A Woman's Will - Anne Warner (english novels for students txt) 📗

at the dark face opposite her.

“Why may we not walk?” he asked, looking up as if she had spoken aloud. “I will be _très raisonable_.”

“It isn’t that,” she replied, annoyed to feel herself blushing; “it is that it is so wet. I should ruin a skirt.”

He started to argue the question but just then the salon door opened and Mrs. Jones came in with a book in her hand. He saw the book and she knew it. Mrs. Jones had evidently come to stay. The salon was public property, and Mrs. Jones had just as much right there as they had. Nevertheless when she smiled and said, “Shall I disturb you?” they resented her question as a sarcasm unworthy of Genoa’s proximity. Von Ibn stood up and said, “Certainly not,” with a politeness which did credit to his bringing up, but Rosina as she threaded her needle took a vow to remember to _never_, in all time to come, pause for an instant even in a room where two people were talking together.

Mrs. Jones seated herself and then made the discovery that she had left her glasses in her own room; she rose at once and started to get them.

“Now we _must_ go out,” he exclaimed, hurriedly, “we may not talk here with her. She speaks French as well as we, and German much better than you;” he referred to the cosmopolitan custom of altering one’s tongue to disagree with an (unwelcome) third party.

Rosina was already huddling her work together in hot haste.

“Yes,” she said, “I have a short skirt that I can wear.” She rose and went towards the door. “I won’t be five minutes,” she said, turning the knob.

Mrs. Jones was leisurely about coming back. She did not want to inconvenience them too much, but she did want to find the salon empty on her return, and she found it so.

While she was smiling and settling herself, they were going down the three flights of stairs and out of the large main door. The rain had ceased but it was still blackly and distinctly wet. Von Ibn had a tightly rolled umbrella which he held with a grasp that somehow suggested thoughts of their other promenade at nightfall.

“You can walk well, yes?” he said, as they turned in the direction of the Isar.

“In this skirt,” she laughed, glancing down at her costume whose original foundations had been laid for golf, “in this skirt I am equal to anything!”

“But if you slip?” he supposed, anxiously.

“You ought to see the soles of my boots. I sent them to the little shoemaker in the Wurzerstrasse and he soled them with rubber half an inch thick.”

“How much is an inch?” he asked.

“Twice the width of the rubber on my boots.”

“No, but earnestly,” he said, “is it a _centimètre_?”

“Two _centimètres_ and a half make one inch.”

“You are droll, you English and Americans,” he said, “you see nothing but your own way. I have heard Englishmen laugh as to how yet the Russians count their time different from the civilization part of the world, and then all England and America do their measure and weight in a manner so uneven that a European is useless to even attempt to understand it. There was a man there at Lucerne,--what did he say to me? ‘A mark is a quarter, is it not?’ that is what he asked. ‘_Mon Dieu_,’ I said, ‘if you cut it in four pieces it is four quarters, and if you leave it whole it is whole,’ then he looked to find me _bête_, and I was very sure that he was, and we spoke no more.”

Rosina laughed.

“He meant a quarter of a dollar,” she explained.

“I know that. You do not really think that I did not know that, do you? It was for his poor careless grammar that I find the American even more _bête_ than for his ignorance. Do you believe that in my own tongue I would speak as many of you speak yours? In my own tongue I am above correction.”

They were under the long arcade in front of the Regierung and in view of the discussion which seemed impending she judged it advisable to say, with a gesture:

“There is where we met Jack; you remember?”

Von Ibn looked quickly about.

“Yes, it was here,” he said, and then he shuddered slightly. “It was very well to laugh after, but that might have been so bad. I was angry and I struck a fearful blow then; I have often think of it when we were travelling together.”

She grew thoughtful also, and her imagination found food among some miserable possibilities which might have been.

So they came to the river banks and the Maximilianbrücke, and paused by its rail.

The air was grand, fresh and moist, reminiscent of summer’s breath while also prophetic of winter’s bite, and the Isar swept below them, carrying its hurry of tumult away, away, far into the west, towards a wealth of rose and golden sky. Between the glory and the water, in the middle distance, lay a line of roofs stretching irregularly into the blackness of their own shadows, and beyond them was the forest, to the fringing haze of whose bare branches the distance lent a softness not their own. The banks of the Promenade were still green, but the masses of vine that trailed in the green ripples were all of a crimson or reddish brown, and the shrubs showed here and there an echo of the same color.

It was beautiful and wonderful to see, and they stood still and feasted their eyes for some long minutes.

“Oh, Isar,” Rosina cried softly, holding her hand out towards the singing waters below, “when shall I see you again?”

“You will return some day,” her companion said hopefully.

“Who can tell?”

“But always you must come over some bridge to return to-night.”

She felt that such levity jarred upon her mood, and refused to return his smile. She did not like him to feel like smiling too often these days.

“Do not be of a bad humor,” he entreated. “I am this afternoon of such a good one; and how can you know that you will not return? A woman can never be decided, so you may very well see the Isar soon again. _Vous comprenez?_”

“Is it being bad-humored to be sad?” she asked; “and why can’t I be decided if I want to be?”

“Because,” he said, wisely, “you are a woman; and a woman is very foolish to ever be decided, for she always changes her mind; and then all her decided seems to have been quite useless.”

Rosina felt that this sentence called for study before reply, and so walked on without speaking.

“Is that not so?” he asked, as they went down by the little stone stair.

“I never change.”

“Oh, now you know well that you do not speak the truth,--you are so very changeable. This afternoon, _par exemple_, when I first come to ask you to go out, you say you cannot of any possibility make it, and then, very suddenly, we go.”

“But I recollected that I might wear this skirt.”

“And there was that lady, also,” he said thoughtfully.

“Yes, she was there, too.”

“But always you did change.”

“I don’t call it being changeable when one has a good reason for so doing.”

He stopped short; and she, after going a few steps further, discovered herself to be unaccompanied and stopped also.

“What is the matter?”

“Suddenly, I think.”

“Can’t you walk and think at the same time?”

He smiled, and came up with her again.

“If I make you a good reason--” he began, and then hesitated and was silent.

They followed the muddy path almost to the Luitpoldbrücke before he continued his phrase.

“If one can change for a good reason, and if I make you a good reason, then will you change about me?”

She drew a quick little breath.

“I can’t change in that way,” she said; “you know that I do not want to marry again: marriage is too awful an undertaking. Don’t you see that even now it does not make you always happy to be around me--”

“I am never around you,” he exclaimed indignantly. “I never have hardly touch you. I have been with you not as a man, but as an angel. _Je me comporte comme un ange--comme un ange--c’est moi qui vous le dit!_ I have given you one kiss such as a small baby might give its mother, and that is all;--and then you say that I am always around you.”

He ceased speaking, and looked straitly and darkly before him. She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

“I tell you,” he continued violently after a short interval, “I am very much too good. Whatever you bid me do, that I do. Whatever you bid me not do, that I do not. And you do not thank me, or trust me, or treat me as a friend. _Vous avez toujours peur de moi._ When I approach you, you have always the air to expect that I will displease you. Have I deserved that? Have I behaved badly once? Did I kiss you when you knew nothing and I held you there in the mud--the night when I lose my umbrella? _Mon Dieu_, you are very _drôle_, if you have known many men and do not appreciate me.”

He stopped as if choked.

They had passed beyond the bridge and entered upon a path along the river bank, a path bordered with willow trees. The sky was more brilliantly gorgeous than ever, but under foot it was wet indeed.

“Try not to stamp so much as you walk,” she asked him very gently; “you keep splashing me.”

“What is splash?” he demanded gloomily; “something that annoys your ears?”

“No, something that spoils my boots.”

“I do not care if I spoil those boots; I find them most ugly.”

“Perhaps; but I could not be here but for them.”

He walked on with somewhat less vigor.

“Let us talk about us,” he suggested, presently.

“With reference to what?”

“To me.”

“No, no,” she said unwillingly.

“Yes; why not?”

“You always come back to that same subject; your mind appears to follow a circuit, like a squirrel in a ring.”

“‘Wheel,’ you mean.”

“Well, ‘wheel,’ then.”

“What squirrel? We never have talked of a squirrel before.”

Rosina’s laugh rang out among the willows.

“_Decidément vous n’êtes pas du tout poli_,” he cried angrily. “You say I am like a squirrel; I ask what squirrel, and you begin to laugh.”

“I never said that you were like a squirrel,” she exclaimed, greatly shocked; “how can you think that I would say such a thing?”

“You did,” he declared bitterly. “You said I was like a squirrel in his wheel, because I tell you so often that I love you.”

“Oh, monsieur, you _know_ that I never meant it in that way; how can you think for an instant that I could have--have said that--that--” She felt it impossible to define her offence again without having the corners of her mouth give way; but she went close beside him and faced his vexation with earnest, upraised eyes the while that she laid one hand upon his arm