Jane didn’t feel she could bear to give an account of her doings over the past couple of days to Sandra tonight. And explain away Etienne ... Sandra wouldn’t be in the least likely to bite because Etienne’s car had been damaged, but she might be amused because Etienne apparently was very forgiving, and was still around ... taking the despoiler of his car out for the day!
But when they drove up to the farm the short drive was lined with cars, and lights streamed from every window. Etienne swore softly behind the wheel, and although he swore in French, Jane was sufficiently familiar with this language to recognize that he was apostrophizing Fate.
“So we were only permitted two days,” he said. ‘Two days in which to get away from everything, and feel the touch of magic! ... Jane, my little one, prepare to come down to earth with a thud, and don’t look too bewildered if events prove too strong for you! Life is like that - it gives, and it exacts its toll! It is a stony-hearted toll-keeper!”
CHAPTER VI
Jane might have asked him what he meant by that peculiar observation if there had been any opportunity, but there wasn’t. The church-like door was standing wide and Sandra herself was waiting for them on the step.
Behind her the hall was filled with light, the great swinging bronze lantern shining like a star. A great many people seemed to be moving in the background ... Jeane Bethune, on her way to the staircase with a pile of coats over her arm, Clarisse with a hat-box in one hand, and a suitcase in the other. A slim, elegant young man with brilliantly fair hair was standing smoking a cigarette beneath the lantern, and a dark young woman was bending over the hall table and examining the letters that were piled up on an enormous silver salver.
Yet another man was standing on the drive and piling suitcases on top of one another as he emptied the boot of a car.
Sandra had a mink stole falling from her shoulders, and her suit was of light-coloured silk. Her hair was light- coloured also - it looked silvery-gilt in the pale beams of the rising moon - and she wore perilously high heels to overcome the disadvantage of being barely five feet. She was smoking a cigarette and inhaling deeply as her much advertised violet-blue eyes stared down the drive.
“Well, well!” she said, when Etienne had helped Jane to alight from the red sports car. “So you two have decided to return at last!”
Jane experienced her first twinge of genuine surprise. Normally Sandra had a slightly drawling voice, a faintly husky, frankly American voice, but tonight it was as sharp as Jeanne Bethune’s when she was issuing orders to Clarisse.
“I’m so sorry, Sandra,” Jane began, “that I wasn’t here when you arrived...”
But at her side Etienne made it unnecessary for her to continue.
“We are both sorry, Sandra.” He held out his hand, but Sandra appeared not to notice it. “We are both so sorry that we find it impossible to express the extent of our disappointment that we weren’t here to receive you when you arrived! And that, cherie, is no more, and no less, than the truth!” and he bent and saluted the top of head with a feather-light kiss.
Sandra appeared to be slightly taken aback, as if the battery of defences she had prepared for the occasion was suddenly a little out of date, and there would be no real need for her big guns. She laughed a little - laughter that expressed unwilling admiration - and shook her head at him.
“Honestly, Rene, if you don’t take the biggest bun I’ve ever seen, I don’t know who does! ... You suggest meeting me in Paris, and then when I take a whole suite at the Meurice you’re not even on hand! You invite me to stay at your house, and when I reach here you’ve taken my secretary out for the day! How I am supposed to react to all that?”
“You will forgive me, of course,” Rene said smoothly, in beautiful English. “And you will forgive Jane because she was over-persuaded, and none of it was in the very slightest degree her fault - except perhaps in one little thing.”
In the midst of her amazement, and the bewilderment that accompanied it, Jane could feel his hand on her arm, the pressure of his fingers warning her. And she knew that he didn’t wish her to disclose that until this moment she had had no knowledge at all of his real identity - although never afterwards could she understand how she had been so easily taken in. She heard Sandra asking curiously what the little thing was for which Jane could be blamed, and he suggested that they all go inside and have a drink while he explained, and for several minutes after that there were sounds of amusement and exclamations like: “Oh, Jane, how unwise of you to try and smash up your host’s car!” and: “Jane, I thought you had a blameless licence!”
Mark Lanyard, the young man with the brilliantly fair hair, who was to play opposite Rene in the film, came across to Jane and slipped a friendly hand inside her arm and told her that he didn’t honestly blame her, because those left-hand drives could be the very devil when you weren’t used to them, to say nothing of Continental roads. And Madame Heloise - no one had ever heard her called anything else - who was Rene Delaroche’s own personal secretary, and very much in charge of his affairs, smiled tightly and looked disapprovingly at Jane out of oblique black eyes with heavily marscaraed eyelashes, and observed that the black car was a new one, and it was to be hoped that the impact wouldn’t show when the garage people had finished with it.
The other member of Sandra’s party was film producer Valentine Wade, and he was much more concerned with the proportions of the room in which they disposed of their drinks than any accident to anyone’s car. He prided himself on having a knowledge of antiquity that went back into earliest times, and he went round tapping the beams and exclaiming over the tremendous strength of the central beam, and the magnificent width of the fireplace - “You could roast an ox in that one!” he said, as if it was an advantage to be able to roast an ox - until some of the others became interested as well, and Rene was called upon to give an explanation of how and when he had purchased the place, and how much he estimated he had already spent on it in the way of improvements.
During all this Jane stood sipping a small glass of sherry and feeling as if someone had given her too hearty a slap on the back, and it had deranged her thinking powers a little. She was trying to take in how easily she had been deceived, and wondering why there should ever have been any need for such deception, while for the first time since they had known one another her employer sent her glances that were not altogether friendly, and just a little disappointed.
It was unlike Sandra to display open jealousy, or annoyance, but Jane felt certain she was annoyed. When Rene had asked Jane what she would have to drink - raising one black eyebrow questioningly, as he had done the night before, and suggesting that she had the same mixture that he had provided the night before - Sandra had looked up from her martini and watched them speculatively, and Jane had said hastily and quite definitely that she would have a sherry.
Rene - who, apparently, was quite impenitent because he had practised a measure of deception - smiled at Jane in the manner which had no doubt quickened the pulse-beats of many of his feminine acquaintances in the past, and asked her whether she was quite sure; and Jane turned away so quickly that Sandra set down her glass and came across to her,
“I hope you realize,” she said drily, “that Rene is never serious for five minutes together. I think most of his women friends would be prepared to warn you that he ought to wear a placard stating very clearly: I am a menace to impressionable females! If you lose your heart don’t blame me!”
“Oh come now,” Rene said softly, suavely, having overheard, “you don’t want to turn your nice little secretary against me, do you Sandra?”
“I don’t know,” Sandra answered, looking at him with her straight-gazing violet-blue eyes. “It all depends on how much of a menace you have already constituted yourself in her young and hitherto blameless life!”
Upstairs Jane lingered in her bath, partly because Sandra had told her rather shortly that she didn’t need her to help her with any of her unpacking because the maid Clarisse h
ad already done most of it for her, and partly because in the bathroom she felt that she was segregated from everyone, and the warm water helped to restore her thinking powers.
Of course she should never have been taken in so easily. There were so many things that should have told her who Etienne really was. His familiarity with the house, the way the servants deferred to him, and welcomed him at all hours - even for breakfast. The constant disturbing something in his voice that had set her mentally groping for an explanation of whatever it was.
At first there was some justification for her being taken in. He had seemed older, sterner ... But very quickly she had begun to see him in a different light. His mocking derisive gestures, the speaking movements of his singularly beautiful hands, the sudden softness in his voice, the caressing note that made her heart beat fast ... Now they were all an easily understandable part of Rene Delaroche, popular entertainer, singer, film-star, No. 1 heart-throb to countless number of Frenchwomen, as well as women all over the world.
Far away in the house he was singing - or she was certain she could hear him singing - with a light-hearted crack in his voice.
It was just one of those things ... Just one of those crazy things!...
She had found that record yesterday, sung by Maurice Chevalier, and it had been running through her head ever since, so perhaps it wasn’t Rene singing after all.
She slipped on the soap, and realized that the water was getting cold, and that she had better come out and dress. In any case, she must go along and see Sandra before she went downstairs again. Sandra might have said she had no need of her services, but she would almost certainly be waiting for her just the same.
Sandra was. She was seated in front of her dressing-table in the exquisite pure-white bedroom reserved for favoured feminine visitors like herself, and doing things to her face. The dressing-table top was cluttered with gold-stoppered bottles and toilet jars, and there was already a fine film of powder over everything, for Sandra used several different types of powder-puff, and wielded them with complete indifference to polished surfaces and glittering mirrors. She had just come from her bath and was clad in a filmy negligee that revealed the fact that below it she had so far donned only a brassiere and panties and when Jane knocked at the door she was most decidedly frowning into the mirror.
Jane, always mindful of the fact that she was only an employee, had made no attempt to dress up for the evening, and she was wearing a navy-blue, tie-silk dress with absolutely no adornment save a solitary row of pearls. But it was the very dress to do a great deal for her mezzotint colouring, and Sandra looked at her thoughtfully. It had never before struck her that Jane’s eyes might have been pools of liquid honey, and her feathery eyebrows and gilt-tipped eyelashes were oddly captivating.
“Don’t you ever use mascara?” she asked, as Jane went round the room picking up discarded items of transparent underwear with the intention of carrying them through to the dirty-linen basket in the bathroom.
“No,” Jane admitted, and watched Sandra applying blue eye-shadow to her own upper lids.
“I suppose you know I’m not at all pleased with you,” Sandra said, when the delicate operation was completed. “In fact, I’m a bit disappointed in you.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Jane replied, and there was the merest suspicion of a sigh in her voice. She went through into the bathroom with the soiled underwear and when she returned her employer told her to sit down.
“I’m not really mad at you, honey,” she said; “but it’s unlike you to go off for the day with a man you knew very well I was expecting to meet and be entertained by! And when I telephoned you, you never even told me he was here! Why did you decide to keep that quiet?”
“I didn’t decide to keep it quiet. I never even knew Monsieur Delaroche was here,” Jane told her, having made up her mind that, whether Rene approved or not, she was going to make a clean breast of things up to the moment Sandra herself arrived. Sandra’s eyebrows flew upwards as she explained that the man with whom she had spent the day had been known to her simply as Etienne; and when she further explained that all they had done was go for a drive and have lunch together, and return by a somewhat circuitous route - she didn’t think a few kisses in the greensward would really interest Sandra - the film-star looked at first amazed, and then relieved, and then finally amused.
“But what an extraordinary thing to do,” she exclaimed, “to string you along like that! And yet, somehow, it’s like Rene ... He’s impish - puckish - and I’ve no doubt he got a lot of fun out of making you believe he was someone else. Probably he was feeling bored ... But that’s hardly a compliment to me, when I was waiting for him in Paris! However, it doesn’t altogether surprise me, because I’ve heard about odd things he’s done. He’s a strange mixture - I’ll tell you about him some time. And at least he didn’t mind about deceiving you! It was obviously a diversion that appealed to him, and he’d have done the same thing if you’d been any other girl with a reasonable pretty face. Of course, if you’d have been as plain as a plate I don’t suppose he’d have bothered.”
“No, of course not,” Jane agreed, trying to sound as if the whole thing mattered little in any case. “It was just an amusing interlude. Let’s forget it.”
Sandra looked at her curiously. “Did you enjoy your day?”
“It helped to fill the time until your arrival. But, of course, if I’d known you were going to be here tonight I wouldn’t have left the house.”
“Then I’m glad I didn’t let you know, because it’s been awfully hot today, and at least you’ve had an airing. And to tell you the truth, Gaston - that’s my vicomte! - began to bore me a bit, and I decided to save myself a fantastically large hotel bill and come here without any further delay. And now that I’m here will you do something for me? - to make up for not being on the doorstep to receive me when I arrived?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then will you take Mark Lanyard off my hands as much as possible? I know he had to come, because of the film, but he will persist in pretending that one of these days we’re going to be married, he and I, and although I haven’t any intention of marrying anyone - at least, not unless I fall violently in love! - I do hate having to snub him, because he’s really very sweet, and he likes you very much, and if only you’ll talk to him sometimes after dinner, and things like that, at least I’ll have a breathing space.’
“If my talking to him will be any sort of recompense for talking to you, then of course I’ll do it,” Jane said quietly.
“Thanks, honey, I knew you would,” Sandra beamed at her gratefully. “And it’s so warm here you’ll have plenty of opportunities for showing him the garden by moonlight, and that sort of thing. And as Rene is playing lead with me in the film it’s important we get together on the script.”
“Of course,” Jane agreed.
Sandra threw off the gossamer negligee and went over to the huge built-in wardrobe.
“And now help me choose a frock to wear this evening,” she said, in her old voice of complete complacency and absolute friendliness. “I bought quite a few things in Paris, and some of them are rather breathtaking. What do you think of this?” and she lifted out a silvery sheath that might have been expressly designed to show off her entrancing fairness, and her slight but delectable curves. “Or this?” - unhooking an ice-blue brocade and throwing it carelessly on to the bed.
“There’s one thing about making money,” she remarked, as she walked to the mirror and studied herself. “It can buy you the things you need to set off your looks, and if you’ve got looks you can get - well, most things!” She smiled rather peculiarly at Jane. “The only thing that defeats me is that I can never quite make up my mind what it is I want more than anything else in life. I’ve had success in films, I’ve made a name for myself, but there must be something else.”
Jane straightened the long line of dresses and suits, house-gowns and play-suits in the wardrobe, and Sandra added: “It could be h
ere in his house, but I wouldn’t swear to it! I’d be afraid to swear to it!”
CHAPTER VII
In the end the silver sheath-like dress won, and Sandra went downstairs, to spend her first evening at La Cause Perdue, looking like a particularly glamorous fairy on the Christmas-tree, which was the way her fans liked her to look.
Jane had no clear idea of how the evening passed, save that in many respects it was like other evenings she had spent with her employer when they were guests of a wealthy host. Sandra was the centre of attention, and because she had a not unnatural liking for being the centre of attention, she sparkled and scintillated like the many facets of a diamond, and her fresh American charm went down well even with the dour-faced Jeanne. Jane had the feeling that Jeanne had disapproved of her very strongly from the moment of her arrival, and she couldn’t think why this should be so, unless the housekeeper resented the fact that a master as popular as the one she served should not have been easily recognised.
The little interlude, during which “Monsieur Etienne” had played the role of a guest in his own house, had obviously not pleased her at all, although Clarri had reacted differently. When she met Jane’s eyes while she was handing drinks in the big salon before dinner she smiled as much as to say: “So you know who he is now! ... Our whimsical “Monsieur”! But he is like that! ... Always one for the little joke, the humorous deception that hurts no one!”
Yes, Jane thought heavily, he probably was like that. But it wasn’t within his province to gauge whether his deceptions would always be quite harmless.
Madame Heloise would have intrigued her under strictly normal circumstances, for although unmistakably French in many ways, she was not so French in others. She had dark, flashing good looks, and dressed with the chic of her countrywomen, and might have been anywhere between thirty and forty; but the Latin side of her ended there. She was a woman of few words, and her brain seemed to be ticking over busily whilst she was observing other people, and the first thing she did as soon as dinner was over was to disappear into the library where she had deposited the letters she had collected on arrival, and start to deal with them. When Jane passed the library door she heard the noise of her typewriter like muted machine-gun fire, and she realized that from now on the library was going to be a closed room to her. It was the room in which Madame Heloise would deal with the affairs of her own particular employer, the fabulous Rene Delaroche.
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