One Coin in the Fountain

by Anita Charles

  If Heather had met an old friend it was a man who was only too conscious of being a fool to wish to call for her at the hotel and meet the surprised looks of people like Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett and Rose, who knew just how badly she had treated him in the past.

  “But I’ll admit I’m a bit surprised,” Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett said as they sat over sherry before going in to dinner. “Although it only goes to prove how weak the strongest man can turn out to be when a clever woman gets a tight hold of his emotions! And Sir Laurence is certainly a strong man, but Heather, apparently, is Heather!”

  Rose, as they went in to dinner, hardly knew whether to despise Sir Laurence or to pity him. But she did know that she despised herself, and she was determined, if it was humanly possible, to outgrow her weakness where he was concerned.

  The following morning she again went out early, but this time she wandered about Rome with only half a mind on its architectural splendours, and the other half in an almost numb state. She kept her eyes averted from every passing vehicle in case she should recognize Heather being driven in Sir

  Laurence’s sleek Bentley, and in the tiny square which echoes with the exuberant music of the Fountain de Trevi stood looking at the coins in the basin, and resisted a childish impulse to add yet another one to their number and make another wish.

  What good were wishes when there wasn’t the remotest chance that they would come true?

  As she wended her way back to the hotel she wished that Camillo had not gone to Florence to transact some business for his uncle, and that she would find his bright blue car standing outside the hotel. For she liked Camillo enough to be capable of finding a certain amount of diversion in his company, whereas, in the company of his uncle, it was not so easy to relax. She was not conceited enough to share Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett’s belief—which was probably no more than wishful thinking—that he was seriously interested in her, but he did treat her in rather a special way which alarmed her when she was alone with him, because under no circumstances could she marry a man with whom she was not in the least in love.

  Particularly when she was in love with another man! . . . a man who had kissed her lips lightly and casually because the sight of them had suddenly tempted him!

  She walked fast back to the hotel, wishing she could blot out the memory, and she was almost relieved when she went up to their suite to find that Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett had made up her mind to rest that day (the Prince’s dinner-party was the following night!) and was having lunch sent up to her in her own room. That meant that Rose was able to avoid the dining-room also, and the sight of Heather’s satisfied face as she spooned her soup, and she had a light snack sent up to her in the sitting-room. Afterwards she spent an hour or so reading to Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett, and writing a few of her letters, and shortly before tea she took them down to the vestibule to post. She had just slipped them in the box reserved for visitors’ mail, and was turning back towards the lift when Heather came quickly through the entrance, followed by Sir Laurence. Outside, through the glass doors, Rose could see Sir Laurence’s car standing in the courtyard.

  Heather was wearing powder-blue and white, and she had an enormous white pouch handbag underneath her arm. Her delicate complexion was lightly flushed and her eyes bright. She called out gaily to Rose as the latter turned:

  “What! No princes around today? You must feel neglected!”

  Her voice was mocking, for ever since she had discovered that Rose was receiving a certain amount of attention in Rome, and was far better dressed than she remembered her, she had obviously thought twice about her decision to be friendly.

  “Good afternoon, Rose!” Sir Laurence’s voice was cool, and even a little curt. “I began to think you and Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett had left Rome! Whenever I called or telephoned you were neither of your available to either see me or listen to me!” Rose looked up at him as if she was taken slightly aback.

  “I didn’t know you—you had called!”

  “Well, I did! I told you when the Prince was taking you out to lunch that I wanted to talk to you. Can you spare me a few moments now?” Heather looked at them both with an odd gleam in her eyes.

  “You obviously don’t want me around,” she said, “but if you’re going to deliver Rose a lecture, Lance, be as gentle as possible! Remember, we’re only young once!” She waved an airy farewell ere she moved towards the lift. “And thank you so much for the drive!”

  Rose felt as if something rose up in her throat and made an attempt to choke her. He had just taken Heather, who had treated him so appallingly, for a drive, and at the same time he expected her, Rose, to be constantly available whenever he wished to see her.

  She swallowed the indignation that had caused an actual lump in her throat, but her eyes flashed the

  most unusual green fire at him.

  “I can’t think what you wish to talk to me about,” she said, “but since you apparently do wish to talk to me about something, we had better find somewhere quiet. The writing-room is usually pretty empty at this hour of the day.” She led the way to it like an affronted, redheaded duchess, and Sir Laurence followed with a frown on his face. The writing-room, when they reached it, was empty, and he shut the door closely to ensure greater privacy.

  “You look offended, Rose,” he remarked. “Have I done anything to offend you?”

  “No, of course not.” But her sensitive face flushed as she looked into his eyes. “However, you can hardly expect me to be always on hand whenever you wish to see me, and I resented the way in which you spoke to me in front of Miss Willoughby. You must remember you are not any longer my guardian.”

  “I’m not in the least likely to forget it,” he assured her, the line of his lips looking suddenly rather thin. “You have made it increasingly plain to me that you don’t wish me to interfere at all in your life! But the other day, when we had lunch together and spent the whole of the afternoon together as well, you were not in this strange, hostile mood. Has it anything to do with the suggestion I made to you, or has it something to do with the sudden arrival on the scene of Miss Willoughby?—as you always preferred to call her?”

  Rose felt slightly taken aback by this direct method of questioning, but she refused to lower her eyes.

  “When you made that suggestion to me the other afternoon,” she counter-questioned, “did you know that Heather was on her way to Rome?” For an instant she could have sworn that his amazement was genuine. And then such a bleak, hard, cold look overspread his face, followed by nothing short of a wall of inscrutability and reserve, that it actually filled her with a faint feeling of apprehension, and

  she didn’t know what to think.

  “I see!” he exclaimed. “So that’s what you think, is it?”

  She felt the colour burning more painfully into her cheeks and her eyes looked both uncertain and appealing.

  “But you did know she was coming, didn’t you? You knew that she hadn’t married, and that she was still free, and you said yourself that you needed protection from undesirable females! I thought at the time you were joking—I’ve never thought you weak, but . . . but Heather is—Heather’s the woman you were going to marry . . .”

  “And, of course, I’m still violently in love with her?” “I don’t know very much about love,” she admitted, pushing back a strand of her hair with rather a pathetic gesture, and looking at him with a young, confused gleam in her eyes. “But I shouldn’t think that—that it could die quite so quickly—not if it really was love, as everyone thought at the time. . .” “Oh, did they?” looking icily interested. “Including you, of course? In spite of the fact that you’d only just left school!”

  “I was nineteen,” she answered quietly, “and it seemed pretty obvious. You allowed her to do exactly as she liked with you, and she flirted outrageously right under your eyes. But you never seemed to mind! You never seemed to mind anything that she did, or how closely she often came to actually humiliating you,” with that faint note of scorn creeping into her cl
ear voice that had crept into it before when she had addressed him on this same subject. “But I wished many times that you were not so blind.”

  “For a nineteen-year-old you appear to have been extraordinarily observant,” he remarked, looking a little pale and taut, but with a coldly humorous look round his mouth. “Quite remarkably observant! And I suppose you were certain that my awakening was as inevitable as the four seasons, and just a question of time?”

  “I didn’t expect it to happen—when it did happen!” she answered in a voice that was suddenly very low.

  “No, and I don’t suppose any of the others who were looking on you—like you!—and seeing most of the game, as people apparently do at a time like that, expected it, either! That was an unrehearsed effort, wasn’t it?”

  His smile was harsh and cynical, and all in a moment her heart contracted with pity for him, and some of it must have been given away by her eyes. For he suddenly put her on her guard by asking curiously:

  “Why were you so concerned about me at that time, Rose? Why did you so particularly wish I wasn’t so blind?”

  She looked at him for a moment as if he had startled her, and then she looked away.

  “I suppose it was because I—I was fond of you,” striving so hard to sound quite casual about it that she actually sounded a little prim. “I always have been fond of you . . . You’ve been so good to me, and kind.”

  “And you felt much as you would have felt if you’d seen your father making an unwise marriage?”

  “Y-yes, I expect so . . .”

  “Or your brother, shall we say?” a little more dryly. “Since I don’t think I’m quite old enough to be your father!”

  Rose looked at him rather helplessly, and he looked back at her with a strong tinge of mockery.

  “In any case, there are years between us, and your concern for me couldn’t have been actuated by feelings any warmer than that! I accept that, especially as you looked almost startled when I asked you to marry me the other day!”

  He started to pace up and down the room, and then he stopped and faced her again, his expression quite unrevealing.

  “And I suppose you’ve quite made up your mind that, as Heather has come back into my life, my hopeless love for her has been revived, and everything is more or less as it was between us? You could be right, of course, for there are very few of us who benefit from the lessons in our past— even the most salutary lessons! —and a man in love, as I’m sure you would agree, is a pitifully weak creature!” He shook his head at her. “Pitifully weak, I’m afraid Rose, so you’ll be able to despise me afresh, and pour some more of that delicate scorn of yours over my head!”

  Rose swallowed hard. For the life of her she couldn’t tell whether he was merely mocking her or whether he was serious. And the fact that he had just brought Heather back to the hotel, that she had thanked him for the drive, and seemed to be on excellent terms with him, was surely an indication that he was serious!

  And he had made no attempt to deny that he had known she was coming to Rome!

  “So perhaps it’s very fortunate that you refused to marry me the other afternoon, Rose, or even to consider marrying me, for things could have been a little awkward now that Heather and I have actually met again! You do see that, don’t you?” He shot her an almost oblique glance and re-started his pacing up and down. “And, as it is, you can marry your Prince, and I’ll marry Heather, and we’ll both live happily ever afterwards, with no rude awakenings for either of us. Don’t you agree?”

  Rose tried to say something, but the words wouldn’t pass her lips, and he smiled most peculiarly, she thought.

  “Won’t we?” he demanded. “And, from your point of view, a marriage to de Lippi will be a much safer thing than marriage to a man who would have used you as a barrier between himself and his various feminine entanglements! For anyone as beautiful as you are, Rose, and as sweet, that would be a poor outlook, and you were wise not to take it on—not even for the sake of Enderby!”

  The sheer, harsh mockery, behind which lay a kind of harsher bitterness, in his voice, disturbed her all at once immensely, and she looked at him with sudden unconcealed anxiety to know what it was that he was trying to convey to her. But the coldness of his expression caused her to stammer painfully as she said:

  “I hope very much that—that if you do think seriously of marrying Heather . . .—well, I hope you’ll think about it a great deal before you finally make up your mind! In some ways Signora Bardoli—Signora Bardoli would be a safer person for you to marry! She—I’m quite sure she wouldn’t ever let you

  down. . .”

  “Thank you very much, Rose,” he returned, with a kind of heavy gratitude in his voice. “It’s immensely good of you to concern yourself with my love life, but I think I’ll manage to sort it out by myself—left to myself!” He moved towards the door, and then turned and sketched her a kind of ironic little bow. “You’ve probably got an appointment for the evening, so I won’t take up any more of your time.”

  “But there was something — something you wanted to say to me?” she reminded him, feeling desperately that she couldn’t let him go like this.

  “Was there?” His eyebrows arched. “Oh, yes, I wanted to know whether it would be out of place to offer you any congratulations? Whether, as a result of your lunch pour deux the other day, you and Prince Paul de Lippi have any glad tidings for your friends? Or is it Camillo, after all, who appeals to you most?”

  Rose’s hands locked and unlocked themselves as she stood there in front of him, feeling, and looking, a little pale—for the flush of embarrassment had faded right away from her cheeks. But her large, greeny-grey eyes were as inscrutable and unreadable as his own.

  “If that was all you wanted to see me about,” she said at last, “there wasn’t really any necessity to call and telephone so often, was there?”

  “On the contrary,” he assured her coolly. “I wanted to be one of the first to congratulate you. My little Rose . . .! Taking such a stupendous step—I’m referring, of course, to marriage to the Prince, not Camillo, who wouldn’t offer it—and perhaps having an unpleasant awakening herself one day!”

  And then someone came and tried the door of the writing-room, and the interview had, perforce, to be broken up. Rose accompanied her ex-guardian out into the main entrance to the hotel, and then watched him striding through it and out to his parked car.

  CHAPTER XIV

  The dinner at Prince Paul de Lippi's villa was all, and more, than Rose had felt certain she could expect, but there were more fellow guests than she expected, and somewhat to her relief Camillo had returned from Florence.

  The Prince seemed to enjoy presenting Rose to the rest of his guests, and as she was wearing a dress of very stiff white taffeta that was an excellent foil for her colouring, and very youthfully simple at the same time, he had every excuse for feeling as if he was drawing particular attention to the latest acquisition to one of his delicate china collections, or some other rare trifle he was thinking of adding to the contents of the villa.

  Indeed, as the evening progressed and he constantly drew her into the limelight, Rose had the feeling that he really was doing it deliberately, and Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett began to be comfortably certain of it. She beamed at Rose, told herself that it didn’t matter if a man was twenty years older than the girl he proposed to marry when that girl was as striking as Rose—and therefore, the sooner someone took charge of her the better! —and when he was so rich that he could make up to her for his lack of youth by surrounding her with every comfort! To say nothing of turning her into a princess, which even in the year 1956 was still something!

  Camillo was still looking, Rose thought, a trifle downcast, and when she accepted an invitation to accompany him outside for a breath of fresh air she discovered, as the result of judicious questioning, that he was feeling downcast.

  Camillo admitted to her that he was in love with Francesca de Boccacello, but her mother expected her
to marry well—which meant where she would be financially secure—and Camillo, if he ever did marry, would have to do so for much the same reason. Rose was shocked by a young man with his assets calmly resigning himself to doing without love in his life simply because, from his cradle, he had been accustomed to luxury, but she couldn’t help sympathizing with him because, m his mood of dejection, and looking, as he did, almost devastatingly handsome, there was something about him that appealed to the maternal side of her.

  When she suggested that his uncle, if he seriously wished to marry Francesca, might come to his rescue he looked at her sideways as if he wondered whether she quite realized what she was saying.

  “My uncle—as you should know, Signorina Rose!—is planning to marry again, and although if he didn’t I might inherit something from him some day (in fact I almost certainly would!), the lady he is proposing to marry is so very charming that I can quite understand his desire to add her, a little dryly, “to his collection of beautiful things!”

  Rose looked at him rather sharply.

  “His—collection of beautiful things?”

  “Yes.” He shrugged his shoulders slightly. “Do not let me disillusion you, Rose, but my uncle is a connoisseur first and foremost, and it is your looks that appeal to him above everything else! You have such a rare type of beauty, and there is something about you that calls out to be cherished and protected. My uncle would take a delight in cherishing you!”

  “But,” Rose said slowly, staring at the moonlit paths and the exquisite examples of garden statuary that showed up whitely in the same clear light, “I have no intention of marrying your uncle, Camillo.”