Enchanted Autumn

by Mary Whistler

  But Jane decided that to sit in a room with him and listen to him singing, while he accompanied himself at the piano was a very different thing from listening to him on gramophone records. Her very first morning in this house, when she had been alone to do exactly as she pleased, and before she had any idea at all what he really looked like, she had sat on the floor of the library with her arms about her drawn-up knees, and known a strange intimacy in his voice floating out to her from the gramophone behind her. It had been just as if he was singing especially for her, the faintly dolorous notes meant to touch her alone, the sudden quickening to gaiety meant to reach out and cause her to feel suddenly gay and lighthearted also.

  But sitting on a couch at the far end of a big room with a noble escutcheoned fireplace, and an open-timber roof, while he shared the piano-stool with Sandra at the opposite end, the changed circumstances were almost depressingly different. The sound was the same - just as heart-tuggingly the same - but the sight of Sandra resting her cheek against his shoulder, occasionally patting his sleeve as a sign of applause, and looking up at him with violent eyes, dreamy with appreciation when the song came to an end, destroyed everything in the nature of illusion.

  Even Madame Heloise seemed to feel this was so, for although she sat without movement in a tight-fitting dress of black velvet, her Frenchwoman’s chic betraying itself as always in the neatness of her head, and the perfection of her make-up, her sloe-black eyes had a strange glimmer of impatience, or disapproval.

  When Jane seized the opportunity to slip away to her room, she found that Madame Heloise was hard on her footsteps, her high heels tap-tapping on the echoing floor of the gallery. It was a gallery that ran, high up, round the hall, and the corridors leading to the bedrooms opened off it.

  Madame Heloise came up behind the English girl, and observed shortly: “It is too much! ... He came here to rest, and night after night it is the same! How much rest does he get, when always it is the entertainment of guests if not the actual work? The long hours devoted to the endless practising!”

  Jane looked at her rather curiously. “Monsieur Delaroche doesn’t strike me as a man who needs a great deal of rest,” she said. “He seems to have a fund of energy that is all his own. In fact, I would say he is a mine of energy.”

  “Tck! Tck!” Madame Heloise exclaimed, with a movement of her shoulders. “I see you do not understand! We have just completed a tour that would test the endurance of anyone, and it was arranged that we come here to be quiet. There is a house not so far from here where monsieur can be quiet, and I was to visit him daily and carry him his letters, and receive his instructions, and so forth. But what happens? ... We come here, and we stay! Mademoiselle Van Doone demands the constant attentiveness of her host, and he is too generous to think of himself! Pah! ....” She sounded immensely irritated. “How I wish it was otherwise!”

  “I see,” Jane said, digesting this intelligence slowly and thoughtfully. “I’m afraid I didn’t understand.”

  “No one understands.” Madame Heloise turned away. “But you, at least, have some intelligence - that I can believe! - and we who serve are not permitted to interfere! Otherwise I would beg of you to use your influence with Mademoiselle Van Doone. But she is quite plainly a law unto herself.”

  “A very successful law unto herself,” Jane murmured, feeling it her duty to defend her employer.

  “Oui!” But where does success lead to in the end? ... And are there not other things apart from success? Tck!” She clicked her tongue again. “Sometimes I grow tired of the sound of the word ... Success, success, success! Monsieur Rene has had all that he needs of it!”

  She tap-tapped away in the direction of her bedroom, and Jane continued more slowly on her way to her own bedroom. The highlight of the evening for her had been the brief few minutes when she had danced a tango with Rene, after listening to his peculiarly attractive voice persuading her. He had approached her the instant Sandra had been claimed by Mark, and told her that she looked as if she had been born to dance the tango, with that slight willowy figure of hers. And when he took her in his arms - and she secretly terrified that she would disappoint him by muffing her steps, or failing to follow his own steps - the discovery that they had both obviously been born to go through the motions of this most sensuous of all dances with kind of instinctive obedience to the other’s movements, and a mental and physical unity that was a little disturbing, to say the least, shook her. And Rene’s dark eyes as he looked down at her had informed her that he was pondering the matter, too, and that even to him there was something inexplicable in this extraordinarily harmonious blending of two personalities quite unlike one another.

  Before the music stopped he had rather spoiled things for her by abruptly ceasing to dance, and guiding her towards the window that opened outwards on to the courtyard. “Come outside and let us look at the moon, Jane!” he said, and although there was a gleam of humour in his eyes, there was something besides that sought to compel her. And for the first time she saw in addition a hint of deep dissatisfaction.

  But she drew back from him at once. “No, I don’t feel like looking at the moon tonight! ... And, in any case, it won’t rise for another half an hour yet - at least, it won’t clear the tops of the trees. It’s down on the horizon!”

  He smiled ruefully. “What an authority on lunar phases you are! But we can pretend it’s moonlight - and there are always the stars, that I once saw reflected in your eyes!”

  He looked at her willing her to remember how he had “kissed the stars good night!” and she turned away, and was grateful to Sandra for abandoning Mark and coming over to drag Rene to the piano. And soon after that Jane made her way up to bed in the sixteenth-century farmhouse.

  And when she reached her room at last she found herself wondering a little. Wondering about Madame Heloise - who so plainly had no time at all for Sandra - and about Rene’s need to get away and have a rest.

  She remembered that when she had first met him she had thought him jaded and cynical ... A man with few illusions. She had even thought him hard ... Now it suddenly struck her that as he was then so he really was. Not so much hard, as hardened, bored, weary, satiated. There had been none of the speaking movements with his hands while they were having lunch. The gaiety that made his eyes dance. His eyes had looked sombre, as if gaiety was completely unknown to him, and it was not until they started off to drive to La Cause Perdue that she had seen the change come over him.

  And once the change started to come over him so it became a concealing mantle. The debonair personality of Rene Delaroche had bubbled up, as it probably always would bubble up in the end, keeping that other side of him hidden.

  Jane walked to her window without switching on the light, and looked out into night that was still only softly star-lit, for the great forest trees held back the light of the moon until the moon itself was directly overhead. She suddenly felt intensely sombre herself, for something had happened at the first lunch with the man who was now her host that would go on and on like a rolling stone gathering momentum.

  In the beginning it had been just a pebble finding its way down the hillside, an eager pebble that within twenty-four hours had swelled to much larger proportions. Within another twenty-four hours it had become the stone that might well be the millstone round her neck intended for her because it was her own particular millstone, from which she would never be able to cut loose.

  It was a frightening thought, her future borne down by the weight of that stone, hampered, restricted, hindered, made at times a little unbearable.

  Rene showed them many of the beauties of the local countryside during the two weeks that Sandra was resting and refreshing herself for the demands that lay a-head. She had decided to permit herself two weeks, and Valentine Wade was quite agreeable, and in spite of what Madame Heloise had said about Rene he seemed to enjoy the role of host.

  He was a very good host. His manner always suggested that his guests were important to him, and
that their comfort was of paramount importance. It didn’t matter whether it was Sandra or Jane, Wade or Mark Lanyard - and if he could have excluded one of them, Jane had the feeling that he would have excluded Mark, possibly because he was so attentive to Sandra, even when she neglected him - nothing was overlooked that would ensure their well-being during their stay. And rather more than their well-being. La Cause Perdue had been equipped to give the visitor an inclination to return.

  Rene’s black and silver car had been restored to him - marvellously unblemished considering the treatment it had received - and in it he drove Sandra when they set out to explore the neighbourhood, and Mark drove Jane in an English car of much older vintage. Val Wade had his own car, which he had driven for years, and which was described by him as “Old Faithful”, and it was his means of getting the “feel” of the district, which was important when he hoped to make it yield profitable results.

  There was a chateau not more than half a dozen or so miles from the farmhouse, and although not one of the more pretentious in the area, it was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful Jane had ever seen. Set against a background of beechwoods already turning lightly to gold, and with pepperpot towers and turrets reflected in a moat, it was like an echo from the Age of Chivalry, and the very quintessence of “high romance.” Its owner, the elderly Comte de Rambouillet, was a well-tried friend of Rene’s, and he had promised to permit the house to be used during sequences of the film, and he also invited Rene and his friends to lunch while they were staying with him as guests.

  Jane was quite prepared to be left behind, being merely a secretary, but Sandra absolutely insisted on her accompanying her.

  “You’re more at home with that class of person than I am,” she said. “And by that I mean you’re more likely to speak their language ... And I don’t mean French!” - with a little grimace. “My French is good enough to get me by, but I don’t imagine I’ll be altogether at ease chatting with a comte and comtesse. Anyway, I’d rather you came along and acted as a buffer state.”

  Jane looked mildly surprised. “But you’ll have Rene with you. He’s at home with them!”

  “Nevertheless, I want you, too. And Rene says you’re to come.”

  That made Jane’s heart glow a little. Rene had said that she was to be a member of the lunch-party! It was somehow dear of him not to have permitted her to be left out!

  But Sandra need not have worried about the Comtesse, for when she married Armand de Rambouillet twenty years before she had been a young governess from England. She was an extremely attractive woman with prematurely white hair, and an absolutely flawless complexion, and her completely affable manners made her the easiest thing in the world to talk to, Jane found her particularly easy to get on with, and she liked the humorous sparkle that dwelt in her blue eyes, and the way she slipped her hand inside her husband’s arm and kept him close to her side when they were walking on the terrace, and showing the guests around the gardens before lunch was served.

  “When I told my friends I was going to marry a Frenchman - even though at that time I was only a governess, and he, of course, was miles above me! - they all warned me against him,” she confessed to Jane, later in the day. ‘They said: ‘You know what Frenchmen are! Always a roving eye...!’ But I’m very happy to say I didn’t listen to them!”

  “And you’re very happy?” Jane asked.

  “Twenty years of uninterrupted harmony,” the Comtesse admitted. “I’d say uninterrupted bliss, only it’s rather like tempting Providence!...”

  She looked towards Rene, seated on the stone parapet of the terrace with Sandra beside him, and in the act of lighting a cigarette for the top-billed American film star. The latter’s deliberately arch glance - or so it seemed - was directed up at him, and she was wearing a fabulous frock that had been created specially for her in Paris. Her hair was like spun-gold in the sunshine that was dimpling the surface of the moat, and playing amongst the woods on the opposite bank; and Rene himself looked casual and completely successful in one of the latest products of his first-class tailor. His linen was immaculate; his hair - like Sandra’s - shone in the sunshine. Only she was the light to his darkness, and he was the perfect complement to her fairness.

  “I believe Monsieur Delaroche is an old friend of yours,” Jane heard herself saying.

  “Yes indeed. But I sometimes think that nowadays ... well, he is no longer the Rene we knew!”

  “I don’t suppose many people stay completely the same,” Jane murmured this time. “And you certainly can’t stay the same if you have a big success!”

  “No, that’s true. But that makes one wonder whether success is all that important!”

  Jane said nothing, but she couldn’t help observing the way her hostess’s eyes continued to rest on Rene. It was the genuinely regretful gaze of one who had his best interest at heart.

  “And then, of course, there was his marriage,” she said. “That, we are all agreed, was a disaster!”

  But Jane was not to find out any more about that disaster just then, for another man joined them on the terrace, a man who was a guest in the chateau. He was a world-famous portrait painter, and Jane had already got to know him fairly well, for he had sat next to her at lunch. He had a little close-clipped dark beard that she found rather fascinating, keen grey eyes, and slightly grizzled dark hair. The grizzled hair made him look a little older than he, probably was, but he couldn’t have been much more than in his late thirties. Jane liked the way he smiled, slowly, as if he only did so when something merited a smile. On this occasion it was Jane, in a pale-yellow silk suit, with neat brown shoes, and a brown calf handbag to match them.

  “You and Michael Pennington have met, of course, haven’t you?” the Comtesse said, smiling her much more vivid smile at them both. “Oh, yes, I remember, you sat beside one another at lunch! Well, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll have to go and have a few words with that rather lonely-looking Mr. Wade! He’s simply thrilled with the architecture of this place, and says he enjoys prowling around on his own; but even so, I can’t let him feel neglected. I’ll show him the banqueting hall - or the room we still call the banqueting hall - and after that he can have a look at the Armoury.”

  As she hastened away Jane smiled at her retreating back, and then smiled up at the man beside her. He wasn’t quite as tall as Rene, but he was broad and well-built.

  “Do you think she likes having a film unit trailing over her house?” she asked. “And that’s what we really are, you know - apart from Mr. Delaroche, who will be our star turn in any case!”

  Michael Pennington looked quizzically at Sandra, bending down gracefully to attract the moorhens on the moat. “Isn’t the glamorous lady over there your ‘star turn’? She looks to me as if she ought to be.”

  “Oh, yes,” Jane agreed. “She plays opposite Mr. Delaroche - or will do when the film gets started - and Mark Lanyard over there is the supporting male in the cast.”

  “And which of the two wins in the end?” Pennington wanted to know. “By which I mean, of course, which one of them wins the lady?”

  “As a matter of fact, Mark does ... in the end! Rene brings the story to a close with a grand renunciation scene, and walks out and leaves Mark to it, after a harrowing farewell to Sandra.”

  “It doesn’t sound in the least realistic to me.”

  “It’s all mixed up with the legend connected with Rene’s own house, La Cause Perdue,” she explained. ‘The story of a lost cause - a hopeless cause! - set of course to music!”

  “Incredible!” Pennington exclaimed. “And no doubt intended to be a money-spinner?”

  “Oh, yes, it will be,” Jane assured him. “With Rene in the cast.”

  “You seem, like everyone else, to have a great admiration for him. But I’ll have to admit that until this morning I’d never even heard his name. I’m not a cinema-goer ... I don’t know much about singers, either, save that frequently their voices upset me, and crooners usually send me up the wall.�
� He smiled apologetically, in case she didn’t share his views.

  She moved down the terrace steps at Michael Pennington’s side, and he showed her aspects of the house that aroused purest admiration in her, and they even walked in the woods and discovered a kind of secret lake, where the beech leaves fell like little golden offerings, and lay upon the water. Jane had never known such silent woods as these French woods, and they enchanted her, and when her new acquaintance suggested that he should row her out to the island in the middle of the lake, taking advantage of the handiness of a small boat which was moored to a ring in the bank, amongst the reeds, she agreed at once, because in some way this was a dissociation from certain things that oppressed her, and an escape from realities that pressed on her, a little too nearly sometimes. The boat shot across the lake, because Michael Pennington had strong arms, and on the island they found a kind of arbour-like boat-house and sat in it, and exchanged information about themselves.

  Jane found that it caused noticeable relief when she explained that she was just a humble secretary, and never in the least likely to see her own name in lights. And Pennington explained that he lived in Rome - one of the oldest parts of Rome, the Appian Way - in a kind of studio-flat someone leased to him. She knew already that he was famous for reproducing Italianate style beauties on canvas, and her surprise was quite genuine when he told her that hers was the sort of colouring it gave him the greatest pleasure to reproduce.

  “That hair of yours,” he said - “neither red nor brown, and definitely not Titian - looks so well against the type of skin you have. And if you don’t mind my diagnosing the qualities of your skin, it’s because it isn’t the heavy matt skin of the red-head, but an exquisitely delicate skin like the first drifts of apple-blossom, that I would like the opportunity to paint you some time.”