A Moment in Paris (6 page)

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 note 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.’

He paused. ‘Life is strange,’ he mused aloud. ‘It plays tricks with every one of us, but although it is too late for many things, there are still one or two things that are possible. You have had a burden to bear, but now it can be eased ... perhaps considerably.’

She felt his lips lie softly, caressingly, against the back of her hand as he carried it up to his mouth; and while a breathless sensation attacked her—something like the sensation that had attacked her while they stood together in the sunshine outside the Duchesse de Savenne’s great house that day, and she had known a moment of pure envy of Celeste (although even in that moment she had tried to persuade herself it was not envy)— he lifted her other hand also and saluted it in the same exquisitely chivalrous, gentle fashion.

‘Diana I should not have been so impatient... I should have waited!’

‘For what?’ she whispered.

‘For happiness ... complete happiness. I thought I could make do with something very different in its stead.’ Then he said, almost inaudibly, a trifle huskily: ‘Go to your room now, and don’t bother about joining us tonight if you don’t wish to do so. But, Diana...’

She stood as if chained to the spot while he made his request. ‘Do all that you can for Celeste, in spite of this conversation we have just had. Perhaps,’ he added strangely, ‘because of it!’ Diana made her way up to her room, and she was never quite clear how she passed the remainder of the evening. She knew that she walked partly on air, and partly in a state of utter bewilderment.

It couldn’t possibly be true that Philippe de Chatignard associated her with some form of happiness that was now completely out of his reach ... because he was engaged to a golden-headed young woman with a feather brain and few other desires in her heart apart from the constant wish to be entertained, and have new and costly trifles laid at her feet? And yet, when he had lifted her hands to his lips and kissed them as if they were precious porcelain, and then looked at her out of his thickly-lashed dark eyes, she had known without it being necessary for him to make a single verbal admission that it was true.

Even if he hadn’t said anything at all about happiness ... she would have known. His eyes had spoken to her quite clearly—quite unmistakably—his hands had imparted a feeling of warmth and desperation at the same time, and his lips had burned with the frustrated devotion of a lover.

A lover!

She felt herself tremble inside—her whole being was dissolved in utter wonder—as she leaned against the window in her room, and stared out at the darkening courtyard in the middle of which the great chestnut tree stood and lifted naked branches to the sky and the shimmer of the first stars.

When she first met Philippe, he had seemed to her so composed, so cool ... slightly inhuman! Living in his house, taking her orders from him, she had grown to think of him as hard, arrogant, utterly self-centred. It was only sometimes—when he spoke to his aunt, when he smiled at her, teased her; when he was gentle to Celeste, treating her as if she was a child; and when he deliberately crossed swords with herself, waiting for her reactions as if they amused him—that she realized there were other sides to him ... like a diamond with several facets

She pressed her face closer against the cold glass of her bedroom window, knowing that for her something truly unbelievable and wonderful had happened. She might go through life unmarried, but she wouldn’t go through life unloved...!

Michael Vaughan’s love had been a poor thing. It hadn’t been love at all. But this ... this thing that was communicated to her by the touch of hands, and a man’s mouth laid almost reverently against the whiteness of her fingers, this unconcealed something in the fluid darkness of a pair of eyes ... was justification for having been born at all.

In the morning Celeste slept late, and then hurried over her dressing because she was lunching with Philippe. She explained, as Hortense helped her into a new pale beige outfit, that the Comte had promised her something very special by way of a present, and that it was to be handed over at lunch time, and she could barely wait to find out what it was.

Her excitement was the excitement of a child promised a fabulous new toy, and when she came back to the house in the afternoon, and Diana went to her suite to see in what practical way she could be of assistance to her, her excitement was bubbling over. She displayed a set of sapphire bracelets and matching earrings with a sparkle in her eyes like the sparkle of the sun on a violet-blue mountain lake, and the praise she heaped on Philippe was a little sickening to Diana.

‘Boy, oh, boy, isn’t he generous!’ she exclaimed. ‘It was a lucky day for me when I met up with him, wasn’t it? Isn’t it an adorable present? And I did nothing to deserve it...’

Diana turned away. It was so plain to her that the sapphire bracelets were a conscience gift to Celeste and that it was she who had started the wheels of conscience grinding.

She saw nothing of the Comte during the whole of that day, and only glimpsed him driving out of the courtyard the following day. Lady Bembridge sent her an invitation to have tea with her in her suite, and over the toasted tea-cakes, she asked, ‘Do you ride, my dear? Philippe is a keen horseman, and when at Savenne—and we’ll probably leave for there at the end of the week he likes to take advantage of all the opportunities for outdoor exercise. If you haven’t any riding things in your present outfit you’d better get some.’

‘As a matter of fact, I have,’ Diana answered. ‘But the Comte is much more likely to expect Mademoiselle O’Brien to accompany him when he goes riding than an employee like myself.’

The elderly eyebrows facing her arched. ‘
Can
Celeste ride?’

Diana answered doubtfully, ‘I don’t really know.’

A small blaze of triumph appeared in Lady Bembridge’s eyes. ‘Well, there you are! If there’s any doubt about it, you’d better not risk her on a horse on a mountain track. And Philippe will want someone to accompany him.’

‘There are almost certain to be other people staying in the chateau apart from ourselves,’ Diana returned. ‘Miss O’Brien said something about an American friend of the Comte’s who has received an invitation.’

‘Indeed?’ Lady Bembridge looked surprised. ‘Not another American
female
!’

‘No.’ Diana smiled faintly. ‘A man this time.’

‘Well, that should be nice for Celeste,’ Lady Bembridge observed complacently. ‘Particularly if he happens to be a young man!’

And at that moment the Comte walked in. ‘Ah, Mademoiselle Craven!’ he exclaimed, and held out his hand to her. ‘Do you realize, mademoiselle, that it is more than forty-eight hours since we last met?’

To Diana it seemed much longer than that, but she knew she must never let anyone guess that the hours when she was afforded nothing more than a glimpse of him were the kind of hours that dragged.

‘Is it?’ she returned, and hoped that under Lady Bembridge’s watchful eyes the colour showed no signs of spreading in her cheeks. ‘I—I understand we’re leaving for Savenne at the end of the week, monsieur. Have you any special instructions for me?’

‘None,’ he told her, ‘except that you can relieve my chauffeur at the wheel of the car while you are driving there, if you wish. I’m afraid I can’t join you for a few days, and you must try and prevent Celeste from being bored until my arrival.’

‘I—I will,’ she promised, and felt him drop her hand.

‘You can handle a powerful car?’ the Comte demanded. ‘You will not be afraid to do so?’

She shook her head, ‘I’m used to driving.’

He walked towards the fireplace, and Lady Bembridge remarked, with a brittle note in her voice: ‘Of course she can drive a car, and of course she can do a lot of things I was never taught to do. But why she should have to try and prevent Celeste from becoming bored I can’t think! That is your province, Philippe. That is the lifetime task you will be taking on when you marry her. I should think well while there is still some chance of escape!’

Diana felt as if her heart started to beat so quickly that it interfered with her breathing, and her soft red lips fell a little apart—almost an expectant parting—as she watched the Comte’s back. But he stared down into the fire of scented pine logs that filled the luxurious sitting-room with an even and delicious warmth and made no answer for a long and taut 'moment. Then he wheeled in an annoyed fashion upon his aunt and addressed her sharply.

‘I do not find that sort of suggestion amusing,’ he said, with an icy undercurrent to the sharpness. ‘And I should prefer it if in future you accepted without question my plans that are quite unalterable.’ He repeated, without looking at Diana: ‘Quite unalterable!’