Pathway of Roses

by Mary Whistler

  For only Miss Calendar accompanied her into the suite, and she went round opening all the windows that were not already opened, and adjusting the sun-blinds so that not one single shaft of brazen sunshine penetrated to the rooms. They were high above the street, and they were literally banked with flowers.

  Janie made out baskets of carnations and cascades of gardenias and roses, all so pale that they were like flowery ghosts in the gloom. Abraham Winterton had scrawled his tribute on an enormous gilt-edged card that was set up on the dressing-table, where she couldn’t possibly miss it.

  “Welcome to one of the loveliest of singers! Tonight I shall give myself the happiness of seeing you. I am giving a party for you in my flat, and you mustn’t disappoint me by being too tired for it.”

  Janie felt herself grow weak and rather faint. The scent of the massed flowers was almost overpowering, and the hint of command in that flowery handwriting appalled her. She realized that Abraham Winterton wouldn’t be merely disappointed if she failed to attend his party—her party!—but mortally offended.

  Miss Calendar came across to her and relieved her of her gloves and handbag.

  “Get out of your things and into a cool wrap and lie down,” she suggested. “And you’ll feel much better after a good sleep. And if you’d like me to split up this florist’s shop and put some of it outside in the corridor I’ll do so.”

  “Please,” Janie gasped. “I think I must have developed an allergy to flowers.”

  Miss Calendar smiled sympathetically. Janie had already decided that she was likely to prove her one real friend and supporter during the difficult days that lay ahead.

  “If you have, you’d better conquer it,” she advised. “Because Abraham Winterton is a rich man, and so are most of his friends.”

  When Janie awoke she was still in the room, and water was running into the bath in the adjoining bathroom. To the perfume of the flowers was added the rich aroma of costly bath essence, and Miss Calendar was draping a slim sheath of white satin over the back of a chair.

  “There’s the dress you’re going to wear this evening,” she said, “and everything’s ready for you. I’ve unpacked and put out all your make-up things, and you’ve only to step into your bath and then I’ll do the rest.”

  “But you’re not a personal maid,” Janie objected.

  Miss Calendar shrugged.

  “We thought it best not to put too much of a strain on Miss Brandt’s personal maid by bringing her with us,” she explained. “The girl is French, and a trifle voluble, and we were not altogether sure we could trust her. But I’ve done most things in my life, and looking after you won’t wear me out.”

  “But won’t Mr. Veldon miss you—?” Janie began.

  “Naturally, I’m acting under Mr. Veldon’s instructions,” Miss Calendar informed her with a faint lift of her eyebrows.

  Of course! Janie sank back on her bed again, limply. Mr. Veldon’s instructions!... Mr. Veldon was ruthless, and he would instruct and organize and drive her until she scarcely knew what she was doing, or why she was doing it. As she lay there on the bed she certainly had no clear idea why she was putting herself through this ordeal and impersonating Vanessa Brandt, and the knowledge that she couldn’t carry through such an impersonation overwhelmed her all at once. She said fearfully;

  “Do I have to go to that party tonight? Couldn’t an excuse be made for me? After all, Mr. Winterton can’t expect me to be very fresh...”

  “Singers are always fresh,” Miss Calendar told her, looking at her expressionlessly. “They have to be.”

  “Of course.”

  Janie struggled off the bed. There came a knock at the outer door of the sitting-room, and Miss Calendar answered it and came back with a cellophane carton of golden roses in her hand. She handed them to Janie.

  “From the Baron von Eisler,” she said, her face still expressionless. “You can’t possibly wear them, because Mr. Winterton has sent you orchids, but I should thank the Baron very nicely for them when you see him. He’s another one we can’t trust, and these people have to be handled rather carefully sometimes.”

  CHAPTER V

  Mr. Winterton turned out to be quite unlike Janie’s preconceived idea of the sort of man he would prove to be. She had imagined a slightly bloated impresario type, with wealth leering at her every time he smiled, and opportunity beckoning to her when he lifted his plump fingers.

  But Abraham Winterton—although he was certainly a very wealthy man—was also a very charming one. He was tall and spare and beautifully dressed, his tailor obviously a man who practised restraint, and his shirtmaker and shoemaker and so forth men with similar ideas. He had greying hair and a whimsical smile, and the diamonds in his shirt-cuffs were opulent without being vulgar.

  Janie felt both her hands caught by him and taken into a firm clasp, and he said as he eyed her with admiration:

  “It is an astonishing thing to me that you and I have never met before ... not as we are meeting now. I have admired you for years, and listening to your voice has given me the greatest pleasure, yet now that we meet at last I can scarcely believe that someone hasn’t played a trick.” Janie raised startled eyes to his face. “You are so very much younger than. I had supposed you would be. I mean,” gallantly, “when you were at the very commencement of your career you could hardly have looked more like a schoolgirl than you do now that you have arrived at the very peak of it!”

  Janie blushed, and wondered what she could find to say to that Winterton made it unnecessary for her to say anything,

  “I see that you are wearing my orchids.” He smiled quizzically. “I was afraid that you might be tired of them ... but orchids are, after all, such very perfect flowers, just as you, Miss Brandt, are such a perfect young woman,” and he bowed over her hands and even kissed them lightly.

  His flat was so sumptuous that Janie wanted to cast glances round her and admire everything openly. She wondered what Hermann Brandt would think of the piano that occupied an entire corner of the huge room into which they were first shown, and the beautiful bronze of Beethoven that stood on a pedestal in a kind of alcove. Brandt worshipped at the shrine of Beethoven, and the bronze would have riveted his attention at once. And the hangings falling from ceiling to floor before the wide open windows were of golden mesh, while the carpet was a sea of gold.

  Abraham Winterton took her by the hand and introduced her to the rest of his guests—and there were so many of them that Janie was appalled. So many people who had to be deceived, and who might possibly have seen her—or rather, Vanessa! —somewhere before. In an opera house where her heavy make-up would have concealed the true Vanessa, in her own dressing-room, perhaps—and Janie hoped fervently that Vanessa never discarded her make-up before the last person who wanted to be presented to her found his or her way round to the back of the theatre. Or, very likely, in a restaurant, or a hotel foyer.

  So she was immensely relieved when no one appeared to stare at her rather harder than they should, and the eager voices that addressed her had nothing more alarming to say to her than:

  “I remember when I heard you sing in Milan ... at La Scala. It was wonderful, and I shall never forget what an enchanting Mimi you made. So many Mimis are fat, even if their voices are marvellous ... but you were perfect! And in Vienna, in Madam Butterfly ... how did you manage to look so completely Oriental, when you are so golden?”

  “Like a golden rose,” Rudi murmured in her ear, having managed to insinuate himself in a space just behind her. “That was why I sent you golden roses!”

  Janie looked round at him, and found his dark lustrous eyes gazing down at her with an openly caressing look in them. But behind the caressing look was one that was faintly reproachful.

  “You are not wearing them,” he murmured.

  Abraham Winterton was forced to devote some of his attention to other of his guests, and Janie was glad of an opportunity to sink back into temporary obscurity beside Rudi, and to have him extricate
her from the crush and guide her out on to a balcony beyond a swaying waterfall of golden mesh.

  “But you did like them, didn’t you?” he asked, looking at her curiously as they stood together with the roar of New York far below them, and the stars in a deeply purple night sky not very far removed from them, or so it seemed.

  “Of course,” she answered, a trifle breathlessly—for she had only just survived the biggest ordeal of her life.

  “And I understand perfectly why you couldn’t wear them,” His gaze had dropped sardonically to the orchids attached to her shoulder. “If you were you, and not Vanessa—and Vanessa is always out to make more and more money; so much you must understand—you would have worn them for me tonight, wouldn’t you, libeling?”

  The unfamiliar German endearment startled her.

  “I don’t know,” she answered.

  He smiled at her in the star-pricked, suffocatingly hot dark, and she had never known white teeth flash as his flashed.

  “But of course you would, lovely one. Already I admire you so much, and you must be aware of it—”

  The golden mesh parted behind them, and a shadow stood there close to them. Max Veldon said coldly to Janie;

  “This party will go on for hours, and you had better fortify yourself. Come with me to the buffet and I’ll see that you get something to eat as well as drink.” He glanced at his brother as if he didn’t exist. “Besides, it’s a bad thing to disappear when you are the star guest!”

  Rudi leant against the parapet and smiled indolently. In his white tie and tails he was almost shatteringly handsome.

  “So the curtain has gone up, dear brother,” he said, “and no doubt you are consumed with anxiety? But don’t worry! Our little Miss Dallas here has already done remarkably well ... she had Winterton practically eating out of her hand, he was so charmed with her. I doubt whether the real Vanessa would have won that compliment about looking like a schoolgirl!”

  Veldon ignored him, although his eyes were gimlet-hard as he gazed at him for a moment “Will you come this way, Miss Brandt?”

  “I prefer to think of her as Jane,” Rudi murmured. “It’s such a soft little name.”

  When they were well away from the balcony Veldon looked down at Janie.

  “You do realize that you are not here for your own amusement, don’t you, Miss Dallas?” he asked, She had the feeling that he was furiously angry with, her because he had to address her by her own name. “If my brother wants to flirt with you you must discourage him at all costs. At all costs, do you understand?” He took her by the arm, and once more his fingers bruised her flesh. “Vanessa is above that sort of thing, and you must be, too! When this week is over, and you are a free agent, you may do as you please ... if Rudi still thinks of you then as a source of entertainment!”

  “Mr. Veldon!” she gasped. Then her face flushed, painfully. “I think you meant that to be as beastly as it sounds,” she said.

  “I did,” he admitted. “And if you are so simple that you can be deceived by a few outrageous compliments and a handful of yellow roses—”

  “So you know about the roses,” she remarked quietly.

  “Of course. And make no mistake, whatever happens to you during the next few days—while you are here in New York!—I shall know about that, too. Vanessa’s interests are important to me, and you will be under constant observation. So don’t imagine you can sit back and enjoy yourself as if this was a holiday you haven’t earned. You can enjoy yourself on the strength of my personal cheque for one thousand pounds when—and if— you carry this thing through for Miss Brandt, and land her a contract.”

  She flushed still more painfully.

  “I wouldn’t touch your money, Mr. Veldon,” she told him.

  He shrugged. He piloted her into a room where a great horseshoe table which practically ringed it was laden with everything from caviare to fresh salmon that had been leaping about in a Scottish river only a matter of hours before, champagne and vodka, and asked her what she would like.

  “Nothing,” she answered, feeling as if she would choke.

  The host swooped upon them and apologized profusely for deserting the side of his principal guest, and himself put a glass of champagne into Janie’s hand. If he wondered why her colour was a trifle high he naturally made no comment.

  “I’m hoping very much that before the evening is out I can persuade you to sing for us, Miss Brandt,” he said, and the champagne glass nearly fell from her hand. But a smooth voice with a faint but attractive accent came to her rescue.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse Miss Brandt tonight, Mr. Winterton,” Max Veldon said. “She had a slight but unfortunate accident when leaving the plane this morning, and her ankle was slightly twisted. She was complaining to me just now that it hurts her a little ... which means that it hurts her a great deal! I was about to suggest that you could be induced to excuse her, and that she retires early...”

  “But of course. Miss Brandt!” Abraham Winterton exclaimed with instant sympathy. “My dear young lady,” he added swiftly, understanding perfectly now why she had looked agitated when he interrupted her conversation with the famous conductor, “you should have told me of this at once! You shouldn’t have attempted to come here tonight ... you should have telephoned—!”

  Janie felt faint with the relief that swirled over her.

  “It isn’t anything at all serious,” she tried to reassure the concerned impresario. “In fact, it isn’t really anything at all.”

  “Of course, of course,” he said, patting her hand and sounding very fatherly—although there was nothing fatherly about the admiration for her that still lingered in his eyes. “I understand perfectly, and you are merely trying to be brave because you don’t wish to spoil my party, or me to be disappointed. But I assure you most seriously that I shall be very upset if you don’t go back to your hotel at once and rest that foot.”

  An anxious glance at it could detect no swelling, but her colour had faded and she did look pale—with the excess of her relief, had he but known it—as Max Veldon drew her hand through his arm and forced her to lean on him.

  “Take her back to the hotel at once, Veldon,” Winterton said urgently. “If I could leave my guests I’d take her back myself, but it isn’t possible.” He cast rather an abstracted glance at his guests. “But unless I hear in the morning that the ankle is better I shall send my own doctor to have a look at it.” He smiled at Janie, and his smile was singularly reassuring to her just then. “Don’t think that because we’ve brought you all the way to New York we’re going to wear you out now that you are here! If necessary—and I understand you’ve recently concluded a most exhausting tour—I’ll arrange for you to have an absolutely peaceful time while you’re here, and a complete rest. As a matter of fact—”

  But Veldon assured him that anything like that would be quite unnecessary, and Miss Brandt would be quite herself in the morning. Taking her cue from him, Janie echoed that she would be quite all right in the morning, and Winterton kissed her hand as delicately and tenderly as if it was a particularly fragile flower and permitted her to escape without making her farewells to anyone save himself.

  In the car which took them back to the hotel Janie lay back and closed her eyes, and Veldon glanced at her rather thoughtfully. She looked like someone who was drained of initiative, or even the power to think, and abruptly he remarked that she might do worse than suffer a genuine sprained ankle.

  Janie opened her eyes and fixed them upon him curiously, and very wearily.

  “You mean,” she inquired, with a certain amount of unusual dryness in her voice, “that you might be able to arrange it?”

  He studied her with inscrutable dark eyes over the glowing tip of his cigarette, and a sudden movement of the car sent her up against his shoulder. She withdrew from his quickly as if the contact was most unpleasant,

  “If a sprained ankle would simplify matters for you—and Vanessa!—it might be worth while arrangi
ng,” he murmured. “But how shall we arrange it?” His dark eyes mocked her harshly. “Shall I throw you out of the car window, or grease the stairs for you to slip upon?” His white teeth gleamed cruelly in the gloom of the interior of the car. “Or shall I think up some other means?”

  She regarded him as if something about him fascinated her all at once.

  “You might be capable of something of the sort,” she answered, “but at least you saved me half an hour ago. I’m grateful to you, Mr. Veldon.”

  “You needn’t be,” he answered curtly. “That was to save Vanessa, not you!”

  CHAPTER VI

  Miss Calendar, when she heard about the sprained ankle, was concerned.

  “But what if Mr. Winterton sends his doctor here to examine Miss Dallas’s ankle?” she said, when Veldon paid a visit to the suite early the following morning.

  “He won’t,” Veldon answered. “And if he did it wouldn’t greatly matter. We could say the swelling had gone down overnight.”

  Janie, who had just emerged from her bath, and was combing her hair in the bedroom, heard them talking, and was not in the least surprised when the door was thrust open without ceremony and Veldon himself stood there looking at her. She saw his eyebrows shoot upwards in mild surprise.

  “Oh, so you’re up,” he remarked, as if he had expected to find her still in bed. “Vanessa wouldn’t have even contemplated rising for another hour or so.”

  “I’m accustomed to early rising,” she told him, the comb suspended in mid-air.

  He moved leisurely across the room until he stood beside her at the dressing-table. She was wearing a pale rose-coloured satin dressing-gown, and she looked all rose and gold and creamy whiteness flushed from the warmth of her bath. She wore no make-up, and the tendrils of her hair were curling tightly from the moisture of the bathroom, and his eye fastened on one of them.