by Susan Barrie
“Indeed?” Cathleen murmured uncomfortably, recalling at the same time the barely concealed hostility that was always present in the Italian girl’s whole attitude when she and Edouard came into contact with one another.
Bianca shrugged.
“Of course, it is sad ... but there it is! One loses one’s heart, and then recovers it. Which is not the happy termination to all Edouard’s affairs.”
Cathleen heard herself asking a question that she afterwards partly regretting asking.
“Did my sister Arlette see much of Monsieur Moroc while she was living with you at the palazzo?”
Bianca looked suddenly intrigued.
“So you have discovered?” she said, very softly. Her fantastic eyelashes fluttered, and she looked down at the tip of her cigarette. “The poor child would not listen to advice,” she declared with a sigh.
“Then—then it is true?” Cathleen leaned towards her eagerly, but at the same time she shrank from learning the real truth.
Bianca’s eyes commiserated with her.
“Shall we say no more than that Edouard is Edouard, and your sister was—fascinated.” She crushed out her half-smoked cigarette in the ash-tray, and lighted another almost immediately. “Paul would have interfered if he could, of course, but what can a young man in his position do when the young woman is actually living beneath his own roof? I know that Paul admired her himself, but he would never have done her any harm.”
“It isn’t true that he wished to marry her, is it?” Cathleen asked, determined now that she had the opportunity to hear the whole truth.
The Count’s sister shook her head.
“There was never any question of marriage between them,” she said. “Your sister’s obsession was with Edouard, not with Paul.”
“I—I saw a picture that he had painted of her in his palazzo,” Cathleen confessed.
Instantly Bianca’s eyebrows shot up. For a moment she sounded really surprised.
“Then you have visited at Edouard’s palazzo? He does not normally take his lady friends there ... only —occasionally.’ ’
“It—it was just that he thought I would be interested in seeing the palazzo,” Cathleen, who wished now that she had not made this revelation, said awkwardly.
“But of course.” Bianca smiled at her almost gently, as if she understood perfectly and would never betray the confidence to a soul ... not even to Paul if he became curious. Once again she leaned across the table and brought her exquisite face a little closer to the English girl’s. “My dear, come to us and we will give you a wonderful time,” she promised. “And, more than that, we will help you to find Arlette. I have discussed the matter of her disappearance with my brother, and we both feel that it is up to us to do our utmost to trace her. After all, our aunt was very fond of her, and she lived with us for several months. She was not as pretty or as charming as you are, my dear, but she had engaging ways, and we became quite attached to her, therefore it will give us pleasure to help you to find her.”
“Then you honestly don’t know where she is?” Cathleen exclaimed, as if she had strongly suspected that they did know where Arlette was hiding herself away.
Bianca looked mildly hurt for a moment, and then shook her head on its slender neck with emphasis.
“Do you think we would have lied to you about her if we knew where she was? The family of di Rini does not stoop to lying about such matters. But I will admit that we have an idea,” with a different kind of emphasis.
“Wh-what do you mean?” Cathleen demanded, sounding almost startled.
Bianca shook her head again.
“At this moment I cannot say a thing, but if you will come and stay with us I will give you my word we will leave no stone unturned to trace your sister. And Paul and I will be so happy to have you.” She genuinely looked as if it would give her personal pleasure to act hostess to Arlette’s sister. “And after all, why should you go on living in an hotel when we have so many rooms at our disposal? Some of them are, perhaps, a little damp, but all of them are comfortable. And you shall have Arlette’s room, which is very comfortable.”
Cathleen hesitated, however.
“It doesn’t seem to me that it would be fair to—to put you to so much trouble,” she objected.
“Nonsense, my dear.” The Italian voice was warm and even caressing. “It will be no trouble at all, and if you refuse we shall feel that you hold it against us because your sister has disappeared—”
“Oh, but of course I don’t do that!”
“Then you will become our guest? You will allow Paul to collect you to-night? Or to-morrow morning if you would prefer it?”
“I think I would prefer to remain in the hotel for another night. After all, I made a reservation for a fortnight.”
“Think nothing of it,” Bianca advised her. “Paul will explain to the management that you are to stay with us, and there will be no difficulty whatsoever. You will not even be charged for your room.” She glanced at her watch. “Now I must go, but I shall pass on the good news to Paul and he will call for you to-morrow morning.” Her dark eyes were full of the utmost satisfaction, and she gathered up her white bag and gloves as if now that the matter was settled she had no desire to linger. Her small, perfect teeth flashed brilliantly as she stood smiling down at Cathleen. “Paul is meeting me, but first I have some shopping to do. I will see you in good time for lunch to-morrow, signorina, at the Palazzo di Rini!”
And it was only when she had actually left her, and Cathleen was once more sitting alone at the cafe table, that the invited guest wondered whether she shouldn’t have made a bigger effort to retain her independence. And then suddenly she thought of Arlette, and Bianca’s promise to assist her to find her, and she was quite sure her mother would consider that she had done the right thing.
Up till now she had made no great effort to find Arlette. Edouard, with his dark, apparently fatal charm, had come between her and her objective, and but for the fact that he had happily dropped her as, according to Signorina di Rini, he had dropped numbers of women in the past—very obviously, it now seemed, Arlette—she might have continued to forget the real reason why she had undertaken this trip to Venice, and that would not have pleased her mother at all. It would not have pleased her once she came to her senses.
But now, thankfully, she had come to her senses, and with the help of the di Rinis she would discover what had really happened to Arlette. She was not particularly attracted by the idea of becoming a guest in the palazzo—occupying her sister’s old room!—but to have refused the invitation so pressingly put would have seemed, at the very least, churlish, and one day she might be thankful that she had accepted it.
When she had discovered Arlette!
CHAPTER VII
As if he could barely wait to see her installed at the palazzo Paul arrived at the hotel the following day to collect her and her luggage before she had actually completed her packing. She sent down a message that she would be with him in ten minutes, and when she stepped out of the lift and her cases appeared in the charge of a couple of porters the expression on his face registered something almost like relief, as well as highly flattering pleasure.
He gripped both her hands and held on to them for a few moments before he carried one up to his lips and kissed it, and then with his black eyes gleaming he spoke softly.
“At last!” he exclaimed. “I cannot tell you how delighted I was when Bianca told me she had induced you to change your mind, and that you were coming to stay with us! It seemed almost too good to be true ... quite wonderful, in fact!”
Cathleen blushed self-consciously, and she also looked rather acutely embarrassed.
“I can’t think why,” she declared in answer. “It’s I who am very grateful to Signorina di Rini—”
“Bianca,” he corrected her swiftly.
She flushed again, and echoed him awkwardly: “Bianca ... for being so kind as to insist that I accept her invitation. After all, just because my
sister was employed at one time by your aunt there is no reason why I should expect to stay at the Palazzo di Rini.”
He smiled at her gently, as if he was humouring her.
“And do you still believe that I deceived your sister by causing her to believe that I would one day marry her, and then permitted her to disappear nursing a broken heart?”
There was gentle raillery in his voice, but she could not respond to it. The subject of Arlette and a possible broken heart was not a subject she wished to dwell upon just then.
“I must have read something into her letters that I was not intended to read,” she excused herself in the same awkward tone. “Anyhow, I realise now that I must have made a mistake.”
“Good!” he exclaimed softly, carried one of her hands up to his face and held it there for a moment—despite the fact that the hotel was a hive of activity at that hour of the day—and then straightened and squared his shoulders and said that they would go.
“I told Bianca that I would take you straight back to the palazzo,” he said. “She has invited several people to meet you for lunch, and before that I know she wishes a—how do you call it?—heart-to-heart talk with you!” He smiled contentedly. “You girls when you get together! You have so much to talk about! You chatter like birds in an aviary, and a mere man can simply hope that he has some part in the conversation, and that it is not all connected with trifles!”
He led the way out of the hotel, and Cathleen followed him, secretly rather perturbed by that mention of a girlish get-together with the slightly formidable Bianca.
She was quite sure that Bianca di Rini never chattered exclusively about trifles, and that men figured largely in her conversation. Since Cathleen had been invited to the palazzo partly, at least, because both brother and sister were labouring under the mistaken delusion that the girl they had insisted on becoming their guest had recently inherited a large sum of money it was almost certain that the man they would discuss would be Paul ... with a possible amount of side-tracking that would draw Edouard Moroc into the conversation, for the sole purpose of putting Cathleen off him completely.
And as she never wanted to see him again that would be unnecessary.
All the same, Cathleen would rather that no one mentioned the subject of Edouard Moroc to her so long as she remained in Venice. Once she returned home to England, well, she could think of him. She would inevitably think of him ... but only when the wound he had inflicted had had time to heal. Or so she hoped.
Bianca was awaiting them when they reached the palazzo, but considerably to Cathleen’s relief she did not snatch at the first opportunity to suggest that they put their feet up comfortably and got to know one another. Arlette’s old room had been prepared for Arlette’s sister, and it was so unexpectedly comfortable that Cathleen was not surprised her sister had regarded the job as a sinecure when first the old Contessa di Rini engaged her—through an agency in London—to act as her companion and write her letters. Everything a young woman who liked luxury could possibly desire was contained in the room, and although in the brief wintertime its marble floor and lack of central heating must undoubtedly turn it into a kind of mausoleum, at the height of a Venetian summer it had everything to commend it.
It had its own balcony overlooking the canal, with comfortable chairs for reclining and also for entertaining the odd visitor; and in the room itself there was a writing-desk and long mirrors, a bed with a highly ornamental bedspread and piled-up pillows each in its satin case embroidered with an enormous ‘R’ for di Rini, a case of books in several languages, and bowls of flowers. The flowers on the dressing-table were scarlet roses. Cathleen touched one of them impulsively in admiration, and then drew back as she remembered the deep red roses still sparkling with dew that had been delivered to her on her first morning at the hotel.
Watching her, Bianca smiled a little quizzically.
“The roses were Paul’s idea,” she admitted. “You like them, yes?”
“They’re—they’re beautiful,” Cathleen replied, but her impulse to bend over and inhale the scent of one of them was checked. She knew perfectly well that she did not wish to receive red roses from Paul ... especially as they were not really for her at all but for a mythical young woman with an inexhaustible bank-balance.
Bianca made certain that she had everything she needed, and then left her. Cathleen went through into the tiled bathroom with its somewhat antique bath and modern shower and washed her hands and re-did her face before lunch, and then spent a quarter of an hour on her balcony enjoying the life of the canal and the warmth and brilliance of the sunshine, but taking particular care to keep her eyes averted from that end of the waterway where Edouard’s small but very beautiful and well-preserved palazzo was sited.
She had one moment of almost pure panic when the time came for her to make her way to the main salon and it occurred to her that Edouard himself might be amongst the guests for lunch, but to her infinite relief they were all strangers, and she was able to relax and respond to their careful English without any of the embarrassment that would have been hers if the Frenchman who had kissed her and then told her he had no intention of falling in love with her had been there to throw her off balance with his dark eyes.
Her first day at the Palazzo di Rini was really quite uneventful, and her host and hostess really put themselves out to ensure that she was really comfortable. The next day they spent the whole of the morning on the Lido, and Cathleen was glad that in her luggage there were some really smart outfits that enabled her to feel at least as much in the picture as the rest of the guests as they disported themselves on the shining sand and in the sea. Lunch was eaten at a gay cafe where the striped sun-blinds and the inevitable champagne all added to the sensation of ‘living it up’ in some particularly imaginative Continental brochure for holidays for the really wealthy and fashionable for Cathleen, and once again she was glad that Edouard Moroc did not appear suddenly and rob her of all her careful composure.
After lunch, Paul took her for a long drive in his pure white car across the Venetian plain, the strip of land some thirty miles in extent that runs between the mountains of the interior and the sparkling Adriatic, and in addition to a fashionable bathing resort they visited ruins and hill villages, Byzantine relics and the sites of modern excavations of Roman remains and by the time they returned to the palazzo there was barely time for a drink before dressing for dinner, to which still more fresh faces were invited and presented to Cathleen.
She began to get the idea that she was partly on show, and partly the cause of some bewilderment to the visitors. They were all so very aristocratic and so beautifully brought up that most of them attempted to conceal their bewilderment, and one or two of the older men were perfectly charming to the English girl. One elderly count paid her such marked attention that Paul declared, when he detached her from him, that he was growing jealous, and from the slightly bleak expression on his face as he led her out on to the main balcony to admire the rising moon that was casting its silver light across the waterway Cathleen could have deduced that if not actually jealous, he was undoubtedly a trifle vexed.
“You are here because Bianca and I wish to have you to ourselves,” he declared, a trifle pettishly, and Cathleen couldn’t help wondering why, if that was really the case, they invited such large numbers of their friends to meet her.
Paul drew her towards the parapet, and they looked down on a gondola that was taking a couple of late diners out to dine. The girl, in a glittering evening dress and silken cloak draped lightly about her shoulders, was reclining on cushions with a man in evening dress beside her, and as they passed beneath the balcony their gondolier started to strum softly on a guitar and to sing in a voice of honeyed sweetness.
“Tourists!” Paul exclaimed, a trifle contemptuously, as he watched them and their high-prowed, old-fashioned means of water transport disappearing awkwardly in the direction of the Rialto Bridge. “You can always tell them.”
Cathleen,
too, looked down. She was never likely to forget the night when she and Edouard had spent hours together in just such a boat in just such a silvery haze of moonlight and she had allowed herself to dream dreams. She had been very foolish then. She looked up at Paul curiously.
“How is it that you can always tell the tourists?’ she asked.
He smiled in that faintly contemptuous fashion again.
“They’re obvious,” he replied. “They have one idea in their heads when they come to Venice, and that is to travel on the waterways in a gondola that is so antiquated it’s a miracle they keep afloat, and of course the gondolier has to entertain them in the time-honoured way. It’s all part of the Venetian scene ... the kind of thing tourists expect. The girl doesn’t realise how much her escort has to pay for the entertainment, but his reward is that under the influence of so much glamour she becomes comparatively easy game. In fact, I doubt very much whether she could put up any resistance even if she wanted to!”
Cathleen felt suddenly a little sick. Had she been such easy game? Could she have resisted Edouard if he’d continued to make love to her even if she’d wanted to do so?
She turned away from the balcony rail and pretended to feel suddenly chill.
“I think I’ll go and get something to put round my shoulders,” she said.
Paul, following her thoughtfully back into the salon, smiled at the creaminess of her exposed neck and shoulders.
“It seems a pity to cover them up,” he murmured.