BOOK II — ECHO
CHAPTER I
Robin, whose other name was Gabriel, arrived at the “little house,” of which Rosamund had spoken to Dion upon the hill of Drouva, early in the following year, on the last night of February to be exact. For a long time before his coming his future home had been subtly permeated by an atmosphere of expectancy.
No. 5 Little Market Street was in Westminster, not far from the river and the Houses of Parliament, yet in a street which looked almost remote, and which was often very quiet although close to great arteries of life. Dion sometimes thought it almost too dusky a setting for his Rosamund, but it was she who had chosen it, and they had both become quickly fond of it. It was a house with white paneling, graceful ceilings and carved fireplaces, and a shallow staircase of oak. There was a tiny but welcoming hall, and the landing on the first floor suggested potpourri, chintz-covered settees, and little curtains of chintz moved by a country wind coming through open windows. There were, in fact, chintz-covered settees, and there was potpourri. Rosamund had taken care about that; she had also taken care about many other little things which most London housewives, perhaps, think unworthy of their attention. Every day, for instance, she burnt lavender about the house, and watched the sweet smoke in tiny wreaths curling up from the small shovel, as she gently moved it to and fro, with a half smile of what she called “rustic satisfaction.” She laid lavender in the cupboards and in the chests of drawers, and, when she bought flowers, chose by preference cottage garden flowers, if she could get them, sweet williams, pansies, pinks, wallflowers, white violets, stocks, Canterbury bells. Sometimes she came home with wild flowers, and had once given a little dinner with foxgloves for a table decoration. An orchid, a gardenia, even a hyacinth, was never to be seen in the little house. Rosamund confessed that hyacinths had a lovely name, and that they suggested spring, but she added that they smelt as if they had always lived in hothouses, and were quite ready to be friends with gardenias.
She opened her windows. In this she was almost too rigorous for her maid-servants, who nevertheless adored her. “Plenty of warmth but plenty of air,” was her prescription for a comfortable and healthy house, “and not too much or too many of anything.” Dust, of course, was not to be known of in her dwelling, but “blacks” were accepted with a certain resignation as a natural chastening and a message from London. “They aren’t our fault, Annie,” she had been known to observe to the housemaid. “And dust can’t be anything else, however you look at it, can it?” And Annie said, “Well, no, ma’am!” and, when she came to think of it, felt she had not been a liar in the moment of speaking.
Rosamund never “splashed,” or tried to make a show in her house, and she was very careful never to exceed their sufficient, but not large, income; but the ordinary things, those things which of necessity come into the scheme of everyday life, were always of the very best when she provided them. Dion declared, and really believed, perhaps with reason, that no tea was so fragrant, no bread and butter so delicious, no toast so crisp, as theirs; no other linen felt so cool and fresh to the body as the linen on the beds of the little house; no other silver glittered so brightly as the silver on their round breakfast-table; no other little white window curtains in London managed to look so perennially fresh, and almost blithe, as the curtains which hung at their windows. Rosamund and Annie might have conversations together on the subject of “blacks,” but Dion never saw any of these distressing visitants. The mere thought of Rosamund would surely keep them at a more than respectful distance.
She proved to be a mistress of detail, and a housekeeper whose enthusiasm was matched by her competence. At first Dion had been rather surprised when he followed from afar, as is becoming in a man, this development. Before they settled down in London he had seen in Rosamund the enthusiastic artist, the joyous traveler, the good comrade, the gay sportswoman touched with Amazonian glories; he had known in her the deep lover of pure beauty; he had divined in her something else, a little strange, a little remote, the girl to whom the “Paradiso” was a door opening into dreamland, the girl who escaped sometimes almost mysteriously into regions he knew nothing of; but he had not seen in her one capable of absolutely reveling in the humdrum. Evidently, then, he had not grasped the full meaning of a genuine joie de vivre.
To everything she did Rosamund brought zest. She kept house as she sang “The heart ever faithful,” holding nothing back. Everything must be right if she could get it right; and the husband got the benefit, incidentally. Now and then Dion found himself mentally murmuring that word. A great love will do such things unreasonably. For Rosamund’s joie de vivre, that gift of the gods, caused her to love and rejoice in a thing for the thing’s own sake, as it seemed, rather than for the sake of some one, any one, who was eventually to gain by the thing. Thus she cared for her little house with a sort of joyous devotion and energy, but because it was “my little house” and deserved every care she could give it. Rather as she had spoken of the small olive tree on Drouva, of the Hermes of Olympia, even of Athens, she spoke of it, with a sort of protective affection, as if she thought of it as a living thing confided to her keeping. She possessed a faculty not very common in women, a delight in doing a thing for its own sake, rather than for the sake of some human being—perhaps a man. If she boiled an egg—she went to the kitchen and did this sometimes—she seemed personally interested in the egg, and keenly anxious to do the best by it; the boiling must be a pleasure to her, but also to the egg, and it must, if possible, be supremely well done. As the cook once said, after a culinary effort by Rosamund, “I never seen a lady care for cooking and all such-like as she done. If she as much as plucked a fowl, you’d swear she loved every feather of it. And as to a roast, she couldn’t hardly seem to set more store by it if it was her own husband.”
Such a spirit naturally made for comfort in a house, and Dion had never before been so comfortable. Nevertheless—and he knew it with a keen savoring of appreciation—there was a Spartan touch to be felt in the little house. Comfort walked hand in hand with Rosamund, but so did simplicity; she was what the maids called “particular,” but she was not luxurious; she even disliked luxury, connecting it with superfluity, for which she had a feeling amounting almost to repulsion. “I detest the sensation of sinking down in things,” was a favorite saying of hers; and the way she lived proved that she spoke the sheer truth.