“You will! You’ll dine with me! And you’ll tell me about yourself. And why you are in that horrible house. And—and everything!”
“Yes, on one——”
“Ah, you are kind! I was afraid of to-night—afraid of sitting alone by that fire, hearing voices and seeing things! But now I shall be all right. Then, perhaps, I shall sleep to-night.”
“I’m staying on one condition,” Rendell announced firmly, “and that is that you have a rest now. I’m going to pull that sofa nearer the fire and you’re going to have an hour’s sleep.”
“Very well. And you’ll sit there and smoke. Wait!”
She ran into the bedroom, returning almost immediately with an eiderdown.
“Look!”
“Good! Now, down you go!”
She obeyed him and he covered her with the eiderdown.
“Now go to sleep at once. Not another word!”
“What a nice person you are!”
“To sleep at once,” Rendell repeated, switching off the lights.
He sat down in an arm-chair with an air of finality.
Ten minutes later the sound of regular breathing haunted the room.
Rendell’s visit to Rosalie created an intimacy which transformed his days so swiftly that the process was effected before he was aware of it.
During the next month they met almost daily, and most of these meetings were of long duration. Frequently they would spend the whole day together, the result being that he obtained a deeper knowledge of her than a greater number of briefer meetings, over a longer period, would have afforded.
Soon he half believed that several different women inhabited her body in turn—one yielding possession to the next with bewildering rapidity.
The range of her emotions; the lightning transitions from mood to mood; her sudden exaltation; her swift relapse to inertia, all fostered the belief that although, physically, she was one woman—psychically, she was a dozen.
He would leave her, apparently tranquil as a child, intent on some problem relating to clothes. He would return and discover an hysterical being, lashed by memories and fears. As any attempt at consolation precipitated a new crisis, he learned to say nothing—and to wait. And he learned this from her maid, whose devotion to Rosalie beggared every example of loyalty known to Rendell. She loved and served her with the self-immolation of a saint.
“How on earth do you stand this!” Rendell exclaimed on one occasion when his patience had collapsed.
“She makes you forget it all with a word or a look,” the girl replied, with the conviction of experience.
Again and again, Rendell had reason to remember Wrayburn’s statement that Rosalie was a “psychic invalid,” but as this diagnosis ignored her fascination, it gradually lost its significance. She quickened Rendell’s imagination, thereby making the world more beautiful and more mysterious. He began to feel life as she felt it. And he learned that although she had no mental consistency, she possessed an emotional logic which revealed itself only to sympathy. He began to respect this, although her actions often dismayed or embarrassed him.
Impulse ruled her. Lacking it, she lapsed into inertia. Prompted by it, she would act instantly and with a total disregard of the conventions. At its bidding, she would rise and leave a restaurant, speak to a stranger, or do some deed which demanded considerable moral courage. Her sensibility to atmosphere—her penetration into the characters of people, with no data other than their appearance—fascinated and bewildered Rendell till he could not decide whether he had been blind before meeting her, or whether he, too, was becoming a psychic invalid as a result of her influence.
Her demands, therefore, were many and varied, but he yielded to all of them. She was experiencing freedom for the first time and was determined to indulge its privileges. This determination expressed itself in a number of ways, one being that she wanted to explore a London she had only glimpsed from the security of Vivian’s car. She had known only the thoroughfares, she now made Rendell take her into the by-ways. It was her reaction to her husband’s orthodoxy. The sheltered life had been a cage—a warm, spacious, luxurious one—but a cage none the less. Also, this penetration into an unknown London set a gap between her and her memories. It created the illusion that a long period of time separated her from them. As nothing recalled the past, it receded.
Often, however, Rendell found her impulsive acts embarrassing.
One night, when they were walking down Bond Street, she suddenly became interested in a street walker, who was hanging about with a dog on a lead.
“Why does that woman have a dog?” she demanded.
“I don’t know, Rosalie, just a whim, I expect.”
“Perhaps she loves the dog—perhaps it’s the only thing she does love. I’m going to ask her.”
She turned and went up to the woman, Rendell having no alternative but to follow, which he did very reluctantly.
“Why do you have that dog with you?”