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Page 8
"You are like a little frightened bird," he said presently. "And
there is nothing to cause you the least fear. We shall soon come
to the lovely gardens, and watch the lowering sun make its
beautiful effects in the trees, and we shall hear the nightingales
throbbing out love songs--the world is full of rest and peace--
when we have had enough passion and strife and want its change--
but you do not know anything of it, and this simple drive is
causing you tumults and emotions--is it not so?"
"Yes," said Stella, with a feeling that she had burnt all her
ships.
"It is because you have never been allowed to be YOU, I suppose,"
he went on softly. "So doing a natural and simple thing seems
frightful--because it would seem so to the rigid aunt. Now, I have
been ME ever since I was born--I have done just what seemed best
to me. Do you suppose I am not aware that the way my hair is cut
is a shock to most civilized persons; and that you English would
strongly disapprove of my watch and my many other things. But I
like them myself--it is no trouble for one of my valets to draw a
straight line with a pair of scissors--and if I must look at the
time, I prefer to look at something beautiful. I am entirely
uninfluenced by the thoughts or opinions of any people--they do
not exist for me except in so far as they interest me and are
instructive or amusing. I never permit myself to be bored for an
instant."
"How good that must be," Stella ventured to say--her courage was
returning.
"Civilized human beings turn existence into a prison," he went on,
meditatively, "and loaded themselves with shackles, because some
convention prevents their doing what would give them innocent
pleasure. If I had been under the dominion of these things we
should not now be enjoying this delightful drive--at least, it is
delightful to me--to be thus near you and alone out of doors."
Stella did not speak, she was altogether too full of emotion to
trust herself to words just yet. They had turned into the Corso by
now, and, as ever, it appeared as though it were a holiday, so
thronged with pedestrians was the whole thoroughfare. Count
Roumovski seemed quite unconcerned, but Miss Rawson shrank back
into her corner, a new fear in her heart.
"Do not be so nervous," her companion said gently. "I always
calculate the chances before I suggest another person's risking
anything for me. They are a million to one that anyone could
recognize you in that veil and that cloak; believe me, although I
am not of your country, I am at least a gentleman, and would not
have persuaded you to come if there had been any danger of
complications for you."
Stella clasped her hands convulsively--and he drew a little nearer
her.
"Do put all agitating ideas out of your mind," he said, his blue
eyes, with their benign expression, seeking hers and compelling
them at last to look at him. "Do you understand that it is foolish
to spoil what we have by useless tremors. You are here with me--
for the next hour--shall we not try to be happy?"
"Yes," murmured Miss Rawson, and allowed herself to be magnetized
into calmness.
"When we have passed the Piazza del Popolo and the entrance to the
Pincio, I will have the car opened; then we can see all the
charming young green, and I will tell you of what these gardens
were long ago, and you shall see them with new eyes."
Stella, by some sort of magic, seemed to have recovered her self-
possession as his eyes looked into hers, and she chatted to him
naturally, and the next half hour passed like some fairy tale. His
deep, quiet voice took her into realms of fancy that her
imagination had never even dreamed about. His cultivation was
immense, and the Rome of the Caesars appeared to be as familiar to
him as that of 1911.
The great beauty of the Borghese Gardens was at its height at the
end of the day, the nightingales throbbed from the bushes, and the
air was full of the fresh, exquisite scents of the late spring, as
the day grew toward evening and all nature seemed full of beauty
and peace. It can easily be imagined what this drive meant, then,
to a fine, sensitive young woman, whose every instinct of youth
and freedom and life had been crushed into undeveloped nothingness
by years of gray convention in an old-fashioned English cathedral
town.
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