CHAPTER II
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.