Love in High Places

by Jane Beaufort

  “I’m afraid she didn’t sleep very well,” Valentine explained awkwardly. “The room was strange.”

  “Your room was strange, but I take it you managed to sleep passably well?” the Baron returned even more dryly. His eyes were on the delicate colour in her cheeks, the fluttering movements of her long dark eyelashes against the purity of her skin, and when she lifted her head and met his eyes she was amazed at the undisguised feeling in them. If the other two hadn’t been so engrossed in a discussion on Italian art, and had seen that look, too, they would almost certainly have registered considerable astonishment.

  As for Valentine, its effect on her was to make her heart bound in such a way that she felt as if something actually leapt like a wild thing in her breast. She looked down at the basket of rolls on the table, the dishes of preserve, and her hand shook a little as she helped herself to a wild strawberry conserve, and then hastily helped herself to more coffee.

  “Won’t you please pour my coffee for me?” Alex said softly, in her ear.

  She managed to fill his cup without accident, and his hand touched hers deliberately as she passed it to him.

  “I must see you and talk with you alone, Valentine,” he said urgently, in an undertone.

  “Why?” she managed to ask.

  He glanced at Haversham, and although she didn’t see the look she had the feeling that he tensed suddenly beside her, and when he spoke his voice was icy with displeasure.

  “Last night you and your English friend seemed to be getting on very well together. I suppose it’s natural, in a way, but I’m sorry I allowed Lou to invite him. I shall be more sorry still if I come upon the pair of you—again—as I did last night! ...” He thrust the basket of rolls away from him with an almost savage movement, and lighted a cigarette as a substitute for something to eat. “Don’t take advantage of an impossible situation to torment me, Valentine,” he pleaded, in a faintly strangled voice.

  She dared not remove her eyes from her plate.

  “I’m glad you admit it is an impossible situation,” she returned quietly.

  “It’s so impossible that I sometimes wish I’d never set eyes on you! At least, if I’d never seen you—”

  “You could have married Lou without the smallest qualm and been ideally happy,” she got out in a low, contemptuous burst that none but his ears could catch. “But don’t worry,” she added swiftly, “you’ll do it just the same! And you’ll be happy enough! It’s only when you set a high standard that you’re liable to be disappointed!”

  For an instant his dark eyes looked almost wounded.

  “Valentine!” he pleaded. “Valentine, later today—”

  And then the Count of Hochenberg, wearing a very gay sweater and twirling his inevitable monocle, came in, and conversation at the table was forced to become general. Valentine could hardly have felt more relieved, but she wondered whether Giles’s ears had been stretched a little more tautly than she had imagined, for he gave her rather an odd look as they left the table.

  Lou didn’t appear downstairs until lunch time, but the Countess came tap-tapping with a slender ebony cane across the floor of the hall, from a little room she used as a writing-room, when Valentine descended the stairs after ridding herself of her warm outer garments after a further exploration of the outside of the schloss. The Countess looked quite pleased at sight of her, and stopped in the middle of the floor.

  “Come here, child,” she said—or rather, ordered—and led her back into the little room which had a glorious view across the valley to the peaks on the farther side. The old lady pointed it out with her stick.

  “Superb, isn’t it?” she said. “And always completely satisfying!”

  “You like the mountains?” Valentine asked, rather shyly.

  “I don’t like them, child,” the Countess answered, with an odd laugh. “I have lived amongst them all my life—at intervals, you understand?—and they have stood my friends on many occasions, and comforted me on many others. Mountains are things you never like, but you can feel so drawn to them that they will bring you back from the far corners of the globe.” She sank down, rather heavily, into a chair with carved ebony elbow-rests. “Nowadays I am too old to pay them many visits, and my doctor talks about my heart, and that sort of thing. It is better that I live on the lower levels, without much excitement, without much of anything ... these days!”

  She sighed, studying Valentine with obvious interest, looking a little curious. And while she did so Valentine secretly admired the faded rose-coloured silk that lined the walls, and the group of miniatures above the fireplace.

  Then the Countess spoke musingly.

  “You have very distinctive red hair, and you remind me so forcibly of someone I once knew—possibly still know—that it vexes me considerably. However, there must be large numbers of young women with your colouring in the world, and I must accept it that you are just a young woman from England. But what puzzles me even more than the certainty I have that I ought to know you is the connection between you and that glamorous American with the abbreviated Christian name that is new to me ... Lou! Do you work for her?”

  “Yes,” Valentine answered.

  “Pity,” the old lady observed, clasping the knob of her cane with two thin hands ablaze with rings. “I should be far better pleased if you had oil wells, and things like that, and my grandson was about to make you a proposal of marriage! You would fit very well into our family life—there is nothing about you that jars, as that young woman, Lou, jars at times, in spite of being very pleasant on the surface. But then she is obviously stupid, and has no appreciation of an ancient house like this.” She looked suddenly angry. “She is far more concerned with hot water systems, and modern innovations of that kind.”

  “But you must admit they are important,” Valentine said, smiling.

  “And are there not other things that are more important? As important, if you like!” the Countess demanded, banging with her stick on the threadbare carpet. “Preserving atmosphere, cherishing beauty, loving simplicity ... Finding happiness in simply being alive! Believe me, if that young woman ever comes to live here, and can boast of being the mistress of Felden, she will turn the place into something that will bring me back out of my grave to haunt her and register my protest if it is at all possible!”

  “Then—if you feel as strongly as that about her,” Valentine got out, in a sudden breathless rush (and she had no idea where she suddenly found the courage to do so, unless it was in a defiant challenge in the eyes of the Countess herself) “why do you not take the obvious steps to ensure that she will not be mistress here? Why do you not do that, Countess?”

  The old lady regarded her with an amused twinkle in her eyes.

  “And what steps would those be, child?” She moved one of her hands about before her eyes, so that the diamonds, rubies and emeralds in her rings caught the light from the window and gave off a kind of multicoloured fire. “These are quite genuine, as I am sure you have guessed, and there are heaps more in a safe place, where they will remain until I die. If I took them out of their place of safety, and handed them over to my grandson—as I am inclined to suspect you feel I ought to do!—then what good would that do Alex? Would it prevent him marrying the golden-headed Lou, do you think?”

  “I—I don’t know,” Valentine answered, in a great deal of embarrassment—especially as the old, shrewd eyes seemed to be taunting her a little, and doing it quite deliberately. “But he does need money ... Or I—I suspect that he does!” she added hastily.

  The Countess went on flashing her rings, and watching them appreciatively.

  “He has a mountain of debts ... Of that you can be reasonably certain,” she told the girl who sat facing her, in the calmest possible manner. “But then I fail to recall a time when Alex wasn’t troubled by debts, and he will go on exercising his genius for collecting them long after he has married our oil king’s daughter, and got her to make herself responsible for the bulk of them! There w
ill always, of course, be the odd debt that he will prefer she doesn’t get to hear about ... The diamond bracelet, or the mink stole, for the pretty little girl in the flower-shop who catches his eye, and is perhaps kind to him, or the bill for the wild party that is intended to drown his sorrows! He will go to considerable lengths to keep these items from her, for, according to his principles—and, of course, he has them!—one should be loyal to a woman who is above all things generous—”

  “Please!” Valentine begged, the colour rising in a most revealing fashion in her cheeks, “I would prefer not to hear you criticise your grandson like this!”

  “But why not, child?” the Countess inquired with rising amusement, while she went on subjecting Valentine to her disturbingly concentrated searchlight gaze. “Because you think I am being unfair, or because—if you owned all those oil wells we were talking about just now—it would be you who would be shouldering the burden of Alex’s debts?” At the abashed look on the girl’s face she extended a conciliatory hand, and her voice grew softer. “Don’t imagine I am easily deceived about anything, my dear, and when I saw you and Alex look at one another yesterday lunch time—and when I saw his face late last night and realised that he is very unhappy!—there was no longer any need for either of you to attempt to pull wool over my eyes!”

  Valentine could say nothing, but her face had turned absolutely scarlet. The Countess looked at her almost pityingly.

  “If I made it easy for Alex to marry you instead of that Morgan creature, that would be no way out for either of you, my dear,” she told her solemnly. “It would probably be but the beginning of your troubles, for Alex is like his grandfather, and only through a certain amount of personal suffering can he ever be made worth while. He must find out what it is like to live simply—and by that I mean for the sheer pleasure of living and loving, giving as well as receiving!—and then there will be some hope for him. When he wants something ... or someone—so much that he is prepared to make sacrifices, even a supreme sacrifice! ... Then I shall feel quite happy about the whole of his future, but I cannot help him to find himself. Money will not do that.”

  The colour died slowly in Valentine’s cheeks, and she sat very still on her chair. She knew that she had been listening to a statement of truth, and she knew also that the likelihood of the Baron von Felden being willing to sacrifice his whole way of life in order to buy a simple form of happiness, and make the woman he professed to love happy, was completely and absolutely remote.

  Indeed, it could never happen. She was so shatteringly sure of that that she no longer felt embarrassment because she had given herself away to the Countess, and she no longer even attempted to say anything. She merely looked straight at the Countess with shadowed golden eyes that were like dark pools of honey untouched by sunlight, and scarcely a ray of hope.

  “Of course,” the Countess said softly, bending nearer to her to touch her cheek, “miracles do sometimes happen, and it is unwise to dismiss them altogether ... But I think your Lou will win, my dear. Hands down!”

  Later that day Lou came downstairs, but she offered no apology to her hostess for remaining so long in her room. And as the Countess had her so thoroughly summed up that she didn’t even expect an apology there was no awkward atmosphere.

  During the afternoon all the younger members of the house-party at the schloss went out into the white wonder of the world surrounding it for some exercise, and somehow Germaine and Haversham got paired off, Lou saw to it that the Baron made up for his distant mood of the night before and was inconstant attendance on herself, and Valentine discovered a little frozen garden at the back of the schloss and wandered there for a while by herself.

  It was such a lonely, tucked-away, abandoned garden that it appealed to her. It wouldn’t appeal to Lou at all. If she ever became mistress of the schloss she would probably have it blotted out of existence, and a hard tennis court or a swimming pool put down in its place.

  Valentine spent the entire afternoon imagining all the things Lou would do when she was mistress of the schloss. And if she ever heard about the girl at the flower shop, or the wild party Alex threw to drown his sorrows, how would she react to the information when it reached her at last? ... And that sort of information always does, sooner or later! ... How would she really and truly feel? ...

  That night—perhaps because Alex hadn’t been quite as attentive as she felt he ought to be in order to make up for the night before—Lou was in rather a strange mood, and openly professed herself so bored that something had to be done to relieve the boredom. The only thing Alex could think of was that they should dance to a portable gramophone he had upstairs in his own apartments, and he brought it down into the banqueting-hall, the few rugs were taken up, and the dancing session commenced.

  The Countess sat in the main salon behind a screen, and Willi von Hochenberg sat with her. Valentine would have preferred to sit with them, but Haversham was determined to prevent anything of that sort happening. Although he discovered Germaine to be a delightful dancer, and in her odd, perverse mood Lou insisted upon him acting as her partner for every second dance, he attached himself to Valentine at every opportunity that provided itself.

  “Where did you disappear to this afternoon?” he wanted to know, in rather a hurt voice, while she was acting as record changer. “I quite thought you would join up with Germaine and myself, but you vanished.”

  “I merely found a little garden at the back of the schloss that was pleasant to wander in,” she said. “Besides,” looking at him with mildly amused eyes, “haven’t you yet discovered that two is company, and three is a crowd?”

  “Of course I have,” he answered, almost fiercely. “And don’t imagine for one instant that I wanted to go off alone with Germaine ... although she’s a charming girl,” he added, watching her as she drifted by in the arms of her handsome relative, the Baron, while Lou lay sulkily curled up on a tapestry-covered couch, and smoked a cigarette and listened to the music broodingly. “A much better type than that fellow Felden!”

  Valentine glanced for an instant at Felden, and then attended to the business of changing the gramophone record.

  “They’re cousins,” she said quietly, “and they probably have a good many characteristics in common.”

  “I don’t think so,” Giles replied. Then he caught her hand impatiently as she turned to sort the pile of records. “Valentine, I know you were a bit angry with me last night, but I had to let your grandfather know where he could find you! But although I think it’s important you should have a reunion with him, there is something else that is even more important, and I must talk to you about it...”

  She glanced at him in dismay. She was beginning to be afraid that he was growing serious about her, and since she could never be serious about him she didn’t want to have the unpleasantness of telling him the true position. He had just admitted that he thought Germaine charming, and she thought him charming ... But that was as far as it went.

  She struggled with a recalcitrant switch, and when it wouldn’t move he bent to assist her.

  “Valentine, there are heaps of empty rooms here. Let’s slip away and find one, and as soon as we’re alone I’ll tell you what I should have told you without any waste of time. For I think we both know that some things are quite inevitable...”

  “No, no,” she said involuntarily, in a sort of panic, and the shadow of the Baron fell across them and their temporarily linked hands. For the second time, as she glanced up and met the slumbrous darkness of his look, she made a far too obvious withdrawal of her fingers from Haversham’s, and as the obstinate switch remained as immovable as ever the guilt in the action was somehow underlined.

  Alex bent suavely above the gramophone.

  “Allow me,” he said, set the thing in motion, and turned to Valentine. His mouth and chin looked oddly set, and, so far as he was concerned, Haversham might not have existed. “We’ll have this one, shall we?” he said, and waltzed her away to the shadows at the f
ar end of the room.

  Lou, reclining on her couch, watched them go, watched through steadily narrowing eyes as the shadow engulfed them, then ground out her cigarette in a convenient ashtray and smiled brilliantly, invitingly, up into Haversham’s face. Within a matter of seconds they were circling the floor, not with any enjoyment, but for precisely similar reasons ... because they had each been temporarily abandoned.

  Valentine—who had so often dreamed of dancing with Alex—had little time to enjoy the experience. There were a few heady moments when his arms were round her, when the scent of his after-shave lotion and the fragrance of his specially-blended cigarettes, which clung about him, were in her nostrils, and she wanted to close her eyes and forget everything but the sensation of bliss that was rising up all around her like a cloud; but Alex himself dragged her ruthlessly back to reality by propelling her between a pair of folding doors that admitted to a kind of ante-room, and shutting out the music as he slammed the doors to behind them. It was just as if a light had been switched off, or a cacophony of sound extinguished at the lift of a finger; and in the ante-room there were only a couple of guttering candles to show them each other’s face. But such feeble illumination as they provided was enough.

  Valentine looked up into Alex’s face and realised that it was white with rage, and his glittering unfamiliar eyes alarmed her. But what disturbed her was the tormented twist to his shapely mouth.

  “Valentine,” he said, as if he had difficulty in getting the words out, “if you don’t want me to do something violent you will keep away from that man! You won’t let him touch you!”

  She felt suddenly icily cool and composed. So that was it! ... Simple, primitive jealousy which he had no right to feel! She could be torn apart by jealousy, but he hadn’t any intention of sparing her! He went out of his way to ensure that she should know the agonies of jealousy several times a day, and last night only Willi Hochenberg had saved her the humiliation of coming upon the man she loved with the woman he didn’t pretend to love in his arms.