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Rosa Mundi
by
She ceased to speak, and suddenly, like a boy, sprang to her feet, tossing away the stone that she had treasured in her hand.
But the man was almost as quick as she. He caught her by the shoulder as he rose. “Wait!” he said. “Wait!” His voice rang hard, but there was no hardness in his eyes. “Tell me–who you are!”
She lifted her eyes to his fearlessly, without shame. “What does it matter who I am?” she said. “What does it matter? I have told you I am Rosemary. That is her name for me, and it was your book called Remembrance that made her give it me.”
He held her still, looking at her with a growing compassion in his eyes. “You are her child,” he said.
She smiled. “Perhaps–spiritually. Yes, I think I am her child, such a child as she might have been if–Fate–had been kind to her— or if she had read your book before–and not after.”
He let her go slowly, almost with reluctance. “I think I should like to meet your–Rosa Mundi,” he said.
Her eyes suddenly shone. “Not really? You are in earnest? But–but— you would hurt her. You despise her.”
“I am sorry for her,” he said, and there was a hint of doggedness in his voice, as though he spoke against his better judgment.
The child’s face had an eager look, but she seemed to be restraining herself. “I ought to tell you one thing about her first,” she said. “Perhaps you will disapprove. I don’t know. But it is because of you–and your revelation–that she is doing it. Rosa Mundi is going to be married. No, she is not giving up her career or anything–except her freedom. Her old lover has come back to her. She is going to marry him now. He wants her for his wife.”
“Ah!” It was the man who was eager now. He spoke impulsively. “She will be happy then? She loves him?”
Rosemary looked at him with her clear, unfaltering eyes. “Oh, no,” she said. “He isn’t that sort of man at all. Besides, there is only one man in the world that she could care for in that way. No, she doesn’t love him. But she is doing the right thing, and she is going to be good. You will not despise her any more?”
There was such anxious appeal in her eyes that he could not meet it. He turned his own away.
There fell a silence between them, and through it the long, long roar of the sea rose up–a mighty symphony of broken chords.
The man moved at last, looked down at the slight boyish figure beside him, hesitated, finally spoke. “I still think that I should like to meet Rosa Mundi,” he said.
Her eyes smiled again. “And you will not despise her now,” she said, her tone no longer a question.
“I think,” said Randal Courteney slowly, “that I shall never despise any one again.”
“Life is so difficult,” said Rosemary, with the air of one who knew.
* * * * *
They were strewing the Pier with roses for Rosa Mundi’s night. There were garlands of roses, festoons of roses, bouquets of roses; roses overhead, roses under foot, everywhere roses.
Summer had returned triumphant to deck the favourite’s path.
Randal Courteney marked it all gravely, without contempt. It was her hour.
No word from her had reached him, but that night he would meet her face to face. Through days and nights of troubled thought, the resolve had grown within him. To-night it should bear fruit. He would not rest again until he had seen her. For his peace of mind was gone. She was about to throw herself away upon a man she did not love, and he felt that it was laid upon him to stop the sacrifice. The burden of responsibility was his. He had striven against this conviction, but it would not be denied. From the days of young Eric Baron’s tragedy onward, this woman had made him as it were the star of her destiny. To repudiate the fact was useless. She had, in her ungoverned, impulsive fashion, made him surety for her soul.