The Young Nightingales

by Mary Whistler

  Although she was absolutely certain they wouldn’t be neglected. Dr. Delacroix was not that sort of man.

  It was after twelve o’clock when they set out, and they drove straight up the winding white road that led to the lower foothills of the mountains that reared their heads above them. Very soon St. Vaizey with its lake shore and its bright gardens, its white houses and its tourists and five-star hotels, was left behind, and they were claimed by a dim green world of whispering trees.

  The white road went on and on, dipping in and out of pine woods and emerging into occasional patches of strong sunlight, and meandering through villages where the steep roofs of the chalet-style houses overhung the balconies that were a blaze of flowers. The Bentley nosed its way effortlessly between these wooden dwellings, and Swiss housewives watched them as they disappeared in a faint cloud of dust round the next bend in the road, while overhead the blue sky was entirely without sign of cloud and the snows whispered on the high peaks ahead of them.

  Jane realised that they were climbing steadily, and the very thought excited her. She had so often lifted her eyes to the summits of the mountains and wished that by some magic process she could be transported at least half-way up them. And now, although she was not half-way up them, she was at least leaving the foothills behind.

  They stopped for lunch about half-past one at a small mountain inn that looked both homely and attractive, and Dr. Delacroix—who apparently knew it well—promised her a lunch that was well worth driving so far for. It was not the kind of lunch that would have been served to her at the Continental, and there was no white-coated waiter in attendance; but the woman of the house who looked after them wore a specklessly clean apron, her smiles were welcoming, her cooking was superb, and the coffee that was served to them later on a table overlooking the whole of the wide valley tasted like nectar and ambrosia to Jane.

  Her companion insisted that she drank a small liqueur with the coffee, and although she didn’t normally drink liqueurs—especially after sharing half a bottle of wine with her host—she found it very difficult to say ‘No’ to such a strong personality as Jules Delacroix. When he decided that something was good for her, or her reason for refusing something was not sufficiently convincing, he simply smiled and ordered her to be served with it over her head, as it were.

  After lunch they proceeded for a short distance higher up the mountain, and then, as it was very hot, Dr. Delacroix brought the car to rest in the shade of a belt of conifers.

  Jane had been feeling very sleepy in her corner of the car, and the welcome coolness of the wood and the scent of the pine needles delighted and revived her for a short while. She left the car when the doctor held open the door for her and ran ahead of him between the slim; straight trunks of the trees until she found a spot where the short, sweet grass was like a tempting couch, and threw herself down on it. She had no intention of closing her eyes, let alone going to sleep, but when the doctor insisted on providing her with his coat for a pillow, folding it up and placing it beneath her head, such a sensation of dreamy content overtook her that she decided to allow her eyelids to droop for a half-second or so.

  Jules Delacroix had walked away from her and was leaning on a fence and gazing out across that wonderful panorama of sloping meadows that eventually became lost in the slight haze in the valley. He was smoking a cigarette thoughtfully, and the aroma of it drifted back to Jane where she lay.

  She made a tremendous effort and forced her eyes open. She couldn’t be so rude as to fall asleep. That would be an appalling thing while her host betrayed no signs of wishing to emulate her example, despite the fact that it was warm even in the shade of the trees, and he had been driving since they left St. Vaizey, and had an excellent lunch like herself.

  She raised herself on one elbow and watched him. The conversation at lunch had been confined to the view and the general aspect of life in the mountains, and she had been prepared to listen rather than join in. Now, she felt—if only to express her gratitude for this wonderful day that had been granted her after so many weeks of depression and doubt and acute uncertainty about the future—this wonderful day of peace and relaxation and no cares at all (at least, none that she was prepared to dwell on)—she ought to bestir herself to say something, to give voice to her gratitude, to try and be as entertaining as possible in return for so much undemanding kindness.

  And then, even as Delacroix turned towards her and smiled at her whimsically, the fatal thing happened, and her eyelashes fluttered and her eyes closed.

  By the time the doctor was standing beside her and looking down at her she was fast asleep, her pose unconsciously graceful, her silken dark hair a trifle damp and clinging to her pale forehead in slight, rebellious, plastered curls, slim breasts heaving gently under the brightly striped silk that covered them.

  Jules knelt down very gently and regarded her for a long time while she slept, then he rolled over on to his side—his face still towards her— and smoked cigarette after cigarette until some slight sound disturbed her, and she awakened.

  She sat up and looked about her as if she was badly startled.

  “I can’t—I can’t have been asleep!” she said.

  “I’m afraid you have,” he answered.

  Jane whipped round until she faced him. He was smiling lazily, indulgently.

  “But that was frightful!” she exclaimed. “It was so rude!”

  “It was not in the least rude, and you must have been very tired, for you’ve slept for nearly an hour. I’m surprised that Madame Bowman works you so very hard that on your first day of freedom you collapse with sheer fatigue.”

  She laughed, realising that he was joking, and that he knew Madame Bowman sufficiently well to be aware that she was quite incapable of working anyone very hard. The fact that Florence strove to toil as hard as she did was her own fault, for she refused to have another domestic living in the house.

  “It was the after-effects of the wonderful lunch we had,” Jane declared, stretching herself luxuriously, for he seemed disinclined to rise, and the fact that she had slept away an hour of the afternoon didn’t apparently matter ... He was in no hurry. “And the wine and the liqueur. I’m usually very abstemious,” she added modestly.

  He sat up and looked down at her, and then leaned towards her.

  “The fact that you enjoyed your lunch is the only important thing,” he said. “Did you?”

  “You know I did. And I’m enjoying this blissfully lazy method of spending an afternoon.”

  “On the way back we will stop for some tea,” he promised. “The English cannot exist without their afternoon tea.”

  “Um,” she agreed, “we are rather like that ... and Madame Bowman certainly is. She couldn’t exist without her China tea.”

  “I’m afraid you won’t get China tea up in the mountains,” he replied. “But I’m sure you’ll settle for Indian.”

  “Of course.” She was slightly embarrassed because he was staring directly down at her, and every movement she made, every expression that came and went in her face both could not, and did not, escape him. “I must thank you,” she added hurriedly, “for a marvellous day, Doctor—”

  He waved an impatient hand.

  “Please do stop addressing me as Doctor all the time,” he said shortly. “My name is Jules.”

  “But—” She half rose on one elbow, flushing noticeably. “Would—would Mademoiselle d’Evremonde—?”

  “And forget Mademoiselle d’Evremonde.”

  Her slim eyebrows went up.

  “But I thought—”

  “It doesn’t matter what you thought.” He put out a finger and touched her cheek, where the velvety flush was staining the creamy beauty of her skin. “You are a very attractive and, I believe, a very intelligent young woman, but you assume a lot. It is true I assumed a lot about you when we first met, but now I have learned to marvel at you, and—not to be sure!”

  “Sure about what?” she whispered, as she looked up at hi
m.

  He frowned.

  “In a few weeks or months you will wish to go back to England, won’t you?” he said. “Won’t you, Jane?” with a kind of urgency.

  “I ... don’t know. No, I don’t think I will.” She wrenched her gaze away from his and looked about her at the sweet dimness of the pine wood, and on the very gentlest of breezes the tinkling music of cow-bells was carried to her ears. She was entranced by it, and she was entranced by the glimpse of deep blue sky above their heads, and the whiteness of the snows across the valley. She thought of the inn where they had had lunch, the friendliness of the woman who ran it, the balcony on which they had sat and the table with the check cloth from which they had surveyed the whole of the valley ... a valley that in winter would be white with snow. The very thought was like a foretaste of something exciting.

  And then she lifted her eyes again to his face, and wild excitement fluttered like a bird in her throat. For she was quite incapable of deceiving herself, and she had known from the first that there was something—something about him ... and now she knew that it was a something that caught at her very heart-strings and twisted them agonizingly whenever she thought of Chantal d’Evremonde ... Chantal, the golden beauty, who had clung to his arm.

  Her eyes widened as she made the profoundest discovery of her life, and even her lips fell a little apart. She gazed at him wonderingly, not even realising that she hadn’t yet answered his question in a way that satisfied him, and that he was waiting for some amplification of her uncertain, “No ... No, I don’t think I will!”

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said, while his long forefinger still caressed her cheek. “But then,” she added, “I no longer have a home in England.”

  “The ties of your family are strong,” he said, as if the thought displeased him. “And then there is Roger Bowman. His aunt is quite certain you will marry him one day!”

  She shook her head, as she lay with it against the short, sweet grass.

  “Nothing—nothing,” she told him, “would induce me to marry Roger.”

  “Because you quarrelled?”

  Another shake of the head.

  “Because he disappointed you?”

  “He disappointed me, but he also opened my eyes. You see, I’ve known him all my life, and I grew up with the knowledge that he was always there. My family encouraged me to think of him as my property, and he was always very kind ... rather sweet to me. But after my father’s death I suddenly discovered that he was not in love with me and I was not in love with him, and when I got over the slight shock of it it was a wonderful relief. For, for the first time in my life, the future did not just mean Roger. I was free, and although I was desperately unhappy I was glad of that.”

  “Were you desperately unhappy because of your father’s death, or because of Roger?” He was watching her shrewdly. “How can you be certain which of those two it was?”

  She smiled with a hint of triumph.

  “I can be, and I am certain. My father’s death shattered me. Roger had nothing to do with it. Nothing, nothing at all!”

  His sombre, slate-grey eyes gazed into hers. She thought it would be wonderful just to drown in the curious, exciting depths of his eyes ... and all at once the look in her blue eyes seemed to have a galvanising effect on him, for he bent and he laid his lips to her hairline, and then his mouth travelled downwards until it found her mouth, and with a gasp of pure ecstasy she surrendered it.

  For how long the kiss lasted she was never able to tell, but when he drew away from her he was looking distinctly pale, and she was trembling. He jumped to his feet, and she heard him say:

  “I shouldn’t have done that! I do apologise!”

  She got to her feet also, and she asked breathlessly:

  “Why? I ... didn’t mind!”

  “I hadn’t the smallest right.”

  “But I tell you I didn’t mind!” She flung out her hands like an appealing child.

  And then her face burned scarlet, for he turned his back on her and walked back to the car, and she had perforce to follow him. They drove back to St. Vaizey without stopping for tea, and so little conversation passed between them that it was almost a silent drive. Jane, reasonably certain about the reason for his behaviour, felt deathly miserable. She had flung herself at his head, and he was, of course, in love with Chantal. Kissing her had been the result of a moment’s temptation, that was all.

  And yet she knew she would never forget his kiss. Every time she glanced at him and saw how fiercely he concentrated on the road ahead, and how curiously rigid was the set of his mouth, she was inclined to suspect, despite Chantal, that he would not forget it, either.

  He drove her all the way back to the villa, and just before they swung into the road leading to it he said, as if he had been thinking the matter over and felt that he had to make her understand one thing very clearly at least:

  “I didn’t take you out for the purpose of making love to you, Jane ... and I don’t normally do that sort of thing. I haven’t,” he added drily, “the time for it, for one thing.”

  “And you are going to marry Mademoiselle d’Evremonde, aren’t you?” she stated rather than asked in a conversational way.

  His reaction startled her. He stopped the car before they reached the villa gates and turned in his seat and looked at her with a kind of icy indignation.

  “No, I am not!” he answered her. “I am not, do you understand? At the moment, if it is of any interest to you, I am not contemplating marrying anyone ... But I think it would be a good thing for you if you stopped deceiving yourself and married your Roger. Habit is strong, and you’ll probably find before very long that he has become a chronic habit, despite what you said to me today. You grew up with the idea of marrying him eventually. He is a countryman of yours, a close contact of your family, someone you can trust. And he is Madame Bowman’s nephew!”

  She turned to him with a somewhat peculiar little smile on her lips. She was beginning to suspect that she knew what he was driving at.

  “Shall I tell you something?” she said. “Although I’ve known Roger for years he’s never really—kissed me. Not as you kissed me today! And I certainly wouldn’t have known how to kiss him back in the way I—kissed you!”

  Then she turned away from him and fumbled with the handle of her door, and she would have leapt out into the road and run along it to the gates of the villa. But he prevented her. He leaned across her and caught her hand, then carried it up against his cheek and held it there, although anyone coming along the road could have observed them.

  “Thank you, little Jane,” he said softly, and there was a wonderful depth of tenderness in his eyes. “Perhaps, after all, you do see things very clearly, and you may really know what you are talking about. But we have to be absolutely sure! I, for one, cannot afford to make a mistake!”

  Five minutes later she was upstairs in her room in the villa, and it was then that she received a shock.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE house had seemed very silent when she entered it, and it had never even occurred to her that Madame Bowman was entertaining visitors in the drawing-room. It was past the hour for afternoon tea, but it was always possible that someone would drop in for a drink and a chat.

  When Florence came tapping urgently at her door, therefore, she was not at first surprised to learn that there was someone below with her employer. But a certain look in Florence’s face—an intrigued look—excited her curiosity, and she asked while she lifted out a dress from her wardrobe for the evening:

  “Who is it, Florence? Anyone I know? Do you want me to go downstairs and relieve Madame of the burden of talking to them?”

  Florence grinned slightly behind her hand. “Well, it might be as well if you go down, miss. The gentleman’s a friend of yours, and there’s another young man. I was told to fetch you as soon as you came in.”

  “A friend of mine? And another young man...?”

  Jane felt startled. It couldn’t b
e her American friend, for Mrs. Bowman would scarcely think it necessary to entertain him in the drawing room during her absence. And in any case, who was the other young man?

  She saw Florence smirking behind her hand, and felt mildly annoyed.

  “You might just as well tell me, Florence,” she said. “It can’t be anyone terribly important.”

  “Can’t it?” Florence displayed her ill-fitting dentures as she grinned. “Well, you go down and find out for yourself, miss.” She was turning away to go back to her kitchen when a thought struck her, and she turned back to Jane, an expression of lively interest in her face this time. “By the way, miss, did you and the doctor have a good time? Mrs. Bowman was most surprised when he telephoned. She didn’t know you’d become such good friends!”

  Jane was changing hastily into the dress she had selected, and she had neither the time nor the inclination to answer Florence. She seized a comb and ran it through her hair, wielded a lipstick hastily, and then sprayed herself with some revivifying toilet-water. After which she glanced at herself hastily in the mirror and slipped past Florence, murmuring something about having had a very nice day, thank you, and made her way to the overcrowded drawing-room.

  It certainly did seem overcrowded when she opened the door to discover, in addition to the pot-plants and the latest addition to the lovebirds preening themselves in their gilded case, a tall man with a distinguished head and shoulders who was standing in front of the flower-filled fireplace, while an almost equally tall and slender youth in what was obviously his best suit and an almost painfully clean collar and tie was making overtures to the love-birds and looking, otherwise, rather-like a fish out of water.

  “Roger!”

  The word left Jane’s lips in such complete astonishment that it brought Roger Bowman round to face her with a distinctly wry expression in his eyes.

  “Why the utter amazement?” he asked. “Were you expecting someone else?”