CHAPTER IV
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.