“Because,” she whispered, “I would take the risk--if you loved me.”
The Pinsents never saw any reason why they shouldn’t be modern without--as they expressed it--going too far.
They didn’t believe in the sheltered-life system, but that was perhaps because they rather under-estimated their own idea of what constituted a shelter.
There were certain risks, of course, in allowing your daughters to play mixed hockey, smoke cigarettes and belong to a suffrage movement (they could attend meetings, but weren’t to throw stones). Still, it was strange how little harm these concessions to modernity had done the Pinsent girls.
Bernard Shaw rolled off them like water from a duck’s back.
Somewhere between the ages of fourteen and seventeen Mrs. Pinsent presented her daughters with an approximate definition of life. Agatha yawned and Edith said, “Oh, dear! We knew all that ages ago.” For a moment Mrs. Pinsent became agitated. Had they, in spite of the healthiness of their surroundings, come in contact with evil influences? But she was reassured when Agatha explained that they had picked it up from rabbits.
Rose, who was more sensitive and less observant, gave her mother more trouble than the others, but she acquiesced at last, that God must know best, though it all seemed rather funny. They were not to earn their own livings because later on--(later on being the term in which the Pinsent parents envisaged their retreat from this world) they would have plenty of money; but they were expected to develop hobbies.
The eldest girls developed splendid hobbies. Agatha, who was the plainest of the three, became a lawn tennis champion with a really smashing serve. Edith distinguished herself by writing a history of one of our western counties. She rode all over it on a bicycle and stayed at vicarages by herself. She earned a hundred pounds by this adventure and had a particularly pleasant notice in the “Spectator.”
Rose was rather slower at taking anything up. She had had pneumonia when she was at school, and it had left her nominally but not at all obstructively delicate.
She played an excellent game of hockey and was her father’s favorite.
It was really for Rose’s sake that they all decided to go to Rome.
They thought Rose would almost certainly settle down to something after that, and it would be good for Edith, who, now she had finished Somersetshire, might like to begin on Rome.
She could at any rate compare the different types of architecture. A friend of hers, a Mr. Bunning, said there wasn’t any architecture in Rome, but you could never be quite sure what Mr. Bunning meant. Edith hadn’t been quite sure for several years--nor apparently had Mr. Bunning, but perhaps their going to Rome might help him to find out. Agatha was very good-natured about it; she said she thought Rome would do as well as anywhere else.
The Pinsents were a most accommodating family and though, of course, they sometimes quarreled, it was all in a loud, direct, natural way, which generally ended in chaff.
They never quarreled with Rose as much as with each other because of her having been rather delicate, still they chaffed her a good deal. She wouldn’t have liked it if they hadn’t.
They knew they weren’t like other families of their class and standing; they prided themselves on talking to people in railway carriages and even crossing the Channel. Of course, they were particularly good sailors but even if they hadn’t been they would have been nice and friendly and not at all stuck up about being sick.
Agatha was thinking of marrying a Canadian who took most magnificent back-handers, Edith was still wondering what Mr. Bunning meant, but Rose was perfectly free.
She’d had two proposals, but both of them had been from men she had known all her life and liked most awfully--but not in that way. So that she’d had, as Mrs. Pinsent put it to her husband, “quite a lot of experience for twenty-one and none of the bother of it.”
Mr. Pinsent growled and said that if Rose married the right kind of man she never would have any bother.
Mrs. Pinsent looked thoughtful; she didn’t want to think that Mr. Pinsent was the wrong kind of man, it would have been dreadful after being married to him for thirty years. Still, she couldn’t honestly have said that she hadn’t had any bother with him.
Probably Mr. Pinsent had forgotten it; men do not remember that kind of thing in the same way.
They chose a French hotel in Rome because they thought it would be more Italian, and when they arrived there everything was just as foreign as possible, which was what the Pinsents wanted--provided that they could get enough hot water.
The Hotel le Roy was even for Rome extraordinarily “black.” Its clientèle was composed of French priests, their sisters, ladies of pronounced age and severity, one or two French families of prehistoric claims, small means and a son at a seminary, and a few Dutch Catholics who were, if anything, blacker than the French, but distinctly pleasanter to the English. Black French Catholics do not like English Protestants. The war may have softened this feeling, but this episode took place a year before the war, when the Entente Cordiale was looked upon as a Socialist blunder to be sharply counteracted in private by a studied coldness of manner.
Mrs. Pinsent, whose French the whole family relied upon, did nothing to improve the situation. She said to Madame la Comtesse de Brenteuil, who couldn’t very well help going up in the lift with her, “Isn’t it a pity the Vatican shuts so often for church things? They say we sha’n’t be able to get into the Sistine chapel in Holy Week, and one of my daughters is writing an article on the Sibyls--it’s really most annoying!”
Madame de Brenteuil looked at Mrs. Pinsent as if she were a smut that had fallen on her sleeve; then, with a weary irony, she observed, “Perhaps, Madame, the English do not realize that the Holy Father is a Catholic?” Mrs. Pinsent was eager to reassure her as to Anglo-Saxon intuitions. She said, “Oh, yes--we quite understand his own personal views--but it isn’t as if Rome really belonged to him, is it?”
Fortunately the lift stopped. It was not Madame de Brenteuil’s étage, but she got out.
After this incident no French person in the Le Roy spoke to Mrs. Pinsent or her daughters, so that it was rather difficult for Léon Legier to begin--especially as he was a third cousin to the Comtesse, and lié to almost everybody there. He had made up his mind to begin from the moment that Rose Pinsent dropped a breakfast roll and blushed as she stooped to pick it up.
He had never seen such a blush before on any woman’s face, and any color he had failed to surprise upon a woman’s face he had naturally supposed could not exist.
Apparently it did, for Rose had it. Her blush was as fine in hue as that of a pink tulip and as delicate as a winter cloud at dawn.
It swept up in a wave from her white throat into her pale, silky, fair hair, and the fact that she suddenly discovered Léon was observing her did not tend to decrease her color. Léon Legier made his opportunity that evening in the hall. The porter was explaining to Mrs. Pinsent what time to start for Tivoli the following morning. His English was limited and he altered the train hour to suit the convenience of the foreign tongue. The greater inconvenience of missing the train had not occurred to him until Léon intervened.
Subsequently Léon discovered that almost all the porter’s other information suffered from similar readjustments of language, and he and Mrs. Pinsent sat down in the lounge to revise the day’s excursion. Mrs. Pinsent should, perhaps, have thought of her daughters, but Léon gave her no time to think of her daughters. He focused her attention upon herself. She felt herself young again, almost dangerous; the young man before her apologetic, diffident, with exquisite manners, was so obviously attracted by her and intent on all that she had to tell him, she had not the heart to cut the conversation short. Later on Mr. Pinsent joined them. He was delighted to find another man to talk to in his own tongue, and who was obviously acquainted with the name of Lloyd George.
It fortunately never transpired that Léon had confused the name of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer with that of a horse who had won the Derby.
Mr. Pinsent told Léon what the English Government really meant and attacked the Italian railway system. Léon listened politely, and it was only at the end of the conversation that Mr. Pinsent discovered his young foreign friend was after all merely French. Not that Mr. Pinsent minded Frenchmen--but they could hardly be held responsible for the state of Italian railways.
In spite of his nationality, however, Léon was able to give Mr. Pinsent the name of a remarkably good wine to be procured at Tivoli; he regretted that the best place to lunch required a slight knowledge of how to order Italian dishes. Mr. Pinsent said it was a pity Léon wasn’t going with them. Léon only hesitated enough not to appear over-eager; his deprecatory, half-delighted eyes sought Mrs. Pinsent’s, and she said quickly, “But perhaps you could come with us?” Léon produced his card. The Pinsents gave him theirs on which was written “Rocketts, Thornton-in-the Hedges,” and on Léon’s was written, No. 9, Faubourg St. Germain, Paris, and there was no one there to point out the deadly disparity between the two addresses.
The next day was glorious, a spacious, sunny, golden Roman day. The air across the Campagna was delicate and keen. The Cascades at Tivoli fell in tumultuous rushes out of their purple caverns.
The tiny temple of the Sibyls caught itself up against the sharpness of the sky. It hung, perilous and delicate, above the cliff like a little weather-beaten storm-tossed shell.
Léon made no attempt to talk to Rose. He hardly looked at her, but he persistently observed her. He saw that she had in some sense which had been denied her family, imagination and warmth.
He surprised in her a sympathy of attention different from the playful kindness of her sisters.
Agatha and Edith were from the first jolly with Léon. They cultivated, with masculine acquaintances, a slightly jocular tone, and the humor of this was deepened, of course, by Léon’s being a Frenchman.
They gambolled cheerfully about him, much like heavy sheep dogs good-humoredly greeting a greyhound.
Léon accommodated his pace to theirs, he met them half-way, but he privately thought they weren’t like women at all.
He took Agatha round the little temple and Edith to the foot of the highest waterfall. He let their niceness (for he recognized with a rare leap of the imagination that they were being nice to him) expand into unconscious revelations.
He allowed their frank communications to slip over the polished surface of his manner like leaves borne on the waters that dashed past them. Once or twice he arrested the floating leaves with the point of his stick, and once or twice in the flood of Edith’s careless chatter he held, very slightly, the point of his mind against a special revelation.
He gathered that the Pinsents were very well off. It wasn’t that they ever spoke of money, but the tremendous amount of things you had to have, the bother of salonslits and the burden of expensive hotels filtered through their wider statements of having to think twice as to whether they’d go on to Sicily or not. They deplored prices, but they invariably chose the best of what there was. Léon listened carefully, but he hadn’t at first any real intentions.
Rose pleased him. She was an unknown English type. A strange creature, as independent as if she were married, and as innocent as if she had never seen a man.
He decided to devote himself a little to studying her, and in order to do this he had, of course, to accept the Pinsent family.
To Mr. Pinsent he could only be attentive. He found him an English club and was delighted to observe the increasing use which Mr. Pinsent made of it. Mrs. Pinsent, however, was comparatively easy to handle. She was a woman with the maternal instinct, and with her Léon found it easy to be candid.
He told her that he had just finished his military service and was now taking a little “voyage” before settling down. He talked a good deal about his mother, who occupied herself with good works in Paris; his father he mentioned less, and the works that occupied him not at all. Nevertheless, it could be seen that he had a great affection for both his parents and no brothers and sisters.
“I expect that’s why he likes,” Mrs. Pinsent explained to her husband, “to be so much with the girls.”
It was three days before Léon found himself alone with Rose.
She had begun to feel a little out of this gay stranger’s intimacy. It seemed to Rose as if Léon purposely avoided her, and yet, in a way, which was very strange to her, their eyes sometimes met, and then he seemed to be telling her something as direct as a penny and as articulate as the cobblestones of Rome.
Then all of a sudden, breathlessly, without preparation, she found herself alone with him in the Campagna.
Mr. Pinsent had said that the girls were on no account to go outside the walls of Rome by themselves.
He hadn’t made it perfectly clear why he put this obstacle to their general freedom, but he’d mentioned when pressed by Agatha, malarial fever and savage Abruzzi sheep dogs.
“So I expect I shall just have to go to a gallery instead,” Rose explained to Léon in the hall. “Edith has gone off with some one to see a fountain, and won’t be back for hours.” Léon hesitated, then he said, “How far does the wonderful English freedom extend? Is it an impertinence that I should offer to take you--wherever you wish to go?”
“Oh, thank you very much. Yes, of course I could go with you. . . .” Rose answered a little slowly. It seemed to her in some strange way that her freedom had ceased to be menaced by her father and mother, but not to have become any the more secure.
She couldn’t have said that she disliked the sense of danger, but she knew quite well what increased it. It was Léon’s saying as they stood for a moment outside the street door, “Do you know it is since three days--I have been waiting for this?”
They took the tram to San Giovanni Laterano, and as it shuffled and shrieked its clamorous way through narrow streets and wide piazzas, under old yellow walls and through long white modern tunnels, a new sensation came to Rose Pinsent.
She had always supposed that what she liked best in a man was his being tremendously manly, and by manly the Pinsents meant impervious to the wills of others, abrupt in speech, and taking up everywhere a good deal of space.
But Léon was masculine in quite a different way and yet no one could doubt his possessing that particular quality.
The form it took with him was that Rose became suddenly conscious of his physical presence. She noticed as she had never noticed in any man before, his smallest personal habits, the flutter of his fine hard eyes, the scrupulous neatness and grace of his person, and, above all, the alert and faultless precision with which in any direction he met her half-way.
He gave her from moment to moment the whole of his indulgent intensity. No man had ever looked at her like this before, so read her mind and forced her in return to read his own!
The tram was crowded and Léon stood above her, holding on to a strap and looking down at her with laughing eyes. “You are thinking something of me, Mademoiselle,” he said at last. “Confess it is a comparison, not, of course, to my advantage. Tell me, then, to whom are you comparing me, in what do I fall short?”
Rose tried to frown. “Why should you suppose I am thinking of you at all?” she ventured. Léon laughed softly. “Why indeed?” he murmured. “And yet why should you not? Here you are, you and I; we have not yet exchanged half-a-dozen words, and now we are to be together for, I hope, three hours, and all these last days I have been waiting for these hours--planning for them, arranging, as it were, my life to meet them. Surely you, who have not prevented my obtaining them, must now be giving a thought to what I am like? It would be droll to go for a ride on a strange horse and not to look at it, not question a little its character, how shall we put it--its pace? Would you think less of the companionship of a man?”
Rose drew in her breath sharply. Léon had a way of putting things which was very exciting, but not, perhaps, quite nice.
“But,” she said, “of course we have thought of you--Mother and Father, they thought you were--” she paused, breathless. Léon came to her assistance. “Respectable? Oh, yes,” he said easily. “But that doesn’t go very far, does it? Simply to go for an expedition with some one who is respectable! Your excellent Mr. Thomas Cook could provide you with that. You might even procure for a few francs more a gentleman to give you a lecture! Really, Mademoiselle, I had flattered myself that your imagination had dealt with me a trifle more directly!”
Rose tacitly admitted this claim. “Agatha and Edith thought you awfully jolly,” she said hurriedly. “So I didn’t see, I mean I didn’t mind when you suggested coming out with me.”
Léon laughed again. “But I am afraid,” he said, “that I sha’n’t be in the least with you what I was like with Mademoiselles Agatha and Edith--‘awfully jolly.’ I do not think of you in those terms. You will have to decide for yourself and not take anybody’s word for it what I am like to you.”
Rose said nothing. She was glad that they had to get out at the foot of the Lateran steps.
They took a little carriage which went very fast through the swollen, sallow suburb; it soon left behind it the trams, the cobblestones and the shuffling wine carts. Almost at once the Campagna was upon them, vaguely breaking away from the farms and the eucalyptus trees into soft-breathing, deep, unbroken emptiness.
They wandered out over the grass to the ruin of a villa, an old pink tower and a group of umbrella pines.
“It asks to be sketched, doesn’t it?” Léon observed. “And now you will have to be very definite, Mademoiselle. It won’t do for you to suppose that you can judge of the Campagna without a glance, as if it were merely a new masculine acquaintance!”
He opened her camp-stool and gravely placed himself on an old wall behind her. “Vous y êtes,” he asserted, “begin!”
But Rose didn’t begin. She had been thinking of what he had asked her. Perhaps she hadn’t been quite frank. The Pinsents as a family thought it a sin not to be quite frank.
“I was thinking about you,” she admitted. “I mean myself; I thought--I thought you weren’t at all like an Englishman!”
Léon laughed gently. “What a discovery,” he said. “I am not like an Englishman--I! And did you want me to be? You are disappointed, perhaps?”
The wonderful pink color deepened in her face. “No,” she said, “I am not a bit disappointed--I like people to be different.”
“Thank you, Mademoiselle,” he said with sudden gravity. “You relieve me very much, for that is one thing I could not change for you--I could not be less a Frenchman.”
Still she did not begin her sketch. “You are tired?” he asked her. “Rest then, and don’t trouble to make a picture on that little strip of canvas. Nothing you can do there will, I assure you, be half as successful as what you are doing, by just sitting where you are.”
She was sure he was flirting now, but what she wasn’t sure was how to stop it. She wondered if Edith or Agatha knew, but it flashed across her in a terrible moment of disloyalty that perhaps neither of them had ever been put to the proof. “I don’t think you ought to say that kind of thing--” she said a little uncomfortably.
“But why not?” Léon urged. “Why do you not wish me to take pleasure in your beauty? And if I take it, would it not be rude and ungracious not to express it? For my part I believe only in the truth. If it is agreeable--good! Let us enjoy it. If it is disagreeable, let us bear it. But why should we try to avoid it? Besides we can never avoid it. If we choose to shut our eyes to the truth it will take us by surprise. Is that the way you like to be taken, Mademoiselle?”
Rose was not a stupid girl; she gave Léon a fleeting glance; there was just the delicate hint of laughter in it, her lips trembled at the upturned corners. “I don’t like being taken at all,” said Rose sedately, returning to her sketch.
It occurred to her afterwards this was not, perhaps, the best way to stop flirting.
They came back rather late for tea, but Mr. and Mrs. Pinsent were not at all uneasy about them. They didn’t look feverish and they hadn’t seen any savage Abruzzi dogs.
For a Frenchman of the type of Léon Legier there are a great many ways of being in love; there are also several goals. You needn’t, as he himself expressed it, finish the game in order to have received your entertainment.
In the case of Rose Pinsent, Léon wasn’t at first very serious, he was out for the fine shades. He had never had an intimacy with an Englishwoman before. It was simply a nationality he didn’t know, and he found it touching.
For her sake he led the Pinsents in compact and cheerful batches into unknown churches and gave them on unfrequented hillsides splendid Roman views.
He never made a visible point of the few moments alone he managed to snatch with Rose.
She took these moments with a certain unexacting grace which pleased him.
It was as if she had a special pleasure which never amounted to expectation in his presence. Her grave blue eyes never claimed him, but when he signaled his own joy into hers--he met with no rebuff. He had passed certain barriers with her and she made no attempt to set them up again.
She was secretly afraid, not of him, but of being so different when they were alone together. She tried very hard to be just the same as she was when those queens of chaff, Agatha and Edith, presided over their small festivities.
She had never supposed before you could have two relations with the same person, without doing anything wrong, and yet the most rigid of her scruples failed to warn her that when she and Léon were together they did anybody any harm.
Rose would have stopped all “nonsense” at once; what she couldn’t stop was the gradual dangerous tenderness, growing touch by touch under the hand of a master.
She tried not to think too much about Léon, and as long as he was with them she found that she succeeded.
Everything became so interesting and so vivid--but when Léon was out of their sight, buried in obscure private affairs, hidden, perhaps, by his French relations whom he persistently excused to the Pinsents as being poor dear people, so terribly provincial and shy! Rose found Rome wonderfully little of an absorption--she was forced to consider that what she really needed was, like her sisters, some definite active goal. Her mind became set upon a hobby. She felt if she had that, it wouldn’t really matter whether Rome was interesting or not. She could not have told quite how the idea came to her; perhaps it was because little Italian children in the streets looked so sweet--but she suddenly thought she would like, when she got back to England, to have a nice little home in the country for children to get well in, quite poor people’s children--only they would be washed there, of course, and probably have curly hair. She told Léon about it one day when they were in St. Maria in Trastevere and had snatched a moment to go off by themselves into the sacristy, to admire what Baedeker so aptly describes as “the admirable ducks.”
“Papa,” Rose explained to Léon, “had been so kind, he thought it could be managed.” For a moment Léon looked in silence at the admirable ducks--and then he laughed a gentle, caressing laugh and flushed a little, fixing his hard bright eyes on her upturned face.
“But Mademoiselle,” he said, “hasn’t it occurred to you that to have your own children--nice little healthy ones--wouldn’t that be just as amusing and not quite as expensive for Papa?”
It seemed as if Rose’s very heart had blushed under his eyes. She wanted for a moment to go away from him--to hide from out of his sight.
She said quickly and vaguely, “Oh, I don’t know--one doesn’t think about such things.” Léon said, “Doesn’t one? I assure you I do.”
He hadn’t said any more, but it was the moment of his own intention. He saw as clearly as the lines of the mosaic on the wall--the prospect of a definite new life.
This mere study of a delightful English temperament should develop into the most serious of all his affairs.
A girl as beautiful and as innocent with such a command of so compliant a parent (for little homes in the country for sick children must involve an elastic pocket on the part of Mr. Pinsent) struck Léon as a rare and favorable opportunity.
After all, he meant to settle down some day. His mother wanted it, and his father’s extravagance had done much to make a good match difficult in France, and Léon liked Rose, he appreciated her. She was innocent, but she wasn’t eager--she made no advances towards him--she was modest without being in any danger of striking him as a fool. She knew, for instance, when to hold her tongue.
She was the only one of the Pinsent family who had the good taste to ignore an awkward little episode which took place at about this time.
Léon had been very fortunate hitherto, he had also been skilful. Rome is not a large town, nor one in which it is easy to keep one’s acquaintances definitely apart.
Léon was at this time carrying on two perfectly different affairs. There was the Pinsent affair--which hadn’t arrived and which took up a good deal of time, and for which he chose a certain type of occupation, but there was another affair--which had arrived some time ago, very much less serious, of course, but also requiring time and a background from which he had so far succeeded in eliminating any appearance on the part of the Pinsent family.
Mr. Pinsent upset this arrangement by altering at the last moment, and without notifying Léon--the program prepared in advance by Léon and Mrs. Pinsent. Mr. Pinsent decided that he would go to Frascati and walk up a hill to a place called Tusculum. There wasn’t much to be seen when you got there--but what he suddenly felt was that he needed more exercise and they could get lunch at the Grand Hotel coming back.
It was at the Grand Hotel that the incident happened. Léon saw them coming inexorably across the garden in close formation, waving parasols and shouting their unfettered greetings.
He notified the brilliant lady who was his companion that they must instantly retire in the opposite direction. His companion stared, not at him--a glance had explained him to her quick intelligence--but at the Pinsent family. She said under her breath, “The English have no families--they have tribes--this appears to be a savage one.”
Léon never moved a muscle of his face--he turned his back resolutely upon the approaching Pinsents, and took his companion into the hotel--where he asked for a private room. If the Pinsents chose to follow him there--it would be a pity--but everything would be at an end. There are forms that must be preserved even in the face of self-interest. Léon knew that he would never forgive Rose if the Pinsents went any further. But they didn’t go any further--Rose diverted their attention--she loudly declared that it wasn’t Léon--and insisted on remaining in the garden. She owned when pressed that the walk had been too much for her. She felt not exactly faint, but that she would rather not go indoors. The Pinsents had their lunch under a magnolia tree in the garden. It was very like a picnic, and Agatha and Edith prepared a splendid method of “roasting Léon” when they got hold of him once more. They effected this seizure in the hall of the hotel that evening. They upbraided him roundly with the exception of Rose. Léon denied steadily that he was ever at Frascati, but of course not--how could he have been there and not rushed to greet them? It wasn’t conceivable--they had seen his double! Agatha and Edith described with much wealth of detail the lady he was with (only the English could walk so merrily into dangerous places).
Léon looked graver still. He turned to Rose. “And you, Mademoiselle,” he asked, “were you under the impression that you saw me?”
“It certainly did look exactly like you,” Mrs. Pinsent murmured, looking rather troubled. “I particularly noticed the hat.”
“Lots of people wear hats like Monsieur Legier,” Rose said, looking away from Léon.
She was the only one of the party he finally failed to convince.
He did more than admire her then, he respected her. There is no taste so perfect as that which permanently conceals a fact which is awkward for others.
Rose concealed it, but she paid for her good taste by her tears.
Léon planned in advance the setting for his proposal. He would make it in the English way, to the girl herself. Léon had never proposed marriage before, and he gave the affair his best attention.
The Baths of Caracalla are never very crowded and at certain times of the day they are extraordinarily solitary.
Léon knew one of the chief excavators and it was part of his idea to take the entire family of Pinsent with the exception of Rose into the underground regions. The excavator, who was an enthusiast, could be calculated to hold them there for a full hour. Rose, who never liked underground temples, agreed easily enough to remain in the open air, and Léon disappeared with the others. She was a little puzzled over Baedeker’s description of the Baths of Caracalla, once she got the tepidarium in her head she felt she could get on quite easily, but the tepidarium eluded her. The great roofless, sunny space, wouldn’t contract itself reasonably, into a guide book, and then she heard Léon’s returning footsteps.
“Has anything happened?” she asked in some alarm.
“That is for you to say,” answered Léon with unusual gravity. “For my part I have found you--and that for the moment is enough.”
“Didn’t you mean to stay down there, then?” asked Rose in some bewilderment.
“Never in the world,” said Léon more lightly. “Am I the kind of man to engage myself with the temple of Mithras, je m’en fiche de Mithras! I beg your pardon--I should say, in the phrase of your American cousins, I have no use for him!”
There was no one but themselves in the Baths of Caracalla, the great pink walls stretched spaciously around them, the blue sky benignantly overhead, under foot the fresh spring grasses spread like an emerald fire.
“I suppose we ought to go all over it properly,” Rose asked a little wistfully. Léon shook his head. “Why should we do that?” he objected. “Let us leave propriety to Mithras. If ancient history is true, he stood much in need of it. For ourselves, let us sit down in this corner--under the shelter of the ivy--and look at the pink blossoms in front of us. If you had not informed me how serious it is to pay compliments, I should have told that tree--that it was very nearly as pretty as the English complexion; but as I am a very truthful man and have no wish to curry favor with any one, I should have added, not quite.”
Rose smiled a little tremulously. She said nothing, but she hoped Léon would go on talking. She turned her eyes on the almond tree; its pale pink flowers hung above them like a little cloud.
A silence fell between them, a significant, tremendous silence. Rose became aware that she was alone with Léon in a way in which she had never been alone with any one before. Their privacy was as breathless as danger. In a moment more it seemed to Rose something tremendous would have happened like an earthquake or a volcano, but probably much nicer than these manifestations of nature.
Then she knew that it had happened already. Léon had caught both her hands in his. “Mademoiselle,” he asked her in a queer, strained voice, “Has any man ever kissed you before?”
She lifted frightened, fluttering eyes to his--they were wonderful in their candor.
“No!” she whispered. “No!”
“Alors! You will not be able to say that again!” he said firmly, bending towards her. But though his eyes held hers with the intentness of a hawk, he waited for her answering surrender. She startled him by the urgency of her protest. “Oh, don’t! Don’t!” she pleaded. “Please let me go!” Instantly he released her.
“You don’t like me enough?” he asked her in surprise. “Do you think I am such a brute that I would kiss you against your will? Why, never in the world! That is no kiss, that is not a mutual pleasure. But why do you say ‘No’ to me, Rose?--for your eyes--your eyes say ‘Yes’!”
“Oh, no!” she answered quickly. “I know you wouldn’t do anything I shouldn’t like, but don’t you see I can’t let you--it’s just because I--I do like you so much.” She turned her face away from him, her eyes filled suddenly with tears. “Please don’t say any more,” she urged. “I know with you it’s different--please go away.”
But Léon sat down near her. “I will do anything in the world you want,” he said firmly, “except go away. After what you have said you cannot expect me to do that. You must listen to me a little now--are you listening, Rose?”
She nodded her head.
“I am going to say something that will give you pain,” Léon began slowly. “I had not meant to say it, I had meant, if I were fortunate enough, to give you pleasure, but when you say you like me you make me feel that I must not be a coward. Rose--I am a bad man.”
She turned startled, unbelieving eyes upon him. What he said was painful to her, but she had been expecting a different kind of pain.
“Yes,” he said gravely. “It is true. I am not in the least worth your regard. I do not think I shall make a good husband even for you. I say this to you because I am going to add the little thing I had hoped might give you pleasure. Je vous aime, Mademoiselle.” The words had a sharper significance in his own tongue. After he had said them he looked for the first time away from her, towards the almond blossom tree. “You are as fine, as beautiful as that tree,” he murmured, “and oh, my dear, you know as little--as these frail pink flowers--about a man like me. How can I ask you to trust me?”
Fear crept into her eyes. “Léon,” she whispered, “what you said just now was true, wasn’t it?”
“That I am bad?” he asked bitterly. “Yes--it is true--it would be a poor joke, such an assertion, just now, though perhaps it is a poorer truth. It is also true that I would have kept it from you--if you had not greatly moved me.”
“No--I didn’t mean that,” she said gently. “I meant the other thing you said.”
He turned quickly. “That I love you?” he asked.
Rose nodded. “Because,” she whispered, “I--I would take the risk--if you loved me.”
He took her hand and kissed it, and then with a fierce gentleness that seemed impatient of its own restraint, he drew her into his arms and pressed his lips to hers. “You child! You child!” he murmured. “God punish me--if I ever fail you--” But even with his lips against her lips--he envisaged his own failure.
She drew away from him. “Léon,” she said, “I want you to let me go home alone--”
He looked at her in surprise--a moment before she had seemed so helpless, so incapable of asserting her surrendered will, and now, facing him with her steady eyes, she seemed an independent, self-reliant woman. For an instant he wondered if he thoroughly understood her, but he put this misgiving away from him.
“You must do whatever you wish, of course,” he said gently. “But it is--not that you are unhappy or that you are afraid?”
She turned towards him fiercely. “Yes,” she said, “I am afraid. How can any one be as happy as I am and not be afraid?”
He drew a long breath, he had forgotten that this was her first love.
They walked together to the gates in silence.
Across the road the mortuary chapel opened its big iron doors to let a common Roman funeral pass out. Rose shuddered, and turned wide eyes of terror on Léon. “Oh!” she said, “How can God let anybody die!”
He put her into a carriage, soothing her as best he could, but his own hands trembled. He had not realized how serious this affair was going to be.
It was as serious as death.
The Hotel le Roy became a place for consultations. Everybody interviewed everybody else. The hall, the stuffy red salon, the tiny, damp garden, even the lift became indispensable for hurried conversations, but of course none of them had the least result. Léon, from the moment of his engagement, had taken rooms at another hotel--this was at once more convenable and also much more convenient. His French relatives were furious. He let them consume their fury among themselves, and told them when he had to see them, that their interest in his affairs was charming.
The Pinsents were all trying to be large-minded, uninsular and modern, but they didn’t like it.
Mr. Pinsent made a false start. He told Mrs. Pinsent that the engagement was out of the question. Mrs. Pinsent suggested his seeing Rose for himself and talking it all out. Mr. Pinsent refused hastily, clinging to the one plank of masculine security. “Aren’t you the child’s mother?” he demanded. Mrs. Pinsent made no attempt to deny this salient fact. She merely said, “I’m afraid Rose will say she wants to see you about it.” Mr. Pinsent knew what that meant. If he saw Rose he was lost. But as a matter of fact, he was lost already, without seeing Rose. Mrs. Pinsent had lost him.
After Mr. Pinsent had finished saying that the engagement was all nonsense and that he wouldn’t hear of it for a moment, she said he was perfectly right, but it wasn’t as if Léon was an Italian, was it? Paris was really not at all far from London when you came to think of it, and Léon was most obliging, and dressed quite like an Englishman, “and after all,” she finished, “we haven’t anything against him, have we? He told me himself he wasn’t a good Roman Catholic.”
In the end Mr. Pinsent had to see Rose, and after this he agreed to a further interview with Léon.
The interview was not, from Léon’s point of view, at all what it should have been.
Mr. Pinsent had no sense of form. He hardly listened to Léon’s statement of his affairs, and he made no statement at all of his own intentions. He walked up and down the rather cold, deserted salon talking about Rose having had pneumonia when she was twelve, and how sensitive she was, and how much he would miss her. She was quite the best bridge player of the three girls, and her golf was coming on splendidly.
He said he thought Paris hardly the kind of place for a real home life. He hadn’t seen any there, some years ago, when he and Mrs. Pinsent stayed in the Rue de Rivoli. He added that he couldn’t really feel as if Rose would like continually hearing French spoken all round her. It was quite different from being abroad for a time and coming home again afterwards. Mr. Pinsent laid his hand on Léon’s shoulder and sentimentalized the situation in a way that shocked Léon’s whole nature.
Emotion should take place (enough of it, for a mere betrothal) between Léon and Rose; it shouldn’t take place between Rose’s father and Léon, and as for talking about the feeling of a man for a good woman, nothing could have been more out of place. You simply, of course, didn’t talk of it. Mr. Pinsent, however, did.
“Of course we must go into everything very carefully later on,” Mr. Pinsent finished, rubbing the back of his head. “Rose seems to have set her heart on you--we must all hope you can make her happy.”
Then Mr. Pinsent shook hands with Léon and seemed to think there was nothing more to be said.
They never did go into anything later on. In the first place, Madame de Brenteuil refused point blank to meet Mrs. Pinsent. “If,” she said to Léon, “your mother sanctions your engagement, we have decided to permit ourselves to speak to the girl. Her family we will never accept. More you must not demand of us.”
Madame Legier wrote two letters--one to Léon in which she said if he was sure of getting £500 a year, and the girl was healthy--and agreed to bring up the children as Catholics--she supposed it was better to close with it, though Heaven knew how they would fit things in, the English temperament being as stubborn as wood, and his father most unaccommodating when he was there; and another letter to Rose in which she welcomed her into the family and said what confidence she had in Léon’s choice, and how she and her husband looked forward to the brightening of their future lives by the sight of their children’s happiness.
Monsieur Legier wrote a third letter which Mrs. Pinsent translated to her husband. He said something about a lawyer in it, but Mr. Pinsent said nothing would induce him to see a French lawyer, English ones were bad enough.
Rose didn’t give anybody time to do much more. She announced that she wanted to be married at once and spend her honeymoon at Capri.
She could buy what she needed in Rome and finish getting her trousseau together in Paris.
She had set her heart on going to Capri for her honeymoon and there wasn’t any use anybody saying anything.
She didn’t even pay much attention to Léon, who ventured on one occasion to wonder if Capri was very gay?
“We sha’n’t want to be gay,” Rose said a little soberly. “We shall just be perfectly happy.”
Léon said no more. Of course he expected to be happy, but he had never in his life been happy when he wasn’t a little gay.
Rose saw very little of Léon during their brief engagement. They were both immersed in preparations for the wedding, but the little she saw was like the vision of a Fairy Prince.
He was gallant, delicate and intent. Nothing about Rose escaped him. He knew with a marvelous tact from moment to moment what would please her best.
It was (but of course Rose didn’t know this) the correct attitude for a Frenchman engaged to be married.
As the marriage approached, Mrs. Pinsent had moments of secret doubt. She knew it was very silly of her, but Rose was her youngest child, and marriage by two consuls and a Cardinal wasn’t at all like being married properly in your own church at home.
She went so far one evening as to go into Rose’s bedroom under the pretext of borrowing her hairbrush, just to see if her child was quite happy. Mrs. Pinsent’s hair was long and thick like Rose’s, it had been the same color when she was Rose’s age. She sat in an armchair by the bed and thought that Rose, whose hair was done in two long plaits, looked terribly like she used to look when she was ten years old.
“My dear,” she said, “I like Léon so much.” Rose smiled and blushed and snuggled further into the rather hard second pillow reluctantly conceded to her by the Hotel le Roy.
“Yes, Mamma, I know,” she said, “and he loves you--isn’t it nice?”
Mrs. Pinsent reflected. “All the same,” she said, “men are very strange. I mean even our own men. You’d think you could tell what they’re like before you are married to them, but you can’t--you don’t even know for quite a long time afterwards.”
Rose looked unconcerned. “It’s so funny,” she said, “but I feel as if I knew Léon better than if he was an Englishman. You see, he tells me more. I can’t quite put it to you, so that you can understand, but I think it’s his being so much more expressive.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pinsent. “Only that isn’t what I mean, you know. I wasn’t thinking of what they said, any of them. I don’t think you can go by that; when they’re in love, they’ll say anything.”
Rose hesitated. “But, Mamma,” she said, “don’t men--don’t they ever stay in love?”
Mrs. Pinsent resorted hastily to the hairbrush. Almost all married women dislike this question.
“Of course, in a sense,” she admitted. “But when they get used to you they aren’t always very easy to hold.”
Rose sat up very straight and slim. “How do you mean--hold?” she asked quickly. Mrs. Pinsent brushed her hair well over her face. She hoped Rose wasn’t thinking about her father. It was an unnecessary fear, Rose wasn’t thinking about any one but Léon.
“Well,” Mrs. Pinsent explained, “I think there comes a time in almost all happy marriages when a man has almost too much of what he wants. He gets, if one isn’t very careful, and perhaps even if one is--a little--a little restive and bored. You see, men never have as much to amuse themselves with as women have--and that makes them take more interest in what they do like even if it isn’t good for them--and other women (whom they wouldn’t really care for a bit--if they saw enough of them) may make an appeal to them just because they’re not their wives. Of course, it mayn’t be at all like this with Léon, dear, only you’re going so far away from us--and he’s a Frenchman, and perhaps they don’t think of marriage quite as we do. I have never read Zola, of course, but I believe there is rather a difference in the point of view.” Mrs. Pinsent faltered--she felt through the cascade of her hair--Rose’s inflexible eyes.
“What would you do, Mamma,” Rose asked quietly, “if anything--happened like that?”
Mrs. Pinsent drew a long breath. For a moment she was almost sorry that Bernard Shaw hadn’t had a sharper effect upon her daughter’s imagination. Mrs. Pinsent wasn’t anxious to explain what she would do. She only wanted to be vague, and at the same time helpful; her own case had been quite different, there had been the children, and, besides, Mr. Pinsent wasn’t French.
“We rather thought,” she said, “of staying on for some time in Rome, and then going to Paris for the first part of the summer. We should be quite near you then--and Agatha could go back to England for her tennis.”
“I couldn’t ever leave Léon,” Rose said strangely, “whatever happened.”
“No, dear, of course not,” said Mrs. Pinsent soothingly, then she started quite afresh and began plaiting her hair.
“Your father wanted me to tell you,” she said, “that he’s going to have your allowance settled upon you--and upon your children--that’s £500 a year, and later on you’ll have even more, of course, like your sisters, but the money is in an English bank, and it is quite your own, but you’re to have trustees as well, your father has seen to all that. Léon was so nice about it. I knew he would be. He’s been so generous and charming and most thoughtful.” Mrs. Pinsent got up and bent over her daughter. “You are happy, Rose?” she whispered. “You do feel safe?”
Rose lifted her undeterred, terribly triumphant eyes to her mother’s. “I feel as safe,” she said, “as if an angel loved me.”
Everything had been done, the last trunk was packed, the last joke, not a very good one, accomplished by Agatha. The two elder sisters, tired out and unequal to their natural play of spirits, had gone to bed.
Rose flew downstairs to the telephone. The Swiss manageress, a sharp-tongued, good-hearted woman, rose wearily and shouted through the receiver. After a violent exchange of reproaches with an irate porter at the other end, she accomplished the feat of getting hold of Léon, and put the receiver into the girl’s hand. “He is there, Mademoiselle,” she said with a curious glance at the girl’s flushed face.
“Oh, thank you,” Rose murmured. “Léon, Léon, are you there?”
“But it is Rose?” His voice answered a little as if he was surprised that it was Rose.
“Yes,” she said quickly, “I want to see you. Can you come at once?”
“Something has happened?” he asked anxiously. “Something has gone wrong?”
Rose reassured him. “Oh, no--nothing, but I felt suddenly as if I must see you.”
There was a moment’s pause, a buzzing sound came across the wires, and then Rose heard a strange voice--it sounded like a woman’s saying very slowly, “Mais--c’est la dernière nuit?” And then Léon’s again, “I am very busy to-night, Rose--this that you want to see me about, is it important?”
She was surprised at his hesitation, and surprised at her own insistence. It seemed to her suddenly very important that she should insist. “Please, please come,” she said urgently. There was another pause, then Léon said again, “Is it a command?”
A moment earlier she would not have said that it was a command, but her wish to see him had been mysteriously sharpened into a strange imperative instinct.
“Isn’t my wish a command?” she asked, trying to laugh. But Léon did not echo her laughter. “Very well, then,” he said, “in ten minutes.”
The big red salon was empty. For the first time Rose noticed the yellow lamp, the blue velvet tablecloth, the enormous imperishable roses in bulging angular vases under the great gilt mirror.
She had been so happy all these weeks she hadn’t really seen what anything was like, and she had hardly ever been alone for ten minutes. Now she was alone. She remembered with a little smile that Léon had once said of the salon that as an interior it was not seductive.
The Pinsents did not use irony, but Rose thought she rather liked it. In ten minutes precisely Léon was with her. Fortunately Madame de Brenteuil had gone to bed.
Léon entered quickly, looking about him as if he had expected one or more of the Pinsent family to be in attendance. Only Rose, feeling suddenly rather small and very far away, stood under an imitation palm close by the mantelpiece.
Léon took her hands, kissed them, pressing them, and letting them go in one quick movement.
“I am here,” he said, drawing a seat up close to her. “Well--what is this thing that has suddenly become necessary for us to talk about?”
Rose looked at him questioningly. Really she hardly knew what it was that she wanted to see him for, perhaps it was after all only to see him! To count over her riches, to feel the wonderful golden coins slip through her eager fingers. Only now as she met his eyes it seemed to her that he shut her out. He had a strange hard look, and though he smiled, his smile itself had a new quality, a quality which seemed to put her a little to one side. “I don’t quite know, Léon,” she murmured. “I did want to see you--but I think I must have had some reason.”
Léon glanced through the glass door of the salon at the back of the Manageress’ head. “Let us hope so,” he said cheerfully, “for it is ten o’clock and I see no one here but Madame at the Bureau.”
“Father was here--but I sent him away,” Rose explained conscientiously.
Léon gave an odd little laugh. “To-night,” he said, “you are very imperative. But you see we are all your slaves. He went--I came--well--what do you wish of us?”
“Léon,” she whispered, frightened by the coldness of his voice, “weren’t you glad to come?”
He gave himself a tiny shake as if he were trying to pull himself into a fresh frame of mind.
“But of course,” he said, “you are adorable.” To a critical ear his tone lacked conviction, but Rose’s ear was not critical; that is to say, not yet. She gave a little sigh of relief.
“I think I know what it was I meant to say,” she stated, “Mamma has been talking to me about marriage.”
“Ah--!” said Léon quickly.
“Something she said,” Rose continued, “made me wonder. You see, I had always supposed when you were in love--that was enough. But what she said made me wonder if perhaps it didn’t matter a good deal how?”
Léon looked a trifle puzzled, but he was also amused, his hardness was beginning to melt under the spell of her wistful loveliness; something--some other spell, perhaps, receded from him.
“Bien sur,” he murmured, looking into her eyes. “It matters how one loves.”
“And I couldn’t help thinking,” Rose went on with gathering confidence, “that you knew rather more about it than I do.”
Léon’s eyes flickered under the yellow lamps. It was almost as if they were laughing at her.
“Yes,” he said caressingly, “yes--that is always possible.”
“You see,” Rose explained, “all along I have felt as if you knew me, and what I wanted, and how you could please me, so astonishingly well.”
Léon smiled. He did not tell her that compared to other women--many other women--she was easy to please.
“Of course,” Rose went on, “in a way I understand you. I told Mamma that! Better than if you were English, because we’ve talked so much, you see--but I’m not sure--not quite sure--that I know all the things you don’t like.
“What I wanted to ask you to-night was--will you always tell me what you want and not mind if I’m stupid and don’t know things until you tell me? You need never tell me more than once--I shall always remember.”
She had touched him now, touched him so much that he sprang to his feet and walked hastily to the window. She could not see his face. She waited patiently and a little anxiously for him to come back to her. He said, when he came back, and stood behind her chair:
“You are adorable,” but he said it quite differently, he said it as if he really found her adorable. “It is true,” he said at last, very gently and tenderly. “There are things that we must teach each other, and to-night I will teach you one of them. You should not have sent for me here.”
“Ah, but why, Léon?” she cried. “It was just the last night”--her voice faltered--some queer little trick of the brain forced into her memory the voice she had heard on the telephone. That woman, too, had said to somebody that it was the last night.
“In the first place,” he said, still gently, but a little gravely, “you should not have seen me at all--on the evening before our marriage, it is the reason itself! You should have spent it with your mother and sisters. It surprised me--it surprised me very much--your sending for me.”
She flushed crimson. “Do not think I blame you,” he said quickly. “But I am a Frenchman, and you must learn a little how we think.” Rose bowed her head. “And in the second place,” he said, “my very dear child--you must not constrain me to come to you--it is my delight--my joy to be with you--be very careful that you never make it my duty! I am your lover--to-morrow I shall be your husband. So--so you will remember, never try to constrain me to be with you--let me come, let me go, do not try to hold me, and do not seek to know where I have been.”
“But,” she cried eagerly, “Léon--I didn’t mean to do anything like that! I--I was frightened. I wanted you! Just to see you! I never will again--I mean--I don’t think--do you?--I shall ever be frightened again. It wasn’t that I meant to--oh, what a horrible word--constrain you--only I thought you would be alone and wanting me, too!”
“Mon Dieu!” he cried, with sudden exasperation. “Of course I want you!”
She drew back a little from the savage light in his eyes--he had caught her arm suddenly and roughly--but in an instant he had himself in hand. “Now I am going,” he said. “You are not to be frightened any more. You are mine, my sweetheart, my wife, my darling! How I love the pretty English words!--and you will love a little your funny French husband, will you not?--and forgive him, if you do not always understand him.”
He took her very gently in his arms, and kissed her troubled eyes and put his lips lingeringly and tenderly to hers. There were tears on her eyelashes, but she smiled bravely up at him. “I will never forget what you have said,” she murmured, “and I will love you always.”
Then he went away. After he had gone, it occurred to Rose that she was to belong to him, but if they were to be happy he must not belong to her. She did not put it quite as sharply as this, but she reminded herself that the great thing was for Léon never to feel bound.
Madame came in from the bureau to put out the lights. “You will not need them any more, Mademoiselle,” she asked, “now that Monsieur has gone?”
“No,” said Rose. “Thank you very much. Madame, are you French?”
“No, Mademoiselle,” the Manageress replied. “I am a Swiss from Basle.”
“But you know French people?” Rose insisted.
Madame shrugged her shoulders. “I know most people,” she observed. “Even Arabs, I once kept a hotel in Egypt; but why do you ask, Mademoiselle?”
“I wondered,” Rose said, “if you thought them--the French, I mean--very difficult to please?”
“No people are easy to please,” Madame replied, putting out the lights with a sharp twist, as if she disliked them. “And all are unpleasant when they are not pleased. I do not say the French are more unpleasant than the others. They know what they are about and they don’t ask for the moon and expect to get it for two sous, but what they ask for--that they do expect to get no matter what it costs others that they should have it. In general, I find the French have very little heart. I have no complaint to make against them. They are orderly, they do not waste time, they have the sense of how to behave. But I find it is better to expect nothing from them, and to remain independent. Is there anything further you require, Mademoiselle?”
Rose thanked her again and turned thoughtfully away. Madame, with the last switch in her hand, looked curiously after her. “The English,” she said to herself, “are not practical. Nevertheless, Madame de Brenteuil is quite wrong about them. They mean no harm. The whole family Pinsent walks about with its eyes shut, as innocent as the newly baptized. They are a race of mystics without manners. It is what comes of a meat breakfast so early in the morning. The senses become clogged. I must not forget to remind Alfonso that the father Pinsent wants bacon with his eggs.”