Dennis Wheatley - Duke de Richleau 07 (30 page)

“What!” she
exclaimed. “That woman! The Chotek! You dare to place her before me? Oh, but I
see it all now. The night when we had that horrid waltz at the Czernins; you
danced with her afterwards. I saw her smiling up into your face, and you were
laughing down at her. I behaved like a dumb little fool; but she is a woman of
the world and knows how to attract men. So you prefer her to me? Oh, I hate
you! I hate you!”

Adam Grünne was
seated, barely out of earshot, beside Sárolta on the bank of the stream below.
Ilona’s raised voice might have caused him to look up, so De Richleau did not
dare to take the hand of the outraged princess who stood glaring at him, or
even to stretch out both his own in a gesture of pleading. Being debarred from
such a course, he swiftly decided that the best alternative was to treat her
like an ordinary girl who had given way to a fit of jealous temper without good
reason.

“Stop it!” he
snapped. “I have never thought you a fool, but you are behaving like one now.”

Her eyes opened
to their fullest extent, and she gaped at him, but he went on swiftly: “Would I
be here if I preferred the Duchess to you? Why should I have hurried to Ischl
on receiving your letter, instead of tearing it up and remaining in Vienna to
pay my court to her. Do you think I enjoy wearing these absurd clothes and
being treated like a servant? Either you will apologize for your unjust
suspicions or I mean to catch the first train north this evening.”

“Apologize!” she
gasped.

“Yes. That is
usual between people of good breeding when one of them is proved to have been
flagrantly at fault. And I take it none of your governesses was quite so
servile as to teach you that royal blood is an excuse for bad manners.”

Slowly she sat
down again, turning her white face from him; and evidently she underwent a
fierce silent struggle before she could bring herself to whisper: “I’m sorry. I
didn’t mean what I said. It—it was the thought of your associating with that
woman.”

His tone changed
instantly. “Believe me, dear Princess, I would not dream of going did I not
feel I positively had to. And your sweet wish that I should remain here till
you leave yourself, makes it all the harder. The trouble is that the Duchess
has asked me specially to meet someone for a definite purpose, and I feel that
to back out at the last minute would be extremely tactless. All the same, if
you desire me to, I will send a telegram saying that I have met with an
accident.”

Ilona shook her
head. “No, you had better go, although it means our losing Saturday. You are so
clever, I feel sure you will find ways of seeing me when I get back to Vienna.”

“Wild horses
shall not prevent my doing so,” declared the Duke. “But that is my main reason
for wishing to remain on good terms with the Duchess. She could, I feel sure,
be a dangerous enemy or a good friend; and in the latter guise might later on
prove very useful to us.”

Again Ilona
lifted her chin a little. “I should not care to be beholden to that woman.”

“Why?”

“She is a
Czech—a nobody—an upstart!”

“Oh, come!”
laughed the Duke. “You are talking now as though your own forebears had been
noble for only four or five generations. It does not become people like
ourselves, who are of truly ancient lineage, to display such snobbishness.”

For a second her
mouth hardened. Then she too, laughed. “Perhaps you are right; but after this
afternoon I shall be tempted to think that instead of a knight errant I have
acquired another governess.”

“I would
willingly don skirts if that would enable me to be near you more frequently.”

Ilona giggled. “How
funny you would look in them. But seriously, I have good cause to dislike the
Chotek. She is an evil woman, and has brought dissension into the Imperial
family.”

“Had you given
your last reason first, I would not have challenged it. But about her being
evil, I am not so certain. She loves her husband, and one cannot blame a mother
for fighting for what she believes to be the rights of her children. I thought
her not at all a bad creature, but she is as sharp as a needle. As she watched
us dancing together that night at the Czernins, she is more likely than anyone
else in Viennese society to guess my interest in you. That is another reason
why I wish to stand well with her. Then, if she sees us together again and
suspects anything, she is much more likely to refrain from starting malicious
gossip.”

Ilona agreed to
the wisdom of that, and for a while they talked of other people in Viennese
society. Then Adam Grünne got to his feet and called up: “It is nearly four o’clock.
Does not your Highness think that we ought to be getting back to the carriage?”

Too late, De
Richleau and Ilona realized that their precious time together had raced by
almost unnoticed, and that they had spent most of it bickering. Before the
others could reach them he whispered; “If I have disappointed you to-day,
please forgive me. The things I said to you were clumsy only because there is
so much in my heart that I may not say.”

The blood mounted
to her face, then she whispered back: “I know, I understand. But you must not
say it.”

Wednesday, apart
from stolen glances, proved a blank; for the narrow-eyed, rather stupid-looking
Baroness Paula took her duties very seriously. During their walk she was never
more than three paces distant from her mistress—even when De Richleau led the
way up as steep a pile of rocks as he thought Ilona could manage—and,
apparently, either the fear of arousing suspicion, or her upbringing as an
Archduchess, still so dominated Ilona that she could not bring herself to tell
the girl to remain behind with Adam Grünne while she made the climb alone with
their guide.

But Thursday was
a day that De Richleau long remembered as one of the happiest in his life. On
the previous evening, when dismissing him, Adam Grünne had said that, if the
weather remained fine, Her Imperial Highness had decided to go for a picnic: so
instead of reporting at two-thirty, as usual, he was to be at the Palace at
eleven o’clock.

The Duke woke early,
jumped out of bed and ran to the window. There was no streak of warning red in
the eastern sky, and the trees in the distance had that intense early morning
stillness which presages a perfect summer day. By ten to eleven, now a familiar
figure at the Palace gates, he walked through them and up to the portico. At
eleven o’clock, with the punctuality which marked all the Imperial
arrangements, they set off.

Ilona had
decided on an expedition towards Ehensee, so they drove northward for about
eight miles before halting the carriage. Normally, as they were to picnic, the
footman would have brought up the rear carrying the luncheon basket: but as
Ilona stepped down into the road she said that their guide could quite well do
so. De Richleau, realising her intention of being freed from the prying eyes of
a servant, willingly abandoned his rucksack, and had the hamper strapped to his
back in its place. They then entered the shady woods that rose steeply from the
right hand side of the road.

As usual the
Duke led the way, some twenty paces in advance of the others, but when they had
been walking for some ten minutes and were well out of sight of the carriage,
Ilona called to him to stop. Then, when they had caught up with him, she smiled
at Sárolta and Adam Grünne, and said:

“Both of you
know the real identity of our guide, so to-day we will make no silly pretences,
but really enjoy ourselves for once. Come, Duke, give me your arm, and we’ll
lead the way together. I shouldn’t be surprised if I make a better guide than
you do.”

When he had
exchanged a pleasant greeting with the others, he replied with a laugh, “I am
quite sure you will, Princess, for I will now confess that I have never before
had the chance to go so far in this direction.” Then he gave her his arm, and
the two couples resumed their ascent of the woodland track.

Adam Grünne was
quick to realize what a happy chance the arrangement gave him to make love to
Sárolta so, with her arm in his, he eased his pace until they had dropped some
way behind. After the party had covered a hundred yards, Ilona glanced back,
and seeing that she and De Richleau were out of earshot, said:

“Do you know,
although we have really seen very little of one another, I feel that in some
ways I know you more intimately than any man I have ever met. Yet I still do
not know your Christian name.”

“It is Jean
Armand Duplessis,” he replied; “but most of my friends call me Armand.”

“Then, as long
as we are alone together to-day, I will call you that, and if you like—Armand,
you may call me Ilona.”

In those days
Christian names were not lightly bandied about, or ever used between men and
women who were not lovers, relatives or old friends; so to hear her almost
whisper his name thrilled him as few things could have done. Pressing her arm very
lightly, he said:

“Thank you, my
beautiful Princess. The name Ilona will come easily to my lips, for it is ever
in my thoughts and in my sweetest dreams.”

Unlike their
previous meetings, to-day no shadow of restraint or misunderstanding lay
between them. As they mounted gently through the twilit woods, they talked of a
dozen subjects. He told her of some of the strange places he had visited, and
thrilled her with a full account of the abortive attempt in which he had
participated as a young officer to place the Duc de Vend
ô
me
on the throne of France. She shyly confessed that she sometimes wrote poetry
and had had some of her poems set to music, so that she could sing them;
although she said her voice was very small, and that she rarely sang except in
private for her own amusement, and occasionally for her old grandfather, the
Emperor, who liked her to sing him to sleep in an arm-chair when he was tired
out from poring over his endless State papers.

It was Ilona who
led the way to a glade on the crest, which opened out to the northward with a
lovely view of lower, wooded hilltops and, beyond them, the little town of
Ehensee, with its long lake shimmering in the summer sun. There, the others
caught up with them and helped to spread out the picnic lunch. Ilona’s gaiety
infected them all and her happiness lent a new radiance to her beauty. Her lips
and cheeks seemed more highly coloured than usual, her eyes were pools of
deepest blue, and her chestnut hair caught the sunshine in its high-piled
waves. For an hour, while they ate the cold collation which had been provided
and drank a refreshing light Moselle, they laughed and joked together in all
the joy of youth; the dark future, which only De Richleau feared to be so close
at hand, mercifully hidden from them.

When they had
packed up the picnic things, the two couples walked on a little farther and,
separating by unspoken agreement, sat down some distance apart to admire the
view. For another hour and a half Ilona and Armand, as they now called one
another freely, talked of their lives before they had met, which now seemed an
age away. Every’ now and then their eyes met in a long gaze and a short happy
silence fell between them. When he gently took her hand in his, she did not
withdraw it; and they would have sat on, unheeding of the passage of time,
until nightfall, had not Count Adam come over to warn them that they were
already over-late in starting back.

To make up time
a little, in case the servants began to fear that an accident had befallen
them, they hurried rather on the way downwards, so talked only at infrequent
intervals. But when they got to within ten minutes’ walk of the road, De
Richleau broached the subject of future meetings.

Ilona said that,
on her return to Vienna, she would ride in the Prater every morning, except
Sundays, between eight and nine o’clock, so he could meet her then as though by
chance, and of course she would invite him to her birthday party on the 13th of
June; but that was still over a fortnight away, and they should be able to meet
several times at social functions which she would attend before then.

“As a starving
man I gladly snatch at every crust,” he smiled. “But I dare not run into you
while riding in the Prater too frequently, or dance with you more than once at
any ball, otherwise tongues will begin to wag. I think I have an idea, though,
by which we might spend a good part of two or three days together.”

“Oh, tell me!”
she exclaimed in delight.

“It is to open
up my castle at Königstein. As you may know, it is on the Danube only some
twenty-five miles west of Vienna. If I gave a house-warming, with a ball and
other entertainments, would it not be possible for you to come to stay for a
couple of nights, with the Aulendorfs and the rest of your suite, as my guest
of honour?”

Sadly she shook
her head. “It is a lovely idea, but I am afraid not practical. If a married
couple wished to entertain me in that way, I could express my desire to the
wife to pay her a visit; but I could not do that to a single man, and it would
be a shocking breach of etiquette for you to invite me, even if you did so
through Countess Aulendorf.”

He was greatly
disappointed at this douche of cold water on the plan that he had been
nurturing, and quickly began to cast about in his mind for a way of getting
over the difficulty. Perhaps if he could get some suitable couple to act as
host and hostess for him—his thoughts had got no further when she impulsively
tightened her clasp on his arm, and cried: