He forced his own ardour into more rational channels and covered her face with the gentlest kisses, kissed her hands and her hair and the creamy spot at the base of her throat where her most excitable pulse had so often leapt wildly when he merely looked at her, and then cradled her tenderly in his arms as if she were an infant and assured her, as soon as he could speak at all normally, that having made this important decision about their joint future he hadn’t any intention of waiting for her or allowing her to continue working for her living, and they would be married immediately. He was consumed with the desire to look after her, and take her away from all unpleasant duties. Make up to her for the harshness of three lonely years.
“But Lou—?” she said, wondering how they would ever be able to break the news to her, and how she would survive such a bitter disappointment. How she would ever forgive her, Valentine!
“You mustn’t take the Lous of this world too seriously, my dearest,” Alex said, holding her hand against his cheek and nuzzling it gently. “She wanted to be a baroness, but that, I think, was the extent of her ambitions as far as I was concerned. She could hardly have imagined I was in love with her...”
“But you did—make love to her!” Valentine accused him, her eyes just a little reproachful.
He flashed her one of his faintly whimsical smiles. “With people like Lou that is all part of a game,” he explained. “With people like me it can be part of a game when there is nothing else in life that is of any real importance,” his voice suddenly much more sober. “But not when they come upon the one woman who was born into the world especially for them!”
“With people like me it could never be a game,” Valentine said, watching him carefully. “You ... are quite sure, Alex?”
“I could never be more sure,” he answered, bowing his sleek head over the smallness of her hands as if they were the choicest and most delicate of flowers. “I love you as I once loved my mother, as I love my grandmother ... and for a hundred other reasons that have nothing to do with mothers or grandmothers!” He looked into her eyes and she felt as if her breath remained suspended in her throat. “Last night I loathed the very sight of Haversham because I know he is in love with you, too, and when I saw him touch your hand—even if it was by accident!—I could have slaughtered him outright and hidden his body in one of the dungeons at the schloss. If these were medieval times I would most certainly have done so,” looking unusually and quite unmistakably savage.
She laughed, but there was a note of exultation in her laughter. And when he said that it would give him an enormous amount of pleasure as soon as they got back to present her to Haversham as his future baroness the exultation became tinged with wonder. She admitted that she couldn’t yet believe it was true.
“It’s the thought that I’ll be your wife, Alex,” she said softly, “that is so wonderful! So—much more than wonderful!”
He kissed each of her eyes in turn, and then, more unrestrainedly, her mouth.
“Soon I’ll convince you that it’s true,” he told her. “There won’t be any possibility of doubt!” And as he saw her flush rosily he forced himself to remember her ankle. “My poor little one,” he said, “it is high time we took another look at it!”
But the ankle mended remarkably as the hours passed, and his constant application of hot and cold compresses undoubtedly reduced the swelling with the maximum amount of speed. By the time it was growing dusk she could move it without feeling any discomfort at all, but he wouldn’t allow her to put it to the ground and submit it to a test until she had to.
Outside, the snow prevented them seeing anything at all, and the strange silence created by the fury of white flakes, and the most peculiar sensation of utter isolation that it imparted, impressed Valentine so much that she knew she would remember these extraordinary conditions all her life. And she would certainly remember what had happened in this hut all her life!
Alex filled their kettle from the snow outside, and brought in more wood from a little lean-to at the side of the hut. Valentine, when he wasn’t looking, hobbled into the tiny wash-room adjoining and tried to make the most of her appearance, and then hobbled back on to the wooden settee. She wanted to prepare them some supper from the selection of tins provided, but Alex insisted on doing that. They had hot soup and baked beans followed by more coffee, and after that they sat in the glow from the stove and watched the darkness outside become a wall of infinite blackness that was rendered more sinister by the thin whine of the blizzard.
It would have been far more sinister, Valentine thought, if she had been alone. And, as it was, it was not really sinister at all, for with Alex beside her, the faint outline of his profile in the velvety gloom very close to her own profile, the glow of his cigarette stabbing the warm darkness, it was an extraordinarily sweet but rather tense experience.
Tense because she was so aware of him, and he was so aware of her... They had but to turn their heads and they were looking into one another’s eyes, a movement and his lips were brushing her hair, her cheek. She was sure that he could hear her heart thundering wildly every time a silence fell between them, and because he knew the danger of such silences he strove hard to avoid them.
“Tell me about yourself, Valentine,” he requested softly, after he had detected a nervous tremble in her voice when she thanked him for lighting a cigarette for her. “Tell me all about yourself when you were a little girl, and the things you did with your father. Talk to me about your father!”
She found that she forgot all her nervousness, and her tension, when she started to talk about her father, and then she insisted that he should talk to her about himself. It was amazing, she thought as she listened, how little one needed to know about a man before one could fall in love with him in a way that meant one would never fall in love with anyone else in the whole of one’s lifetime. And she was amazed that, in some ways, his story resembled her own. He couldn’t remember very much about his father, but he had adored his mother, and there was no doubt about it she had spoilt him consistently. He seemed to have done very much as he liked always, there was very little that he hadn’t done—he even admitted that he had once had a job in Canada. He had worked on a farm, and enjoyed it, then he had gone in for forestry. He had enjoyed that, too, until a great-aunt died and left him such a large sum of money that it seemed rather a waste of time, and he had packed up and gone back home to Austria.
“But unfortunately the money didn’t last long,” he admitted. “It seldom does with me,” on a whimsical note.
But Valentine felt a quick pang of uneasiness. How would he manage, in the future, with a wife to support? ...
Although she didn’t actually pose the question it must have hung in the air between them, for he put his arm about her and said softly, as he kissed her:
“Don’t worry, Liebling! If we are ever in danger of starving, or our debts get too much for us, I can always go back to forestry! And then you’ll be a lumberman’s wife!”
Somehow the thought of being a lumberman’s wife—such a lumberman’s wife!—filled her with a wistful longing to taste the experience straight away.
But he started to talk to her about his flat in Vienna, and she gathered that was where they would live once they were married. Although he referred to it as a small flat she gathered that it was not really small at all, and it sounded extremely luxurious. He was addicted to giving parties there, and he assured her that life in Vienna, even in these modern days—perhaps especially in these modern days—could be gay. He wanted her to have a little gaiety, because she had had so little in the last three years of her life. She had such a prematurely grave look sometimes ... He kissed the eyes that were growing drowsy as he talked ... And it was only right that she should have every young woman’s birthright, a certain amount of fun. But when they started a family then they would move to a bigger flat, and the fun would be of a different kind—
Valentine, her ankle throbbing dully, but otherwise supremely content, heard him
with a growing feeling of astonishment because she was lying there in the dark with him, and he had actually mentioned the possibility of her one day bearing him a child. A son, perhaps ... Who would look like himself!
She quivered slightly, an ecstatic shiver that travelled down the whole length of her body, but she was glad of the darkness and the knowledge that he couldn’t really see her face. He drew her head down into the hollow of his neck, and ordered her softly to go to sleep.
“It will be a long night, Valentine, but I don’t suppose we’ll experience another like it in the whole of our lifetime. I, for one, shall probably look back on it with a certain amount of amazement...”
She knew what he meant, and she hid her face. She felt him kiss her hair, give an odd little laugh, and then he lighted a cigarette without disturbing her. After that he lay thoughtfully staring at the glow of the fire.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When they returned to the schloss the following morning they found it in a state of mild uproar. Although it was still quite early in the morning, and the sun hadn’t been up for more than an hour or so, all the inhabitants of the ancient dwelling had been up for several hours, and they were none of them in a very good humour.
The Countess was the least agitated, but she was extremely angry. She assured the elderly gentleman with the white hair and the fierce white moustache who had arrived during the beginnings of the snowstorm the afternoon before that her grandson should not be allowed to get away with this. He had behaved inconsequentially before, but this was too much. .. This was something that would not merely recoil on him, but she, personally, would see that it was put right!
“They’ll have to be married without any delay,” she said, tap-tapping with her stick up and down the main room of the schloss. “A night in a mountain hut with someone like my grandson and any girl’s reputation would be ruined!”
“But how do you know they’re in a mountain hut?” Lou demanded, with tired peevishness. “You don’t even know they’re alive still, if it comes to that! If they were caught in the sort of blizzard we had here yesterday they might easily have wandered off the track, and gone over a precipice!”
“Tush, girl, don’t talk rubbish!” the Countess ordered her tersely. “Do you think I don’t know my own grandson? And do you think he doesn’t know this country well enough to avoid going over a precipice in a blizzard?” She tapped angrily with her stick. “You talk like a fool, and you make Alex out to be a nitwit who would risk a girl’s neck without a thought! Of course there was a hut, and it’s only her reputation he risked!”
“Then in that case they ought to be back at any minute,” General Fabian said, going to the big window and looking out anxiously into the brilliance of the morning. “There’s nothing to hold them up now.”
“Nothing but Alex,” his grandmother returned, with furious dryness. “Haven’t you got a saying in your country about being hanged for a sheep as well as a lamb? Well, that will be Alex’s attitude!”
“All the same, I do think we ought to send someone to start searching...” Giles Haversham cut in, his face definitely haggard after the anxieties of the night. “I’m quite willing to start off myself, if I could have a guide...”
“Stefan and Max are already out searching,” the Countess told him shortly. “Not that they’ll have far to search. This was undoubtedly planned yesterday morning.”
“I don’t believe it,” Lou declared stonily. She was tired of hanging about the ground floor of the schloss in a mink coat over the evening dress she had worn the night before—for they had none of them been to bed, and it had been difficult to keep warm in such an icy atmosphere—and though there had been times when she had been acutely anxious she was now too bleakly angry to care very much one way or the other about the outcome of this little episode. “Valentine isn’t the sort to go off with a man without giving anybody warning, and as for your grandson ... Why should he pick on Valentine if he wanted to do a disappearing act? Why not me?”
“Because he’s not in love with you, and he is in love with Valentine,” her hostess snapped back rather cruelly.
Lou’s colour changed so painfully that the General, always exceedingly chivalrous in his dealings with members of the opposite sex—particularly when they looked like this young woman who had employed his granddaughter—was quite disturbed. He went across to her and thanked her formally for her excellent opinion of Valentine—which he assured her he shared—and offered to get her something hot to drink if she would only show him the way to the kitchens.
“There must be someone who could bring us some more coffee,” he said.
The Countess tugged hard at the bell-rope.
“There is. There’s Helga. My guests don’t have to help themselves even in a crisis of this sort!”
“Your guests?” Lou said drawlingly, looking hard at her. “I thought this schloss belonged to Alex.”
The Countess returned her look unflinchingly.
“It doesn’t greatly matter what you think, Miss Morgan. When Alex is married his wife will act hostess here, but until that happens his guests are my guests.”
“And you’ve got it all worked out that he’s going to marry Valentine?”
“He’ll have to.”
Lou shrugged, and turned away. Count Willi piled some more logs on the fire, and when the coffee was brought in he put a measure of cognac into the American girl’s. As she smiled up at him gratefully his sympathy for her overspread his face. He was inclined to think she needed that cognac, and was glad he always carried some in a silver flask in his pocket.
Barely had they started to drink their coffee than Helga came flying back to announce that the missing pair were safe. They were back in the schloss, and getting rid of their boots in the hall. The young lady had sustained a sprained ankle, but apart from that there didn’t appear to be much wrong with either of them.
Alex’s grandmother straightened her back and looked the part of the Countess of Hultz-Reisen. Valentine’s grandfather looked relieved but nervous, and played with the cord of his monocle which was an affectation he shared in common with the Count von Hochenberg.
“What did I tell you?” the Countess said, tightening her lips.
When Valentine entered the room she wasn’t expecting to find them all there waiting for her. Neither was Alex. They had made their way, with little or no difficulty because her ankle had recovered miraculously from its jar of the day before, through the splendour of the morning, leaving the hut just as soon as the sun was up, and the new snow lying in unblemished beauty all around them, and now they each had a light in their eyes that was quite unmistakable as they halted on the threshold of the vast room. It was true that Valentine, in addition to having a light in her eyes, had an anxiety at the back of them that was solely in connection with Lou, her employer, but the Countess of Hultz-Reisen took it for an expression of guilt.
“Ha!” she exclaimed. “So I was right! I was right about everything! There is nothing for it but to rush forward the wedding!”
“The—wedding?” Valentine echoed, and then she caught sight of the General. She stood absolutely still for a moment, a curious kind of foreboding knocking at her heart. “Grandfather,” she demanded, in a small, cold voice, “what are you doing here?”
“It’s a little late in the day, I’ll admit,” the Countess spoke for him, “since he ought to have had his eye on you from the day your father died. What was it? Suicide? No man ought to commit suicide, but some are weaker than others! However, I’d have seen to it that you didn’t run around earning your living as a sort of lady’s maid. For one thing, I should have thought anyone as young and healthy as Miss Morgan could have put her own clothes on!” glaring at her as if she were responsible for the entire situation.
But Valentine was gazing at her grandfather and hardening her heart against the appeal in his eyes.
“I didn’t want you to start looking for me,” she said. “I preferred to be on my own!”
> “I know, my dear,” he agreed, moving towards her, “but it wasn’t as easy for me to allow you to remain on your own! For one thing, you’re not very old yet, and you are my granddaughter! My only granddaughter,” he added rather tragically.
Alex stood with knitted brows, regarding the General without really appreciating the relationship in which he stood to Valentine.
“Grossmutter,” he said, addressing the Countess, “you’ll have to introduce me to your guest. I’d no idea you were expecting anyone else to join us here.”
“I wasn’t,” the Countess answered. “But then I wasn’t expecting you to spend a night on the mountain alone with the General’s granddaughter! However, in addition to being Miss Brown’s grandfather, he happens to be a very old friend of mine, so I’m delighted to make you known to one another. Brian,” she called the white-haired soldierly figure, “this is my unrepentant Alex, Baron von Felden! And you’ve only got to look at him to see he’s completely unrepentant!”
The General surveyed the Baron a little grimly. The Baron clicked his heels and regarded him stonily.
“Did I hear my grandmother say you are Miss Brown’s grandfather, sir?”
“You did,” the General replied gravely. “But you must understand she was christened Valentine Pelham-Brown. I should be glad if you would refer to her as Miss Pelham-Brown in future! And naturally I shall require an explanation from you of what happened to the pair of you last night.”
The Baron’s nostrils seemed to dilate, and his eyes grew disturbingly dark.
Love in High Places Page 14
