Enchanted Autumn

by Mary Whistler

  The smoke was thick in the corridor, but it was not as thick as it might have been considering that mad crackling that seemed to be going on in the roof, and the flames that she had seen licking hungrily about the framework of the windows of the kitchen end of the house. There was no doubt about it, whatever had started the fire in the first place, the spark that had ignited it had occurred in the maid’s quarters of the house. And fortunately Clarri - and almost certainly Jeanne! - had been aroused, and Clarri had come to rouse her.

  Now Clarri had vanished, and it seemed to Jane that as yet the main bedrooms were untouched, and so also was the hub of the house. The hub of the house to her meant the main public rooms and the staircase, and she made her way towards the latter with a belief that it was down there that she would escape. But no sooner did she reach the head of the lovely, curving, shining staircase - one of the main features of the whole house - and look down into the hall, that she realised how wrong she had been.

  Tongues of flame were licking up the stairs, and the hall itself was full of smoke. Recoiling in horror she turned and rushed back along the corridor, but the skirts of her dressing-gown seemed unnecessarily long, and for the first time it was easy to trip over them, unless it was that the smoke was everywhere and blurring her vision. It seemed to be bursting her lungs, and every step she took she wanted to cough, and she wasn’t yet fully awake ... And she kept telling herself that this was just a nightmare.

  Surely it was just a nightmare?...

  La Cause Perdue wasn’t really being consumed by angry, crackling flames!

  Several corridors branched off the main corridor, but she kept on down the mercifully straight stretch to where she knew there was a secondary staircase - apart from the one in the servants’ quarters, almost certainly ablaze by now - which led down into a tiled hall, as yet well away from the fire. Or it should be, unless fire had broken out at that end of the house as well.

  And then before she reached it one of those unexpected tongues of flame leapt out at her from nowhere, and instantly the hem of her dressing-gown was on fire. She beat at it with her hands, conquering the panic that rose in her as if a floodgate had been opened, and when her blackened fingers had extinguished the personal menace, went on down the corridor like a mad thing, only to catch her foot in the carpet and fall headlong while she was still several yards from the stairs.

  The roaring of the fire was like the roaring of a Niagara Falls in her ears, the shocks of her fall and the bursting in her lungs made it impossible for her to get to her feet immediately, and she started to whimper: “Etienne! ... Oh, Etienne!”

  She didn’t know why it was his name that she whimpered, but she did know that the danger was close, and she might never see him again. If she didn’t make a supreme effort and drag herself to her feet she would certainly never see him again, and for her, life would be over. Life that had never really begun!...

  “Help me to get to my feet, Etienne!” she implored, in a soundless whisper, through cracked lips. And then she knew that it was no good - that she couldn’t do it! The smoke was beating down on her, filling all the house; there was no air for her to breathe, the heat was intense, and the roaring in her ears was blotting out her senses. Something crashed somewhere in the house, and she gave a little moan.

  “It’s no good Etienne!...”

  “Jane!” Desperately a voice called her name, and she heard it, but her senses were slipping away from her fast, and before the voice called again they had slipped away from her altogether. “Jane, Jane! Where are you, Jane? Oh, Jane” - in such desperation that if only one part of her brain had stayed alive to the agony in that masculine voice she would have made the superhuman effort and dragged herself to her feet, “why won’t you let me know where you are?”

  And then he all but fell over her in the corridor, and his relief was so great that his common sense deserted him for an instant.

  He dropped onto his knees beside her, and cradled her in his arms.

  “My darling, my little one! ... My Jane!” he breathed. The smoke came beating at him swirling round Jane’s lolling head. He thrust it into his neck, so that the worst of it would not reach her; and then, with all his protective instincts roused, and his sense of urgency alert once more, rose with her in his arms and fought his way through the acrid-smelling fog to the head of the staircase.

  At the foot of the staircase a door was standing open, and outside there was the cool, sweet-scented night, and the courtyard with the bronze faun posing gracefully in the middle of a silvery sheet of water. Stars reflected in the water, and a russet glow from the house created an illusion of unusual flood-lighting.

  Jane opened her eyes when the cool air touched her face, and the stars were reflected in them, also.

  “Lie still, best beloved,” Etienne said softly, and then stooped to kiss her brow. One of her eyebrows had been lightly scorched, and he pressed his lips to it, and then against the white, fluttering eyelids, with their bright lashes. “You are quite safe, my little one,” he told her, in the gentle voice of a mother reassuring an infant. “You are quite, quite safe, and from now on you always will be safe!”

  Before the front of the house there was a whole concourse of people, and firemen were fighting the flames. Their engines were in the drive, and their apparatus was reared against safe portions of the house, and already a fireman had tried to force an entrance into Jane’s room, and had to report that there was no one there. As Etienne carried Jane across the courtyard Clarri came flying round an angle of the house, and at the sight of him and his burden she almost collapsed with relief.

  “Oh, monsieur, you have her safe!” she cried.

  Etienne barely looked at Clarri. “Yes, I have her safe,” he said.

  “The firemen have hopes of saving the east wing, monsieur,” Clarri volunteered the information. “And many of the books have been brought out of the library! And much of the furniture has already been saved!”

  But her master didn’t seem to hear her, or to want to hear her. He carried Jane away from the courtyard, and along the flagged paths of the parterre to that distant corner of the grounds where the great granary stood, immune from the fire. Even, as it seemed, disinterested in the fire.

  Clarri ran back to the front of the house in order not to miss any of the excitement, and Etienne laid Jane on a chintz-covered couch in her own little office.

  Jane, by this time, was completely conscious, and she knew how often Etienne had paused to kiss her and whisper to her on the way to the granary. When he placed her gently on the couch in the familiar little room she managed to ask her first question.

  “But how? I don’t understand how you came to be here?”

  He was examining her carefully for burns, and when he saw that they were superficial he heaved a long sigh of relief. Her poor, blackened fingers would require attention, but he had a medicine-chest in the next room, and he would deal with them himself.

  “Something warned me that you needed me, and I came,” he said. He looked deep into her eyes. “I have never driven a car so fast in my life, knowing that something was wrong! And thank heaven it was a car that was in sympathy with me, and we got here in time!”

  Gently he secured the end of a neat bandage. “You mustn’t have spirit, because you have been shocked,” he said. “But there is all the equipment for making tea in that cupboard in the corner, and I will make you some.”

  But her eyes told him that she didn’t need tea. Her eyes spoke to him so unmistakably that he went down on his knees beside the couch, and as he put his arms about her, and his lips to her cheek, he whispered: “What is it you do want, my darling?”

  Her arms went round his neck, and he held her closely. A long, shuddering sigh went through him as he told her: “If anything had happened to you, Jane ... If, when I entered the house, I had discovered that it was too late, I would have gone on to where the flames were fiercest and made certain that I never left the house alive, without you! Do you believ
e that?”

  Her arms tightened convulsively about his neck. “Yes, Etienne, I do believe it!”

  They gazed at one another. For the first time there were no barriers of any sort or kind between them, no pretences, no lack of understanding, not even an ability to think separate thoughts. His hand stroked her hair, and he smiled at her tenderly.

  “You have much to forgive me for, dearest, but the future will make it all up to you. I know now that you are the most precious thing that has ever come into my life, and it isn’t this nightmare tonight that has made me realize it. I have known it for weeks, but I am clumsy, and I couldn’t convince you and it looked as if there was nothing but unhappiness in store for both of us because you had no real faith in me! But tonight I think you needed me more than you ever needed any human being in your life, and you must have known that I would come to you! How could I really fail my loved woman? My Jane!”

  They clung together in silence for several seconds, and then he turned her face towards him, and kissed her lips. It was the kiss of an adoring lover.

  “You will marry me soon, Jane, won’t you? Immediately! ... There mustn’t be any waste of time. I won’t be happy until I have the right to take care of you, and until you are indisputably mine! And as soon as we are married we will go right away ...For a long, long honeymoon, to the Bahamas, or somewhere like that! I won’t make any more films ... I shall do a few recordings, and that sort of thing - occasionally - and we will keep on my flat in Paris. But I plan to do something quite different with my life to that which I have done with it up till now! I am tired of feverish activity, and bright lights. I want to live somewhere with you, Jane, where you will feel absolutely secure, and where I can become someone solid and looked up to, like a - well, a farmer! I was born on a farm, and the next farm I possess will not be a kind of glorified hotel for my friends. It will be a home - for you and me, Jane!”

  “And Adele?”

  Once again he looked deep into her eyes. “You would wish to have Adele with us?”

  She sighed, as if all at once she was too exquisitely happy to be capable of appreciating just how happy she was.

  “Oh, yes, Etienne, darling! I never really liked the idea of your sending her to school when she was still so young; and if - if we are going to be married! - then of course we must have her with us! I would love to have her with us!”

  “And then, a little later, she can go to school? Your own old school in England! ... And perhaps by that time, when you feel that she is of an age to go away from us, there will be another child - our child - to take her place! To make it seem not so strange that there will be no Adele!”

  Jane had gone through quite a lot that night, mentally and emotionally, and she had also suffered a little physically. And now all at once she felt herself trembling rather uncontrollably. The thought that one day she might bear Etienne a child, on top of the blissful knowledge that now at last everything was right between them, was almost too much, and she reached out blindly and clung to him, and he took her possessively into his arms. He kissed her, softly, gently, tenderly, at first, and then with a rising passion that would not be denied, and all their desperate longing for one another during the past few weeks was in the passionate fusing of their lips, the wild clinging of their hands and arms.

  At last, because he knew he had to be the one to be strong on this occasion, he let her go, and as dark eyes and brown eyes gazed at one another as if there was nothing in the whole world for either of them apart from the magic deeps of their own two pairs of eyes, he said: “And now I am going to wrap you up in a blanket and drive you straight to Elspeth. She will look after you for me until I can do it for myself. She told me to take you back to her, and you can stay at the chateau until we are married ... Elspeth knows all about you and me! One day I told her how much I loved you, but I never told her what I once offered you!”

  “Don’t!” she said, as he looked away.

  He smiled at her. “And we will have to buy you lots of new clothes! Do you realize, Jane, that you are without a possession in the world save this dressing-gown you are wearing, unless they have managed to salvage some of your things? And I did love that yellow dress that you wore on the night of the party - and also at Elspeth’s dinner! - which made you look like a delicious, half-opened yellow tea-rose! We must find another one like it, my darling, if it doesn’t survive this night.”

  “What about all your own things?” she asked, suddenly realizing how much he was likely to lose. “Oh, Etienne, I am being very selfish, not thinking about you and your lovely house! Is it insured? Are all the contents insured? Will you lose at all heavily if they don’t save very much of it?”

  He shrugged his shoulders slightly, a fatalistic gesture.

  “I wouldn’t worry overmuch over the loss of material things. But the house is insured, and most of the contents, also. I don’t want you to upset yourself, dear heart, over such a thing as a burned-down house! And, as a matter of fact, I never had any great affection for the house, such as it was. Perhaps it was because I turned it into the thing you once called it - a glorified stage-set. A rich man’s holiday hotel, to which most of his friends followed him sooner or later! La Cause Perdue ... It was a lost cause! If we rebuild it, darling, we will give it a different name, as well as a different character. What about The Cause Regained? ... Or Beau Horizon! Beautiful Horizon!” he said, softly.

  “I think that would be wonderful,” Jane murmured, once more back in his arms. “Beautiful Horizon!” she said it lovingly, to herself. “Oh, Etienne” - shivering a little with so much unaccustomed happiness, “life is going to be like a beautiful horizon for us, isn’t it?”

  THE END