by Susan Barrie
“Thank you, I could manage the day after tomorrow.”
“You overwhelm me with relief!” he exclaimed dryly. “I began to think your appointment book was stacked with entries that would leave me no opportunity, to see you at all!”
And this suddenly made her feel as if something grated on her very seriously.
“Dr. Daudet,” she said, gathering together her gloves and handbag, “there is really no reason why you should concern yourself with me and my affairs. I am sure you have far better things to do with your time, and my concerns have nothing whatsoever to do with you. At the end of the year you will get what is left of the fifteen million francs Miss Constantia left me—and I don’t think you need feel anxious lest the sum will be very badly depleted by that time. It won’t!”
He spread his hands with the lazy amused gesture of a Frenchman.
“How do I know, mademoiselle, if you persist in handing out favors to one man only? A year is a very long time, long enough to acquire a husband and dispose of him, if you felt like it! In England I believe the divorce courts manage these things very efficiently! Therefore it is only natural. I should be alarmed when it seems that you—what is the English phrase you have—are going ‘steady’ with one young man already!”
She reached for the door to open it.
“I promise you, Dr. Daudet, that you will have the bulk of Miss Constantia’s fifteen million francs,” she told him between her teeth.
He slipped out of his own door and went around to hold open hers for her.
“I shall hold you to that,” he said, and from his expression she couldn’t tell for a few moments whether he was making fun of her, or serious. Then she saw that his eyes were dancing. “I shall most certainly hold you to that, Mademoiselle Brooke!”
She didn’t even offer him her hand when she said goodbye and he watched her move toward the steps with the same expression in his eyes. He said with much empressement, “I shall look forward to our lunch the day after tomorrow, mademoiselle! May I pick you up here about one o’clock?”
“You may if you wish,” she answered. Then she turned and looked at him with complete coolness. “But if you find that your appointment book is more heavily stacked with entries than you imagined, I shall understand perfectly if you telephone and cancel the arrangement!” He smiled swiftly, and it was the nicest, most genuinely amused smile she had seen on his lips.
“Touché!” he said. Then he reached for her hand, and to her infinite surprise he carried it up to his lips, and kissed it with the utmost gallantry, even a sort of courtliness. “Au revoir, mademoiselle! There is not the least likelihood that I shall telephone to cancel the arrangement and I hope you will not be tempted to do that very thing, either!”
And she felt herself blushing, swiftly, delicately, in a way that made her feel her whole body was doing the same thing, and she had no idea how utterly enchanting such a young revealing blush made her look.
CHAPTER SIX
But WHEN SHE SAW HIM again she felt much more able to behave as a young woman of twenty-three, who for a year at least would not be penniless, should behave. That is to say, naturally and with a touch of something in her manner that suggested she was bestowing a favor, not receiving any benefits.
She was able to feel like this because the day before she had spent so much time in the company of Peter Fairfield that he had done her a great deal of good. There was no doubt about it, she thought when the day was over, Englishmen were a relief after foreigners, and with someone like Peter it was possible to relax. He might catch her eyes occasionally, and there might be something very meaningful in his blue gaze, and when they were walking shoulder to shoulder their hands might touch, and she might feel a queer little thrill; but on the whole it was peaceful being with Peter. He was quite unlikely to seize her hand and kiss it after saying something provocative; he had no real knowledge—as yet—of women and he wasn’t the sort of man women would ever chase after.
He was nice and pleasant, good-looking and charming, and he knew her own native land just as she knew it herself. He could talk of Hampstead Heath and Wimbledon, ice hockey at Wembley, Sadler’s Wells and Drury Lane, Stratford-on-Avon and the Edinburgh Festival. All subjects that interested her. And if he also liked to talk a lot about the Greek islands, that was all right, because she liked to hear about the Greek islands, and particularly his book about them.
They enjoyed their lunch at the same open-air restaurant; and afterward they sat in the gardens of the Luxembourg Palace and wandered in the quiet of Notre-Dame. They looked at art and antique shops on the Quai Voltaire, and watched the Seine slipping sleepily beneath its bridges.
In the Luxembourg Gardens the children were enjoying donkey rides and sailing model yachts on the round pond, so much like the round pond in Kensington Gardens; and De Brosse’s formal Italian style of laying out avenues and flower beds was at its best in the sunshine of another fine spring day. Valentine always felt at home in the Luxembourg Gardens, although the atmosphere was so typically French, and she and her escort were so unlike the Latin types who lounged on the benches and read books in the sunshine.
Notre-Dame always filled her with admiration for its size, although the details of it depressed her a little. Peter, however, was able to arouse her admiration for the rose window in the north transept, which is a superb example of thirteenth-century glass, unlike the modern reproduction glass in most of the other windows. And the quais of Paris always enchanted her; and could one ever, she wondered, grow tired of watching the Seine?
Peter suggested that they should climb to the heights of Montmartre the following day, and he would show her the view from the terraces of Sacre Coeur, which she had not so far seen. And he would give her a meal in a picturesque haunt of artists, which was the sort of thing one should do at least once, even if it was never repeated. But she had to explain that she would not be free the following day, and he immediately looked a little dashed. Then he said, “Well, the day after then?”
But she had hesitated for a reason she was not quite clear about. Unless it was that she realized that if she continued to accept his invitations day after day it would look rather obvious that she enjoyed his company, and so far in her life she had not permitted any man to believe that. It was rather like committing oneself, she thought.
But Peter had urged, “Give me your telephone number then, and I can ring you. Perhaps one evening you’ll be feeling a little bored, and I’ll persuade you to come out to dinner.”
“Perhaps.”
She had smiled at him and given him her number, and he had then asked curiously, “Who is this chap you’re lunching with tomorrow? It is a man, of course?”
“It is a friend of Miss Constantia’s,” she had replied, thinking his question had a faintly familiar ring. “A very old friend, her doctor, in fact, and also a beneficiary under the will.”
“I see.” But he had looked doubtful. “If it was her solicitor I could understand. He’d probably want to discuss the whole thing with you.”
And now, after a day that had left her with some pleasing memories and a curious feeling of having been refreshed and cast in a slightly new mold, she was having lunch with Dr. Daudet, and from the outset it looked as if it was going to be an enjoyable lunch.
Not in the least like the day before, of course. No check cloth and vine leaves flickering across the table, and no bottle of vin ordinaire beside the menu.
Dr. Daudet’s choice of a restaurant was entirely in keeping with Dr. Daudet himself, elegant after a restrained fashion, like his impeccable appearance and, of course, expensive. The waiters were all soft voiced and deferential, and the flowers on each table were different. Vases of white lilacs and freesias filled the air with a delicate perfume, and some glorious wine-dark carnations on the table Dr. Daudet had obviously booked because he was familiar with it and approved its position, gave off an exciting spicy odor as Valentine bent over them and sniffed them appreciatively before she sat down.
She was wearing a corded silk suit of palest gray, with a white blouse beneath it that had a round puritan collar, and she looked like an unusually attractive puritan herself. All her accessories were neat and gray, and only her hair and her young smooth skin provided a touch of color.
Dr. Daudet snapped off one of the carnations and bent forward to tuck it into the front of her suit. He exclaimed approvingly, “That was all that was needed to complete a picture.”
Valentine didn’t blush. She looked at him with faintly surprised eyes, and there was also a tiny glimmering of amusement in her expression.
“Do you remember, doctor,” she asked reflectively, “that when you first saw me you ordered me out of Miss Constantia’s room?”
“Yes, because I thought you were far too ornamental to have around at that juncture,” he returned. “Far too ornamental to be a secretary-companion!”
“Yet I have reason to believe that I was a very efficient secretary,” she told him, “and I hope I was a good companion. Miss Constantia said I was, and—that very last morning—she wanted me to stay with her! She asked me to stay with her!”
“I can understand that,” he replied, and for several seconds their glances held, hers clear blue and a trifle questioning, his dark and, just then, more than a trifle enigmatic.
“I’d like you to know that in the short time I knew Miss Constantia I grew to be very, very devoted to her,” Valentine said as she dropped her eyes to the gleaming damask of the tablecloth. “She was that very rare type of person who is easy to know and easy to ... love! I’d never met anyone like her before, and I was looking forward to a long, long time of working for her. Answering her letters to her nieces and nephews, taking Fifi for walks; playing cribbage with her in the evenings ... And then it all ended when it had hardly begun!” She swallowed suddenly, remembering Miss Constantia and her gentle ways. “I don’t think I fully realize that it’s all over!”
He looked at her with eyes that were not so much enigmatic as suddenly interested and searching.
“You would rather work for Miss Constantia than be a beneficiary under the terms of her will?”
“Oh, yes, yes, of course!” She looked at him as if she was amazed he should ask such a question. “Being a beneficiary, as you put it, is, well, it’s lonely, and naturally all sorts of people are going to get the wrong idea about me. Just as you did!”
“I have already apologized for my wrong ideas,” he reminded her, “after I drove you back from Chaumont, if you remember?”
But her eyes were grave as she studied him.
“You apologized, but it is impossible for you to feel sure that your ideas were wrong. They might very easily be right.” She lowered her eyes, and her long eyelashes fluttered as she studied the wine that had just been poured into her glass. “But whether you believe me or not, when Miss Constantia was alive I felt safe and anchored somehow. I had a good salary, plenty of free time and her companionship. She never treated me like an employee, you know, and if you’d ever worked as I have in a big general office, or even for an employer to whom you were simply part of the office furniture, you would know what it means to find yourself suddenly in the employ of someone who prefers to look upon you as a member of her family!”
“But you have a family of your own?” he suggested. “You can’t be without relatives.”
“I have no close relatives, one or two cousins scattered around here and there, but we don’t really know one another.”
“Your father and mother?”
“Both dead,” she told him. The main course had arrived—chicken breast immersed in a succulent sauce and garnished with mushrooms—but she didn’t seem to have any appetite for it. “My father was a doctor—a general practitioner—and he died because he overworked himself in an epidemic. My mother, who left him three or four years before that, died in a hotel fire. It wasn’t in England—she was abroad at the time.”
“And you?” Dr. Daudet asked quietly.
“Oh, I was in a boarding school on the south coast of England.” She tried to make a start on the chicken breast. “You see, I hadn’t any brothers or sisters, and my father was never any good at keeping a housekeeper, or keeping a home together for any length of time, the sort of home where I could have lived, anyway! I was better off in a school in the care of a housemother who knew when my clothes were in danger of coming apart and had to be renewed.” She smiled slightly, rather tenderly. “My father was a darling, but the poor pet would have been happiest of all in a leper colony—somewhere where he could have really sacrificed himself! He was not the sort of man to marry and have children. But I loved him,” she added.
“I’m sure you did,” Dr. Daudet said with very little real expression in his voice.
She peeped at him a trifle uncertainly.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I’m afraid I’m boring you.”
“On the contrary,” he assured her, “you interest me very much!”
She tried to swallow another mouthful of chicken.
“So you see, I ... I’m not very impressed with marriage. My own parents made such a hash of it that I always vowed I’d never marry at all, and in the years I’ve been looking after myself I think that resolution has become stronger than ever. Marriage is all right if you’re the sort of person who likes things to be impermanent and doesn’t mind when they come adrift. But perhaps because I’ve never really known even a permanent home I do value things that are likely to last, and I’m not going to take any risks. Certainly not to secure a large sum of money.”
He poured a little more wine into her glass.
“You’re not eating anything,” he said, “and you’ll never get fat if you don’t eat! If anything you’re a trifle too slim.” He regarded her critically.
She felt herself flushing.
“Now I know I’m boring you! But I only wanted you to ... feel happier in your mind about Miss Constantia’s money. I shall use very little of it in the year I have been given, and when it reverts to you you can do what you like with it. Possibly Miss Constantia’s relatives ...”
“Not another word about Miss Constantia’s relatives until you’ve finished that chicken,” he said sternly. “And after that you’ve to polish off a dessert, and I’d like to force a few other courses down you besides! Doesn’t Martine feed you? I thought she was supposed to be a marvelous cook.”
“Oh, she is!” she assured him. And then the conversation took on an entirely different turn, and she found herself obviously entertaining him with her accounts of Martine’s plans for her future and the money that had been left to her when her time of service with Valentine came to an end. “She says she’s going to open a restaurant, and if she can’t get her sister to join her she’s going to try and persuade me! She thinks by that time I might have saved a little money—or she wouldn’t consider it unscrupulous to keep back a little when the time comes for me to hand over the residue!”
“Then Martine is prepared for you to hand over the residue?”
“Oh, yes. Marriage is Martine’s bete noire! She thinks I’d be happier waiting on tables than running a home for a husband!”
“Too bad,” Leon Daudet said dryly. “It seems that you’re going to be influenced against marriage, and apparently you don’t need much influencing!”
They arrived at the coffee and liqueur stage—and he insisted that she drink a liqueur—and they went on talking about nothing that was of vital importance to either of them, until suddenly Valentine remembered why he had asked her to lunch.
“You said that you wanted to talk to me. Was it important?” she asked. “I thought it might have something to do with Monsieur Dubonnet. Something that he has asked you to say to me.”
He looked surprised.
“Did I say I had something important to say to you? Well, whatever it was, I have forgotten it!”
“But it was when you picked me up in the Champs-Elysees! When you had Madame Faubourg with you and
you drove me back to the apartment ... It was the reason why you asked me to lunch!”
He looked at her with a decided tinge of humor in his eyes and then smiled in a way she thought gentle and unexpectedly charming.
“Surely I wouldn’t have asked you to lunch for a reason other than that I wanted you to lunch with me? You had been bestowing your favors on some unknown young man, and I thought he was being treated to an unfair advantage ...” Then he grew more serious. “There was something I wanted to say to you. but I will not say it here. I will drive you home by a roundabout route and say it on the way.”
THE ROUNDABOUT ROUTE was very pleasant in the sunshine, although the day was not quite so spring like. There was a keen wind, and in the Bois de Boulogne new spring hats were being freakishly whisked from heads with new spring hairstyles, and nursemaids with charges had their white aprons whipped up over their heads, so that the charges shrieked with delight.
Dr. Daudet brought his car to a standstill under a tree, in a spot where it was not quite so well populated, and offered Valentine a cigarette. She saw his white teeth gleam attractively as he sat back and smiled at her.
“I feel that if you are tempted to bite my head off for interference it will be better here in the open.” he said.
“Interference?” she asked.
“First and foremost, I do not think you should continue to live all alone with Martine. She may be filling your head with ideas about colorful little restaurants in the south, where you will look very attractive in one of those flowered smocks, waiting on tourists at gaily painted tables, but I do not think that would meet with Miss Constantia’s approval at all! She wished a very different life for you, or she would not have provided you with the wherewithal, and if only to show your gratitude you must, for the time being, do what she would wish. And she would not wish you to live alone!”
“But ... but I have Martine.”
He waved expressive hands.
“Forget Martine. She is to look after you and I hope she will do it well. But have you no particular friend—and I am not, of course, referring to the masculine friend with whom you lunch so frequently—who could join you and keep you company for a while? Preferably someone older than yourself, who could advise you on occasion and give you the support that I think you need!”