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

their early love, he had torn her out of his heart, and turned to this ignominious calling to help him to forget.

Rosemary felt giddy and ill; even the sweet woodland air seemed to have turned to poisonous fumes of intrigue and venality. She roughly pushed away from Peter’s arm that supported her, but she was still swaying; her hat fell from her head, and her glorious hair lay in a tumbled mass of ruddy gold around her face.

“Better sit down on this old stump,” Peter remarked drily. “You’ll have to lean on me till you get to it.”

But Rosemary did not really know what happened just then⁠—she had such a gnawing pain in her heart. She certainly tottered forward a step or two until she reached the tree-stump, and she sank down on it, helped thereto, no doubt, by Peter’s arm. The next thing of which she was conscious was a flood of tears that would not be checked. It welled up to her eyes, and eased that heavy pain in her heart. Great sobs shook her bowed shoulders, and she buried her face in her hands, for she was ashamed of her tears. Ashamed that she cared so much.

And the next thing that struck her consciousness was that Peter sank down on his knees before her, that he raised her skirt to his lips, and that he murmured: “Goodbye, sweetheart. My Rosemary for remembrance. God bless and keep you. Try to forget.” Then he jumped to his feet and was gone. Gone! She called him back with a cry of despair: “Peter!” But he was nowhere to be seen. He must have scrambled up the incline that led to the road. She certainly heard high above her the crackling of dry twigs, but nothing more. Peter had passed out of her life, more completely, more effectually, indeed, than on the day when she became Jasper Tarkington’s wife. Peter⁠—her Peter, the friend of her girlhood, the master from whom she had learned her first lesson of love, was dead. The thing that remained was a vague speck, a creation of this venal postwar world. It was as well that he should go out of her life.

XLII

A minute or two later Rosemary was startled out of her daydream by the sound of Jasper’s voice calling to her from somewhere in the near distance. She had barely time to obliterate the traces of tears from her eyes and cheeks before he appeared round the bend of the path. The next moment he was by her side. Apparently he had been running, for he seemed breathless and not quite so trim and neat in his appearance as he usually was.

“I heard a scream,” were the first words he said, as soon as he came in sight of her. “It terrified me when I recognised your voice. Thank God you are safe!”

He was obviously exhausted and, for him, strangely agitated. He threw himself down on the carpet of moss at her feet; then he seized her hand and covered it with kisses. “Thank God!” he kept on murmuring. “Thank God you are safe!”

Then suddenly he looked up at her with an inquiring frown. “But what made you scream?” he asked.

Rosemary by now had regained control over her nerves. She succeeded in disengaging her hand, and in smiling quite coolly down upon him.

“It was very stupid of me,” she said, with a light laugh. “I saw a pair of eyes looking at me through the undergrowth. It startled me. I thought that it was a wild cat⁠—I had heard that there were some in these parts⁠—but it was only a homely one.”

She tried to rise, but Jasper had recaptured her hand. He was engaged in kissing her fingertips one by one, lingering over each kiss as if to savour its sweetness in full. Now he looked up at her with a glance of hungering passion. Rosemary felt herself flushing. She was conscious of an intense feeling of pity for this man who had lavished on her all the love of which he was capable, and hungered for that which she was not able to give. He looked careworn, she thought, and weary.

“You were not anxious about me, Jasper, were you?” she asked kindly.

He smiled. “I am always anxious,” he said, “when I don’t see you.”

“But how did you find me?”

“Quite easily; I went to the hotel, you know. Not at all a bad little place, by the way; rather primitive, but with electric light and plenty of hot water. I engaged the rooms, and had a mouthful of breakfast. Then I sallied forth in quest of you. A man in the village told me you had been asking the way to the château, and I knew you would never stand the dusty road. So when I found that there was a woodland path that went through the same way as the road, I naturally concluded that you would choose it in preference. You see,” Jasper concluded, with a smile, “that there was no magic in my quest.”

Then he looked up at her again, and there was a gleam of suspicion in his dark, questioning eyes. “You must have walked very slowly,” he said. “I started quite half an hour, probably more, after you did.”

“I did walk very slowly. This path is enchanting, and this is not the first time I have sat down to think and to gaze at this delicious little stream. But,” Rosemary went on briskly, “I think I had better be getting on.”

But Jasper put out his arms and encircled her knees. “Don’t go for a minute, little one. It is so peaceful here, and somehow I have had so little of you these last days. I don’t know, but it seems as if we had taken to misunderstanding one another lately.” Then, as she made an involuntary movement of impatience, he continued gently: “Do I annoy you by making love to you?”

Rosemary tried to smile.