A Moment in Paris Page 7

  For it was in the interval between the second and third acts, in the noisy and crowded bar of the theatre, that he had asked her to marry him.

  But one of the first things she did, after she re-met Michael in Paris, at that luncheon the very thought of which had so petrified Celeste, was to burn both the letters and the theatre programme by dropping them into a fire when no one was looking.

  The Michael episode was finally and irrevocably over, and she knew it. Never again would she imagine herself in love with him, in spite of his persuasive grey eyes and that sleek, shapely golden head of his. She was absolutely free of the unhappy burden of loving Michael, but she was not free of loving. One moment in Paris—one moment when she had looked into the eyes of a French aristocrat—had altered not merely the trend of her thoughts, but the trend of her life.

  That night they stopped at a very comfortable hotel in a populous market town, and in the morning they dawdled a bit because Lady Bembridge was not in a mood to be hurried on, and the poodle had to have exercise. It was Diana who exercised him, and enjoyed herself for a brief while making the acquaintance of the charming old-world streets and houses, and buying herself a bunch of violets from a woman flower-seller.

  When she got back to the hotel Lady Bembridge was still in bed, but Celeste was waiting for her, looking unusually fresh and alert for that hour of the day. She was wearing one of her most attractive suits, and she took the bunch of violets Diana had bought and buried her nose in them.

  ‘They’re gorgeous, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘Different, somehow, from the flowers one gets in Paris. And I like it here. It reminds me a bit of my own home town, although nothing in America is as old as this, of course. Why didn’t you ask me to go out with you?’

  Diana looked astonished. ‘But you’re never up at this hour.’

  ‘Well, I am today!’ Celeste said, almost blithely.

  They went inside, and had coffee and rolls at a table in the window, with the morning sunshine streaming through the window and pouring over them, the scent of the violets which Diana had insisted Celeste should attach to the lapel of her suit filling the atmosphere around them, and mingling with the odour of croissants and roasting coffee-beans.

  Celeste had developed an appetite since she left Paris which further astonished Diana, and she also made a few overtures to the poodle, who responded by accepting various tit-bits. Diana couldn’t help thinking, as she studied her, that this was a different girl from the one she had first got to know, and she wondered whether it had anything at all to do with the miles that separated her from Philippe—and his implied criticism, despite the physical attraction he held for her.

  ‘It would be nice if you and I were going off somewhere for the day, wouldn’t it?’ Celeste said unexpectedly. ‘Just going off somewhere sightseeing together! I’d adore to be a tourist, with nothing else on my mind...’ Then she looked towards Diana and coloured. ‘Well, what I mean is ... if there were no Lady Bembridge. She gives me an inferiority complex.’

  Diana could understand that, for Lady Bembridge delighted in making the American girl both feel and look small...

  Examining the problem dispassionately and silently while they finished their breakfast, Diana could see nothing but trouble ahead for Philippe if he refused to accept Celeste, as she was.

  And, looking at Celeste, she wondered whether the girl herself really knew what she was doing. Whether she could ever be happy—really and truly happy—attempting to fill a role the very thought of which alarmed her.

  And suddenly she had a mental picture of Celeste, married to a man with whom she could be completely relaxed, and for whom she need put up no form of pretence ... and it was a very different Celeste from the girl who was hastening to devour the last crumbs of her roll before Lady Bembridge joined them—a slightly haunted Celeste, whose appetite would fail the instant a pair of malicious mascaraed eyes focused upon her.

  By evening they were in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and the light was dying all around them.

  The road climbed, tunnelling deeply into the mountains and overhanging ravines, and frozen peaks brooded aloofly above them, and on all sides of them. They were not the dizzy giants to be found in Switzerland, but they stood out splendidly against the sky, with the fires of a spring sunset painting it like a canvas.

  They approached a small mountain town, at the foot of which spring flowers clustered thickly in the meadows, and a river wound like a ribbon. The river was swollen with the melting of the snows and the rising of the spring floods, and in places it overflowed on to the floor of the valley, forming little lakes. Everywhere there were evidences of spring, although up on the heights it was intensely cold, and Diana was glad she had brought a fur coat with her—Although, by comparison with the furs that protected Celeste and Lady Bembridge, it was a very poor thing indeed, blatantly squirrel, and dyed at that.

  When they swept under an arch into a white-walled courtyard Diana realized they had arrived. She descended stiffly from the seat she had occupied for so many hours and was dazzled by the sudden flinging open of a door, and a stream of yellow light that poured into the courtyard. There was a slight babble of voices, and then a sharper voice that rose above them like the curling of a whiplash and demanded to know why they had taken such an unnecessarily long time over the journey.

  ‘You should have been here at least a couple of hours ago. Why weren’t you here before dark?’

  Diana blinked unbelievingly at the Comte himself, and she saw him wrench open the rear door of the car for his aunt and his fiancee, and Lady Bembridge climbed out stiffly and protested that she was exhausted enough as it was, and what in the world was he doing there ahead of them? They had left him behind in Paris, and that’s where he ought to be ... unless there was something wrong with her eyesight, and her powers of hearing!

  ‘You couldn’t possibly have come by road,’ she said, tottering about on the cobbles of the courtyard, and prevented from falling by his strong right hand. ‘You must have flown, Philippe.’

  ‘I did,’ he admitted, in the same brusque voice, and without thinking it necessary to explain why he had done anything of the kind he lifted Celeste bodily out of the car and set her on her feet.

  Lady Bembridge was assisted into the house by a manservant and Diana dived into the back of the car to collect some of the hand luggage that was strewn all over the seat and the carpeted floor space. She had actually laid hold of the poodle’s basket, and its teddy-bear rug, when the Comte fairly snatched them from her and thrust them into the arms of another servant who had emerged from the house.

  ‘Leave everything!’ he ordered harshly. ‘And don’t pretend you’re feeling much fresher than the others, for if you’ve driven only a part of the way you’ve a right to be more tired!’

  She looked up at him, in the yellow light that filled the courtyard, and as she mechanically put back an end of her hair from her forehead it seemed to her that they had journeyed backwards in time—he and she—and his attitude towards her was the hard, unfeeling attitude she had first come up against.

  ‘Did you drive?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘and I enjoyed it.’

  ‘You would,’ he replied mockingly. ‘Give you a chance to prove what you’re made of and you’ll take it! It is a pity you are not always so strong,’ a note of ice underlying the caustic disapproval in his tone. Then he turned back to Celeste and transferred his entire attention to the task of seeing her safely into the house.

  Diana followed in their wake, stumbling a little because she was bewildered as well as tired. And in an enormous room with stark white walls and a positive blaze of colour in the rugs and hangings, and lovely period furniture, a tray of refreshments awaited them, and the Comte bent solicitously over his future wife and his aunt, after seeing them into two of the most comfortable chairs the room contained, and plied them with glasses and tempting-looking sandwiches.

  He put a glass of something specially blend
ed into Celeste’s hand, and received a limpidly grateful smile from her as she lifted her violet eyes to his face. Lady Bembridge lay back against the scarlet velvet cushions in her chair and declared she was so exhausted she could not have travelled another half-mile.

  Diana was temporarily ignored by all three of them, and it was an elderly servant with kindly dark eyes that betrayed his Basque blood who tried to persuade her to eat at least a part of a sandwich and drink a small glass of sherry. But she felt as if anything she tried to force down her throat would choke her just then, and she gathered up her bag and coat and asked the servant if she could be shown to her room.

  ‘I’m tired, monsieur,’ she told the Comte. ‘If I could be excused...?’

  But he answered inexorably:

  ‘Dinner is at nine, and we shall expect you to join us. If you can make yourself useful to Mademoiselle Celeste in the interval between now and dinner, I’m sure she will appreciate it. She, too, is tired after her journey.’

  ‘Yes, monsieur,’ she answered, and turned blindly towards the door.

  Celeste came to her room shortly after she had been shown in to it, and she attempted to apologize for the Comte.

  ‘He’s in one of his cross moods—’ although there had been nothing cross in his manner to Celeste, and perhaps that was why the American girl looked just a little self-satisfied—‘and you don’t have to go down to dinner if you don’t want to. And of course you don’t have to do anything for me tonight.’ But Diana scrambled into the dark dinner dress she had extracted from one of her cases, and went down to dinner a couple of minutes before nine o’clock. She was still too shaken inwardly to take much note of her surroundings, and the only thing that impressed her was the sombre simplicity of the dining-room. Here again the furniture was magnificent, splendidly preserved and beautifully cared for; and the great chair at the head of the table—the one occupied by the Comte—had the de Chatignard crest skilfully carved into the dark wood of the head-rest.

  Before she went upstairs to bed the Comte spoke to her.

  ‘I would like you to ride with me tomorrow morning, Miss Craven. My aunt tells me that you do ride.’

  Diana whirled and gazed at him in astonishment ‘But—Celeste...?’

  ‘Unfortunately, my fiancee does not ride .... yet,’ he emphasized with dryness. ‘It is a matter that will have to be put right sooner or later, but I’ve no doubt she will prefer to have what she describes as a long lie-in tomorrow morning.’ He glanced for an instant at Celeste. ‘Is that not so, petite?’ Curled up on a deep settee and trying to conceal her inclination to yawn—and, incidentally, doing it very prettily—Celeste nodded and looked apologetic.

  Philippe turned back to Diana.

  ‘Will six o’clock be too early for you? The sun is already up at that hour, and it is very pleasant.’

  She agreed that it was very pleasant at six o’clock, and promised not to keep him waiting. This time it was he who held open the door for her and as she passed him he said calmly: ‘Good night mademoiselle.’

  She found herself forced to glance up at him, and her heart leapt violently in her breast. His eyes were infinitely dark and a little mysterious, but was that a gleam of apology in them? ... Appeal? Deliberate appeal?

  In the morning she knew the answer. He was waiting for her in the courtyard of his chateau in the sparklingly beautiful Pyrenees. And they were so beautiful, at that hour, that they took away her breath.

  The sun was sending down a flood of gold which lay like a brilliant mantle over the snows, and the sky was a wonderful soft blue. There were rosy streaks left by the sunrise streaming like banners across the sky, and there was even the pale shape of the moon that had not yet vanished lying like a ghost on the rim of a mountain peak.

  Down in the valley there was sparkling mist, like a woman’s sequin-scattered, gauzy grey stole, and a few spirals of it crept upwards and floated about the courtyard where the Comte waited with a couple of horses and an attendant groom. Above them the pepper-box towers of the white chateau—dazzlingly white in the sunshine—looked out across the valley and the shifting mist.

  The instant Diana looked towards her employer—seeing, at first, neither of the horses, although one was a particularly handsome bay with a white star on its forehead, and the other a slim grey mare obviously intended for herself—she knew why it was that she had slept scarcely a wink all night, and had been up and out of her bed as soon as the slight greyness in the eastern sky could be called daylight.

  However harshly he treated her—however, perhaps, unfairly he treated her—Philippe de Chatignard was the only man in the world who would ever be able to bring her to his feet by the mere lifting of a finger. The thought shook her so much that, for a few seconds, she was appalled by the truth of it; and as she walked across the courtyard towards him she determined to conquer her weakness.

  Philippe came quickly to meet her, leaving the groom to hold the horses’ heads. But all he said, softly, was: ‘Good girl! I knew you wouldn’t keep me waiting!’

  It was he who assisted her into her saddle, putting the reins into her hands. There was something masterful, and dominant, and satisfied about him this morning, although the faint hint of pleading was in his eyes again whenever they met hers.

  ‘Monique should carry you beautifully,’ he said. ‘She is exactly the right weight for you.’

  He signalled to the groom to let the horses’ heads go, and they trotted out of the courtyard. The tortuous path ahead of them, which the Comte elected to pursue, appeared to lead right into the heart of the mountains; but the mare picked her way daintily along, and ahead of Diana the Comte’s broad back—exceedingly shapely in a tweed hacking jacket— was a sight to inspire confidence.

  She had the feeling that he was much more than at home in the saddle, and could do things with horses that would surprise her considerably if the opportunity arose. And yet nothing he did would ever really surprise her, for he was a man with an iron nerve and an iron will, and now she had the opportunity to observe that he had iron hands too ... in spite of their slim brown shapeliness and the expensive primrose gloves that concealed them for the moment.

  He waited until the path broadened, and then swung his mount aside so that she could draw level. He looked directly at her, and now his eyes were pleading and something else ... they were vitally anxious.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘Diana, I know I behaved badly to you last night ... but will you forgive me?’ he pleaded.

  She reined in her mount, and looked down at her gloved hands, clutching the reins.

  ‘There is nothing to forgive,’ she replied stiffly. ‘If you were annoyed with me, then you had a perfect right to air your annoyance.’

  ‘But you are not weak, only foolish...’ He sounded as if he were attempting to excuse not only himself, but her. ‘You have been hurt badly once, and you are asking to be hurt badly again. Don’t you know that men like Michael Vaughan are constitutionally incapable of being loyal to anyone? They have their own interests at heart and nothing but their own interests.’

  She gazed at him in growing astonishment.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that you were angry with me last night simply because I had dinner with Michael?’

  He frowned, and brought his horse so near to hers that the white star in the middle of the bay’s forehead was on a level with the grey’s pricked ears.

  ‘And isn’t that a sufficient reason for anger? Why else did you think I was so boorish to you?’

  ‘I don’t know ... I couldn’t really think.’ Once more she looked down at the reins in her hands. ‘I suppose I imagined it was because you thought I had neglected Celeste in some way or other.’

  ‘And because of Celeste you thought I would be discourteous to you? ... Abominably discourteous! I left you to find your own way into the house because I was seething with anger, attended to the others although I was so much aware of you that it was almost more than I could do, refused your poor l
ittle request to remain in your room! Your eyes were so big and bewildered that they haunted me all night ... And yet all I could think of was that fellow Vaughan, and what satisfaction it would give me to wring his neck!’

  Diana uttered a little sound like a gasp, and looked up at him with widening eyes.

  ‘But that’s so absurd, I—I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous!’ she declared.

  ‘Ridiculous? Perhaps so. But I am a man so painfully jealous of someone who once figured prominently in your past that I find it difficult to think clearly these days! My whole attitude—every waking thought—is affected by it, this bitter, burning, hostile jealousy!’

  He reached for her hand. ‘Oh, Diana,’ he confessed, with a simplicity she knew she would always remember, ‘I love you as I once thought I might love a woman one day; but that was when I was very young, and still had a lot of illusions. If I had only known that you were in the world—that you were real and warm and human, and that one day we would meet...!’

  He carried her small hand up to his lips and kissed it passionately. ‘I meant to tell you all this after our ride, but I found that I couldn’t wait. I could tell that you were unhappy too. It was in your eyes when you appeared in the courtyard.’

  ‘I—I didn’t sleep very well,’ she admitted, and then as he once more kissed her hand, lingeringly, adoringly, she whispered: ‘Oh, Philippe!’

  They looked at one another with the last of the scales falling from their eyes, and as men and women in love have looked at one another from time immemorial. And then he released her bridle and spoke softly.

  ‘Come, beloved, we will not remain here, for the horses are restless, and the path is dangerous. Follow me, and we will find somewhere where we can talk.’

  She followed him with the meek obedience of one who would follow him to the end of the world, if the opportunity was hers, and he led the way along the sloping path that twisted in and out of the mountains. The iron ring of the horses’ hooves sounded like music in her ears as it echoed from one frozen peak to another; and even in the slippery places where the mounts had to be held in strongly and with concentration if they were to negotiate them at all, she could still feel only a wondering happiness and had no room at all in her heart for fear.