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And this is what I said: "Gentles all, squires and dames, loving and loved, here is rose-scented news for you. The unknown poet has sung again, and Messer Guido has the words in his fingers." Now there came a hush of talking in the room as I said these words, and Messer Guido looked at me something reprovingly, because of my forwardness, and all eyes were fixed upon the pair of us.
And they talked on of little else than of the great steeple-chase of the Service, for the next hour in the Tabak-Parliament, while the great clouds of scented smoke circled heavily round; making a halo of Turkish above the gold locks of the Titanic Seraph, steeping Chesterfield's velvets in strong odors of Cavendish, and drifting a light rose-scented mist over Bertie's long, lithe limbs, light enough and skilled enough to disdain all "training for the weights."
As he spoke, he pulled off the pilgrim's gown, and Huguette stood before him in her familiar boy's dress of green. "Hide among the roses until the sport begins," he cried. The girl flung her arms about him. "Dear François!" she cried, and then ran swiftly away from him and disappeared into the rose-scented night. Villon looked after the girl as she ran.
The stillness of the house was as the stillness of ages. Human creatures had come and gone, as the days went and came, sunshine coming in at one moment, darkness falling the next, nothing altering the calm routine, the established order. Pains and fevers and heartbreaks, and death itself, would disappear and leave no sign, and all remain the same in the quaint rose-scented room.
Willie reiterated. Mr. Eldridge shrugged his shoulders. "Take it or leave it," he said. "You're welcome to your own way. Only don't say I didn't warn yer." Flinging this parting shot backward into the room, Janoah Eldridge passed out into the rose-scented sunshine.
Davies and Risk, when called to supper, smelled strongly of rose-scented cold-cream; and Lund was unsparing in sarcastic remarks on the extreme floridness of complexion of the entire party. "Ben, don't have any powder lying round loose to-morrow, with such a face as that. As for Creamer, he can't have any cotton sheets to-night, for fear of a conflagration.
She decided to wait until he came to look for her, then as swiftly changed her mind. Rose was still playing. Isabel hummed the melody to herself, not noting that she was off the key, and started slowly toward the house, by another path. Allison was standing in the shadow of a maple, listening to the music and drawing in deep breaths of the rose-scented air.
To an uninitiated mind it would have seemed marvelous and beautiful in its combination of simplicity and intricacy, to have noted the delicate tactics with which Bertie conducted himself between his two claimants bending to his Countess with a reverent devotion that assuaged whatever of incensed perception of her unacknowledged rival might be silently lurking in her proud heart; wheeling up to the pony-trap under cover of speaking to the men from Egerton Lodge, and restoring the Zu-Zu from sulkiness, by a propitiatory offer of a little gold sherry-flash, studded with turquoises, just ordered for her from Regent Street, which, however, she ungraciously contemned, because she thought it had only cost twenty guineas; anchoring the victimized Seraph beside her by an adroit "Ah! by the way, Rock, give Zu-Zu one of your rose-scented papelitos; she's been wild to smoke them"; and leaving the Zu-Zu content at securing a future Duke, was free to canter back and flirt on the offside of Vivandiere, till the "signal," the "cast," made with consummate craft, the waving of the white sterns among the brushwood, the tightening of girths, the throwing away of cigars, the challenge, the whimper, and the "stole away!" sent the field headlong down the course after as fine a long-legged greyhound fox as ever carried a brush.
But somehow they never touched me; I lost sight of them in the rose-scented smoke, only the sweet, slow voice which I could have sworn was that of Mameena, murmured in my ear well, words known to her and me alone that I had never breathed to any living being, though of course I am aware now that they must also have been known to somebody else. "Do you doubt me any longer?" went on the murmuring.
If she was not to go to Oliver, impossible that she could live on in this rose-scented stillness of the old house and garden, surrounded by comfort, tranquillity, beauty, while the agony of the world rang in her ears wild voices! speaking universal, terrible, representative things, yet in tones piteously dear and familiar, close, close to her heart.
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