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

was in the highest possible spirits. The chef surpassed himself; everyone pronounced the lobster à l’Américaine perfect and the Charlotte Russe Créole quite inimitable.

All afternoon tennis balls were flying, and there was coffee, ices and iced drinks going all day on the lawn. At five o’clock the gipsy musicians from Bonczhida arrived, and after that music never ceased. Rosemary learned something of gipsy endurance that day, for this band of twelve musicians never left off playing from the moment they arrived until⁠—until midnight, when time ceased to be and Fate began to swing her long pendulum.

But between five o’clock and midnight there was music, ceaseless music. While the guests arrived, while everyone played tennis, croquet, drank coffee, walked, flirted, dressed, dined and danced there was music⁠—music all the time.

After dinner the young Romanian officers from the garrison at Cluj came over in several motors. Among them were the eleven cricketers, very proud of themselves, feeling quite English and real sportsmen, delighted to have been chosen to play in the historic match. Fine-looking young men, most of them, with the unmistakable swaggering air of the conqueror about their whole attitude towards the subject race. Elza was invariably a perfect hostess; but Maurus, after a curt greeting, nursed his wrath in a corner of the ballroom, surrounded by his own friends. He had been drilled to keep his temper in check, and love for his own son, anxiety for him and knowledge of danger gave him for this one evening a certain amount of self-control. Rosemary admired him as much as she did the others, for she knew what it cost Maurus to have these alien conquerors in his house.

Anna’s mother and sister had come over from Ujlak. The mother was a hard woman, obviously selfish and unsympathetic. Her own grievances, the confiscation of a great deal of her property, seemed to have smothered every soft, womanly instinct in her. Apparently she knew nothing of the danger that hung over her daughter, and Rosemary had the feeling that if she had known she would not greatly have cared. Her eyes, which were dark and set very wide apart in a flat, colourless face, only softened once, and that was when she spoke about her husband, who had died just before the war.

As for persecutions, humiliations, petty tyrannies, she dismissed them with a shrug of the shoulders. “The Romanians are the scum of the earth,” she said in her quiet, unemotional manner, through her thin, colourless lips, “just a horde of uneducated peasantry; you can’t expect anything from a pig but a grunt. I am only thankful that Béla is not here to see it all.”

On the other hand, the young people who filled the stately château of Kis-Imre with their flutterings like an army of gaily painted butterflies did not worry about political grievances. For them the Romanian officers were just dancing-partners, and their worth was only measured by their proficiency in the latest steps. The mammas and papas either played bridge or sat on the chairs that were ranged against the walls all round the beautiful ballroom placidly admiring the evolutions of their own progeny.

Rosemary, not to be outdone in self-discipline, was outwardly as gay as any of them. She danced impartially with the Hungarians and the Romanians, and talked cricket knowledgeably with the team. For her the atmosphere was electrical. At times it seemed to her overstrained senses as if she could hear the whir of the spinning-wheel driven by the Fates, the hum of the spindle, and the click of their scissors as they made ready to cut the thread of these people’s destiny.

Just before midnight the young Romanian officers who formed the cricket team left in the two motorcars which were to take them direct to Hódmezö, a matter of ninety odd miles. Rosemary found herself saying goodbye to them like an automaton⁠—counting them over as if they were ninepins. A kind of mist was before her eyes through which their good-looking faces seemed to be grinning at her, and their moustaches bristling like Alice’s Cheshire cat.

Elza, wonderful as ever, fussed around them, stuffing delicacies into the cars at the last moment, fruit, bottles of wine, cakes, chocolates, and lending them rugs and cushions.

“It is a long drive,” she said, as she shook hands one by one with the young officers, who clicked their heels together, jingled their spurs and declared that they had had a very pleasant evening. “You will be hungry when you get to Hódmezö,” she added, “and all the restaurants will be closed. You will be glad of a glass of wine and some of my homemade cake.”

Rosemary was standing next to Maurus Imrey at the time. She heard him mutter between his teeth:

“And may it choke you when you eat and drink.”

But even Maurus was wonderful. Wonderful! He shook hands. He smiled⁠—wryly; but he smiled. Wished them all Godspeed. He had been well drilled, and he was fully conscious of the danger to Philip and Anna if he lost control over his temper now.

So he, too, gave directions for putting provisions into the cars. He had four bottles of French red wine in his cellar and he insisted that the young officers should have those. “It will make them play that silly cricket better,” he said. “And I hate the stuff myself.”

The four men who were going with the team as servants were there arranging the rugs, stowing the wine and fruit and cake in the cars. Rosemary knew the two sons of János, the miller, by sight. They were fine, well-set-up young fellows, obviously of the stuff that heroes are made of, for they were going to risk their lives for the children of their feudal lords.

Anna, equally self-possessed, flitted among the guests like a little fairy. She had on a pale blue dress, and out in the open her slim figure was hardly distinguishable in the gloom; only her small, white face told as if carved out of alabaster: that dear