CHAPTER VII
They had been married a week--a tremulous, ecstatic, amazing week.
It seemed to Rose made up of all the laughing colors of the sea.
They were surrounded by the sea, clear and limpid as a shallow pool, the great deep bay gleamed and shone about them.
Out of it the Islands rose like flowers. Capri uneven, wild and blue, Ischia tulip-shaped and tall--Posilippo and its attendant isles like a fallen spray of blossoms; and in Capri itself the whole spring lay bare to the sun.
The South was like Léon--it was beautiful, but it was strange.
On their first evening they had driven swiftly up the hillside; the air was cold and keen; the small mountain ponies galloped through the quick-falling darkness and just for a moment a breath of fear touched the triumphant bride.
She longed for something familiar, something that wasn’t even beautiful, but to which she had grown accustomed. She didn’t put it to herself quite like that--she only wished she hadn’t had to leave her fox terrier at home.
The moment passed and other richer moments took its place.
Love was just--what without expecting it Rose had most desired. No one could have expected any one to be as wonderful as Léon. He spilt his soul into his passion, his ardor filled their hours, there was no way in which he did not color her life. She felt herself like some poor common pebble transformed into purple and rose color by the touch of the sea.
It never occurred to her that when the tide recedes the color goes. She did not know that Léon’s passion was a tide, and she did not believe that it would ever recede.
They explored everything in Capri, the ruins of Tiberius’ villas, the many colored grottos, the little stray paths that led between high walls to the heights of Capri--and everything they saw Rose loved. But best of all she loved their own familiar garden of the Hotel Paradiso, surrounded by violets, where Léon taught her to smoke cigarettes and where the stars swooped down on them in the velvet dark evenings, leaning just over the tops of the little stunted trees.
She had everything she wanted then, but most of all she had Léon, rarer and sweeter than the voilets, more astonishing and limitless than the southern stars.
Of course he had his faults. Rose accepted these limits of natural frailty with eager tenderness.
He was jealous, fierce and a little hard on anything that interfered with his crowning absorption. Rose had heard him speak with cold, incisive sharpness to a waiter who interrupted one of their soft, interminable garden intimacies; and Léon was indifferent, intensely indifferent--to anything or any one but her.
She couldn’t be said to mind it, but she noticed it; it made her hope that nothing would ever happen to her--it would be so awful if it did--for Léon.
Then one day he ran up the outside staircase which led to their rooms with a peculiar, excited expression in his eyes. Rose came out to meet him, and together they leaned over the balcony.
“Such a funny thing has happened,” he explained. “I’ve met an old friend, isn’t it strange?--he is here also on his honeymoon. The wife--I had not met before--you must know them. I have asked them to-morrow to tea.”
Rose hid a moment’s dissatisfaction. “Are they French, Léon?” she asked a little nervously.
“But of course, yes, Parisians of the most Parisian. Do you object to that?” he demanded impatiently.
“Oh no!” she explained. “Only you know, Léon dear, my French is so bad!”
He didn’t say it was adorable, which was what he usually said, though he never allowed her to attempt it when they were together. “It is time you learned French,” he said. “You can’t go on like this.” Then he looked at her with strange critical eyes. “You mustn’t wear that to-morrow,” he said coldly. “What have you got that you can wear? Madame Gérard--dresses.”
Rose flushed. “Dearest,” she answered, “you know everything I’ve got--I thought you liked my clothes--they were all I could get in Rome.”
“They are, nevertheless, extremely poor,” Léon pronounced with an air of finality. “I can’t think why you have no manner of putting on your clothes. There is no character in them, no charm, no unexpectedness. You dress as if you wanted shelter from the cold. Also none of your things have any seduction--they are as dull as boiled eggs. You cannot live in Paris and dress like an English country miss.”
Rose felt as if she would die if Léon would not get that cold look out of his eyes. She lost her head under his impassive scrutiny. “Must I meet them?” she pleaded. “The Gérards, I mean. They don’t sound a bit my kind of people.”
“But of course you must meet them!” said Léon angrily. “Naturally, since you are my wife--you are not my mistress, to be hidden away at such a time!”
“Léon!” Rose exclaimed--his words struck at her like a whip lash. She turned quickly away and went into their room. She felt as if she could not stay any longer with Léon. In five minutes he rejoined her--not the strange, disagreeable man who had spoken to her like that, but her husband Léon. He was full of tender apologies. He couldn’t, he explained, think what had made him so nervous. Perhaps it was because Capri was so quiet, one resented anything that broke into it. But, after all after to-morrow they need see very little of the Gérards--Raoul wasn’t a great friend of his--he was, however, an interesting man--a well-known and very fine singer. He was a good deal thought of in Paris. Perhaps one day he would sing to them. Madame also was musical. She adored her husband’s voice.
Rose said that would be lovely, and she asked Léon how long the Gérards’ honeymoon had lasted. Léon said longer than theirs--a fortnight or three weeks, perhaps.
It was Madame’s idea, Capri. They had taken a villa so that Raoul could practise comfortably. Raoul would naturally have preferred Naples. “She is romantic, however, like you,” Léon murmured, kissing Rose’s soft white throat.
Then he sighed a little and moved restlessly about the room. “For Raoul,” he murmured, “I am not so sure. Capri isn’t very gay.” This was the second time Léon had mentioned the lack of this quality in Capri, and neither time had Rose paid any attention to it. She was not a Frenchwoman, and she had no idea that Léon attached any particular weight to the idea of gaiety.
Léon kissed her again. This time he did it a little remorsefully.
They were to have tea in the garden under the almond blossom trees. Léon was to go into Capri and return early with cakes and roses, but before he went he inspected Rose’s dressing table. He frowned helplessly at her dreadful lack of accessories.
“Before she goes,” he explained to Rose, “Madame will no doubt wish to tidy her hair and readjust her veil. Why is it you have nothing here?”
Rose gazed at him. “But, Léon,” she said gently, “I have pins and brushes.”
Léon exploded suddenly into one of his picturesque whiffs of anger. “Mon Dieu! Are you a woman at all?” he exclaimed. “You have no powder, no rouge, no scent. You have nothing here on your dressing table that a woman should have! Oh, you everlasting creature of soap and fresh air! How can I explain you? How can I explain anything? I shall go mad!”
Afterwards he calmed down. He would, he explained, buy what he could get at Capri. Fortunately Rose did have silver-topped boxes and bottles; these could be filled to look as natural as possible.
Rose agreed; she would have agreed to anything to please him, but she was surprised at the amount of things Léon apparently considered a Frenchwoman would find necessary in order to reassume her veil and tidy her hair after a tea-party. Besides, Rose didn’t like scent.
At half-past four Madame Gérard appeared, her husband strolling a little behind her.
Two impressions flashed simultaneously upon Rose; one was that Madame Gérard, though distinctly smart, wasn’t particularly pretty, and the other, that in spite of her lovely clothes, her new husband, and the romance of Capri, she hadn’t got happy eyes.
Her other impressions of Madame Gérard she formed more slowly.
Monsieur Gérard she instantly and wholly disliked.
He was much older than his wife, and had a bored, conceited air, and rather thick red lips.
He stared a great deal at Rose, and said several times over, when Léon introduced him to her, that he was very much impressed.
Madame was charming; she was charming about the garden, about the tea, about the wonderful English nation, and about Capri; but she was charming in Parisian French. Neither of the Gérards knew a word of English, and Madame spoke in a cascade of little soft, vanishing sounds, the significance of which poor nervous, attentive Rose couldn’t possibly catch.
Monsieur Gérard, on the other hand, made three separate emphatic attempts to talk to Rose. Rose blushed and frowned and didn’t suppose for a single instant that she had understood what he said. She wouldn’t have liked it at all if she had, but of course men couldn’t say such things to ladies to whom they had just been introduced.
What was strange was that she could, she always bewilderingly had been able to understand Léon’s French, however fast or complicated the rush of his talk might be, and what was so odd, so uncomfortable and bewildering was that Léon was saying really dreadful things to Madame Gérard. Not that Madame Gérard minded, on the contrary she seemed particularly stimulated by Léon’s vivid attentions. Nor that Monsieur Gérard minded, either; he gave up his endeavors with Rose, and seemed to resign himself to a silent but perfectly good-tempered peace. He seemed, though the idea was as preposterous as everything else, to feel like a sentry who has just been relieved after a too protracted exposure at a difficult post. He ate heartily, and when he had finished he asked permission to smoke, once or twice he hummed something under his breath.
It was perfectly natural that Léon should not notice Rose, you can’t in public single out your wife for attention, and Madame Gérard made the most valiant efforts to include her.
Expressive, gesticulating, infinitely gay, Madame drew, or strove to draw, the poor dull little English wife into the swift current of their talk, but she did not succeed, partly, no doubt, because Rose was shy, but partly also because Léon markedly wished to keep her out.
Rose kept out. She made herself as busy as she could pouring out tea and handing cake, then she leaned back in her chair and tried to look as if she enjoyed hearing Léon and Madame--what?--you couldn’t call it exactly talk.
That was the difficulty. It was more of a game than a conversation, and a game whose rules Rose had never learnt.
Monsieur Gérard got up after a time, and asked if Madame would excuse him--might he examine the planting of the lemons? He was madly interested in lemons.
Rose gladly excused him. She heard Léon ask Madame Gérard if this statement of her husband’s was true.
“Never in the world!” Madame gaily replied. “He does not know the difference between a lemon and an orange!”
“Then let us,” said Léon, “also go and examine something we do not understand.”
Rose stayed where she was. Something had happened to her little secret lovely garden, it was suddenly vulgarized and spoilt.
The scent of the lemons, delicate and pungent, made her head ache. The pigeons came to her, when the others had gone, and she fed them from the crumbs of her first party. She had always thought it would be so delightful to give a party with Léon, but she had not supposed that the party, as far as she was concerned, would be composed exclusively of pigeons.
CHAPTER VIII
An affair of importance had brought Monsieur Gérard to the Hotel Paradiso. He excused himself to Rose for wishing to consult her husband privately. Rose accepted his excuses sedately and retired to her balcony.
She liked Léon to be consulted. It showed how wise he was, that an older man, even if he wasn’t very nice, should stand in need of his judgment.
It was very interesting to watch the two men walking up and down the garden. Léon slim and smart, with his little unconscious air of having arrived without premeditation at the perfection of appearance. Monsieur Gérard heavy, with a kind of sleepy uncertainty in his movements, and the effect of forcible compression about the waist. There was something to Rose very repulsive in the muffled greediness of Monsieur Gérard’s expression. He looked at once selfish and burdened; it made her nervous to see the two men together--for she had an idea that the burdens of the selfish are apt to be readily transferred.
She could not hear what they said, but she could see they were saying a tremendous amount. First Monsieur Gérard would begin emphatically with a puffy white forefinger attacking the air. His shoulders, his eyebrows, his hat were volcanically active, speech broke from him in a cascade as overwhelming and magnificent as the Tivoli Falls. Then he would pull himself up abruptly, broken in upon by another torrent from Léon. Even when they listened to each other their attention was as vivid as speech, and they were capable at moments of catching each other’s speech without discontinuing the rapid flow of their own.
Rose thought their conversation must be about an opera; and she was sure that if the opera was like their conversation it would be very exciting.
There were moments when she thought the two men were angry, there were others when the emotion between them seemed to rise up like a sudden wind and possess the garden.
On the whole it was Léon who was the most excited--he repeatedly said “Non!”--but even from the balcony Rose gathered in his passionate negative a reluctance for it to be taken as final.
They parted with great affection; there was gratitude in Monsieur Gérard’s attitude, and there was protection and soothing in that of Léon’s. “But above all,” she heard her husband say, “with women one must be practical.” They shook hands three times, then Monsieur Gérard waved his hat to Rose and hurried out of the garden.
Léon rejoined her, lighting a cigarette; his hands trembled a little, his eyes were intensely bright. It struck Rose that he was restless, more restless than usual.
He hummed a little tune to himself and then, breaking off suddenly, told her to bring him out her best hat.
“It has an air,” he explained, “quite too much of the Sunday. I want to eradicate it! A tranquil hat afflicts me! It has no power to move the heart. In a hat, one should have peril. It should not be an accident, I admit many are! But it should have an intention with a hint of danger. Pass me the scissors.”
Rose passed him the scissors. “I hope,” she ventured, “that Monsieur Gérard hadn’t anything dreadful to say.”
She thought it couldn’t have been very dreadful, for Léon was looking distinctly pleased.
However, he put a decent amount of gravity into the headshake with which he answered her.
“Everything is of the most complicated,” he assured her. “The affair Gérard has literally come to pieces. The marriage has as little integrity as the inside of a volcano. They walk on broken glass. It is no longer a honeymoon--it is an inferno!”
Rose cried out in horror. “But what has happened to them?” she asked anxiously.
“It is a long story,” said Léon, who had by now completely unpicked her hat and was trying the trimming upside down, and rather liking the effect. “But I shall tell you as much as I can. One must make the troubles of others one’s own--must we not? Both our religions agree upon that. Non?
“It appears, in the first instance, the marriage was of Madame’s making.
“She had the idea--common to many women--that she was born to be the wife of a great artist. As a matter of fact, no women are born for that, because no great artist should have a wife. They should have from time to time a tragic union with a mistress--that develops them; wives do not. Raoul was the only artist Madame knew. She was twenty-three, an heiress, and as you see for yourself a charming little woman of the world. She made a good impression upon Raoul. He discovered that marriage with her would have a solid foundation. Now he has got it and naturally he does not know what to do with it. Above all he finds that Madame considers herself ill-used. She is, as I told you before, romantic. She expected a grand passion, she knew him capable of one, but she did not grasp that it could never be in her direction.
“I find it myself a little bourgeois of her to expect Raoul to develop such a thing for a wife. Do not look so like the Sunday hat, dear Rose! Remember their marriage was a French one. Ours is English--therefore we were in love. Still, of course, both were marriages!” Léon manipulated the hat afresh, it was beginning to look less and less like Sunday. Rose said nothing. She had a silly feeling that if she spoke she might cry. She was very sorry for Madame Gérard.
“That, then, is the grievance of Madame,” Léon went on. “She is young, excitable and disappointed. You have that on one side. I must say that I think she lacks management, but for all that one sympathizes with her.
“His grievance is, however, more serious still. Because he has no grand passion for her, Madame turns round and asserts that there is no real marriage between them!--that, in short, if she cannot have the silver moon, she won’t be put off with very good cheese of the day. You follow me? She does not wish to be a wife to Raoul.”
“Oh,” cried Rose incredulously, “oh, Léon, surely Monsieur Gérard did not tell you this about his wife?”
“But yes--” said Léon calmly, “why not? I, however, consider that if Madame lacks management, Raoul lacks souplesse. Things should never have been allowed to reach such a sharpness. I don’t say he could have given her a grand passion, one can’t invent such things, but he might, all the same, have lent himself to the situation during the honeymoon. If a good woman cannot have a honeymoon, what can she have? The type will die out if they are to be starved all round.”
“Do you mean to say you want him to pretend?” Rose asked. She spoke quietly, but the feeling behind her words made Léon throw down the hat and catch her hands in his.
“Ah!” he said, “you Queen of the Puritans! No! not pretend--but he might--mightn’t he?--have for the moment have gone a trifle in advance of the facts?”
Rose withdrew her hand from his. “It seems to me,” she said, “all of it, simply horrible! I don’t understand. How could he come here and tell you such things--to talk about his wife and her feelings? Why, it’s all so incredibly private! It’s as dreadful as if he’d killed her. I don’t think I should have minded it half so much if he had. And what is the use of it, Léon--why did he come to you?”
“Ah, that is why I told you at all,” Léon explained, a little crestfallen. “Of course, I knew you would shrink from this affair. It is natural that you should, though I cannot, for my part, see why, in a strange land, surrounded by Italians, the poor Raoul shouldn’t be allowed to consult a compatriot and a friend. However, it is really for my assistance that he came, and I cannot give him that, Rose, without your consent. It is simply a question of whether or no you are sufficiently magnanimous.”
“How do you mean?” asked Rose, more frightened still. “You know I can’t talk French properly, and if I could I shouldn’t know what to say to people like that!”
“Oh, I didn’t ask you to mix yourself up in it,” Léon answered reassuringly. “It is, however, perhaps even harder for most women--what I have to ask of you! It is to stand aside and let me mix myself up in it.”
She shivered a little. “Oh, but why,” she asked, “should you be mixed up in it? We only saw them yesterday!”
Léon picked up the hat again. “It appears,” he said, “that I managed to entertain Madame yesterday. Poor thing! she has been living the life of a tortured Romantic. For the first time Raoul heard her laugh, saw her smile, and he became attracted by the idea. He thought if I managed to amuse her a little, she would be less tragic, and then, after a time, she might submit her case to me, and I could, little by little, you know, much as I have done with this hat--a feather here, a ribbon there, readjust the situation. Such things have been done, you know, by people of tact, and to save a marriage when one has oneself made such a success of one’s own--isn’t that a duty one perhaps owes, in return for one’s happiness?”
Rose thought the situation over, that is to say, she felt it over. Here and there her heart winced under the probes she gave it. She knew that Léon was magnificent, and she felt humiliatingly conscious that she was not as magnificent as Léon. She saw plainly enough what was required of her. She was to stand aside for the sake of these strangers, she was to give up her honeymoon, she was to be alone, and to let Léon spend his time with this French lady, who was charming, and whom she could not understand. She remembered what Léon had said, that he must not be constrained, she remembered it perhaps too well. Her whole being centered in the desire to leave him free.
She shut her eyes and prayed. Léon did not know that she was praying, but he felt a little uncomfortable. He was deeply sorry for the Gérards, but there was no doubt that their complications had made the Island of Capri more amusing.
Rose opened her eyes wide. “Léon,” she said, “I want you to do whatever you think right, and I will help you all I can.”
He kissed her joyously. “There,” he said, “the perfect wife! What a pity Madame cannot hear you! She would see the path of happiness without a lesson! Of course you will help me. You will help me profoundly. Day by day I shall bring you the history of my little attempt. It is on your advice I will lean, the drama of it will be for both of us an immense resource, and I have a feeling that for all of us it will have a happy ending!”
Rose did not share the feeling. She picked up the hat which he had finished and tried it on. “It is very French,” she said doubtfully, “but does it really suit me, Léon?”
“Ah, you must make it suit you,” said Léon a little ironically. “I cannot help you to that! It’s all a question of how you wear it!”
CHAPTER IX
Léon had, from the first, the best intentions. He was to be the good comrade to Raoul, the sympathetic counselor to Madame, and for the situation in general a happy blend of an olive branch, a dove, and a rainbow in the heavens!
His shrewdness of judgment was only to be matched by the lightness of his heart. For a month many of his most salient gifts had been lying idle. Rose had not asked for management, and there had been in their easy-going lovemaking no very great place for tact.
Léon was on the look-out for difficulty, for gulfs of temperament and training, efforts and sacrifices and gently taught lessons, but after a time his look-out ceased. Rose looked out. She made the efforts, she learned his lessons, before the need arose to teach her. In fact, she saved him trouble, and there had been moments when Léon found this a trifle dull. It was different now; his skill was called upon at every turn. Madame Gérard was a very unhappy woman. She had had a spoilt childhood and a sentimental and enthusiastic youth guarded at every point from experience.
All her adventures had been in her unfettered dreams. She had dreamed that she should marry Raoul, and then she had married him. Life had brought her up very short. She had believed in an exquisite and ideal relationship and she had been given with terrible promptitude Monsieur Gérard’s impression of what constituted the marriage tie.
He had spoilt her dreams, he had shaken about her ears the fullness of her life; but he was still the man she loved. All other men were but as trees walking, even Léon was only a tree that walked. It was true that he walked more and more frequently in her direction. She took a certain notice of him, her heart lay in the dust but it began to mean something to her that Léon resented this. She felt through the bitterness of her shame a tiny spark of returning pride.
It was a very tiny spark, it hardly amounted to self-respect--but Léon guarded it and kept it alight, as a man shields a flickering match from the rough air. He flattered her grossly at first because she was too sad to understand subtlety. Afterwards, as her mind turned towards him, he refined his flatteries. He kept her a little hungry so that she should more and more look to him for this nourishment of the spirit.
But Madame Gérard, in spite of her grief, was a kind-hearted little woman. She remembered Rose.
“We must not neglect her,” she would say gently, “the little English wife. One does not cure one unhappiness by making another.” And Léon would explain that the English were a strange race. They loved solitude, speechlessness and wonderful long newspaper articles about politics. Also Rose was learning French from a nun and she didn’t care to make a third in their little amusements until she could talk more freely with them.
“She has a pride about it,” Léon explained. “These cold, silent women are very proud.”
“I should not have thought her cold,” said Madame Gérard, thoughtfully. “She has kind eyes. When one is very unhappy one notices kind eyes.”
Léon led the conversation back to Madame’s unhappiness and away from Rose’s eyes. He had not meant to be disloyal to Rose, he rather liked to think of her as cold and proud. After a time Madame no longer tried to send him back to Rose; she was a Frenchwoman, even if she was broken-hearted, and she was not slow to understand Léon. “This type,” she said to herself, “will always be with some woman or other--with me he is safe! I shall send him back to her as he came even perhaps a little wiser, a little more appreciative of her. I will do her no bad turn, the little English wife.”
Madame Gérard had the best intentions, too. She had even better ones than Léon, but neither of them perceived that they had them in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, for a time all went well. Monsieur Gérard studied for the coming opera season with a freer mind and in a better temper.
Rose took long lessons from the nun, and as she slowly and painstakingly began to master the intricate and exquisite language of her husband she felt as if she were approaching his spirit, and preparing for herself and for him a fresh world of understanding and companionship. Day by day Léon brought her, with fresh enthusiasm, endless stories of his progress with the affair Gérard. Some instinct in Rose told her that by the length of these stories, and by Léon’s absorbed, invigorated returns to her, their love was still safe.
She needed all the assurances that she could get, for she was very much alone. She was always just the same to Léon; she spread about him the warm, wide sea of her magnanimity; he was never to know she felt sad or strange, or that she had a silly habit of almost crying when she walked alone on the cliffs above the bright, transparent sea.
He wasn’t to dream that she minded his boating and driving and walking with Madame Gérard, or that she kept explaining to herself how natural it was for him to talk more and with more gaiety in French, and not to care so much as he used to for moonlight in the garden.
She succeeded so entirely in the effect of appearing not to mind that she thoroughly annoyed Léon.
He had been looking forward to a fresh drama with Rose, a little visible but not fettering jealousy, a scene or two, even a few tears, wise and tender explanation on his part, and passionate pleading upon her own.
But Rose’s passion was very quiet and it never occurred to it to plead.
She had no such intention, but she made Léon’s vanity smart, under her daily serenity. “Is she made of wood--or of iron,” he asked himself bitterly, “that she lets me live in the pocket of another woman even during the honeymoon? What have I to look forward to--centuries of ice?”
He knew very well that there was no ice in Rose, but his bad conscience enjoyed resentment very much. It was not only his vanity that was injured, he began to be conscious of a secret fear.
Rose was to be his guardian angel in this affair--he mustn’t, whatever happened, be allowed to lose his head.
He didn’t expect his wife to stop his doing what he wanted, but she ought to be so effective, so in the center of things as to prevent his wanting it, and Rose wouldn’t come into the center of things. She remained in the background, trusting him. He felt the burden of her confidence checking him at every turn.
There was danger, and she didn’t see danger. Was she going to walk straight through it, with her wonderful blue eyes forever unaware?
She ought to have realized that however noble a man is, and however unhappy a woman, a situation in which, from the best motives, they are constantly thrown together, needs watching. A most unfortunate thing had already happened. Madame had discovered, from an unguarded remark of Léon’s, that he had talked with her husband about her. Madame Gérard had a constructive mind--if two and two were anywhere about, it did not take her long to arrive at four. Instantly she understood: this new companionship, the devout attention of her husband’s friend was nothing at all but a plot between the two men to play with her broken heart!
She knew their aim; it was to make her compliant to the lowest needs of one who had not so much affection for her as a stray dog for the hand that strokes it. To say that Madame Gérard was angry at this discovery is to underestimate the uses of language. She was attacked by a bitter fury of outraged pride. Léon had brought back her pride, then, simply in order to outrage it! But this time she kept her head. Any woman can keep her head with a man with whom she is not in love.
Madame Gérard knew herself to be standing with her back to the wall, fighting for her life against two men, one of them at least she could injure.
She gave herself a moment of despair, her small hand clutched fiercely at a little stone beside the path near which they sat--her hidden eyes burned with unshed tears. For a long moment she held herself in silence, while she let Léon cover up his mistake as if she had not heard him; then, being a practical woman, she put despair away till afterwards: besides, despair could only hurt herself.
It was a pity that in destroying Léon’s marriage she should have to destroy Rose’s. Enraged as she was, she thought of this; still, she couldn’t stop to consider a woman who, if she had had the least sense, would have interfered in the whole affair long ago.
“You are not angry,” Léon urged, “that I should have touched on your sufferings with the good Raoul?”
Madame laughed softly and looked at Léon with provocative, caressing eyes.
“You who know women--must know how safe you are from me,” she replied. “Do I look angry?” She did not look angry, but she looked provocative, and this was the first time that she had looked provocative.
It was the difference between a battery turned on and a battery turned off. Madame Gérard, like all Frenchwomen, could use her sex or sink it as the occasion required. Up till now she had never used it, she had kept it steadily in abeyance out of respect to Rose. Now Rose had to go, respect had to go, everything had to go--but her fierce rage against the two men who were in league against her pride.
It was no wonder that Léon began to be afraid, even though it must be admitted that his fear was chiefly of a pleasurable nature, nor that Monsieur Gérard should suddenly feel that he had evoked rather more help than he needed; nor that Rose should find herself not only more alone but suddenly deprived of the support of the long histories Léon used to make to her, on his returns.
He could no longer tell her what took place between him and Madame; speech had become a medium for something better not explained.
Madame Gérard was the only one of the group who appeared wholly at her ease; all her energies were being freely used, and in the direction she had chosen for them. She was making her husband jealous, Léon infatuated and giving the stupid English wife plenty of time to learn French.
The good intentions of everybody began to look a little like the fashion of the year before last.
CHAPTER X
It was part of their general attention to the surface of things that Rose was never to appear deserted.
Léon and Madame tore themselves away from her with public reluctance at the garden gate; they rejoined her eagerly like creatures reprieved, after a prolonged but obviously penal absence.
They even arranged between them times and occasions when Monsieur Gérard should also be represented, when the united four, like a procession on parade, strolled before the watching eyes of Capri.
The watching eyes of Capri are indulgently accustomed to youth and change, they are incapable of the element of shock, but they are equally incapable of the delusion of a good appearance. When Capri beheld Rose and Léon issuing from the Hotel Paradiso on their way to a “Thé Intime” at the Villa degli Angeli, Capri was not hoodwinked by this overflow of a dual domesticity, rather it laid a finger to the nose and cried, from one doorway to the other, “Behold!--a festa of knives!”
It was a many-colored day in the late spring, the bright air shimmered and danced like the bubbles in champagne. The Villa degli Angeli shone pillow-shaped and glittering in a rose-hung garden. Wistaria streamed from its porch, and cloaked like a shield its romantic lovers’ balcony.
Inside the high-ceilinged, gilded little salon, Madame Gérard moved gracefully to and fro--she wore a white dress with touches of scarlet and gold; her lips were very red, her cheeks were lightly powdered, her eyes had a certain sparkle in them, and the heels of her small white shoes were thrillingly high. It struck Rose, not for the first time, that there was really no use being much prettier than that. Madame Gérard greeted Rose with ecstatic pleasure and Léon with a charming ironic gravity; behind her from the gloom Monsieur Gérard moved heavily forward. It was plain that he found the occasion exhausting. Monsieur Gérard easily exhausted most occasions, his was not a revivifying nature; still, there was a certain dignity in the way he murmured over Rose’s hand that he was impressed, greatly impressed, by her visit. She remembered that he had been impressed before. Rose would have liked to have said something pleasant in return, but it is difficult to appear full of savoir faire when expression is limited to requests for hot water, the superficial qualities of dogs and cats, the time of day, and the habits of railway trains.
Rose could talk quite easily about these things by now, and she was also an expert in weather and could have made herself into a well of sympathy to an invalid, but for ordinary tea-party purposes her French hung fire.
The burden of entertainment fell naturally enough upon Madame. She was equal to it, in all probability she had arranged her rôle in advance.
The week had gone well with her. Monsieur Gérard had been roused from practising operas and from nervous hostility over his matrimonial liabilities. He perceived that at one stroke his liabilities and his security had been snatched from him. He was jealous and had begun to be a little eager; but Madame did not meet him half-way.
She no longer bored him to make love to her, indeed she ignored any opening for his attention; she lived exquisitely and extremely unapproachably a life of her own. Monsieur Gérard resented this; he hadn’t meant anything so extreme, but he did not see his way to put an end to it. Madame knew perfectly that he was ready to put an end to it, and she had arranged this occasion, both that he might be given his opportunity and that Léon might receive the punishment that he deserved.
Léon had wanted, it appeared, to reunite her to her husband. This was the height of kindness on his part; she would repay him by showing him that his efforts were a little in arrear of the facts. But alas! once more she showed that lack of intelligence to be found in the cleverest of women when they are dealing with the man they love. She understood the man--she had proved it--but she muddled the love. She should have hooked her fish before she dangled it before the exasperated eyes of Léon, and she should have remembered that it was only half a fish--and half an artist. But at first she was satisfied with the rôle of the perfect wife--instantly she succeeded in exasperating Léon. She drew her husband skilfully and prominently into the front of the situation; she did not praise him, but little by little she tapped the fount of his successes.
She laid him out before her guests with delicate touches that were far finer than praise. It was intoxicating for Monsieur Gérard. After a week’s complete indifference he found himself a hero in his wife’s eyes!
He found himself also in the most comfortable chair in the room (for with men over forty a certain attention must be paid to an appropriate background) and enjoying a wonderful “gouter” in which his taste ruled supreme. Lately Madame had not studied his taste, but for the occasion everything his fancy desired had been obtained for him. His future spread before him in a rosy glow--after all this marriage of his had not been a great mistake--he rather wished he had not taken Léon into his confidence about it; still, it was amusing to watch the fellow’s nose slipping out of joint! He would now have to return to his dull little wife--that would be punishment enough for any man!
Léon was a bad loser; he became first restive, then actively hostile, finally sulky. Madame turned his active hostility into gentle ridicule; his restlessness served somehow to bring out the grand nature of Monsieur Gérard. The grand nature of Monsieur Gérard was not as a rule, active; and Léon, confronted with a specimen of it, sank into silent resentment.
Even this tent of Achilles was not, however, left to him; it blew this way and that under the delicate raillery of Madame. She noticed that Monsieur was out of spirits?
She attacked Rose about it. “A woman is responsible for all that happens to a man during his honeymoon, is she not?” she asked her. Rose, thinking that Madame was doubtful as to the state of Léon’s health, told her painstakingly that Léon was an “esprit fort.” Madame, with a happy little shriek, proclaimed that she was sure of it, but was not his wit like Madame’s own--this afternoon, at any rate--of the wonderful silent English type? Even Monsieur Gérard laughed at this, but on the whole Madame spared Rose; she kept as far as possible her hand off her. She would gladly have spared her altogether, and, in a sense, of course, she was doing so. She was giving her her husband back--not wiser, nor more appreciative, and certainly in a far worse state of mind--but for all that he would be returned to Rose this afternoon not so very much the worse for wear, as husbands go.
For half-an-hour Madame Gérard took upon her little supple shoulders the entertainment of her guests. She was for that half hour like the whole cast of the Comédie Française put together--brilliant, exquisitely decorative and incredibly, ironically knowing; then she turned to her husband with her eyes like an innocent caress, and said, “Now, mon ami, will you not make music for us?” Monsieur Gérard was not unwilling to use his magnificent gift. Léon, who felt that the end had come, politely echoed the request; and then Madame made her fatal mistake. The game was hers--she had only to stand aside and let it finish itself; but she could not stand aside--nervously, with happy flutterings, she must show them how she followed her husband’s work, and how she helped him: and she didn’t help him at all.
She drew out his music--it wasn’t what he wanted to sing and he said so crisply; he always knew what he wanted to sing. Then she said she must play his accompaniment, so that he could stand up and let his voice out.
Now Monsieur Gérard’s voice was not of a quantity to be lightly let out in a small bird-cage of a room; it would have been sufficient to roll over Capri like a rock-stream. Also, Monsieur Gérard was like a tiger to any accompanist but his own, who was taking at the moment a much-needed holiday.
It counted for nothing at all with Monsieur Gérard that his wife was dressed in white and scarlet and gold and that she had roused in him the temporary sentiments of attraction. From the moment that she mounted the music-stool nothing counted but her power of playing a correct accompaniment without too much expression. She had evoked the artist, and the artist upsets everything.
Monsieur Gérard began to sing; he modulated his great dramatic voice, but the sound of it shook the Villa degli Angeli; it poured out on the dancing air with the majestic roll of great billows breaking on the beach.
Madame tinkled mildly and prettily on the piano after him--too prettily of course, and not very accurately. The little ineffective notes were like a pee-wit chirping in a storm. In an instant Monsieur Gérard had swept her from the music-stool almost on to the floor. “You have no more music in you than a fly!” he broke off abruptly to inform her, then he sat down in her place and roared in velvet with magnificent effect.
Madame, shaken and reduced from triumph to the verge of tears, quivered for a little in the window-seat; but even then her prize was still within her grasp--Monsieur had simply for the moment forgotten her. She was capable, if she had waited, of reminding him successfully. Alas! she had that fatal longing to help which reduces the greatest women to the level of a nuisance. She could not let herself be forgotten even for a moment--even for his art. She would go back and turn over the leaves for Raoul. He frowned, he swore under his breath, he shook his heavy head at her; but she went on turning over the leaves--he was not playing to the score, he did not want his leaves turned over--her eager, fluttering figure drove him frantic. In ten minutes he banged the piano lid down, and threw the score on the carpet. He told her before Léon, before Rose, in the drawing-room of the Villa degli Angeli that she was an intrusive insect!
There was a horrible pause. Léon approached Madame in a state of mingled chivalry and satisfaction. She was a pitiable figure as she stood there biting at her dainty lace handkerchief to keep the tears back; her face was very white under its layer of powder. Probably it would have been better if she had sat down. She simply stood with imploring, helpless eyes fixed upon the angry tyrant before her.
No angry man likes to be looked at helplessly. Monsieur Gérard glared at her--then he made the gulf that had come between them impassable.
“Understand!” he shouted, turning the music still on the piano to and fro, as if he were making hay, “To-night I go to Naples! I cannot stand more of this! I will go to Naples for one night, for two--for three! You must remain here! I go to Naples!” Madame’s eyes went from her husband to Léon. Léon’s eyes were fixed on hers in pity, in forgiveness--and were they also fixed a little in expectation? He knew, and Madame knew, precisely the purpose of Monsieur Gérard in going to Naples.
Rose did not understand as much as this, but she thought it was very wicked of Monsieur Gérard to go away from his wife on their honeymoon because she tried to turn over the leaves of his music.
She got up and crossed the room towards Madame. It was Rose who put an end to the unendurable silence.
Léon was waiting for a cue from Madame, and Madame was too stunned to give him any cue. She was like a little helpless leaf that has brought on its own storm, but Rose waited for nothing. She looked first at Monsieur Gérard. She compelled that enraged artist to meet her steady, disapproving eyes; then she held out her hand to Madame Gérard and with a gracious diffidence that was the perfection of dignity, she said in her stumbling French, “I hope very much, Madame, that if your husband is to leave you for a few days, you will give us as much of your company as possible.”
Madame excused herself. She murmured under her breath that Rose was too kind. Once more her eyes flickered from her husband to Léon. “It is a great happiness to me to second my wife’s invitation,” said Léon gravely. He murmured something more as he bowed over her hand and kissed it. Rose had already turned and without even glancing in the direction of Monsieur Gérard she went out into the gay little garden.
Capri saw them return to the Hotel Paradiso.
Léon was remorsefully attentive to his wife; he treated her as if she were something very valuable that might break.
Perhaps in some subconscious way he knew that he was going to break her, but he was very much impressed by her behavior.
She was, he thought to himself, the soul of generosity, and when we are sure that we have the soul of generosity to deal with we sometimes find it difficult not to take advantage of it.
CHAPTER XI
The next day Monsieur Gérard carried out his intention of going to Naples.
Madame Gérard remained invisible. She accepted the flowers Léon called upon her to present, but she sent down a message that she was indisposed and could see nobody. She was indisposed until five o’clock the following day. By this time she had made up her mind.
It was not an easy task. She said to herself again and again that she would have accepted heartbreak--but she could not accept outrage. Her husband had not only cruelly wronged her--he had done so publicly before the eyes of a man who loved her--and before his wife. Her marriage was a false step--it had been her first adventure--but in her imagination she had only counted upon adventures as successes--now she was face to face with an adventure which had proved a failure. She could not go back--she could only go on--and yet she hesitated, for after marriage, adventures that go on are no longer innocent. Her husband had left her with a weapon lying within her reach--from the first it had occurred to her that she could strike back with Léon, but with this idea had come another one, that in striking back she must cruelly wound an innocent and happy woman. In all the horrible scene which had taken place the day before there had only been one moment less intolerable than the others, and Rose had given her that moment. She had distinctly stood by her with an offer of friendship.
Madame Gérard spent twenty-four bitter, sleepless hours considering Rose. At the end of that time--having come to the decision that she did not want to hurt her, but that she wished to do the thing that would hurt her--she made the further decision that, after all, it need not hurt Rose so very much. When she thought of her own unhappiness, a little distress on the part of other wives did not seem out of place.
She would do her best to shield Rose from the truth, but she wouldn’t do anything to prevent the truth taking place. These two decisions placed her in a better position than Léon. Léon had decided nothing.
He only knew that he must see this complex woman, that he must, out of chivalry, discover what she felt about the incredible behavior of her husband. He must find out also--in honor or common kindness--if there wasn’t in the situation some successful part for a good friend to play. He drew upon all his virtues for his reasons. Yesterday Madame had sharply wounded his amour propre; he saw that she had been playing a game with him. Well, the game had failed, and yet he was still there; there was therefore still the possibility of a new game under new conditions, with the advantage, perhaps, to him.
He went no further than that. He wanted, he assured himself, to go no further. He was full of consideration for Rose, but he distinctly wished to see how far he could go.
At five o’clock he found himself admitted. Madame was already out in the sheltered wistaria-covered balcony. She lay in a long chair draped in a soft white robe; there were pearls round her neck and a little black velvet band. She looked extraordinarily pathetic and young and very tired of grief.
There were no traces of tears on her little white face--but she was not the woman to allow traces of any kind to appear, unless they were becoming.
“It was kind of you to come,” she said gently after a long pause. “Forgive me, I had misjudged you. I thought that you were playing with me.”
Léon protested eagerly, how could she have had such an idea? One did not go about playing with young and innocent women who were unhappy. She must not do him so much injustice.
He talked for five minutes nobly and eloquently about unhappy young married women. Madame Gérard listened, looking between the wistaria branches towards the sea. When he had quite finished she said gently, “And yet it was a plot between you and my husband--your friendship, your attention to me--they were not very real, Monsieur. You had agreed with him to win me over to his wishes. Is that not so?”
Léon was upset. You can never be sure what a husband will not tell a wife, even an estranged and angry husband. There is a terrible habit of indiscriminate confidence in marriage. Léon had come across it before.
He would have eagerly denied conjecture, but it would not do to deny a confidence; besides he was secretly much relieved at this new version of things. He had been afraid that Madame had been playing with him; it appeared now that he had been playing with her. What had happened yesterday was merely a charming little feminine revanche. He began to find the part he was playing more attractive.
“It is true,” he said at last, “your husband told me that your marriage was not happy--and to begin with perhaps I had the idea that it lay with you to make it so. Forgive me, this idea soon passed. It passed before the affair of the other day showed me the incredible lacheté of Raoul. Permit me to say that his behavior shocked me to the heart; but before this shock took place I had learned in what light to consider you. Believe me, I have not been playing with you. I am in earnest, in terrible earnest.”
She turned her eyes to his. They were not beautiful eyes like Rose’s--but he did not know them so well, besides she used them better. “You are really in earnest, really, Léon?” she asked him searchingly. He sprang to his feet, but with a wave of her hand she motioned to him to remain where he was.
“I wonder,” she said very softly. “I do not want to be twice deceived, to be deceived once is to go broken-winged through life, but to be deceived twice, could one live at all?”
“I swear that I have not deceived you--that I will never deceive you!” cried Léon passionately. “The feeling that I have for you is real--it is intense.”
Still he meant to stay at Capri; he hadn’t any idea of doing anything else.
“You are prepared,” she asked him, “to prove your words to me? You realize if I believe them what is at stake for me--and if you realize that, do you not think that I have the right to ask you for a proof?”
“You shall not ask me for one!” he cried. “Rather I will give you all the proofs in my power--one or a dozen--what you will--you have only to ask!”
“You are very generous,” she said with her pretty irony. “One will be enough. I want you to-night to take me to Naples. I cannot stay in Capri until my husband returns. I will not return alone to France. It appears that we made a mistake in not going to Naples for our honeymoon. Let us then--you and I--rectify this mistake.”
Léon said nothing. He gripped at the little wooden balcony railing with both hands, and stared with blank eyes at the laughing sea. Leave Capri! Leave Rose! His heart shuddered within him--with every honest fiber of his nature, and he had many honest fibers in his nature, he loved Rose. He did not love the woman before him--but he had sought what she offered--how could he refuse it? It was true he had expected to make his own terms, but this would not be very easy to explain to her. Still, he tried hard to keep the situation in hand.
“I have said,” he began at last, “that I considered your husband, in leaving you, to have committed the worst of infamies. You are asking me to commit the same.”
Madame raised her eyebrows.
“You mean in leaving your wife?” she asked. “After what you have allowed me to suppose, I had not thought you would have that feeling. Nor would it be necessary for you to act as my husband has acted. But I am supposing, of course, that what you feel for me is--real.”
“Pardon me, Madame,” said Léon firmly, “all that I have said to you is true--and yet--is it incredible to you?--I love my wife!”
Madame smiled at him.
“You know how children play with daisies?” she said. “As they pull off the little white petals one by one--‘He loves me--a little, very much, passionately, not at all.’ It is funny what comes after passionately--so soon after, Léon.”
He stirred uneasily. Madame began to pull to pieces a spray of wistaria, throwing the blossoms one by one smilingly into her lap. “I do not ask you, my friend,” she said slowly, “for the devotion of a lifetime--there are hardly enough to go round of these blossoms--we must not stop at passionately, must we--we must stop at not at all! I was thinking of spending three days in Naples.”
“And you would expect me to leave you in three days?” asked Léon reproachfully. He watched her feverishly. A man must know what he is in for. “In three days,” said Madame, throwing all the silvery mauve blossoms with a quick little gesture over the balcony, “I should insist upon your leaving me.” As she did this her small, firm hand touched his. He caught it to his lips and kissed it fervently. The smile in her eyes deepened.
She supposed he must have stopped thinking of Rose, but he said again, after a moment’s pause, “To leave her--to leave her--that seems somehow very base!”
“Then do not leave her,” said Madame wearily, withdrawing her hand. “Break your word to me, it is very simple. I have no claim on you--I am not your wife.”
“You are everything in the world to me,” he said desperately. For the moment he believed she was.
She leaned forward a little.
“After all,” she said, “your wife will not know why you go to Naples. You have only to say you go on business. She is so innocent she will believe you--you might even tell her that you are to act as my escort back to my husband. She need not suffer.”
Léon flung back his head. “But,” he stammered, his eyes filling with sudden tears, “I cannot lie to Rose! She is not like that! I cannot lie to her--it is as you say, she would believe me!”
“Ah,” said Madame, “let us hope then that you can lie about women better than you can lie to them! But you are making a mistake. It is very easy to lie to us. All men have found it so.”
He pushed her words away from him.
“Elise,” he asked her suddenly, “do you care for me? This thing that you are about to do, is it from your heart?”
She rose and stood beside him.
“I will give you the proof,” she said in a low voice.
But still he was not satisfied; his eyes continued to question her.
“It is from my heart,” she repeated firmly. He caught her to him and kissed her, but it seemed to him even then as if he held something dead in his arms, something which by no beat of the heart, by no single spiritual response, met his. She gave him her lips.
For a long moment he held her, then she withdrew herself and moved away from him. “No more,” she said gently. “To-night I shall expect you. I will meet you at the turn of the road by the Madonna of the Rocks.”
She moved with him slowly towards the door. “Voyons!” she said before they parted. “Don’t hurt her--don’t ever tell her--your young wife. She is too good. A lie will cost you nothing. And, after all, if it was not me--it would be some other woman soon--would it not? After all--” Her voice faltered. Something in her wavered for a moment, something very hard and deep, tried suddenly to melt. “After all,” said Léon gravely, “this is the greatest proof I have to give. Take it as generously as I give it!”
She looked at him with strange eyes. “We are both about to be very generous, are we not?” she said with a dry little smile. “Eh bien! Love is short and marriage is long--all the better for love--which sees its end.”
Léon did not like this point of view. There was some truth in it, no doubt, but it would have sounded better from the lips of a man. He kissed her hands reproachfully. He could not think for the moment of anything very beautiful to say about love, and Madame herself said no more. She simply looked suggestively at the door.
After he had gone she stood where he had left her, clenching and unclenching her small, firm hands.
“From my heart,” she whispered, “Mon Dieu--it appears so--from my heart.”
CHAPTER XII
Rose was finishing a letter to Agatha on the balcony. She found it difficult to write to her sisters, they seemed so very far away.
She was afraid, too, that they might find her letters dull. You couldn’t go on describing the blue grotto; besides, neither Agatha nor Edith cared for descriptions of scenery, they always skipped them in books; and as far as Rose could tell nobody played any particular game in Capri. Young men shot birds on Sunday afternoons when they could, but they weren’t even the proper birds to shoot, so perhaps it was better not to mention them.
When Rose wrote to her people she always said “we” even when she was referring to things that she did by herself.
It wasn’t very like a Pinsent to give way to this illicit expansion of fact, but Rose comforted herself by thinking that after all, editors said “we” when there was only one of them writing, and most of the married people she knew expressed themselves in the plural, though that perhaps was because they really did the things together. Still, she went on writing “we” because she didn’t want her people to think anything funny about Léon. She had just got as far as “We have such jolly little dinners in the garden,” when she heard Léon’s whistle coming up the stairs. He stood looking at her a little curiously.
“You are writing,” he asked her, “to your people?”
“To Agatha,” she said. “Have you any message?”
Léon sometimes sent very amusing messages to Agatha. For a moment Léon did not reply, then he said, “And what do you say to them--of me--your people?”
Rose blushed, just the same wonderful pink tulip blush Léon had from the first particularly admired, but it was ill-timed, it looked guilty. It shot through his uneasy mind that she had been complaining of him to the Pinsents. In his irritable, resentful state it gave him a sudden sense of justification. Hadn’t he done already wonders for Rose? He had not made open love to Elise (until just now, of course), he had borne for over a month the ennui of Capri. He hadn’t so much as been to a café without his wife, and now he had almost decided not to leave her!
“Tell them,” he said bitterly, “that you are perfect, and that I am a monster of depravity. Almost all wives say that to their relatives sooner or later. You, it appears, have taken up the tone in good time!”
“Léon!” she cried, aghast. And then, because she loved him so, because she had shielded him in the defiance of truth, because she had never had a suspicion of his faithlessness, she chose this moment to say the only harsh thing she had ever said to him. “I think,” she said, turning away her eyes, “that you are guilty of very bad taste.”
It was, of course, the one fatal reproach to make to a Frenchman. If she had said he was guilty of anything else he would have forgiven her.
Léon rushed into their room, his cheeks on fire as if she had struck him. It was clear she no longer loved him! Coldly, cruelly, with her horrible English justice, so out of place in a woman, she had thrown this stone at his heart! There could be but one issue now. He must go to Naples. She complained of him to her parents and she had accused him of bad taste! He packed a small bag feverishly. The door between them was shut.
Rose hesitated. Should she open it and tell him she was sorry?
What would Agatha or Edith do, if they were there? Probably they would have burst open the door with shouts of glee, and inserted a cake of soap down Léon’s back, but this happy method of conciliation seemed closed to Rose. She had never had their robuster gift of horseplay. She got up hesitatingly and walked slowly away, out into the garden and beyond the gates to post her letter. Perhaps when she came back for dinner she might have thought of something nice to say, something that would show Léon she was sorry and not aggravate him.
It was a lovely evening. She wandered on, seeing at every fresh turn of the road a yet more glorious view.
The great bay spread before her like an endless liquid flame. The color seemed to throb upon its burnished shield.
Naples lay beyond it, a long pearly circle in the evening light, pale cream and coral pink and soft, dull gold. Above Vesuvius the white plume of smoke drove straight as a lifted feather up into the sky.
She went on till she reached the Madonna of the Rocks, then she sat under the tall raised figure with its lamp.
At the turn of the road below her a little carriage was standing; in it was the figure of a woman in white. The figure reminded her of Madame Gérard, only it could not be Madame Gérard, of course, because Madame had written to Rose that she was not well and could not leave her room.
As Rose sat there her eyes filled with tears. They were not for herself, though her own heart was sore; they were for the poor woman whose husband had so cruelly left her all alone on her honeymoon. And when Rose thought how happy she was herself, and how soon she would tell Léon, with her cheek against his cheek, that she was sorry she had been horrid, her heart ached for that other bride who had no lover to appease; and who must be looking at all this great sparkling sea and wonderful bright earth with such sad, different eyes! And so Rose sat there and cried for Madame Gérard--and Madame Gérard, two hundred yards away, waited for Rose’s husband.
He came at last, hurriedly, quietly, with hanging head, like a thief. He was ashamed, ashamed of his anger against Rose, of his incredible folly, of his silly, intemperate desires. He passed close by the rock on which Rose sat. Her heart moved suddenly against her side; it betrayed her; stubbornly it beat as if it knew itself in danger, and yet, Rose said to herself, there was no danger. It was only Léon hurrying by, looking as if he were ashamed.
She saw him get into the little carriage, and then turn and look back. She could not see his face, but it seemed to her as if he were reluctant to be driven away. Of course he would be back for dinner.
Perhaps, after all, that was Madame Gérard, and Léon was driving her down to the eight o’clock boat? Probably she was going to Naples to join her husband, and Léon had offered to see her off. He would be very late for dinner. If she hadn’t been cross he would have told her what he meant to do. The little Capri ponies plunged forward and the carriage disappeared in a cloud of dust. A long while after she saw the little steamer pushing its way across the crystal sea and leaving behind it a long purple trail. She watched it till it lost itself beyond Castellamare. Léon would soon be back now. She walked slowly towards the hotel and when she got there she was conscious of something strange about it. The Padrone met her with a bunch of flowers, and the stout Padrona bustled out from the office to ask Rose if there wasn’t anything extra she would like--would she not dine now in the garden?
“Oh, no, not now,” Rose said quickly. “I will wait for my husband.” A shadow passed over the Padrona’s face. She hesitated and then said with urgent kindness, “The Signora has only to ask for anything she wants.” The waiter, too, looked at Rose with strange, sympathetic eyes. He suggested her feeding the pigeons, and hurried to offer her new bread off the table of some traveling Germans.
“These people,” he said, “Tedeschi will not know the difference. Take it, Signora mia, for your birds.”
The pigeons had already gone to roost.
Peppina, the chambermaid, watched Rose from the balcony. She should have been at her supper, but she stood for some time gazing down into the garden at the figure of the young wife. Suddenly she also bethought herself of something and hurried down into the garden carrying a black kitten in her apron which she deposited on Rose’s lap. “Behold,” she said, “the little one of fortune. A black cat brings luck. Talk to it, Signora, perhaps it will stay with you.” But the black kitten jumped off Rose’s lap. It wanted to play with its own shadow in the grass, and to stalk birds. It was not too young for that.
The sky changed slowly from rose color to a clear, pale blue. One by one the stars came out, but they made no place in the sky, till the evening waned and night came, velvety and black, to Capri, embracing it like a dropped mantle, and then, through the curtain of the mysterious dark, the stars grew enormous and shone down upon the scented lemon gardens and over the vague wide sea.
Outside the gate a mandolin struck up a hungry, empty little tune.