The Wedding Dress

by Mary Burchell

  “Don’t exaggerate!” she said, and laughed. But she was infinitely pleased really, and oddly soothed.

  “No exaggeration,” he assured her. “It wasn’t only the natural grace and charm, Loraine. It was the way you made almost a stage role of every design. You were different every time. Did you know?”

  “N-no. I don’t think I did.”

  “It was fascinating. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Everyone was talking about you. I was bursting with pride, and couldn’t help telling several people you were my ward.”

  “Paul, you didn’t!”

  “Indeed I did. Do you mind?”

  “No, of course not. But somehow I can’t imagine your doing anything so—so naive and nice.”

  “Good lord!” He made a face. “Was I actually being naive?”

  “Well—no. Perhaps not. Perhaps you were just being nice,” she told him. And she put her head against his shoulder and rested very contentedly there.

  He made no more conversation on the short drive home, for which she was glad. She was able to think about Philip and how she could explain everything to him—which made her draw a troubled sigh once, though, inexplicably, she already felt less distracted.

  Paul glanced at her when she sighed, but still he said nothing. And, even when they got home, he treated her a little as though she were an invalid—which was hardly less than bliss after the day she had had.

  He made her have her supper on a small table, which he drew up beside her armchair, and he gave her a glass of some very special wine, which made her feel exquisitely warmed and soothed.

  “Feeling better now?” he inquired when, her meal finished, she leant back in her chair and smiled at him. “Heaps better. You’re the best of guardians.”

  He actually flushed slightly at that, which touched her, as well as faintly amusing her, and reminded her forcibly of the way he had looked at her when she walked past him in the wedding dress.

  “You really did enjoy the dress show, then!” She put out her hand and lightly patted his arm.

  “Enormously. Particularly your part in it. Florian was delighted with you too, wasn’t he?”

  “I think so.”

  “There was no doubt of it! He was muttering to himself in a satisfied way each time you came into view.”

  “Really?” She looked interested. “Even before the—the sensation of the wedding dress?”

  “Certainly. But that doesn’t surprise you, surely?”

  “It does rather. He was very cross with me just before the Show began, and I wasn’t sure at which point he forgave me.”

  “Cross with you? Whatever for?” Paul looked rather annoyed on her behalf.

  “Oh, well—” She remembered suddenly that she could not possibly explain in detail. “There are lots of ups and downs on a day like this.”

  “I gathered as much,” he said unexpectedly. “What went wrong, Loraine?”

  “Nothing went wrong,” she assured him quickly. “What made you think so?”

  “The moment you appeared, when I went to fetch you this evening, I saw that something had clouded the earlier radiance.”

  “That was just tiredness.”

  “No, dear, it wasn’t. I wish you’d tell me.”

  She wished she could. She wished it so intensely that she could not keep the eager impulse to confide in him from showing in her face.

  “Come on,” he urged her, half laughing, half serious. “What are guardians for if, they can’t offer counsel and consolation when things go wrong?”

  “I don’t think I can. It’s so difficult—”

  And then the utter longing to tell someone—to shift even a small amount of the worry which was weighing her down—became too strong to resist, and she said in a rather small voice:

  “You won’t—like me very much when I tell you.”

  “How do you know? It would take quite something to make me stop liking you.”

  “Would it, Paul?” Again her hand went out to touch his arm in that light, appealing gesture. “You once said I was so—so straight and truthful. I haven’t been absolutely straight with you.”

  “Haven’t you?” He frowned, but in thought rather than anger. “About Florian, you mean?”

  “Oh, no! It’s nothing to do with Florian—except indirectly, this morning. It’s to do with—Elinor and the man she’s now engaged to.”

  “With Elinor?” He stiffened suddenly and his expression changed so that he looked aloof and on guard. “What on earth do you know about her?”

  “She was—there, this morning, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said unexpectedly. “I caught a glimpse of her before the Show began. That was one reason why I didn’t stay to speak to you afterwards. Florian assured me that I would have to hang about indefinitely before I got a word with you, and I didn’t feel inclined to risk that.”

  “He was there too,” Loraine said slowly.

  “Who was?”

  “Philip. Philip Otway. The man she’s engaged to now.”

  “So you know him too?” Her guardian looked at her curiously, with no trace now of the half-teasing smile which had lightened his glance a few minutes ago.

  “It’s Philip whom I really know,” she explained with an effort. “He and his mother lived near my home. They were very kind to me during my father’s lifetime. Then I found they—he was living in Paris, and that he was engaged to the girl who had—”

  “Jilted me.” He supplied the word with a sort of grim deliberation, and she nodded apologetically.

  “But, you strange girl, why make such a mystery of it?” He gave a slight, annoyed laugh. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I couldn’t,” she said simply. “You might have forbidden me to see him any more, in view of the position between you and him.”

  “O-oh, I see. And it was very important to you that you should see him again, Loraine?”

  “Yes, Very.”

  “Even though he was engaged to someone else?”

  “That’s difficult to explain, too. I didn’t want—I didn’t intend—to behave badly. But his mother insisted on telling me that Philip wasn’t really madly in love with her—that, in fact, she, Elinor, had done most of the running.”

  “Interesting,” he interjected drily.

  “I felt I couldn’t bear just to let everything go by default. I wanted Philip to see me, not as the schoolgirl I had been, but as the girl I now was.”

  “Do you love him very much?” her guardian asked curtly.

  “Yes, I love him very much,” Loraine stated, softly but categorically. And at that, Paul got restlessly to his feet and walked up the room and back again.

  As she watched him, anxiously, she could not decide if he were very angry or deeply disquieted. She only knew that some quite powerful emotion prompted those restless steps and clouded his grimly handsome face. And after a moment she asked rather timidly:

  “Shall I go on?”

  “Oh, lord, yes! I suppose there’s some more to tell.”

  “Quite a lot. But—but please don’t stand over me like that while I’m telling it. You make me nervous.”

  He sat down again immediately, though without comment.

  “I couldn’t tell Philip about you, any more than I could tell you about Philip,” she went on, after a moment, and, because her head was beginning to ache again, she pushed back her hair with a weary, absent little gesture. “I didn’t like pretending to you both. In fact I hated it.”

  “I’m sure you did,” he said brusquely. “It would have been so much simpler if you had confided in me from the beginning, Loraine.”

  “You weren’t all that easy to confide in,” she reminded him with a small, pale smile. “Don’t you remember?”

  “I’m sorry. Go on.”

  “I hate to say it—but things were made much easier for me when you went away. At least, I didn’t have to practise any active deception or tell any downright lies. But then—Elinor discovered I was yo
ur ward.”

  “How?” he asked briefly.

  She explained about the telephone number, and he smiled grimly and said, “Too bad. What did Elinor propose to do with that awkward information?”

  Until that very moment, Loraine had thought she meant to tell Paul the whole story. But then she knew suddenly that, however badly Elinor had behaved, she simply could not betray her exact baseness to the man who had once loved her, and perhaps still did, in spite of his anger.

  She drew a long breath and said firmly:

  “I don’t know that she proposed to do anything with it—until today. Then I was called to show some dresses to her, and Philip and his mother were both there. I hardly know how it happened, but some mention was made of where I was living, and Elinor put it that I was living in your flat, and—and Philip immediately jumped to some horrid conclusion—”

  “What horrid conclusion?” Paul inquired with dry exactness.

  “The obvious one,” she replied, in much the same tone.

  “There is no obvious conclusion to draw except that you are my ward,” he said curtly.

  “I meant—the obvious one when anyone uses that particular expression.”

  “You mean, in fact, that Elinor gave the statement a particular and questionable flavor?”

  “I was too stunned to notice just how she put it,” Loraine lied gallantly. “I only knew that Philip was appalled—”

  “The censorious prig!”

  “Oh, he isn’t! Only, before I could straighten things out, Madame Moisant came in and wh-whisked me off to be photographed in the wedding dress and I was so m-miserable I didn’t know what to do,” Loraine confessed forlornly. And, in spite of all she could do to prevent it, a lone tear trickled down her cheek and splashed on to the back of her hand.

  “Don’t cry,” he said in a flat sort of voice. “I don’t expect he’s worth crying about. Few of us are.”

  “Oh, but he is!” She gulped and managed to choke back the rest of the tears. “He was always so wonderful to me. Like no one else at all. I know, in a way, he belongs to Elinor. But he belonged to me in a very special sense before he even met her.”

  “How?”

  “It was when I was very much on my own—because my father didn’t really take much notice of me. And on my eighteenth birthday Philip found me, out on the moors, and he took me home to his mother and they gave me a heavenly, heavenly day I shall never forget. After that, I used to see a lot of him.”

  “Did he ever make love to you?”

  “No. I think he just thought of me as a schoolgirl. Which I was then, of course,” she added naively.

  “But he doesn’t think of you as a schoolgirl now?”

  “I—don’t think so.”

  “Not after seeing you in that wedding dress today,” he said half to himself. “Florian’s a clever devil.”

  Loraine opened her eyes wide, and was on the point of asking how Paul could possibly know about the special significance of the wedding dress. But at that moment, he glanced at the clock and said:

  “Dear, have you noticed the time? I’m afraid your personal problems will have to wait for another day. Tomorrow isn’t going to be much less strenuous than today, is it?”

  “Oh, no! We have both the Press Show and the showing for the buyers.” She smothered a yawn at the very thought and got to her feet. “I must go to bed. But—I’m so glad I’ve told you, Paul.”

  “I’m glad too.” He also stood up and, as he looked down at her, she found his expression hard to fathom. It was indulgent, she was relieved to see, but there was a curious touch of melancholy too in the way he looked at her.

  “Are you—disappointed in me?” she asked diffidently.

  “Disappointed in you, child? No, of course not! Why on earth should I be?”

  “Well, I thought, you know, that it might seem to you that I’d been deceitful and not—not at all like truth itself, as you once said.”

  “You were not deceitful,” he told her. “You were just pushed against the wall and didn’t know what on earth to do next. If I had been half as understanding as I should have been, you wouldn’t have had to handle this business alone.”

  “Oh, please don’t blame yourself!” She put her hands on his arms and looked up at him anxiously. “There wasn’t a thing you could have done about it, even if you’d known more.”

  “No?” He took her face between his hands and smiled down at her. “I wonder.”

  Then he kissed her, lightly but with an odd tenderness which told her that any fault or indiscretion of hers was entirely forgiven.

  “Goodnight, Loraine. And try not to worry too much. I know that sounds fatuous when one is miserable. But things have the strangest way of working out in the end.”

  “Is that what you told yourself when you were miserable?” she asked, with a touch of mischief.

  “No. If I had, I might have avoided a vital mistake,” he replied drily. “Now go to bed.”

  So she went to bed, though she would have liked to linger and ask him just what he meant by that last admission. But it was too late now to go into the complications of his relationship with Elinor. She was sorry if he felt he could have handled his own love affair better, but she simply could not help thinking that, in point of fact, he had had a lucky escape when Elinor had thrown him over.

  Incredibly, after all this emotional discussion, she slept dreamlessly and deeply, and woke to a feeling of freshness and well-being.

  True, the instinctive smile was wiped from her face when she recalled the scene yesterday in the fitting-room. But, with an illogical sense of comfort, she remembered Paul’s saying that things had a strange way of working out in the end. And, although she could not see her own affairs working out with any degree of satisfaction or simplicity in the near future, she recalled thankfully that at least she had taken her guardian into her confidence and would no longer have to guard every word and action while at home.

  Once more he drove her down to the dress house, where she was greeted with cries of mingled congratulation and envy, because she had captured most of the headlines in the morning newspapers.

  It was the most extraordinary experience, to find oneself something of a minor celebrity, and to see one’s own face smiling back from the page of a newspaper.

  “She has influence, that one,” declared Lisette contemptuously. “Only so does one have one’s photograph in the papers before the actual Press Show.”

  “No, no. She won the distinction on merit,” countered Odette good-humoredly. “She was a sensation, the little Loraine. The biggest sensation since Gabrielle stole the show and married Monsieur Florian. Perhaps you also will marry romantically, petite.”

  “But not Monsieur Florian. She is a good little girl,” mocked Lisette, “and does not take someone else’s man. Is that not so, Loraine?”

  “I hope so,” said Loraine. But so soberly and thoughtfully that the other girls laughed, and Odette said it was as well not to commit oneself too far on such generalities.

  The Press Show and the Buyers’ Show lacked, perhaps, the drama of the opening day. About them there was no element of the theatre premiere. But in practical fact, Loraine knew, they were at least as important. The one supplied priceless advertisement and the other represented solid business.

  Twice again she went through her part, not only to the satisfaction of Florian, but in a manner which won her the kind of notice and compliment she still found difficulty in accepting as hers. But she kept her head and even contrived to remain pleasant and unruffled when the representative of one of the more sensational papers tried to extract intimate details of her private life from her.

  “You did well to say nothing so charmingly,” Odette told her with approval. “Now he will have to make it all up.”

  “Make it up?” Loraine looked taken aback.

  “To be sure. He will have his story, one way or another. But now he will have the trouble of inventing it.”

  “Oh,” sai
d Loraine, none too pleased. And, for the first time, she glimpsed the kind of persecution which some Continental newspapers turn upon the unfortunate people classed as newsworthy.

  Again there was little time to think about her own affairs. But, in the background of her mind, there still hovered both anxiety with regard to Philip and relief whenever she thought about Paul.

  “In a way, I suppose I wasted yesterday evening,” she thought once. “I should have telephoned to Philip and insisted on explaining the real position. Or at least I should have got in touch with Mrs. Otway and asked her advice. Instead—”

  But how could she possibly regret what had happened instead? Every time she thought of the way Paul had looked after her, his understanding reception of her confession, and his particular method of reassurance, she felt soothed and comforted.

  All the same, she realized that she must somehow contrive to give over this coming evening.to the problem of finding Philip and counteracting the mischief which Elinor had done her. The longer she left things, the worse they might well become. And it was significant that Philip himself had not attempted to get in touch with her.

  True, he probably knew that she would have been very late at the salon the previous night. But that not even a telephone call had been received did now strike her as ominous.

  She grew more and more nervous and anxious, therefore, as time went on and it was obvious that another late evening was inevitable. And the last straw came when Marcelle—well-wishing but dreadfully serious about everything—snatched a moment to run up from the boutique and inform her:

  “A very charming English monsieur is waiting outside for you. But he has his car and he says it is all right. He will wait until you can get away.”

  'Oh, dear!” Loraine exclaimed in dismay. She had not expected Paul to repeat his good deed of the previous evening, and now it was going to be difficult to explain that he had waited in vain—that, in fact, all she wanted was to go to Mrs. Otway’s hotel and find out the best way to get in contact with Philip.