Enchanted Autumn

by Mary Whistler

  And then her inventive capacity and her voice dried up together, and the detached voice said quietly that it was speaking from the hospital. Jane gripped the edge of the table on which the telephone stood.

  When she returned the receiver to its rest her knees were knocking, and she couldn’t prevent them, and Etienne was wide awake and calling from the salon: “Jane! ... What is it, Jane? Who?...” He stood in the doorway of the salon, looking at her. His look wasn’t merely beseeching, it implored her. And at the same time his face was grey. “It is - bad news, Jane?”

  “Oh, no, no!” She moved towards him, her knees still threatening to give way altogether. “It’s wonderful news! ... She’s not only recovered consciousness, but an operation is no longer considered necessary. You can see her tomorrow morning - early tomorrow morning! It isn’t thought advisable for you to see her tonight, but her condition is no longer considered dangerous! She’s going to be all right!”

  CHAPTER XVI

  Etienne’s whole expression underwent such a lightning change that Jane could hardly believe it. One moment he looked as if he was about to receive Fate’s worst blow, and then his eyes were alive and blazing with relief, the greyness fled away, and suddenly his voice was strong.

  “Oh, Jane! ... You said that was how it would be, and I wouldn’t believe you. And now I have nothing left in life to wish for, now that my child is safe!” For one moment he covered his eyes again, and the jubilation left him. “But what an agony of mind! I have aged twenty years tonight, Jane! I wouldn’t live through another night like this for twenty years’ income handed me on a platter. A golden platter at that!”

  “No.” Jane’s voice was queer and small. “It has been dreadful, hasn’t it? But it’s over! You can go to bed now and feel completely happy. You’ll soon have Adele back with you again!”

  She started to move towards the staircase, as if her own only overwhelming desire was for her bed, but something in the bowed shoulders, and the slightly shuffling movements, made him call her back.

  “Jane! Aren’t you happy, too?”

  “Of course.”

  But all at once she was sobbing wildly, hysterically, and it was so completely unlike Jane that he stared at her, aghast. Then when he saw that she was just about to crumple up into a little heap in the very middle of the hall floor he went to her and swept her up into his arms and carried her back to the settee in the salon. He went and fetched her a small nip of cognac, but although her teeth were chattering she refused to touch it.

  “I’m all right ... I’ll be all right! J-just l-leave me! ... J-just leave me alone!”

  “Jane, darling, as if I could!” This time it was he who was on his knees beside her, and he peered anxiously into her streaming face. “My little beloved, what is it?” He tried to draw her into his arms, but she fought him wildly. “Jane! ... All this has been too much for you. Far too much!”

  “It doesn’t matter so long as Adele is - is going to be all right!” she said.

  “We know she’s going to be all right, and I am so happy. You must be happy, too!”

  “I am,” she assured him, but her voice was empty and hollow. “I’ve endured just as bad an evening about her as you have, Etienne ... But tomorrow I won’t go with you to see her. You must go alone. I think that would be better for her, and in any case I’ll have to get back to Sandra. She gave me a couple of days - a week at the outside! It won’t be necessary to stay as long as a week now.”

  He gazed at her in complete puzzlement. “But, Jane, of course you’ve got to stay and see Adele! And in any case—”

  “Yes?” - with a weary thrusting of her tousled hair back from her brow.

  “I’m not going to allow you to return to Sandra. She’ll have to find another secretary. She’d have to do so sooner or later, so she might as well do so at once.” He ran his fingers through his own hair, as if this was not the moment he would have chosen to say all this, but since she had brought matters to an unexpected head it had to be said. He got up and started to walk about the room as he talked. “I’ve never given so much thought to a problem in my life as I’ve given to the problem of you and me, Jane! ... And I know now that I’ve got to marry you! There is no other way out! I may have vowed that I would never marry again, but I can’t stick to it! I have never broken a vow before, but this one has got to be broken!”

  The slight greyness was creeping back to his face, and he stood there looking at her, his eyes dark as fathomless pools, his mouth strangely set.

  “If you think I can stand aside and let you go off to America with Sandra - or, worse still, marry that fellow Pennington! - you might as well know that I can’t! I’ve thought the whole thing over - night and day I’ve thought it over! - and although I’ve struggled against this feeling that I’ve got to keep you with me at all costs, it’s no good, Jane - I’ve had to give way. I’ve got to offer you marriage!”

  Jane struggled suddenly to her feet. Perhaps if she had been feeling entirely normal - if her head hadn’t felt light with exhaustion, her feet heavy as lead, and her whole body aching with weariness - she would not have reacted as violently as she did. She might even have reacted altogether differently. But just then she was conscious of one thing only, and it made her voice shake with humiliation as she said: “How kind of you! ... how overwhelmingly kind of you, Etienne! And do you imagine I will take advantage of the one weak point in your armour? Do you think I’ll let you break a vow for my sake?”

  Etienne looked a little uncomprehendingly. “What do you mean, Jane? I have already said that my mind is made up!”

  “Your mind is made upBut it’s just a little late, Etienne. In fact, it’s too late! I wouldn’t marry you if you were the only man in the world to ask me - the last man in this world! One day you may meet a woman for whom you’ll gladly make sacrifices, as well as concessions, and when that day dawns anything that happened to you in the past won’t matter at all! You won’t even remember that you had a past ... But it hasn’t dawned yet, and I’m not so much in love with you that I want to share the condescending crumbs you offer me! In fact, I don’t think I’m in love with you at all ... it was just a physical attraction that passed! And now that it’s over I can at least feel free!”

  She started to walk towards the door, but he got between her and the stout oak barrier beyond which lay the hall.

  “Jane! Do you know what you’re talking about?”

  “Of course I know.” She looked at him with infinite tiredness. “It’s the first time since I met you that I know what I really do think and feel about you. And they both add up to nothing in the least important. So do you mind if I go to bed?”

  “I think you badly need bed. But...” and his voice seemed to catch, as if he, too, was experiencing the aftereffects of almost unendurable strain - “you won’t talk like this to me in the morning, Jane.”

  “I will! Nothing will be in the slightest degree altered in the morning. And I wouldn’t want it to be altered now that I’m free ... Now that I almost hate you!”

  She passed a hand across her eyes, as if she was confused, and her fingers touched the wetness of the tears that had not yet dried on her cheeks. “Sandra was right about you ... You are not a good thing for women! You might have been capable of loving once, but now you only love Adele. I hope you will take care of her in future!”

  “Jane,” he gasped, “you are surely not jealous of Adele?”

  “I am not jealous of anyone - certainly not a poor little lonely mite who nearly lost her life because you were too neglectful to repair her swing!” She could almost feel him wince, but was beyond recognizing that this was slightly below the belt. “You think too much of Rene Delaroche, Etienne, and should realize that Etienne incurred responsibilities, as well as made vows! It is a grandiloquent thing to make a vow, but it is not always so easy to carry out one’s responsibilities!”

  And then as he stood there, temporarily off guard, jolted and jarred by her accusations, she slipped p
ast him and turned the handle of the door. Within minutes she was upstairs in her own old room - the room she had never expected to see again - and turning the key in the lock.

  Nearly twenty-four hours later she lay in bed and thought how strange it was to be the only occupant of the house apart from the two permanent members of the domestic staff.

  Etienne had telephoned from the home of the Comte and Comtesse de Rambouillet earlier that evening, and said that after visiting the hospital where Adele was no longer in any danger he had asked Elspeth and Armand to put him up for the next few nights. He didn’t labour the reason why he had thought it necessary to do this, but Jane gathered that it was entirely in her own interests, and possibly because he thought she would prefer it.

  Before when she had been alone at La Cause Perdue he had stayed with his daughter and his aunt. Now he went farther afield.

  Jane could have bitten out her tongue every time she thought of the things she had said to Etienne the previous night - or, rather, in the early hours of the morning. Not the things about declining to take his proposal of marriage seriously, but the unnecessary criticism of the way he had discharged his duty to his daughter. He had already suffered enough that day, and only a woman writhing beneath the knowledge of her own superior love, and his love that failed to measure up to any standard that could bring her comfort, could have said the things she said, at such a time, as she realized.

  If only he hadn’t been quite so honest about his fight to overcome a desire to possess her physically! – his fight to get her out of his system, as it were - then she might not have lashed out as she did. She might even have been weak enough to agree to marry him.

  That morning there had been a look in his eyes that reminded her of the look in the eyes of a dog when it has been unjustly punished. It took all the strength of her will, when she realized that he had slept badly - if at all! - and that in forty-eight hours he had become older, and more care-worn, to prevent herself from going to him and catching at his arm and saying: “Oh, Etienne, forgive me! ... Please forgive me! Of course I’ll marry you if you want me to, and if you don’t I’ll understand - I honestly will understand!”

  Instead of which, when Etienne said: “Jane, you didn’t really mean it last night, did you? ... You will marry me?” she had shaken her head and assured him more in sorrow than anger that not only had she meant it, but nothing he could say would induce her to change her mind about him. “I couldn’t marry a man who offered me only a part of himself, Etienne! ... And that’s what you would be doing! You would be trying to make certain all the time that the cherished place in your heart was retained by your first wife, Marie- Therese! And since you’ve been so loyal to her all these years” - was there just a suspicion of irony in her voice as she said this? she found herself wondering afterwards - “I wouldn’t want to be the one to come between you! One day, as I said, Etienne, you may meet someone with whom - well, with whom you really will want to start afresh, without any doubts, without clinging to your memories...”

  “I want to start afresh with you,” he said simply.

  But she shook her head again. “You only think you want to do so, Etienne, because I couldn’t fit in with the plans you made for us both! They weren’t acceptable to me, and you decided it would have to be marriage. But it wouldn’t do - not marriage that was entered into so unwillingly!”

  “There would be no unwillingness on my side,” he assured her. He moved closer to her, and his eyes pleaded with her. “How could there be, Jane, when I love you? I have told you so many times that I love you, and you must believe me! You insult us both when you suggest that some day I will meet some other woman whom I could love more than I love you! That is impossible! It is unthinkable! It is unfair to yourself!”

  “But - but - if I had agreed - to what you wanted me to agree to, only a few weeks ago! - that would have contented you?” she said, staring into his eyes.

  “No, it wouldn’t, Jane - not for long!” He took both her hands, and held them tightly. “I would have wanted the whole of you before very long! I would have wanted to feel that you were absolutely mine, and that no one could take you from me!”

  “So you would have overcome your scruples sufficiently to make me legally your property once you had offered me the insult of something much less valuable in the eyes of the world? And particularly to a woman who needs security almost more than she needs love!”

  “If I offered you an insult, Jane, I beg you to forgive me!”

  “No,” she said, snatching away her hands -and turning from him, and speaking from behind her small, closed teeth. “It is something I can’t forgive! Something I won’t forgive!” She whirled round on him. “Do you think any man of - of principle! - would have offered me the life you offered me?”

  His face had taken on that strange, set, shut-in look she had seen it adopt before, and he, too, seemed to be speaking between his teeth as he suggested: “Such a man as Michael Pennington for instance?”

  “I can’t think why you should drag in his name, but it would be difficult to associate him with affairs.”

  “Yet you have associated me with affairs from the beginning?”

  She bit her lip. “Michael is different ... He is an Englishman.”

  “And all Englishmen are admirable?”

  “Of course I didn’t mean that. And I didn’t mean that all Frenchmen—”

  “You need say no more on that head!” He started to pace up and down the room like a caged tiger, and he was white with anger and resentment. “Your opinion of me is so low that we need not go into it, and I realize that I merely consolidated that opinion when I rashly tried to get the best of two worlds ... To be loyal to a past that had meant a great deal to me, and to have you in my life as well! But I realized the other night at Sandra’s party that you and Pennington were being irresistibly drawn to one another, and when the two of you disappeared it was no surprise! If my insult lies between us, then Pennington lies between us as well! If you are honest, you will admit it!”

  She gazed at him in horror. “You can’t think ... Oh, but you can’t surely think that I...?”

  “Yes?” he said politely.

  She put her hands up to her mouth and whispered into them: “That I would forget you so soon!...”

  This time it was he who turned away, and when he turned back his face was abject. “Jane, forgive me!... You wouldn’t have come down here with me to see Adele if - if you were really serious about Pennington, would you?”

  She kept her face averted, while she bit hard at her lower lip.

  “No.”

  “Then you will stay on here for a day or so? ... You will not go away until you have seen Adele? Please, Jane! If not today - and perhaps it would be best if I saw her alone today in order to prevent any excitement - you will go with me to see her tomorrow?”

  And she had agreed because she couldn’t resist him, and she hadn’t the power to do anything else. “Yes, I will do that.”

  And now, a good many hours later, she was lying in bed, and the only comforting thought she had was that Adele was really better. If anything had happened to Adele she had the feeling that Etienne would really have crumpled, and that was something she couldn’t have endured to witness.

  The house was very silent, and she seemed to have been lying in bed for hours, listening to the ticking of the grandfather clock outside in the thickly carpeted corridor. Because of the carpet the sound was muffled, just as every sound in the house was muffled. The servants slept in a separate wing, and she was the only human being in the main body of the house.

  If only Etienne was in his severe little room at the far end of the corridor! ... Just to know that he wasn’t so very far away from her would be something!

  La Cause Perdue! ... She found herself saying the name over and over to herself. Why should anyone name a house after a lost cause?... And then she told herself that when she went away from it this time she and Etienne would be lost to one another for
good! That wild, exciting, disturbing love of theirs would all be part of a lost cause!...

  She must have fallen asleep at last, for it was a voice calling her name over and over again that wakened her.

  “Mademoiselle Arden! Mademoiselle Arden!” Hands were beating on her door, too, and the voice sounded slightly hysterical. She would never have recognized it as Clarri’s. Then, following an imploring “Mademoiselle Arden!”, feet rushed away down the corridor, and she climbed out of her big bed with the net curtains and reached in a bemused fashion for her dressing-gown.

  She wrinkled her nostrils. Something acrid was stinging them, and the room seemed to be full of smoke, so that she started to cough. She thought she heard a most curious sound, like a crackling sound, and in the length of time that it took to fasten the sash of her dressing-gown the crackling became a roar, and there could be no doubt at all what it was that had caused Clarri to make such a frantic attempt to waken her.

  She rushed through the: smoke to her window, and throwing it wide she looked out. Her breath was instantly drawn in a gasp. La Cause Perdue - the house that someone had so unhappily named - was blazing away like tinder, all the mellow sixteenth-century woodwork going up in a splendid conflagration.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Jane never knew how long she stood there, before her brain started to resume its normal function, and to recover from the shock and the surprise. Then she recrossed her room to the locked door, and once it was open found her way out into the corridor.