporary loss of her apricot-bloom colouring made her eyes more than ever like blue-green pools of light in her face.
She was gentle and affectionate with Kate.
They sat in the shady hill-side garden, in the shabby old deck-chairs that Rosalie had pulled, laughing, out of the summer-house on the day that Lucy had first come up to St. Brinvels to see her.
“Mother won’t let me help to get things ready for to-morrow. She’s got Aunt Maude, and Mrs. William Williams and Miss Jones from the village. She says I’m to rest.”
“You look rather tired,” Kate said timidly, “but very pretty. You’ll be lovely in your wedding dress. Fanny wants to know if you’ve got plenty of invisible hairpins. She says she hadn’t, and her veil pulled her hair.”
They both laughed.
“I expect I have,” said Rosalie. “Please thank Fanny—it was very kind of her to think of it.”
“She thinks of odd things, doesn’t she?” Kate murmured. “There’s something I want to say.”
Rosalie looked round, but said nothing.
“Will you forget about my having been so—hateful—before I went away? I’ve been very sorry, Rosalie.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rosalie said gently. “Were you very unhappy, poor little thing?”
“Yes.”
“Please don’t be, any more.”
“I’ll try not,” said Kate humbly.
Then she saw that Rosalie was crying.
“Oh, what is it?”
“Nothing. It’s just that I’m tired. Don’t tell anyone, please—please.”
“It isn’t about anything to do with me, is it?”
“No. It’s nothing at all. Don’t let Lucy know—or anyone. I’ll be all right—don’t say anything.”
“I promise.”
Kate, crouching on the grass beside Rosalie, touched the long, slim fingers half fearfully and found her own hand clasped in return.
She remained faithfully silent while Ro
salie struggled with sobs, and felt wonderingly glad that Rosalie’s hand should be grasping hers, as though for comfort.
At the same time she knew, dimly and yet certainly, that Rosalie’s tears and Rosalie’s need of comfort were not in any way related to her.
They were caused by a grief that no word or deed of hers could reach and to the origin of which Kate’s only clue was a profound intuitive conviction that her conscious mind would not admit.
Somewhere, within herself, Kate unknowingly registered that intuitive conviction, never again to lose it.
(8)
Rosalie’s wedding-day dawned with a wet, white September mist curling up from the valley to meet the clouds that hung over the Welsh mountains. By ten o’clock the sun had broken through and the larch-trees showed green on the hill-side, amid lingering ribbons of vapour.
Rosalie, still in her nightdress, stood at her open window and looked out with troubled eyes.
She had shed no further tears since the previous evening and shed none now.
Her decision was made, and she told herself that she would never regret it. Lucy was deeply in love with her, and if she cared less for him than he did for her, it should not mean that she would make him suffer. Rosalie understood her own processes well enough to know that, when she and Lucy were actually together, he could make her believe that she cared for him far more than she actually did. He had charm, and it had its hypnotic effect upon her.
If she had never met Fred, or Fred had never made love to her, she would have believed that in her response to Lucy’s ardours lay happiness and fulfilment, for she had been, and was still, in love with him.
But her feeling for Fred, devoid alike of trust and of repose, tore at her heart bringing neither happiness nor hope, and forcing her to realize that, because she loved him against her will, her judgment, and her conscience alike, her love was irrevocable, without escape.
Presently she was in her white silk dress, her long veil was pinned over her golden clouds of hair and crowned with clusters of orange-blossom, and her mother was in tears before her, repeating that she looked beautiful.
Aunt Maude was there, too, briskly telling her sister not to give way and ecstatic in admiration of the long string of pearls that was Lucy’s wedding gift to his bride, and the diamond star that Cecilia had given her to fasten her veil.
Rosalie felt herself becoming absorbed by all the preparations, the sight of herself in the long glass and the delight and admiration of the maids. It was all rather like falling under the influence of a drug, she thought—and presently she was neither unhappy nor remorseful, but in a kind of dream that made everything seem slightly unreal and very far away.
Then she was driving to the church with her father and mother, and in the porch were Kate Charlecombe and another girl, a distant cousin of the Merediths, and they were both dressed alike in old-fashioned stiff, pale-pink flowered satin, and held huge posies of autumn leaves and berries and red roses.
Fanny Ballantyne’s little boy, Cecil, was in a page’s costume of white satin, and Fanny and the nurse were anxiously holding him, one by each hand. The organ was playing and a group of white-robed clergy and choir-boys stood at the door of the church.
John Meredith gave Rosalie his arm.
She felt quite calm now, and remembered to let fall the length of glistening train that hung over her arm.
Someone behind her was spreading out the long folds, and she could hear Fanny’s agitated exhortation to “wait a minute.”
“The bride’s bouquet,” hissed someone.
Kate was holding it out, in both white-gloved hands—a shower-bouquet of white roses and trailing green, tied with silver ribbon. Rosalie took it from her, and smiled without knowing that she did so, and then, with bent head, walked slowly into the church beside her father.
She never looked up until she stood at the chancel rails and felt Lucy’s touch on her gloved hand.
Then she raised her eyes, and saw him, tall and dark and with his light hazel eyes fixed upon her, and the look in them was no longer ironic, but intensely serious.
For an instant the mist in which Rosalie felt herself to be moving cleared, and she was pierced with the sharp conviction that the look in Lucy’s eyes was one of pleading. At the same instant, she saw the black head of the best man towering above even Lucy’s inches, and knew that Fred’s gaze also was immovably fixed upon her.
Rosalie’s own head bowed once more under its white veiling and gleaming diamonds, and was not again raised even when she made, almost inaudibly, her responses.
She heard the exhortation of the clergyman, and knew when the proper moment came for her to hand her gloves and bouquet to Kate, and she felt the unfamiliar weight of the ring on her third finger and the close clasp of Lucy’s hand over hers as they walked slowly into the vestry.
Her parents and Cecilia kissed her, and other people pressed forward … she signed her maiden name “Rosalie Meredith,” and smiled at the unfamiliar “Lucian Lemprière” beneath it … there seemed to be a long waiting for something undefined … then she was going down the aisle again, with Lucy, her veil thrown back and the well-known chords of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March crashing out noisily from the organ.
People on either side smiled and exclaimed, and outside in the porch were village forms and faces long well-known to Rosalie.
“Oh, what a pretty bride!”
“Good luck to you both!”
“Hurrah for the bride and bridegroom!”
The carriage was at the lych-gate.
They drove away in it and Rosalie seemed to herself to wake from her trance at the sound of Lucy’s fervent exclamation:
“My Rosalie!”
She turned wholly to him, surrendering herself to his embrace.
Chapter VI
(1)
It was approaching the end of the year—early in December—when Lucy and Rosalie Lemprière returned to South Wales after their prolonged honeymoon abroad.
Fred had not yet returned to the West Indies, where the sugar plantations were not doing well, hurricanes of unusual violence and frequency had ruined crops and old Johnny Newton’s management of the coloured labour, grown slack, was deteriorating still further.
Fred repeatedly advised his mother to sell the estate if she could. Cecilia imperiously refused and talked of going out there with him to see for herself.
Fred ignored this suggestion and went to his club in London.
Lucy and Rosalie came back to The Grove, to their own suite of rooms in the large house.
Rosalie was happy, her ready gaiety had returned, and with it the poise that was naturally hers.
When Lucy held her in his arms and asked, “Are you happy, my sweet?” her answering “Yes” carried conviction to them both.
Sometimes she said, “I feel safe.”
He did not ask her what she meant.
The sense of security, that Rosalie believed to be a permanent one, did not desert her even when Cecilia asserted:
“Of course, Fred will come home again—he knows I want him, and he’ll like to see Lucy and Rosalie, naturally. You know he’s really made up his mind to settle in England, I think.”
“So as to have more time for playing the piano?” said Mrs. Joe Newton drily.
Cecilia laughed indulgently.
“I should be very thankful to have him, to help me with this place,” she declared. “You seem to forget that I’m not getting any younger.”
“I thought Lucy ran the place and gave you all the help you needed.”
“But Fred, being so energetic and fond of bestirring himself, would naturally take everything off both of us,” suggested Lucy, making even his mother laugh.
Rosalie told herself thankfully that she could hear it all with little or no emotion. Her mad obsession had left her. She felt, as she had told Lucy, safe.
She and Lucy had been staying at St. Brinvels and they had returned and were walking up to the house from the stables one ev
ening just as the white mists were slowly beginning to rise up from the ground, when Kate came down the drive to meet them and announced that Fred had arrived—unannounced, as usual.
Rosalie was startled, yet still the feeling of inward security was with her.
It would be all right.
She had “got over it,” as people said. She was Lucy’s wife now, and they were happy together. In her brief madness with Fred, she had only once known happiness. The rest had been searing misery and uncertainty and heartbreak.
Rosalie closed her mind to the remembrance of it, and thought—as she had often thought before—that it must be true that the more fiercely a flame burned, the sooner it died down.
She slipped her arm through her husband’s as they drew nearer to the house, and Lucy drew it close to his side, looking down at her and smiling.
Kate said: “Fred has brought two friends of his with him from London: a Captain Durant and a Mr. ffillimore with two little ffs. They’re in the drawing-room with Mama. Captain Durant wears an eyeglass.”
She laughed as she said it, and Rosalie experienced a fleeting sensation of surprise that made her realize what a long while it was since she had heard Kate laughing, like the schoolgirl she still was, at nothing.
Cecilia was entertaining Fred’s friends at tea. The Newtons were there, and also the doctor, looking apologetic and out-of-place for he had been called in to see one of the servants and it was Fred who, meeting him in the hall, had insisted on his remaining.
Dr. Williams was not at all accustomed to being invited into drawing-rooms like the one at The Grove. He was a burly, red-faced Welshman, a hard drinker, well known locally to ill-treat his wife and bully his nine children. He was as nearly illiterate as it was possible for a man to be who had taken a medical degree at a provincial University in the eighteen-fifties.
The splendour of the drawing-room, the elegance of the tea appointments, and Cecilia’s freezing astonishment at his appearance, all combined to add to his discomfiture.
Only Mrs. Joe Newton spoke to him, and she put him through a searching catechism about the consumptive family of the village washerwoman.
No One Now Will Know Page 24
