THE KISSING ROSE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXX, Issue 14881, 1 January 1909, Page 10

THE KISSING ROSE.

(By .MRS BAILLIE-SAUNDERS) Author of “Saints in Society,” ■“'•London Lovers,” Etc., Etc.

[An Rights Reserved.]

It divells in the heart of Alexis like a dream-prologue acted in a fairy-lii-s, before real life was at all—that scene in an old gardon. A man and a woman bending heads together and whispering. An old Georgian wall, fruitcovered. Herself at nine years old in striped stockings like a zebra, and a poplin frocks with hoops, gazed yearningly at a distent bank of gaudy flowers, impatiently critioal of her elders’- absorbed chatter. Then the voice of mamma—pretty mamma—saying hurriedly: “ Run away, Alexis, and look at the flowers,” and her little self obeying on fussy feet, glad to leave those idiotelders who talk, talk even in a garden.

Mamma turned heavily-lashsd eyes, slightly accentuated by bistre to the man at her side.

“ Flowers will lead her anywhere,” she said, half contemptuously. Edward Dare bowed his handsome, rather vulgar head. It was in the days of the early seventies, and men still bowed to women.

“May she never change!” he said, lightly. His clear, full eyes were on mama’s pink and white face with a glance of permitted boldness. Mamina tossed her head with its blond chignon. , “Do you hope it—in a woman?” she answered.

“My wishes do not often flower into hopes,” he said.

Mamma looked flattered, and her bridling fluttered the striped gingham of her gown. Nevertheless, impatience and annoyance darted out into the smile, like lizards in the sunshine. She glanced across the lawn at the child sedately parading against the massed bank of flowers.

“ J wonder ” she broke off, and laughed. “Well?” said the attentive host. “ Whether it may ever be, Edward, that you and she ” “ Nonsense!” / “ May find the fulfilment of which you and I have only dreamed.” “Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense!” “O, what a world!” said mamma, almost angrily. Alexis went sedately pat-a-pat across the grass to' where the great hedge of flowers made a bank of autumn flame. It was late summer, just catching autumn. _ There were a million thousand iridescent dew-drops, like opals and diamonds, shimmering ail over the lawn, where a white haze, like glittering gauze, filmed the lighter boughs with prismatic sheens. Great clumps .of phlox—pinky, mauvey. pearly white—stood tad in a mass of poppies, blood-red, dim, wonderful. Marigold, nasturtium, petunia, flaming dahlia, and above it all tall churchspires of holly-hocks, made the old walled garden, into a wonderland. Alexis had a cloud of hair pulled back from a grave brow. She raised awofilledy passionate eyes from these glories to the wall beyond, for there upon its lichened, hoary summit grew—dream of it. sigh for it! —gilly-flowers, rooted in the mossy chinks of the old, old bricks i Velvets, .browns, oranges, yellows, tawnys, bloomed oyer with purple—like grapes; dim with gold dust, scented, fragrant still. The heart of Alexis stood still. To get to those 1 Her prim little well-brought-up young ladles’ walk, her trained quietude changed suddenly. She made a forward dart of blind rapture, and would have butted against the wall when a great red rose, heavyheaded, and full to the very cups with • dew, struck her full in the face and sent her backwards. Bor little foot on his lower boughs had swayed forward the heavy thing, and he had dashed over her ail bis fragrant dew with a glorious impudence. Wiping her face resentfully, Alexis stood and looked at him amazed. Then she stamped the leg in the stocking with stripes going round. Then sho laughed softly, in a sort of baby coo, and went solemnly back to where mamma and Mr Dare still talked against the shadow of the brown brick Georgian house. “ I tried to get to the gilly-flowers, but the big red rose struck _me in the face,” she said in clear, child-didactic tones. Edward Dare turned his handsome, vulgar head and looked at her quizzically. “ Say it kissed you, Alexis. Rcses don’t strike. Call it a kiss.”

Alexis considered. “ It may have been a kiss,” she said, thoughtfully. “ But it stopped ms getting What I wanted.” “Oh. it gave you something better 1” ne laughed, and turned again to mama.

Those two had a few more inaudible words. Then Alexis, still angry with the rose, came away with mamma and went the round of slow visits, the wife of a provincial solicitor—bitterly discontented, wretchedly out of tune with her world—would be likely to drawl through. The town, provincial, sleepy, proper, materialistic, went on with its little businesses languidly, self-right-eously, little dreaming of an angry passion hidden anywhere under its correot breast. In her mad heart) foolish, erring mamma rased inwardly at social jaws, at moral duty. In her crystalline heart Alexis raged at the rude red rose.

Fifteen years later something haggard, something wrecked and drawn and dreary, something that spoke like mamma and that lived in her place, but that had long ago ceased to look like her, lay fretting and fuming in a chair by a greyish fire. Shawls covered it; the eyes were glassy and dull, and stared into the grate. A hectic, uneven, oonfused look jumhled her once pink and white face into a blur. Tho mouth-musoles had relaxed. Nothing was left of these other deckings 6ave a melancholy over-drawing of the worn eyebrows in black chalk, a last poor signal of vanity. The room was as shabby as the woman.

“ It is all that can be expected,” she said in oddly muffled, resentful tones. “Ingratitude! You’re like your father. You're all the same.”

A grown-up Alexis in one of the windows that overlooked the grey market place did not speak. She v/ae propping her heavily-dressed head inelegantly on both hands at a little desk, over a book. A heap of books lay at her side and about her feet. Her face was a pure whits cameo against the old fadetinted curtains. It was the cno divine thing in all the sordid dinner-odoured room.

u Always at your books! Never a companion to me,” went on the grinding carp from tbo dusty hearth. “ A philcsooher! That’s what they say at the' college; that’s the vicar’s idea. A philosopher and poetess! You are as cold and hard as ice. There is no love in you. What a daughter for a bankrupt widow-woman, for that’s all T am. There’s the quarter's rent due next week. I’ve nothing. I don’t know where the money went to. Your father must have melted it. __ There was plenty a few years ago. Now it’s all floated, floated a wav.” “Floated,” said Alexis, without looking up. She said it as a statement, not an an exclamation. She said it as one caps a story with one’s final assent. The thing by the hearth reached out a not very steady hand, stealthily, and found, after a little fumbling, a tumbler hidden behind one of the heavy, ugly vases on the marble mantelpiece. Whatever it contained it seemed to

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calm her for a season. Then she began again. “ From the very first I was crossed in love. A woman’s rate! To marry the wrong man. To love another in vain. And now to come down to this. Alexis!” she suddenly buret from a whine into a shower of shuddering tears, mawkish and repellant. “ I haven’t long to live. I know I haven’t. Even Doctor Brady hinted it the other day. You won’t be troubled with me long. You might make my last days harmv for me! _ , Alexis pushed aside her boon and turned round, with a startled look in her 'grave, remote, angel’s face—ti.e face of an angel of stern justice. “Mamma,” she said awkwardly, “vou are surely wrong.” “ No, it’s true. I shan t be hero long. 1 1 am convinced of it. “What can I do for you, mamma? camo the grave voice, elowly. ' What more Ls there that I can do? I must otudy, to make even what I do at tne college. I’m studying now. In the future I’ll keep you far more comfortably than now, hut ” “You keep me? By your poetry your philosophy? Ugh!” She laughed rudely in the midst of her tears. The effect was hideous. The girl 6 voice fed- , j, “ Then what do you warn? eadly. “ One thing.” “Well?” “You must marry, child.” . Alexis leaned back in her desk chair, and held up her clearly cut chin high, and spread out her hands as if to call the smoky ceiling to witness this horror. The late afternoon light fell on to the waxen chastity of her outline. “ Never, never, never! “Do you mean that?” The mother turned furiously. “ Mean it? Yes, I live for the world of thoughts. I cannot marry. I never will. lam searching for the kingdom of the mind and soul. Oh, it s a hard enough search!” The outburst from the hearth-chair was too hideous and prolonged for coherent recording. When it had subsided a little it added in a mutter, like tho last rumble of a thunder-clap. “ And we must be turned out into the streets. ■ I shall die in the workhouse infirmary, probably; you will—goodness knows what! Alexis had locked her hands, hut still sat with her chin thrown up, silently enduring. Now she said in a. hard voice, “But you speak of marrying as though it were a trade. There is no one, even if I would, to marry me. The orphan daughter of a ruined country solicitor!—poor Daddy !—with no friends to 6peak of and without a penny. But even if there were, I should never love, not in that. way. Mv vocation is the world of thoughts and poetry. Give me time, and I will make it pay for us both, dear',” “Give you time, time? I cannot give you title i This house is no longer ours. Wo must go from it, be turned, out. My wretched annuity will not meet half the rent. Even a landlord who is a friend will not wait for over.” 1 “A friend?” “Yes. Didn’t I tell you? Thi3 house and garden and offices all belong now to—Edward Dare.” “Belong to Mr DareP”

“ Yfs. Fie bought it all up when our poor father died. Out of kindness, as aii old friend. Hitherto I have paid my rent out of the main sum. But' it is fast dwindling away. We are already almost living on his charity now. Soon wo shall be entirely.” Alexis started with horrified eyes. “Then we .must go at once,” she said. “Go? Go?” sneered the other. “ Where to?”

“ Oh, away to London, anywhere, so that we don’t live on this man’s charity.” “ And starve in London?” “ But, mother, this cannot go on.” “ No, but you can stop it any day if you will marry.” , ,

“ But there is no one to marrv me!” “ There is.” “ You are mad.” “No. It is true.” “Who, then?” There was a long pause. Then the mother said: “ Edward Dare.”

Alexis stood like an avenging angel carved in stone, and looked long and silently at her mother. Then she spoke breathlessly, furiously:

Is everything m the hands of Mr Dare? Is he a divine monopolist? The richest man in the countryside,” she went on, “the self-made owner of our house and home, the Mayor of the town, the sharpest lawyer, the cleverest justice, the vulgarest suoce®3 in the county. Handsome, eelf-confidept, hateful. And you dream he would marry me!” “I don’t dream it. He came to me yesterday and said so. You saw him as ho left from your window.”

“ I refuse to believe it. He hardly eyer speaks to me. We hardly ever meet.” “ Nevertheless, he loves you because —Alexis ” —the wrecked mother paused and raised heraelf in her chair, staring, as though herself horrified at the thought. “ Alexis, I was once a little —just a very little, like you.” “Well, mother; but ” “ And years ago he and I—we thought we cared tor eacn other. But our Hves were parted.” She subsided ou to her grey cushions shamefacedly, lyet less dreadful in that moment because of her grave candour to her fiercely angry child. “ Tt was only a dream,” went on the muffled voice. “It began before I met your father. I trifled with love. The mistake was mine, and I suffered—only I, I think. But he has kept unmarried all these years. Now that lam a widow and free—another lover, Death, is claiming me. You Lave grown to what he imagined me to be.” Again over the spirit of Alexis came the dream-prologue in the old garden. The odours of thyme and rose, and rue, and gilly-flowor. Again she seemed to bo stretching at something far up on a wall-top, and find herself struci: in the face. It was like a nightmare. With a great heave cf her bravo shoulders she flung out of tho room before the other could stop her, and plunged out into the little town to get through it into the country beyond, to shake it off her feet. For she knew her mother spoke the truth about this man. A hundred small proofs, long looks deep tones, trifling encroachments came flying into her indignant mind and' wove themselves rapid/y iuto a great web that seemed to be encompassing her round, a prisoner. In all the tumult of her maiden rave the heard his full voice say as of old:

“ Call it a kiss, Alexis.” “ I refuse!” she almost cried aloud. “ I will go to him and show him how I hate him. Then I will take that engagement in London, away from all the sickening, sordid wretchedness,_ and live the life I have chosen —the life of the soul! How hard it is to reach one’s ideals in this miserable world!” 1 A week later Miss Alexis Frost was

announced in the town hall in the Mayor’s private parlour. The Mayor oat in bis official throne, supervising the civic correspondence, lordly and competent, master of the whole of the matters before Ms augusfcU*S3. . ■ The town itself was almost ms, legally and from & property point. Certainly it was morally so. Its red roofs and cobbled streets cringed to iiim. Those fifteen years had greyed hii hair, which, worn close-cropped and of appalling neatness, looked almost unreal as though r-'-ade up for the stage. _ Some of the early insolence _ of his handsome blue eyes under their black brows was turned by hard work and responsibility into concentration. And if his dress was less foppishly perfect in detail, he had gained in a quality of almost theatrical impressiveness. He looked flamboyantly, almost ridiculously impressive and powerful, and his firm mouth, widening into a lazy smile, only looked like the concession of omnipotence which can afford to joke over things of which it is supreme master. But now he changed colour at a name. Alexis came in and stood stiffly in. the middle of the room. The INlayor rose at his desk and bowed the courtly, greyish iiead, and smiled with radiant eyes and compressed mouth. His bow was lower to her than to any other person. Alexis knew, too, that _all Cantering bowed to her in him. Her heart shuddered with rage. Roughly, she refused the proffered seat, all the courtesies. She thought his keen blue eyes were a little _quizzical, but his air wa6 decorum itself—decorum and reverence. “Mr Dare, I’ve come to ask you a—a last favour I She half choked. His eyebrows knitted. “Last favour? I do not understand.’"

“ Mr Dare, I am now going away— I am leaving Cantering. I have got an appointment at a school in London. At last I get away from this hateful P “Indeed, Miss Alexis!” The words were meek, the manner beyond criticism. But that use of her Christian namel “ My mother is to join me, Mr Dare, later on. After the first term, if I succeed, 1 shall be able to support her. You know our affairs so well that I need not explain. But the favour I have to ask you is, will you extend the use of the old house to my mother for another quarter longer, until I can send for her?” The Mayor’s manner had been courteous. acquiescent. His eves had betrayed nothing. He laid down the paperknife he had held and played with, and went over past Alexis to the door, to assure himself that it was secured, turned the key in it, walked back deliberately and said calmly:

“No.” , , ‘ . Alexis went from red to a slow, furious white. She was speechless. He went and stood with his back to the empty grate, his hands behind him, head down, eyes levelled under brows to her face. “I won’t grant anything that will help vou to get away from me.” “You refuse?” She could hardly articulate. “ Yes, I refuse. Because I love you. You know I love yoii. You don’t want to hear it. But I’ll make yon hear it. And I’ll make you love me. There was a furious silence. “ And you shall marry me, ’ added his angnstness. “Do you dare- “ Yes, I dare. I love you and I understand you, better than you understand yourself. You think you will find happiness in the intellect. You never will. You nr® not cold enough. No woman who hates as hotly as you hate me oould be happy in negations! • Years and years apo your mother jilted me. She could trifle. You could never trifle, and I adore you for it. You hate me like a queen, you darling, and I’ll turn it into love.” She gazed at his triumphant eyes, his handsome, determined face, and her breath came and went, her breast heaved. “•You cannot frighten me, she said- “ I refuse to he coerced. T will not marry. My. life has been one long struggle against the sordid and the mean. You know what our home—what my father—was? I am fighting against soualor and narrowness, and misery. I will be free for the higher 'ife.” She said it passionately. She almost stamped her foot. He held her with his level eyes. “ Love is the higher life, he 6aid, judicially. “What nonsense! Love!” “The free spirit is only born of love,” he persisted. “How can it be? Earthly love—marriage bells, presents, ugh 1” “ Oh, woman, carping at detail!” he said. “ Nevertheless, what I say is true. You will never reach what you search after till you let love conquer you.” “Nothing shall conquer me!” “I will conquer you!” ‘ Absurd ! You are horrible and cruel. But this is my last word. I give you notice as our landlord. We Leave the house to-morrow, and go away to London. Good-bye for ever, Mr Dare. I did not think you could be so cruel, so insolent.” She flashed to the door. “"That is locked,” he replied, calmly, from his august stand by the hearth. She threw him a glance of white fury. He came towards her.

“ Little Alexis,” he said, very gently. “Do you remember, years ago, you complained that a rose in my garden struck you in the face? I told you it was'a kiss. Now, at this moment I seem to strike you in the face. But one day you know that'my action is—a kiss.”

Before she could reply he had put bis firm arms slowly and surely about her, and bent his grey head and kissed, her, masterfully, finally,, as men kiss once in a lifetime.

Alexis leane-d against her shoulder, and her heart reeled: She said nothing. But she saw suddenly, as women often see in a lambent Lightningflash of a glorious emotion, the real truth of all human and all soul history spread out before her in one glowing picture. She knew, then, that the higher life was not in the gillies out of reach on the wall, but in the great rose, -dew-fillel to the cups, that swung out and struck and kissed her; ha that makes the whole world’s garden—the Rose of Love.