The Young Nightingales

by Mary Whistler

  The consulting-room windows were blank, and it was too late in the day for Jules’ secretary to be busying herself behind the impeccable net curtaining. Apart from the bell the house seemed very silent, and she had the alarming thought that the doctor might be out, or that he was entertaining visitors somewhere in the rear of the house.

  She was fighting the urge to turn and dash back down the steps when the door was opened to her by Pierre, the manservant who had served her with her coffee in the morning. He had discarded his white coat and was in sober black, and looked as if he might be about to serve dinner.

  Jane’s voice failed her for a second, and then she asked for the doctor. She asked if she could see him.

  The manservant looked as if he was not quite sure how he ought to reply.

  “Is it a professional visit, miss?” he asked, recollecting that he had seen her during the morning.

  “No.”

  “Then I’m afraid the doctor’s changing. He’s going out to dinner.”

  “But I must see him.”

  A rakish cream-coloured car drew in at the kerb, and Mademoiselle Chantal leapt out of it. She ran lightly up the steps behind Jane.

  “Oh, good evening, Pierre,” she greeted him.

  “Good evening, mademoiselle.”

  “I want to see the doctor. Tell him I’m here, will you?”

  She barely glanced at Jane, and she certainly did not acknowledge her. With a smile for the manservant she walked past the other girl and was about to let herself into the room on the right of the hall, which Jane had seen for the first time that morning, as if it was beyond the bounds of possibility that the doctor would refuse to see her, when the manservant plainly summoned up all the shreds of his courage and checked her.

  “The doctor is going out, mademoiselle, and he issued instructions that he would see no one unless it was urgent.”

  Chantal looked completely incredulous.

  “But that’s nonsense,” she said. “It’s important that I see him. Please let him know that I’m here.”

  She opened the door of the room on the right, and was about to disappear into its dim coolness when the doctor himself came running lightly down the stairs, wearing immaculate white tie and tails, and paused at the sight of his two female visitors.

  Chantal did not hesitate. She moved to greet him with a burst of eager French, but Jane started to back slowly down the steps to the drive, and she was about to turn on her heel and run ... run away, anywhere, so long as it was far removed from the elegantly turned-out Chantal and the man who had undoubtedly given her the right to use his home with such freedom ... when the doctor’s fingers fastened themselves about her wrist, and he swung her round to face him.

  “Jane! What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I—” She couldn’t think why she was there.

  All at once the enormity of what she had done by arriving at his house at this hour rushed over her, and quite literally deprived her of speech. She gazed at him with an expression of so much horror on her face that his fingers bit deeper into her wrist, and he demanded sharply to know whether anything was wrong.

  “Jane! You look upset—”

  Chantal’s voice spoke sweetly behind them. “Jules, I haven’t much time, and I must have a word with you. Do you think you could ask Miss Nightingale to come back another time—at a slightly more reasonable hour if she wishes to consult you professionally!—and spare me just a few minutes where we won’t be quite so public. I know you’ve got an important dinner on tonight, and I promise I won’t keep you...”

  “Another time, Chantal.” He sounded so impatient that her eyes opened wide. “Come and see me tomorrow, or the day after—”

  Jane strove to wrench away her wrist, but he refused to let it go.

  “I’m the one who can come and see you again,” she said. “It really isn’t important—”

  “Isn’t it?” He looked at her grimly and hung on to her. “Well, I shall be better able to give you my opinion on that when I’ve found out what you’ve come about. Pierre,” nodding crisply to his servant, “see Mademoiselle d’Evremonde to her car, and then make it absolutely clear to anyone else who calls—unless it’s a matter of life or death!—that I’m not available.”

  “Oui, monsieur,” And an intrigued Pierre saw an indignant Chantal to the gleaming white roadster that stood outside in the road.

  Jules half led, half dragged Jane back into the hall. Then, instead of opening the door on the right, he escorted her to his library. It was a very quiet room, and very pleasant, and she sank down in a state of palsied fright into the chair he placed for her.

  “Why have you come?”

  She lifted hopeless eyes to him.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she said huskily. “I was silly to come.”

  Abruptly he changed his tactics. He went to her and bent over her, and his fingers touched her hair.

  “All the same, I want to know what you’re doing here, Jane,” he said, very softly. “I must know!”

  She gathered her courage together shred by shred, and she told him.

  “After I left you this afternoon I found that Roger had arrived. He insists on marrying me. He says he won’t go away until I’ve agreed to marry him! He’s staying at the Continental.”

  “Well?”

  She looked up at him in amazement.

  “Nothing—nothing would induce me to marry him, but he’ll try and wear down my resistance, and he’ll appeal to his aunt ... I’ll have them both lined up against me! And worse than that, he’ll find out about you, and he’ll do everything he can to make you believe I’m going to marry him, and you’ll believe him, and—and—”

  “I shall not believe him unless you tell me yourself that you’re going to marry him.”

  “Oh, but I couldn’t ... I won’t!”

  “Then what is there to worry about?”

  She looked at him with agonised eyes. He didn’t understand ... he couldn’t understand, because he didn’t feel as she did. He was making that abundantly plain. She felt a trifle sick.

  “Wait here while I get you something to drink,” he said. “I think you need it.”

  When he returned he was bearing in his hand a small glass of what looked like neat spirit, but he explained that it was diluted.

  “Just sip it,” he said. “I think you’ve had rather a trying afternoon one way and another.” She found that her teeth chattered against the glass, and her hands trembled so much it was difficult to hold it. She gulped:

  “You’ll think I’m a permanent hysteric! This is the second time I’ve made an idiot of myself with you.” Then she corrected herself miserably. “No, the third!”

  “No, my darling, you’ve never made an idiot of yourself. Never with me!” He sat down on the arm of her chair, and after carefully removing her glass and setting it on a table he drew her head into the hollow of his shoulder and pressed and held it there. “This afternoon we kissed one another, and after that there shouldn’t have been any doubts for either of us. But I was afraid. You’ve led a rather sheltered life, and Roger Bowman was the man you once planned to marry. The members of your family expected you to marry him, and he could have become a kind of habit.”

  “No, no.” She mouthed the words fiercely against his white shirt front. “I woke up in time, and now I’m so ashamed of myself for wanting so little. So pitifully little! ... Oh, Jules,” clutching at him, “this is the most abandoned thing I’ve ever done, but I had to come to you. It was so important ... like standing on the wrong side of the garden gate, and seeing all the wonders of the garden and knowing they might be out of bounds to you for ever. I didn’t simply panic ... I went a little mad!”

  “My darling,” he said again, very, very tenderly. His fingers stroked her hair. “If you went a little mad it’s a highly infectious form of madness ... I’m mad, too!”

  He smoothed her hot hair back from her brow, and looked down at her. She had never realised he could
look so grave and intent before. Almost dedicated, but it was not dedication to a cause.

  “Before I say what I have to say to you, kiss me. Kiss me as you kissed me this afternoon!” he commanded.

  In a kind of dazed wonder she obeyed him. It was an experience that shook her even more than it had shaken her that afternoon, and it quite plainly shook him, too. He was quite white when they separated.

  He put her aside from him and stood up. For several seconds he walked about the room, studying the carpet with bent brows, keeping her eyes glued to him and her lips parted, as if she was half terrified of what he might be going to say. Then he spoke, and she couldn’t help noticing that his accent was stronger than usual because he was agitated ... and she had never known him to be agitated before.

  “I’m several years older than you, although not as old as Roger Bowman, whom you so nearly married. I hadn’t thought of marrying for some time yet—perhaps not ever. But fate decreed that I should share a taxi with you, and at that time I don’t mind admitting I thought you were rather a spoilt young woman who was going on holiday by herself and would hardly attract people by the charm of her manner. And then I met you a second time and I was shaken by the way you looked. I could see that even the young man at the reception desk was ready to eat out of your hand. But the third time I met you I received a shock. You were not on holiday, you were delightful to look at, and you were antagonistic towards me ... I could feel it quite strongly.

  “I couldn’t wait to meet you again, at Madame’s dinner-party, although you probably won’t believe me ... or you might not have believed me a fortnight ago,” smiling at her. “And it amazed me the way you melted towards me when I sought you out after dinner.”

  “I think I amazed myself,” she confessed.

  “We should neither of us have been amazed,” he told her very soberly. “We had fallen in love.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, her rapturous eyes following his every movement, “we had fallen in love! And I think I was the first to realise it, for I knew it on the night of Madame’s dinner party. The sight of Mademoiselle d’Evremonde made me feel slightly ill. ... It was she who brought on that acute attack of depression after dinner!”

  He looked at her with slightly expressionless eyes.

  “We will leave her out of it for the time being,” he said. “We will stick to our facts! I fell in love with you, and I acknowledged it to myself, but I was not prepared to consider marrying you because it seemed to me there was already one man who was very much in your life. You might deceive yourself about being no longer interested in him, but being feminine—very feminine!—you would change your mind again and marry him in the end. Anyway, I could not afford to take the chance. When I married I wanted there to be no doubts about it, and my future wife wholly mine.”

  Her breath caught in her throat as he said it. Wholly his ... She was wholly his! He watched the lovely tide of colour as it rose in her cheeks, and his eyes kindled.

  “But this afternoon I was nearly sure of you, and I knew you wanted me to be sure! However, my native caution asserted itself,” smiling with a faint twist, “and I decided the only safe thing to do was to wait.”

  She caught her breath in a kind of agony. Was he going to insist that they wait?

  “No.” He shook his head, his expression all tenderness again. “You have decided that for me. You came here tonight because you were driven to do so, and I accept it that you have made up your mind. But you must still understand that there are risks ... where your happiness is concerned. This is a strange country, and if you marry me you will have to live here, and there will be no going back to England except for an occasional holiday. I am a busy man, and I shall not have as much time to devote to you as some other husbands might ... Roger Bowman, for instance. You may even find me impatient and difficult to live with at times, because I become very preoccupied. But that is only one side of the coin. There is the other!”

  “And that?” she whispered.

  His slate-grey eyes did more than merely kindle. They blazed suddenly with a depth and intensity of feeling that shook her.

  “I will care for you as Roger Bowman would never care for you—having met him I am absolutely certain of this!—and I will love you with every fibre of my being, and I shall go on loving you for the rest of your life, my sweet, adorable Jane.” He went towards her with his hands outstretched. “Will you marry me, my dear one? Will you?”

  “Oh, yes, yes!”

  Jane hurled herself at him, and he folded her closely in his arms, and their eager mouths came together again. It was rather more than ten minutes later when she found that she had enough breath to ask him about Mademoiselle d’Evremonde, and his reply was entirely satisfactory.

  “I’ve known her—just as Roger Bowman knew you!—for years, my sweet, but unlike Roger I have never even contemplated marrying her or suspected myself of falling in love with her. A few months ago she was very ill, and since then she has become rather dependent on me, and her parents were anxious that I should keep my eye on her and divert her as much as possible. There was some sort of an unfortunate love affair which they frowned on, and until she has quite got over it they are not entirely happy about her.”

  “I see,” Jane said.

  He put his fingers under her chin and lifted it. “You may not believe it possible now, but you could probably help her ... later on. You could help her by being friends.”

  “If you wish it,” Jane murmured.

  “I do.” He kissed the lobe of her ear. “And what about Madame Bowman? Will she be disappointed, do you think?”

  And Jane answered as if she was inspired. “No, I think she will be delighted. In fact, I know she will! She was reasonably certain that I was coming here tonight.”

  “Then we’d better telephone her and let her know that you are here. Or better still, I will take you back to her now, and we will let her into our secret ... shall we?”

  Jane’s radiant eyes answered for her.

  “And what about this young brother of yours? When we are married would you like him to stay with us?”

  “That will be wonderful,” she assured him. And then she remembered that Toby was lunching at the Villa Magnolia the following day, and she asked Jules shyly whether he would lunch with them, too. “Then you can meet Toby and the two of you can get acquainted.”

  “And what shall I say to Roger?” he asked, his eyes suddenly amused. “Shall I tell him he can cancel his booking at the Continental because you’re going to marry me and there isn’t the slightest danger that you’ll change your mind?”

  Jane withdrew from him a little. She spoke with a slight catch in the words:

  “Yes, please tell him that. And please believe it yourself, because ... I love you! Oh, Jules,” in a breathless rush, “I love you so very much! I’d have died if you’d turned me away tonight!”

  He caught her back into his arms.

  “Never fear, my darling ... I had never the slightest intention of letting you go ... not once I saw you here tonight! You had the courage to come, and I could hardly believe it. It was all the proof I needed!”