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.