Yellow Roses

THEY were talking about an embezzlement, the old story of a trusted employee, who had taken funds so cleverly and systematically for so long that he had come to look upon his peculations as a part of his salary. At last he had been found out. Tina Metcalfe remarked bromidically that people always were found out.

‘Do you suppose,’ she asked, ‘that anyone ever really lived a lie and got away with it— forever, I mean?’ Reggie Forsyth said he knew a woman who did once—he would tell them about it if they liked. The little group around the fire, who had just dined and would eventually make up a table of bridge, assured him they did like; so he told them this story.

‘It happened a few years ago,’ Forsyth said, ‘and it happened a long way from here. The woman was the wife of a mill agent in a little manufacturing town. Where she came from, I don’t know; she was certainly not bred in those parts; no one there had ever seen her like. Had she been in society or on the stage, her beauty would have made her famous; but her fellow townspeople merely thought her odd, she was so amazingly unconventional and so astonishingly unprovincial. She did as she chose, as a duchess might have done.

‘One wonders where the little chap she married ever found her, or why she appealed to him. He was a good little chap enough, absorbed in his work and in the life of the town, delighted with his house, and heartbroken because no children had ever come to it. LTgly little man he was, too, and quite typical of his class; repeated your name when he met you; said, “Pleased to meet you,” and “Excuse my glove,” just where, according to his lights, he should have.

‘ And she — she was like a wild bird caged, a woods-flower set in a border of zinnias and asters, a well-kept border where one would not expect to find a Weed, however rare. She was slender, and long-limbed, shapeless as a young boy; her neck was slim and white, and her head small and wonderfully set. She had a great mass of reddish hair, — short, thick, curly hair, —but her lashes were long and black.

‘No wonder the towmspeople disapproved of her; they bored her, and when her husband insisted that they should continue to bore her by forcing her into their society, she became extremely ill. Then he became almost frantic, for he adored her and would trust her to none but the greatest doctor he could discover; and the doctor proved himself great by his diagnosis, for he told the man that nothing ailed his wife but that her life did n’t suit her, and that she must be left freer, to choose one more congenial. So after that she was let alone, free to find the country that surrounded the town, to walk, to run, to read. The townspeople thought she was “touched,” and were kinder to her than she knew. They ceased to criticize her and made it easy for her to be alone. In the summer-time she would take her book and her lunchbasket and tramp the fields and woods till she found some spot she could love, and spend the days with her dreams and her long, long thoughts. But the evenings belonged to her man; though what they found in common I cannot guess.

‘But one day on her walk she had an adventure. She found a field she liked — liked because it was flushed with hardhackand white with meadow-sweet, and inhabited by a man whose type was unknown to her. Any of you would have placed him quickly enough; his riding togs and English boots would have marked him for you — a young blood who had come a cropper among the hardhack and meadow-sweet. But to her he was new; his looks and his clothes and his opening remark to her were all quite different.

‘“I’ve lost my horse,” he said genially. She looked curious, which apparently encouraged him. “ I don t mind,’ he said. “He was a horrid horse.” She looked about her. “ You won’t see him, said the man; “he could run most awfully fast.”

‘ It occurred to her that he had fallen off. “Are you hurt?” she asked.

“‘Thanks, not a bit. This is a jolly field, is n’t it?”

‘“I like it,” she said.

‘“Blueberry-picking?” he suggested, looking at her basket.

‘She shook her head. “No, just lunch.”

‘“Picnicking! By Jove, what luck. Falling makes one so frightfully hungry, you know.”

‘She did n’t know, but she believed him and invited him to share her meal. They found a shady place, and in the course of time discovered many things about each other. He was staying at a country house with people she knew by sight — knew their traps and their grooms when she saw them outside shops in the town; knew what the town people had chosen to tell of them and of their ways. He discovered more about her. And he found her book.

Masefield, Daffodil Fields,“ he said; “do they read that — in the town?”

'“No,” she said, “I read it — in the woods.”

‘“Oh, no, you don’t; I read it to you.”

‘So he began and read for a while; and he read delightfully, for he had a pleasant voice and he loved what he read. But by and by he put down the book and they talked for a while, of books and of themselves again. It was a wonderful day for her — a surprise to find the things she cared for were loved by others, and that she was not really " odd " at all. By and by it was time to go home, before her man should come from his work. But they made plans for the morrow, or, should the morrow not be fine, for the day after.

‘It happened they were in for a spell of fair weather, and they spent long hours together in the fields and in the woods. They read books together, and he told her of cities and of life in the cities, and of people he knew, people who would not have bored her and made her ill. He told her of music, and art and architecture, and stories of hunting and balls and dinner-parties, and about the women who hunted and danced and dined. But oftener he told her about herself — how lovely she was, and how lovable. They were very much in love before long, and she showed a curious courage in her determination that, having missed so much, this should not pass her by.

‘So they lived to the utmost — while the fair weather lasted. The third day he met her, he brought her a yellow rose from the garden of his hostess.

‘“I searched the garden,” he told her, “ to find what flower you are like. This is it.”

‘ So every day she wore a yellow rose tucked in her gown.

‘At last the weather broke, and he went back to the city, and she no longer could roam the fields and woods. She drooped like a flower in the long wet autumn, confined to the house; and though nothing ever ailed her very much, she died before the winter was half through!

‘Her husband was beside himself with grief, and the neighbors who had bored her came and looked on her when she was dead. Her husband had filled her hands with yellow roses.

‘“She loved them so,” he told his friends; “all summer long she wore them in her dress.”’

‘So that,’ said Reggie Forsyth, ‘is the story of a woman who lived a lie, yet no one ever knew.’

‘Yet you knew,’ said Tina Metcalfe quickly — and wished she had bitten out her tongue before she spoke.