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But, to be sure, you would only have thought the wind was blowing about the rose, so you would have seen nothing really of the drollery of it all, which was not droll at all to Rosa Damascena, for a wound in one's vanity is as long healing as a wound from a conical bullet in one's body.
India itself has a considerable area devoted to rose-gardens, as at Ghazipur, Lahore, Amritzur, and other places, the kind of rose being R. damascena, according to Brandis. Both rose-water and otto are produced. In the morning, the film of oil, which has collected on the top, is skimmed off by a feather, and transferred to a small phial.
But to this terribly proud and discontented Rosa Damascena he had been a bore, a common creature, a nuisance, a monster any one of these things by turns, and sometimes all of them altogether. She used to long for the cat to get him. "You ought to be such a happy rose!" the merle had said to her, one day. "There is no rose so strong and healthy as you are, except the briers."
Was she, indeed, no more mere simple Rosa Damascena? She felt so happy she could hardly breathe. She thought it was her happiness that stifled her; in real matter of fact it was the tight bands in which the gardener had bound her. "Oh, what joy!" she thought, though she still felt very uncomfortable, but not for the world would she ever have admitted it to the Banksiae.
As for the rose tree herself, she would not look at any one; she was carried through the old garden straight past the Banksise, but she would make them no sign; and as for the blackbird, she hoped a cat had eaten him! Had he not known her as Rosa Damascena? She was borne bodily, roots and all, carefully wrapped up in soft matting, and taken into the great house.
Well, there was Rosa Indica at the head of the room in the Sevres vase, and very proud and triumphant she felt throned there, and the azaleas, of course, were whispering enviously underneath her, "Well, after all, she was only Rosa Damascena not so VERY long ago." Yes, THEY KNEW! What a pity it was!
From the shape of its flower, the trumpet-flowered wood-sorrel has been called St. Cecilia's flower, whose festival is kept on November 22. The Nigella damascena, popularly known as love-in-a-mist, was designated St. Catherine's flower, "from its persistent styles," writes Dr. Prior, "resembling the spokes of her wheel."
The truth was that in this garden there was such an abundance of very rare roses that a common though beautiful one like Rosa Damascena remained unthought of; she was lovely, but then there were so many lovelier still, or, at least, much more a la mode. In the secluded garden corner she suffered all the agonies of a pretty woman in the great world, who is only a pretty woman, and no more.
She twisted herself round not to see him, and felt quite annoyed that he went on and sang just the same, unconscious of, or indifferent to, her coldness. With each successive summer Rosa Damascena became more integrally and absolutely a Rosa Indica, and suffered in proportion to her fashion and fame.
It needs so VERY much more to be "somebody." To be somebody was what Rosa Damascena sighed for, from rosy dawn to rosier sunset.
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