The whole thing was becoming an impossible, revolting, one-sided experience from which she recoiled as she would recoil from the thought of something definitely amoral and wrong.
She decided to ignore the outburst.
“Why have you brought me here?” she asked.
“We’re not staying here,” he told her. “This is no place for the kind of conversation you and I must have. The facing up to a few truths!” There was a thickness in his speech that was new to her, and she was aware that he was perfectly sober. He was not greatly interested in the contents of his wine cellar, and—in point of fact—apart from his love of luxury in his surroundings, his apparently incurable weakness for fine linen and high quality clothes, ease and elegance in his daily life, he was no true lotus-eater, and not even particularly self-indulgent. He was fastidious—far more fastidious than Lou could ever be!—and perhaps that was one reason why she could never honestly appeal to him; and there was even a degree of asceticism in him at times, which Valentine had detected from the first. It warred with his sybaritic instincts, and showed up plainly when he was either bored or dissatisfied ... possibly, more often than not, with himself! “There is a fire in the library...”
She laughed, briefly, and a little cruelly, for she regarded this as the final straw.
“You’re not in the least original, are you?” she said. “Why, do you know that, last night, when I was being shown over the house by Count Willi, we both very nearly blundered into the library where you were so busily engaged in making love to Lou that I don’t suppose you even noticed the interruption? And now you suggest that you and I have a little ‘conversation’ in the library!”
The mockery in her voice was so rasping, and so undisguised, that he actually turned paler. He caught her by her slender shoulders, and his fingers dug hard into her soft flesh.
“Listen to me,” he said, in that strange, muffled voice of his, “I didn’t ask Willi to take you to the library! And I wasn’t making love to Lou! She was making love to me—Or trying to!”
“That’s a caddish thing to say,” Valentine told him, contempt in her golden eyes.
“Very likely,” he agreed at once. “But then, according to you, I am several different kinds of cad, and all of them quite beyond the understanding of anyone like yourself!” A look flashed into his eyes that hurt her so much that she wanted to reach up and touch his face and beg him not to look like that. And if only it had been possible to forget, even for a moment, everything but himself, she would have caught his face between her hands and done something about that twisted look of unhappiness that altered the shape of his mouth ... perhaps touched it with her own lips, and even the thought of doing that made her heart labour heavily. So heavily that she was certain he could see the result of it in the quickened pulse at the base of her throat. “You couldn’t understand your father’s inability to cope with things, so how can you understand me?”
“My father, at least, had a moral code,” she answered stiffly.
His fingers released her shoulders.
“If you have so strong an objection to the library we will not talk there,” he said, almost as if she had done or said something to sting him. “But to-morrow we will have to talk. I will arrange something.”
“To-morrow we go back to the hotel.”
“But not before you and I have spent a short while alone!”
His eyes gazed straight down into her widely distended golden ones, and she felt as if something interfered with her breathing, and she wanted to gasp ... She wanted, also, to stop having any qualms and press near to him, beg him to take her into his arms, beg him to hold her, kiss her ... The words very nearly formed on her eager lips:
“Please, Alex! ...”
But he was suddenly very remote, far, far removed from her, in spirit as much as anything else, and the words were choked back into her throat, and only the slight trembling of her mouth betrayed the storm that had swept over her. She felt as if tears pricked behind her eyelids—weak tears of frustration—as he walked back to the double doors and prepared to open them.
With his hand on one of the crystal door knobs he turned back to look at her.
“To-morrow, do not forget, I shall arrange something!”
She nodded. She didn’t attempt to say anything, and as they walked back into the banqueting-hall she was remembering that Haversham wished to speak with her alone. But the irony of it was that, although he had a perfect right to talk to her, was a thoroughly upright, admirable, and estimable Englishman—which meant that he was also a fellow countryman—he had no power at all to melt her bones with a single look, or plunge her into such a wild desire for contact with a beloved creature as that which had just shaken her to her foundations.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the morning Lou started talking about packing and getting back to the hotel even before she had had her breakfast, which was brought up to her on a tray by Helga.
“I’ve had quite enough of it here,” she said, studying Valentine in a way that was new, and which made the English girl feel vaguely uncomfortable. “Alex hasn’t behaved like the same man since we arrived, and I find that grandmother of his a most unsympathetic character. She’s a survival of the past, and she clings to the past so tightly that you can smell the moth-balls she carries around with her! And I mean that quite literally! That awful old fur coat of hers! ... Yet her hands are smothered in rings!”
She surveyed the breakfast-tray, with its fine lace cloth and exquisitely delicate china, and a puzzled gleam appeared in her eyes.
“It doesn’t fit in. This”—she touched the tray—“and this!” She indicated the room. “Everything has been allowed to go to rack and ruin, but the contents of the schloss would fetch a great deal of money if they were put up for auction! I know Pop would like to get his hands on some of the stuff that is here! ... That bureau thing downstairs in the main room, and those chandeliers in the ballroom! They’d be worth a fortune in the right market. And that old woman knows that...” Valentine felt a shiver of distaste as she heard the Countess constantly referred to as “that old woman”—“and I think she takes a kind of delight in maintaining things as they are, and keeping Alex poor. Poor sweet, it’s no wonder he ceases to be himself when he gets back into this kind of atmosphere! It would destroy me altogether!”
“Then you don’t think you’ll live here when you ... get married?” Valentine asked, as she bent above an open suitcase and expertly folded away gossamer under things.
“I don’t honestly know.” Lou sent her another of her sidelong, searching looks. “There’d have to be some large-scale alterations before I’d consent to spend more than a few days here, anyway. I’d rather have a nice house on Long Island, and another on the French Riviera... Monte Carlo, perhaps. That would be fun!”
“And a flat in Paris,” Valentine said, as she lifted a satin evening-gown with a balloon skirt that made it difficult to pack, out of the dark recesses of the wardrobe, “and a penthouse flat in New York! You’ll be able to have such a lot of homes that you’ll never be dull! So why worry about a place like this? ...”
“Yes, why?” Lou asked, as she went on privately studying her employee, and tried to prevent herself shivering uncontrollably in the icy atmosphere of the bedroom and a flimsy bed-jacket that was utterly inadequate over her cobwebby nightdress. She buttered a corner of roll with slightly numb fingers. “Would you say that you, as a result of being English, and as a result of—well, perhaps, going to the right schools, and living a different sort of life from the one I’ve lived—speak Alex’s language better than I do?”
“You mean ... German?” Valentine looked round at her in surprise, for Lou’s knowledge of German was confined to the ability to say “yes” and “no” in that tongue.
Lou shook her head impatiently.
“No, of course not. Why, I couldn’t talk to Alex at all if he hadn’t any English! No, what I mean is...” She tried to explain without damaging her own o
pinion of herself, or giving rise to the belief that she considered she lacked something. “Alex’s title makes him a bit unique, and I know he’s very proud of his birth, and that sort of thing ... He’s not a snob, but he could be snobbish if he felt like it! And you ... well, your father was a Sir Somebody, wasn’t he? And at times you’ve a sort of air about you as if ... well, as if you felt a bit superior.” She waved away Valentine’s denials with an impatient hand. “No, don’t interrupt, honey ... It’s just an idea of mine. That if two people are more or less the same, well, they’re more likely to get on well together than two people who are not.”
Valentine stared at her, the blood moving quickly along her veins, a sensation like guilt rushing up over her.
“What do you mean, Lou?” she asked.
“Oh, forget it,” Lou said, stepping gingerly out of bed and snatching up her dressing-gown. “I’m just about blue with cold, and if that Helga woman hasn’t filled my bath right up to the top...” She smiled momentarily, sideways, at Valentine. “Well, for one thing, you speak German, and I’ve noticed that Alex likes to snatch a few moments alone with you sometimes, and last night he asked you to dance...”
“Shouldn’t he?” Valentine asked, her heart beating faster than ever, a strange rising resentment right at the back of her mind.
Lou shrugged, sliding her feet into mules.
“So far as I was concerned, honey, it was O.K. But he left me sitting alone on a settee while he waltzed you right out of that awful draughty room they call a banqueting-hall, and it seemed to me that you were away for quite a time. I think the Haversham man thought so, too. He didn’t seem to find me a very good substitute for you.”
Valentine bent once more above the suitcase, and she said quickly that that was absurd. It hadn’t struck her that they were away for any length of time.
Lou gathered up her sponge-bag, and the bag that contained all her bath oils and so on, and grimaced.
“Always remember, honey, that it’s the looker-on that sees most of the game,” she said. “If the time was passing very agreeably you wouldn’t be likely to notice it. But I hope you realise that Alex was born telling a pretty woman he liked the colour of her hair, or her eyes? I’ve made up my mind that, marriage or no marriage, that’s one weakness I’ll never cure him of!” And she slithered across the floor to the bathroom. Valentine left the suitcase and walked to the big window. Outside the morning was blue and gold and smiling, and the whiteness of the snow was a heartening whiteness. But beyond the peaks on the far side of the valley there were a few clouds floating about, sailing above the peaks as if they were boats on a lake of blue. A mere murmur in a sea of silence, but they could be a warning of more snow if they decided to mass together.
But Valentine wasn’t interested in clouds, or snow, just then. She was thinking of Lou’s words, “Alex was born telling a pretty woman he liked the colour of her hair!” But Alex had never told her he liked the colour of her hair! ... He had called her “Cinderella,” and “Poor little Valentine!” And she was certain that, whatever his record with women, last night he had been so desperately in love with her that he had probably never been quite so unhappy before in his life ... Because there were complications in the way of his loving her, and she wasn’t the type to be loved lightly and then forgotten.
She was Valentine, and he was Alex! ... Alex and Valentine!
“Oh, Alex!” she whispered, pressing her cheek to the cold pane of glass.
There came a knock on the door and she went to open it. Outside stood Max, the Baron’s personal servant, an elderly man with rather a tired face and trustworthy eyes.
He bowed formally in the Austrian manner as he handed over a note sealed down in an envelope.
“Good morning, Fraulein,” he said. “The Herr Baron has entrusted this message to me, and he begs you will read it at once.”
He bowed again and disappeared.
Valentine glanced round guiltily to make sure that Lou was still in the bathroom, although the noise of her splashing could be plainly heard in the bedroom. Just as the scent of her bath essence came richly and thickly under the door.
Valentine slit open the envelope in her hands with slightly shaking fingers, and the message on the single sheet of embossed notepaper inside it made them shake still more. It had been written in German—a clever ruse, she thought, on Alex’s part, in case by some mischance Lou had got hold of it (although the necessity for ruses caused her a quick pang)—and it commanded simply:
“Meet me in the courtyard in half an hour. Make any excuse that occurs to you to get away. But do not fail to be in the courtyard!”
It was signed, simply, Alex.
Once again she whispered his name to herself. Over and over she whispered it.
“Oh, Alex, Alex, Alex!”
Then she rushed to complete Lou’s and her own packing, and to be ready to descend to the courtyard in half an hour.
He was waiting for her under the arch beneath which one had to pass to reach the bridge that crossed the torrent, and was the only means of gaining access to the world beyond the castle precincts. He was wearing a thick sweater and vorlagers, and when Valentine made her appearance at the head of the flight of steps leading up to the great front door he was smoking a cigarette and regarding the tip of it in an oddly contemplative manner.
But when Valentine slipped furtively down the steps he threw it away and moved at once to greet her. She, too, was wearing a thick sweater and ski-pants, and her cheeks were flushed with her hurry, and her eyes were bright and questioning. She had had to endure a difficult five minutes with Lou before she made her escape, and she was by no means convinced that her employer was entirely satisfied with the explanation that had seemed finally to lull her suspicions.
“We’re leaving immediately after lunch,” she said.
“For heaven’s sake don’t go and get lost, or something, if you must explore this desolate neighbourhood. Although why you should want to do so, I can’t think. The skiing’s poor, and the scenery isn’t any better than we had at the hotel.”
“But at least we have it to ourselves,” Valentine pointed out, in a further attempt to sound convincing—and also because she felt the urge to defend the beauties of the schloss, and its immediate surroundings. “The place isn’t overrun by tourists.”
“Well, you may have something there,” Lou agreed, running a buffer over her nails, and settling down for a quiet half-hour with the finer details of her toilet. “But, to be honest, I prefer the tourists.” And she grinned fleetingly and unrepentantly up at Valentine.
So Valentine made her escape, leaving behind her a much more thoughtful Lou than she imagined, and when the Baron came to greet her, and approve her punctuality, she was experiencing a kind of uplift of her spirit because she was temporarily free, and the world was fair. And he... he was waiting for her!
“You have done exactly what I asked,” he said, as he laid a hand upon her arm. There was nothing guarded about his eyes this morning, nothing resentful, nothing hidden. They were deep and dark, and full of an extraordinary tenderness, and a gentleness—a gladness, too—that melted her bones. “I was so afraid that Lou might make difficulties, and you might even find it impossible to get away.”
“I ... would have got away somehow,” she answered, and she knew, in those moments, that it was true. She would have got away somehow. She would not have missed meeting him alone! ... Perhaps the very last time they would ever be alone together!
“Come along,” he said, after he had smiled down at her with wholehearted approval, and he closed his fingers firmly over her arm and drew her towards the bridge. “Your skis are here, and I will attach them for you while you sit on the parapet.”
She recoiled for an instant as she glanced down over the parapet, but he reassured her instantly.
“It is perfectly safe. You do not think I would let you slip down into that abyss, do you?” regarding her reproachfully.
So she sat on the pa
rapet in the sunshine that was mellow and golden all about them while he knelt in the snow at her feet and carefully buckled the straps of her skis. And if she recalled another occasion when he had done the same thing—and she had just escaped a danger that had come so close it had practically claimed her—she was not in the least troubled by the memory, and had no intention at all of dwelling on it ... either as a warning, or as a reminder which might be needed later on, when she was bewitched by the snow, and her freedom, and ... him!
“Where are we going?” she asked, when he gave her a hand to assist her to rise from the parapet, and she clung to it instinctively for a moment as they stood close together.
He wrenched his glance away from hers and indicated a hut on the mountainside some considerable distance above them.
“I thought we might make for that.”
“But it looks ... quite a climb!” Her voice was suddenly doubtful. “Are you sure I can do it? I mean, without slowing you up? ...” She felt his fingers tighten over hers. “And won’t it take rather a—rather a long time to get as high as that?”
“Is time so important?” he asked gravely.
She sighed.
“You know it is! ... You know I can’t be away too long!”
He answered impatiently:
“Forget how long you can be away! Forget everything but that we are together, and Lou and Willi and Giles Haversham and my grandmother—and her dogs!—can all do without us until we consent to return. Until we consent to return!” he added, more slowly, as if the words appealed to him, and he gazed thoughtfully at Valentine. “This is an experience that cannot be snatched at, or rushed, or mitigated in any way. It is too important for that, so come, my little one, my love, and let’s be on our way!”
Love in High Places Page 12
