Читать книгу Rose and Rose - E. V. Lucas - Страница 3

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Fifty years ago, when I was a young medical student, I was in the habit of spending as many week-ends as possible at home with my father, to whose practice I was one day to succeed.

On a certain Saturday the only other occupants of the railway compartment were an artist and his wife. I knew him to be an artist from certain scraps of his conversation that I overheard, but I should have guessed it also on the evidence of his hands and dress. I don’t mean that he wore a black velvet tam-o’-shanter and trousers tight at the ankles, as in plays; but his hands were eloquent, and there was a general careless ease about his tweeds that suggested the antipodes of any commercial or anxious calling.

After a while he turned to me and asked if I knew the town of Lowcester.

I said that I had lived in the neighbourhood—at Bullingham, five miles away—all my life.

“We are going to spend a few days at the Crown at Lowcester,” he said, “looking about to try and find a house.”

“There’s a very good house at Bullingham,” I said: “just empty. Jolly garden too. As a matter of fact it adjoins ours. My father’s the doctor.”

“Next door to the doctor,” said the lady, speaking now for the first time. “That would be a great convenience.”

One result of this chance meeting was that they took the house and we became friends; another was the general shaping of my life; and a third is this narrative, the fruit of an old man’s egoism and leisure.

I don’t put my own case as an example to the medical profession, but you can’t deny there is a kind of fitness in it: it is surely more proper than not that the doctor who presides at the birth of a child should continue to take an interest in that child throughout its life. Being born is, after all, something of an event, and he who assists in that adventure and helps to introduce a new soul (not to mention a new body) to this already overcrowded and over-complicated planet of ours, ought to be counted as something a little more important than a jobbing gardener, say, or any other useful ally that the householder calls in. For no matter how mechanical his services, he is also an instrument of destiny.

None the less, if accoucheurs were expected to follow the fortunes of every new arrival from the cradle to the grave one of two things would happen: either the medical profession would disappear for want of recruits, or home life (with the addition of the semi-parental doctor intervening between father and mother) would become more difficult than it already is. Perhaps then it is as well that the man-with-the-black-bag remains the piano-tuner that he more or less appears to be. But I shall continue to believe that so tremendous an affair as a birth should carry more fatefulness with it; although for the well-being of patients I can see that it is better that doctors should be machines rather than sympathetic temperaments. Good Heavens! if we were not so mechanical into what sentimental morasses should we land ourselves!

All this, however, is more or less irrelevant and too much concerned with myself. But you will find that preoccupation, I fear, throughout this story, such as it is. I commenced author, you see, at a time of life when it is not easy to keep to the point or exclude garrulity. When one does not take to writing until one is over seventy—I shall be seventy-one this year, 1920—readers must expect a certain want of business-like adroitness. Had you known me in the days when I was in practice, before I was established on the shelf, you would have found me, I hope, direct and forcible and relevant enough. The stethoscope was mightier than the pen.

Still, there is more relevance than perhaps you would think, for I am coming to a case where the doctor and the newly-born established an intimacy that was destined to grow and to endure through life. For, as it chanced, my father died very soon after I was qualified, and when our new neighbours, the Allinsons, became parents, it was I who was called in to assist. I was then twenty-seven. Circumstances of personal friendship and contiguity alone might have promoted a closer association than is customary between the babe and the intermediary; but the controlling factors were the death of the mother, after which many of the decisions which a mother would have to make devolved on me; and Rose’s delicate little body, which caused her during her early years to need fairly constant watching. The result was that until a certain unexpected event happened she moved about almost exclusively between her father’s house and mine, and was equally at home in both. But even with such a beginning it never crossed my mind that the strands of our fate were to be so interwoven.

Rose’s father was a landscape painter of rather more than independent means: sufficient at any rate to make it possible for him to seek loveliness in no matter how distant a land. He had sketches which he had made all over Europe, in Morocco, in Egypt, in Japan. But France was his favourite hunting ground, partly, I think, because he liked the comments of the French peasants who stood behind his easel better than those of any other critic.

Artists, even when they are poor, are enviable men. They live by enjoyment—their work is fun—for even if the unequal struggle to persuade pigments to reproduce nature fills them with despair, they are still occupied with beauty, still seeing only what they want to see, and remote from squalor and sordidness and the ills of life.

Theodore Allinson took the fullest advantage of his artistic temperament and his private fortune. The one enabled him to ignore whatever was unpleasing, and the other to fulfil every wandering caprice. It was all in keeping with such a man’s destiny that he should have as a next-door neighbour an ordinary trustworthy fellow like myself, who could be depended upon to keep an eye on his motherless infant when he was absent. Or, for that matter, when he was present too. He would have taken it as a very cruel injustice on the part of the gods if I had moved to any other part of the kingdom—as probably any decently ambitious young man in my position would have done. How he would have raised his clenched fists to Heaven and railed against fate! But, luckily for him, I could eat the lotus too.

My lotus-eating, however, would have been only half as delightful if Allinson were not my neighbour and his small daughter my protegée. For he was easy and amusing and full of whimsical fancies, with a very solid foundation of culture beneath all, and his little girl was a continual joy.

She had taken to me at once, or at any rate had taken to my watch—watches having always been useful links between infantile patients and their medical men. Mine was a gold repeater, very satisfying to immature gums and surprising and amusing to the ear. I still have it, and sophisticated though the world has grown, and mechanically melodious with gramophone and piano-player, it still chimes for the young with all its old allurement.

As Rose developed, the function of the repeater as a mediator decreased in importance, and she and I took to more ordinary means of communicating our sympathy; but the watch laid the foundations and laid them truly.

It is extraordinary what a small child’s tongue can do with an honest English name. Every one has had experience of this fantastic adaptive gift, but none could be more curious than my own. My name is Greville—Julius Greville, M.D., if you please—and if there is a sound less like Greville than “Dombeen” I should like to be told of it; but Dombeen was Rose’s translation of what she so often heard her father call me, and Dombeen I have remained to her. Of all the music in the world none was more sweet to me than her cool clear voice calling “Dombeen! Dombeen!”

Our gardens were separated only by an old fruit wall with a gate in it, both sides of the gate being equally Rose’s domain; and I used to rejoice when on returning from my rounds I saw her dainty proud little head among the fruit bushes.

Briggs, my gardener and my father’s gardener before me, was the happier for her society too, as she circled about him like a robin and never ceased her inquisitorial functions.

“Lord, but she do flummox me sometimes,” he would say. “The things that child wants to know! It isn’t only book-learning that’s needed, it’s flower-learning too. It makes me feel that ignorant.”

“What sort of things?”

“Well, why one flower’s blue and another pink. Man and boy I’ve worked in gardens, and with good head-men over me too when I was learning—Scotchmen and all—but I never heard about that. Never even wondered about it. ‘So as to look prettier in nosegays’ was all I could say; but it must go deeper than that. I told her to ask you, you being a gentleman of learning, but she says, ‘No, no, Briggs, it’s what a gardener ought to know,’ and she’s right.

“Here’s some more nuts of hers to crack—‘Why do some flowers have scent and others don’t?’ ‘Who discovered that potatoes are good to eat?’ ‘Who began to put horse-radish with beef?’ ‘Why are butterflies called butterflies?’ Really, sir, you ought to take her on, she makes me seem that ignorant. She won’t ask me the things I do know. The funny part of it is,” Briggs went on, “she doesn’t want to have a garden of her own. Some children are mad about that, but she doesn’t care. All she wants is to walk about among the flowers, or stand by me, and watch and watch.”

And off he went.

He came back a moment later. “It would be very good of you,” he said, “to try and find out why butterflies are called butterflies. My missis wants to know too.”

I remember another of Briggs’ stories of Rose. “The other day,” he said—this was when Rose was about six—“she brought a tooth—the one that you gave her a shilling for if she didn’t cry when she went to have it pulled—and what do you think? She wanted me to plant it for her. Plant it! And what for? So as it would grow into a soldier, as it did in some book they’d been reading to her.

“‘A soldier!’ I said, wishing to tease her a little, ‘why a soldier, I should like to know? Why not a gardener?’

“‘Pooh, gardeners!’ she said. ‘That wouldn’t be any fun. Besides, teeth don’t grow into gardeners anyway, they grow into soldiers’; and she comes out every morning and evening to water it.”

Rose’s want of interest in work of any kind extended to games. Her boredom when her father and I were at croquet or billiards was abysmal, and I could never induce her to persevere with a mallet. Her playground was the world, and her play was to be in it, and see it, and, I doubt not, speculate as to its peculiarities. She liked to have stories read to her, but she liked better to invent them for herself and relate them to herself as she walked about, outdoors or in. But when she could get one’s whole attention, which is the too-often-frustrated desire of most children, she was happiest. A walk with me in the garden when I was “ab-so-loot-ly” idle, without scissors or spud or preoccupation, was one of her special treats; the tendency of grown up people to let their eyes wander towards weeds or suckers or green fly being among her heavy crosses.

But her crosses were few. She must have been one of the first children for whom those in authority made the world primarily a happy place. It is more or less the rule now, but it was exceptional then.

Like most little girls, she was interested in young creatures: more than interested, enchanted by them. The finest horse in the world—Iroquois, say, who had just won the Derby—the finest cow, the finest sheep, left her calm; but she trembled with rapture on catching sight of a foal or a calf or a lamb. If the lamb had a black face she screamed with joy. As for puppies and kittens, she lost her head completely over them. Again and again I have had to stop, when she has been on my rounds with me, while she got down in order to embrace one of these impostors, and the uglier the kitten was the more she loved it. I could never break her of the habit—an extremely insanitary one, I am convinced—of hugging stray kittens.

It was odd that an ugly one should appeal to her more than a perfect one; but odder that any injured creature had such an immediate claim on her sympathy. Many children are afraid of animals that are maimed and in pain: or at any rate they avoid them. But Rose collected them. Birds with broken wings, mangy puppies, kittens that had been scalded or lamed—her infirmary always contained one or more specimens of these, and we all had to help in nursing them back to vigour.

Such was Rose in those early days when we were still neighbours. And then came one of the crises in the life of both of us.

I had been on a long day’s round and returned tired out, after eight in the evening, with the doctor’s dread in my mind that another call would be waiting. There was indeed a telegram, but it was not of the kind that I had feared, but a worse. It was from the British Consul at Marseilles stating that Theodore Allinson had died of typhoid fever two days before, and that his effects were being forwarded home.

Allinson’s household consisted at that time of Rose’s nurse and several servants under a cook, and I went over after dinner to break the news. It was, however, broken. We had so few telegrams in those days that their contents always became public, and I found the staff in tears. Rose, however, I was glad to find, had not been told.

The next thing was to inform the relatives, chief of whom was Mrs. Stratton, Theodore’s sister, older by a few years, whose husband was something in the city; and a telegram, despatched to her the next morning, brought herself and Mr. Stratton quickly on the scene.

Mrs. Stratton was as different from her brother as two members of the same family can be—and often are. Where he was gay and insouciant, she was grave and anxious. He was full of fun and banter; but to her life was real, life was earnest. Where he let things slide she was all for management and control. She was a big woman too, with a suggestion always of having her square-sails set and bearing down on you before the wind.

As for George Stratton, he was the nice quiet somewhat invertebrate husband that such women capture.

No sooner was Mrs. Stratton in the house than she got to work and explored every room systematically, sniffing a good deal as she inspected the canvases in the studio. Drawings were turned out, documents read, and Rose was sent off to Lowcester to be properly fitted out with black. I offered to take the child into my house until the memorial service was over, but Mrs. Stratton declined; and on this rebuff I disappeared from the scene and was not again in evidence until the ceremony in the church, which most of the neighbours and various relations, near and distant, attended.

I was however called out to a case a few miles away, and was therefore not present at the luncheon that followed; but I returned in time to take my place, at the lawyer’s invitation, in the studio to hear the reading of the will, in which, the lawyer informed me, to my great surprise, I was mentioned.

“As,” he announced, “Mr. Allinson died abroad too far away for any of his relatives or friends to attend the funeral, it has been thought well that now, when they are convened together in his house, they may like to hear what his wishes were with regard to the disposition of his estate and the settlement of his affairs. It was fortunate that he was able to put these wishes in order before his illness had made that impossible; the document is properly signed and attested and bears every indication of cool judgment. With your permission I will now read it.”

I had never been present before at the reading of a will, and I am glad not to have had the experience since. It is too dramatic. Why more plays do not contain a will scene, I cannot understand. But the dramatic quality is not all. My objection to such a ceremony is the disappointment that one has to witness, and perhaps even more the triumph. Poor human nature’s expressions of joy on coming into a few hundred pounds can be an almost tragic spectacle.

Theodore Allinson had remembered most of his relations and all of his dependents. Such benefactions came first. “‘The remainder of the estate,’ the lawyer read on, ‘I leave in trust to my daughter Rose, to be administered as they think best by her trustees George Stratton and Julius Greville, until her twentieth birthday, when it will be hers to do as she wishes with.’”

The lawyer paused again and Mrs. Stratton indicated her approval of at any rate one of the trustees by a guarded smile.

“‘Finally,’” the lawyer went on, “‘I ask my friend and neighbour Julius Greville to become my daughter’s guardian and foster-father.’”

At these words a rustle of astonishment ran round the room, and no one could have been more astonished than myself. Mrs. Stratton did more than rustle: she bridled and shot me a furious glance. “Did you hear that, George?” she asked her husband in a loud whisper.

“If you please,” said the lawyer, and continued: “‘guardian and foster-father, reimbursing himself from her estate for every expense which that duty imposes upon him, from the present time until she shall become, on her twentieth birthday, her own mistress.’”

He paused again, and again the company sought each other’s faces. Mrs. Stratton was scarlet with indignation.

“Why, that’s thirteen years!” she exclaimed.

“But supposing that Dr. Greville, not unnaturally, is unwilling to take so great a responsibility?” Mr. Stratton asked, after a little whispered coaching from his wife.

“We are coming to that,” said the lawyer. “The will continues: ‘I ask Dr. Greville to do this great thing for me, because I have for him both affection and respect, and because such neglect towards our Rose as my own indolence and selfishness have betrayed me into has as far as lay in his power been corrected by him; also because Rose loves him and has profound confidence in him. I am conscious, however, that it is more than I have the right to ask, and if he declines, which he can do with perfect propriety and not the faintest suggestion of unfriendliness to me, I wish that Rose may become the ward of my sister Millicent Stratton, who I am sure will be delighted to have her, with the same conditions as to finance.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Mrs. Stratton. “Then my brother had not entirely taken leave of his senses.”

“My dear Milly!” said her husband soothingly.

“Well, and what do you say?” Mrs. Stratton asked me eagerly. “Of course you will decline?”

“Before Dr. Greville comes to any decision,” the lawyer interposed, “there is a letter from the testator which he ought to read. It was included among the papers of the deceased, and would have been handed to Dr. Greville earlier had he not been called away.”

“But there is no need for time or consideration to be given to such a simple matter as this,” said Mrs. Stratton. “It is obvious on the face of it that a busy country doctor, living alone, can have no fitness for such a delicate task as the bringing up of a girl from seven to twenty. It’s preposterous, and any real friend of my brother would agree.”

“In any case,” said the lawyer, “I don’t think that Dr. Greville should, in fairness to himself and to every one concerned, be rushed into a decision. Here, sir, is the letter”; and he handed me an envelope, which I had the prudence to put in my pocket.

And so doing, I rose and left. It is one of the rare compensations in a general practitioner’s life that he can go when he likes and without ceremony. I don’t say that an engagement is always awaiting us; but it is our privilege first to suggest it and secondly to be exempted from cross-examination.

As soon as I was alone I read Theodore’s letter. I can give its exact words, as it is one of the very few that I have kept.

“Dear Greville,” he wrote. “I’ve been eating oysters and they’ve got me. There’s only a muddler of a doctor here and I have no hope anyway. One knows when one’s number is up. The only thing that really worries me is Rose. Be a good fellow and take charge of her and bring her up to beat the band. I can’t bear the thought of Milly getting at her and making her just like all the other women in the world. I’ve made my will, and the Consul here has witnessed it, so you will find everything in order. I wish I’d done more with my life, but I haven’t had a bad time and, after all, after a certain age one day may as well be one’s last as another. I hate not to see you again, and as for Rose. . .”

Here the letter broke off.

George Stratton and his wife were announced before I had finished dinner, and I went to them not in the best of humour. I was tired, and the day’s events had been disturbing, and I had been looking forward to a quiet dispassionate review of the whole matter. It was an evening of unusual charm too, and I am devoted to the garden in the dusk when there is only enough wind to carry the scent of flowers and not enough to disperse it. Such evenings are memorable and precious by their very infrequency and I have always grieved when one has been wasted.

Doctors, however, being more naturally, and, I suppose, even wilfully, at the mercy of other people than anyone else is, I laid aside my napkin with a sigh of surrender and once again prepared for duty.

I thought that George looked a little awkward, and I hastened to put him partly at his ease with a cigar. Mrs. George, who was clearly on the warpath, was not to be pacified so simply. Women aren’t. Even with the spread of the tobacco habit they cannot be bought, as a man and brother can, by a Corona Corona; while a whisky-and-soda is powerless, at any rate with the Milly Strattons of this earth.

She came to the point at once. “You must excuse such an informal and probably inconvenient call,” she said, “but we have to leave by an early train and I want to get everything settled. How soon will Rose be ready?”

“Ready?” I said. “For what?”

“To come to us,” she replied. “You surely don’t, on consideration, propose to fall in with my poor brother’s very curious idea of keeping his child from her own kith and kin?”

“I don’t see that I have any way out of it,” I said. “The terms of the will were that I was to be Rose’s guardian unless I had an insuperable objection; in which case she was to go to you. But although I am aware that her presence here will cause certain readjustments and that possibly the child might be happier where there were more young companions, I have no objection that for a moment could be called insuperable. Besides, your brother was a friend of mine whom I knew pretty well—possibly, through our contiguity, even better than you—and it was his wish.”

“His wish!” Mrs. Stratton echoed contemptuously. “And how capable was he, do you consider, of making a sensible wish? At any time, but particularly when he was so ill?”

“The will sounded sensible enough to me,” I said. “It has not been contested. What do you think, Stratton?”

But Stratton was not there to talk. It was the grey mare’s evening out and he was silenced almost before he had completed the preliminary stages of lip-opening.

“Even if my brother had not been at the moment so ill as to be mentally unhinged,” said Mrs. Stratton, “you must agree that the case is most peculiar. Here am I, his own sister, with children of my own more or less of Rose’s age, the properly equipped and natural person to bring up this motherless and fatherless child, and instead she is left to the tender mercies of a young man—and an unmarried man—whose only claim is that he lived next door.”

“Not his only claim,” I suggested. “It is something to have known the family for many years and to have brought the child into the world.”

“Mere accidents of adjacency and profession,” said Mrs. Stratton.

I granted that, but added that chance could rarely be separated from destiny.

Mrs. Stratton hastened to assure me that she had no patience with mystical balderdash. In any case it was absurd that a busy unmarried doctor should be selected to train an orphan—and a female orphan at that—when the orphan’s own aunt was not only ready to take over the duty but had been in the dead man’s mind. She was convinced that ninety-nine out of every hundred men in my position would have the grace—the humanity—to stand aside and give close relationship precedence. She was also convinced that no decently-honest judge, if there were such a person, would hesitate to set the will aside and give her the custody of her own flesh and blood.

I doubted if the phrase “own flesh and blood” could be applied properly to nieces.

“It’s near enough,” said Mrs. Stratton. “There’s no need to quibble about it. But to return to the question of a girl being entrusted to a young unmarried man, I consider it unsuitable in every way. It’s not nice,” she went on. “It’s not proper. It’s a kind of a scandal. The idea of a bachelor bringing up a girl!”

I pointed out that I was a little different from most men in being a doctor.

“A doctor!” she exclaimed, as though annihilating at one sniff not only every pretension I might have cherished to know anything of the healing art, but every vestige of discretion too, and all my predecessors from Galen onwards.

“At any rate,” I said mildly, “I have been practising in this neighbourhood for a good many years and I succeeded a highly-esteemed father.”

“And not without your reward,” she returned. “It was worth having one of your patients, at any rate, if you could induce him to leave you his daughter and a nice little sum to play with.”

“My dear!” said George from the sofa. “My dear!”

“I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Stratton. “I didn’t mean to say that. You must excuse the feelings of a sister and—and an aunt. But,” she continued, wasting no time in the nuances of regret, “at any rate you wouldn’t think of accepting this trust if you didn’t marry? You must realize that my poor brother had your marriage in mind when he made this preposterous will.”

This was a new idea to me, and it assorted ill with Allinson’s expressed views as to the matrimonial state.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“I know,” she replied.

“But,” I said, “I saw him more often and knew him more intimately in his latter days than you could have done. He gave me no hint of wishing to see me married. I could even give you a proof to the contrary, only I should not wish to run the risk of offending you.”

Mrs. Stratton intimated that she should like to hear anything that her poor brother had said.

“Very well then,” I replied. “He has often remarked what a relief it was to be able to come over to me in the evening, to a house where there were no women about to have to be polite to.”

“Disgraceful!” said Mrs. Stratton. “But his own dislike of refinement and the convenances is one thing; the bringing up of his daughter is another. I repeat that not even he would wish to leave his only child to the mercies of a bachelor. I claim to know something of his character,” she went on: “we were girl and boy together. He would have added the clause to the will if he had been more himself. I am convinced of that.”

“But he didn’t,” I pointed out. “One can take wills only as they are framed. Isn’t that so, Stratton?”

“Except in very exceptional cases, yes,” said George, with an heroic effort.

Mrs. Stratton became tearful and turned on her husband. “You never support me,” she complained. “You allow any one to override me. As if I didn’t know my own brother better than strangers could! His wish—more, his decision—would be that Dr. Greville should marry if he accepted the care of Rose. Of course you must marry,” she added, to me. “How old are you?—you look about thirty—every man of thirty should be married. There’s always something wrong with bachelors. We can’t allow—can we, George?—our niece to be brought up by a bachelor of thirty.”

“Many good men have been bachelors,” I said.

“Tell me one,” she replied, “and I shall be surprised.”

“Very well then,” I rejoined: “our Lord.”

“Don’t be blasphemous,” she said.

“I was merely being historical,” I explained meekly.

“You have no right to compare yourself with Him,” she said. “It all helps to confirm my worst fears. I didn’t intend to pass on to other matters connected with this deplorable affair; but that remark of yours has forced me to. Not only are you young and unmarried, but you treat sacred things with levity. I have not been prying, though you may think so—I should scorn the action—I have not been prying or asking questions, but I have learned that you are not a churchgoer. And not just because you’re a doctor either,” she added.

“It was not an excuse that I was about to make,” I replied. “I should not be a churchgoer whatever happened. It would involve suggestions of belief that I could not make and should not like to be dishonest about.”

“An agnostic!” she said. “How terrible! O my poor Rose!” She began to be tearful.

“There are more agnostics than you know of,” I said. “In this country, where religious questions are rarely asked and more rarely answered, no census of them could ever be taken. You probably not only know but esteem and trust scores of them.”

To this she made no verbal reply, but settled down steadily to sob.

“My dear Mrs. Stratton,” I said. “You are taking the gloomiest view without the faintest reason. You might just as well look on the case brightly.”

“Yes, yes,” said George, who had gone to his wife’s side and was stroking her with reassuring movements.

“You!” she said. “You’re always siding against me! Come away. It is no use staying here or talking any more. Such selfishness I never saw in all my life. But no good will come of it, I feel that. My poor little Rose, my poor little Rose!”

She returned to look at me with an intense yearning in her exceedingly damp features.

“I will not decide to-night,” I said.

“I shall pray that you may have the best guidance,” she assured me.

I thanked her.

“You shall know in the morning, early,” I said, “how your prayers have been answered”; and she stumbled away, blind with tears.

George followed her, pausing only for a moment to inflict upon me one of those grasps in which man assures man of understanding and allegiance, and re-states the solidarity of sex. It hurt horribly, and I nursed my hand for some moments; but it was comforting too.

It was late when I went to bed, for there was much to do and plan. I was not too happy about the future and my new responsibilities, but one thought as I turned out the gas gave me the purest joy—and that was that I was not George Stratton.

Allinson had asked a great deal. It meant a kind of bondage for thirteen years—and the years between thirty-four, my present age, and forty-seven ought to be good ones. Should a young man dedicate them to a child not his own? Ordinarily a young man would not, but my case was not quite ordinary. A doctor automatically surrenders to his profession much of his youthfulness. Some one has said that the roystering medical student must be forgiven all when it is remembered how suddenly and completely he has, on qualification, to be changed into a staid, sober and punctual servant of the public for the rest of his days—yes, and his nights. And I had always been a little old-fashioned, as we say, and the circumstance of succeeding to so big a practice so early, and being accepted favourably by so many of my father’s patients, had not impaired this characteristic. I was therefore both by nature and by profession more of a predestined guardian of another man’s child than most men even of forty-four are.

All the same, it was a tremendous responsibility, and it might result—I came back to this again and again—in a tremendous sacrifice. Because if I agreed to be Rose’s foster-father, I should have to be thorough and absolute. She might in time go to school, but while she was my child she would be mine and no one else’s. I could not share the duty of bringing her up. This means that the marriage upon which Mrs. Stratton had set her mind would not materialize. Whether or not celibacy was going to involve any kind of martyrdom for me I did not know; certainly up to the present time I had not fallen in love or felt in danger of doing so; and that is a good deal to say at thirty-four. But there were years ahead famous for their susceptibility.

And then, as to education, a girl, even when one can give her adequate attention, is a disquieting creature. One never knows of what she is thinking, as she sits there, knitting, or apparently poring over a book, or arranging flowers without a sound: more than thinking, plotting even. A boy is simpler. To begin with, he is rarely being still, and for the most part he wears his thoughts outside. As for a boy, if I had one to bring up I don’t quite know what I should teach him, except that he must not step away from fast bowling, and that it isn’t fair to get into a railway compartment where the only other passengers are a pair of lovers.

During a wakeful night my thoughts traversed the ground again and again, in unprogressive circles; but amid the dubieties that crowded on me this steady question periodically challenged me—Could you let her be brought up by that Stratton woman? Then, for the moment, I saw my course clear and shining: only however to lose it again when the gigantic difficulties of the task of education—made infinitely greater and more difficult by the fact that I was considering them in the small hours, when no man’s judgment is well-balanced—arose to darken the future.

Thus pondering and fearing, I fell asleep.

How long I should have overslept, as the result of this earlier restlessness, had not some gravel rattled on the window, I cannot say. I hastened to it and peered out. The sun was high, the scent of the garden came up warm and fresh, and just below me was Rose herself, all strange and pathetic in her stiff black clothes, lifting her transparent little face upwards and calling “Dombeen, Dombeen. Oh, I do want you so.”

How could I have disregarded such a sign? Was it not an answer to Mrs. Stratton’s prayer?

“I have decided finally to take charge of Rose, as her father wished,” I wrote to Mrs. Stratton before she left for her own home.

My first duty now was to secure Hannah Banks; because it would be necessary for Rose to have a nurse and steady companion, and I had never cared greatly for the one in Allinson’s employ.

Hannah Banks, who years before had been my own nurse, was now in retirement at Lowestoft, living with a married niece on the annuity that my father had left her; but she expressed her willingness to re-enter service, and a day or so later her motherly old face beamed once more upon me.

“To think of you,” said Hannah, “bringing up a child—and a little girl at that—without anyone to help! The idea! Of course I came. I’m not as strong as I used to be, but thank God, I’m tough.”

Rose took to her instantly, and they established themselves in a wing of the house, which, for too long much too big for me, was now becoming human again. Hannah was vigilant but not fussy: her especial qualities were a kind heart and an unsleeping thoughtfulness. She could hardly write her own name, and her reading was confined to the simplest words; but what are reading and writing compared with the conduct of life? What I wanted from Hannah was wholesome solicitude and old English simplicity; I could supply the rest myself, and later on there would be some regular lessons.

The fact that Hannah had stood in the relation of nurse also to me made her a little contemptuous of my present parental airs. You can’t bring up a boy from the cradle to boarding-school without detecting lapses from the god, and these can be remembered even when he is adult and your employer. Nor, after bringing up a boy like that, can you ever quite lose the feeling that he is still something of an infant. Since, to nice women, all men are still something of infants (and, if sensible, willing to be so), this does not ordinarily matter; but the attitude may lead to embarrassing results when one is endeavouring to cut a figure of authority, with a child of one’s own or in one’s own charge. How can a lecture on hygiene be effective when in the middle of it an officious old lady crosses the lawn with a pair of goloshes in her hands, and says: “Now, Master Julius, put these on directly. The grass is wringing wet!” For I was still Master Julius to Hannah.