by Susan Barrie
And he shook his head so sadly that Valentine couldn’t refrain from laughing out loud, and even Jane, although she blushed—unmistakably this time—had to permit herself a smile.
“Unlike you, monsieur le comte, I do not look upon love as a hobby,” she told him.
He smiled at her with an unusual touch of sweetness. “Any woman as delightful as you would find it impossible to look upon love as a hobby,” he said, and his voice was suddenly quiet and grave.
Valentine made up her mind.
“I can’t come with you,” she said, “because I’m determined to get through a whole wodge of correspondence today; but Jane needs an outing. She finds the heat of Paris just now a bit trying, and I shall be terribly grateful to you, Philippe, if you will take her out and keep her out as long as possible!”
“That is a commission I undertake with zest,” Philippe declared and held up a finger to Jane before she could say a word. “Non, non, it is all decided. The little Valentine must have her way. But—” looking curiously upward at Valentine as she stood above them “—why is it that you, my infant, prefer correspondence to an outing? I would say that you are just a little pale and peaked—you are not quite the Valentine I left behind when I went away so many weary weeks ago.”
“I am all right,” Valentine said.
“She must come with us,” Jane insisted.
He took her by the shoulders and drew her to her feet. “Go and change if you must—although I would prefer that you kept on that pink dress which is so becoming! But disappear for a short while ... Add powder to your nose, or lipstick to your lips, or eye shadow to your eyes, or whatever it is women do to themselves when they get in front of a dressing table, but leave me to talk to Valentine alone!”
“But ...”
“Go!” he said and held open the door for her.
For the first time in years Jane went meekly at the behest of a man.
Valentine was smiling when Philippe returned to her, but the smile vanished when he said quietly, “I have a shoulder for you to cry on at any time that you feel it would be comfortable to do so, little Valentine!” His brown eyes were so gentle that they made her swallow slightly even as he gazed at her. “Your eyes are heavy as if you find the nights too long sometimes, and there is not enough distraction during the days to make the nights bearable.”
She said nothing, but looked away.
“Valentine,” he took her hands, “is it the Englishman, Fairfield?”
She shook her head.
“I understand he is no longer in Paris, but I did not imagine for one instant that his absence would make your eyes heavy.” There was a silence of perhaps half a minute, and then he seemed to find the ceiling interesting as he asked, “You do not see much of madame la marquise these days, or ... Leon?”
“Madame is in the country,” she said chokily.
“And Leon is taking his annual vacation. Probably somewhere down on the Mediterranean. Ah, well, holidays end, and people like Leon return to their muttons, as the saying goes ... Although why one should ever return to a mutton I cannot think! However, you may be sure that Leon will return to his.”
The door opened and Jane came in hesitantly.
“I’m not interrupting anything?”
“Nothing,” he assured her, and with his old audacity added, “Valentine and I decided to defer embracing one another until another occasion, although I did offer her my shoulder if she wanted to put her head down for a moment! Now let me see whether you are presentable enough to spend a whole day in my company.”
He turned her around and was apparently very well satisfied. She had not changed the pink dress, but she had made up her face very delicately and perfectly, so that the makeup would not be too noticeable if she acquired a light touch of sun, and she had a loose white coat over her arm.
He took the coat from her.
“Au revoir, my little one,” he said to Valentine. “We will be seeing you!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HARDLY HAD THEY TAKEN their departure before the telephone rang.
Valentine had wandered to the window as soon as the apartment door closed behind them, and although it was her own suggestion that she. should remain behind, she had been feeling somehow as if she had been temporarily abandoned by the entire world, and a weight of depression made her slim shoulders feel as if they were sagging.
Fifi bit the hem of her skirt, and she picked her up. As she stood fondling the animal and holding it rather tight in her arms, she thought, I’d like things to come right for Jane. It would be dreadful if she had to go back to the old life. And at the end of the year I shall have to go back! But Philippe is a darling, and I don’t care if Jane thinks he’s immoral—or is it unmoral she said—most of his nonsense is on the surface, and underneath I’m sure he’s quite different to what we all imagine. At least, I don’t imagine anything unpleasant about Philippe ... And if it had only been Philippe instead of ... instead of somebody terribly correct! In some ways ...! It was unfair to look upon me as a temporary diversion, and then remember in time who he was. Who, and what, I was! A young woman—a very young woman—who might get ideas into her head and who, therefore, had to be dropped ... like a hot brick!
And it was just at that moment that the telephone rang.
Valentine lifted the receiver.
“Miss Brooke?” said a voice.
“Speaking,” Valentine answered and wondered how she managed to make her voice sound so cool and composed.
“Leon Daudet here,” he said quite unnecessarily. “I’m driving out to Chaumont and I wondered whether you’d like to come along, too. After all. the house has a certain amount of interest for you—it may one day have a great deal of interest for you—and in any case, you’d probably like to see it now that the gardens will be a blaze of flowers. Unless, of course, you can’t spare the time?”
Valentine was silent so long that he said rather sharply. “Are you still there?”
“Yes ... yes,” she answered.
“Perhaps your friend Mrs. Beverley would like to see the house with us?”
“Jane has ... has gone out for the day.” she told him.
“Your friend Mr. Fairfield?” he said much more dryly.
“Peter has gone back to England and is staying with his uncle.”
“Then that seems to leave only the two of us.” the doctor remarked. “Does the prospect of driving alone with me dismay you? I promise you we’ll get back in good time, before dark.” There was something in his voice that made her clutch the receiver more tightly.
“I’ll have to bring Fifi,” she heard herself saying absurdly. “Martine is having a day off.”
She heard him laugh, and for an instant she thought his laughter sounded boyish.
“By all means bring Fifi. I’ll call for you in half an hour, shall I? We’ll have lunch on the way.”
AT FIRST NEITHER OF THEM seemed to have a great deal to say, and as they slipped effortlessly out of Paris Valentine, acutely aware of him in the seat beside her. kept asking herself why he should be making this trip to Chaumont, and why he had asked her to accompany him.
Chaumont on such a day as this, all fierce golden warmth and unsullied skies, would be quite beautiful, she knew, and she felt a curious eagerness to see it yet again; but for him there must be more interesting places he could visit, and with someone who could make the journey pass more sparklingly.
Valentine was feeling slightly devitalized after the long hot summer, much hotter than the summers to which she was accustomed, and in the comfortable car all she wanted to do was to sit quietly and watch the scenery unfold itself. The peaceful woods and the cultivated land, the farms and the barns and the tree-shaded villages, all overlaid with the shimmer of heat, and just a little tired and dusty from the continued dry spell. Most of the ponds were dried up, and the ducks hadn’t the energy to quack, but after the pavement of Paris it was a blissful relief to see even parched green opening out like a ribbon
and those dark woods rising against the sky.
Valentine wished she didn’t have to speak, and that during the drive neither of them need talk at all, but politeness forced her to overcome her lassitude and say something.
“It was good of you to call me.”
“Not at all,” he returned with the same careful politeness. He stared at the road ahead, but his next remark proved that he had taken careful note of her when he had arrived at the apartment. “Have you been away at all this summer? I thought you were looking as if you could do with a change when you opened your door to me.”
“That,” she informed him with a rather wry smile, “is hardly flattering.”
“Doctors don’t believe in being flattering. And they see more than most people.”
“You obviously do. I wasn’t aware that I was looking peaked.” Although she knew very well that she was. “And as a matter of fact, I haven’t been away this summer. But I understand you have?”
“Yes. I have a little place rather farther out than Chaumont and I visit it as often as I can. It is not as impressive as Chaumont—not much more than a cottage, really—but I like it. And I like to get away from Paris and patients.”
Suddenly she realized that she knew very little about him. She had not even visited the place where he lived in Paris. She had visited his consulting rooms once to collect some special tablets for Miss Constantia. and she had seen his secretary and the magnificent rolltop desk behind which he interviewed patients and got to know all their symptoms before directing them to the elegant little dressing room where they were provided with a silk wrapper and assisted by the secretary if they were nervous.
But his apartment in Paris, the ultramodern apartment in which he spent so much of his leisure time, she had never seen.
And now when he talked to her of his country cottage she felt suddenly wistful.
“I like small houses.” she said. “It’s easier to feel at home in them than big ones.”
“But one day you will feel very much at home in Chaumont.”
“I shall never live in Chaumont.”
He let it go at that. The day was too hot to argue, and perhaps he was not in the mood for an argument, anyway.
Not long afterward they stopped for lunch at a little vine-wreathed hotel where it was at least cool, for there were electric fans whirring in the dining room, and the garden at the back had an ornamental pool on the fringes of which tables were set out, and sun umbrellas and some lovely tall poplar trees cast a shade across the house.
They sat beneath one of the sun umbrellas and drank a couple of aperitifs, and afterward their lunch was very pleasant and relaxing. The doctor’s mood was still rather unlike his usual one, and the topics of conversation he introduced made it quite unnecessary for Valentine to feel that she had to be very mentally alert to deal with them. Only when he asked her how it was that Jane had deserted her for a day, and she admitted that Jane was in the company of the Comte de Villeneuve, and that they, too, were escaping to the country, did his dark eyebrows lift, and she thought he smiled rather strangely.
“Philippe is quite a success with you two girls, isn’t he?” he said.
“I like him very much,” she answered, as if she was determined he should know her opinion of Philippe.
His smile grew more quizzical.
“Does Mrs. Beverley like him very much?”
“I ... I don’t know.”
“Philippe is not a safe person to become very attached to.”
Valentine stared down at the gay check cloth and drew patterns on it with her finger.
“In order to become very attached to a person you have to become reconciled to most aspects of his character—good and bad,” she said.
He smiled. “How wise you are! There is a little of good in all of us and very likely quite a lot of bad in the best of us! Now shall we go?”
She nodded, and within a few minutes they were on their way again.
Chaumont, when they reached it at last, was like a lovely lady welcoming them after a long and tiring run. Valentine, having seen it last in the springtime, when the grounds were still partly asleep after the severities of the winter, and on a day when its mistress was laid to rest, hadn’t realized quite what a perfect place it was. It was of no particular style of architecture, but it was just exquisite, its lines harmonious, its condition a proof that it had been lovingly preserved.
On a hot August afternoon it was very still, and into every room stole the many and conflicting scents from the masses of flowers that bloomed all around it. The lawns looked delectably green and fresh, in spite of the drought, and the lake was a sheet of looking glass reflecting blue sky and little white feathery clouds.
Valentine felt a kind of ache in her heart as she wandered around the house with Leon. What would become of it, she wondered? How soon would it know life again, and not just the slippered footfalls of a caretaker?
The same caretaker offered to make them tea, and they had it on the terrace overlooking the lake. A magnificent Gloire de Dijon rose bloomed in a bed below the terrace, and the scent of it was so penetrating and so almost poignantly sweet that Valentine commented on it, and Leon descended the terrace steps and plucked her a splendid specimen and brought it back to the tea table for her. She buried her face in it with delight and thanked him with a blush of pleasure rising to her cheeks.
He sat down again and watched her.
She found herself plunging into speech. Although she had already asked after the marquise, she made another inquiry as to when she would be back in Paris, and he replied composedly that she would probably be back in a week or two. And then he leaned forward with his hands clasped between his knees and said quietly. “Nearly five months of your year have gone. Valentine. Have you any plans for the remaining months?”
She shook her head.
“Why did young Fairfield go back to England?”
“His uncle was very ill, and his aunt needed him. But his uncle is better now, and ... and he may be returning.”
“And you are, of course, looking forward to his return?”
Suddenly she lifted her eyes to his, and the clear transparent blueness of them should have made him wonder. They should also have disconcerted him slightly.
“Dr. Daudet,” she said, “I know what you are thinking, but you might as well know that there will never be anything serious between Peter and myself. I like him very much indeed, and I think he likes me, but that is as far as it goes.”
“You couldn’t bring yourself to marry him in order to make your legacy secure?”
She seemed to whiten a little in the strong sunshine.
“Dr. Daudet—” this time her voice was nervously sharp “—I shall marry no one to secure my legacy. But I will tell you something, if you like.”
“Please do.” he said, removing ash from his cigarette.
“Peter asked me to marry him, and I refused—unless he was willing to marry me after the year was up, and without my legacy! I gave him twenty-four hours in which to decide whether it was worth it or not.”
“Well?” he asked very quietly.
“He flew home to England that very same night. I haven’t seen him since. Oh, he writes, and his aunt writes, too, and has invited me to stay with them if I feel so disposed. She has even suggested that I might like to make my home with them if I feel lonely, and I’m sure she’s very nice ... very nice indeed.”
“But where Peter is concerned you have received a bitter disappointment?”
“I’ve received nothing in the nature of a disappointment!” Suddenly she was angry with him, furiously angry for finding it a simple matter to put questions of this sort to her. If he had had the smallest degree of interest in her he couldn’t, she knew, have put them in quite that detached and impersonal a manner, and it hurt her suddenly so cruelly that she could hardly bear it. “I am not in love with Peter. I should loathe to marry him, because marriage without love is that one thing I would never contempla
te. And if there is one thing that has upset me in the past few months, it is the knowledge that the sudden acquisition of money, or property, will also enable you to get to know people for what they really are. They’ll either want to share it with you, or they’ll despise you. Peter would like to share it with me, and you ... you ...!”
“Yes, me?” he asked.
They were both standing and facing one another now, and he could see that she was almost beside herself with distress that was making her lips quiver and her eyes threaten to brim over at any moment. He took her by the arm and said. “Come along. Let’s go down to the lake where it’s cooler.”
Meekly she submitted to being led down to the lake, and near to the dazzling shimmer of it they sat down on a carved wooden bench. Valentine clasped her trembling hands tightly in her lap, and the man laid his lean brown ones over them and gripped them and held them until they ceased to tremble.
“Now listen to me. Valentine.” he said. “What would have happened if Fairfield had said he would marry you without your legacy? Would you have stuck to your promise, even though you have told me that you. have no love for him?”
She shook her head with that disillusioned lost look on her face.
“I knew there was no danger. I knew that Peter didn’t need twenty-four hours to decide.”
“I see. ‘ But his voice and his look were grave. “And now will you tell me in what way I have contributed to your present state of disillusionment?”
“Yes,” she answered, looking at their linked hands. “In the beginning you thought I was an adventuress, and then you decided to pay attention to me. You introduced me to your aunt, you told me that I disturbed you. you—”
