The Misses Mallett | Page 6

Sales, a
friendship which had been tacitly recognized by them both when,
meeting her soon after his mother's death, he had laid his arms and head
on the low stone wall by which they were standing, and wept without
restraint. It was a display she could not have given herself and it
shocked her in a young man, but it left her in his debt. She felt she
owed something to a person who had shown such confidence in her and
though at the time she had been dumb and, as it seemed to her, far from
helpful, she did not forget her liability. However, she could not
remember it to the extent of marrying him; she had always shown him
more kindness than she really felt and, in considering these things on

her way home, she decided that she was still doing as much as he could
expect.
She had by this time turned another corner and the high bridge, swung
from one side of the gorge to the other, was before her. At the
toll-house was the red-faced man who had not altered in the whiteness
of a single hair since she had been taken across the bridge by her nurse
and allowed to peep fearfully through the railings which had towered
like a forest above her head. And the view from the bridge was still for
her a fairy vision.
Seawards, the river, now full and hiding its muddy banks which,
revealed, had their own opalescent beauty, went its way between the
cliffs, clothed on one hand with trees, save for a big red and yellow
gash where the stone was being quarried, and on the other with bare
rock, topped by the Downs spreading far out of sight. Landwards the
river was trapped into docks, spanned by low bridges and made into the
glistening part of a patchwork of water, brick and iron. Red-roofed old
houses, once the haunts of fashion, were clustered near the water but
divided from it now by tram-lines, companion anachronisms to the
steamers entering and leaving the docks, but by the farther shore, one
small strip of river was allowed to flow in its own way, and it skirted
meadows rising to the horizon and carrying with them more of those
noble elms in which the whole countryside was rich.
Her horse's hoofs sounding hollow on the bridge, Rose passed across,
and at the other toll-house door she saw the thin, pale man, with
spectacles on the end of his pointed nose, who had first touched his hat
to her when she rode on a tiny pony by the side of her father on his big
horse. That man was part of her life and she, presumably, was part of
his. He had watched many Upper Radstowe children from the
perambulator stage, and to him she remarked on the weather, as she had
done to the red-faced man at the other end. It was a beautiful day; they
were having a wonderful spring; it would soon be summer, she said,
but on repetition these words sounded false and intensely dreary. It
would soon be summer, but what did that mean to her? Festivities
suited to the season would be resumed in Radstowe. There would be
lawn tennis in the big gardens, and young men in flannels and girls in
white would stroll about the roads and gay voices would be heard in the
dusk. There would be garden-parties, and Mrs. Batty, the wife of the

lawyer, would be lavish with tennis for the young, gossip for the
middle-aged and unlimited strawberries and ices for all. Rose would be
one of the guests at this as at all the parties and, for the first time, as
though her refusal of Francis Sales had had some strange effect, as
though that rejected future had created a distaste for the one fronting
her, she was aghast at the prospect of perpetual chatter, tea and pretty
dresses. She was surely meant for something better, harder, demanding
greater powers. She had, by inheritance, good manners, a certain social
gift, but she had here nothing to conquer with these weapons. What was
she to do? The idea of qualifying for the business of earning her bread
did not occur to her. No female Mallett had ever done such a thing, and
not all the male ones. Marriage opened the only door, but not marriage
with Francis Sales, not marriage with anyone she knew in Radstowe,
and her stepsisters had no inclination to leave the home of their youth,
the scene of their past successes, for her sake.
Rose sat very straight on her horse, not frowning, for she never
frowned, but wearing rather a set expression, so that an acquaintance,
passing unrecognized, made the usual reflection on the youngest