Pimpernel and Rosemary

Elza Imrey talked very freely with Rosemary, and often referred to her husband having taken the oath of allegiance to the King of Roumania. It was all because of Philip. "What I am working for," she said, with the light almost of a fanatic in her eyes, "and what I shall work for so long as I have breath left in my body, is to save Philip's inheritance. The Roumanians are lying in wait for us, watching for an excuse to expel us from Transylvania. Many have had to go. Nothing would induce them to be false to the oath that they had sworn to the anointed King of Hungary. So they had to go. Sometimes at twenty-four hours' notice, bag and baggage, turned out of the home their forbears had owned for hundreds of years. But I would not do that. I had to think of Philip. The Roumanian occupation is now an accomplished fact, and we are too helpless, too friendless, not to accept it. But we must be very careful. One false step and we are done. Imagine how I tremble every time Maurus lets himself go. You know how unguarded he always is in his speech."

Rosemary felt an actual physical pain in her heart when she thought of this devoted mother's brave struggle to guard her son's inheritance, and how little she guessed that Philip himself was jeopardizing his future and risking his life in a cause that she was proclaiming hopeless. Those rides to Cluj! The meeting with Anna Heves! The dispatch of those newspaper articles of his! And Government spies lurking everywhere!

But during meals all unpleasant subjects were vetoed. Rosemary would have none of them, and her wishes, as the honoured guest, were law in this hospitable house. These good people, with their mercurial temperament, had a wonderful gift of casting aside trouble and giving themselves over to the pleasures of the moment. And so at dinner in the evenings the gipsy band not yet driven forth out of the neighbouring village would discourse sweet music, the tender, sad Hungarian refrains that appeal to the stranger almost as much as they do to the native.

Rosemary, who was an exquisite dancer, longed to tread the measure of the csàrdàs, the Hungarian national dance, which begins with a dreamy, languorous slow movement, and then suddenly breaks into a wild, mad whirl, wherein the dancer's eyes glow with excitement, their cheeks burn like fire, and their breath comes and goes through quivering, parted lips. Surely the merriest, maddest, most intoxicating dance devised by a passionate people-probably for the letting off of some inward steam that must find vent in such rapturous movements from time, or it would consume them with its glow.

"I think Lady Tarkington is quite splendid," Maurus Imrey said to Jasper, in the intervals of beating time with hand and foot to the ever-quickening measure of the dance. "Hey, you confounded gipsy!" he cried, shouting to the swarthy, perspiring leader of the band. "Quicker! Quicker! Can't you hear me speak? Do you think you are playing a funeral march?"

"I think," Jasper put in, with his quiet smile, "if the musicians put on anymore speed, Rosemary for one will be crying 'Mercy!'"

But for the moment Rosemary showed no sign of crying any such thing. Her nimble feet had quickly caught the quaint, syncopated rhythm, and Philip was a magnificent teacher. Perhaps there was some truth in saying that he had inherited a strain of gipsy blood, for indeed when he danced the csàrdàs there was something barbaric about his movements. They were full of grace and perfect in rhythm, but all the time they gave the impression of wild roamings through desert lands, of a will that brooked to fetters and was a law unto itself. Rosemary gave herself wholly to the pleasure of being whirled round, turned and twisted, sometimes lifted off her feet. All intellectuality fell away from her for the time being: she was just like a young and beautiful animal in enjoyment of the senses kind Nature had given her, the sound of that intoxicating music, the feeling of unfettered movement, the scent of dying roses in huge vases, that sent their sweet indefinable fragrance through the heat-laden air.

Faster, ever faster! Little hoarse cries escaped her throat as Philip seized her with one arm round the waist, and, lifting her off her feet, twirled her round and round till the golden lights of the shaded candles swam like the trail of comets before her eyes.

Faster! Always faster! She could hardly see now out of her eyes; all that she saw was Philip's dark, curly hair waving around his forehead. The music seemed now a part of the universe, not played by one band of musicians, but the very atmosphere itself vibrating and resounding, forcing her to tread the measure and not to leave off, to go on-and on-and on-always hearing the music-always lifted off her feet and whirled round and round—