The Rosemary Tree Page 15

  And so the addition of a small boy to her other burdens was not very welcome and she was thankful when she could pack him off to boarding school.

  She was twenty-three when the Boer War broke out. At first it seemed to make little difference to them but as soon as things went badly all the quixotic chivalry of Richard’s nature flamed up into the conviction that he must go. As captain of the local militia, a post he held because the Wentworths had always held it, this was possible but not necessary and Maria pleaded against it. She was young but she had good sense and intuition and she had a shrewd idea of the sort of effect that war would have upon his nerves and temperament. She argued that the Wentworths had seldom been fighting men; Philip had been the only professional soldier in two generations. They were not the type. It was not likely that Richard would find himself a great deal of use when he got there. But even while she argued she knew it was no good. Though the Wentworths were not the type for war they were the type for knight-errantry and they had always gone to the rescue when things went badly. And Richard went, returning eighteen months later blinded and nervously shattered by an experience that had been too much for him, yet capable on the unexpected night of his return to Belmaray of walking along the terrace to the front door with a quick firm step, and opening the door with a cheery shout to her before he tripped over the mat and collapsed sobbing on the bench inside the porch. That spurt of gallantry and the quick collapse afterwards had been typical of all the remaining years of his life at Belmaray, twenty-three years of recurrent melancholia, alternate periods of courage and despair throughout which he never lost his charm, his love of humankind, of books that had to be read to him and beauty that must always reach him now at secondhand.

  Maria poured herself out in devotion to him. It made little difference to her that in one of those early years her father had a stroke and thereafter lay a useless hulk of a man, for she had scarcely ever seen him. His racing career was now at an end but the money still drained away. There were his nurses, and Richard’s schemes for the beautifying of Belmaray grew more and more expensive. Though he would never see them he planted the banks of the river with masses of rhododendrons and azaleas, and he bought rare roses and shrubs for the garden. He would sit in the gazebo that Rupert had built for love of Queen Henrietta Maria, beside the sundial that Francis Wentworth had put up for love of Queen Elizabeth, and think out more and more garments of beauty in which to deck Belmaray and delight Maria and their guests. He would imagine beds of flaming tulips, rivers of daffodils flowing down the terraces, a froth of white narcissi waving in the spring wind, and then order hundreds of bulbs from Holland. And then there would have to be extra gardeners to keep the beauty just as he visualized it. Maria did all that he wanted, that being the reason for her existence. And she loved to see Belmaray so beautiful and their guests so happy and refreshed. If Richard endured at times almost intolerable mental suffering, and she with him and for him, it was the ground from which much beauty sprang.

  Through these years she continued to do her duty by Charles, growing up, coming and going to public school and university, getting engaged to his pretty cousin Anne Wentworth. She was glad about Anne because of the transformation that she wrought in Charles. He had been a delicate boy, inclined to melancholy and self-distrust, but Anne transformed him. Beloved at last he blossomed into good looks, rather effeminate looks but undoubtedly good and even distinguished, with liveliness to match. There was joy at Belmaray over their engagement, and it cast only a small shadow upon Maria’s happiness when in the midst of the rejoicing her father suddenly died. For years some mercy had seen to it that there was a blind spot in her mind and she could not understand the commiserating looks that she surprised on the faces of servants and old friends. Why? Her father had always been such a stranger to his children that they could scarcely be expected to grieve, and for him his death was a happy release. Throughout the days preceding the funeral, through the funeral itself, she remained entirely obtuse and it was not until they were assembled for the reading of the will that she understood. The estate was entailed and Charles, not Richard, was now squire of Belmaray.

  The old Maria of eighty-two, lying in her bed, was reliving that day as though it were present with her, for she knew it now for a turning point in her life. It had been then that she had known, for the first time in her own experience, the meaning of the phrase “conviction of sin.”

  Charles, not Richard. As the will was read she gave no sign, only straightened herself in her chair and looked at Richard. It was one of his good times and he was with them, sitting with his great grey head bent forward, his hand behind his ear because he was growing a little deaf. He was only forty then but he was aging very quickly. His face remained impassive and Maria thought he had not understood, but when the lawyer had left them he got up, made his way unerringly to where Charles was sitting, laid his hands on his shoulder and said in his steady, deep, musical voice, “God bless you, boy. May you and Anne reign happily. I am your humble and obedient servant.” Then a pitiful confusion fell upon him and turning to face what he thought was Maria’s chair, but was in reality the piano, he said, “Maria, are you there? We must go. From court to cottage. You understand, Maria. From court to cottage.”

  But Charles, with effeminate tears in his eyes, flung his arm round his uncle’s shoulders and told him he must stay; Belmaray would not be Belmaray without him and Aunt Maria. They must never leave it. He and Anne wanted them. He became incoherent and letting go of Richard he hugged Maria, who disliked effeminacy and thought a man in tears (excepting only Richard upon that one occasion when they had been flayed out of him on the night of his return) as contemptible a sight as a man in drink. But now the contempt that she felt was not for him but for herself. All these years he had come and gone at Belmaray bearing his burden of unrequited love for her and for Richard, and engrossed in each other they had neither recognized nor accepted the treasure that he had for them.

  She looked up at him. “God forgive me, Charles,” she said. “I take everything you have to give from this day on.”

  He looked puzzled, for he still thought of love exclusively in terms of giving and not of taking, but her tone was so warm that he returned her smile with delight. He had never bothered as to whether he understood things or not. All he had ever wanted was to be loved and be happy.

  He was amazingly happy in his marriage and in the birth of John, and so was Richard, whose delight in Anne and her baby gave him the longest period of respite that he had known. The two years of Charles’s marriage were so perfect an idyll that from beginning to end Maria watched it with a sort of dread. Somehow the Went­worths had never quite had the knack of making entirely happy marriages and this one seemed too good to be true. She was not surprised when the news of Anne’s accident and death was brought to her. This world would not be this world if such a wonder of perfection could last. But she got up from the garden chair where she had been sitting blanched and shaking. She knew very well that it was not only Charles’s life that was darkened. Belmaray itself, the place, the family, the whole entity that she adored, had turned now to face the shadows because she had not loved.

  She did her best, but it was too late. Her idea of her duty to Charles had not included the attempt to train him in any sort of mental or moral toughness, and so now neither his will nor his reason could help him. Only his emotions were strong and his grief defeated him utterly. Maria tried to rouse him to attempt some sort of valiance but though he had always loved her he had never been able to give her his confidence, because she had not wanted it, and it was too late for her to win it now.

  He began drinking and fearing the effect of this on Richard, Maria persuaded him to go abroad for a while. He went to France with a friend of his, to Spain and then to Italy, and about eighteen months after Anne’s death came back to Belmaray married to Judith. She was eight years older than he, a widow with two young sons of four and six years. Maria had no
t seen them together for more than ten minutes before she knew that Charles had married Judith because he had been too weak to oppose her wishes, and she had married him for social position. Her vitality and dominance, her worldliness and high spirits, were like a whirling stream that rushed him along stunned and half-conscious. For a few months he imagined that he was happy, then he took to drinking again. If Wentworth marriages had never been entirely happy they had never until now been disastrous. This one was. The wretchedness of the man and woman with each other seemed to poison the whole life of Belmaray. Richard’s attacks of melancholia became more frequent, but he would not leave Belmaray, even to avoid Judith’s noisy house parties. The more it was desecrated the more he clung to it. The first World War broke out but Charles was by this time too ill to fight and except that it made housekeeping more difficult Maria hardly noticed it. She became almost too weary to notice anything except Richard. Her whole being was gathered up and absorbed in the struggle to protect and cherish him. She knew vaguely that the fragile little John, so cruelly tormented by his stepbrothers, should not have been at Belmaray at all but she was too tired to think what to do about him, and comforted herself by remembering that he had Harriet to cherish him. He was Harriet’s business, as Richard was hers.

  Towards the end of the war Judith left Charles for another man, taking her boys with her, and a year later Charles died. Slowly a little renewal of happiness came to Belmaray. John, squire at eight years old, could occasionally be heard laughing in the garden. Maria recovered her old energy. Richard thought out more schemes for the garden and for the last few years of his life was almost a happy man.

  He died in the summer of 1924. Returning from church early one Sunday morning he went to the gazebo to wait until breakfast was ready. There he fell asleep in the sun and passed from sleep to death in tranquility and peace.

  The evening before his death he and Maria had been sitting together in the gazebo. Reliving that evening again Maria could remember every word they had said to each other, as though they had been talking together only yesterday. It was rhododendron time and she had been telling him how wonderful the valley looked in the afterglow, with the golden river winding through the banks of flaming color. Splendid as had been the love between them, that lifelong love of a brother and a sister that at its greatest can be almost deeper than that of husband and wife, they had never spoken to each other very intimately either of their love or of Richard’s afflictions. Their generation had never felt the need of having their exact spiritual, emotional, nervous and physical state, as conceived by themselves, thoroughly understood by those about them. Richard in addition had been naturally reticent. He had endured as best he could and said as little as possible about it. She had helped him to endure as best she could and asked as few questions as possible. As for their love, it had grown with their growth and was to them both as the ground beneath their feet. Whatever else was missing that was always there and for that very reason called for no comment. But that evening he had spoken simply and naturally of the last twelve years.

  “I should like you to know that they have not been as hard for me as you probably think,” he said. “To be at times imprisoned in melancholy, to be at all times imprisoned in blindness, yes, it’s bad, but all imprisonment has its compensations. Now what was the name of the woman who wrote with such simplicity of the enclosure of God’s love?”

  “Dame Julian of Norwich,” said Maria. “I don’t approve of these people who shut themselves up but I read her aloud because you wanted me to. And I like the things she says. ‘Here is our clothing, that for love wrappeth us, and windeth us, halseth us and all becloseth us for tender love, that He may never leave us.’ ”

  “Yes,” said Richard. “Her imprisonment was worse than mine. Walled up for life in an anchor hold. Yet those men and women of the so-called dark ages chose it. Enclosed to feed on prayer. Have you ever thought what they must have gone through? There must have been times in the early days when they were afraid they would go mad. Then they passed in. You remember what she said about going in? ‘I saw the soul so large, as it were an endless world, and as it were a blissful kingdom. . . And when it cometh above all creatures in to itself, yet may it not abide in the beholding of itself, but all the beholding is blissfully set in God, that is the Maker dwelling therein, for in man’s soul is his very dwelling.’ I said to myself, I didn’t want this anchor hold. Like the old knight, it’s a case of ‘must.’ But I choose it, I said to myself. Ridiculous though it sounds when the thing had happened already, it was a hard choice. Yet when I’d made it—” He paused.

  “You passed in?” asked Maria.

  “Hardly that,” he said. “The time has been short and I had had no training before enclosure. But I do know there is a threshold. Forgive me for talking about myself but I wanted you to know that.”

  Maria said nothing but gazed at the glowing beauty spread out below them, that he had created but never seen. “Belmaray is much more beautiful because of your blindness,” she said. “Now I understand you better. In there you saw much beauty and as best you could you had to pass it on to the world outside enclosure.”

  “I never forgot you in there,” he said. “In there I was your beadsman still.”

  “I’m glad you remembered me,” said Maria. “I’m not much of a woman but I might have been a worse one had you not been enclosed.”

  As they walked towards the house he said, “Memory. No one knows how powerful it is.” He paused, picked a sprig from the tree beside him and gave it to her. “ ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember.’ ”

  They went indoors after that, and to bed, and she did not see him alive again. At first it was hard to go on living, but she still had Belmaray, and John, to whom she must learn to give more than faith and duty. The heavenly, natural, effortless devotion that had been hers for Richard was not a thing that could be achieved by herself, but she could love him in the sense of centering her thought and work upon him with the utmost affection of which she was capable, meanwhile longing and praying that the other might be given to her. It might, or it might not. It was not in her hands.

  It was not given. John always had exasperated her, and always did, but she loved him and served him. With no sense of doing her duty, but with gladness, she sold land and farms to keep him at Winchester, and precious family heirlooms to send him to Oxford. She cut down the staff at the manor to the bare minimum to send him to a theological college, even though of this latter course she strongly disapproved. She was a churchwoman but no Wentworth before John had ever been a priest and she disliked the idea of the squire of Belmaray in a dog collar. And how did he suppose he could combine the double duties, she asked him? John said he wanted to work in the slums while she continued to look after Belmaray. She was a better squire than he could ever be and she was happiest by herself. This was true and she did not deny it. She liked being by herself at Belmaray and meeting Richard’s stooping figure at every turn.

  So John overworked himself in the slums, and she at Belmaray, until the war broke out and he became a naval chaplain. She fought this decision of his as she had fought Richard’s decision to go to South Africa, for she knew these Wentworth men and what war did to them, but John was as obstinate as Richard had been and had his way. His ship was torpedoed and he was in a hospital for nerve cases for a year. What he suffered there she did not know, for he would not let her go and see him, but seeing him when he came out again she was able to guess. But she thanked God that it was not as bad with him as it had been with Richard, and she also thanked God for sending to the old vicar of Belmaray at this juncture a quick and merciful demise in his garage, cranking up his car, a thing which with his weak heart he had been forbidden to do.

  John was given the living but he would not live at the manor. He said he must live at the vicarage, closer to his people, and he wanted to have Harriet as his housekeeper, for she was not happy
housekeeping for her nephew Harry at his pub. Also he had just got engaged to his cousin Daphne Gilliard, and he did hope Aunt Maria would be pleased.

  Maria was far from pleased. She had not seen Daphne for years but she remembered her as a naughty girl, impudent and self-willed. They had not got on at all. And all that she had later heard of Daphne had not improved her opinion of her. She had gone on the stage, a thing no member of Maria’s family had hitherto done. In the war she had become engaged to some rather fast young man who had left her in a particularly heartless manner, so Maria had been told, and now she had become engaged to John on the rebound. What would such a girl make of the remoteness of Belmaray, and of the enclosed life she would have to lead within the valley? When John brought Daphne to see her Maria could see that she did not love him, while John was as much in love as a man of his type could be. Maria in great distress of mind foresaw a marriage as unhappy as had been that of John’s father to Judith.

  She was not very sure how it had worked out; not very happy, she thought, but better than she had expected. At least Daphne had stuck to the job and had never wanted to come and live at the manor and force Maria to take second place; as she had had to do with Judith. “I dislike playing second fiddle,” she confessed to herself, lying in her bed and watching the shimmer of the stars through the drifting clouds. “I am not yet a humble woman.”

  In old age, she thought, how it all falls away. Your good opinion of yourself, all the virtues you had thought you had, your beauty, your wealth. But she still had Belmaray. The old house had held her from her birth and she was resolved it should hold her to the end.

  Though the wind was still blowing she suddenly felt sleepy, as though the house were a cradle that rocked her as it swung in the wind. Disconnected thoughts drifted through her mind. “That young man down the passage. What has he done? Not my affair. How attached God is to bushes as a means of revealing Himself. Moses’s bush. Brother Lawrence’s. Now why a bush? The rosemary tree by the sundial is choked with weeds. Michael is probably capable of that much. How John loved running off to the river when he was a child. I remember once I found him sitting cross-legged under the white rhododendron, looking like the infant Buddha with his eyes in slits and smiling fatuously. What a peculiar-looking little boy he was, so yellow.” She drifted towards sleep and thought that white feathers were falling on her face, softly as snow, and that a swan was singing. The music was familiar but just as she was trying to remember where she had heard it she fell asleep.