Rosa Mundi | Page 7

kindness, and the chance to be good. Perhaps you think she would not care for that. But you do not know her. Rosa Mundi was meant to be good. She hungered for goodness. She was tired--so tired of the gaudy vanities of life, so--so--what is the word--so nauseated with the cheap and the bad. Are you sorry for her, I wonder? Can you picture her, longing--oh, longing--for what she calls respectability? And then--this chance, this offer of deliverance! It meant giving up her career, of course. It meant changing her whole life. It meant sacrifice--the sort of sacrifice that you ought to be able to understand--for she loved her dancing and her triumphs, just as you love your public--the people who read your books and love you for their sake. That is different, isn't it, from the people who follow you about and want to stare at you just because you are prosperous and popular? The people who really appreciate your art--those are the people you would not disappoint for all the world. They make up a vast friendship that is very precious, and it would be a sacrifice--a big--sacrifice--to give it up. That is the sort of sacrifice that marriage meant to Rosa Mundi. And though she wanted marriage--and she wanted to be good--she hesitated."
There was a little pause. Randal Courteney was no longer dissembling his interest. He had laid his pipe aside, and was watching with unvarying intentness the downcast childish face. He asked no questions. There was something in the low-spoken words that held him silent. Perhaps he feared to probe too deep.
In a few moments she went on, gathering up a little handful of the shining shingle, and slowly sifting it through her fingers as though in search of something precious.
"I think if she had really loved the man, it wouldn't have mattered. Nothing counts like love, does it? But--you see--she didn't. She wanted to. She knew that he was clean and honourable, worthy of a good woman. He loved her, too, loved her so that he was willing to put away all her past. For she did not deceive him about that. He was willing to give her all--all she wanted. But she did not love him. She honoured him, and she felt for a time at least that love might come. He guessed that, and he did his best--all that he could think of--to get her to consent. In the end--in the end"--Rosemary paused, a tiny stone in her hand that shone like polished crystal--"she was very near to the verge of yielding, the young man had almost won, when--when something happened that altered--everything. The young man had a friend, a writer, a great man even then; he is greater now. The friend came, and he threw his whole weight into the scale against her. She felt him--the force of him--before she so much as saw him. She had broken with her lover some time before. She was free. And she determined to marry the young man who loved her--in spite of his friend. That very day it happened. The young man sent her a book written by his friend. She had begun to hate the writer, but out of curiosity she opened it and read. First a bit here, then a bit there, and at last she sat down and read it--all through."
The little shining crystal lay alone in the soft pink palm. Rosemary dwelt upon it, faintly smiling.
"She read far into the night," she said, speaking almost dreamily, as if recounting a vision conjured up in the glittering surface of the stone. "It was a free night for her. And she read on and on and on. The book gripped her; it fascinated her. It was--a great book. It was called--Remembrance." She drew a quick breath and went on somewhat hurriedly. "It moved her in a fashion that perhaps you would hardly realize. I have read it, and I--understand. The writing was wonderful. It brought home to her--vividly, oh, vividly--how the past may be atoned for, but never, never effaced. It hurt her--oh, it hurt her. But it did her good. It showed her how she was on the verge of taking a wrong turning, of perhaps--no, almost certainly--dragging down the man who loved her. She saw suddenly the wickedness of marrying him just to escape her own prison. She understood clearly that only love could have justified her--no other motive than that. She saw the evil of fastening her past to an honourable man whose good name and family demanded of him something better. She felt as if the writer had torn aside a veil and shown her her naked soul. And--and--though the book was a good book, and did not condemn sinners--she was shocked, she was horrified, at what it