Enchanted Autumn

by Mary Whistler

  Jane kept seeing the mental picture of Adele’s thin arms wound tightly about her father’s neck, and the concern on his face when he looked down and pushed the heavy hair off her brow. “Why doesn’t Germaine get you a ribbon?”

  He had sounded somehow helpless, pathetically helpless, as he spoke. And yet he could afford to buy her quantities of ribbon, he could see her safely bestowed in one of the most expensive schools, and there was nothing that she need lack - save the society of her father! Jane didn’t suppose she ever remembered her mother.

  Jane typed a lot of letters for Sandra that afternoon, and because Clarisse had had the misfortune to accidentally burn one of the more delicate examples of Sandra’s vast quantity of underwear whilst pressing it in the farmhouse kitchen, she did a little ironing for her as well. Jeanne kept out of the way, and she had the big kitchen to herself, quiet, peaceful, beautifully equipped, decorated in soft pastel colours.

  Jane sighed a little as she looked round it, before putting the iron away. Fancy owning a house like this, where everything had been planned to make life easy and comfortable, and where there never was any true home-life!

  She wondered whether Adele ever came here, and whether Jeanne baked special cakes for her, and allowed her to perch on the leather-covered stools and watch culinary operations at the table.

  It would be a change for the child - a pleasant change after the paper flowers, the huge cat sitting stolidly on the hearth, the tank of goldfish. Jane had nothing against cats and goldfish, but the paper flowers worried her. As, apparently they worried Etienne!

  When she went up to her room at last she selected a dress to wear for the evening that had little blue flowers like cornflowers, printed all over a white ground. It was quite a charming dress, one she hadn’t worn before, and it made her look rather touchingly youthful. The touches of blue emphasized in some curious way the honey-gold depths of her eyes, and because when she gazed into those depths there was something vulnerable and disturbing, she added rather a lot of lipstick to her soft, full mouth. Instantly it glowed like a scarlet lacquer flower, and that pleased her in some way. It was like putting on a coat of armour.

  Downstairs in the salon drinks were already being handed round when she entered, and Rene was the usual suave, attentive host. But he crossed the room to put a drink into her hand immediately, and although he first looked into her eyes rather questioningly, his glance dropped within a matter of seconds to her mouth.

  Then he met her eyes again. His were dark and disturbing. For the first time she found them profoundly disturbing, and with the sensation that she needed a life-line to prevent her drowning she looked away.

  Sandra called her over to inspect the velvet bolero Clarri had been working on that afternoon, and she was glad of the opportunity to escape without answering the low-voiced: “I heard your typewriter this afternoon, but when I looked in at the office you had gone! Where were you? And what have you been doing with yourself until now?”

  Why tell him that she had been ironing Sandra’s underthings in the kitchen of his luxurious farmhouse? she asked herself, in a slightly unbalanced way. Why tell him anything, when nothing she did was of any real concern to him! When it was no concern of his at all!

  All through dinner she had the feeling that he was watching her, and it began to make her feel quite agitated at last. She had been agitated when she left her room and descended to the ground floor of the house ... She had been full of a strange, confusing, bewildering perturbation ever since she returned from her morning’s shopping; and such unbalanced recollections as the red rose she had had to part with - and of course she had had to part with it when the child wanted it! - the moment when it had been dropped into her lap, and the look in Rene’s eyes when she had parted with it, didn’t help her. And then she began to be certain that Sandra was watching her, too - and when she wasn’t watching her she was watching Rene. No doubt she was remembering all she had heard about Rene’s past life, and really Rene’s past life was nothing at all to do with her. It was his own affair.

  Jane felt alternately almost panicked by Rene’s fixed regard, and fired with the urge to stick up for him and defend him against any form of criticism. If Sandra was disposed to criticize him for keeping his only child hidden away in the depths of a silent forest, then she had absolutely no right to criticize. .. No one had any right!

  Jane’s passionate attachment to Rene’s cause - and just then she refused to recognize it as attachment to anything other than a cause - made her whole body feel as if it was no longer quite steady, as if it might dissolve into a state of trembling at a touch. Or at one more curious glance at her.

  And as soon as they left the dining-room, with its flowers, and its lights, and its ultra-modern elegance, she knew that she had to make her escape. If anyone questioned her afterwards she could say that she was tired, or that she remembered an important letter in her notebook which had not yet been transcribed, and had decided that it must be typed that night. Or she could say that she felt an overpowering need for fresh air, and her own company.

  While the others trekked towards the piano, as they always seemed to do at this hour, she slipped like a shadow across the main courtyard, and made for the towering roof of the granary. But half-way to the granary she changed her mind - in her office almost anyone could find her if they wished - and headed in an entirely opposite direction. Breathlessly at last she became aware that she was on the very boundaries of the forest, and the great trees were huddled in a sort of solemn conclave all about her the moonlight stealing between their trunks. Her slight figure was silvered by the magic as she sought to be swallowed up by the towering giants, and in her urgency her heel was caught and held by a bed of emerald ling. She felt the stiletto point of it become embedded, and then when she paused to wrench it out a bramble sent out an eager arm and caught at her dress and for a few minutes she was as good as a prisoner.

  She scratched her hands as she tried to free herself of the bramble, and it was while she was making slightly desperate efforts that the voice, surprisingly close at hand, called her name. It was a voice she would have recognised anywhere, and at any time, masculine and imperative, yet also persuasive, and with just a hint of anxiety in it, unless her ears deceived her.

  “Jane! ... Where are you, Jane? Jane, it’s too late to play hide-and-seek in the forest!”

  She stood absolutely still with the bramble still clinging to her, and within a few seconds he had reached her, although she hadn’t uttered a sound. He moved with the sureness of one who could have done the same thing blindfold over the uneven forest path, and when a turn of the track brought her into view she looked like a small silver figurine with the moonlight pouring over her.

  “Jane! ... My poor petite!”

  She said in a small, pathetic voice: “I can’t free myself!”

  “Then don’t move,” he cautioned her. He bent, and the bramble was no longer clutching at her dress, and she managed to withdraw her heel. But in order to do so she needed the support of his hands, and as those hands slipped round her and held her so securely that she had never felt so secure in her life, she yielded to an overwhelming compulsion to collapse against him, as if her bones had melted, and his arms took possession of her and simply locked her against him.

  He spoke in a voice that was slightly unrecognizable from just above her head. “Jane, you are never again to enter the forest alone at this hour of the night! If you do, I will beat you! Do you hear? I will beat you!”

  “Yes,” she sighed, and turned her face into him. “Oh, Etienne, Etienne!”

  She didn’t know whether she actually did utter his name, or whether it was her longing to do so that made it seem as if the sounds passed her lips.

  “Then promise that you will never do it again!”

  “I promise!”

  He lowered his cheek to her hair, and she could smell the scent of his shaving-cream, and the faint scent of cigarette-smoke that clung to him. He started to mur
mur urgently into the soft, silken strands of her hair, and the night wind blew one of them up into his face, and he turned his mouth wildly into the perfumed softness, and she could feel that his lips were trembling.

  “Oh, my darling little Jane, I love you so, I love you so!” he told her. “We must go somewhere where we can talk!... There must be no more pretence!”

  She looked up at him in the bemused way she had done once before, only this time there was need on both sides, and she knew it. There was no longer even a spark of humour in the dark eyes she had longed more than once to drown in, and his face was pale in the shadows of the forest. He swung her up into his arms and started to carry her away from the whispering world of trees, and it was only when she saw the roof-tops of the house that she pleaded with him to set her down.

  But he refused absolutely to do so. “You have already risked a sprained ankle, and you are safe in my arms, sweetheart! And I am not taking you back to the house. I am taking you to the little room I created for you, where we can turn the key in the door if necessary. Do you think I could endure the rest of them pestering us - trying to keep us apart! - when we so badly need to be together?”

  The fierce protest in his voice silenced her, and she nestled her face into his neck. Just before they left the forest behind them he paused and kissed her forehead, with a kind of white-hot passion, and she heard him say again: “I love you, Jane! I tell you I love you!”

  “And I love you, Etienne!” Her fingers were clutching at him; her brown eyes were swimming with love. “Oh, Etienne, Etienne!” And this time she knew that she really said it.

  CHAPTER XII

  The little room that had become so familiar to her by day seemed strangely unfamiliar at night. Etienne switched on the light, and then deposited her in one of the deep armchairs, and went round drawing the curtains, so that they were safe from prying eyes.

  Jane looked at her typewriter on the desk, at the bowl of flowers beside it - they were spiky mauve dahlias, interspersed with some vivid red begonias - and at the books on their shelves, and the little Empire cabinet in the corner. Then she looked at Etienne, who knelt suddenly in front of her and cupped her face in his hands.

  “How long have you loved me, Jane?” he asked.

  “From the beginning, I think,” she answered. She smiled at him. “Yes; almost certainly from the beginning.”

  He picked up one of her hands and examined the delicate pink nails. “I think we were fated to meet, Jane! You were fated to come back to France, where you and your father were happy together and meet another man who could make you happy.” His arms encircled her. “Much, much happier than you have ever been in your life before, my little Jane!”

  “But—” she traced the dark outline of his brows with a slightly tremulous little finger - “I don’t think I - really - understand! Only this morning you told me about your - about your marriage ... And about your wife!...”

  “Yes; that is true.” He lifted his lips from the little hollow in her throat, and his eyes looked up at her darkly with that strange mystic look in them that she had seen before. “Perhaps I was a little abrupt when I let you into the secrets of my life this morning, Jane; but you had to know - it was highly important that you should know and understand! - and there didn’t seem any way of softening things if they were to be quite clear. I loved my wife ... Perhaps there are many ways of loving, but I loved her in a way that it is impossible to forget. I have never loved any other woman, except you, and that is all there is to it!”

  All there was to it!... Jane felt her heart thumping as his own heart beat heavily against hers, and with impatience he suddenly found her mouth, and his kiss scorched along all her veins. Helplessly she clung to him, her love for him the only thing in the world just then - the only thing that completely filled her world - and all the warning voices that had spoken to her before were suddenly shut out, and her surrender was almost abject.

  “Oh, Etienne,” she whispered to him, when her mouth was free at last, “what would I do if you didn’t love me?”

  “But I do love you.” He dropped feather-light kisses on her eyes. “I love these eyes that are so big and brown! I love these velvety white eyelids” - the kisses becoming more impassioned - “the freckles on your nose - just the two of them!” He rubbed his cheek against her cheek. “I love the whole of you, Jane, and I want the whole of you - for the rest of your life, and mine!”

  She trembled. “Oh, Etienne!...” Further speech was quite impossible.

  He looked at her almost broodingly. “I have plans for you, Jane ... I have spent many hours of all the nights we have been here, thinking up plans for you!” Suddenly he rose and lifted her out of her chair and sat down with her in his arms. “We must be calm and discuss these plans - or we must try to be calm! - and I want you to tell me that you see no fault in them, I want to be certain that my Jane agrees with all that I would do for her.” He ran a finger down her cheek, and along the line of her neck. “What did you really think of my little Adele?”

  Jane put back her head to look up at him with warm eyes.

  “I told you that I think she is absurdly like you - wonderfully like you!”

  “And she is also like her mother,” She wondered whether it was a sigh he checked, and then told herself that in such moments it could hardly be that. But there was that sombre, brooding look in his eyes still. “Jane, you were right, of course, about Adele. I have known it for some time - that it was no life for her hidden away here in the heart of the forest - but what could I do about it when I was always coming and going? La Cause Perdue has never been, in any sense of the word a home to me ... It is just somewhere I come occasionally.” He reached for a box of cigarettes on a little table beside them and lighted one, although she refused. “So you see that Adele was a problem. Tante Clothilde has never been a problem, for she is just my pensioner, and so long as she lives she will remain where she is in the little house.”

  “And do you stay there yourself sometimes?” she asked.

  “I planned to stay there this time, but you upset my plans, Jane! I found it impossible to tear myself away from you!” He lifted her chin. “You have upset the whole of my life, and I ought to find it hard to forgive you, for I imagined my life would run in the same familiar pattern for years yet. I even desired that it would run in the same familiar pattern ... But—” His smile was sweet and caressing. “Jane, do you think it would be a good idea to send Adele to school? Perhaps to some school in England, where she would learn to be a well-balanced young woman like yourself?”

  She nodded, almost eagerly. “Oh, yes, I think it would be a very good thing.” And then she hesitated. “But wouldn’t you miss her?”

  “I would, but I would get accustomed to it, and it would be for her good, I would see her during holidays, and times like that, and she would see me during those stated times, and all would be well.”

  But Jane felt as if a tiny shadow fell across her heart. Adele was after all not very old yet, and the plan seemed to leave out of consideration altogether any warm human influences in her life - such as a woman who might learn to love her!

  “She is just a little young,” she objected, diffidently. “Of course, the plan would be ideal for her in about another year. But in the meantime...”

  “In the meantime I do not think we should hesitate. I was appalled today to see her looking so - so altogether unlike a daughter of mine ought to look” - his mouth twisting a little wryly. “I wanted you to think well of her, Jane, and I’m sure it was not easy. She even robbed you of your rose.”

  “Oh, I was glad to let her have it, and although I think she’s a little pathetic, I also think she’s sweet. But since she happens to be your daughter I imagine I would think her sweet whatever she happened to be like.”

  He made a little murmur beside her ear, and pressed his lips to her hair. “You are such an enchanting woman, Jane - and a man would be blind indeed not to recognize how sweet you are. Even that bearded
painter fellow discovered it at a glance.” Then he forced himself to be practical again. “I wish you and Adele to get to know one another, and to be good friends, and perhaps one day she will be grateful to you for making this suggestion about a school. And now about you, Jane!”

  It wasn’t a shadow across her heart this time; it was a sudden, odd sensation of coldness. “Yes?” she once more put back her head to look up at him. “What about me, Etienne?”

  “You do not like to think of me as Rene?”

  “I prefer to think of you as Etienne.”

  “Then I will always be your Etienne.” He smoothed her soft skin. “Jane, my adorable, darling Jane, when we first met I thought that we might give each other a brief moment of happiness, and that was why I said that it would be just an interlude. That day when we had lunch together, and I bought you the carnation - which you did not think worthy of preserving amongst your personal treasures! - I still thought that the interest we had in one another would settle down very quickly into its right perspective, and that you would go your way, and I would go mine. There would be a few pleasing memories, and then some other man would put me right out of your thoughts altogether. That was the way I wanted it - at that time!”

  The coldness round Jane’s heart began to feel as if it was the first bleak hoar-frost of winter. “You are accustomed to - affairs of that sort?” she asked, keeping her face hidden.

  “No, darling” - a faint laugh in his voice - “I am not precisely accustomed to them. No man ever takes the charms of the opposite sex for granted. But in between loving two women I have sometimes paused to admire one or two others ... My life has brought me into contact with some of the most beautiful women in the world, and one cannot altogether ignore them! It would be, as we would say here in France, l’impolitesse! But that is nothing for you to feel jealous about, any more than there was any reason for me to feel jealous when Mark Lanyard kissed you on the cheek on that very first evening of his arrival, after I had kissed you in the daytime! Mark is the devoted slave of Sandra, and your heart was not in it that night, was it?”