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

All night Rosemary struggled with the puzzle. All night she wrestled with herself for the right to break her promise to Jasper and to lay all the facts of this case before Peter. She wanted to do this before Jasper’s return, and, anyway, he must release her⁠—he must⁠—from that promise which placed her in a false and disloyal position towards Peter. When Rosemary fell asleep the dawn was breaking, and she had almost made up her mind to tell Peter everything.

But the next morning when she went downstairs she found the whole house in a turmoil. Servants rushing to and fro, Elza in close conversation with the chef, Maurus shouting contradictory orders across the galleried hall. Peter was in the drawing-room playing a jazz tune this time, and Philip and Anna were foxtrotting, infusing even into this ugly so-called dance some of their own native grace.

As soon as Rosemary appeared she was greeted with regular war-whoops of delight. In a moment she was drawn into the whirlpool of excitement. Philip and Anna dragged her to the sofa, and they and Maurus and Elza all talked to her at once, while Peter, with the inevitable cigarette in the corner of his mouth, continued to pound away at the jazz tune.

From the deafening hubbub of conversation Rosemary gathered, in the first instance, that the gipsy band from Bonczhida were coming over the next day, and the gipsies of Bonczhida were the finest in Transylvania. Then that the Keletys were driving over from Hajdu, and the Fejérs from Henger; that perhaps Aunt Charlotte would come too and bring Marie; that the Keletys were bringing the Poltys, and the Fejérs having the Kékesy boys staying with them would of course bring them along. They reckoned that there would be ten or a dozen couples to dance, and with the mammas and papas they would be thirty to supper. They expected most of the guests to arrive in time for luncheon, and in the afternoon they could have some tennis; then in the evening they would have a ball to which the officers from the garrison at Cluj had already been invited, and they had accepted by telephone. Among them were those who were going to play cricket with the Hungarians at Hódmezö under Peter’s direction.

At this marvellous statement Peter came to a pause in the music with a crashing chord, took the cigarette out of his mouth, and throwing up his hands, exclaimed:

“Going to play cricket with the Hungarians under Peter’s direction! Oh, blessed People! Ye ghosts of Fitzgerald, Pycroft, and of Lillywhite, do ye hear them and writhe up there in Heaven?”

Then he struck up the “March of the Men of Harlech.”

“If anyone says anything more about cricket,” he said solemnly, “I shall force them to play with warped bats and golf-balls on a ploughed field.”

Not a trace of anxiety or even preoccupation on any of those dear, beaming faces. Elza was as excited as any of them, worried to death because the carp they had got out of the lake for this evening’s supper were not really fat.

“They’re no bigger than a good-sized goldfish,” she said to Rosemary with a note of real tragedy in her voice, and her blue eyes at once looked anxious and troubled, as if the matter of the carp was the only thing that could worry her.

Rosemary made a great effort not to be a wet blanket in the midst of all this gaiety. In this she succeeded admirably. All she had to do was to smile and to nod her head, and now and then to cry out, “How splendid!” The others did all the talking, and when conversation subsided for a moment Peter came down with a fresh, crashing jazz tune.

Rosemary would have thought the whole scene a phantasmagoria⁠—illusive images that would presently be dispelled⁠—only that she had known these people ever since she was a child. She had studied their curious psychology, half barbaric, with all the primitive disregard of danger and the passion for pleasure, even at the point of death. She gave ungrudging admiration to Elza⁠—Elza who had sat in her room last night, rigid, dry-eyed, a living statue of despair. What went on behind that smooth, white brow of hers? What projects? What hopes? And little Anna? Anna knew. Anna guessed. She had spoken of her fears to Rosemary. Spoken of eyes that watched her, of eyes that were willing her to do something foolish that would compromise her irretrievably this time. Elza and Anna! What an example of self-possession, of self-control! Rosemary was almost ready to persuade herself that something had happened to reassure them both⁠—that, in fact, they knew the danger to be past.

Only that Elza avoided her glance, and that the dear soul, usually so placid, so stable, was just a thought more restless than usual, and her gentle voice would from time to time become shrill.

At last, genuinely tired and bewildered by so much noise, Rosemary jumped up and, laughing, declared that she must escape out of the bear-garden for a moment and get a breath of fresh air in the park. In order to reach the glass door that gave on the veranda, Rosemary had to go past the piano. Quite close. Peter looked up when she was near him, and she said to him as she went past: “They are very gay, aren’t they?”

“Elza has a perfectly mad plan in her head,” Peter replied, and struck a few loud chords so that no one save Rosemary should hear what he said. “For God’s sake, if you have any influence over her, get her to give it up.”

Then he shouted merrily: “I’ve had enough of those horrible American tunes. Who wants a csàrdàs?”

But he did not play a csàrdàs. For a moment or two his fingers wandered aimlessly over the keys, whilst his eyes followed Rosemary as she stepped through the glass door on to the