Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  Her father expected her to return from this service in a state of elation, and was not the least alarmed by his daughter’s extreme light-heartedness. She seemed to have given gravity itself the slip, and by the end of the day no one would have been much surprised if Rose had been observed treading upon the ceilings. Only her mother was concerned. On Monday Rose awoke with a head that ached so badly she cried out that it would burst. She could not bear the slightest sound, and the merest crack of light was agony to her. Everything, she told her mother, hurt her, and thinking hurt worst of all. She wanted no one in her room but her mother, and Mrs. LaTouche, cursing both herself and her husband for the mental exertion and spiritual anguish Rose had been subjected to, stayed with her day and night. Weeks of invalidism followed. Rose claimed she could not eat––food hurt her, she insisted. The physicians her worried parents imported tried tempting her with delicacies and threatening her with noxious solutions. They failed equally with both. Rose, all but mute, was not listening to them. She grew very thin but was never afraid. She knew if she were left alone He would guide her.

  When Rose could speak again she would whisper to her mother things she knew would happen to her during that day to come. When things happened as she predicted her mother began to ask the doctors to leave her alone. Still, they forced her to take things she didn’t want and knew were bad for her. At last they asked her why she was so firm, how she knew what was good for her and what bad. Although it was very strange and very hard to say Rose had to tell them that God was telling her what to do.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Lamp of Power & The Lamp of Beauty

  Ruskin received Maria LaTouche’s report of her daughter’s collapse as he was working building a dry wall along one edge of his rented villa’s vegetable garden. The day was unseasonably warm, and under a brilliant Alpine sky he had removed his jacket and worked in shirt-sleeves and old straw hat. He had impressed his servant Crawley and the resident gardener for his task, and procured the services of a local farmer’s donkey that was single-minded in its attempts to decimate the remains of the chard rows when not occupied hauling new stone in the baskets slung across its back. When it was time for lunch Ruskin bathed his face and arms and resumed his jacket. He sat at the table on the flagged terrace and opened the newly arrived post. An hour later, his lunch untouched, he wrote in his despair a note to his father both announcement and plea: I think she’s dying.

  She did not die, Maria LaTouche wrote him. Felled by unexplainable listlessness and debility, Rose was in bed for weeks, weeks spent in silence as she seemed to grope for an ability to speak. Once she could whisper she warned her mother she would become for a time in body almost as helpless as a baby, but that she would recover. It was, she knew, her mind which would recover last of all.

  Jane Carlyle had written him asking when he would return to London. It was November, she reminded him, were not his Alpine valleys growing cold? More importantly, people there missed him.

  No, I can’t come home yet, he told her. There’s a difference I assure you––not small––between dead leaves in London Fog––and living rocks––and water––and clouds...No–I can’t come home yet...Yes, it is quite true that I not only don’t know that people care for me, but never can believe it somehow. I know I shouldn’t care for myself if I were anybody else.

  He returned from the continent to Denmark Hill in the late autumn to find that in his own discontent, life with his parents was even less bearable. He grasped at any distraction from his preoccupation with Rose’s survival. When she was well enough to write, her letters were despairingly short and irritatingly laden with pietistic maxims. From mutual friends of the LaTouche’s he was sometimes sent scraps of poetry she had written in adolescent wonder about bird’s nests or the beauty of the dawn. In mid-November he escaped to Winnington Hall in Cheshire, the progressive girls’ school––the girls were taught to play cricket, and urged to develop their own unique personalities and intellects––where the directress Miss Bell had in recent years kept a room for him. He had spent happy evenings there when happiness was hard to come by. The girls were sweet-voiced and sang for him in choir, their music drifting through the open windows while he walked under the quiet trees. Being surrounded by Winnington’s “birds” eager to go on nature walks with him gave him comfort, even though Miss Bell once again apologetically approached him for funds to keep the school afloat.

  His latest loan of £300 was never meant to be repaid, and he had in fact entered it in his ledger book under “Charity”. He had by this point given considerable sums to assure the school’s continuance, and of itself it meant nothing to him save that it was all his father’s money, and he must ask his father for it beyond his yearly allowance. His earnings from his own writings were so slight that nearly everything he possessed materially––mineral specimens, rare books and manuscripts, and most of all his collection of paintings and drawings––had been in fact purchased by his father.

  Meditating on this one morning at Winnington, he began to collect his scattered thoughts about the two people he revered more than all others. He was rent by competing emotions: sorrowful to be forever chafing under his parent’s loving yet unwarranted concern; grateful for his father’s grudging generosity––the sums he had to ask for to help those causes and friends he found so worthy of aid––and resentful when it failed: those Turner paintings his father, through bull-headedness, refused him fresh from the easel, and so were never to be his. He lived in a state of fury that he was regularly being driven out of their shared home by his mother’s eccentricities and his father’s domineering caution. They were, he thought, so good, so well-meaning towards their only child; and had raised him so wrong-headedly.

  He realised now he had been baulked by them at every turn. His morning letter to his father began in an intentionally contentious manner, denying that his friendship with Thomas Carlyle had ever affected his revised thoughts about religion, and then went on to fever pitch in personal accusation.

  Men ought to be severely disciplined and exercised in the sternest way in daily life, he told him; they should learn to lie on stone beds and eat black soup, but they should never have their hearts broken––a noble heart once broken never mends––the best you can do is rivet it with iron and plaster the cracks over––the blood never flows rightly again. The two terrific mistakes which Mama and you involuntarily fell into were the exact reverse in both ways––you fed me effeminately and luxuriously to that extent that I actually now could not travel in rough countries without taking a cook with me! ––but you thwarted me in all the earnest fire and passion of life.

  About Turner, he went on, freely mourning the lost paintings, you never knew how much you thwarted me––for I thought it was my duty to be thwarted––it was the religion that led me all wrong there; if I had had courage and knowledge enough to insist on having my own way resolutely, you would now have had me in happy health, loving you twice as much, and with power of self-denial; now, my power of duty has been exhausted in vain, and I am forced by life’s sake to indulge myself in all sorts of selfish ways, just when a man ought to be knit for the duties of middle life by the good success of his youthful life...

  He had said it. The reading of it would sting, and nothing about the old people at Denmark Hill would change.

  In late February Ruskin arrived home at Denmark Hill in the early hours following a dinner party which had devolved into long conversations on Life and Art. Seeing the lamp still burning in his father’s study he went in to say goodnight, but was detained by the old man’s insistence that he listen to two lengthy and intricate business letters which he had just completed. Having long experience in practical lying he was successful in feigning enough interest not to yawn until his father began the reading of the second letter, at which point his father rose and bid him goodnight. In the morning John James came down so much not himself that his son insisted on bringing his own work––which for that morni
ng was the drawing of a coin depicting the water nymph Arethusa––from his upstairs study so he could sit by his father, should he need anything. When Ruskin went back upstairs an hour later to fetch a softer pencil he heard his father following him up, and then the latch fall on his father’s bedroom door. He was never to leave the room alive.

  After some hours a ladder was brought to lay against the brick wall beneath his father’s bedroom, and it was white-haired Anne Strachan, his old childhood nurse, who pushed to the foot of it and insisted climbing to the window. John James was collected off the floor and put to bed. Ruskin was holding his father in his arms when he died four days later. Here was a man who would have sacrificed his life for his son, he thought, and yet forced his son to sacrifice his life to him, and in vain.

  John James Ruskin had never trusted his son with money and complained bitterly about the petty misuse of it. To his wife he left Denmark Hill itself and £37,000. To his son he left the unrestricted residue of his estate: £120,000 in cash, and all of the paintings.

  Rose had gone to a party at a neighbouring manor, and upon arriving was told a missing friend was ill. The only natural thing she could do, she wrote Ruskin, was to fall down upon her knees there on the carpet, and cry aloud a blessing in the absent girl’s name. She pulled a hall chair from the wall and using it as a prie-dieu clasped her hands and prayed most earnestly for the girl’s recovery. Her young friends and their parents stood watching in surprised silence until they one by one joined her upon the floor. And look, she added, these are for you––and a wild pansy and a mignonette blossom fell into his hand. Folding up the cream-coloured sheet he was touched not by her piety, but by her love.

  He had a box made of rose-wood in which he kept all her letters, save for the most precious to him, which he pressed between sheets of gold and wore next his heart.

  Although his mother considered him now head of the household it did not stop her, when distinguished guests arrived for dinner or tea, from telling her son before them that he was talking like a fool. If young people visited and Ruskin wished to take them to the theatre, he must still ask her permission to do so, which she on more than one occasion withheld. When his young Scots cousin on his father’s side, Joan Agnew, visited Denmark Hill following John James’ death, he was grateful for the buffer. His mother was drawn to the even-tempered seventeen year-old, and to both their satisfaction Joan was asked to stay on.

  In early December Mrs. LaTouche wrote that the family was coming to London. She reminded Ruskin that Rose’s eighteenth birthday was in January, as if that date could be forgotten; and shared that plans were being made for presentation to the Queen. She added that Rose was particularly looking forward to seeing him.

  Ruskin asked the female LaTouches to come to Denmark Hill for tea as soon as they were settled. He did not know what to expect of her, but he wanted to see Rose there, in his own setting, before he saw her anywhere else, to place her foremost amongst the beauties of natural and manmade art that surrounded his days. He forced himself to wait upstairs in his study as their barouche drove up, and he watched from the window as Rose and Emily and Mrs. LaTouche were helped down. Rose had grown tall, taller even than her older sister, and was very slender. They had scarcely made it to the opened door when he arrived at the bottom of the hall stair and stood awaiting her.

  Rose moved past the maid and gave Joan a quick embrace. It had been three years since she had seen the house, and it struck her as strange that it looked different–– smaller somehow––now she was grown. There was her St. C on the step of the curving stair, and with the flurry of her sister and mother and Joan behind her she stood staring at him. Rose felt a second strange feeling, stranger even than the great house’s relative diminution. She looked at John Ruskin and said to herself, He is a man.

  She saw that he was almost as old as her father, and that his sandy hair was silver at his ears, and that his smiling mouth was crooked from the dog bite he had received as a boy. He was not the huge limitless looming figure whose life she could not even imagine. She saw that he was a man, who loved her, and if she was not quite a woman yet she was close and she loved him back.

  Because of this love Rose could not run into his arms and kiss him as she had always done. But as she smiled at him his hand lifted in a small gesture, a move towards her, and she came to him. Her mother was already crossing the floor to him, and Emily was laughing about something with Joan, and St. C could not so much as touch her hand before her mother blocked her way by taking his hand in her own.

  Ruskin stood looking over Maria LaTouche’s shoulder at her youngest child. As their eyes locked he felt their hearts enfold, and he was aware that no coming moment would surpass this one. Her face was so radiant he could die then, looking at it.

  They all had tea in the drawing room, the four females surrounding him so pleasantly, laughing and talking together. Then he walked them about the house, revisiting the larger paintings. Last of all they went up to his study. He had hoped they would come up, to have Rose there once again in the centre of all that was most meaningful in his work.

  She stopped in the centre of the room and looked about her, and he stood at her side as her eyes travelled over the walls covered with books, the cases of geological specimens, the shelves of labelled seashells, the pressed ferns mounted on blue paper, the microscope on the table with its pasteboard box of glass slides. One wall was devoted to his favourite watercolours.

  “Ah! The Turners. They are lovelier than I even imagined, in all my happy remembering! And this one,” she went on, “is the one you spoke so long to us about, the first time we saw it.” She had just touched her fingertips to the frame of Turner’s view of Gosport, the waters of Portsmouth harbour alive with boats.

  “It is the last of his watercolours I would part with,” he said. More so since you have blessed it with your touch, he thought. It was almost too much, having her there with his Turners, minerals, shells, and books; she was both too rich and splendid and too simple and pure for the setting.

  They retraced the path of that long-ago first visit, and went out into his gardens. Rose had not the slightest compunction in removing her bonnet in the mild air. Her hair was still the tint of pure gold thread. The sight of her bare-headed in the winter sunshine, walking between his laurels and primrose bank filled him with exquisite joy. She was life-giving Proserpine, returned. The south London garden was Paradise; he expected and needed no other.

  On the evening of her birthday Ruskin and Joan were invited to the LaTouche’s house in Mayfair. When the moment came to take the ladies in for dinner it was Ruskin who stepped forward to take Rose’s arm. She had already passed over from her father’s protection to his own, he felt; was given over to him. Very soon now he would ask for her hand in marriage.

  The man to whom Ruskin would present his suit was more than ordinarily silent during his daughter’s birthday dinner. Even Mrs. LaTouche, a woman who took pride as a hostess, was less interlocutory than usual during that festive hour. Her skills at prompting conversation and drawing out her guests were not required. Her son Percy was seated across from Joan and was animated, and even boisterous, in entertaining the young Scotswoman. Rose was sitting next Ruskin at the end of the table, too far for her mother to hear their conversation. Rose was delicately flushed and her head almost always inclined close to her guest’s ear. They may have been dining alone, their absorption in each other was so complete. Maria LaTouche hoped to catch Joan’s attention about this, and tried raising her eyebrows to question her puzzlement, but Percy had so monopolized the young woman that she too was oblivious. John LaTouche sat impassively at the table’s head, chewing thoughtfully and staring down at his plate with knitted brow. The pairing up at the table was marked; and Mrs. LaTouche, glancing at the two captivated couples, was left paired with a man as unresponsive as a figurehead.

  At the conclusion of the meal Rose placed her hand on Ruskin’s arm as they passed into the drawing room.
Mr. and Mrs. LaTouche led the little procession, and it was only once seated over cordials that Mr. LaTouche began perhaps to make a closer observation of his male guest. Ruskin rose, and smiling all the time at the birthday celebrant, took a paper from his breast-pocket and read aloud a poem he had written in her honour, one in which he compared her to a holy Queen.

  But he was resigned not to ask her yet, nor here in a hurried moment in her father’s house in Mayfair. At the beginning of February Joan invited Rose to spend the day at Denmark Hill. There on Candlemas Day, the Feast-day of the Purification of the Virgin––the anniversary, too, of his own parents’ wedding––he led Rose into the garden once more. They walked again the gravelled path by the primrose bank, but the day was dull and there was no sun to glint over the wall at them. He directed her gaze to a vivid patch of moss by the stone stair, and she bent and plucked a tiny white star-flower thrusting from the mat of green. She held it to him, and in taking it he lifted her palm to his face, and pressed it with his lips.

  “I cannot answer yet,” she said, before he had spoken a word. “I cannot tell you Yes or No.”

  “My darling––my sweet and wild Rose,” he said, still holding her hand.

  She lowered her eyes but did not pull her hand from him. She wished she could keep him as happy as he was at this moment, but could not. “Will you, could you, wait three years for my answer?”

  It was as a blow struck between his shoulder blades; his breath left him.

  “Do you know how old I shall be in three years?” he finally asked.

  “I do, of course.” The lightness of her tone suggested that she had asked him to wait three months, not years; and that even if it had been three decades the outcome would be a happy one. “You shall be fifty, and I twenty-one, and fully of age to marry or no.”