Bride by Arrangement (13 page)

Inside herself she even had a queer conviction that, in such a pleasant world, things must work out for the good of everyone eventually. They might even work out well for her—and Pierre!

And then she saw the taxi standing on the drive.

Inside the house Yvette met her, and, taking the basket from her, whispered urgently:

“There is someone to see you, madame. A Mademoiselle de Lisle. I have put her in the
salon,
but she is in a great hurry, and the taxi is ticking away like mad, and if you hadn’t come she said she would leave a message! But she was most anxious to see you!”

Chloe felt her heart stand still.

“A Mademoiselle de Lisle?”

“In the
salon,
madame. I have offered her coffee, and a glass of wine, but she will accept nothing. It is you she wishes to talk with most urgently, and she is pacing up and down like a golden-headed whirlwind! She has a train to catch to Paris.”

Chloe took a step towards the
salon
door, and then paused.

“Monsieur Albertin? Where is he?”

Yvette made a shrugging movement with her broad shoulders.

“I do not know, madame. He took the car and vanished an hour ago. But he will be back for the
dejeuner.
And it is you Mademoiselle wishes to see!”

Chloe drew a deep breath, and once more stepped towards the door. Inside the room Fern de Lisle was prowling restlessly about the room, and keeping an eye on her taxi through the window. She turned impulsively as Chloe entered. She was wearing a beautifully fitting suit of tailored grey, and a coquettish hat that looked a little absurd on her bright hair. Her deep violet eyes flashed a relieved smile at Chloe.

“Oh, I’m so glad I didn’t have to go away without seeing you!” she said. “That taxi’s going to cost me the earth, but it doesn’t matter now that you’re here! You see,” she explained slowly, “I felt that I had to see you. That it was important—to you!”

Pierre didn’t return for lunch after all, but he telephoned to
say that he would be back in time for tea. He had been held up in the local town over some business with his solicitor in connection with
La Maison,
and the two men were going to have lunch together. He hoped Chloe would understand, and wouldn’t mind.

As it happened, Chloe minded very much. She had never known the hours pass so slowly as they did until Pierre returned at last, and when he pushed open the door of the
salon,
and Yvette followed him in with the tea-tray, her nerves were so tightly stretched, and she was so filled with impatience, that she could have screamed during the brief interval while the housekeeper set down the tea-tray, made certain that it contained everything necessary, and then withdrew.

Chloe moved across the room and stood in front of Pierre. He looked brown, and casual, and pleased with himself, and his carelessly flowing tie and silk shirt lent him a jaunty, prosperous air.

“I have arranged today what I will do with my aunt’s money,” he said. “It is all to go to charities, and if you are agreeable we will permit Trelas to become the maternity home that was at one time my aunt’s plan for it. I will buy out your share of the house, and the money will be paid into the bank to swell the rest of your account in England. What you will do with it one day is your own affair.”

“Pierre!” Chloe’s voice was strained, and her face reflected the tension of the past hours. “Pierre, there is something I have to tell you!”

“Well?” He helped himself to tea since she made no attempt to pour out, adding a generous quantity of cream. “What is it that you have to tell me?”

“Fern came here today. To see me!”

“Well?” He was biting into a spiced bun that had been baked that day by Yvette, and his dark eyes narrowed as he regarded his wife.

“She—she told me everything.” She made a little gesture with her hands. “How she pestered you to take her down to Trelas, and how you helped her with money! How you found her a job. It’s in a Paris dress-house, and she’s taking it up next week, modelling. You never made love to her, but she was in love with you for a time, and you sent her away when you got engaged to me. She only returned to the King’s Arms to see me and wish me well because I was lucky enough to—to be going to marry you!—but Eunice told me otherwise. She told me that Fern had been there all the time, and that that was why you didn’t follow me to London!... Oh, Pierre, don’t you see?” and this time she held out her hands to him appealingly.

“No,” Pierre admitted, his expression scarcely altering, “I don’t see!” He replaced his cup and saucer on the tray. “You were so eager to get the wrong impression of me that I find it very difficult to see. Even in the beginning you accepted me at your own valuation, and that was low enough! When we became engaged you persuaded yourself that you could fall in love with me, and that you could overlook a few of my deficiencies, but Eunice found a way to prove you wrong. It was the easiest thing in the world for Eunice to turn you against me, and you insulted me on my wedding day by accusing me openly of unspeakable things. For I may be partly French, but there are some things that are unspeakable even to me!”

His eyes were blazing at her, alive and brilliant with his anger, and the same anger robbed him of his tan and made him look unnaturally pale. Chloe’s heart first turned over, and then quailed.

“Pierre, I was so unhappy,” she pleaded, “and it was only because I thought the evidence was before my eyes...
”

“Instead of which there was no real evidence, but Eunice was your life-long friend and you believed her. It never occurred to you that Eunice would have taken me from you without a moment’s thought if I’d been willing ... but I wasn’t willing! And you believed Eunice!”

His eyes went dark, as if he too had had his own private misery since the ceremony that had made them man and wife, and he turned away from her. Chloe rushed at him and caught at his arm.

“Pierre, forgive me,” she begged, almost sobbing, agonised by the sight of his undisguisable distress. “I know I’ve behaved unpardonably, but forgive me! And I do love you
...
It was never a pretence!”

But he kept his face averted.

“You ruined everything,” he accused her, “everything I’d looked forward to so much! You made me behave like a cad, and to you—the woman I wanted to treat as if she was something different from all other women, something to cherish and be tender to and never to hurt! Nothing will ever be the same again between us because you looked at me as if you’d been plunged into a nightmare, and you told me never to come near you again. To keep away from your room!”

Chloe found she could say nothing, but her eyes appealed to him to understand. She had had so little to go upon ... so little knowledge of what he was really like.

“You need never fear that I shall come anywhere near your room again,” he told her harshly. “The woman I can put my trust in will have complete trust in me ... and you’ve proved
t
hat you’ve had the poorest opinion of me from the beginning! As a result I shall never be able to believe in you, and in a way I think I despise you because you hadn’t the cou
r
age to tell me the truth. You preferred to go on believing the worst
...
”

Her lips moved.

“I wanted to tell you
...
I wish I had!”

His lips curved contemptuously.

"The trouble with you, Chloe, is that you haven’t very
much
courage. In a way you are a puny thing. You leave it to others to put things right, but this is something that can’t be put right!”

Late that night Chloe sat and heard him pacing about downstairs. Apart from that the house was still ... almost as uncannily still as Trelas had been on her wedding night.

Whatever Pierre said about her she loved him as she would never love any other man, and she had known that even when she believed he was already unfaithful to her. She had known it and been frightened out of her wits lest she should lose him! She had been willing to humble herself in almost any way to keep him ... yet had fought him like a fury on her wedding night!

And now he had lost faith in her. Now he despised her.

The hours wore away, and Chloe still sat there. There was a warm summer air coming in at the window, but she felt cold and utterly hopeless. She hadn’t any courage!
.
..
any real courage!
That, at least, was true!

Downstairs Pierre started his pacing up and down the main
salon.
Chloe could hear him quite plainly, for the tiled floor had rugs scattered about it only at intervals. And each footfall he made beat like a hammer upon her heart. She knew that he was as unhappy as she was, but she could do nothing about it. She could do nothing to help him, and her distress became a kind of mounting agony.

Oh, Pierre, Pierre, she moaned to herself, if only I knew what to do!

At last, stiffly, she got up and undressed and slipped into her dressing-gown, but Pierre made no attempt to come upstairs. Chloe wondered what Yvette thought if she could hear
him ...
What she thought of her, Chloe, who was a wife and yet no wife, and allowed the man she had married to suffer a torment unheeded down below in the
salon.
For if a man was not in torment, or violently perturbed about something, would he continue that ceaseless pacing up and down that was so utterly purposeless, and yet suggested he was trying to get to grips with a problem that was defeating him? A problem that had had him beaten even before he attempted to deal with it!

“The trouble with you, Chloe, is that you haven’t any courage!
...”

At last his footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Chloe listened with her heart pounding so violently that she thought it would choke her as he went draggingly along the corridor to his room. The light in the corridor clicked out, and then Pierre’s door closed almost soundlessly ... but not too soundlessly for Chloe to hear it.

“The trouble with you, Chloe, is that you haven
’
t any courage!... Nothing
will
ever come right again for us because I haven’t any trust in you!”

But it must come right, Chloe thought in complete desperation as she sat clinging to the arms of her chair, and wondering where she could find the courage to do the right thing. Something had to be done, before it was too late—before there was no possibility of things coming right again!—and she was the one to do it. Pierre, she knew with absolute certainty, would never now do it. The move had to come from her, and that meant something more than courage
... It meant ceasing to think about herself and thinking only of Pierre, whom she had injured and wronged and loved more than anything in the world! And when you loved someone as much as that there shouldn’t be any question of pride, and courage should come naturally.

It did. All at once she was so desperately anxious to get to Pierre’s room—to get to him!—that she all but tripped up over the flowing skirts of her dressing-gown, and her eager, running footsteps nearly defeated their object as she raced along the corridor that separated her own and her husband’s room. Her husband!...

Her breath was coming in little gasps as she hammered urgently on his door, not caring whether Yvette heard, and when he opened the door her face was flushed and her eyes brilliant, as if all the world was hers at last. Pierre stood gazing at her in astonishment, saw the bright eyes and eager lips and the cheeks the colour of her rose-pink satin dressing-gown, and then stood aside to let her come in without a word.

She struggled for words. That was the only difficult part. And then, when the right words wouldn’t come, she simply opened her arms to him and got out breathlessly:

“You said I hadn’t any courage, Pierre! But, oh, I have, I have! And that’s why I’ve come! To—to put things
...!”

But she didn’t need to proceed beyond that. Pierre, who was looking oddly young and forlorn in his shirt and trousers, his collar dejectedly ripped off, and his tie on the dressing-table, uttered a sound that seemed to be strangled in his throat, and
then held out his own arms to receive her. She ran to them, clutching at him, starting to cry convulsively:

“Oh, Pierre, I’ve nearly died of misery, and it was so hard to find the courage
... the courage that you said I hadn’t got! But I love you so much that I’d rather suffer any sort of misery than not have you love me in return! And, oh, Pierre ... you do, don’t you?”

She looked up at him with streaming eyes, her mouth working, her chin trembling, and Pierre swept her up in his arms and carried her over to his deep armchair, and sat down with her and held her tightly. His own voice was not particularly steady as he returned:

“I don’t merely love you, Chloe, you’re my life! Without you—unless we’re going to live together, happily, as I’d planned!—nothing is any longer of the slightest importance!
Nothing!
... And I mean that!”

Chloe let out a long sigh, a long, trembling, unbelievably relieved sigh.