The Light Heart (28 page)

Rosalind’s face lifted ever so little—and then she was bent backward like a reed under his kiss….

Phoebe found herself out in the corridor with hot cheeks, closing the door noiselessly behind her. She regained her own room in haste, rather shaken by what she had seen, and began to wash and change her dress for tea. In all the easy, affectionate, family life at home she had never witnessed so frank a
demonstration
of ownership as the one which had ended the
uncomfortable
scene in Rosalind’s room. And she
dared
him, Phoebe thought fastidiously, splashing cold water on her face. She deliberately
enticed
him, because if she didn’t he was going to be cross. She behaved like a—a mistress in a French play, and it
worked.
This whole place is second-rate Sardou, and if I’m not careful I’ll be hypnotized into starting a flirtation with that little tick Gerzlow….

When she had cooled off and Braga had helped her into a tea-gown, Phoebe went down to the green drawing-room where tea would presumably appear at the usual hour. She went a little self-consciously, for she felt like a chidden child who has got its playmate into trouble, and she felt also as though she had been peeping at keyholes. She wondered when they realized that she was no longer in the room….

Gerzlow and the Lieutenant and Countess Malvida were assembled in the green drawing-room, and the silver kettle was boiling above its spirit-lamp when Phoebe went in. They waited another twenty minutes, making conscientious
conversation
on general topics, before their host and hostess appeared, both of them very self-possessed, very unconcerned,
behaving as though they were not late at all. Rosalind was wearing the most fragile of chiffon robes, so fresh that it had obviously not even been sat down in. Their attendants, of course, made no allusion to the fact that the usual tea time was an hour gone. It was only Phoebe who was embarrassed.

D
INNER
was enlivened by a discussion between Prince Conrad and Rosalind regarding a musician named Schimmel who had been rescued from poverty by their good offices some time ago and put in the way of making an excellent living as a concert pianist. He was to fulfill an engagement in Breslau before long, and Rosalind wanted to ask him to stay at the
Schloss
as a guest, and play for them there.

“You forget,” said Prince Conrad, “that we shall have other guests at that time.”

Rosalind said she didn’t see what that had to do with Herr Schimmel.

“Then you also forget that the man is part Jew,” said Conrad patiently.

Rosalind pointed out that many good musicians were Jews. Mendelssohn, she reminded him, was a Jew.

“Nor would I ask my relations to dine with Mendelssohn,” said Prince Conrad coldly, without in the least intending to be funny.

“But surely it doesn’t matter what a man is if he can play so magnificently,” Rosalind suggested.

“No matter what he does, however magnificently, it matters that he is a Jew,” Prince Conrad replied, closing it.

Herr Schimmel was not mentioned again.

Phoebe’s impression that she was living in an unproduced manuscript of one of the lesser French dramatists was
augmented
that evening by the uncalled-for behaviour of Cuno von Tiefenfurt, who took root at her elbow in the drawing-room
after dinner and began openly to pay her compliments and hang on every word she uttered, springing to light her cigarettes, and generally being a nuisance, while Count Gerz-low glowered ineffectually and Countess Malvida looked hurt and bewildered.

Phoebe’s surmise was that the Lieutenant and Malvida had had a quarrel and he was only trying ineptly to irritate his
amie.
Then she became uneasily aware that Prince Conrad had noticed what was going on and chose to be amused. There was no opportunity in so small a group for any two persons to say more than half a dozen words to each other which were not overheard, so Phoebe’s impulse to demand of her host that he keep his young men in better order was thwarted. And when in an effort to show the Lieutenant his place she devoted herself to entertaining Conrad exclusively, she was
disconcerted
to find that he responded with alacrity. So that the evening ended with all three men grouped attentively around Phoebe, while Malvida sat alone on the sofa and Rosalind dreamed melodiously at the piano and appeared to take no notice of any of them.

The difficulty of getting a private word with anybody weighed on Phoebe as she undressed for bed that night in her vast, gold-ceilinged room with the red velvet draperies, the French screens and the Persian carpet. Heidersdorf was not like the big English houses she had stayed in, where everyone wandered around all day as they chose, pairing off here and there and saying what they liked to each other. Talking to Rosalind was always complicated by Malvida’s dutiful presence. Talking to Prince Conrad without an audience was apparently unheard-of. If it had been Archie’s house, or even the Earl’s, she could easily have found an opportunity to corner her host and say, Look here, you’ve got to call off those two young chumps or I shall be rude to them. An attempt to say the same sort of thing to His Highness looked very complicated, if not impossible.

Besides—Phoebe paused, hair-brush in hand, to gaze
accusingly
at herself in the mirror—judging by the evening’s developments, Prince Conrad was not much better. There was no denying that to-night, under the noses of those two sulky boys and poor Malvida, she and Conrad had struck a spark. The first unexpected, exciting flash between two people who are going to be in some degree attracted to each other was not a new phenomenon to Phoebe any more, nor to him, she was sure. To-night she had felt his personal magnetism and
experience
as the young Phoebe in London years ago was too ignorant to do. And his eyes looking into hers had been
something
more than friendly.

There must be worse fates, after all, she thought while she brushed briskly, than being married to him. For one thing, one would hardly be bored. But the
nerve
of him, thought Phoebe, brushing. To look at his wife’s best friend like that, as if— But of course no Continental is ever supposed to be monogamous, I don’t suppose I’m the first. Women must be after him in droves. I wonder how much of that sort of thing Rosalind has had to put up with. Not from me, anyway, and that’s flat. We’ll see how he reacts to an American woman who knows how to dig in her heels. Beginning tomorrow I ignore him.

Tomorrow was the day Conrad had given his gracious permission for his wife’s piano to be moved into the library. Having issued the necessary orders to the proper underlings, he withdrew into his study, signifying that he had no further interest in women’s whims, and when the servants had done the job and retired from the room Rosalind and Phoebe and Malvida stood surveying the mammoth misplaced piece of furniture rather blankly. Rosalind touched the keys and said, “I do believe it will be a good room to play in.” Malvida said, “Like a concert hall, rather. Dare we draw up a few chairs?”

“Let’s make a conversation corner down at this end,” Phoebe suggested, for all the furniture sat stiffly around the walls and facing outwards from against the big round centre-table, in the German way. “If we brought that sofa and some armchairs into a group near this window it would be a little more homelike.”

“Shall I ring for the servants?” asked Malvida.

“The servants would only be in the way,” said Rosalind, rising from the piano. “There are three of us. Let’s do it without the servants.”

“But His Highness—” Malvida began.

“Don’t let’s
tell
His Highness,” said Rosalind, laying hold of an armchair and pushing it across the carpet towards the window. “Perhaps if he doesn’t see it till it’s all done he will agree that it’s an improvement. This room has always been a desert, it’s time something was done about it.”

For half an hour they pulled and pushed and puffed and enjoyed themselves. When they had finished, a small console table stood in the long west window, with books and flowers on it, and the sofa and several armchairs made a cosy group around it, near enough the piano for conversation with anyone who sat on its bench. Phoebe and Malvida threw themselves down into the chairs with sighs of satisfaction, and Rosalind played Strauss waltzes to them, while the almost forgotten clock ticked on towards lunch time.

Presently the door opened and Prince Conrad came in, pausing to gaze haughtily through his monocle at the rearranged library. The piano fell into guilty silence.

“We—changed things round a bit,” Rosalind said.

“You did all this yourselves—without having in the servants to do it for you?” he demanded.

“Yes. It was easier than trying to tell them what we wanted, when we hardly knew ourselves till we experimented.”

“Then put it back.”

“Oh, Conny, please don’t—”

“Put it back the way it was before your—experiment began.

“Don’t you like it this way?” Rosalind asked pleasantly.

“It is not a question of what I like. The room can hardly be recognized.”

“That’s what I hoped,” said Rosalind softly.

“The library must look like the library,” said Prince Conrad,
and he raised his voice. “No one else has seen fit to change it, these many years since I was a child, I will not have my rooms cluttered up like a cottage parlour. Put everything back the way it was. There is not much time before lunch.”

Say Please, Phoebe heard herself thinking irreverently, but rather to her surprise this time Rosalind made no effort to coax him out of his bad temper. She said only, “The sofa was very heavy. Will you give us a hand with that?”

“Certainly not,” said Conrad flatly. “You have torn the room to pieces without my help. You can therefore restore it to its former aspect, also without calling the servants’ attention to such irresponsible meddling with the home of my ancestors. It is only twenty minutes till lunch time.”

And he walked out and closed the door behind him with a snap.

For a moment Rosalind stood with her clenched fists resting on the keys and her head down. Then she straightened and met Phoebe’s compassionate gaze and her slim shoulders rose in a small, humourous shrug.

“That’s the German half of him,” she said, and began
resolutely
to replace the furniture as it had been when they first entered the room.

Malvida looked near to tears, but Phoebe herself was trembling with rage. And only last night she had thought him charming and civilized and—well, civilized.

In silence the three of them pushed and tugged the heavy sofa and chairs into the original formal pattern. Phoebe’s cheeks were scarlet, Rosalind was paper-white, Malvida was trying not to sniff. Then they went upstairs to wash their hands before lunch.

Just as Phoebe was about to leave her bedroom again, still molten with anger, there was a timid knock at her door and Rosalind came in and stood waiting while the maid Braga departed.

“I’m sorry you should see him at his worst so soon,” she said then, without preface. “You were getting along so nicely, too, I thought last night. Please forgive him.”

“
Is
that his worst?” Phoebe asked grimly, and Rosalind glanced at her, and away.

“I don’t know but what it is,” she said. “But I suppose by now you can guess the rest.”

“Which is to say that by the time he’s Uncle Eugen’s age he’ll be wanting to paw people too,” Phoebe guessed brutally.

“I don’t mean that at all,” Rosalind protested honestly. “Conny has very good taste. I’m—always in the best of company. And when it’s over he always tells me there is no one like me, after all.”

“Rosalind,
really
—!”

“I know, I shouldn’t mention it,” Rosalind sighed. “But I’d feel such a fool not to, now that it’s beginning again, and this time with you.”

“Well, you certainly don’t suppose it’s
going
anywhere, with me!” Phoebe cried, not knowing quite where to look, for last night she had fallen asleep thinking of him, and at breakfast their eyes had struck sparks and his had lingered.

“I should be rather sorry if it did,” Rosalind said gently. “Not that it need make any difference between you and me. I’ve often been quite good friends with people Conny has—had a fancy for. But he breaks so many hearts, always coming back to me. Please don’t think I’m bragging, but—he
will
come back to me, you know.”

“And you don’t want to see my heart broken like the rest?” Phoebe put an arm around the small, straight figure and felt it tense with nerves and embarrassment. “Honey child—time has rolled on. Your friend Phoebe has turned thirty, do you realize that? And in all these years, her heart has been broken only once.”

“Oliver,” murmured Rosalind against her hair as they stood clasped, their cheeks together.

“Oliver. And anyway, I wouldn’t have your Conrad as a gift, if you don’t mind my saying so!”

She kissed Rosalind’s grave face tenderly, and they went down the stairs with their arms around each other’s waists.
At luncheon His Highness seemed innocent, or oblivious, of having behaved like a brute, and likewise unaware that Phoebe would not even look at him.

W
HEN
Aunt Christa returned, and the absence of Rosalind’s piano from her sitting-room was noticed and explained, Aunt Christa said that anyway it was Rosalind’s place to be in the room when there was conversation in it, and not in the library mooning over music.

With the arrival of Conrad’s relations, the Heidersdorf ménage went off the British schedule imposed upon it by its English chatelaine, and dinner was in the middle of the day. One
did not wear formal dress for the evening meal, for it was remarked that only Englishwomen wore evening gowns as a matter of course every day of their lives, as though it was not in quite good taste. Much more food, and very German food, was served—the peas were cooked in vinegar and grease, and such strange delicacies as eels stewed in beer, carp in wine sauce, goose stuffed with apples, venison basted with sour cream and served with cranberry jam and vinegared beans made their appearance. Afternoon tea became coffee with a spirit kettle and a silver teapot as a sort of after-thought, so that tea as usual was defiantly partaken of by Rosalind and Phoebe, and sometimes, indulgently, as though to lend them
countenance
, by Prince Conrad.