II. THE WOMAN’S ROSE.

I have an old, brown carved box; the lid is broken and tied with a string.
In it I keep little squares of paper, with hair inside, and a little picture which
hung over my brother’s bed when we were children, and other things as
small. I have in it a rose. Other women also have such boxes where they
keep such trifles, but no one has my rose.
When my eye is dim, and my heart grows faint, and my faith in woman
flickers, and her present is an agony to me, and her future a despair, the
scent of that dead rose, withered for twelve years, comes back to me. I
know there will be spring; as surely as the birds know it when they see
above the snow two tiny, quivering green leaves. Spring cannot fail us.
There were other flowers in the box once; a bunch of white acacia
flowers, gathered by the strong hand of a man, as we passed down a village
street on a sultry afternoon, when it had rained, and the drops fell on us
from the leaves of the acacia trees. The flowers were damp; they made
mildew marks on the paper I folded them in. After many years I threw them
away. There is nothing of them left in the box now, but a faint, strong smell
of dried acacia, that recalls that sultry summer afternoon; but the rose is in
the box still.
It is many years ago now; I was a girl of fifteen, and I went to visit in a
small up-country town. It was young in those days, and two days’ journey
from the nearest village; the population consisted mainly of men. A few
were married, and had their wives and children, but most were single. There
was only one young girl there when I came. She was about seventeen, fair,
and rather fully-fleshed; she had large dreamy blue eyes, and wavy light
hair; full, rather heavy lips, until she smiled; then her face broke into
dimples, and all her white teeth shone. The hotel-keeper may have had a
daughter, and the farmer in the outskirts had two, but we never saw them.
She reigned alone. All the men worshipped her. She was the only woman
they had to think of. They talked of her on the stoep, at the market, at the
hotel; they watched for her at street corners; they hated the man she bowed
to or walked with down the street. They brought flowers to the front door;
they offered her their horses; they begged her to marry them when they
dared. Partly, there was something noble and heroic in this devotion of men
to the best woman they knew; partly there was something natural in it, that
these men, shut off from the world, should pour at the feet of one woman
the worship that otherwise would have been given to twenty; and partly
there was something mean in their envy of one another. If she had raised her
little finger, I suppose, she might have married any one out of twenty of
them.
Then I came. I do not think I was prettier; I do not think I was so pretty
as she was. I was certainly not as handsome. But I was vital, and I was new,
and she was old—they all forsook her and followed me. They worshipped
me. It was to my door that the flowers came; it was I had twenty horses
offered me when I could only ride one; it was for me they waited at street
corners; it was what I said and did that they talked of. Partly I liked it. I had
lived alone all my life; no one ever had told me I was beautiful and a
woman. I believed them. I did not know it was simply a fashion, which one
man had set and the rest followed unreasoningly. I liked them to ask me to
marry them, and to say, No. I despised them. The mother heart had not
swelled in me yet; I did not know all men were my children, as the large
woman knows when her heart is grown. I was too small to be tender. I liked
my power. I was like a child with a new whip, which it goes about cracking
everywhere, not caring against what. I could not wind it up and put it away.
Men were curious creatures, who liked me, I could never tell why. Only one
thing took from my pleasure; I could not bear that they had deserted her for
me. I liked her great dreamy blue eyes, I liked her slow walk and drawl;
when I saw her sitting among men, she seemed to me much too good to be
among them; I would have given all their compliments if she would once
have smiled at me as she smiled at them, with all her face breaking into
radiance, with her dimples and flashing teeth. But I knew it never could be;
I felt sure she hated me; that she wished I was dead; that she wished I had
never come to the village. She did not know, when we went out riding, and
a man who had always ridden beside her came to ride beside me, that I sent
him away; that once when a man thought to win my favour by ridiculing
her slow drawl before me I turned on him so fiercely that he never dared
come before me again. I knew she knew that at the hotel men had made a
bet as to which was the prettier, she or I, and had asked each man who came
in, and that the one who had staked on me won. I hated them for it, but I
would not let her see that I cared about what she felt towards me.
 She and I never spoke to each other.
If we met in the village street we bowed and passed on; when we shook
hands we did so silently, and did not look at each other. But I thought she
felt my presence in a room just as I felt hers.
At last the time for my going came. I was to leave the next day. Some
one I knew gave a party in my honour, to which all the village was invited.
It was midwinter. There was nothing in the gardens but a few dahlias and
chrysanthemums, and I suppose that for two hundred miles round there was
not a rose to be bought for love or money. Only in the garden of a friend of
mine, in a sunny corner between the oven and the brick wall, there was a
rose tree growing which had on it one bud. It was white, and it had been
promised to the fair haired girl to wear at the party.
The evening came; when I arrived and went to the waiting-room, to take
off my mantle, I found the girl there already. She was dressed in pure white,
with her great white arms and shoulders showing, and her bright hair
glittering in the candle-light, and the white rose fastened at her breast. She
looked like a queen. I said “Good-evening,” and turned away quickly to the
glass to arrange my old black scarf across my old black dress.
Then I felt a hand touch my hair.
“Stand still,” she said.
I looked in the glass. She had taken the white rose from her breast, and
was fastening it in my hair.
“How nice dark hair is; it sets off flowers so.” She stepped back and
looked at me. “It looks much better there!”
I turned round.
“You are so beautiful to me,” I said.
“Y-e-s,” she said, with her slow Colonial drawl; “I’m so glad.”
We stood looking at each other.
Then they came in and swept us away to dance. All the evening we did
not come near to each other. Only once, as she passed, she smiled at me.
The next morning I left the town.
I never saw her again.
Years afterwards I heard she had married and gone to America; it may or
may not be so—but the rose—the rose is in the box still! When my faith in
woman grows dim, and it seems that for want of love and magnanimity she
can play no part in any future heaven; then the scent of that small withered
thing comes back:—spring cannot fail us.
Matjesfontein, South Africa.