“Three is always a bad number, so I’ll leave you. But not for ever. It can’t be that, we’re not living in a melodrama.”
As he went out of the room, Rosalie began to cry.
“It’s Fred you’re crying about, really, isn’t it?” Lucy said in a gentle, remote voice, not approaching her. “He’s hurting you in exactly the same way that you’re hurting me, I suppose. By caring just not enough. If he had, of course, you’d never have hesitated.”
He watched her as he spoke and saw that he had spoken the truth.
“I do love you,” said Rosalie. “I do, I do!”
She moved towards him and Lucy took her in his arms.
“For God’s sake, my sweet, don’t go on saying that. I know exactly what it doesn’t mean, and so do you. If it hadn’t been Fred——”
He broke off.
“Rosalie.”
She lifted her face to his, all its golden beauty temporarily blurred and spoilt.
“I’m going to risk your thinking me an utter cad. Fred’s no good to you. He doesn’t love you—he’s just madly in love with you. If I thought he was the one person in the world to make you happy I might—No, I mightn’t. I won’t lie to you. I don’t suppose I’d give you up to anybody on earth. But if Fred was anything but what he is, he could have married you by special licence in London last September and taken you out to the West Indies with him. You wanted him to do that, didn’t you?”
“Don’t——”
“No, all right, I won’t. It’s only hurting you and myself too, and on the whole we’re likely to get hurt quite enough without adding to it gratuitously. It’s a fairly good muddle, isn’t it?”
He bent his head and kissed her, hard and passionately.
“Some day I’ll make you love me, just as much as I love you—I swear I will.”
“I love you now,” Rosalie said.
There was passion without conviction in her voice, as in his.
(4)
Fred had spoken truly in telling Rosalie that they could not look for a melodramatic finality.
Two days after the conversation in the schoolroom he went out riding and overtook Rosalie walking down the road by herself.
Fred dismounted.
“The devil looks after his own, they say. Not you, but me. Where are you going?”
“To the village.”
“Supposing we turn the other way, then. I want to talk to you.”
“Very well,” said Rosalie quietly. “I knew we’d have to talk, sooner or later—and it’s the last time. After that——”
“After that, it won’t be what you think it will, or what I think either. Things never are. But one always has this illusion of finality.”
“Lucy says that.”
“How right he is. Lucy is rather good at saying things. I often borrow from him,” said Fred, slipping his arm through the bridle.
He led the mare, and he and Rosalie walked slowly down the road until they reached a gate leading to a steeply-sloping field where poppies still lingered beside the rough stubble.
“I’ll hitch her up here. She’ll stand for hours.”
They passed through the gate.
It was a still afternoon, damp and cloudy, and a drowsy stillness hung over the remote hillside. Only one distant farm-roof could be seen, and the sound made by a cawing rook seemed to come from a long way off.
Fred, towering above her, took both Rosalie’s hands into his at once and pulled her towards him.
“What are you going to do?”
“Go away—unless you do.”
“With Lucy?”
“Of course.”
“But you love me,” said Fred simply.
“I love Lucy, and I’m not going to hurt him any more than I’ve done already, and you ought never to have come back.”
“Theoretically, that may be right. But you know quite well it couldn’t have been done. Mama’s always ruled the roost and she ordered me to come. She’s not accustomed to be disobeyed and she’s quite shrewd enough to have guessed something was up. She’d never have rested till she found out what it was, either. Situations don’t work out the way they do in books when it comes to everyday life.”
“I know,” said Rosalie. “The things that have happened to us are all utterly impossible. Lucy should never have known that we’d fallen in love—and I ought to have cared only for one of you and not at all for the other, and instead—instead—I do care for Lucy, most terribly.”
“And you’re in love with me.”
She would not answer.
“I could get you away from him now, if I tried hard enough.”
“Never,” said Rosalie passionately. “If you’d wanted to do that, you should have made me marry you while I still could.”
She had never meant to say the words, but they had burnt themselves into her inmost being and they broke from her against her own will.
The echo of Lucy’s saying had never left her.
“Fred’s no good to you. … If he was anything but what he is, he could have married you … you wanted him to do that. …”
She had passionately sought to make herself forget or disbelieve them but she had always known them to be true—and never more so than when Fred replied, with words that were no answer.
“A week before the date of your wedding to my own brother? You’d never have faced the rumpus there’d have been. Even Mama wouldn’t have swallowed that. At best, it would have meant a permanent life in Barbados for both of us. I couldn’t have exposed you to that, my beautiful Rosalie. It’s no place for you.”
The sharpest pain that she had known yet tore at Rosalie’s heart as she heard the glibness of his words that he scarcely even attempted to make convincing.
Disengaging her hands from his, she asked coldly: “Is there anything else that we need say to one another?”
“Only goodbye, I suppose. Look here, Rosalie—I’m going off to London this afternoon. That’s really why I wanted to see you. I’ve trumped up a story for Mama about having to be there on business, and I needn’t see you again if we arrange things cleverly.”
Rosalie felt the colour ebbing away from her face and it took all the resolution of which she was capable to keep her voice steady.
“I’m very glad. It’s the only possible thing to do.”
“You’re not glad at all,” said Fred heavily.
They stared at one another in silence.
Afraid that in another moment she would faint, Rosalie sank down to a sitting position on the stubble and hid her face in her hands.
“O God!” said Fred.
He knelt beside her and put his arms round her.
“No, no.”
“I’m going away and I swear I won’t see you again—nor Lucy either—poor old Lucy! But I had to say goodbye to you—to hold you in my arms once more, my darling—darling!”
With his first kiss, although she turned her face away from his lips, Rosalie knew herself lost.
Chapter VII
(1)
News that Cecilia had imperatively demanded from her daughter-in-law at intervals was imparted to her some months later.
In October 1898 Rosalie’s daughter was born, and named Caroline Cecilia.
Her grandmother’s comment was characteristic.
“She’ll be called Caroline, of course. The real Cecilia Lemprière doesn’t exist any longer—there can’t be another one.”
The baby’s name, as a matter of fact, became transmuted into the childish abbreviation of Callie, and it was as Callie that she grew out of infancy into babyhood.
She had the same brilliant, dark-hazel eyes as Kate, golden hair, of a deeper tint than her mother’s and that grew nearer to brown with every advancing month, and no marked resemblance to anybody.
Rosalie’s spontaneous gaiety and light-hearted-ness dimmed a little in the two years following her marriage and there lay a shadow between her and Lucy.
Sometimes it seemed dark, sometimes it
was almost as though it had no existence. When that illusion presented itself, Rosalie grasped at it eagerly. Lucy accepted the alleviation that it brought, but knew it for what it was.
In Barbados, the situation grew steadily worse. Fred wrote seldom, and when he did assured his mother that the plantations not only were not paying, but were never likely to pay again, and that old Johnny was not worth the salary he was receiving and ought to be forced to retire.
Cecilia said:
“I wish Fred would sell the whole thing, even at a dead loss, and come home.”
No one responded. Only Cousin Joe Newton said:
“I don’t know why old Johnny don’t retire and come home himself. Funny thing, I suppose he and I wouldn’t know one another if we met in the stree—but I’d like to see the old chap again.”
“If I were Cecilia,” remarked his wife, “I’d send Lucy out there. I don’t believe that idle fellow Fred is doing any good at all.”
“What, and have Fred home again? Cecilia’d ask nothing better. And what about Lucy’s wife? She couldn’t take the baby out to the West Indies, could she?”
“I suppose not. But it would only be for a few months.”
Old Joe shook his head.
“Lucy’s crazy about her. He wouldn’t leave her. And I don’t know that I’d blame him, especially if Fred was to be at home. He’s an unprincipled feller, is Fred. Mind you, I’m fond of the chap—fond of them all—but he’s unprincipled.”
Mrs. Joe nodded.
“Let Rosalie go with her husband. She could very well leave the baby at The Grove, or with Fanny.”
“Ain’t Fanny got enough brats of her own?” grinned old Joe.
Fanny and Tom Ballantyne now had four children, two boys and two girls. Fanny had indulged her naturally florid tastes by bestowing upon the successors of Cecil and Awdry the names of Juliet and Reginald.
“Little Kate’d look after Callie. Nice girl, little Kate. Make a good wife, some day.”
Mrs. Joe, although she made no reply, wondered as she had often wondered before, if Kate was ever to have the opportunity of making a good wife to anybody.
Kate was just twenty—less attractive than she had been at seventeen because less spontaneous, far less confident in herself and in the kindness that she expected from life.
Cecilia became more, rather than less, autocratic as she grew older and still bullied her daughter, crushing any initiative and allowing Kate no individuality except such as might happen to tally with her own preconceived determinations. She then commented, directed and advised until she had reduced any manifestations of Kate’s true personality to fit into her own formula, so that they ceased to express anything at all.
Kate’s devotion to little Callie was convenient, and Cecilia approved of it, although she sometimes taunted her daughter with becoming a maiden aunt. The gibe was the more easy of application since Kate, when she was not at home, was staying at Rock Place with Fanny—as much isolated in its remote corner of Devon as was The Grove in South Wales.
“I ought to send her out to look after Fred, I suppose, and see if she could get hold of a husband there,” Cecilia sometimes remarked with her careless outspokenness, regardless of whether Kate heard her or not.
Sometimes men came to stay at The Grove. They were usually Lucy’s contemporaries and much more impressed by his wife’s charm and beauty than by the gaucherie of his young and rather silent half-sister.
But for the most part The Grove remained without guests, since Cecilia no longer enjoyed the task of entertaining them and could not make up her mind to delegate it.
When the South African war broke out Lucy surprised everybody, and angered his mother, by the announcement that he was going out with the Volunteers.
“It’s not in the least necessary,” said Cecilia, “and your first duty is to your mother. And after that, to your wife and child,” she added belatedly.
“I’m not leaving any of them to starve,” Lucy pointed out mildly. “And as for duty, Mama, I feel bound to tell you that nothing so high-falutin’ ever crossed my mind. I merely thought I’d like to do something a shade adventurous before settling down into the middle years, as they’re politely called. This affair will be over in six weeks, most likely.”
To Rosalie he said:
“If I don’t leave you now, my sweet, I never shall.”
“But why should you leave me at all?”
Lucy looked into the distance, ran his fingers through his black, thick hair and frowned.
“I must try and make you see what I mean. You’re in my blood, Rosalie, and in every thought I think and every word I utter. It’s too much. No man can afford to build his whole life round a woman. I suppose I mustn’t add ‘especially a woman like you,’ but that’s what I mean. If you’d cared for me in the same way that I do for you, we should have been insanely happy for a time, and then—because insane happiness doesn’t, in the nature of things, endure for ever—we’d have settled down into a happy marriage, with that as a background to everything else. But because I’m not sure of you, and never shall be, I’m obsessed with you. And that, my love, has got to stop. I’m going to get it out of my system somehow. I love you and I shall always love you—but for the last two years I’ve not been sane. I want to get back my sense of proportion and this demn’d, damp, moist, unpleasant business in South Africa—as I feel it will be—ought to do the trick. Can you understand?”
“Yes,” said Rosalie.
“Then, besides being beautiful, adorable and intoxicating, you’re intelligent.”
Lucy looked down at her, touched her hair lightly with his hand.
“But I love you, Lucy.”
“I know you do.” He grimaced slightly. “It isn’t your fault, and it isn’t mine, that I’m what I am. It’s probably something to do with some loathsomely possessive, emotionally unstable Creole ancestor—or ancestress more likely.”
“Your mother is possessive.”
“Indeed she is. But not emotional. She’s one of the coldest women in the world, I’m certain. Kate takes after her father.”
“What was he like?”
“Gentle, and rather sensitive, and pretty inarticulate. He was very kind to us, but I fancy he always thought of us as Dagoes. Kate’s the product of his Englishness, and of having been brought up with, and almost entirely influenced by, Fred and Fanny and me. God alone knows what she’ll turn into. It depends on whom she falls in love with, I suppose. She’s one of the unlucky ones, to whom personal relationships will always be the first—if not the only—things in life. They’re not the only things in life, of course, and not the most important either. This business with the Boers, for instance—war, politics, slums, poverty, work, anything you like——”
“If you’d been poor, Lucy, and had to work for your living, you’d have known that personal relations aren’t the only things in life.”
“Doubtless. You might say that I know it now. But do I feel it—should I ever have felt it? After all, one’s as one’s made. Still, I propose to give myself a chance by hopping off to these veldt-and-camp-fire surroundings, ’mid shot and shell, as the music-hall songs have it.”
“Lucy, you won’t get killed? You know I care for you, most terribly.”
“I won’t get killed,” said Lucy, taking her into his arms. “And it’ll probably be all over long before I get out there.”
(2)
The war in South Africa went on.
Kate told Rosalie that she wanted to become a Red Cross nurse, but that she knew Mama would say it was nonsense.
“Stay with Rosalie and the baby, Kay,” advised Lucy. “I shall feel happier if I know you’re here. No, not only for their sakes—for yours too,” he added, answering the look on her face.
So Kate remained at The Grove.
She did not go with Rosalie to see Lucy sail. She said goodbye to him in the schoolroom at home, tearless and wide-eyed.
Rosalie, who had wept in Lucy’s arms most of t
he previous night, went to see him off.
Her grief was very real and very passionate, and so was her love.
“It’s true—it’s true—I love you and nothing else matters,” she said, clinging to him.
Lucy, for twenty-four hours, believed her, and sailed with that belief pervading his whole being, so that he was, strangely, happier in leaving her than in the months when they had been together.
(3)
No letter or cable announced Fred’s return to The Grove. He merely arrived, with a great deal of luggage, about three months after Lucy’s telegram saying that he had reached Durban.
“I may just as well be at home as out there, where the plantations are going to the dogs and old Johnny drinking himself blue in the face with rum-swizzles,” said Fred.
Cecilia was rapturously glad to receive him.
“One of my boys isn’t going to leave me alone in my old age,” she said triumphantly. “I need a man, nowadays, to help me.”
Fred had put on weight and was less inclined than ever to exert himself. But he was ready to give orders to the servants for Cecilia, to exercise the horses and play the piano.
Rosalie said that she was going to St. Brinvels.
“Nonsense, my dear,” Cecilia returned. “There isn’t room up there for you and Callie and the nurse, and there’s no point in it whatever. You won’t be in our way. It makes it more cheerful for Fred, and he’s devoted to children, and we can have some music in the evenings, with you and Kate both here. You ought to practise some duets.”
As Fred himself had once said, there could be no melodramatic finalities in a family like theirs. Cecilia, and Cecilia’s assumptions, dominated the circumstances of all their lives.
Rosalie and Lucy had had their own rooms allotted to them in the big house, the baby Callie and her nurse occupied the two nurseries on the second floor. Fred’s time was spent in the distant wing that Cecilia called “the Barracks,” in the smoking-room or in his mother’s sitting-room. Rosalie and Kate used the old schoolroom.
It was actually possible enough for the different members of the household to meet only at mealtimes and in the evenings, when Cecilia always had a fire burning in the yellow drawing-room, asserting that it was good for the grand piano.
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