by Susan Barrie
“Oh, Leon!” Valentine exclaimed, and suddenly her mouth trembled and the slow tears brimmed over her eyes. “Then it’s to Philippe and your aunt that I owe ... everything? All this sudden happiness!”
“Is it happiness?”
“Much, much more than happiness!”
“Don’t cry, sweetheart,” he begged her, kissing away the tears. “And it is to our Miss Constantia that we really owe the bliss of our getting to know one another, learning to love one another so desperately. Before I give you something that Miss Constantia wanted you to be given on the day that you became engaged to be married, will you tell me one thing?”
“Of course,” she answered, with her heart in her eyes.
“How much do you love me?”
Her arms wound themselves tightly around his neck. She held him tightly, so tightly that he could feel the slim arms quivering.
“With all my heart and soul! With everything there is of me!”
“And when did you start to love me?”
She looked as if her admission was a surprise even to herself.
“From the beginning, I think. I must have loved you from the beginning. But I first realized I was falling in love with you that day I had lunch with you. When I knew I could never fall out of love with you was the night when you kissed me!”
She hid her face swiftly, but he put his fingers under her chin and lifted it. He looked down into her eyes with a tenderness that she had never expected to see on his dark handsome face—at least, not for her—and now that she saw it at last it was a tenderness that dissolved her heart and melted her bones. And in addition to the tenderness, there was so much love and a quiet sort of adoration, behind which something flickered as if it might leap to life at any moment.
“Don’t you want to know when I first fell in love with you?”
“When?” she whispered.
“That night after we returned from Miss Constantia’s funeral. I came around to the apartment to see you, because I was horribly conscious of having been a brute to you, but Martine didn’t want to admit me because you were asleep. But I asked her to let me see you, and I stood beside you as you lay on the couch, here in this very room, and I tucked the blanket over you and felt as if my heart dropped right at your feet. They were such little feet and so weary, and you looked like a child who had had too much to bear. You had been badly used, and I was the one who had used you badly.”
“And you really ... loved me then?”
“I wanted to kneel down and kiss you! I probably would have done, but for the fact that Martine stuck so close to my side!”
She laughed softly, happily, exultantly.
“Martine never told me that you called.”
“I asked her not to.”
They gazed at one another, discovering so many wonderful new things about one another that their hearts began to beat with a concerted wildness, and she felt his arms begin to strain her to him with a kind of desperation, a longing that was almost uncontrollable.
“Valentine, I love you, I love you, I love you!” he told her, and she felt his mouth burning like fire on her own, sending fire through all her veins, as it had done once before. “Je t’adore!” he breathed huskily. “Je t’adore!”
Later—considerably later—they remembered Miss Constantia’s letter, which he had received from Maitre Dubonnet only the night before.
“He let me have it,” he told her, “because I told him you were going to marry me. He is expecting an invitation to the wedding.”
She took the envelope into her hands and held it. It was heavily sealed and inscribed in Miss Constantia’s elegant spidery hand to Miss Valentine Brooke. Valentine felt her heart start to beat curiously as she endeavored to slit the envelope open and found that she couldn’t. Leon helped her, and even then she hesitated to draw out the single sheet of paper it contained. It was so like making unexpected contact with someone who was dead; hearing, perhaps of some unspoken wish.
And it was a wish Miss Constantia expressed in her letter. But even at the time that she expressed it, she realized that it might not be fulfilled.
Dear child, she began. By the time you will receive this—and it is of course possible you will never receive it—you will be engaged to marry someone. I hope from the bottom of my heart you will love as I never loved any man. I have been a spinster all my days, and I take a spinster’s heart to the grave. But you are young and lovely, and for you I want so much. In the short time that we have known one another I have become deeply attached to you, as I might have been attached to my daughter if I had ever had one.
I have left you a sum of money and my house called Chaumont, which you can do with as you will. If it is too large for you, you can sell it, and the money will purchase you something that will suit your needs better. If you do as I hope you will do, and marry Dr. Daudet, he already has a small country house, and if he wishes to turn Chaumont into a nursing home, or some sort of a convalescent home for children—as I know he has often wished me to do—then he may do so with my blessing. But if you don’t marry Leon Daudet, and my plan to leave you equal sums of money, with yours to return to him if you don’t marry, doesn’t give you a new interest in one another and bring you together, then I wish you all happiness with the man of your choice.
In any case, the important thing is that you shall marry. But it is my earnest wish that it shall be Leon! He needs a wife, and you would be ideal for him, or so I thought from the first moment I saw you. Don’t ask me why ...! Just the romantic instincts of a love-starved old woman, I expect!
The letter was signed Amelia Constantia and dated a month after Valentine’s arrival in Paris.
Valentine put the letter away in its envelope, and Leon watched her, a gleam of admiration in his eyes for the writer of the letter.
“The inspired old one!” he said at last. “And she was certainly that—inspired! I am deeply flattered that she thought I was a suitable husband for you, my own Valentine! If at this moment some other man had been sharing the contents of that letter with you, how would I have felt?”
Valentine smiled at him.
“There is no one else on this earth who could have shared the contents of that letter with me,” she said almost solemnly, “and Miss Constantia knew that; she really was inspired! And, oh, Leon, if you want to turn Chaumont into a nursing home or a convalescent home, I hope you will do so, because when you told me about your cottage I knew it sounded so much more like a home than Chaumont could ever be!”
He drew her back into his arms and kissed her tenderly. “We will decide the future of Chaumont at some later stage, and in any case, it is your house, it is for you to decide. But the thing we have to decide now is how soon we will be married. This morning, when I saw those two taking each other for better or worse, oh, Valentine, how I wished that it was you and I who stood there waiting to be man and wife! The only thing I didn’t want for you was a civil marriage!”
“I wouldn’t want a civil marriage, either!” she admitted.
“We are both Protestants; we can be married in a Protestant church, and will be as soon as it can be arranged. And until then you will stay with Tante Minette, who is longing to have you. That will give me time to fix things so that we can have a long honeymoon!” He smothered the pale cheeks and the blue eyes that had been so shadow-haunted with kisses. “I want to see you happy and brown, and to bring about that desirable end I think we will go to the Bahamas. You will love the Bahamas, my Valentine ... Is that what you would wish?”
Valentine couldn’t speak. She just looked at him dumbly. But her eyes said, “The Bahamas or the North Pole—anywhere with you will be seventh heaven!”
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