"You can put it down to nerves," Jasper said, with the ghost of a smile, "to intuition or foreboding, or merely to jealousy and my wretched character, to anything you please, my dear one. But promise me! Promise me that everything in connexion with this miserable affair will remain just between you and me. Let the others talk, guess, plan. Promise me that you will never speak of it with Peter. Promise me, or I will throw up the sponge, remain here to look after you, and let Naniescu do his worst with the lot of them."
Thus, alternately demanding, entreating, threatening, he extracted the promise from her, even though her heart cried out against what she felt was treachery to Peter. Jasper's insistence filled her with a vague sense of foreboding not unmixed with fear; and yet, the very next moment, as soon as he had her promise, he became tender, soft, loving, as if trying to make her forget his solemn earnestness of a while ago. He took her in his arms and gazed into her eyes with an intensity of longing which made her own heart ache with self-reproach.
"If God there be," he whispered softly, as if to himself, "it was cruel of Him to make you so beautiful—and so desirable."
Again his mood had changed. Tenderness had turned into passion, fierce, almost primeval, and he held her now more like a man defending the greatest treasure he possessed on God's earth than like a husband taking affectionate leave of his wife.
"If I should lose you, Rosemary," he murmured, "because of this."
She tried to laugh and to speak flippantly. "Lose me?" she said. "You have little chance of doing that, my dear, for this or any other cause. Naniescu has not the power of life and death over me," she added more seriously.
There was something about Jasper at this moment that she could not entirely fathom. Twice before she had seen him in these moods of violent passion akin almost to savagery, when she felt utterly helpless and absolutely in his power. She had the feeling that when he was in one of these moods he was capable of any violence against her if she dared to disobey or resist. Not that Rosemary was afraid; she had never in her life been afraid of anyone; but she had always been mistress of herself, and at this moment, held tightly by the man to whom she had sworn love and fealty, she felt like a slave of olden times in the grip of her lord.
"You—you will care for me some day, Rosemary?" he asked with passionate earnestness. "Say that you will some day, when all this—all this is forgotten, and we are back again in England, free to live our own lives, free to love. You will care for me then, Rosemary, will you not? For I could not live beside you for long, feeling all the time that you did not belong to me with your whole soul. You have such haunting eyes—eyes such as pixies and fairies have—maddening eyes. I should go crazy presently if I failed to kindle the love-light in those eyes."
He kissed her eyes, her mouth, her throat. Rosemary would have struggled, would have screamed if she dared. Fortunately a knock at the door and the entrance of one of the menservants, who came to fetch milord's luggage, put an end to a situation which Rosemary found very difficult to endure. After the man had gone the spell appeared to be broken. Jasper became once more the courteous, grave man of the world he had always been. The episode of a moment ago did not seem to have occurred at all, as far as he was concerned, and while Rosemary felt her teeth chattering and the palms of her hands were covered with a cold sweat, Jasper moved about the room and spoke to her about his proposed journey, his certain return in a fortnight, as if nothing had happened.