Mrs. Warren's Daughter Part 30

_Vivie_: "Dear, brave Bertie, whom I shall everlastingly mourn, was shot here in Brussels by the abominable Germans, as a spy, on April 8th, 1917. He was of course no more a spy than you are or I am. The poor devoted fool--I rage still, because I shall never be worth such folly, such selfless devotion--got into Belgium with false pa.s.sports--American: in the hope of rescuing me. He came and enquired here--my last address in his remembrance--and came by sheer bad luck just as the Kaiser was about to arrive. They jumped to the conclusion that--"

_Rossiter_: "_Awfully, cruelly_ sad. But you can give me the details of it later on. You must have a long, long story of your own to tell which ought to be of poignant interest. But ... will you marry me? I suppose you know dear Linda died--was killed by a bomb in a German air-raid last year--October, 1917. I really felt _heart-broken_ about it, but I know now I am only doing what she would have wished.

She came at last to talk about you _quite_ differently, _quite_ understanding--"

_Vivie_: "That's what all widowers say. They always declare the dead wife begged them to marry again, and even designated her successor.

Poor Linda! Yes, I read an account of it in a copy of the _Times_; but I couldn't of course communicate with you to say how _truly, truly_ sorry I was. I am glad to know she spoke nicely of me. Did she really? Or have you only made it up?"

_Michael_: "_Of course_ I haven't. She really did. Do you know, she and I quite altered after the War began? She lost all her old silliness and inefficiency--or at any rate only retained enough of the old childishness to make her endearing. And I really grew to love her. I quite forgot you. Yes: I admit it....

"But somehow, after she was dead the old feeling for you came back ... and without any disloyalty to Linda. I felt in a way--I know it is an absurd thing for a man of science to say, for we have still no proof--I felt somehow as though she lived still. That's why I don't want to get rid of the Park Crescent house. Her presence seems to linger there. But I also knew--instinctively--that she would like us to come together.... She..."

_Waiter_ (knocking at door and slightly opening it): "Madame! Le General Tompkins veut vous voir. Il ajoute qu'il n'est pas habitue a attendre. Il y a aussi M'sieur emile Vandervelde, qui arrive instamment et qui n'a pas d'installation..."

_Rossiter_: "d.a.m.n! Let me go and settle with 'em. Tompkins! I never heard such cheek--"

_Vivien_: "Not at all. You forget I am Manageress." (To Waiter) "Entrez done! Dites au General que je serai a sa disposition dans trois minutes; et montrez-lui ce que nous avons en fait de chambres.

Tous les appartements avec bain sont pris. Casez M'sieur Vandervelde quelque part. Du reste, je descendrai."... (Waiter goes out) ...

"Michael! It is impossible to have a sentimental conversation here, and at this hour--Eleven o'clock on a busy morning. If you want an answer to your second question, now you've seen me, meet me outside the Palm House of the Jardin Botanique, at 3 p.m. I'll get off somehow for an hour just then. Don't forget! It's close by here--along the Rue Royale. Be absolutely punctual, or else I shall think that having _seen_ me, seen how changed I am, you have altered your mind. I shall _quite_ understand; only I _may_ come back at five minutes past three and accept General Tompkins. Acquaintances ripen quickly in Brussels."

In the Palm House--or rather one of its many compartments; 3.5 p.m., on a beautiful afternoon in early December. The sun is sinking over outspread Brussels in a pink and yellow haze radiating from the good-humoured-looking, orange orb. There are no other visitors to the Palm House, at any rate not to this compartment, except the superintending gardener--the same that cheered the last hours of Mrs. Warren. He recognizes Vivien and salutes her gravely. Seeing that she is accompanied by a gentleman in khaki he discreetly withdraws out of hearing and tidies up a tree fern. Vivien and Michael seat themselves on two green iron chairs under the fronds and in front of grey stems.

_Vivie_: "This is a favourite place of mine for a.s.signations. I can't think why it is so little appreciated by young Brussels. These palm houses are much more beautiful than anything at Kew; they are in the heart of Brussels, over which, as you see, you have a wonderful view. It was much more frequented when the Germans were here. With all their brutality they did not injure this unequalled collection of Tropical plants. They made the Palm House an allowance of coal and c.o.ke in winter while we poor human beings went without.

I used often to come in here on a winter's day to get warm and to forget my sorrows....

"Look at that superb Raphia--_what_ fronds! And that Phoenix spinosa--and that Aralia--"

_Rossiter_: "Bother the Aralia. I haven't come here for a Botany lesson. Besides, it isn't an Aralia; it's a Gomphocarpus.... Vivie!

_Will_ you marry me?"

_Vivie_: "My dear Michael: I was forty-three last October."

_Michael_: "I was _fifty-three_ last November, the day the Armistice was signed. But I feel more like thirty-three. Life in camp has quite rejuvenated me..."

_Vivie_ (continuing): ... "And my hair is cinder grey--an unfortunate transition colour. And if the gardener were not looking I should say: 'Feel my elbows ... Dreadfully bony! And my face has become..." She turns her face towards him. He sees tears trembling on the lower lashes of her grey eyes, but something has come into the features, some irradiation of love--is it the light of the sunset?--which imparts a tender youthfulness to the curvature of cheek, lips and chin. Her face, indeed, might be of any age: it held the undying beauty of a G.o.ddess, in whom knowledge has sweetened to tenderness and divinity has dissolved in a need for compa.s.sion; and the youthful a.s.surance of a happy woman whose wish at last is won....

For a minute she looks at him without finis.h.i.+ng her sentence. Then she sits up straighter and says explicitly: "Yes, I will."

The gardener managed an occasional peep at them, sitting hand in hand. He wished the idyll to last as long as the clear daylight, but the hour for closing was four o'clock--"Il n'y avait pas a nier."

Either they were husband and wife, reunited, after years of war-severance; or they were mature lovers, and probably of the most respectable. In either case, the necessary hint that ecstasies must transfer themselves at sunset from the gla.s.s houses of the Jardin Botanique to the outer air was best conveyed on this occasion by a discreet gift of flowers. Accordingly he went on to where exotic lilies were blooming, picked a few blossoms, returned, came with soft padding steps up to Vivie, offered them with a bow and "Mes felicitations _sinceres_, Madame." Vivie laughed and took the lilies; Rossiter of course gave him a ten-franc note. And they sauntered slowly back to the hotel.

L'ENVOI

I am reproached by such Art Critics as deign to notice my pictures with "finis.h.i.+ng my foregrounds over much,"--filling them with superabundant detail, making the primroses more important than the snow-peaks. And by my publishers with forgetting the price of paper and the cost of printing. My jury of matrons thinks I don't know where to leave off and that I might very well close this book on the answer that Mrs. Warren's daughter gave to Sir Michael Rossiter's proposal of marriage in the Palm House at Brussels. "The reader,"

they say, "can very well fill in the rest of the story for himself or herself. It is hardly likely that Vivie will cry off at the last moment, or Michael reconsider the plunge into a second marriage. Why therefore waste print and paper and our eyesight in describing the marriage ceremony, the inevitable visit to Honoria, and what Vivie did with the property she inherited from her mother?"

No doubt they are all right. Yet I am distrustful of my readers'

judgment and imagination. I feel both want guiding, and I doubt their knowledge of the world and goodness of heart being equal to mine, except in rare cases.

So I throw out these indications to influence the sequels they may plan to this story.

I think that Michael and Vivie were married at the British Legation in Brussels between Christmas and the New Year of 1918-1919; before that Legation was erected into an Emba.s.sy; and that the marriage officer was kind, genial Mr. Hawk when he returned to Brussels from The Hague and proceeded to get the Legation into working order. I am sure Mr. Hawk entered into the spirit of the thing and gave an informal breakfast afterwards in the Rue de Spa to which Mons. and Mme. Walcker, Mons. and Mme. Trouessart, and the Directeur of the prison of Saint-Gilles and his wife were invited. I think the head gardener of the Jardin Botanique who had charge of the Tropical houses cribbed from the collections some of the most magnificent blooms, and presented them to Vivie on the morning of her marriage; and that afterwards she laid the bouquet on her mother's newly finished tomb in the cemetery of St. Josse-ten-Noode, where, the weather being singularly mild for the time of year, the flowers lasted fresh and blooming for several days.

I am sure she and Michael then crossed the road and pa.s.sed on to the building of the Tir National; entered it and stood for a moment in the verandah from which Vivie had seen Bertie Adams executed; and pa.s.sed on over the tussocky gra.s.s to the graves of Bertie Adams and Edith Cavell, where they did silent homage to the dead. I believe a few days afterwards they visited the Senate where the victims of von Bissing's "Terror" had been tried, browbeaten, insulted, mocked. And the functionary who showed them over this superb national palace is certain to have included in his exposition the once splendid carpets which the German officers prior to their evacuation of the Senate--all but the legislative chamber of which was used as a barracks for rough soldiery--had sprayed and barred, streaked and splodged with printing ink. He would also have pointed out the three-hundred-year-old tapestries they had ripped from the walls and the historical portraits they had slashed, and would again have emphasized the fact that in all these senseless devastations the officers were far worse than the men.

Also I am certain that Michael and Vivie made a pilgrimage to the prison of Saint-Gilles, and stood silently in the cell where Bertie Adams and Vivie had spent those terrible days of suspense and despair between April 6 and April 8, 1917; and that when they entered that other compartment of the prison where Edith Cavell had pa.s.sed her last days before her execution, they listened with sympathetic reverence to the recital by the Directeur of verses from "l'Hymne d'edith Cavell"--as it is now called--no other than the sad old poem of human sorrow, _Abide with me_; and that they appreciated to the full the warmth of Belgian feeling which has turned the cell of Edith Cavell into a Chapelle Ardente in perpetuity.

I think they returned to England in January, 1919, so that Michael might get back quickly to his work of mending the maimed, now transferred to English hospitals; and so that Vivie--always a practical woman--should prove her mother's will, secure her heritage and have it in hand as a fund from which to promote all the happiness she could. I doubt whether she will give much of it to "causes" rather than cases and to politics in preference to persons.

I think she was awfully disgusted when she was back in the England of to-day not to find Mrs. Fawcett Prime Ministress and First Lady of the Treasury, Annie Kenney at the Board of Trade and Christabel Pankhurst running the Ministry of Health. It was disheartening after the long struggle for the Woman's Vote and the equality of the s.e.xes in opportunity to find the same old men-muddlers in charge of all public affairs and departments of state, and the only woman on the benches of the House of Commons a millionaire peeress never before identified with the struggle for the Woman's Cause.

However I think her disenchantment did not diminish the rapture at finding herself once more in the intimacy of Honoria Armstrong. Sir Petworth, when he ran over on leave from the Army of Occupation, thought her enormously improved, though he had the tact not to say so. He frankly made the _amende honorable_ for his suspicions and churlishness of the past, and himself--I think--insisted on his frank and friendly children calling her "Aunt Vivie." I am equally sure that Vivie was not long in London before she appeared at dear old Praddy's studio, beautifully gowned and looking years younger than forty-three; and I shouldn't wonder but that her presence once more in his circle will give his frame a fillip so that he may cheat Death over a few more annual outbreaks of influenza. I am convinced that he has left all his money, after providing a handsome annuity for the parlour-maid, to Vivie, knowing that in her hands, far more--and far more quickly than in those that direct princely and public charities--will his funds reach the students and the poverty-stricken artists whom he wants to benefit.

I think that after spending the first five months of 1919 in London, getting No. 1 Park Crescent tidy again and fully repaired (because Michael wished to pursue more thoroughly than ever his biological researches), Vivie and Michael went off to spend their real honeymoon in the Occupied Territory of the Rhineland, in that never-to-be forgotten June, memorable for its splendid suns.h.i.+ne and the beauty of its flowers and foliage. I think they did this expressly (under the guise of a visit to General Armstrong), so that Vivie and Minna von Stachelberg--now Minna Schultz--might foregather at Bonn. Minna had married again, an officer of no family but of means and of fine physique whom she had nursed in Brussels. His left arm had been shattered, but the skill of the Belgian surgeons and her devoted nursing had saved it from being amputated. She had wished however to have him examined by some great exponent of curative surgery at Bonn University, and the conjunction of the celebrated Sir Michael Rossiter--who in his discussions of anatomy with the Bonn professors forgot there had ever been a war between Britain and Germany--was most opportune.

I think however that Sir Michael said this was all humbug on Minna's part, and that all she wanted--her husband, Major Schultz, looking the picture of health--was to meet once more her well-beloved Vivie.

At any rate I am sure they met in the Rhineland in a propitious month when you could be out of doors all day and all night; and that Minna said some time or other how happy she was in her second marriage, and that however heartily she disliked militarism and condemned War, soldiers made the nicest husbands. I think before she and Vivie parted to go their several ways, they determined to work for the building up of an Anglo-German reconciliation, and for the advocacy in both countries of a Man-and-Woman Government.

I think, nevertheless, that Vivie being a sound business woman and possessing a strong sense of justice on the lines of an eye for an eye, will claim at least Five Thousand pounds from the German Government for the devastations and thefts at the Villa Beau-sejour; and that having got it and having disposed of her mother's jewellery and plate for 3,500, she will present the Villa Beau-sejour property and an endowment of 8,000 to the Town of Brussels, as an educational orphanage for the children of Belgian soldiers who have died in the War, where they may receive a practical education in agriculture and poultry farming.

I fancy she gave a Thousand pounds to Pasteur Walcker's Congo Mission; and transferred to Mme. Trouessart all her shares in and rights over the Hotel edouard-Sept.

I also picture to myself the Rossiters having a motor tour of pure pleasure and delight of the eyes in South Wales in September, 1919.

I imagine their going to Pontystrad and surprising the Vicar and Vicaress and puzzling them by purposely-diffuse stories of Vivie's cousin the late David Vavasour Williams, intended to convey the idea, without telling unnecessary fibs, that David died abroad during the War, but that Vivie in his memory and that of his dear old father intends to continue a strong personal interest in the Village Hall and its educational aims. I also picture Vivie going alone to Mrs. Evanwy's rose-entwined cottage. The old lady is now rather shaky and does not walk far from her little garden with its box bower and garden seat. I can foreshadow Vivie dispelling some of the mystery about David Williams and being embraced by the old Nannie with warm affection and the hearty a.s.surances that she had guessed the secret from the very first but had been so drawn to the false David Williams and so sure of his honest purposes that nothing would have induced her to undeceive the old Vicar. I can even imagine the old lady ere--years hence--paralysis strikes her down--telling Vivie so much gossip about the Welsh Vavasours that Vivie becomes positively certain her mother came from that stock and that she really was first cousin to the boy she personated for the laudable purpose of showing how well a woman could practise at the Bar.

I like to think also that by the present year of grace--1920--the Rossiters will have become convinced that No. 1 Park Crescent, even with the Zoo and the Royal Botanic Gardens close by and the ornamental garden of Regent's Park in between, does not satisfy all their needs and ambitions: that they will have resolved even before this year began--to supplement it by a home in the country for week-ends, for summer visits, and finally for rest in their old age.

That for this purpose they will acquire some ideal Grange or Priory, or ample farmstead near Petworth and the Armstrongs' home, over against the South Downs, and near the river Rother; that it shall be in no mere suburb of Petworth but in a stately little village with its own character and history going back to Roman times and a church with a Saxon body and a Norman chancel. And that in the ideal churchyard of this enviable church with ancient yews and 18th century tomb-stones, and old, old benches in the suns.h.i.+ne for the grandfathers and loafers of the village to sit on and smoke of a Sabbath morning, a place shall be found for the bones of Bertie Adams; reverently brought over from the gra.s.sy amphitheatre of the Tir National to repose in this churchyard of West Suss.e.x which looks out over one of the finest cricket pitches in the county. If, then, there is any lien between the mouldering fragments of our bodies and the inexplicable personality which has been generated in the living brain, the former office boy of _Fraser and Warren_ will know that he is always present in the memory of Vivien Rossiter, that she has placed the few physical fragments still representing him in such a setting as would have delighted his honest, simple nature in his lifetime. He would also know that his children are now hers and her husband's; that his Nance very rightly married the excellent butler, Jenkins, with whom he had discussed many a cricket score; and that Love, after all, is stronger than Death.

THE END