Desert Doorway

by Pamela Kent

  "Then you ought to believe Celestine instead of me," Jenny half whispered. "After all, I'm only someone she employs, and you've known her a very long while, haven't you?"

  100

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FOR the next week Jenny was allowed to carry

  out her normal duties as' a governess in the St.

  Alais household and occupy herself in her spare time in any way she pleased, and she received

  no invitations from anyone which she would have preferred to decline. She exercised the children m the garden, they

  were carried out each afternoon for a conventional outing in one of the big cars, and if there were

  visitors to the house she did not see them.

  About the middle of the week the Comte announced at lunch time that it was necessary for

  him to fly to Paris. Jenny was a little dismayed

  by the news because she knew that she was going

  to miss his pleasant, courteous conversation at

  meal times, and an occasional quiet talk with himin the evenings, although Celestine apparently

  was left quite unshaken by the information. She

  did not even bother to ask him how soon he would be back, or why precisely he was going�although, as Jenny realized, she probably knew it was in

  connection with business � and her attitude of complete indifference struck something like a cold chill to the heart of the English girl.

  To her it was a dreadful thing that a marriage, which should surely have been happy, was such an

  empty, comfortless thing. And when she remembered Celestine's rapt expression while she was

  dancing in the arms of Max Daintry she felt

  colder still. i The Comte left before dinner that evening, and

  the Gomtesse dined out. Jenny .had her dinner

  brought to her on a tray in the nursery, 'and she was glad of the society of the children because thehouse seemed strangely quiet and deserted.

  � For the next two days practically all her meals were brought to her in the nursery, and she sawlittle or nothing of � the Comtesse. She took the I � ' 101

  children to a French dressmaker who was re

  sponsible for a good many of their clothes, and

  she took Louis to a dentist for the removal of

  one of his small teeth because he had been kept

  awake by toothache, and on the way home in the

  big grey car she caught a glimpse of Si Moham

  med on his theatrical-looking white horse, but he

  was disappearing in a cloud of dust under an arch

  way, and he did not see her.

  The next day Max Daintry came to lunch, and Jenny was asked to bring the children downstairs for the meal. Max was good with the children, and they appeared to like him very much, twining their arms about him and calling him Uncle Max,

  -while Celestine looked on with a strange, carven smile on her lovely, cool red lips. Jenny was glad that she had to occupy herself cutting up Simone's food, supervising Louis occasionally and making certain there were no disasters at the table, such as a vase of flowers overturned, or a glass of orange squash sent cascading across the polished surface, to the danger of the lace table mats, and that she had little opportunity to be anything but aloof to Max Daintry without it seeming at all noticeable. For at least half a dozen times a day she kept recalling that picture of him dancing with the Comtesse, she remembered what Lady Berringer had said about the dangers of seeking to make an impression on him, and she had only to close her eyes to feel again the ruthless pressure of his fingers on her arm and the steel in his voice when he warned her of encouraging Si Mohammed Menebhi.

  Lady Berringer was right; he was hard. And he was hard right through! The mockery in his eyes made them dangerously attractive, and it would be impossible to doubt that Celestine � though in every other way she too was hard as unbending metal � was in love with him.

  And unless he wanted to encourage her he would not meet her as often as he did. Jenny, who knew only too well how much danger she was in herself

  102

  �of being battered against a stone wall?�was constantly hearing those murmured words ofCelestine's when she let him out of the house after he had devoted a whole day to her. Jenny:

  "'You won't be late tonight, wiU you. Max? Last time you kept me waiting a, full five minutes."

  There was only one interpretation to put on requests of that sort.

  Jenny was thankful that she was able to refuse coffee after the meal was over because the children had to be returned to the nursery and settled down for their afternoon naps, but as she sat with some needlework on her lap she had to keep giving her head a little shake in order to shut out the picture of the man who claimed to be afellow countryman of hers, and who knew her

  native Dorset, sitting in the lovely main salon

  with the Comtesse while the two of them lingered over their coffee.

  Or perhaps they would choose the even greater seclusion of the library, where possibly he would seize the opportunity to kiss Celestine's brighthair, and no one would dare to go near and inter

  rupt them.

  Jenny sewed away industriously, and she was telling herself that at least she need not meet him again that day, because tea could be served to her in the nursery, when a knock came on the nursery door, and before she could call out a"Come in" or "Who is it?" the door opened and the man who had not been out of her thoughts for half a minute since she left the dining-room stood looking somewhat quizzically down upon her. ,

  "I wanted to see the children to say good-bye/" he said. "That is, if they've had long enough for their naps? And I remembered that I hadn't said good-bye to you, either."

  Jenny stood up with assumed coolness and liftedher eyebrows,,

  "Of course you can say good-bye to the child

  ren," she answered primly. "But it wasn't exactly necessary to say good-bye to me, was it?" His quizzical look became more noticeable. "Well, under strictly normal circumstances, per

  haps not�but I'm joining the Comte in Paris

  tomorrow, and I'm not quite sure how long I'll be

  away, so I thought it would be a good plan to

  lay a few injunctions upon you before I left!" As she exclaimed "Oh!" in a queer, flat little voice, as if the ground had been suddenly knocked from under her feet, his smile grew more definitely amused.

  "Perhaps not so much injunctions, as offer you a few suggestions," he continued affably. "For instance, if by any chance you should feel the need

  of someone who speaks your own language to exchange a few words with, Lady Berringer is delightfully understanding, and she'll be at the Mamounia for at least another fortnight. You can always get in touch with her if you want to� either her or Esther Harringay, her companion. Esther, by the way, has taken quite a fancy to you."

  "Oh!" Jenny exclaimed again, and stared down at the silk smock she had been hemming, which was still in her hand.

  "I'm sorry if I said something to you the other night which annoyed you," Daintry remarked, and she knew he was referring to Si Mohammed, and the conclusions he had arrived at. "But you're very young, you know"�with a much fainter smile�"and you haven't been in Marrakesh very long. All the same, I'm glad you didn't take my advice and go home."

  Jenny was silent She was wondering why it had come as such a shock to her that he, too, was going away, and why she felt so much more than dismayed because he was going. She ought to be relieved�relieved that she wouldn't have to see anything of him, and that Celestine wouldn't be able to see him, either, and her sympathies where

  104

  Raoul de St. Alais was concerned would not be

  called upon to work overtime because hia wife

  was being so blatantly unfaithful to him. �

  The children came running from the night nursery and threw themselves upon their visitor, and after he had picked each of them up and made a fuss of them for
a short while he set them down again and held out his hand to Jenny.

  "I consider it was most unfortunate the way we met," he remarked, "but if you hadn't such a busy little brain which you permit far too much rope, and if you weren't so eager to absorb the wrong sort of impressions, at least it would be possible for us to be friends." The quizzical look had returned to his eyes, but his voice was more gentle than she had ever heard it before, and the close grasp of his hand was warm and somehow

  sustaining. "Don't do anything of which I wouldn't

  approve while I'm away, little Jenny�or do you

  object to my calling you Jenny? Perhaps you're

  annoyed because I called you Jenny several times

  on the night of the dance ?"

  "Of course not," Jenny answered, and all at once, although she felt sure he was laughing at her, she only wanted to cling to his hand, and she wished that Lady Berringer, delightful though she was, had never made those remarks about him. There was nothing unkind about him today, and despite his swarthiness the English half of him seemed very much in the ascendant. He had an English wholesomeness, an impeccability, an unquestionable masculinity. Whatever he was, and however he behaved, there was nothing weak about him�and that white-toothed smile of his had undeniable charm. Jenny felt it catch at her heartstrings, and her heart even tip-tilted dizzily while she allowed him to retain possession of her fingers. 1

  She wished more earnestly than she had ever wished for anything in her life that they could be the friends he suggested.

  105

  "Then that's all right," he said. "I can go on thinking about you as Jenny, anyway."

  He looked at the sewing in her hand, at the pile of mending on the table beside her chair, and then around him at the pleasant room where she spent so much of her time, and he added the ob�

  servation:

  "You fit in here very well. Now that I've seen you in here, and I've also seen you with the children watching over them at lunch time, and so forth, I realize that Celestine was lucky to get you. And whenever I want to do so I can call up a picture of you in this room!"

  He gave her fingers a hard, suddenly rather

  brutal little squeeze, and then he let them go. His grey eyes flickered over her, from the crown of her head to the top of her white-shod feet, and

  then back again to the burnished curls that framed her white brow, and she had the impression that the look was deliberate, .and that he had no objection at all to her realizing that it was deliber

  0|4-p

  "Au revoir," he said, and swung back to the door. "Don't forget that you can always call^on Lady Berringer, for advice or anything else."

  And then he was gone, and if the house had seemed empty to Jenny after the Comte had left, with the departure of Max Daintry the large, cheerful day nursery seemed suddenly berefto

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  JENNY slept badly that night. In fact, for a long time she found it impossible to get to sleep at all. The moonlit night outside her windows was disturbed by the monotonous noises of a wedding party that was making a tour of the medina, and the thought of the barbaric custom that permitted a girl to become the bride of a man she had never seen�and who, for that matter, had never seen her�caused her a chill of revulsion. The thin, wavering noises of the reed pipes that accompanied the procession seemed to linger in the air even after it had passed, and to Jenny they, were almost sinister sounds. She looked at the violently purple sky outside, at the white bar of moonlight on the floor of her room, and she thought that Africa�the whole of Africa�was a land of severe contrasts, and because of those contrasts it was more than a little frightening.

  There was a thin veneer of civilization on the top, but underneath there was so much that was primitive, and worst than primitive. What she had seen of Marrakesh had taught her that. She recalled her tour of the medina with Max Daintry, and remembered how shocked she had been by the many evidences of squalor and grime and poverty that not even the hot sun could do much about, her shrinking from the frenzies of the medicine men and the holy men in the Djemaa el Fna, and the monotonous rhythm of the tomtoms that beat like a discordant nerve in the ears of the unaccustomed. The> beggars and the snakecharmers and the diseased animals that fleds.

  through the cobbled lanes and dark alleyways of the medina�these things had made her glad that Daintry was at her elbow.

  ; And then, as she tossed restfully in bed, she ;; asked herself whether he had already left Mar| rakesh. If he had, it was unlikely that she would

  I 107

  have him at her elbow for perhaps some while 1 to come, and with his departure Marrakesh seemed even more sinister. She was not even sure that she had any liking for it at all.

  And then she thought of Celestine, lying wakeful perhaps, in her own extremely luxurious room, and thinking of him. Missing him already�regretting his departure just as Jenny was regretting

  it!

  For�and she buried her face suddenly in the

  pillow, as if she was acutely ashamed of the knowledge� they were both in love with him, and' Jenny's love was so new, and so doomed to be hopeless, that it was a torment without any ot the compensating pleasures love was supposed to bring in its train. But if she chose to fall in IOVP with a man about whom even Lady Berringer had warned her�and there had been no malice in Lady Berringer's warning, she felt sure, because she admitted that in a way she liked him, and he obviously thought highly of her�and whom she herself mistrusted so much, and most of her instincts disapproved of, what could she expect but torment?

  She turned over on her back, and in a panicstricken way she stared at the moonlight, and asked herself whether it would not be the wisest thing for her to act upon the advice Daintry himgplf had given her, on the second occasion they met, and that was to go home to England. If she did that not only would she save herself future misery, because love once born has a habit ot growing stronger, like a lusty infant, but she would be unlikely ever to see him again, and the

  reeling he had awakened in her might in time shrivel up. Above all she would not be forced to enter into a kind of unacknowledged competition with Celestine for the notice of a man who probably secretly despised them both, even it he found Jenny moderately entertaining, and Celes

  tine violently attractive.

  108

  At the moment during that long and restless night Jenny was certain that the right thing

  would be for her to go home, but when the morning dawned, and she found that she had dozeda little after all, she was not so certain. She hadher living to earn, and this was quite a goodjob�or at least, it brought her a good salary,

  and she had become genuinely fond of her charges. Also the conditions were excellent. If she went back to England it might be a very long time before she landed herself another job where theconditions left so little to complain of.

  And after the children had had their breakfast and were washed, dressed, and ready for the day, telestine made a somewhat abrupt appearancem the nursery and announced that she was taking

  them all away for a few days, and that Jenny

  couM start helping Nerida to pack.

  "It's getting a bit stuffy here in Marrakeshjust now,' she said, concentrating her attentionon the children, who were always delighted tosee her, although if she was wearing something

  new and special she kept them at a distance, "and

  a drive into the Atlas will do us all good." Shelooked up at Jenny, and surveyed her rather curiously. "You haven't seen much of Morocco

  yet, so you'll enjoy this chance of a fresh glimpse

  Jenny didn't like to ask her outright where theywere going, and Celestine became preoccupiedwith deciding what the children would need towear, and whisked open the doors of small ward

  robes with the air of one who had no other immediate problems on her mind.

  Jenny helped Nerida to pack, and then Nerida changed the children's nursery clothes for othersthat were more suited
to a visit away from home, and Jenny herself put on something more formal

  .than her candy-striped cotton. When they were 'ready to leave she was surprised that the Corn

  ;;tesse decided to leave Nerida behind, although

  j Jenny was quite capable of coping with Louis

  and Simone alone, and she was even more surprised when she overheard Celestine telling the Berber servant before they left that if Lady Berringer made any attempt to contact her she was to be told that an invitation had been accepted for a few days, and that they would soon be back. Nothing more�no information as to whom the invitation was from, or where the Comte himself might contact them if he returned unexpectedly.

  But Jenny lulled a vague feeling of wonder� it was not at that stage uneasiness�by telling herself that Celestine was probably in touch with her husband by letter, and that he knew wherethey were going, and that the whole thing might even have been arranged before he left.

  The big grey car carried them away from the

  . closely-packed medina, and soon they had crossed the Djemaa el Fna and were outside the walls of Marrakesh and heading towards the High Atlas. Jenny looked back at the rose-pink walls of thedesert town, which seemed to be glowing like blood against the light. The sunshine fell goldenly all about them, promising great heat as the day advanced, the sky was a brilliant blue, and in front beckoned the impressive grandeur of the

  mountains.

  Because the car travelled effortlessly at speed it was not long before they reached the lower slopes of the Atlas, and then they started to climb. Red earth fell away below them, and fields of wheat and barley, olive trees and dark green pencil-like cypresses. Jenny's breath was caught by the patchwork loveliness of the scene they were leaving, while they mounted into a world that wasgrim and austere. Above them loomed peaks as grand as any that were to be seen in the Alps, rising against the cobalt-blue backcloth of sky in endless majesty, while the pale brown color of therocks was an attractive half-tone after the angry red of the desert soil.