The Light Heart (17 page)

She was not crying. She rocked her head slowly, listlessly, on her crossed wrists without looking up, and her voice was flat and hopeless.

“It’s no use, Charles. I can’t stand up to them. I did try. But it’s cheaper to go on.”

“Cheaper! At the price of your whole life?”

“You don’t know what it’s like with Mamma,” she said. “She gets an idea in her head and she never lets go. Besides, it’s Evelyn’s turn, next year. And he’s better than Lord Meriton—or Willie McBride. I can’t go through all that again. I might as well go on.”

Charles went down on one knee beside the chair and laid his arms around the small, quivering figure, but she clung desperately to the back of the chair and would not yield.

“My dear, let me try,” he said. “Let me talk to your mother—”

“No—please—you’ll only make it worse—”

“Then come away with me,” said Charles quietly. “Now. This minute. And hang all the consequences. I’ll keep you safe.”

Slowly she raised her head to look at him, and he saw her white face as though she had been stunned, as though any minute now she might begin to come to.

There was a discreet tap on the door. When they did not answer at once it was repeated, more insistently. Rosalind’s dazed blue eyes went on past Charles’s face to rest on the panels of the door behind him.

“Yes?” she said.

A girl’s voice spoke through the door.

“I’m sorry, Miss Norton-Leigh—but I was to
say the fitter has been waiting, and she has another appointment at four-thirty.”

“I’m ready,” said Rosalind. “Just one minute.” Her wide, unseeing look came back to Charles where he still knelt beside the chair. “You’ll have to go,” she said tonelessly.

“Rosalind—”

“Thank you for trying to help. But it isn’t any use. You’ll have to go now.”

He rose, and picked up his hat and gloves and turned to speak again. Her forehead was resting on her crossed wrists on the back of the chair, her face was hidden.

“A message to me at the club,” he said, “before it’s too late—”

She made no answer. He looked back through the narrowing crack of the door as he closed it behind him. She had not moved.

P
HOEBE
came in with the fitter and watched Rosalind stand listless and docile while gown after gown was put on her, pinned, snipped, altered, discussed, and removed. When they had finished it was tea time and Eden’s motor was at the curb. They got in and were driven off smoothly towards Regent’s Park.

For more than half the way they sat in silence.
Then Rosalind said, very low, “Charles asked me to go away with him.”

“You mean
elope?
” Phoebe’s eyes were round. “Oh, Rosalind,
do
it! There’s still time!”

Rosalind turned her head to look at her friend, withdrawn and defensive.

“What’s the good of that?” she asked. “There’s be an awful row, and when the dust settled I’d be married anyhow—to a man with no money at all instead of to a man with lots. I don’t see much point in that.”

“Don’t you love Charles?”

“No. I don’t think I do. If I did it might be different, but I never thought of such a thing till this afternoon.”

“But he’s English,” Phoebe said. “You wouldn’t ever have to go away and live on the Continent.”

“He said my children would be German,” said Rosalind, frowning at the chauffeur’s back, for she had not thought much about the children either.

“And if there should be a war—” Phoebe began carefully.

“I should come straight home in that case.”

“But it might not be possible to come—especially if you had children. Your son would be a prince. He would be the heir. You wouldn’t be allowed to bring him with you.”

“Perhaps I shan’t have any children,” Rosalind said slowly. “Sometimes one escapes that.”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know. If they’re going to be German it will seem very strange—and rather uncomfortable, I should think. I shall get them an English nurse, anyway. Conrad had an English nurse when he was little. It’s the fashion in Germany. And French governesses. The boys have German tutors when they’re old enough.”

“Are you going to see Charles again?”

“No. I told him it wasn’t any use. Besides—” She hesi tated. She wasn’t in love with Charles. But compared to the unknown ahead of her he looked very safe, very usual, very comforting and restful. She sighed. “It’s too late now,” she said. “Don’t tell a soul, will you. It wouldn’t be fair to Charles.”

Phoebe promised and the motor stopped in front of
Rosalind’s
house. Phoebe watched till the door opened and then was driven back to Claridge’s for tea.

Rosalind found her mother propped up on the sofa in the drawing-room wearing a skittish lilac tea-gown and holding a lace handkerchief to her face. Opposite her, in his well-cut English clothes, sat Prince Conrad. He stood up as Rosalind appeared in the doorway—she noticed how he moved all in one piece, it was a way Germans had, and stood erect with his feet together, no lounging—and Mamma said, “Oh, there you are at last, my dear. His Highness was kind enough to come and inquire how I had survived at the dentist’s, and I persuaded him to wait for a cup of tea.”

Prince Conrad bent over Rosalind’s hand till his lips touched her glove.

“What I waited for,” he said in his formal, almost
unaccented
English, “was a glimpse of you. I hear you have been trying on dresses. Are you tired? Shall I go?”

But just then tea came in, and Rosalind had to sit down and pour out for all of them, and answer Mamma’s searching questions about the dresses and what was still to be done on each of them. Instead of boring Prince Conrad, the conversation seemed to elicit from him the most intelligent interest. It developed to Rosalind’s surprise that he knew all about the dresses, and had been to Hanover Square himself to see the designs and to choose the furs, which had been shown to him on living models.

In the midst of it Mrs. Norton-Leigh set down her cup rather suddenly and said she really must go and lie down, she did think her face had begun to swell—which it had. Prince Conrad gave her his arm as far as the door and saw her sympathetically into the care of her maid, Gibson. She looked back from the threshold to where Rosalind remained stranded at the tea-table.

“Give His Highness some fresh tea,” she said. “You will have to keep each other company today, I’m not fit for anything.” And she tottered away, supported by Gibson.

As Prince Conrad returned across the room, Rosalind knew a moment’s terror, and then reminded herself that this was no Willie McBride, and thought, Mamma did it on purpose. But she was still far from guessing that Prince Conrad had requested even required, her mother to leave them alone together that day, and had received as a warning an account of the Willie McBride episode. Suppose he wants to kiss me, Rosalind thought—I can’t go on with this—suppose he—

She reached for his cup on the corner of the table and he said, “Please, no—don’t trouble. Come and sit here, you will be more comfortable.”

It was the sofa.

She rose and moved obediently to sit on the end of it, and he placed himself casually in the middle, where his knee brushed her skirt, and took her left hand in both his. He had already put the ring on her finger in her mother’s presence some days before, and he sat looking down at it—an impressive sapphire, which was her birthstone—in a silence she found impossible to break.

“It is time, I think,” he observed in his too perfect English, “that you ceased to be afraid of me.” His piercing, melancholy gaze, lighted by the immovable eyeglass, came up to her face. “Your hand is cold, and it trembles in mine.” He chafed it gently in his fingers. “Will you answer me a question? I would like the truth.”

She nodded speechlessly.

“Are you in love with somebody else?” he asked.

“No. Of course not,” she assured him in some confusion.

“There is no Of course about it,” he remarked placidly. “I come into your life. I am a good match. You are advised to accept me. I do not flatter myself, you see. But that is not to say that you have never had—dreams, shall we call it—of marrying someone quite different.”

“No. There’s nobody. But I don’t—I think it’s only fair to tell you that I’m not in love with you.”

“You have said so before.” He smiled, with tolerance and
affection, his fingers chafing hers. “I do not expect that so soon. But I am relieved to know that I have no rival.”

He raised the hand he held and turned it over, and laid a lingering kiss in its small moist palm. She felt the bold, heavy curve of his lips and started, and found she could not draw her hand away. It was a very slight liberty he took, to put his kiss in her palm, but it was her first experience of the strong
attraction
he had for nearly all women, and she thought, dizzy and surprised, I don’t know—it may not be so bad—

Then he was looking at her again, his arm sliding along the back of the sofa as he leaned towards her.

“You see,” he was saying softly, “I am no ogre to eat you! You need not fear. And tell me another thing. Are those
eyelashes
real,
or do they come off when you wash your face?”

“
Nothing
comes off when I wash my face!” she told him indignantly. “And none of my hair spends the night on the dressing-table, either!”

“I am very glad to hear,” he said, and her cheeks flamed while his deliberate gaze probed the mystery of her waved pompadour and intricate coils. He smiled again, more and more broadly, and then he laughed, disproportionately, and his hand possessed hers more closely against the front of his coat. “I shall remember,” he said, laughing. “When the night comes that I take it down for myself—nothing falls away with the pins, eh?” His other hand came up from the back of the sofa to catch her chin between finger and thumb. “Oho, she has spirit!” he said. “She will talk back to her clumsy prince, English fashion, when he puts his foot in it!”

“Don’t German girls defend themselves from slander?” she demanded, removing her chin with a little jerk from his grasp.

“Ah, let us not talk of German girls, they are nothing to do with us! They are always dull, and say Yes and No, and have thick ankles!”

She tried to smile at him gallantly, tried to meet him halfway, the beginnings of coquetry awakening to his experienced approach.

“But you haven’t seen my ankles,” she remarked, pink-cheeked at her own audacity.

“Yours I can imagine,” he said easily. “You have small bones everywhere, like a doe’s, that I could break in my hands.”

“That’s not a pretty simile,” she objected hastily.

“To say I could break you in my hands? It is true. But you will be quite safe. I am not a bad-tempered man, I am very easy to get along with, you will sec.”

“No doubt you are,” she said, playing up the best she knew how, “so long as you get your way!”

“But you will give me my way,” he said confidently. “It will be your pleasure to do so when you have learned—learned how happy it is in your power to make me. Heretofore, I swear it, there is no woman I cannot do without. I come—I go—it makes no matter to me. But always I say to myself, Conrad, I say, your time will come. Somewhere is the woman you will possess at any cost. Make sure you are free to take her, I tell myself. And so what happens? The years go by, and I am still not married again, and there is still no heir after me. My father is anxious. People make up foolish stories about me, some of them not altogether—savoury. But I do not mind, no. I am still free. I still come and go. Once, twice, I think possibly—but always I am wrong. Always they know too much, or too little, they try too hard, or they are too—unpromising. Then I see little Rosalind, and I know at last I am undone. True, it is not what was most desirable for me in many ways. It is not a title, it is not a fortune, but I have both. It is not experience of the world, to uphold my position. It is not a figure to furnish me with strong heirs. It is not even
sophistication
, to keep me amused. What then is this magic you have for me? Because it is magic, and I am bewitched.”

His hard, unsparing eyes ran over her, from her hair down across her face and body to the hand he held, while she sat mute and unresisting and a remote corner of her brain reminded her hysterically of the rabbit and the snake.

“Perhaps it is your stillness, which nothing reduces to fidgets
—for I have tried,” he was saying. “Or your beauty, which does not come off at night—I believe you. Or your naked fear of what I may do next—ah, yes, I can see!—but that will pass. Or your courage, to make a marriage you do not understand and cannot but dread. Whence comes so much courage, in a thing my two hands can span? Perhaps that is what holds me fast, so that I must see more of this courage, I must try it still further, I must hold it in my arms—I can see your heart beat in your throat, but you sit quite still beside me. You don’t try to escape. You don’t cry quarter. Perhaps it is that that I—But how thoughtless I am, to press you so,” he broke off in apparent chagrin. “Believe me, it was not intentional. You take one quite out of oneself. Always remember, if I hurt you—and no doubt I shall—it was not my intention. Always
remember
I shall be sorry, when sanity returns. It will always return, I promise you. In all but one way. As for that—you are the woman I cannot live without possessing. Try to thwart me in that now, and you will find no sanity anywhere—no mercy. Little love, there is no need to look at me like that! You will find me the tenderest of men, for your happiness is mine. Your lightest wish shall be my law, and it shall be my joy to anticipate even the wish. Do you Like baubles? It will take a little time for me to learn your taste. If I make you presents you do not care for, please do not hesitate to say so—we can send them back and choose others.”

He paused, and his gaze rested on her rigid face, amused, penetrating, but kind. He was somehow much nearer than he had been when he first sat down, and when she tried to draw back she met the corner of the sofa. He put his hand into his breast pocket and took out a small plush case and flipped it open to
reveal a brooch set with diamonds and sapphires which would have taken any woman’s breath away.