A Moment in Paris Page 5

  ‘Come here, child, and bring Philippe with you. What’s the matter with you, Philippe,’ she demanded, ‘that you stare as if I’ve aged since you saw me last? I was eighty-three last birthday, and when I’m ninety-three we’ll have such a celebration that you’ll none of you forget it! Come here, both of you!’ she thundered.

  Diana sent an aghast look at the Comte.

  ‘Godmother,’ he said loudly and coldly, ‘this young lady is not my fiancee.’

  ‘Not your fiancee? Don’t be silly! What have you brought her here for, then? She’s as pretty as a picture, and I can tell you at once that I approve! Yes, Philippe, I approve!’ she shouted at him. ‘J’approuve, mon enfant!’

  ‘Whether you approve or not, Marraine, Mademoiselle Craven is not going to marry me,’ Philippe enunciated icily into the ear-trumpet that was thrust in his direction. ‘She is at this moment acting as companion to Mademoiselle O’Brien here, who will become my Comtesse in a very few weeks from now. Is everything clear to you now, Madame la Duchesse?’

  If no one else realized that he was consumed with anger, Diana certainly did. By the time Celeste had been formally presented, and the Duchesse had looked her over and declined to apologize for mistaking someone else for her godson’s future wife, she was still feeling too shaken even to move. But once more the Duchesse beckoned to her imperiously, and she had to go forward.

  ‘So you’re English, are you?’ she said. ‘That makes me like you even more, for Michael here is English, and I’m very much attached to him. He’s amusing, and so good-looking, and although he’s supposed to be my secretary I really keep him on just because I like to have him around, as this American young woman would probably say!’

  She peered distastefully at Celeste.

  ‘Don’t look so terrified, child. I’m not going to bite you, and if Philippe wants to marry you then he can do so for all I care! People must make their own beds, and lie on them, too, if they don’t suit them.’ She stretched forth a claw-like hand and caught at her secretary’s sleeve. ‘Say “how do you do” to your countrywoman, Michael. You’re in luck today, for I give you full permission to show her all over the grounds after lunch, and you must make the most of your opportunity.’

  But Michael had already grasped Diana’s nerveless hand. He was holding it very strongly, and his handsome grey eyes were insisting that she look up and meet their full regard.

  ‘Miss Craven and I already know one another,’ he said softly, ‘indeed, Madame, we have known one another since we were children.’

  The Duchesse’s mouth dropped open, and then she cackled delightedly.

  ‘But isn’t that extraordinary?’ she exclaimed, ‘isn’t it delightful?’ She looked round at the others as if she didn’t doubt they agreed with her. ‘Two of the nicest-looking people I have ever met, and they know one another! All their lives they have known one another! They will be telling me next that they are in love with one another!’ And her faded eyes grew quite bright at the prospect.

  Michael—somehow he was still holding Diana’s hand—smiled down at the old lady he served.

  ‘As a matter of fact, Madame, there was a time when we did plan to marry. We were engaged to be married.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Diana wrenched away her hand from the almost possessive clasp of the man who sought to retain it.

  Michael—who had once meant everything in the world to her, and gone for good out of her life (or so she had thought!)—was here in the house of the Duchesse de Savenne, and it was so unbelievable that it deprived her of the power to behave normally. And she knew that she must remember her position and behave very normally indeed, especially while her employer glared at her from the other side of the Duchesse’s chair.

  Already she had snatched away from his fiancee a certain amount of her rightful limelight, and now she was attracting fresh attention to herself.

  Lady Bembridge, however, seized the opportunity to beam at her, and she said in one of her penetratingly loud whispers: ‘What a surprise, my dear!... But you’ve put the Duchesse into a good humour, and at least we shall be able to enjoy our lunch. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it at all.’

  Celeste stole across to her and whispered, also.

  ‘I always said you were a dark horse! Now everything’s coming out, and we shall learn the truth. He’s terribly good-looking!’ She glanced from Diana to the debonair secretary, who had provided his employer with an aperitif, and was coming across to put one into Diana’s uncertain grasp. ‘I shall want to hear the whole story!’ And she bestowed a radiant smile on Michael Vaughan.

  But, although Celeste had recovered her nerve—having been more or less accepted by her fiancé’s august godmother—Diana had never felt so strained and unequal to an occasion in her life, and she was glad when a silver-toned gong announced the fact that luncheon was about to be served, and they all moved into an enormous and grandiose dining-room. The Duchesse insisted that Michael sit beside Diana, and in helping her to the various dishes and refilling her glass, he seized every opportunity to touch her hand—quite by accident, as it must nave appeared to everyone else—and told her that he would certainly show her the gardens after lunch, and they would have a talk.

  Their first for a very long time!

  ‘It’s been so long, Diana. Far, far too long!’

  She looked at him, and then away. That golden, beautifully shaped head of his, those clear and strangely commanding grey eyes, had had the power to melt her bones at one time. She had been lost when he so much as whispered her name; but now, after three years, the power seemed to have weakened. It had weakened extraordinarily, and she knew that she was free of the desperation of loving him.

  ‘You seem to have landed yourself a very comfortable job here with the Duchesse,’ she remarked.

  He shrugged.

  ‘She’s an extraordinary old thing, but I like her. And ... yes, it’s a good job. Financially.’

  ‘Which means you’ll hang on to it as long as possible?’

  ‘I expect so.’ He smiled a little wryly. ‘As you know, I’m always in near-danger of being broke.’ She knew it so well that she felt a quick spasm of sympathy for him. ‘Diana,’ he said huskily, ‘you’re lovelier than ever!’

  She looked downwards at her plate.

  ‘I mean it,’ he told her urgently, in all this time, ‘I’ve never for one moment forgotten you, Diana. There’s never been anyone else.’

  A servant stood behind them, and she accepted a proffered dish. Michael spoke more casually and cautiously.

  ‘What sort of a job have you landed yourself?’ he inquired, and looked along the table, loaded with silver and flowers and resounding with crystal, to where Celeste sat beside the Comte. ‘That girl to marry de Chatignard? I can’t believe it! She won’t last longer than a few months. He’ll have to find some means of disentangling himself!’

  ‘It’s no entanglement,’ Diana returned, a little curtly. ‘He’s in love with her.’

  ‘Sez you?’ Michael murmured, and his experienced eyes could hardly have looked more cynically amused. ‘Philippe in love with a girl who sticks like a limpet, and has nothing at all to say for herself? In that case, I’m in love with the old woman who pays me my salary!’

  ‘Celeste is shy,’ Diana said in her defence. ‘And she hasn’t had many advantages.’

  ‘She’s getting them now,’ Michael remarked. ‘That engagement ring she’s wearing must be worth a small fortune.’ Philippe lifted his eyes from contemplation of a piece of crested silver and looked along the table at them. His gaze was still dark and brooding, and Michael whistled softly under his breath.

  ‘He doesn’t appear to be in a very good humour, does he?’ he breathed. ‘Our Comte! In fact, I’d say he’s in a very bad humour. Must be because the Duchesse mistook you for the girl he’s got himself engaged to marry. And you can’t blame her. For one awful moment I thought so too.’ And he glanced at her sideways. ‘I thought fate was giving me a fina
l prod!’ There was no opportunity once lunch was over for Michael to show Diana the gardens, for the Comte decided to cut short the visit—remembering an appointment he had somewhat surprisingly overlooked—and they drove back to Paris in rather a strange sort of silence.

  But before they left the Duchesse issued an invitation to Diana to come and see her whenever she pleased, but she said nothing at all to Celeste that could be interpreted as a desire to see her again soon. The Comte’s brow grew blacker than ever.

  Michael put Diana into the car, and whispered to her as he did so:

  ‘I’ll get in touch with you soon. We’ve got to meet before you go south. Au revoir, Diana!’

  Philippe drove them up to the great front door of his Paris house, and then went off to keep his appointment. Diana was completing her dressing that night when Hortense informed her that Monsieur le Comte wished to see her in the library immediately.

  She tapped nervously on the library door, and the Comte opened it himself. He was wearing full evening dress, and looking darkly handsome. His eyes were quite inscrutable as he gazed at her.

  ‘Come in, Miss Craven,’ he said. He placed her very formally in a chair, and she sat there with her hands locked in the lap of a shadowy black dress that threw into prominence the pearly beauty of her skin, while he wandered about the room. He touched a book here, a heavy silver cigarette box there, an ornament of jade that stood on his desk. And then he came back to her.

  ‘So you have been in love? With that secretary of my godmother’s?’

  ‘Yes, I ... Yes,’ she answered truthfully.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he commanded, and sat down beside her on the elegant Empire couch. ‘Tell me all about yourself. ... Everything!’ he insisted. ‘Leave nothing out!’

  Diana complied with the order, although at first she found it difficult to marshal her wits sufficiently to do so. But her memories—and it was astonishing how very recent they seemed after her unexpected meeting with Michael Vaughan—had been given a thorough shaking up that day, and once she got started on the strange pattern her life had followed for the past three years, the difficulty was to prevent herself being carried away altogether.

  From the moment her father married again, a young and vastly attractive widow, Diana reported, she had tried to convince herself that it was the best thing for him. He had been lonely for years, and it was natural that he should desire the close companionship of a woman who could also be a wife to him.

  But Elaine had been gay as a butterfly, and a natural spendthrift. She had mistakenly believed Sir Richard’s coffers to be bottomless, and in order to satisfy her whims, he had started to speculate unwisely. Disaster followed swiftly. And it was at that time that Elaine was insisting on a house in Town with costly built-in furniture instead of the small service flat, a new car, and a private tutor for Jeremy: the child of her first marriage.

  Sir Richard’s constant fruitless efforts to stave off the inevitable financial crash had exhausted him mentally and physically. He was in no condition to fight when illness overtook him, and his death was as inevitable as the ruin that stared him in the face. He left a wife and a daughter and a small stepson with no visible means of support once all his debts were settled.

  Elaine took it so badly that Diana was horrified by the naked animosity she displayed. She ranted and raved, stormed and wept ... and Diana felt that she herself was held partly responsible. She had never had a job, never kept herself ... and Elaine accused her of having been brought up the soft way. But within a matter of weeks she was not merely keeping herself, but her stepmother and Jeremy too. She had a tiny personal income which she supplemented by teaching languages to the two children of an old friend of her father, and in the evenings she gave piano lessons. She was an accomplished pianist, and had there been time and the money, she might have attempted to make music her career ... But there was not time, and not nearly enough money for Elaine.

  Her luxury bubble had been pricked, and she simply couldn’t endure to go on living the way she was living. She snatched eagerly at an invitation to stay for a while in America, and while she was away Diana continued to make herself responsible for Jeremy. She put him to school in the country ... somewhere fairly inexpensive where he began to thrive... And then a cable came to say that Elaine had married again, but saying nothing at all about wanting to have Jeremy join her in America. Diana half made up her mind to insist upon Elaine taking full responsibility for her son, and then she changed her mind. She had grown quite devoted to the small, pallid-faced boy, with one leg which dragged a little, and if her stepmother had no maternal yearnings for his society, then she had plenty of sisterly yearnings for his well-being.

  She heard of a school in Switzerland where he would be likely to improve tremendously in health, and in order to meet the fees she converted part of her income into cash. Then she got her first job on the Continent to be near him—although, unfortunately, it wasn’t a job that lasted long— and then came the opportunity to work for her old school friend in Paris. This was a badly paid job, and it, too, didn’t last very long ... but it led to her being employed by the Comte.

  The salary the Comte had agreed to pay her was going to make things much, much easier for her. She admitted as much to him with a breathless catch in her voice.

  The Comte said with a strong note of insistence in his voice: ‘But you have said nothing yet about Monsieur Michael Vaughan. How, and in what way, does he fit in to this little story of your life?’

  She swallowed, and the muscles of her slender throat quivered.

  ‘I was engaged to him, monsieur.’

  ‘At the time of your father’s death?’

  ‘Yes.’ She swallowed again. ‘But he—I—we neither of us had very much money ... although at the time when we became engaged I hadn’t the least idea that I wouldn’t always have ... plenty.’

  ‘And Monsieur Vaughan was prepared to live on you, and enjoy your “plenty”?’

  She shook her head hastily, flushing brilliantly.

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that... really. We had talked about going abroad together—taking some sort of a farm, a fruit farm, in Rhodesia, or somewhere like that; but when it was found that there wasn’t enough money ... well, the whole idea was dropped. It had to be dropped.’

  ‘Although any man worth his salt would have got a job in England, and provided you with a roof over your head!’ The Frenchman’s voice was almost raspingly harsh. ‘It was not imperative that you had to start farming immediately after the commencement of your married life, was it? That could have waited?’

  She made a helpless gesture with her hands.

  ‘It wasn’t that so much. It ... There was my stepmother, and Jeremy. Something had to be done for them.’

  ‘And could not Monsieur Vaughan have done that instead of you? In France we do not shelve the responsibility for family life ... Families are important. But your Englishman did not care for so much responsibility, so early, is that it? And so he let you go!’

  ‘It didn’t strike him as altogether fair,’ Diana said lamely, feeling the hot flush of humiliation burning her cheeks, and still restlessly twining and intertwining her fingers. ‘And he wanted me to convert the little money I had then... To—realize on it.’

  ‘Still with the idea of purchasing a farm?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Instead of which you expended it on this half-brother of yours?’

  She nodded again, but said instantly: ‘it was nothing, because I wanted to do it. Jeremy is—well, in a sense he’s all I have now, and as I’ve told you I’m devoted to him. He’s devoted to me.’ She looked up suddenly, her eyes lightening and glowing a little with pleasure. ‘Poor scrap. One of these days he’s going to walk like other boys—do the things other boys do—and I shall be so happy. There’s nothing I’ve done for Jeremy that I wouldn’t willingly and gladly do again and again.’

  ‘I believe you, Mademoiselle Craven,’ de Chatignard said, with rather an odd n
ote in his voice, and he stood up and started to walk about the room. All at once she felt him beside her again, standing very close to her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this when I engaged you to be of assistance to Celeste?’ She looked up at him in the utmost astonishment. ‘Because, monsieur, you told me that you had no interest whatsoever in my background.’

  ‘Did I say that? Then I deserve to have the words forced down my throat.’

  She saw that he was smiling wryly.

  ‘You are a strange young woman, Miss Diana Craven. I remember that when I first saw you you had the most peculiar effect on me. I was so convinced you were too good to be true that I wanted to catch you out somehow or other, and perhaps that was why I was rude to you ... For I must have been very rude to you!’

  Her grey eyes wavered, and she looked away.

  ‘Forgive me, Diana,’ he said, with a softness that shook her to the very core of her being. ‘Any man who could not believe in you must be blind indeed ... But perhaps I was wilfully blind! I have seen so much of life that I am inclined to look for that which is inferior, rather than that which is superior! But that young man, Vaughan...’He seated himself once more beside her, and he reached out for her hands. She let him clasp them tightly, and resisted the almost overpowering urge to curl her cold fingers responsively about his. ‘Vaughan deserves to be shot for the way he treated you! You have no longer any feeling for him, have you?’ he demanded almost sharply. ‘Tell me that that is quite dead!’

  She knew that there was unconcealed amazement in the way she looked at him. There was so much urgency in his voice that it astounded her.

  ‘I ... no longer have any serious interest in him,’ she .admitted, quite truthfully.

  ‘Good!’ he exclaimed, and lifted one of her hands and regarded it steadily, as if the slim white beauty of it, with delicately gleaming nails, had him fascinated for a few moments. ‘You have had a bad time, petite,’ he said gravely, ‘but it is past, and any help you require in future for your small brother will come from me.’