CHAPTER V
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.”