CHAPTER III
Max Veldon frowned as a tap came at his door. He was the occupant of a very large suite in a very impressive London hotel, and when the interruption came he was at his desk, and had just put down the telephone receiver.
“Come in,” he snapped. He had a quiet voice—a deadly quiet voice—and underlying it was a continuous note of impatience. It also had a very faint Austrian accent.
A liveried hotel porter stood aside for Janie to enter. She had lost herself in the maze of thickly-carpeted corridors once she left the lift behind her, and the porter had come to her rescue. He looked at her pityingly when he saw the way in which the musician regarded her as he stood up reluctantly to greet her.
“Sit down.” He thrust a chair towards her. It was a spindly-legged chair covered in satin damask, and Janie sat down on the edge of it. The man resumed his seat at the desk. “You are Miss Dallas?” he said. “Miss Jane Dallas?” His inscrutable dark eyes made her feel cold and unacceptable as they roved over her, “I’ve just been talking to Miss Brandt on the telephone, and I’ll confess I don’t quite understand why she is taking such a risk. Such an appalling risk!” His voice hardened, his eyes grew bleak and cold as arrow-heads. “Have you anything to do with it, or is this notion all hers?”
“It certainly isn’t mine.” Janie found it impossible to prevent her voice from trembling, but part of the unsteadiness was due to indignation on her part. “You surely don’t imagine that I thought of such a dangerous piece of deception? For one thing, I don’t really look in the least like Miss Brandt—”
“You look sufficiently like her to deceive some people if they haven’t already met you,” he cut her short brusquely. “Or Miss Brandt, of course! Anyone who knows Miss Brandt as I do wouldn’t be deceived for a moment.”
“No, of course not,” she agreed, moistening her lips. “But Miss Brandt thought ... when I’ve had my hair re-styled, and I’m wearing different clothes...”
‘You most certainly will have to wear different clothes,” he agreed, and the glance of contempt he cast at her neat grey suit and modest accessories made something inside her feel as if it was curling up after the assault of a whiplash. “Very different clothes!”
She bit her lip.
“I’ve never had occasion to wear anything but very simple clothes, Mr. Veldon,” she told him. “Quite apart from the fact that I’ve never had the money to buy anything but simple clothes.”
“Quite,” he agreed coldly. “You do, in fact, belong to an entirely different world from the one which contains Miss Brandt,” and he rose and started pacing about the room in his superbly tailored suit; a slim live-wire of a man with a debonair touch lent to his appearance by the flower in his buttonhole and his carelessly flowing tie, but with nothing else that was debonair about him.
There was a kind of fluid grace to his movements which did nothing to detract from, the impression of primitiveness which he exuded ... and Janie knew why, when he took his place on a rostrum and lifted his baton, the women in the audience watched him with an almost suffocating sensation of excitement—as she had done once. For he was like an elegant caged tiger with music in his blood, and at a distance one didn’t see the bleakness in his eyes ... the criticism. One only knew that his eyes must be dark, and that darkness predominated where he was concerned.
Dark eyes, dark hair, an impeccable set of faultless dark tails, with a white tie highlighting his square dark chin.
Exciting under the lights, with the orchestra swelling into a crescendo ... but forbidding in a hotel room!
“You work for Miss Brandt’s father?” he asked, his tone as remote as a falling star.
“Yes,” she answered.
“He is, I believe, an antique dealer?”
Janie supposed that that could be one description of old Hermann Brandt’s disgracefully cluttered junk shop in a corner of London where antiques were not much sought after, and nodded her head.
“In that case you probably know a lot about antiques, but nothing about music?”
“On the contrary,” she replied, “I know practically nothing about antiques, but I do love music.”
“So?” he said, and sent her a long and curious glance. "A lot of people love music, but their knowledge of it is grossly limited.”
“Try me,” she invited, when he had seated himself again at his desk. “Put me through a sort of catechism, and I’ll answer you to the best of my ability.”
“Then what do you know of Brahms?” he asked.
She gave him a concise but correct history of the life of Brahms.
“Beethoven?”
She sketched the life of Beethoven briefly but almost poignantly. His eyebrows ascended.
“You have mugged all this up for my benefit?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” she assured him. “That wasn’t necessary, because my father was Stephen Dallas, and he wrote a book called The Great Ones. It wasn’t, unfortunately, a great success, but it was a part of my reading when I was still not much more than a child.”
“I know the book,” he told her. “As a matter of fact, I’ve got it in my library.” He stared hard at her. “So you’re the daughter of Stephen Dallas, and he no doubt passed on to you his ability to appreciate music. Is that why you say you love it?”
“I suppose so.”
His expression grew dry again.
“Don’t tell me that, through the benignity of an understanding Providence, you also sing like the Brandt?”
“No, I don’t sing at all,” she answered quietly, “And I don’t suppose many women have a voice like hers.”
“You are quite right,” he agreed, with brusque finality. “Not one in a million.” He passed her a box of cigarettes, and she waited for him to light one for her. His gold lighter had a severity which matched his personality, but it also had his initials in diamonds on one side of it, and she wondered whether it was the gift of a fan. “The trouble with Vanessa is that she works too hard, and becomes caught up by too many enthusiasms, with the result that she has acquired what is known as a tired throat. Is it because you are sorry for her that you wish to help her, or because she is paying you well?”
“She is not paying me at all,” Janie said curtly.
He smiled unpleasantly.
“And the gift of an entirely new outfit of clothes, visits to beauty parlours, etc., is nothing? Means nothing? You couldn’t possibly be tempted by trifles like those?”
This time it was she who looked hard at him with her steady grey eyes.
“No,” she said.
He smiled disbelievingly.
“Not even the thought of a week in a luxury hotel? The sheer glamour attached to such an opportunity! Nothing like that has anything to do with your decision to play a part?—and a very difficult part at that! For Vanessa has personality as well as looks, and you will be required to put over Vanessa as she is at her best. Did you realize that?”
“Yes. And I am not attracted by glamour, or anything you have mentioned.”
“Then what?” He was leaning towards her, his own cigarette smouldering between his fingers, his eyes alive and bright with sudden curiosity. “What, Miss Dallas?”
She found herself faltering, and looking away from him. He had very long eyelashes—ridiculously long for a man—and they fluttered as he talked. She kept seeing him as he was when he stood on the rostrum, baton in hand ... the very essence of strange, compelling masculine charm. Masculine mystery.
“I ... don’t think I quite know,” she answered at last.
He looked intensely cynical all at once.
“Then we’ll accept simply that it’s the glamour,” he said. “I never thought for one moment that it was anything else.” He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray, and pushed back his chair to cut short the interview. “I’ve given my word to Miss Brandt, whom I admire tremendously, that I’ll see this thing through ... although my every instinct warns me that it’s crazy. She’s risking everything she’
s worked for by allowing you to impersonate her even for a day. You look like her, you may be able to act like her, but I doubt it.”
“And if you’re wrong, Mr. Veldon?” she asked, feeling herself stiffen as if something had put her on her mettle, and not merely was it vital to her own future interests to prove him wrong, but it was curiously and intensely vital.
“Then I’ll probably dislike you a little less than I do at this moment,” he returned contemptuously, treating her to a look of absolute dislike. “Now you’d better run along and see my secretary. She has a list of appointments she has made for you—all under cover of the strictest secrecy, of course!” dryly—“and I hope you’ll be ready to fly with me to New York in forty-eight hours.”
CHAPTER IV
It was a whirlwind forty-eight hours for Janie. Before they expired the curl had been taken out of her hair, and it was bound sleekly and smoothly about her head, her complexion was several degrees fairer, and for the first time in her life she wore eye make-up.
The effect was to deepen the colour of her eyes, so that in certain lights, and under certain conditions, they could have been blue instead of grey. And as Vanessa Brandt had a weakness for veiling, even with cocktail hats, this was a help, too.
Her clothes were chosen for her in a great hurry by Max Veldon’s secretary. She managed to get certain people to work overtime, so that various alterations were carried out with the minimum loss of time; and certain dresses selected from Vanessa’s own wardrobe had the essential alterations to them carried out quickly.
Vanessa was a shade taller than Janie, and her figure just a little fuller. But by the time the dresses were altered no one would have guessed that they hadn’t, in the first place, been created for Janie. An evening gown in gold brocade, suitable for very grand occasions, took her breath away completely. She had never dreamed that she would ever wear a gold brocade evening gown.
Miss Calendar, Max Veldon’s secretary, was an alert little woman of uncertain age who had been with him for years. He had, also, one or two other secretaries, but these were men, responsible for stage-managing and publicizing him wherever he went, and only one of them accompanied him to New York,
He was a handsome, dark-eyed young Austrian—a half-brother to Max. His mother had been a baroness in her own right, and the title had devolved upon Rudi, who did not, however, use it.
“In Austria we bury our titles these days,” he told Janie, when he met her for the first time at the airport. Miss Calendar introduced them a trifle agitatedly, and in the midst of her agitation she called him “Baron.”
He held up a finger to her.
“Tut, tut, Miss Calendar, what a lapse! Whoever heard of a baron without any money? And, apart from the occasions when Max is generous, I have none!”
His eyes, black and audacious, smiled into Janie’s. They had an extraordinary lustre that lent them the appearance of sparkling black velvet, and every feature of his face was fascinatingly regular. But, despite hair with a kink in it, and teeth like blanched almonds—and long and shapely fingers that pressed a little too warmly when they closed over a woman’s hand—Janie had an instinctive urge not to trust him too far.
Or, at any rate, not to be beguiled by him.
“You are quite enchanting,” he told her, when they sat together in the aircraft. His half-brother and Miss Calendar occupied the seat across the aisle, and were both deep in the perusal of a batch of correspondence. “Only a fool would be deceived into thinking you were Vanessa.”
She looked at him in a startled fashion.
“But that means I’m going to let her down!”
“Don’t worry,” he said soothingly, resting a hand over hers where they were tightly, and somewhat convulsively, clasped in her lap. “I say that because I know her well, and to me she no longer has—what shall we call it? Freshness? She has the charm of sophistication, but you have the charm of the early morning. Otherwise you are much alike.”
“Thank you,” Janie said, a faint note of asperity, instead of appreciation, in her voice. “I feel considerably relieved.”
He laughed.
“You should be flattered, and under normal circumstances I’ve no doubt you would be. For what can be more delightful than the early morning? But I realize you have a part to play, and the thought of it must be weighing on you. But don’t worry too much, for I will support you ... I will make everything as easy as it can possibly be made for you.”
Janie regarded him thoughtfully, endeavouring to sum him up. Deep down inside her anxiety started to grow because she felt that in a sense he had her in the hollow of his hand.
“I suppose,” she said slowly, “that Mr. Veldon had to let you into Miss Brandt’s secret. If you’re his brother, and you know her very well, too...”
“I don’t know her quite as well as Max,” he confessed, a smile which she didn’t like at all on his lips, and a sleepy glitter in his eyes as he slid them across the aisle at his brother. “But I do know her ... reasonably well. And of course I had to be in. on this, otherwise I could have given the whole show away before it actually became a show at all, couldn’t I?”
“You mean that if Mr. Veldon hadn’t consented to your accompanying us you could—would have given away something that has to be kept secret?”
He shook his head.
“No, little one, I wouldn’t have done that, because Max would cut me off with a penny if I let him down like that. But I’m not at all sure I would have been permitted to accompany him, as you phrase it, if I hadn’t accidentally blundered on this secret you’re going to find it a little hard to guard sometimes ... if you’re not perpetually alert and a consummate actress!”
Her grey eyes grew large and round with anxiety as she gazed at him.
“I’ve no reason at all to believe that I’m even a remotely good actress, Baron Eisler,” she told him. “But because I’ve got to be, there isn’t any doubt that I’ll be perpetually alert.”
“Of course.” He gave her hand another pat, and smiled at her encouragingly—and with a warmth that should have banished all mistrust. “And you can depend upon it that I’ll help you, as I’ve said—in every possible way that I can help you. If only you’ll do one thing.”
“And what is that?” she asked uneasily.
“Call me Rudi, and forget all that nonsense about Baron Eisler. I’d much rather be Rudi to you.”
When they arrived in New York Janie came close to pure panic. Max was looking distinctly grim, and he had hardly addressed a word to her during the flight. Every time she accidentally met his eyes their coldness and disapproval made her feel as if she herself was cold inside, and she had a wild urge to back out long before she said farewell to the interior of the aircraft.
Max must have sensed this, for when he helped her into the sleek and glistening private car that had been sent to meet them at the airport he gripped her arm hard. It was a distinctly cruel grip.
“Panic now, and everything’s lost,” he said. “And if you fail Vanessa I’ll never forgive you!”
The unfeeling threat in his voice was like an icy douche that brought her up gasping protestingly but determined never to merit such another warning.
“I won’t fail her,” she said in a low tone.
“Better not,” he emphasized, and released her arm.
Miss Calendar—who had consistently addressed her as “Miss Brandt” from the moment they left London—saw her effusively on to the back seat of the car, and an enormous bouquet of flowers was then placed in her lap. It was the second bouquet she had received in a matter of hours, for the stewardess had brought her a mass of red roses with a fulsome card attached—“From one of your most ardent admirers?”—as soon as she set foot in the aircraft that had just brought her, for the first time, across the Atlantic.
With the stewardess looking on and beaming at her and admiring her silvery-beige outfit, and the mink coat without which Vanessa had insisted a top-line singer of her quality never travelle
d—“If you carry this thing through successfully I’ll give it to you before we part!” she had promised, when Janie went to say goodbye to her in the nursing-home—she had stammered and looked confused and practically denied that such a passionate tribute could be for her.
Until Miss Calendar swept to her rescue and requested the stewardess to place the roses in water until Miss Brandt reached New York. Janie had sent her a grateful look—which she was quite sure Max Veldon intercepted, because his expression had taken on an even grimmer look—and the second time she received flowers she was careful not to betray any surprise.
“For me?” she inquired, sweetly and languidly, and the uniformed chauffeur who had bent to tuck a light rug over her knees answered at once. His eyes expressed admiration for the slight, golden-headed figure as he did so.
“With Mr. Winterton’s compliments, Miss Brandt.”
Janie merely smiled at him, as if she was touched but exhausted.
She didn’t need the rug, for the airport was heating up—a long, hot June day stretched ahead of her, which she was to find really exhausting before it reached its close—and she didn’t need to pretend that she had scarcely slept a wink all night, for the slight pallor of her face proclaimed it. In a way it was a good thing, for no one was likely to attribute her lethargy to a petrified feeling due to the novelty of a first flight, and a secret terror that, sooner or later, she must give herself away. People were much more likely to assume that she was bored by too much travelling, and was a poor traveller in any case.
Rudi sat beside her in the car, and Max Veldon was stiff and unco-operative on her other side. Miss Calendar chatted blithely in the seat beside the chauffeur.
When they drew up outside the great hotel where a suite had been reserved for Janie, the morning—her first New York morning—was really brilliant. But she stumbled awkwardly from the car, and was led away to the lift. She thought of it afterwards as an ornamental cage that wafted her away from prying eyes.
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