Pimpernel and Rosemary, Baroness Orczy [i have read the book a hundred times .txt] 📗

longing and a sorrow that she dared not face, she prayed for help and for guidance. She had no one to turn to but Him who said with infinite understanding and love: “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.”

In the midst of worldly joys, satisfied ambition, hopes for the future and pride in the past, Rosemary Fowkes would tonight have felt desperately lonely and lost in bewilderment before a divided duty⁠—duty to self, duty to Jasper⁠—but for the comfort of prayer, the thought of all that lay beyond this world of ours, a world that is so sordid and petty even at its best.

VII

The next two or three weeks were like a dream for Rosemary Fowkes. She left herself no time to think. The future beckoned to her with enticing arms, holding prospects of activities, of work that would fill the mind to the exclusion of memory. That evening when she rose from her knees, she rose with a resolve, and never for one moment after that did she allow herself an instant of regret. She wrote a line to Jasper to tell him that she would do as he wished; she was prepared to marry him as soon as his own arrangements were completed.

She also wrote to General Naniescu, agreeing to his proposal. She reserved to herself complete freedom of action to send any articles or reports she chose to English or foreign Press; all that she desired from him was a confirmatory letter, promising that nothing she ever wrote would pass through the censor’s hands. This he at once sent her. Nothing could be more fair, more straightforward. Rosemary’s chivalrous mind responded wholeheartedly to Naniescu’s generosity, and the feeling that it would probably be in her power to do real good, not only to individuals but to peoples, acted as a soothing balm upon her bruised heart.

On the other hand, nothing could have exceeded Jasper’s kindness and consideration during the days immediately preceding her marriage. It almost seemed as if his super-sensitive soul had received a faint inkling of what was going on in Rosemary’s mind. Nothing appeared too onerous, no sacrifice too great where Rosemary’s comfort and desires were at stake, and at times⁠—such are the contradictions of a woman’s nature⁠—she felt almost impatient with him for his magnanimity, almost obsessed by the unselfishness of his love.

She only saw Peter Blakeney once before she and Jasper left for Budapest, and that was on the day of her wedding. By one of those involuntary blunders so peculiar to dim-sighted lovers, Jasper Tarkington had asked Peter to be his best man. What it was that had induced Peter to accept, Rosemary could not conjecture. His impulses had always been strange and unaccountable, and this one was more unaccountable than most. Perhaps he merely wished to pander to his own mad desire to see her once again, perhaps it was just a semi-barbaric instinct in him that pushed him to self-torture. Rosemary by now had sufficient hold over herself to meet him calmly; not one line in her beautiful face, not one look in her haunting eyes, betrayed what she felt, after the wedding ceremony, when she accepted Peter’s warmly expressed good wishes for her happiness. Even her sensitive ear could not detect the faintest note of irony or bitterness in his voice. After that he said a few words about the projected journey to Hungary, about which Jasper had spoken to him. She would be seeing his relatives there⁠—the Imreys, the Heves. Elza Imrey was his mother’s sister and such a dear, and Philip used to be a jolly boy; but Rosemary knew them all. She knew she would be made very welcome. Peter ended by speaking with great earnestness about his little cousin Anna Heves; her father, who had been Mrs. Blakeney’s only brother, was dead, and Peter had an idea that Anna was not altogether happy.

“She has left home for some reason I can’t quite fathom,” he said, “and lives now at Kolozsvár⁠—I mean Cluj. She writes to me sometimes, and when I know the exact day when you will be in Cluj, I will write and tell her to go and see you. I suppose you will put up at the Pannonia?”

Rosemary nodded and Peter went on talking about little Anna, as he called her. “I know you will be kind to her,” he said. “You remember her as a child, of course; in a way she is still a child, and so pretty and enthusiastic. Give her a kiss from me when you see her.”

Which Rosemary, of course, promised to do. Then she gave him her hand, without saying anything, for she could not trust herself to speak much, and he kissed it just above the wrist, but more like a knight doing homage to his lady than a lover who gazed, perhaps for the last time, on the woman he worshiped.

It was after the marriage ceremony that the dreamland in which Rosemary had moved these past days became more intangible, more of a spirit-world than before. The brief days in a dreary hotel at Folkestone would have been unendurable but for her state of mind, which almost amounted to semi-consciousness. Then came the weary journey to Budapest, the sleepless night in the train, the awful meals in the crowded, stuffy restaurant-car, the ceaseless rub-a-dub-dub, rub-a-dub-dub of the wheels that bore her away farther⁠—ever farther from that bygone world which had become the might-have-been. And through it all, like a ray of light, so persistent that it ceased to impress, was Jasper’s constant, unwearying care of her. He never seemed too tired to minister to her wants, to arrange cushions for her, a footstool, to open or close the window, the thousand and one little attentions, in fact, which most travellers are too self-engrossed to render.

And as Rosemary sat in her corner seat during those two wearisome days gazing out of