A Child of the Age (Adams)/Chapter 16

by Francis William Lauderdale Adams

IV

Fortune favoured our flitting. We arrived at Charing Cross in good time for the train. I took two first-class tickets and tipped the guard heavily, for the privilege of having the compartment to ourselves. I lay back deep in my seat, with my feet up opposite me, full of thought, unobservant. Then I felt a hand steal into mine, and, looking up at a sweet anxious face, smiled, and said:

'Well, Rosy! Here we are, you see!'

'Yes,' she said, 'Here we are.'

'Are you sorry you came?' I asked.

'No, no! Not sorry.'

'Glad then?'

'I would be—if you'd speak to me!'

I drew down her face and kissed the cheek, and laughed a little.

Then she said:

'What were you thinking about all this long time, that you didn't say anything to me?'

'Well,' I said, 'among other things, about where we were to go to.'

'Yes,' she said.

I proceeded:

'I think-the best thing for us to do will be to get out at Calais; not go on to Paris. Suppose we went to some little seaside village in Brittany for a month or so? It must be very hot in Paris now.'

'I will do what you like,' she said.

'Very well,' I said, 'we'll get out at Calais.'

We had a beautiful crossing, the sea like a mill-pond. Rosy wasn't sick, nor was I. Fortune still favoured us. At Calais we got out, and I set about making inquiries as to the whereabouts of the desired little seaside village in Brittany. After many difficulties, that ended in—for me at any rate—complete weariness, I found out a place that seemed eligible, Pierlaix.

In Pierlaix we arrived that evening, and found our way to an inn, where we entered, and I demanded two rooms for the night, and something to eat at once. After some trouble, that would have been amusing if it had not been so dreary to us who were tired out, we were shown two rooms, a bedroom and (as we thought) a sitting-room, which I accepted on the spot, and proceeded to iterate my demands for a bath in the morning and something to eat and drink at once. (We were in the sitting-room.) They left us.

I opened the folding-windows wide, and stepped out onto the little balcony, into the noise of the sea and the coolness of the evening breeze from over it. As I leant on the rail I felt Rosy at my side, and turned to her. Poor child, how pale and tired she looked!

'Never mind. Rosebud,' said I, putting my arm round her shoulders and smiling at her. 'Keep your heart up! You'll be all right in the morning! I'm afraid the sea disturbed your little stomach. Do you feel ill?'

'No,' she said; 'I'm all right, thank you.'

'Then let's go up and wash ourselves. I feel filthy.' We went up into the bedroom together, and made some discoveries regarding the quantity of water here considered sufficient for the ablutions of two. However, this difficulty also was at last overcome; but we gave up the soap in despair. It was just after this that the fat hostess reappeared with considerable complacency, producing a species of scrubbing-brush, as being, à coup sûr, what monsieur required. (All the English gentlemen had the habit of using it, she explained to the puzzled host beside her.)

When they had gone away:

'I thought you knew French,' said Rosy, a little piteously, 'What did she bring that scrubbing-brush up for?'

Weary and dreary as I was, I exploded into laughter at this, and kept on at it till I fell exhausted backward on to the bed, and lay. From there, having rested a little, while Rosy was trying to wash her face in the bowl that did duty for a basin:

'I was only trying,' I said, 'to make them understand that I should like to have a tub in the morning.'

'I believe the whole hotel was on the stairs listening^ said Rosy, rather disgustedly. I went off into laughter again.

'I don't see what there's to laugh at,' she said: which made me continue even more than before, she drying her face and hands at the window, with dignity.

I suddenly stopped.

'It will be rather fun,' I said, 'seeing us buying new clothes to-morrow! You can't expect me to do that for you, you know!'

'I shan't,' said she.

'Very well,' I answered philosophically, 'then …' She was crying. I jumped up and came to her.

'Ah child what's the matter?' I said, taking her in my arms; 'what is the matter?'

'It's very unkind of you,' she sobbed, 'to go on like that at me, and you know it is.'

'Indeed,' I said, 'I'm very sorry. I didn't think you minded my fun. I was only joking. … There, there now! It 's all right. Give us a kiss, and let's be friends again.'

'I'm tired,' she said, wiping her eyes: 'and hungry.'

I continued chattering to her, till I at last succeeded in making her cheerful, and in quite a happy humour we went down together into the sitting-room. But, her hunger somewhat appeased by shrimps and fried sand-eels, the weariness once more began to acquire the ascendant. Before we were half through the meal, the big brown eyes were blinking fast and frequent, and the little head nodding downwards and suddenly starting up when it was approaching the table-cloth, at ever shortening intervals. I persuaded her to sit in the arm-chair in front of the window, so that 'she might look at the sea, since she didn't care to eat any more,' while I finished the stewed fruit and three shrivelled apples.

When I had peeled apple number two and cut it into pieces, I went round to have a look at her. She was fast asleep.

I went back and ate the pieces, and then apple number three, thinking all the while till I became quite incoherent in my ideas about things. The end of this was that I awoke with a start, and, having realised where I was and with whom, decided that bed was the best place for both of us. But when I came and looked at her breathing asleep, so pale and tired, I did not care to awaken her. And going, first opened and left open the sitting-room door, and then the bedroom door, and returned, intending to carry her up to bed. The dear child let herself be lifted with no more trouble than a few uneasy sounds and movements of her arms; and then up with her I went, and laid her softly on the bed. She sighed, and sank into unruffled sleep again. I made her as comfortable as I could, and shut the door.

Over the door there was a small window. The walls of the room were simply boards, polished. I went to the other end; opened the window, and leant out. Below was a garden. I could hear, but not see, the sea. The evening breeze still blew softly and coolly. I gave a large long yawn, and bethought me of lying down. I took off my coat, putting it on the back of a chair, and came and lay down quietly beside her. I must have fallen asleep almost immediately.

When I awoke, the room was half-full of sunlight; a bird was singing outside, and I saw Rosy, lying half a yard away, seriously looking at me.

'Good-morning,' I said.

'Good-morning,' she answered.

'… I wonder what time it is?'

I got out my watch and looked at it.—Half-past five.

'Stopped!' I said, '… How long have you been awake?'

'Oh, a long time.'

'… I feel hungry.'

'What time is breakfast going to be?'

'God only knows——or the fat woman! I don't know what even the French for it is. Suppose I get up and see.'

I got up; and, feeling very dried and not a little dirty, pulled off my waistcoat and shirt, and entered upon the best course of ablutions possible with the basin and neither sponge nor soap.

'This is certain,' I said, drying myself on the small towel, 'I never knew what it was to be without a sponge and soap before!'

We talked a little about such things, till I was dressed. Then, on my way to go out, I stopped by the bedside, and stooped down over her.

'May I have a kiss?' I asked.

She put her arms up round my neck, and drew me down to her. Our lips would have met, but that I, avoiding hers, kissed her on the cheek. Then I, supporting myself by my two arms on either side of of her (for she still held me), and, looking at her, said:

'If you think you wouldn't be happy with me, Rosy, it is not too late for you to go back again.'

'Naughty boy!' she said, smiling at me. 'Fancy talking like that!'

'Nay,' I said, 'I was quite serious. You see what a weathercock I am: one moment laughing, the next crying, the next cursing. It is not too late to go back again to your old life. Nay, it will never be too late! Whenever you are tired of me, you must leave me. Half of what was mine is yours. That goes without the saying. You are your own mistress—now, as always, as far as I am concerned.'

'Well,' she said, 'then I'll take you, if you please.'

After a moment:

'That being so,' I said, smiling, ' I am yours—till you are tired of me, that is. Till when, I will do my best—what in me lies, to make you happy. So help me my own poor will and love for you!' I bent down and kissed her on the lips.

 

For the first week or so, there was no one in the inn—or, as they called it, the Hôtel du Midi—but we; but a good many people came over from the two adjacent towns of St. Denys and Marny to spend the day, going back by the diligence in the evening. Then two Englishmen, evident 'Varsity men or aspirers thereto, en tour, arrived and stayed for a short time; but, beyond talking with them a little at dinner (what I had taken, by-the-by, for our private sitting-room, turned out to be a public one), we, or rather I, saw nothing of them.

The following, written later, refers to now:

'I had some things to trouble my peace: to write, and more than once, to Mr. Sandford, the solicitor who had informed me of Colonel James' death and of my inheritance of his fortune, and to Strachan touching the Book.

'I scarcely knew what to say to Mr. Sandford. Certainly I was not going to explain to him the cause of my sudden flight, and as certainly I was not going to lie about the matter. In the letter in which he informed me of the burial of Colonel James in Kensal Green, and of the probable cost of a suitable tombstone, etc.; he said that he now regretted, after his long, he might say, personal affection for the deceased, an affection which, etc., and in which, etc., etc., but he must request that I would transfer the conduct of my affairs to, etc., etc., etc.

'I sat frowning over the regular winged writing for a little, with a vague wonder as to the nature of the friendship here alluded to, and sorrow that I had apparently profaned it: then tore the paper across, and threw it on to the table beside me. And Rosy came in with her hat on, ready for a ramble over the reefs now the tide was out; and that was the end of the matter—as regarded the friendship, I mean.

'One afternoon, in a fit of despondency, I sat down and began a letter to Rayne. I am not quite sure whether in my inmost mind I absolutely intended sending it. I think that the chief reason for my writing, or rather attempting to write it, was the relief thereby given to my pent-up feelings. Sheet after sheet was ripped up, and at last I sat still in a disgust that was almost petulant.

'Suddenly a hot flush stole up to my cheek, and I looked fixedly at the pile of torn-up paper in front of me, which contained shameful words: hints of what I had done. "I could never see her again," I had said; "I could not forget what had passed between us. Did she expect me to return and look at her being consumed alive at the stake of Duty? I was made of flesh and blood. Such a sacrifice as she was making was a sacrifice to Moloch: sin, not heroism."—In any case, how purposeless, all this! in every case, how unmanly! She had to dree her own weird, and I too, with what light conscience and knowledge could impart. That was all. All that day I felt I had done a wrong to Rosy. If there was a victim anywhere, it was she.

'Then came Strachan.—I told him simply that it was impossible for me to return to London, at any rate, at present: I hoped never. I was going on to Paris in September, and might perhaps take up my permanent abode there. Could not the proof sheets be sent to me there, and from me on to him? I would write to him again from the Hôtel de Manchester, Rue Faubourg St. Honoré, when I got there. I hoped Parker, Innes, and Co. had accepted the Book all right. I should stay at the Hôtel de Manchester till I found a house to please me. But, more later. I asked him to excuse haste and confusion. As a matter of fact, I hated pens, ink, and paper now. To write at all required an effort. I was thinking of buying a vineyard, and eating fruit till I brought on—whatever the disease was that was induced by a surfeit of grapes. I hoped Mrs. Strachan and the Miss Strachans were well. It was rather dull weather here. We had not had a fine summer for long. I doubted we ever should have one again. And I remained, etc., etc'

A few days after this, a small troop of students and girls who, the fat hostess assured me, were their brides, arrived, and we had rather noisy times of it at dinner. Rosy did not like any of them. Me they amused. I used to talk with the men, or rather boys, as I best could. (Among other articles I had purchased at St. Denys, was a French dictionary and a stock of French novels at which I studied some hours a day.) But my belief in the brides (I mean in their brideship) was soon first considerably shaken, and then altogether demolished. I remember how one evening I was sitting out on the veranda (in the evenings the sitting-room was nearly always deserted for the garden or the country round about), having been reading Balzac's Mémoires dc Deux Jeunes Mariées with some pleasure, when I became aware of one of our young couples at the bottom of the garden, sporting together somewhat as I supposed Isaac to have sported with Rebekah on a certain historic occasion not unconnected with Abimelech and a window. The idea made me laugh, and laugh again, till it shook my book down off my knees: when a hand was put over my eyes and firmly pressed there. I threw it off, and beheld Rosy standing, absolutely glaring at me.

'Hullo,' I said, 'what's the matter?'

'You were laughing at one of those girls,' she said.

'No,' I said, 'I was laughing at a couple there in the bushes, playing together.'

'You were not! You were laughing at that girl with the red hair. I saw her go out there a moment ago on purpose!'

'Are you joking?' I said surprisedly, getting up. I could see she was not. I turned a little. She turned, so as to keep her eyes on mine. Our eyes met and stayed together while I spoke:

'Rosy,' I said, 'I do not tell lies, at least of this sort. When I tell you I have done a thing, I do not expect you to question the truth of my words.'

'But you did!' she burst out, 'you did. You know you did!'

'Did what?'

'Nod to her, and laugh at her! I saw you!'

I lost patience. I gave one step to her.

'I warn you never to say such a thing again,' I said, 'there must be trust between us, or nothing, I did not tell you this before. I thought you understood it. Now choose. Believe me, or we part—for always. I will never see you again.'

If I had not caught her, she would have fallen. She writhed about in my grasp, muttering quickly, her face and hands working, her eyelids quivering. I held her and looked at her steadily. I did not know what was the matter with her; but was decided that she must say she believed me, or we would part. Life with a woman who did not trust you, would be nothing short of the popular conception of hell.

At last she became coherent enough for me to gather that I had terrified her. Then she appeared to recognise me, and covered me with a hundred endearments, beseeching me over and over again not to leave her, or she would kill herself. I did not know how she loved me! Indeed, indeed, she couldn't help it! She always was jealous—from a child! If I would only kiss and be friends again, as we were before, she would never, never be jealous again. But that girl with the red hair was so forward-like, she didn't care what she did!

Weary of this, I sat her down on the sofa, and stood, half-turned away, before her. She went on in the same strain for a little, and then came a pause. Perhaps she was exhausted. I said:

'Well, Rosy, have you considered? I was not joking just now. I asked you to choose. Do you believe what I said to you about those two down there, or do you not? You know what your choice implies?'

'What?' she asked; 'what do you mean?'

I answered:

'I cannot live with anyone who thinks that I have told them a deliberate lie. If you think I have told you a lie, then I will leave you.'

'I don't think you told a lie. I never said I thought you told a lie.'

'Didn't you say just now you thought I had been laughing at that red-haired girl? '

'Yes, I said I thought you did.'

'And didn't I say I had not?'

'Yes.'

'And didn't you say then that I had?'

'Yes.'

'And didn't I tell you that I had not?'

'Ye—es.'

'And didn't you refuse to believe me?'

'Ye—e—es.'

'And what is that but telling me, straightly and directly, that I had lied to you?'

'I don't understand it,' she said, piteously, bewildered. I walked round the table, with my hands in my pockets.

Then, standing in the middle of the open window, I stared out into the dull evening and my thoughts. I do not know how long I stood so: maybe scarcely two minutes, but it seemed more than two hours. I roused myself with a sigh, turned round, and going to her, knelt down by her knees; put my arms round her, and kissed her.'

How the child smiled, and cried, and laughed, and caressed me!

We came on to Paris in the first week or so of September, to the Hôtel de Manchester. A letter had arrived there for me the night before, from Strachan. He expressed surprise at my flight in the night time, and hoped that there was nothing serious the matter with me? But Mrs. Strachan had been pestering him to take her and the girls to Paris for a fortnight, and as his term at the Queen's College did not begin till the end of October (by-the-by he had not informed me that he had just got the chair of Natural History there, had he?), he thought he might manage it (say) halfway through September. We could talk over matters about the Book then. Parker had agreed to publish it all right; but there was some lumber about plates, etc. He would write again shortly, or, perhaps better, when he arrived in Paris.

I answered this letter at once.

First, as regarded the Book. No expense was to be spared to make it attractive. That was my affair, or rather it was Mr. Brooke's own. I only held his money and property as a guardian till Mr. Starkie returned from Africa, when I should hand it over to him with the account of what had been expended of the one or made use of of the other, during his absence. But, I was quite sure, no possible objection could be raised to any expense undertaken in behalf of the Book. I would be responsible for that. For the rest, I need not say how glad I should be to see him (Strachan) here in Paris, but it would be, I thought, impossible for me to see Mrs. Strachan or his daughters. For this reason: there was with me now one who had given up all she had for my sake, for which I loved and reverenced her, and, considering that the only reason that she was not my wife was because I did not believe in what was known as 'marriage,' I would go nowhere where she could not come with me, and be assured of the same respect as if she were my wife. This I knew was more than I could ask (my first form of the sentence was: than either I could ask or desire) of Mrs. Strachan, with the beliefs that I knew she held. I repeated that I should be indeed glad to see him here, I hoped in my own house, and have some opportunity of returning him some little of the hospitality which he and his had given to me while I was in London.

There was, I thought, no more to be said than this. If he were a true man, it would be enough: if he were not, then let each go on his separate way. It was as nothing to me. Only one acquaintance the less.… Should I never have a friend?

In the morning Rosy and I set out together in pursuit of a house, or rather a flat, to suit us. After some trouble, I remembered that, when I had been at the pension in the Avenue de Fontenoi, I had noticed a flat that was to let, some way up the street, which had impressed me favourably for some reason or other. I suggested that we should go there now, and we did. The place suited us, and we took it.

We, or rather I, began with a delightful scheme of doing each room (there were seven, not counting the kitchen, all opening into one another) in some particular style: as, for instance, there was to be a terracotta room, and a brass room, and a silvered room, and so on, I got through the first two pretty well, I think, but with some trouble, in the next three or four days. Then one morning came a letter from Strachan.—He would manage to see me soon somehow, and we could arrange about the Book. He was bound to cross the Channel in any case, he found, before the term began. There were some bones in the Museum of Natural History that he must manage to see somehow before he went on any further with a monograph on the Elephas Primogenius he was now working at. Mrs. Strachan and the girls were not coming to Paris this year. I must excuse haste, and, hoping to see me well, he remained, etc., etc.

What a time that was, furnishing the house! As for the idea of doing each room of the house in a particular style—L'homme propose, les commis disposent! I really don't know how we ever got the place done at all. However, at the end of a fortnight, we, or rather I, again had made five of the seven rooms habitable, and the two servants I had got had done the same for the kitchen. (The servants of the whole house slept up above in the grenier, as they call it, not in the several flats.) I worked like a slave, and rather liked it: hanging all the pictures, deciding where, and generally helping, to put all the things in their places, and so on; for I had my doubts about the Parisian sense of the beautiful in the matter of furniture arrangement.

Rosy's chief anxiety in the matter was as concerned the fate of the things which she had herself ordered, all the linen and the household utensils. She did not care to come up to the place itself, for reasons of her own: not unconnected, I thought, with a small coffin which had happened to be exposed by the door one morning, covered with flowers, a child's coffin. When I had asked her, as we went up the staircase, why she hurried by so quickly, she said in a half-whisper:

'It was a child! Don't let's talk about it.'

It must have been a fine thing in the way of amusement to have seen her ordering her things at the Magasin du Louvre her favourite shop, lists in hand. The composition of those lists in the evenings with pen, ink, paper, and dictionary was delightful; but she would not hear of my going with her to see their fulfilment.

At last all was ready for her, and the next morning we installed ourselves.

I remember that, as we sat together that evening, I looked across to her sitting with far-off eyes with her book, and thought how impossible it was to know anything about anyone else. I felt that in her mind a train of ideas existed of which I was absolutely ignorant.

At last:

'Rosy,' I said, getting up, 'I have not welcomed you to your home.'

She rose, and I took her hands, and, looking into her eyes, went on:

'Welcome to it, and may you be happy in it! And here at the beginning of our new life together, let us say that, whatever may happen, one thing shall always be between us—Trust. Believe me,' I said, taking her in my arms and looking closer into her eyes, 'Believe me, child, that without Trust, happiness can never live, let love be as broad and as deep as is the sea. Oh Rosy, give yourself to me, heart and soul! It seems to me, as we are now, that Love is not so far away from us.'

Her arms pressed me with strange strength. Her face grew to mine: our lips met in a kiss that was her full surrender unto mine: a kiss so sweet, so long, so mingling, that I knew not whether this was death or life, or earth or heaven. And then I thought that it was Love.

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