The Rosemary Tree Page 14

  They finished their meal and turned their chairs round to the fire. The two older people found the younger man easy to talk to, for he appeared to have nourished himself upon the books of their youth through the turmoils of his own, which touched them oddly, as though they had themselves ministered to his needs. He told them about his particular war, in Crete and Africa, frankly and easily. They talked, and Walsingham stretched himself, and slept and snored again, until John said suddenly, “Aunt Maria, did I telephone to Daphne?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Miss Wentworth. “Why?”

  “To tell her I am here.”

  “Was she expecting you at home for supper?”

  “I rather think she was,” said John slowly. “I rather think she had something special for supper, and I forgot.”

  “Then you’d better go home at once,” said Miss Wentworth soberly.

  It was over. The charmed circle vanished and though the door was still shut and the windows closed the wind seemed in the room. John got up and kissed his great-aunt, patted Walsingham and smiled at Michael, and his eyes as well as Walsingham’s were full of the sadness of his knowledge of himself. He went to the door followed by Walsingham, opened it, went out and closed it gently again in the dog’s woeful countenance. “No, Walsingham.” They heard him go out of the front door and run round the corner of the house in the rising wind. Walsingham flopped across the threshold of the door and laid his chin on his paws again with a deep sigh.

  “We’ll take these things to the kitchen and Jane will wash up in the morning,” said Miss Wentworth. “I like to go to bed early.”

  “So do I,” said Michael. “With a good book.”

  “There are plenty in the library,” she said.

  “I know,” said Michael. “I saw them through the window.”

  “Choose what you like,” she said. “And sleep well. There’s a gale getting up. You don’t mind a storm at night?”

  “Of course not,” lied Michael.

  They were in the old raftered kitchen now, the wind was booming in the chimney and Miss Wentworth’s tranquility seemed momentarily to have deserted her. “So temporary,” she murmured, and Michael knew she was not thinking of the storm of nature. Did Don Quixote and his Dulcinea del Toboso have storms? Yet Don Quixote must love Dulcinea, for he had rushed off to her apparently entirely forgetting that he was leaving his great-aunt alone with an unknown vagabond who might possibly murder her in the night. But Miss Wentworth was talking again as she stacked the plates, though more to herself than him.

  “Sometimes I wonder if the inherited weaknesses for which we are not responsible do not cause more trouble to ourselves and others than the sins for which we are responsible,” she said sadly.

  Michael, filling her hot water bottle as though he had been doing it every day of his life for ten years, flinched but longed to comfort her. “Trouble, perhaps, but not injury,” he said slowly. “I mean, you may cause others a spot of bother by your weaknesses, perhaps, but coping with you may possibly increase their strength and sympathy. But if you sin deliberately, even if it seems only against yourself—well—you won’t be the only one to suffer. You may even be the one who suffers least.”

  She was with him again and not with John. “Choose an amusing book,” she commanded. “Concentrate upon it and then sleep well.”

  Chapter 7

  1

  Michael chose The Pickwick Papers and half an hour later was in bed with it, but time went by and though he held the book open he could not concentrate upon it. And the cough that had been with him since an attack of bronchitis in the winter was bothering him. He put the book down and looked about him. “If I’ve hated my life up till now it has at least been varied,” he thought. “The places I’ve slept in, for instance; the rooms, dormitories, bunks, wards, dugouts, trains, cells, and now this. It’s like Mother’s and my room when we lived with Grandmother. Mother had a double bed like this, and I slept beside it in my cot. And there was a basin and jug with storks on them too. She used to tell me stories about those storks. We called them Jemima and Jim. Is there by any chance one of those china dressing-table sets patterned with pink roses, with a queer thing with antlers sticking up? Mother used to give me her rings to put on the antlers.”

  He rolled over on his elbow and looked at the old mahogany chest of drawers that did duty for a dressing-table. There was a china set there but patterned with forget-me-nots, not roses. But there was an antlered thing and unknowingly he had hung his wristwatch on it. He lay back and looked round the room again. The storks on the old washstand set were brown, and Jemima and Jim had been red, but otherwise they might have been identical. The bunches of faded pink moss roses on the wallpaper must have been there for a number of years, and the heavy old furniture for perhaps a century. The solidity of the furniture gave him a feeling of safety, the sort of safety he vaguely remembered from that brief time in his childhood when he and his mother had gone to live with his grandmother after his father had died. It had been such a short time, and its ending had seen the beginning of all his sins and fears. He did not remember his father but in this room he remembered his mother with a new vividness. In the early mornings he had crept out of his cot into her bed and she had told him about Jemima and Jim. His mother had been killed in a street accident when he was eight years old but he had not forgotten her. . . Nothing had gone right with him since he had seen her killed.

  He turned restlessly and looked towards the blackness of the dormer window. He had pulled back the old chintz curtains but the wind, blowing from the southwest and now bringing the rain with it, was so strong that he had had to shut the window to keep the rain out, though he was a fanatical lover of fresh air. One of the recurrent nightmares, after his mother had died, had been that she was outside in the darkness, the wind and the rain, and no one would let her in. There would be crowds of people in the warm lighted room, as there had been a crowd of people about her when she had died, but they would not let her in. He would see her white bleeding face pressed against the streaming window, the pitiable mouth and eyes begging him to let her in, but he would not be able to move hand or foot, and he would wake up screaming. It had been a waking nightmare too. On stormy nights, whenever he was warm and sheltered inside it would seem that she was outside, and he grew to hate storms and darkness with a morbid numinous dread. His grandmother, who had believed in nothing but four square meals a day and as much comfort as possible, had made a bungling attempt to tell him some fairy tale of harps in heaven, but she did not tell tales well, as his mother had done, and it had carried no sort of conviction. The nightmares had been far more real, for some years the most real thing in his life, until with the loss of his belief that the numinous had its roots in anything more solid than superstition they too were lost; or rather transmuted, for it was chiefly as a writer of tales of fear and horror that he had made his reputation. But he had retained his loathing of storms. At the first rush of wind, the first spatter of raindrops hurled against the window, there would come that tremor along the nerves, the feeling of cold, as though a bucket of snow water had been emptied over him. Even tonight, in spite of this feeling of safety, his nerves were too taut for him to be able to read. He was so ashamed of his ridiculous childish fear that he always fought it with the same savage contempt, the same stiffness of nerves and muscles, with which he had fought his fear of injury in battle. Mercifully, being so short-lived and trivial an ordeal, it could not bring him to the scene of humiliation.

  Another fear had dogged him always, the fear of poverty, and passing now in thought through the gamut of his fears he remembered the day of its inception. He had been ten when his grandmother had died but even now he could never smell boiled cod without revulsion, because the dining room had smelled of cod on the day when he and Mr. Davidson the lawyer had sat one on each side of the table with the inkstained cover, and he had stared at the inkstains while Mr. Davidson exp
lained that his mother and grandmother had not been clever about money and so now there was nothing left for him. The kindness of friends would provide for his schooldays, and food and shelter in the holidays, but after that he must fend for himself. He must work very hard at school, and be very clever and do very well, for he would only have himself to depend on when he left it. Mr. Davidson had meant well but he had explained himself badly, and he had made that which awaited Michael seem like a black pool of horror into which he was to be tipped headlong in only eight years’ time. Michael had gazed at the largest inkstain while Mr. Davidson talked and it had got larger and blacker as he gazed. It was destitution into which he would fall when his schooldays ended. For he knew very well that he could neither work hard nor be very clever. He was at a day school at present and the other boys laughed at him because he stuttered and was not good at either work or games; not good at anything at all except telling himself stories behind the toolshed in which he was revenged upon his tormentors by sticking pins into all their tenderest parts. They were horrid stories, and had taken the place of the escapes into foxglove bells and down among the grasses with which he had consoled himself for his grandmother’s scoldings before he went to school. With a thin brown finger he had traced an imaginary line round the big inkblot, and then round two smaller stains which were the twin horrors of his schooldays and his holidays. He had been able to find no relief anywhere except in the thought of the tool shed. He had slipped off his chair and gone there.

  The two smaller blots had grown less unendurable as time went on, for as he had grown older he had grown tougher. He had grown out of his stammer, and developed good looks, vivacity and charm, and a brilliance of imagination that had tricked all but the most discerning into thinking that he was a good deal cleverer than he actually was. But he did not trick himself and the fear of poverty had been with him all his life and had brought him to the ultimate disaster.

  The old house shuddered beneath a more violent blast of wind, recalling him to the room where he was. He could not remember that he had been afraid of storms while his mother had lived, but then her imagination had always made such fun out of them for his entertainment. Had she been here now, and he a small boy in bed beside her, she would have said that this room, with its small window and sloping whitewashed ceiling, was his cabin, the captain’s cabin on an Elizabethan galleon, driving across stormy seas to Eldorado; in perfect safety, of course, because her stories, unlike those which he himself wrote later, were always happy. Any ship of whose voyage she had control would be sure to let down its anchor at last in a safe and quiet harbor. . . A voyage of which she had control. . . A safe and quiet harbor. . . “Good lord, is it possible that I’m feeling sleepy?” he wondered. “I haven’t had a decent night for weeks.”

  He blew out the candles. The window was now an oblong of light in the darkness and through a break in the scudding clouds he could see a star. The brief spring storm had passed its peak and his taut nerves relaxed. He got up and opened the window. Back in bed he lay thinking bemusedly of the china ornament with the antlers and of Jemima and Jim. “I’m thirty-eight and I’m not even adult yet,” he thought, “not even after that filthy war and what happened to Bill Harris, and that girl and the way I treated her, and then the other business and prison.” But there was less shame in the thought than usual. It was good to be able to remember Jemima and Jim. Had he been adult he might have forgotten them, and forgotten about his escapes into the little worlds. Perhaps even the memory of his mother might have become a little dim, and as things were with him it was vivid.

  He was drifting into a dream. The ship rocked, but delightfully, for she had control of the voyage. “Why, you’re not outside any more,” he said to her, and fell asleep.

  2

  In her own room down the passage Miss Wentworth was sitting up in her big old curtained bed, an ancient pink flannel bedjacket round her shoulders, adding up lists of figures with the help of her account book and passbook. Her face in the candlelight looked haggard and old. She was badly in debt. Even with the allowance that John gave her she was in a very bad way. The little she made over her pigs, and selling her fruit and vegetables, were only drops in a bucket that had many holes in it. She put the books on her bedside table, blew out the candles and lay down, but not to sleep. She lay facing the window, watching for the moon and stars that shone out occasionally now that the rain had stopped, and when they gave their faint light she looked round at the dim outline of the furniture. She had slept in this room since she was sixteen years old and now she was eighty-two. She was wedded to the house and could not leave it. Things were undoubtedly in a bad way but she would contrive somehow, as she had always contrived. She would write to Entwistle, her lawyer, who was also good at contriving. They had been in very tight places before but they had always managed, by selling land or jewels, or by selling out investments. It was as unthinkable that she should leave Belmaray as it had in the past been unthinkable that she should leave Richard. The two of them had been and were the passion of her life.

  Yet lying in her bed and looking back over the years, just as Michael had been doing, she realized more sharply than she had ever done that the exclusiveness of her caring had been a sin in her. If in the beginning she had loved John’s father, Charles, he might not have married his second wife Judith and both he and John would have been spared much misery. Looking back on one’s life at the end of it the perspective was changed and one saw things differently. At the beginning she had prided herself upon the fact that longing to be alone with Richard she had nevertheless faithfully done her duty by Charles and his boy; now she saw that to have kept all her love for Richard had been no virtue. Richard and Belmaray being a part of her, loving them had merely been loving herself. To have loved the other two would have been true love; they had needed love just as badly as she could have given it to them if it had occurred to her to ask for the grace of God. But she had been too self-confident in those days to realize her own bitter need and poverty, and perhaps too proud to cast herself in her lovelessness upon God’s mercy if she had. “Duty, faith, love.” For metrical reasons the poet had put love last but she was sure that in his heart he had had the humility to know better. Her own past pride she regarded now as the worst sin of her life. Too late, her heart ached over Charles. The only real love he had known had been given him by his first wife Anne, and she had died on the second anniversary of their wedding day.

  Reliving it all again she realized that Charles had always seemed a little remote from her; perhaps because his father Philip had been so remote. They had been a family of four boys and three girls. Philip had been the eldest and she the youngest, with twenty years between them. Her mother had died while she was still a baby and Philip had left home when she was only four. In the various scourges of illness that so cruelly swept Victorian schoolrooms and nurseries two boys and two girls had died and she and Richard had been left alone with their father, a morose unloving man, unlike any Wentworth before or since. He had taken little notice of them and they had only had each other; but that had seemed to them no misfortune, for the ten years between them had been no hindrance to the delightfulness and fullness of their love. Even as a schoolboy of fifteen, home from Eton, Richard had found the five-year-old Maria the best company in the world. She had been small and dainty, vivacious, quick-witted and extremely practical. He had been tall and fair, good-looking with his fine large head and breadth of shoulder, scholarly, sensitive and inclined to melancholy. He had been a fine host, a connoisseur of old books and old wines, a lover of gardens and all beautiful things. His years at Oxford had been brilliant and he had read for the bar, but his lack of self-confidence had not made him a good barrister and he had been glad to come home and take over the management of the estate from his eccentric father, and help Maria entertain the guests whom he delighted to gather about him. He and Maria had been the perfect complement the one of the other and entirely satisfied with her company, he
had never wanted to marry. Maria refused all her own offers of marriage that she might stay with him at Belmaray.

  Philip, married and with his regiment in India, had hardly come into their lives at all. When he and his wife died of fever Richard and Maria had heard of their deaths as of the deaths of strangers, and when the ten-year-old Charles was brought home from India to live at Belmaray he seemed the child of strangers, and something of an embarrassment to his young aunt.

  For by this time Maria’s life-long struggle to keep the manor, the estate and her family with their heads above water had begun. Her father had grown steadily more odd and now he was very odd indeed. He had never thought much of the human race and now he thought nothing of it. He eschewed all human company but retained a passion for his horses and his dogs. In their company he lived in the fields, on the racecourse and in the gun room; but increasingly upon the racecourse, even though there were far too many people there. When he was at home his meals were served to him in the gun room and he never spoke except to complain of the cooking. Richard was now squire in all but name and Maria his lady. As mistress of Belmaray she had a vast amount to do for Richard was not very competent in the management of the estate and she had to advise him. Nor did he enjoy coping with the financial problems created by their father’s racing debts and his own expensive tastes and she had to help him there too. And though he was so delightful a host he was also an absent-minded one, inclined to forget whom he had asked to stay, and for how long, and to invite more people to dinner than the table would hold, and there too her tact and charm and gift of practical contrivance were very necessary to him. And at all times he wanted her entire love.