Rosalie’s relationship with Lucy had, to all appearances, altered not at all. They spent as much time together as possible, riding, and sometimes walking with hands intertwined along the dusty, quiet lanes, where nothing was ever to be met with but an occasional farm-cart or a labourer trudging home from work.
Lucy was passionately in love, and Rosalie responded to his love-making because response was instinctive to her, and because he could rouse her emotionally and make her forget, as she was always ready to do, everything but the moment.
Once or twice he fixed on her the half-sad, half-ironic gaze of his light hazel eyes, one eyebrow lifted and a wholly unamused smile on his lips.
At those moments, Rosalie felt certain that he knew at least something of the conflicting feelings that she was trying all the time to stifle within herself.
But neither of them said anything.
On the eve of the wedding, Fred came down from London to The Grove.
Cecilia had been furiously bemoaning the West Indies business that she declared had been keeping him away.
On the same morning, a registered packet arrived for Rosalie through the post, containing his wedding present — a startlingly magnificent bracelet of twined rubies, diamonds and pearls. Enclosed with it was Fred’s card, bearing only his initials and a date — that of a fortnight earlier.
Rosalie thrust the card into the bottom of the old trinket-box that she had had ever since her fourteenth birthday, but the bracelet was displayed with the other presents.
“It’s perfectly magnificent! “cried the irrepressible and exultant Aunt Maude. “The finest thing you’ve got — except the bridegroom’s pearl necklace. Really, these Nabobs —— !”
“West Indian taste,” observed John Meredith.
Lucy, when he saw the extravagant jewel, only lifted his eyebrow higher than ever.
Rosalie did not go down to The Grove again after Cecilia’s party, which preceded the wedding by two days.
On the last afternoon of her girlhood, she asked Kate to come up to St. Brinvels, and Kate came.
“I wanted you to spend it with me,” said Rosalie.
She looked very pale and the temporary loss of her apricot-bloom colouring made her eyes more than ever like blue-green pools of light in her face.
She was gentle and affectionate with Kate.
They sat in the shady hill-side garden, in the shabby old deck-chairs that Rosalie had pulled, laughing, out of the summer-house on the day that Lucy had first come up to St. Brinvels to see her.
“Mother won’t let me help to get things ready for to-morrow. She’s got Aunt Maude, and Mrs. William Williams and Miss Jones from the village. She says I’m to rest.”
“You look rather tired,” Kate said timidly, “but very pretty. You’ll be lovely in your wedding dress. Fanny wants to know if you’ve got plenty of invisible hairpins. She says she hadn’t, and her veil pulled her hair.”
They both laughed.
“I expect I have,” said Rosalie. “Please thank Fanny — it was very kind of her to think of it.”
“She thinks of odd things, doesn’t she?” Kate murmured. “There’s something I want to say.”
Rosalie looked round, but said nothing.
“Will you forget about my having been so — hateful — before I went away? I’ve been very sorry, Rosalie.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rosalie said gently. “Were you very unhappy, poor little thing?”
“Yes.”
“Please don’t be, any more.”
“I’ll try not,” said Kate humbly.
Then she saw that Rosalie was crying.
“Oh, what is it?”
“Nothing. It’s just that I’m tired. Don’t tell anyone, please — please.”
“It isn’t about anything to do with me, is it?”
“No. It’s nothing at all. Don’t let Lucy know — or anyone. I’ll be all right — don’t say anything.”
“I promise.”
Kate, crouching on the grass beside Rosalie, touched the long, slim fingers half fearfully and found her own hand clasped in return.
She remained faithfully silent while Rosalie struggled with sobs, and felt wonderingly glad that Rosalie’s hand should be grasping hers, as though for comfort.
At the same time she knew, dimly and yet certainly, that Rosalie’s tears and Rosalie’s need of comfort were not in any way related to her.
They were caused by a grief that no word or deed of hers could reach and to the origin of which Kate’s only clue was a profound intuitive conviction that her conscious mind would not admit.
Somewhere, within herself, Kate unknowingly registered that intuitive conviction, never again to lose it.
8
Rosalie’s wedding-day dawned with a wet, white September mist curling up from the valley to meet the clouds that hung over the Welsh mountains. By ten o’clock the sun had broken through and the larch-trees showed green on the hill-side, amid lingering ribbons of vapour.
Rosalie, still in her nightdress, stood at her open window and looked out with troubled eyes.
She had shed no further tears since the previous evening and shed none now.
Her decision was made, and she told herself that she would never regret it. Lucy was deeply in love with her, and if she cared less for him than he did for her, it should not mean that she would make him suffer. Rosalie understood her own processes well enough to know that, when she and Lucy were actually together, he could make her believe that she cared for him far more than she actually did. He had charm, and it had its hypnotic effect upon her.
If she had never met Fred, or Fred had never made love to her, she would have believed that in her response to Lucy’s ardours lay happiness and fulfilment, for she had been, and was still, in love with him.
But her feeling for Fred, devoid alike of trust and of repose, tore at her heart bringing neither happiness nor hope, and forcing her to realize that, because she loved him against her will, her judgment, and her conscience alike, her love was irrevocable, without escape.
Presently she was in her white silk dress, her long veil was pinned over her golden clouds of hair and crowned with clusters of orange-blossom, and her mother was in tears before her, repeating that she looked beautiful.
Aunt Maude was there, too, briskly telling her sister not to give way and ecstatic in admiration of the long string of pearls that was Lucy’s wedding gift to his bride, and the diamond star that Cecilia had given her to fasten her veil.
Rosalie felt herself becoming absorbed by all the preparations, the sight of herself in the long glass and the delight and admiration of the maids. It was all rather like falling under the influence of a drug, she thought — and presently she was neither unhappy nor remorseful, but in a kind of dream that made everything seem slightly unreal and very far away.
Then she was driving to the church with her father and mother, and in the porch were Kate Charlecombe and another girl, a distant cousin of the Merediths, and they were both dressed alike in old-fashioned stiff, pale-pink flowered satin, and held huge posies of autumn leaves and berries and red roses.
Fanny Ballantyne’s little boy, Cecil, was in a page’s costume of white satin, and Fanny and the nurse were anxiously holding him, one by each hand. The organ was playing and a group of white-robed clergy and choir-boys stood at the door of the church.
John Meredith gave Rosalie his arm.
She felt quite calm now, and remembered to let fall the length of glistening train that hung over her arm.
Someone behind her was spreading out the long folds, and she could hear Fanny’s agitated exhortation to “wait a minute.”
“The bride’s bouquet,” hissed someone.
Kate was holding it out, in both white-gloved hands — a shower-bouquet of white roses and trailing green, tied with silver ribbon. Rosalie took it from her, and smiled without knowing that she did so, and then, with bent head, walked slowly into the church beside her father.
&n
bsp; She never looked up until she stood at the chancel rails and felt Lucy’s touch on her gloved hand.
Then she raised her eyes, and saw him, tall and dark and with his light hazel eyes fixed upon her, and the look in them was no longer ironic, but intensely serious.
For an instant the mist in which Rosalie felt herself to be moving cleared, and she was pierced with the sharp conviction that the look in Lucy’s eyes was one of pleading. At the same instant, she saw the black head of the best man towering above even Lucy’s inches, and knew that Fred’s gaze also was immovably fixed upon her.
Rosalie’s own head bowed once more under its white veiling and gleaming diamonds, and was not again raised even when she made, almost inaudibly, her responses.
She heard the exhortation of the clergyman, and knew when the proper moment came for her to hand her gloves and bouquet to Kate, and she felt the unfamiliar weight of the ring on her third finger and the close clasp of Lucy’s hand over hers as they walked slowly into the vestry.
Her parents and Cecilia kissed her, and other people pressed forward … she signed her maiden name “Rosalie Meredith,” and smiled at the unfamiliar “Lucian Lemprière” beneath it … there seemed to be a long waiting for something undefined … then she was going down the aisle again, with Lucy, her veil thrown back and the well-known chords of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March crashing out noisily from the organ.
People on either side smiled and exclaimed, and outside in the porch were village forms and faces long well-known to Rosalie.
“Oh, what a pretty bride!”
“Good luck to you both!”
“Hurrah for the bride and bridegroom!”
The carriage was at the lych-gate.
They drove away in it and Rosalie seemed to herself to wake from her trance at the sound of Lucy’s fervent exclamation:
“My Rosalie!”
She turned wholly to him, surrendering herself to his embrace.
Chapter VI
1
It was approaching the end of the year — early in December — when Lucy and Rosalie Lemprière returned to South Wales after their prolonged honeymoon abroad.
Fred had not yet returned to the West Indies, where the sugar plantations were not doing well, hurricanes of unusual violence and frequency had ruined crops and old Johnny Newton’s management of the coloured labour, grown slack, was deteriorating still further.
Fred repeatedly advised his mother to sell the estate if she could. Cecilia imperiously refused and talked of going out there with him to see for herself.
Fred ignored this suggestion and went to his club in London.
Lucy and Rosalie came back to The Grove, to their own suite of rooms in the large house.
Rosalie was happy, her ready gaiety had returned, and with it the poise that was naturally hers.
When Lucy held her in his arms and asked, “Are you happy, my sweet?” her answering “Yes” carried conviction to them both.
Sometimes she said, “I feel safe.”
He did not ask her what she meant.
The sense of security, that Rosalie believed to be a permanent one, did not desert her even when Cecilia asserted:
“Of course, Fred will come home again — he knows I want him, and he’ll like to see Lucy and Rosalie, naturally. You know he’s really made up his mind to settle in England, I think.”
“So as to have more time for playing the piano?” said Mrs. Joe Newton drily.
Cecilia laughed indulgently.
“I should be very thankful to have him, to help me with this place,” she declared. “You seem to forget that I’m not getting any younger.”
“I thought Lucy ran the place and gave you all the help you needed.”
“But Fred, being so energetic and fond of bestirring himself, would naturally take everything off both of us,” suggested Lucy, making even his mother laugh.
Rosalie told herself thankfully that she could hear it all with little or no emotion. Her mad obsession had left her. She felt, as she had told Lucy, safe.
She and Lucy had been staying at St. Brinvels and they had returned and were walking up to the house from the stables one evening just as the white mists were slowly beginning to rise up from the ground, when Kate came down the drive to meet them and announced that Fred had arrived — unannounced, as usual.
Rosalie was startled, yet still the feeling of inward security was with her.
It would be all right.
She had “got over it,” as people said. She was Lucy’s wife now, and they were happy together. In her brief madness with Fred, she had only once known happiness. The rest had been searing misery and uncertainty and heartbreak.
Rosalie closed her mind to the remembrance of it, and thought — as she had often thought before — that it must be true that the more fiercely a flame burned, the sooner it died down.
She slipped her arm through her husband’s as they drew nearer to the house, and Lucy drew it close to his side, looking down at her and smiling.
Kate said: “Fred has brought two friends of his with him from London: a Captain Durant and a Mr. ffillimore with two little ffs. They’re in the drawing-room with Mama. Captain Durant wears an eyeglass.”
She laughed as she said it, and Rosalie experienced a fleeting sensation of surprise that made her realize what a long while it was since she had heard Kate laughing, like the schoolgirl she still was, at nothing.
Cecilia was entertaining Fred’s friends at tea. The Newtons were there, and also the doctor, looking apologetic and out-of-place for he had been called in to see one of the servants and it was Fred who, meeting him in the hall, had insisted on his remaining.
Dr. Williams was not at all accustomed to being invited into drawing-rooms like the one at The Grove. He was a burly, red-faced Welshman, a hard drinker, well known locally to ill-treat his wife and bully his nine children. He was as nearly illiterate as it was possible for a man to be who had taken a medical degree at a provincial University in the eighteen-fifties.
The splendour of the drawing-room, the elegance of the tea appointments, and Cecilia’s freezing astonishment at his appearance, all combined to add to his discomfiture.
Only Mrs. Joe Newton spoke to him, and she put him through a searching catechism about the consumptive family of the village washerwoman.
Rosalie met Fred with scarcely a tremor, smiling at him with her lips and avoiding his eyes. It was with relief, even though she told herself triumphantly that it had meant nothing to either of them to meet again, that she turned to the strange men whom Cecilia was introducing.
“Captain Durant — my daughter-in-law, Mrs. Lucian Lempriére; Mr. ffillimore — Mrs. Lucian Lemprière.”
Captain Durant was neat and dapper, wearing, as Kate had said, a monocle, and much younger than the other guest. Mr. ffillimore might have been any age between forty and fifty-five and wore the unmistakable hard-bitten, weather-beaten look of the hunting man.
He owned a place in Devonshire, not far from where Tom and Fanny Ballantyne lived.
Fred had turned away almost as soon as he had greeted Rosalie, and was discussing the next day’s shooting with Joe Newton and Captain Durant.
Rosalie took her place near her mother-in-law and did her best to entertain Mr. ffillimore. It was not easy, for he was both inarticulate and afraid of women — although he actually lived at home with four unmarried sisters, all of them older than himself.
He had never married.
Kate, who had met him whilst staying with Fanny at Rock Place, was able to help the conversation by asking after the Misses ffillimore and all the horses and dogs, of which they appeared to have an inordinate number.
Rosalie wondered why Fred had chosen to invite him.
Lucy handed about the harlequin-china tea-cups and plates and rescued Dr. Williams from Cousin Edith’s curt commentary on the wicked folly of a social system that allowed a man and a woman, related to one another by blood and each of consumptive stock, to marry and p
roduce half a dozen children.
The whole scene felt to Rosalie slightly unreal. The talk was lacking in any sort of continuity, and the people gathered together had, for the most part, no common interests to bind them.
It was a relief to everyone in the room when Dr. Williams rose to his feet and contrived to blurt out a clumsy farewell to his hostess, who received it with icy haughtiness.
Fred escorted the doctor to the door and came back grinning.
“Are you annoyed with me, Mama?”
Cecilia smiled indulgently.
“Of course not. But why embarrass the poor man for nothing? There was no point in bringing him in here at all, surely.”
Then she began to talk of other things.
Rosalie thought that it was like Fred to have brought the rough, mannerless Welshman into his mother’s drawing-room for no reason whatever, and regardless of the fact that neither the doctor nor anybody else would enjoy the experience.
“He’s selfish,” she said to herself, with deliberate, dispassionate scorn. “Not like Lucy.”
It renewed her sense of freedom to feel that she could judge so coolly between the two men.
The feeling remained with her for the rest of the day, and Fred and she exchanged scarcely a word until dinner-time, when Rosalie found herself placed between him and Captain Durant.
The neat little Captain addressed himself politely to his hostess, and Rosalie turned resolutely towards Fred.
“Are you going to be in England long?”
“I don’t know. I may stay in England for good. Mama would like me to throw up Barbados altogether, but I like the life out there. One does nothing and nobody objects.”
“You couldn’t live at home.”
“Perhaps not. Though one would get plenty of cricket, and hunting, such as it is. But let’s talk about you.”
Rosalie shook her head.
“I’m not interesting,” she said lightly. “I’m settling down into married life, that’s all, and the happiest marriages have no history.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 507