by Susan Barrie
Toni tried to withdraw from him, but he held her more tightly than before. His ever-bright blue eyes frankly caressed her.
“You’re not the type of girl to go wandering round the world with an elderly man like the General, who isn’t the most observant of men in some ways. You need someone to plan your moves for you, really think for you—someone with the right to look after you—”
“If you’re suggesting that I find someone and marry, I’m not interested in marriage,” she said stiffly.
“No?” His eyes laughed at her sceptically. “But, my sweet child, you’re astonishingly pretty, you know —especially in that dress!—and someone will want to marry you!” He realised that she was looking past him over his shoulder, and whirled until he was able to catch sight of the hotel proprietor threading his way amongst the dancers. “But not that man!” he exclaimed with emphasis, as if he could read her thoughts with ease. “Antoine is the kind of man I would describe as a permanent bachelor. Pretty little English girls, even with rich uncles attached, are not in the least likely to interest him! Mademoiselle Raveaux, however, does interest him up to a point. He admires her, and she’s useful, and she’s in love with him. He has no objection to anyone like Marianne—quite the most beautiful woman in this room tonight—being in love with him. It flatters his ego, and he doesn’t have to feel afraid of her!”
Toni, who had not yet recovered from the moment when Antoine kissed her that morning, swallowed something in her throat.
“Why should he feel afraid of her, anyway?” she asked. “She can’t force him into a relationship he doesn’t desire. No woman could do that.”
Gresham’s eyes gleamed at her.
“You’re right there,” he agreed. “No woman could discover a softer side—a permanent softer side—to Monsieur Antoine. She might pique him a little by being unusual, but she wouldn’t make any more progress than that. One day he would unbend—the next she might not exist. He’s that kind.”
Toni stared hard at his shoulder, and although she felt the subject would be wiser not pursued, she had to pursue it.
“I don’t know why you should feel able to make such a confident statement as that,” she observed. “You hardly know the man.”
Once again his eyes gleamed at her, this time half pitifully.
“My poor child,” he returned, “a man can always assess another man’s potentialities. He knows when to cry ‘Beware!’—if a girl needs someone to cry ‘Beware’ to her. You’re a sensible little thing, I feel sure, so that isn’t in the least likely to be necessary...”
She wrenched herself out of his arms, and made an excuse to return to their table. Although he certainly drifted from table to table talking to his guests, Antoine made no attempt to approach her and claim the dance he had asked for that morning.
She began to feel hot with humiliation, and every time she accidentally encountered his eyes, the humiliation increased. Her uncle was obviously enjoying the evening, and he talked loudly and cheerfully. Philip watched her constantly, one moment almost gloating over her, the next betraying something like suspicion in his eyes.
At last Toni decided to fall back on the pretext that she was tired and escape from them both, and she made her way out of the ballroom while the dancing was still at its height, and Marianne had just persuaded her employer to circle the room with her for the third time.
Toni made her way up to her room and then changed her mind and returned to the ground floor of the hotel. Although she had no wrap, and the night air was always cool in the mountains, she went out on to the terrace and was about to descend into the gardens when someone accosted her.
“Little idiot!” said Kurt Antoine, grasping her by the wrist. “Do you want to catch a chill?”
Toni stood looking up at him, a bewildered feeling at the heart of her, a pale, lost look on her face.
“I—” she stammered, and then he let her go. He drew her back into the glassed-in verandah, led her to the far end of it and placed her in a chair at one of the small tables. He took out a cigarette and lighted it, ground out the match in an ashtray, and then spoke. He was looking heartrendingly handsome in his beautifully fitting dinner-jacket, and Toni was in no mood to have her heart rent about him just then. She knew it would have been better for her if she had escaped up to her room.
“I don’t know whether you are aware of it,” he said, “but I haven’t had my dance.”
She looked back at him with a coldness that was no reflection of the state of her inner feelings.
“I don’t remember that you asked me to dance,” she replied.
He drew thoughtfully at his cigarette, and then surveyed the glowing tip of it.
“You seemed to be doing very well with Mr. Gresham, so I didn’t bother,” he told her. “It would have been a pity to spoil your evening. By the way, does that young man usually behave badly after a little champagne? You seemed to be objecting to the way he was holding you.”
She flushed very slightly as his dark eyes returned disconcertingly to her face.
“You’re very observant,” she remarked. “But it was nothing. Nothing offensive, I mean.”
“Merely pressing home his claim to hold you even more possessively if he felt like it? But I thought you said you were not interested.”
“I’m not.”
He stood up suddenly and wandered along the terrace. Then he came back just as suddenly to where she was seated.
“I think you have to come to a decision about your future, haven’t you?” he suggested. “Either you go back to England with your uncle and settle down with him until you marry someone like Gresham, or you assert your independence and do something entirely different.”
“Such as what?” she asked.
He ignored the question for the moment.
“After all, you don’t have to become suddenly weak and dependent and fall in with the wishes of other people. When I first met you you were doing that, and you mustn’t return to a state of servitude. I think your uncle’s a very fine man, but he has his own interests and he can get along without you. There are other things in life that you can do that have nothing whatever to do with being a dutiful niece, or marrying a man who breathes champagne fumes down your neck when he’s dancing with you, and where his first attempt to establish friendly relations between you was hardly reassuring from your point of view.”
She knew the episode to which he was referring, wondered how he had got to know about it, and bit her lip hard.
He nodded as if he had received confirmation.
“So it really was an unfortunate beginning, and you wouldn’t have a great deal of confidence in the future, would you? Not the future of yourself and Mr. Philip Gresham!”
“I’ve told you, I’ve no intention of considering Philip Gresham seriously—even if he wanted me to do so,” she bit out angrily, “and as a matter of fact, he’s done nothing of the kind!”
“No; but he will.”
She made a little impatient movement with her hands.
“Do we have to talk about all this? It can’t be a very interesting subject for—for you!”
There was still no one near them, and he continued to stand looking down at her with an intensity of expression on his dark face that bewildered and confused her.
“We’ll ignore the relevance or otherwise of that for the moment,” he said. “What I want to suggest is that you stay on here when your uncle leaves, and let him see that you can still be independent. Don’t return to the condition of mind you were in when I first met you. Don’t let these past few months count for nothing at all.”
She was so astonished that she simply stared up at him rather stupidly. There was no doubt about his earnestness. He was giving her advice to stay on at the hotel where he himself had not used her as well as he might, his preoccupation with her ranging from callous insistence on overwork to an occasional soft word and an unexpected kiss in the pine wood that morning.
From the hard, concentra
ted look on his face he had already forgotten that kiss, and the certainty made her wonder why she had risen up in revolt against him earlier.
She stood up, very slowly, and faced him.
“And if I was unwise enough to listen to you and to stay on here, what kind of a job would you have to offer me?” she asked.
She waited, her heart lurching against her ribs, a sensation as if her breath was suspended in her throat draining some of the colour out of her face, and he answered at once:
“We could find you one. Oh, I’m sure there are lots of jobs you could do here.” He was looking at her very hard, watching her hand groping for the back of her chair, gripping it. “Marianne could find you one—”
A voice spoke in the shadows behind them, triumphantly:
“And there you have it, Toni, my dear! Our friend Monsieur Antoine offers you your job back, or something similar ... you can stay on here as a barmaid, or perhaps he might find you a job in the kitchen! He or his mistress ... you little idiot! Why do you even listen to him?”
Philip Gresham emerged from the shadows, face contorted with a mixture of fury and triumph. He looked with a particular kind of vicious triumph in his eyes at Antoine.
“Marianne could find her something! I daresay she could! You, out of the goodness of your heart, could find her something! Wait until the General hears of this! He’ll probably give me permission to knock your block off—”
The General spoke, not very far away.
“I’ve already heard, Philip. But I don’t think you’re in a condition to champion my niece’s cause tonight. I should go to bed, and leave her to deal with the problem herself.”
His voice was very quiet, almost amiable, and Philip, who was swaying a little on his feet, looked at him in amazement.
“Go to bed, Philip,” the General repeated.
“B-but—”
“My dear boy, Toinette has coped with her own problems before, and the wisest thing we can both do is to leave her to cope with them again.” He smiled at the slender figure in the golden chiffon dress, and his smile said gently that he was very fond of her, that in future she could always look to him for assistance, but he had no intention of trying to direct her life or underlining Philip’s attitude. She must make some decisions herself.
Toni felt almost as amazed as Philip as she looked towards her uncle. His smile was very gentle—almost understanding—and he went up to her and squeezed her hands.
“If you want to come and be my housekeeper you can do so, my love. If you want to stay here you can stay. But listen to this chap, Antoine—just give him one small hearing. It’s possible you may not regret it, despite the fact that through him you once received a lump on the head the size, I believe, of a golf ball!”
He took Gresham by the arm and led him away, and Toni called helplessly after the General.
“But, Uncle—?”
Kurt Antoine said quietly, at her elbow:
“Go with them, if you want to. They are more your people than I am. Or so it seems very likely!” She was too confused to detect any bitterness in his voice. “But you have the right to make up your mind, and you’d better listen to me before you go to bed. In the morning we might both be viewing the world from a different standpoint.”
“What do you mean?”
His tone was so odd that she had to ask, although she had little hope that any proposition he made to her could affect the decision she had already arrived at. The decision to depart from the Rosenhorn the moment her uncle was ready to leave.
He did not remove his eyes from her as he repeated his previous offer.
“I suggest that you stay here and turn your back on the temptation to run away. Running away never did anyone any good. You were running away when I met you for the first time on that ledge in Switzerland —only on that occasion you were running away from yourself. Now you’re about to start running again, and I’m asking you to think well before you do so. Even your uncle agrees with me, I think, about that. So will you consider staying on here?”
A fierce kind of fury raged through her suddenly. He had nothing good to offer her, but he expected her to stay. For his own convenience he wanted her to stay, and when the time arrived and he could dispense with her services, she could start running in any direction she pleased.
“And this time, Monsieur Antoine, what would you suggest I do if I stay?” she asked bitingly. “Chambermaid’s work, as you’re short-staffed, or perhaps somewhat lighter duties in the office? Or would you like me to get back into that absurd outfit I was wearing at the time that I dropped the tray and smashed quite a lot of your glass? Was I such a draw that you can’t afford to do without me?”
“I’m not offering you anything along those lines,” he replied quietly.
“Then what, precisely, are you offering me?” She turned away before he could answer. “In any case, whatever it is I don’t want it,” with finality. “My mind is made up.”
In the same quiet voice he arrested her steps as she started to move away.
“That’s a pity, because it’s the one position that might have satisfied you, and from which you would certainly never have been allowed to run away. I wanted you to stay on as my wife!”
“WHAT ... did you say?”
Slowly she retraced her steps, and unbelievingly, with wide, amazed eyes she returned to within a foot of him.
“What did you say?”
“I said I wanted you to stay on as my wife!”
Bells rang in her ears; her heart expanded and contracted, and then expanded again. Although it was very dim in the corner of the verandah where they were standing he could see her eyes and the extraordinary, glorious shimmer that made them seem huge and luminous.
“Oh, Kurt!” she said.
By contrast with the sudden radiance of her expression his was grave and remote. She felt as if he had withdrawn from her, although he stood so close, and in sudden fear lest her ears had deceived her she put out a hand and touched his arm.
“You didn’t really say that, did you? I—I imagined it?”
“You’ve known me several months now, Toinette,” he responded grimly. “Do I normally say things I don’t mean?”
“Or—do you?” she added, with a wondering break in her voice.
“Like that kiss this morning? Little idiot!” He all but snatched her into his arms and fastened them about her so tightly she could hardly breathe. “Oh, Toinette,” his voice was utterly unlike any voice she had ever heard from him, “I’ve wanted to do this from the moment I met you on that ledge, and because I wanted it so badly I very nearly lost you altogether! Oh, Liebling, Liebling!... Why do you think I kissed you this morning?”
“Tell me, please,” she begged, faint with the ecstasy of being in his arms. “Tell me, Kurt!”
For answer he forced back her head until he could see her eyes, and then deliberately lowered his mouth to hers. By the time the kiss ended the stars were wheeling in the sky above her, and even the mountain peaks were swaying round her. Dizzily she clung to him, and he picked her up in his arms and carried her back to her chair. Although there was a hard wood floor to the verandah he knelt down beside her and took her hands, carrying them up to his face.
“Little idiot,” he repeated. “Adorable little idiot!” and he kissed the hands fiercely.
“Why did you let me think it really was nothing more than a job you had to offer me?” she whispered.
He smiled twistedly.
“To test your faith, perhaps ... your faith in one human being who adores you! Listen, little one—darling, darling little one! All my life I have wanted to meet a girl like you, and when I met her on the ledge I couldn’t believe it ... It was too good to be true!”
“I still can’t believe that,” she confessed, as if she was quite convinced she was dreaming.
“Nevertheless, it is true. When you were on that ledge I wanted to rush to your assistance, but something held me back. I suppose it was because I’m bas
ically hard, and I’ve led a hard life ... and you were so small, and soft, and vulnerable!” He smiled wryly. “I knew you disliked me instinctively, and it didn’t trouble me at all at the time. But ...” lifting her chin with an unsteady finger and then cupping her face in his hands, “I couldn’t bear it if you disliked me now!”
“You know I don’t,” she barely breathed, and wondered where all her courage was coming from. Why he was suddenly so much more than physically near, and infinitely dear ... and why she had ever imagined it was an hallucination in the office when he called her ‘darling.’
He was saying it now, over and over:
“Oh, darling, darling! ... Liebling!”
His arms went round her again, and he held her so close that her heart beat against his. The two of them thundered together and caused a roaring in her ears like the roaring of an express train. At the same time he was kissing her eyes, her hair and her cheeks with a mixture of fierceness and tenderness she would never have believed him capable of. The spot on her head where the lump had arisen under her hair after her accident with the loaded tray he kissed like one possessed.
“I’m so terrified of hurting you, darling! You’re so small, and there’s such a little of you ... and when I think how badly you might have been hurt if some more of that glass had cut you I can’t bear it!” He strained her against him. “I’ll never forgive Marianne!”
“I thought you ... liked her,” she whispered.
He looked puzzled for an instant.
“Only as a woman I thought I could admire. For her business capabilities and her shrewdness. She has put the Rosenhorn on its feet...”
“And not for any other reason?”
He shook his head.
“There never was any other reason. In all my life I have felt tenderness for two women ... One was my mother, and the other is you! Does that satisfy you?” he asked.
“Oh, Kurt!” she answered, as if she was shattered. For several minutes they dung to one another, and he whispered every sort of endearment to her in a mixture of English and German. Then he drew her over to the glassed-in wall of the verandah, where the light of the stars shone full upon her, and asked her a question that was really unnecessary.