She spun to face him, with a snarling leopard head at her feet, the velvety pelt under her shoes. "And now what?" she demanded.
"Oh, surely your outrageous imagination can supply the answer to that question," he drawled. He came towards her, silent and lithe as the animal beneath her feet would have walked through the jungle, and with a gleam to his eyes that was equally leopard-like. She backed away, into a divan that caught her behind the knees and tipped her among cushions. She lay there for a few breathless seconds, staring at him, then she twisted to her feet out of his reach.
"Mon coeur!"
It was a woman's voice, and Chrys swung round to see that a woman had appeared from a curtained doorway, to stand there outlined against the topaz velvet. She wore a kaftan of deep-purple brocade, trimmed with braid around the full sleeves, and she was gazing at Prince Anton with radiant dark eyes set in a high-boned, Slavonic face that was neither old nor young, but had a curious agelessness about it. Her hair was covered by a kind of veil, almost nun-like, and as she stretched her arms towards Anton, they made the graceful speaking movements that a ballet dancer never loses her whole life through.
"Dushechka!" He strode past Chrys towards the woman, and with a loving hunger he wrapped her in his arms and kissed her face for several moments.
"You are so unpredictable," laughed the woman. "To come at this hour — and driving, of course, like a hare through the night! "
"Of course, tu."
"Just to see me ?"
"Is there another woman whose charm can reach out like yours to a man?"
"Even yet, Anton?" The woman pressed her hand to his heart and studied his down bent, quizzical face. There was something poignant in her gesture, as if she still believed that he might suffer or die of his injury . and it was in that moment that the truth struck at Chrys.
It struck even as Anton de Casenove turned to her, his left arm still encircling the woman he had greeted so affectionately.
"Miss Devrel, I played a trick on you, but only because you seemed so certain I was abducting you. But all I really wanted was for an English dancer to meet a Russian one. Won't you come and meet Miroslava?"
Chrys had imagined his grandmother miles away in her desert house ... not for one second during that drive had she dreamed that he was really bringing her to see the woman who had fled during a revolution and borne a son to a murdered prince. A son who in his turn had died in uniform.
Seeing her, and the way she touched Anton as if to make sure he lived and breathed and was not lost to her like the other men she had loved, Chrys could understand why she had taught him from a boy to live his life to the full.
To taste the wine of every experience in case the cup was snatched from his lips while he was still a young man
She approached Miroslava and held out her hand with a smile. "I'm thrilled, madame, to meet a ballerina
who danced for kings. I can only imagine how exciting it must have been in the days when dashing officers actually drank wine from the slippers of their favourites of the ballet. Prince Anton tells me that you were a great favourite."
"So you are a dancer?" The appraisal of the dark slanting eyes was rapid and expert, taking in the pure modelling of Chrys's face, and the slim suppleness of her body in the silver dress. "And no man has yet enjoyed his wine from your slipper, hein?"
Chrys smiled involuntarily, and felt almost at once that fine steely thread of communication which exists between people of the same profession who love it with the same nervous intensity. "The outward trappings of ballet have become very prosaic since your exciting days, madame."
"And you wish you could have known them, eh? The stage deep in flowers at the end of a performance, and troikas unharnessed from the horses so that handsome, crazy Guardsmen could pull them through the streets, with the ballerinas laughing among Serbian furs like pampered dolls, and often flourishing a whip over the broad shoulders. Yes, crazy, exciting days, never to be known again."
Miroslava glanced up at her grandson. "So when you telephoned this morning, rouh, this is what you meant by saying you could bring me a surprise?"
"And do you like your surprise, dushechka?" He quirked an eyebrow. "I personally thought it too good an opportunity to miss, to bring you a young ballerina who lives for nothing but her art, but who must give it up for a year to enable her spine to fully heal after a bad accident. I thought that you alone could assure her that once a dancer always a dancer. Miss Devrel fears that her career will suffer if she is forced to discontinue her ballet dancing, but I feel sure you can convince her that to learn other aspects of life during that year will be of immense value to her as an artiste."
"My child, you have my sympathy." The dark eyes
of Miroslava were instantly compassionate. "Yes, now I look at you I see in your face a fine-drawn look of recent suffering, and in your eyes a fear of the future. Anton and I between us must dispel for you the anxiety — but first of all I must know your first name. We Slays love diminutives and titles, but we dislike formality. I cannot call you Miss."
"I am called Chrys."
"Chris — like a boy ?" The arching of the dark brow was very reminiscent of the grandson.
"Chrys — golden flower," Anton broke in smoothly. "And now let me take your wrap, matushka." He did so, sliding it from her shoulders and making her aware of his tallness behind her, his fingertips brushing her bare arms and, leaving, it seemed, a trail of fire in their wake. What was his game? Was he genuinely concerned that she learn from Miroslava that her career could be gripped by both hands and held on to despite this setback? Or was he playing some devious role of his own — his ultimate aim to subdue her resistance to him?
"Perhaps, Grandmère, Vera could make us some tea and provide a snack?" he said. "We had dinner at eight, and the drive was a long one."
"Tout de suite," she exclaimed. "What am I thinking of not to offer refreshment! But this young dancer, she fascinates me because you bring her to see me! " Miroslava clapped her hands, and like a genie a woman appeared from behind the curtained doorway. She had obviously been listening to the conversation and her face was seamed in smiles as she bobbed a curtsey at Anton and spoke to him in Russian. He replied in the same tongue, and because the woman was about the same age as Madame, Chrys realized that she was the maid who had fled from Russia with her mistress all those years ago and had been with her ever since.
"Do come and sit down." Madame drew Chrys to a divan beneath one of the Moorish ceiling lamps, and everything felt so strange and foreign to her as she sat down beside Miroslava and saw the filigreed bracelets
piled on to the fragile wrists, and the gleam of henna on the long narrow fingertips. Madame also wore an Eastern perfume, exotic as the slant to her eyes and the tiny mole at the corner of her mouth.
There was power in her, and the magnetism which her grandson had inherited. The drive of a "girl of the people" who had married a prince in secret and lived many years with the memory of his love.
Miroslava was still a woman to reckon with . . . to hold spellbound strong and wilful men ... she was exciting, and must have been wonderful as a young woman when her golden-tinted skin was unlined and her eyes filled with the fire of her youth and her passion.
Chrys could understand why Anton de Casenove adored his grandmother; not only had she been his "parent" and his mentor, but she had a rich personality, a wealth of feeling in her heart, and that insidious charm of the woman who had lived fully and without a single regret.
"These two children wish for supper," she called over her shoulder to her maid Vera. "And then prepare the pussinka a room for the night. Antonyi can sleep on a divan here in the petit salon, and he can cover himself with the fur laprobe which covered me and my coming child when I fled from the revolutionaries."
"You are indomitable, my darling grandmother, and will always be so." He bent over her hand and kissed the hennaed fingers with casual grace. "I wanted Chrysdova to meet a woman who was also forced to give up
something which she loved with all her heart. Two things, eh? Your dancing and your husband, with whom you would have stayed but for the child."
"Ivanyi would not leave," she said sadly, "but for the sake of his son — I knew from the first moment of knowing that I should have a son — I left him to be killed by the mob. When his son was born, many miles from Russia but beneath an Eastern sky, I developed some trouble in my left leg and was never able to dance again as a ballerina. These things seem like a punish-
ment at the time, and you search your mind and your heart for the reason."
Miroslava paused and gave Chrys a long, intent look. "It could be, my child, that you must learn other facets of living before going on with your career. Art is wonderful, but not to make of it a bondage. Great dancers have done so and it has killed them before their time. Pavlova lived only to dance and she sacrificed the passionate reality of her own being so that her Dying Swan could be immortal. It was wonderful to see her, with her dark head bound in the pale swan's feathers, and her limbs as graceful as the swan's neck — but there was an element of tragedy in her performance that could break your heart. Day by day, hour by hour, she had given herself to the dance — her very soul."
Miroslava made an eloquent gesture with her speaking hands. "To be a Slav is to have a love of suffering. The Russian soul, Hone slave. But even so I would sooner sacrifice myself for another human being. The perfection of love can be the greatest art of all, but alas too few people take the trouble to perfect the art of love."
"Chrysdova has forsworn love." Anton had made himself comfortable on a divan, stretched full length and relaxed as a dark, sleek cat of the jungle. His eyes dwelt lazily on Chrys, such a fair contrast to his grandmother and himself. "She dreams only of being a ballerina, and is in agony at being parted from the torments of the barre and the Pointe. What strange, complex creatures women are; almost less fond of the creature comforts than the male of the species."
"You see and hear speaking a male creature who very much likes his comforts," said Madame, drily. "That is when he is in Europe, for the real fact of the matter, Chrysdova, is that he has two sides to him. I have known him endure and exult in the most trying desert conditions just like l'arabe. Though to see him at the moment one would think him terribly lazy and luxury loving."
Chrys smiled and gave him a swift look that avoided a meeting with his eyes, which she knew to be glinting in the lamplight, like a kind of gem made up of fascinating shades of grey. It flashed across her mind yet again that no man had the right to possess such wickedly marvellous eyes, with the added deceit of double black lashes. Such eyes could conceal a thousand wicked thoughts.
"Are you on a visit to England, madame?" Chrys asked. "I know from what your grandson has told me that you have a house in the East, with the fascinating name of Belle Tigresse."
"So Anton has told you about the house, eh? It used to be my desert abode, but now it belongs to him. I grow old, pussinka, and the climate of the East is no longer good for me, or my faithful Vera. Ah, how the years have quickly passed, and yet they were filled with incident! Vera and I have settled here in Kent, with its apple orchards which remind me of the Russia of my girlhood. Did Anton not tell you that he was bringing you to see his grandmother?"
"No, madame." Chrys shot him a severe look. "He behaved disgracefully and let me assume that he was —abducting me."
"Like a Cossack, eh ?" Miroslava laughed with great enjoyment. "Anton is so like his grandfather — look, there on the mantel I There is a photograph of Ivanyi."
Chrys arose from the divan with her own particular grace, and knew herself watched by the grandson as she took into her hands the silver-framed photograph of the dead prince. He wore a superb white uniform embroidered with an eagle, gauntlets on his hands. a sword in his hilt, leather kneeboots, and a fur-trimmed hat. On a less handsome man the uniform would have been fabulous, but Prince Ivanyi had a distinction, a dashing air of a man who took what he could not beguile from the ladies. The eyes . . . Chrys didn't need to turn her head to compare the pictured eyes with those she could feel almost tangibly on her person.
"In the twin frame," said Miroslava, "there is a picture of myself as a girl ... a girl who danced on the very air in those far-off, legendary days of the Maryinsky, of snow-capped towers, and jingling troikas. It was all really true, and yet now like a dream."
Chrys gazed with wonderment at the vivid, eloquent face of the young Miroslava, wearing a black off -the-shoulder dress, with full sleeves, a satin bodice, and a flared chiffon skirt.
"That was when I danced the pas de deux of Siegfried and Odile." There was nostalgia, and a note of husky longing in the deep voice of the woman who had known great happiness and deep sorrow. "Ivanyi always liked the costume, and that particular role for me. He always said I was too passionate to be a heroine. He knew me well, did my dark huntsman, my Orion, like a star that burned with too much flame for long living. I was his black swan, and always he was my dark huntsman . . . not always a kind or forgiving man, but irresistible as honey to the bee, as flame to the moth. I would live again those two years that were my love time and not regret a single one of them."
Chrys felt a slight tremor in her hand as she replaced the photograph on the shelf. Never had her own family spoken with such frankness of their personal feelings ... the love between her parents had always seemed a gentle, patient, tolerant emotion, binding them closely like the pattern of a durable carpet. She had never thought of their love as being like a flame, and she knew instinctively that it never had been. Their love was made to wear, to endure . . . but now she read in Miroslava's eyes the story of another kind of love.
She was glad that Vera entered the room in that moment, wheeling before her a trolley on which stood a lovely old samovar of silver, tea-glasses in filigreed containers, and plates of sandwiches.
"Food! " exclaimed Anton, as if he had not eaten for hours. In a single supple movement he was on his feet and bending over the trolley. "What have we here,
Vera? Smoked salmon, I hope?"
"Have you not always loved it, barin?" smiled Vera, addressing him as the "master" but looking at him as if she still thought of him as the wild boy who had been delivered into the care of his grandmother by the elopement of his mother.
Chrys found it difficult to picture him as a boy, and when Miroslava talked of him as l'arabe, yet another side of this worldly, well-dressed, cynical man-abouttown came into focus to confuse her still further. She was beginning to wonder which was the real Anton de Casenove. Last night he had appeared wholly as a rake who chased after women . . . tonight she learned that his motive in being in that French girl's bedroom had not been an amorous one at all but a recklessly gallant one.
Watching him with Miroslava now convinced Chrys that he cared for no other woman on this earth but Madame. She alone held the key to his sardonic personality. She alone knew what inner devil drove him to the gaming tables of Europe; on bold safaris through the drawing-rooms of the beau monde, charming his way into the hearts of women but never offering a single proposal of marriage.
Was it possible that he reaped a sort of revenge on his mother by making women love him, only to laugh at them as he flung himself into the saddle of a swift horse and galloped the aroma of their perfume out of his nostrils?
Seen in this light he was even more dangerous. A rake was forgivable, for he loved women too well. An-ton de Casenove didn't love women at all. To him they were all as faithless as his mother had been . . . that gay and reckless mother who had run off and left his father to die in the war.
Chrys watched him as his fine teeth flashed in a smile and his dark head almost touched the jade tassels on the Moorish ceiling lamps. The silver samovar purred as the tea-glasses were filled from the little tap at the
side of the urn.
The scene was cosy enough, but the feelings that smouldered beneath the surface were those of people strange to Chrys, and with an intense emotionalism bred in their ve
ry bones. They hated ... or they loved . . . in equal fiery measure. There was little of the gentleness which Chrys had witnessed in the lives of her parents; and in the romance between Dove and Jeremy.
Anton brought her a glass of tea and as he placed the filigreed container in her hand, his eyes looked down into hers. She almost shrank away from him among the cushions of the divan . . . she didn't believe for one moment that he cared about her career as a dancer, her future, or her feelings.
"You will have some sandwiches?" he asked; and there was no doubt about the thread of mockery that ran through his words, as if he had noticed her withdrawal from him, her avoidance of his fingers as she took the glass of tea. "You must be feeling a few twinges of hunger after that long drive into the country?"
He knew that whatever twinges she felt were in no way connected with hunger. He knew far too much about women and the workings of their minds and their hearts . . . he played on that knowledge and used it to make fools of women.
Well, thought Chrys, the time had come to show him what one female thought of him and his penchant for tearing the pride off women as a naughty boy might tear the wings off pretty moths.
Chrys met his look and quite deliberately she let her blue eyes fill with coldness and dislike. Blue eyes, she had once been told by a ballet teacher, could look as chilling as they could look heavenly, and she knew she conveyed a cold disdain to Anton when he shrugged his wide shoulders and walked away from her.
She turned with a smile to Vera. "Yes, please, I will
have a couple of those delicious-looking sandwiches." "Something," drawled Anton, "has put an edge on
Miss Devrel's tongue."
"Our Kentish air, perhaps," said Miroslava.
But as Chrys drank her tea and ate her sandwiches, she could feel Madame studying her profile with reflective eyes. What was she thinking, that it was unusual for a girl to be so cool towards her grandson.
"So what will you do, pussinka, during this year when you must 'rest' from your dancing?" Miroslava asked her.
Rapture of the desert Page 7