Pimpernel and Rosemary

by Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy

Rosemary shook her head.

"No!" she murmured.

Jasper gave a harsh laugh. "Then," he said, "I can only repeat what I said just now. Go and tell Elza everything, then see if her arguments will be different from mine!"

"Jasper!" Rosemary exclaimed, flushed with bitterness and resentment.

He paused in his restless walk, looked at her for a moment or two, and then resumed his seat beside her. For an instant it seemed as if he wanted to take her hand, or put his arms round her, but whether she divined this wish or no, certain it is that she made a slight movement, a drawing back away from him. A curious flash, like a veritable volcano of hidden fires, shot through the man's deep, dark eyes, and, as if to control his own movements, he clasped his hands tightly together between his knees. Strangely enough, when he next spoke his voice was full of tenderness and almost of humility.

"I am sorry, dear," he said gently, "if I hurt you. God knows that I would rather be broken to pieces on a rack than to do that. But things have come to a pass," he went on more harshly, "where my duty—and my right—as your natural friend and protector command me to get you out of this impasse before all this damnable business has affected your health, or, God help us! clouded your brain."

"The impasse, as you very justly call it, Jasper," she riposted, "will not cloud my brain, so long as you do not seek to make right seem wrong and wrong right."

Then suddenly he dropped on one knee close beside her; before she could prevent him his two hands had closed upon hers, and he looked up into her face with a glance full of love and entreaty, whilst every tone of harshness went out of his voice.

"But child, child," he urged, "don't you see, can't you understand, that it is you who make right seem wrong? What good are you doing, what good will you do, by letting those two wretched young idiots suffer the extreme penalty for their folly? Will you ever afterwards know one moment's peace? Won't you for ever be haunted by the ghosts of those whom you could so easily have saved? Won't your ears ring for ever with the whole-hearted curses of these wretched people, who will look upon you as the murderer of their son? And, honestly, my dear, your articles in the Times won't do more than flatter the vanity of Naniescu. Those people in England and America who have really studied the question won't think any the better of Roumanian rule or misrule in Transylvania because a lady journalist—eminent, I grant you—chooses to tell them that everything is for the best in the best possible occupied world. Think of all those articles in the Times on the subject of the French occupation in the Ruhr and their misrule in the Palatinate—did it prevent the very readers of that same paper from joining the League of the Friends of France and proclaiming at the top of their voices their belief in the unselfish aims of M. Poincaré? You attach too much importance to the Press, my dearest. Roumania and Transylvania are very, very far away from Clapham and Ealing. People don't trouble their heads much what goes on there. A few do, but they are the ones who will stick to their opinions whatever you may say."

Unable to free them, Rosemary had yielded her hands passively to Jasper's clasp. She lay back with her head resting upon the cushions, her eyes obstinately evading his glance and fixed upon the ceiling, as if vainly seeking up there for some hidden writing that in a few terse words would tell her what to do. Jasper thus holding her captive by her hands made her feel like an imprisoned soul bruising itself against the bars of an unseen cage. She felt fettered, compelled, unable to see, to visualise that rigid code of honour which had ruled her actions until now. Jasper had talked at great length; she had never heard him talk so long and so earnestly and with such unanswerable logic. And Rosemary, who up to this hour had seen her line of action before her, crystal-clear, was suddenly assailed with doubts, more torturing than any mental agony which she had suffered before. Doubt—awful, hideous, torturing doubt. How could she fight that sinister monster "compromise" if the one man whom she could trust tilted on its side? She had never dreamed of such a possibility. And now, suddenly, Jasper had made such a thing possible—worse, imperative!