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

her servants, was a veritable heroine, strong and tenacious, proud without vanity, loving without weakness, the type that represented everything that was finest and best in a woman. She was of the stuff that religious martyrs were made of in the past, and she would not come to a decision without a terrible struggle. If in the end her heart overruled the dictates of justice and of right, her remorse would be as devastating as her courage hitherto had been sublime.

If Elza had been a religious woman she would not have suffered nearly so cruelly. The pagan knows nothing of the comfort of prayer, of diving blindly from the rocks of care into the ocean of God’s love. And Elza was only a pagan from whom the thin veneer of Christianity laid on in early life had been rubbed off long ago. She would not now be on her knees, murmuring with heaven-born resignation: “Lord, not my will, but thine be done!” she would be fighting a tough battle, wrestling with her heart, castigating her tenderest feelings, fighting alone, unaided, unconsoled.

Poor, poor Elza! Rosemary, looking out into the storm, seemed to see the pretty round face distorted by grief, the big, childlike eyes gazing bewildered on the immensity of the puzzle which the Fates had set for her to solve. And while Rosemary gazed the storm became full of pictures, each lightning flash revealed a face. Elza! Philip, dark-eyed, enthusiastic, the idealist! Anna, gentle and resigned. Maurus, the man, the head of the family, the trunk of the tree weaker than its branches. And then Peter. Oh, Peter filled the night with his presence. There was Peter in flannels, a boy with bright eyes and curly head, fighting life’s battles with a cricket bat and a joke. Peter home on leave from that hell in Belgium, receiving from his king the supreme reward for an act of almost unequalled bravery, of which, in his boyish way, he would often look quite ashamed. And Peter that night in June, long ago. Peter’s strong arms round her shoulders. Peter’s impassioned words, vying in melody with the nightingale. Peter’s kiss that opened wide the portals of Heaven; and, lastly, Peter the mysterious, the subtle, unseen influence in whose wake strode sorrow and disaster. And the rumbling of the thunder brought back to Rosemary’s ears Jasper’s words of warning: “I only wish I had your belief in coincidences;” and “Ever since Peter’s arrival I have seen nothing but one calamity after another fall upon these wretched people here.” And then that awful, awful indictment which she had been unable to refute: “Don’t you know that Peter Blakeney is a paid spy of the Romanian Government?” The thunder brought the echo of those terrible words. Louder and louder, for the storm was drawing nearer, and the echo of those awful words drowned the very sound of thunder.

All at once the storm broke in all its fury; there was a deafening crash and a flash of lightning so vivid that for the space of one second the garden stood revealed as if in broad daylight before Rosemary’s gaze, clear-cut in every detail, every tree, every leaf, every flower, every ripple upon the lake, each pebble upon the garden walk; and in that one second Rosemary had seen Peter standing on the gravel walk, not fifty yards from her window, and looking up at her⁠—gazing. She caught his eyes in that one flash. He was dressed in a dark suit, his cricketing cap was on his head. It had been an instant’s flash, but she had seen him, and he was gazing up her window. And their eyes had met in that one flash, right through the storm.

After that all was darkness, and though from time to time the night was rent by lightning flashes, Rosemary did not see Peter again. And when later on the storm subsided, and, wearied out, she went to bed and slept, she dreamt that all her suspicions of Peter had been proved to be wrong. She dreamt that she was a few years younger, that they were on the river together, in a punt, and that the nightingale was singing. She dreamt of the lapping of the water against the low-lying river bank, of the scent of meadow-sweet, and of the honey-coloured moon that painted long lines of golden light upon the reeds. She dreamt that Peter kissed her, and that she was free to give him kiss for kiss.

XXXII

When Rosemary woke the next morning she felt quite convinced that the vision which she had had in the night, of Peter standing on the gravel walk and looking up at her window, was only a creation of her own fancy. Rosa had opened the curtains and the volets, and Rosemary saw a dull, grey sky before her. The storm had certainly abated, but it was still raining. Rosemary thought of the cricket match, which would probably have to be postponed owing to the weather, and of the disappointment this would mean to many, especially to Peter, who had set his heart upon it.

During breakfast Jasper told her that he had received a note from his agent de change at Cluj, and that the latter said in his letter that the cricket match which should have been begun yesterday had to be postponed owing to the weather.

“Steinberg goes on to say,” Jasper continued, “that he had heard that the cricket pitch⁠—the playground he calls it⁠—was like a swamp. The storm seems to have been very severe the other side of the frontier. It went on for twenty-four hours without a break, and was still raging at the time of writing. Unless the weather improves very much, Steinberg says that the match will have to be abandoned altogether, as Payson and several of his team have to be back in Budapest in time for work on Monday morning, which means leaving Hódmezö on the Sunday.”

Then, as Rosemary