CHAPTER XII
Rose was finishing a letter to Agatha on the balcony. She found it difficult to write to her sisters, they seemed so very far away.
She was afraid, too, that they might find her letters dull. You couldn’t go on describing the blue grotto; besides, neither Agatha nor Edith cared for descriptions of scenery, they always skipped them in books; and as far as Rose could tell nobody played any particular game in Capri. Young men shot birds on Sunday afternoons when they could, but they weren’t even the proper birds to shoot, so perhaps it was better not to mention them.
When Rose wrote to her people she always said “we” even when she was referring to things that she did by herself.
It wasn’t very like a Pinsent to give way to this illicit expansion of fact, but Rose comforted herself by thinking that after all, editors said “we” when there was only one of them writing, and most of the married people she knew expressed themselves in the plural, though that perhaps was because they really did the things together. Still, she went on writing “we” because she didn’t want her people to think anything funny about Léon. She had just got as far as “We have such jolly little dinners in the garden,” when she heard Léon’s whistle coming up the stairs. He stood looking at her a little curiously.
“You are writing,” he asked her, “to your people?”
“To Agatha,” she said. “Have you any message?”
Léon sometimes sent very amusing messages to Agatha. For a moment Léon did not reply, then he said, “And what do you say to them--of me--your people?”
Rose blushed, just the same wonderful pink tulip blush Léon had from the first particularly admired, but it was ill-timed, it looked guilty. It shot through his uneasy mind that she had been complaining of him to the Pinsents. In his irritable, resentful state it gave him a sudden sense of justification. Hadn’t he done already wonders for Rose? He had not made open love to Elise (until just now, of course), he had borne for over a month the ennui of Capri. He hadn’t so much as been to a café without his wife, and now he had almost decided not to leave her!
“Tell them,” he said bitterly, “that you are perfect, and that I am a monster of depravity. Almost all wives say that to their relatives sooner or later. You, it appears, have taken up the tone in good time!”
“Léon!” she cried, aghast. And then, because she loved him so, because she had shielded him in the defiance of truth, because she had never had a suspicion of his faithlessness, she chose this moment to say the only harsh thing she had ever said to him. “I think,” she said, turning away her eyes, “that you are guilty of very bad taste.”
It was, of course, the one fatal reproach to make to a Frenchman. If she had said he was guilty of anything else he would have forgiven her.
Léon rushed into their room, his cheeks on fire as if she had struck him. It was clear she no longer loved him! Coldly, cruelly, with her horrible English justice, so out of place in a woman, she had thrown this stone at his heart! There could be but one issue now. He must go to Naples. She complained of him to her parents and she had accused him of bad taste! He packed a small bag feverishly. The door between them was shut.
Rose hesitated. Should she open it and tell him she was sorry?
What would Agatha or Edith do, if they were there? Probably they would have burst open the door with shouts of glee, and inserted a cake of soap down Léon’s back, but this happy method of conciliation seemed closed to Rose. She had never had their robuster gift of horseplay. She got up hesitatingly and walked slowly away, out into the garden and beyond the gates to post her letter. Perhaps when she came back for dinner she might have thought of something nice to say, something that would show Léon she was sorry and not aggravate him.
It was a lovely evening. She wandered on, seeing at every fresh turn of the road a yet more glorious view.
The great bay spread before her like an endless liquid flame. The color seemed to throb upon its burnished shield.
Naples lay beyond it, a long pearly circle in the evening light, pale cream and coral pink and soft, dull gold. Above Vesuvius the white plume of smoke drove straight as a lifted feather up into the sky.
She went on till she reached the Madonna of the Rocks, then she sat under the tall raised figure with its lamp.
At the turn of the road below her a little carriage was standing; in it was the figure of a woman in white. The figure reminded her of Madame Gérard, only it could not be Madame Gérard, of course, because Madame had written to Rose that she was not well and could not leave her room.
As Rose sat there her eyes filled with tears. They were not for herself, though her own heart was sore; they were for the poor woman whose husband had so cruelly left her all alone on her honeymoon. And when Rose thought how happy she was herself, and how soon she would tell Léon, with her cheek against his cheek, that she was sorry she had been horrid, her heart ached for that other bride who had no lover to appease; and who must be looking at all this great sparkling sea and wonderful bright earth with such sad, different eyes! And so Rose sat there and cried for Madame Gérard--and Madame Gérard, two hundred yards away, waited for Rose’s husband.
He came at last, hurriedly, quietly, with hanging head, like a thief. He was ashamed, ashamed of his anger against Rose, of his incredible folly, of his silly, intemperate desires. He passed close by the rock on which Rose sat. Her heart moved suddenly against her side; it betrayed her; stubbornly it beat as if it knew itself in danger, and yet, Rose said to herself, there was no danger. It was only Léon hurrying by, looking as if he were ashamed.
She saw him get into the little carriage, and then turn and look back. She could not see his face, but it seemed to her as if he were reluctant to be driven away. Of course he would be back for dinner.
Perhaps, after all, that was Madame Gérard, and Léon was driving her down to the eight o’clock boat? Probably she was going to Naples to join her husband, and Léon had offered to see her off. He would be very late for dinner. If she hadn’t been cross he would have told her what he meant to do. The little Capri ponies plunged forward and the carriage disappeared in a cloud of dust. A long while after she saw the little steamer pushing its way across the crystal sea and leaving behind it a long purple trail. She watched it till it lost itself beyond Castellamare. Léon would soon be back now. She walked slowly towards the hotel and when she got there she was conscious of something strange about it. The Padrone met her with a bunch of flowers, and the stout Padrona bustled out from the office to ask Rose if there wasn’t anything extra she would like--would she not dine now in the garden?
“Oh, no, not now,” Rose said quickly. “I will wait for my husband.” A shadow passed over the Padrona’s face. She hesitated and then said with urgent kindness, “The Signora has only to ask for anything she wants.” The waiter, too, looked at Rose with strange, sympathetic eyes. He suggested her feeding the pigeons, and hurried to offer her new bread off the table of some traveling Germans.
“These people,” he said, “Tedeschi will not know the difference. Take it, Signora mia, for your birds.”
The pigeons had already gone to roost.
Peppina, the chambermaid, watched Rose from the balcony. She should have been at her supper, but she stood for some time gazing down into the garden at the figure of the young wife. Suddenly she also bethought herself of something and hurried down into the garden carrying a black kitten in her apron which she deposited on Rose’s lap. “Behold,” she said, “the little one of fortune. A black cat brings luck. Talk to it, Signora, perhaps it will stay with you.” But the black kitten jumped off Rose’s lap. It wanted to play with its own shadow in the grass, and to stalk birds. It was not too young for that.
The sky changed slowly from rose color to a clear, pale blue. One by one the stars came out, but they made no place in the sky, till the evening waned and night came, velvety and black, to Capri, embracing it like a dropped mantle, and then, through the curtain of the mysterious dark, the stars grew enormous and shone down upon the scented lemon gardens and over the vague wide sea.
Outside the gate a mandolin struck up a hungry, empty little tune.
Rose shivered and moved back into the house. She could not bear the beauty of the garden any more alone.
The Padrona met her with a letter in her hand. She had had it for two hours, but she could not make up her mind to give it to Rose. “How,” she asked her husband, “am I to slay happiness?--I am not a butcher.”
“Signora,” she said nervously, “here is a little letter--it is doubtless from the Signore. He is perhaps detained--hospitable friends have kept him--” Rose held out her hand for the letter. The Pinsents never made fusses. They didn’t believe in bad things happening, and when they happened they tried to look as if they weren’t bad.
This was the way Rose looked now. She smiled pleasantly at the Padrona, and moved slowly away towards her room with the letter. She would not hurry.
The Padrona gazed compassionately after her. “She is walking over a precipice,” said the Padrona to herself, “as if it were a path in our garden, Poverina!”
It was a very short letter.
“My dear,” Léon wrote in French, “I find I must go to Naples. It will not be for long I leave you, and I have told them all to look after you until my return. Forgive me. Léon.”
After all he could not lie to Rose.
She read his letter three times. The first two times she translated his letter into English, and wondered why Léon had gone to Naples. The third time she read it without translating it, and then she knew everything. She knew everything in all the world.
But she could not quite believe it. The arrogance in her rose up and fought against the truth.
Rose had very little arrogance, but all women who have been loved must have some. Surely he who was so much her lover could not have left her so soon?
She remembered that when she had said to her mother, “But I could never leave Léon,” Mrs. Pinsent had made no direct response. Her mother had realized that that wasn’t the only question. How had she realized this? Had her father ever--? Rose buried her face in her hands and wept bitterly. “Oh, poor mother!” she murmured, “poor mother!” She could not see herself as wholly poor yet.
And then she remembered Léon’s face as he passed her, his sad, ashamed face, and she knew now why he had left her; but that he did not want to leave her.
She sat up very straight and stopped crying when she realized this.
She thought it very strange, for she knew quite well that Madame Gérard didn’t love Léon, either. She loved her own husband, Rose had seen this; she knew it as if it were in the multiplication table; but she couldn’t think of Madame Gérard now, she wasn’t her business. Léon was her business. She must understand, why he had done this thing. It wasn’t any use being silly and just crying, then it might happen again, and it should never happen again; she wasn’t going to have Léon looking ashamed twice.
From the first what wrung her heart was that Léon would feel it so! He had meant to be such a help, he nearly had been, and if he hadn’t been wasn’t it because Rose had failed him? She hadn’t meant to fail him of course, she had meant just the opposite; but that was before she knew all about everything, and before you know how to mean, meaning isn’t going to be much of a help.
She had thought Léon was strong. He wasn’t strong, but in the rush of her passionate reasoning she carried this feather-weight of disadvantage into the fathomless sea of her love and left it safely there. No, he wasn’t strong--but he was Léon--he was hers.
It was she who should have realized his weakness. She remembered now that once or twice lately he had turned back from his excursions with Madame to suggest that Rose should join them, but she had refused in her foolish pride because she had wanted to prove to him how magnanimous she was. She shouldn’t have done that at all, she shouldn’t have had any pride--and it didn’t matter in the least whether she was magnanimous or not! She should have held him to her by whatever could have kept him there. Tears, if tears were necessary; pity, duty, pleading--anything and everything that would have helped him.
She had been thinking of what he would think of her--not of what he needed in her! She saw now it only mattered what he thought of her in so far as it helped her to save him. Her magnanimity hadn’t saved him. Something less beautiful but more practical might have saved him, her just being, for instance, a little more there.
But he hadn’t lied to her, she came back to that as if it was something on which her heart might rest. Ah! if he had done that she would have known that he no longer loved her!
But he had given her no reason--no excuse; he had flung his sin before her because he was ashamed, because he wanted his soul to be naked in her sight--because he knew that she would never fail him.
In the dark she caught sight of the hovering Peppina. “Signora,” Peppina pleaded, “will you not dine?”
Rose stood up. “Yes,” she said in a voice that sounded strange. “Yes, please, I will dine.”
The Pinsents always dined.
“Tell the Padrona,” Rose said steadily, “that the Signore has had to go to Naples on business. He will not return to-night.”
Peppina still hovered. “Si Signora,” she said, “and the black cat, the one I brought to the Signora earlier in the evening, he has found for himself the room of the Signora. Behold, he lies there curled-up on her bed. He is there now--a miracle! The Signora remembers that I told her ‘a black cat means good fortune’?”
Rose hurried into the room, and found him. He was not quite so good as her fox terrier at home, but he was a comfort. She buried her cheek against the round black ball of the fortunate kitten, and wept with easier tears.
Then she went down and had her dinner in the garden.