The Rosemary Tree

by Elizabeth Goudge

  “Or like a scene in one of Michael’s own horrid books,” went on Daphne. “Cheap melodrama. The timing was perfect, of course, as in his plays, and the revenge nicely calculated. He’d ceased to love me, come to hate me instead I believe, and he repudiated me in the exact words in which I had refused him. Clever, wasn’t it?”

  “Unintentional,” said Harriet.

  “Nothing Michael did was ever unintentional,” said Daphne. “He has the kind of mind that thinks everything out down to the last detail.”

  “And thinks out every disaster that might happen long before it happens, up to years ahead,” said Harriet. “The worrying mind. Well I know it. My dad was that way. And then some sudden shock would hit him unexpected like and the pent-up worry would come rushing out like a spate of water when the dam’s gone, and he’d be whirled into doing this, that and the other, and each thing sillier than the last. Yet in the usual way my dad was a sensible man. What did you all do come the morning?”

  Her question was not mere idle curiosity. She wanted to lead Daphne on to the happy ending whose happiness she had never allowed herself either to admit or accept.

  “Aunt Mary sent me straight down to my godmother, old Lady Wainwright, in Cornwall, while she and Uncle Pete cleared up the mess. I believe they said Michael had discovered that he was in worse health than he’d realized—something like that. He’d disappeared so they could say what they liked. I didn’t care what they said so long as no one knew what had really happened.”

  “What did you do in Cornwall?” asked Harriet. “Did you take long walks?”

  “I took too many. I got drenched to the skin one day and had pneumonia. That meant a long sick leave and I couldn’t go back to work. Shut up with my old godmother and nothing to do. Think of it, Harriet!”

  “Poor Lady Wainwright too!” murmured Harriet sympathetically. “The old, they can’t help feeling for each other. Cornwall. That’s where John went after he’d been discharged from hospital. He’s always had a fancy for Cornwall. He was in rooms down there.”

  “In the next village,” said Daphne. “I did not know he was there, and he did not know I was with Lady Wainwright, until we met by accident on the cliffs one day.”

  “Had he heard about it?”

  “No, Harriet.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Lady Wainwright told him Michael had broken our engagement. Nothing more. John was kind. He never asked me a single question—he never has—just set himself to deal with the state I was in.”

  “What sort of state were you in?”

  “A despairing sort of state, Harriet.”

  “Well, really,” said Harriet. “If you’ll excuse me saying so, love, weren’t you taking it to heart a bit too much? Jilted, that’s all you’d been. Didn’t you call to mind that the worst war in history was on at the time?”

  “Harriet, I’m selfish,” said Daphne. “I’ve never thought much about other people’s troubles. I’ve only wanted to take from the external world the things that make me happy.”

  “What were you taking just then?” asked Harriet drily.

  “Nothing. What was there to take? For me, I mean. John at the time was probably going about in company with all the poor wretches in concentration camps, and finding a sort of paradoxical consolation in piling everyone else’s miseries on top of his own.” She spoke bitterly but, Harriet noted, with understanding of John.

  “How did John deal with you?” asked Harriet with curiosity. “I didn’t know he had it in him to deal with anyone. A rare old blunderer, I’ve always thought him.”

  For the first time a gleam of humor broke through Daphne’s self-engrossment and she laughed. “Well, no, I don’t think I used the right phrase. He took me out in a rowing boat and lost an oar, and he took me to see a rare orchid he’d found on the cliffs and it wasn’t an orchid after all. He gave me a Siamese kitten and a pot of freesias, going all the way to Truro by bus to get them because he remembered how I’d loved kittens and flowers when I was a child staying in Belmaray. He’d remembered everything about me from those days; that I’d liked chocolates with hard centers and the poems of Walter de la Mare, and verbena soap and honey. He got me all those things and we laughed over them, and his care of me was balm to my shame. When I was a child, you know, he’d been in love with me in the idyllic way in which a boy can be in love with a little girl, and it was touching and sweet to find him still loving me in exactly the same way. When he asked me to marry him I thought about it and then I said yes. I didn’t love him but when I was a child he’d seemed a rock of strength and I thought I might recapture some of that feeling. And I thought that after we were married, when he discovered the little girl had grown into a woman, that his love for me might grow up too. Harriet, it never did.”

  “No,” said Harriet. “For he’s never grown up. Not in the sense that most folk use the word. But when there’s a moment that matters, he knows things. Well, my dear, if he’s never loved you in the way you wanted, marrying him made you able to hold up your head again. As Mrs. Wentworth of Belmaray you were somebody. And marrying John so soon after Michael left you, well, you showed the world how little you cared. I see now why, apart from loving you all his life, he was able to summon up enough self-confidence to ask you. He knows things.”

  The two women looked at each other and Daphne flushed again, not with indignation but as Winkle would have done, caught in the act of telling only half the truth.

  “You know me better than I know myself, Harriet,” she said.

  “I know human nature,” said Harriet, “and I know proud women for I was proud myself once; and if I’m not now humility is no virtue in me, for it was the arthritis taught me different. It took away my independence.”

  “Is independence so bad for one?” asked Daphne.

  “Nothing worse,” said Harriet. “It gives you a wonderful conceit of yourself.”

  “Well, that’s all, Harriet,” said Daphne lamely. The tale of her humiliation, never spoken of, had seemed a thing of nightmare proportion in the place where she had buried it, but brought out into the light it looked both paltry and ridiculous. She looked back with contempt to the girl who had stood upon the cliffs in Cornwall and found a sort of self-indulgent pleasure in thinking how easy it would be to throw herself over. And then she had heard a thud behind her and turning round had seen a prostrate man who had caught his foot in a rabbit hole and fallen headlong. She had run to help him get up again, and it was John. “Has this made you dislike me very much, Harriet?” she asked.

  “You know I’ve always loved you,” said Harriet “You and Pat, I’ve loved you the best after John.”

  “Not Margary? Not Winkle?” asked Daphne, surprised.

  “I’m sorriest for you and Pat,” said Harriet. “Pride takes a lot of breaking.”

  “I love Pat least of the children,” said Daphne. “In fact, sometimes I wonder if I love her at all. In some queer way she’s like Michael.”

  “Bound to be, and you not able to rid yourself of the thought of him all the time she was on the way, and never telling John a thing about it all. Well, talk to him about it now. Do you good.”

  “Harriet, I couldn’t! Not after all this time. And I promised Michael to hold my tongue.”

  “That’s a promise that’s only binding on you while he still wants to hold his. He won’t for long.”

  “Harriet, he will. He values John’s good opinion.”

  “That’s why,” said Harriet. “If John’s taken a liking to him he won’t find himself able to live with John’s liking under false pretences. He’s a decent young chap, from the look of him.”

  “Harriet, how can you say that after what I’ve told you!”

  “I don’t believe a word of it, dearie.”

  “Harriet!”

  “I mean I don’t believe a word of the interpretation you
put upon it. There’s John coming up the drive.”

  Her indomitable little figure relaxed against the pillows. They had fallen over the edge of the waterfall and passed through the whirlpool below. With the sound of John’s step in the drive it was as though they had reached calm water again. But she could not ever remember having felt more tired.

  “Harriet, you look as though you were going to faint!” ejaculated Daphne, half in and half out of her chair.

  “What would that matter, and me safe in my bed?” asked Harriet tartly. “But there’s nothing to prevent us all having a cup of tea.”

  Her eyes were twinkling and Daphne went downstairs reassured, and strangely light of heart, in spite of her premonition that the worst humiliation of her life was still before her. . . But the lightness of heart was also a premonition.

  She was making the tea when John came in, saddened after a death that had not been easy.

  “Some celebration, darling?” he asked.

  “A lightness of heart,” she said. “Mine. But it was Harriet’s idea about the tea. Very bad for her so late in the evening but it’s a weakness with her. Make up the drawing-room fire while I take hers up.”

  When she came back he had mended the dying fire and flung a handful of fir cones on it, so that it was blazing merrily. “To match your lightness of heart, dearest,” he said. “And thank you for lighting the study fire the other morning. I had meant to thank you earlier than this but I forgot what the knot in my handker­chief was for.”

  He did not ask her why she was light of heart because he never asked questions, but as they sat in front of the fire together his depression vanished in a happiness as infectious as a child’s. She was reproached that she could make him happy so easily, thankful to him that he could let such moments come to them without questioning. It is when children start to question their happiness, she thought, that they lose it and grow up. In spite of the distresses she caused him, in spite of his morbid self-distrust, she believed that John was essentially a happy man. Would she like it if he grew up?

  Chapter 14

  1

  John shut the front door behind him and came down the steps of the house into amazement. He had expected the vicarage garden at six o’clock on an April morning but this was no place that he knew, and no time. It was true that through the silver music of the pipes and flutes, the rise and fall of crystal cadences, he heard six times the golden note of a bell, but it had nothing to do with time. The notching off of weariness into slow inches was as far removed from this rhythmic gleaming of light through light as was the vicarage front lawn and herbaceous border from this garden of immortal freshness in the dawn of the world.

  He walked on and knew himself to be in Eden before the Fall. Why had he thought it unfamiliar? He recognized it now. Through the whiteness of the light he saw the river and the arc of blossoming boughs. He walked lightly, a song in his soul, and knew that he had within him now that which his boyhood had seemed to be without. Within him now the Seraph song, the birds’ voices in the garden the echo of its song. The flowers about him, many-colored beneath the sparkle of dew, the branches misted with green and swaying in the morning wind, the rose-tinted sky of this April morning, were the faint reflection of a glory he had known and possessed still as seed in the darkness of the soul. He would know it again when the seed had come to flower. The child’s country of escape, his playground, had become the man’s cell and wrestling place, but in clear-sighted moments he knew them one.

  The amazement passed, but he still walked lightly, his whole being light with the lightness of the day. On a morning like this the whole world seemed spun out of a rainbow. The clouds were mere breaths of rosy smoke away in the immensity of light where a single invisible lark was singing. The trees, the flowers and the very earth were so etherealized by the quality of the light that they looked as though they might at any moment vanish, like mist drawn up by the sun, and John, soaked in the same light, lost all sense of heaviness in body, mind or soul. While they lasted such moments could make the whole drab stretch of painful years seem well worth while, leading to such freedom.

  When he shut the church door behind him again he could still hear the lark singing. How golden was praise. When he looked towards the altar he could see the gold flooding through the east window over the daffodils. He was quite unaware that as he walked to his stall he was croaking out words to some sort of a tuneless tune. “The glory of the Lord is spread over the heavens and His praise is in the earth.” He fell to his knees in a state that was close to rapture. Prayer today would be no dry wilderness. He would be able today to pour himself out in wordless adoration, without distractions, without encroachment of evil, in perfect abandonment of will and libation of love. Today, just for once in a way, his prayer would not be quite so desperately unworthy of the God whose wealth of giving seemed washing through him now in wave after wave of warm life. He too would be able to give today. Ultimately it was the only thing he ever wanted to do. He laid his head on his crossed arms and sighed deeply, like a child falling to sleep. Within him the Seraph sang in profound stillness. Then the Seraph too was silent, and in the body of the man all his senses died.

  A sudden violent jab of pain in a back tooth jerked John’s head up and made the perspiration stand out on his forehead. He leaned back against the seat of his stall and explored the painful area with his forefinger. It was that molar. He ought to have had it seen to months ago but his besetting sin of procrastination was always most pronounced where the dentist was concerned. The dentist’s drill upset his raw nerves for days, and since the war distressed nerves brought with them a wretchedness and darkness of the mind that he dreaded more than pain; and heaven knew he dreaded pain more than enough. He was the most arrant coward who ever lived. He prodded cautiously. Yes, that was the one. Perhaps it would just be an extraction. The trouble was you could not know until you got there, and had the uncertainty with you night and day until the date of execution . . . and in these days an appointment, two weeks ahead was the most you could hope for. But he’d ring up Woodcote as soon as he got in. He might be able to fit him in somewhere.

  The clear note of a bell floated down and seemed to fall like a stone upon his head. Half past. For how long had he prayed? Five minutes? Ten minutes? What sort of priest was he that the least disturbance could shatter his prayer immediately? Well, why ask that question? “. . .children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind.” He knew what sort of man he was too; afraid of toothache. Contemptible! Not a man at all; not adult. The dust of his failure rose as a murky cloud and darkened the light. It seemed to grit in his teeth and drift into his soul. The Seraph was stifled there, choked and blinded. He was back again in the desert of aridity, with the grinning faces behind the rocks, the voices that taunted the useless hulk that he was. When the spirit of praise had been poured into a man he forgot what he was; he was like a cheap ugly glass made beautiful by the golden wine which filled it. Empty, he knew his ugliness. In prayer, for those as undisciplined and inexperienced as himself, there were times when one scarcely seemed the same person for five minutes together. He took a grip on himself and knelt upright, clinging to his belief that one was not the same being; one was the self that one was now in all the disturbance and agitation of weakness, and the self that one would be when the compass needle had once and for all steadied to the north. His hands gripping the sides of the stall, he pronounced in words his belief that even for such as he, if he could endure to the end, eventual perfection was not only possible but certain through the grace of God, his conviction that despair was sin. The prayer of words was all he had now. The discipline of words must hold him up until the desert was crossed and the Seraph could sing again.

  His toothache was raging now. Well, what of it? He opened the book in front of him and began steadily to say matins, offering each prayer and psalm as he came to it for one of the many for whose peace he prayed daily. Daphne and
the children. Harriet and Michael. Great-aunt Maria. That woman who bullied Margary. Troubled folk in the parish. On his good mornings it was a delight to hold the thought of each in his mind while he repeated with attention the words that were as old or far older than the church in which he prayed, prayers and praises whose content of beauty had deepened through the centuries as the number of saints and martyrs who had used them as the vehicle of love and adoration had soul by soul enlarged the bounds of heaven. He liked to think how the luster of each verse, each sentence, had increased through the ages with every loving repetition of it, and tried hard to make his own repetitions worthy of those others. The brightness of the ancient words about the souls for whom he prayed seemed to unite them with all who had ever prayed, to make them part of the company of the saints.

  That was on his good mornings, but on his disastrous mornings, such as this had so suddenly become, the whole business of intercessory prayer became no more than an arid discipline. Words. Words. Words. Why had he ever thought that they had any beauty? Each was as dry as dust as he forced himself on through them. Blast this toothache. That woman who had bullied Margary, and for whom he and Mary O’Hara had been praying together since the day of their meeting. The words of the Twentieth Psalm enfolded her without brightness, for she seemed toiling along beside him in the dust. “The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble.” He had not been to see her yet. He was wanting to but he was shirking it. “Send thee help from the sanctuary.” He was afraid of doing more harm than good, fool that he was. “Strengthen thee out of Zion.” He’d not know what to say. “Grant thee thy heart’s desire, and fulfill all thy mind.” What was her heart’s desire? How could he know unless he went to see her? “The Lord perform all thy petitions.” Yes, but the Lord had a habit of granting the petitions of sinners through the agency of other sinners. He must go and see the woman. “Some put their trust in chariots, and some in horses.” Dear old Rozinante, her brakes needed seeing to. He could take her to the garage, go on to Woodcote, if he had a free five minutes to look at this darned tooth, and then go and see Miss Giles. If she was in. She was sure to be out just when he had nerved himself to it, but he did not want to make an appointment with her. It must seem a casual affair. “Save, Lord; and hear us, O King of heaven.” She’d be in if it was the will of God she should be. How appallingly his thoughts were wandering. This darned tooth! Psalm Twenty-one and Bob Hewitt. “Thou hast given him his heart’s desire.” What had the old boy ever wanted except to live and die at Belmaray?