*chapter Iii*
*FAIR ROSAMOND’S CHOICE*
The terrace under Nadier’s roses—dotted with little tables covered with napery, silver, crystal, and china, surrounded with laughing, chattering feasters—the terrace was no longer a scene out of a comedy of the lighter side of Parisian life… Tragedy, pale and awe-inspiring in her ink-black mantle and purple chiton, had stepped across the gravel in her gold-buckled leather buskins, to offer to the girlish bride—a piece of human porcelain, prinked in the height of the fashion, and lovely—with her wild-rose cheeks and little uptilted nose, her floss-silk hair and wide, dark, lustrous deer-eyes—Fair Rosamond’s choice, the dagger or the bowl…
“Yes—yes… It is the ugliness of the thing! …” The little mouth was pulled awry as though it had sipped of verjuice. The tiny hands knotted themselves convulsively, and the colour fled in terror from her face. “The grotesque ugliness… And the”—the last two words came as though a pang had wrung them from the pale lips—“the pain—the awful pain! And besides—my mother died when I was born!” Margot’s voice was a fluttering, appealing whisper; her great eyes were dilated and wild with terror. “Perhaps that is why I am so deadly afraid”—she caught her breath—“but there are heaps, heaps, heaps of married women who fear—that—equally! And they arrange to escape it—I don’t know how! … For I knew—nothing—when I married you! …” She lifted her great eyes to Franky’s, and he realised that it had been so, actually. “I’ve been ashamed ever to confess that I was—ignorant about these things! … I’ve talked a language—amongst other women—that I didn’t understand! …”
There are moments when even the shallow-brained become clairvoyant. Franky’s love for her made him see clear. He looked back down the vista of Margot’s twenty years of existence, and saw her the motherless daughter of a self-absorbed, cultivated, Art-loving valetudinarian, who habitually spent the chillier part of each year in ranging from French to Italian health-resorts, occupying the spring with Art in Paris—returning to London for June and July, generally spending August and September in Devonshire—to take flight Southwards before the migrating swallows, at the first chill breath of October frosts.
Margot had been educated at home, down in Devonshire, by a series of certificated female tutors. The spinster aunt, the younger sister of her father, extended to her niece for a liberal remuneration a nominal protection and an indifferent care… And Mr. Mountjohn had died when the girl was sixteen, leaving her unconditionally heiress to his considerable fortune, and the aunt had let Margot have her head in every imaginable way. She had allowed her to take up her residence at the “Ladies’ Social” Club three years subsequently, on the sole condition that a responsible chaperon accompanied Margot to Society functions. Hence, Mrs. Ponsonby Rewes, the irreproachable widow of a late King’s Messenger, was evoked from Kensington Tower Mansions upon these occasions—by telephone—to vanish when no longer wanted, in the discreetest and most obliging way.
“Poor little Margot! … Poor little woman!…” Franky could see how it all had happened by the wild light of the great deer-eyes, so like those in the portrait of the girl’s dead mother—half Irish, half Greek by birth.
While Franky reflected, the tables had been emptying. People were hurrying away to hear the band of the Jardin d’Acclimatation or to fulfil other engagements of a seasonable kind. Some remained to smoke and gossip over liqueurs and coffee. The light blue wreaths of cigar and cigarette smoke curled up towards the awning overhead. Franky mechanically produced his own case and lighted up. And Margot, stretching a slender arm across the table, was saying:
“Give me one!—I’ve forgotten mine! …”
“Ought you? … Is it wise? …” Franky was on the point of asking, but his good Angel must have clapped a hand before his mouth. He silently gave Margot a thick, masculine Sobranie and supplied a light; and as their young faces neared and the red spark glowed, and the first smoke-wreath rose between the approximating tubes of delicate tobacco-filled paper, his wife whispered as their eyes met:
“You’re hurt! But now you know—you’re sorry for me, aren’t you?” It was a dragging, plaintive undertone, not at all like Margot’s voice.
“Frightfully! All the more because”—Franky drew so hard at his cigarette that it burned one-sidedly—“I can’t help being thundering—glad!”
“I—see! …”
She breathed out the words with a thin stream of fragrant Turkish vapour crawling over her scarlet under-lip, it seemed to Franky, like a pale blue worm. And he bit through his Sobranie and threw it on his dessert-plate, saying desperately:
“Not yet. Will you listen quietly to what I’ve got to say?”
She nodded. Franky launched himself upon the tide of revelation. Nearly everybody who had been eating when he had come into Nadier’s with Margot had got up and gone away. And the Cuirassiers band was playing the love-music from Samson et Dalila on the terrace of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, as melodiously as only a French military band can play.
“It’s got to do with the Peerage. Only a Second Afghan War-Earldom dating from 1879—tacked on to the Viscounty they gave my great-grandfather after Badajos—but worth having in its way, or the Dad wouldn’t have accepted it. And, naturally enough—I want a boy to take the Viscounty when I succeed my father, and have the Earldom when I’ve absquatulated, just as the kiddy’ll want one when his own time comes.”
Margot was burning a strawberry-leaf on her plate with her cigarette-end. She asked, impressing another little yellow scorched circle on the surface of rough green:
“Would it matter so very much if there wasn’t any boy?”
Franky jumped and turned red to the white, unsunned circle left by the field-cap on the summit of his high forehead.
“It would matter—lots! For my Uncle Sherbrand, a younger brother of my father’s, would come in for the Viscounty when I succeeded the dear old Dad. And my Uncle Sherbrand is a blackguard! Got cashiered in 1900, when he was an Artillery officer in a gun-testing billet at Wanwich. Kicked out of the Army—in War-time, mind you!—for not backing up his C.O. And the brute has got a son, too, an apprentice in an engine-shop, if he isn’t actually a chauffeur. Probably the young fellow’s respectable, and of course it ain’t the pup’s fault he’s got such a sire. But my Dad would turn in his grave at the idea of being succeeded by the brother who disgraced him—and as for his grandfather—the jolly old cock ‘ud bally well get up and dance, I should say… So, you see, I can’t—sympathise with you as you want me to do in this, darling! I want you to buck up and be cheerful, and face the music like a brick… As for what you’ve told me—about your mother—“ In spite of himself, Franky gulped, and little shiny beads of sweat stood upon his cheeks and temples. “That sort of thing doesn’t run in families, like rheumatism”—he was getting idiotic—“or Roman noses! Be plucky—and everything will turn out all right. Can’t possibly go wrong if we call in Saxham … Saxham of 000, Harley Street—man my sister Trix simply swears by. Brought her boy Ronald into the world thirteen years ago, and successfully operated on him for appendicitis only the other day! …”
Margot looked at Franky attentively and bent her head slightly. Had she understood? She must have… Had she tacitly agreed? Of course…