Love in High Places (12 page)

“Please!” Valentine begged, the colour rising in a most revealing fashion in her cheeks, “I would prefer not to hear you criticise your grandson like this!”

“But why not, child?” the Countess inquired with rising amusement, while she went on subjecting Valentine to her disturbingly concentrated searchlight gaze.
“Because you think I am being unfair, or because
—
if you owned all those oil wells we were talking about just now
—
it would be you who would be shouldering the burden of Alex’s debts?” At the abashed look on the girl’s face she extended a conciliatory hand, and her voice grew softer. “Don’t imagine I am easily deceived about anything, my dear, and when I saw you and Alex look at one another yesterday lunch time
—
and when I saw his face late last night and realised that he is very unhappy!
—
there was no longer any need for either of you to attempt to pull wool over my eyes!”

Valentine could say nothing, but her face had turned absolutely scarlet. The Countess looked at her almost pityingly.

“If I made it easy for Alex to marry you instead of that Morgan creature, that would be no way out for either of you, my dear,” she told her solemnly. “It would probably be but the beginning of your troubles, for Alex is like his grandfather, and only through a certain amount of personal suffering can he ever be made worth while. He must find out what it is like to live simply
—
and by that I mean for the sheer pleasure of living and loving, giving as well as receiving!
—
and then there will be some hope for him. When he wants something ... or
someone
—
so much that he is prepared to make sacrifices, even a supreme sacrifice!
...
Then I shall feel quite happy about the whole of his future, but I cannot help him to find himself. Money will not do that.”

The colour died slowly in Valentine’s cheeks, and she sat very still on her chair. She knew that she had been listening to a statement of truth, and she knew also that the likelihood of the Baron von Felden being willing to sacrifice his whole way of life in order to buy a simple form of happiness, and make the woman he professed to love happy, was completely and absolutely remote.

Indeed, it could never happen. She was so shatteringly sure of that that she no longer felt embarrassment because she had given herself away to the Countess, and she no longer even attempted to say anything. She merely looked straight at the Countess with shadowed golden eyes that were like dark pools of honey untouched by sunlight, and scarcely a ray of hope.

“Of course,” the Countess said softly, bending nearer to her to touch her cheek, “miracles do sometimes happen, and it is unwise to dismiss them altogether
...
But I think your Lou will win, my dear. Hands down!”

Later that day Lou came downstairs, but she offered no apology to her hostess for remaining so long in her room. And as the Countess had her so thoroughly summed up that she didn’t even expect an apology there was no awkward atmosphere.

During the afternoon all the younger members of the house-party at the
schloss
went out into the white wonder of the world surrounding it for some exercise, and somehow Germaine and Haversham got paired off, Lou saw to it that the Baron made up for his distant mood of the night before and was inconstant attendance on herself, and Valentine discovered a little frozen garden at the back of the
schloss
and wandered there for a while by herself.

It was such a lonely, tucked-away,
abandoned
garden that it appealed to her. It wouldn’t appeal to Lou at all. If she ever became mistress of the
schloss
she would probably have it blotted out of existence, and a hard tennis court or a swimming pool put down in its place.

Valentine spent the entire afternoon imagining all the things Lou would do when she was mistress of the
schloss.
And if she ever heard about the girl at the flower shop, or the wild party Alex threw to drown his sorrows, how would she react to the information when it reached her at last
?
... And that sort of information always does, sooner or later!
...
How would she really and truly
feel
?
...

That night
—
perhaps because Alex hadn’t been quite as attentive as she felt he ought to be in order to make up for the night before
—
Lou was in rather a strange mood, and openly professed herself so bored that something had to be done to relieve the boredom. The only thing Alex could think of was that they should dance to a portable gramophone he had upstairs in his own apartments, and he brought it down into the banqueting-hall, the few rugs were taken up, and the dancing session commenced.

The Countess sat in the main salon behind a screen, and Willi von Hochenberg sat with her. Valentine would have preferred to sit with them, but Haversham was determined to prevent anything of that sort happening. Although he discovered Germaine to be a delightful dancer, and in her odd, perverse mood Lou insisted upon him acting as her partner for every second dance, he attached himself to Valentine at every opportunity that provided itself.

“Where did you disappear to this afternoon?” he wanted to know, in rather a hurt voice, while she was acting as record changer. “I quite thought you would join up with Germaine and myself, but you vanished.”

“I merely found a little garden at the back of the
schloss
that was pleasant to wander in,” she said. “Besides,” looking at him with mildly amused eyes, “haven’t you yet discovered that two is company, and three is a crowd
?
”

“Of course I have,” he answered, almost fiercely. “And don’t imagine for one instant that I wanted to go off alone with Germaine ... although she’s a charming girl,” he added, watching her as she drifted by in the arms of her handsome relative, the Baron, while Lou lay sulkily curled up on a tapestry-covered couch, and smoked a cigarette and listened to the music broodingly. “A much better type than that fellow Felden!”

Valentine glanced for an instant at Felden, and then attended to the business of changing the gramophone record.

“They’re cousins,” she said quietly, “and they probably have a good many characteristics in common.”

“I don’t think so,” Giles replied. Then he caught her hand impatiently as she turned to sort the pile of records. “Valentine, I know you were a bit angry with me last night, but I had to let your grandfather know where he could find you! But although I think it’s important you should have a reunion with him, there is something else that is even more important, and I must talk to you about it
...
”

She glanced at him in dismay. She was beginning to be afraid that he was growing serious about her, and since she could never be serious about him she didn’t want to have the unpleasantness of telling him the true position. He had just admitted that he thought Germaine charming, and she thought him charming
...
But that was as far as it went.

She struggled with a recalcitrant switch, and when it wouldn’t move he bent to assist her.

“Valentine, there are heaps of empty rooms here. Let’s slip away and find one, and as soon as we’re alone I’ll tell you what I should have told you without any waste of time. For I think we both know that some things are quite inevitable
...
”

“No, no,” she said involuntarily, in a sort of panic, and the shadow of the Baron fell across them and their temporarily
l
inked hands. For the second time, as she glanced up and met the slumbrous darkness of his look, she made a far too obvious withdrawal of her fingers from Haversham’s, and as the obstinate switch remained as immovable as ever the guilt in the action was somehow underlined.

Alex bent suavely above the gramophone.

“Allow me,” he said, set the thing in motion, and turned to Valentine. His mouth and chin looked oddly set, and, so far as he was concerned, Haversham might not have existed. “We’ll have this one, shall we?” he said, and waltzed her away to the shadows at the far end of the room.

Lou, reclining on her couch, watched them go, watched through steadily narrowing eyes as the shadow engulfed them, then ground out her cigarette in a convenient ashtray and smiled brilliantly, invitingly, up into Haversham’s face. Within a matter of seconds they were circling the floor, not with any enjoyment, but for precisely similar reasons
...
because they had each been temporarily abandoned.

Valentine
—
who had so often dreamed of dancing with Alex
—
had little time to enjoy the experience. There were a few heady moments when his arms were round her, when the scent of his after-shave lotion and the fragrance of his specially-blended cigarettes, which clung about him, were in her nostrils, and she wanted to close her eyes and forget everything but the sensation of bliss that was rising up all around her like a cloud; but Alex himself dragged her ruthlessly back to reality by propelling her between a pair of folding doors that admitted to a kind of ante-room, and shutting out the music as he slammed the doors to behind them. It was just as if a light had been switched off, or a cacophony of sound extinguished at the lift of a finger; and in the ante-room there were only a couple of guttering candles to show them each other’s face. But such feeble illumination as they provided was enough.

Valentine looked up into Alex’s face and realised that it was white with rage, and his glittering unfamiliar eyes alarmed her. But what disturbed her was the tormented twist to his shapely mouth.

“Valentine,” he said, as if he had difficulty in getting the words out, “if you don’t want me to do something violent you will keep away from that man! You won’t let him
touch
you!”

She felt suddenly icily cool and composed. So that was it!
...
Simple, primitive jealousy which he had no right to feel! She could be torn apart by jealousy, but he hadn’t any intention of sparing her! He went out of his way to ensure that she should know the agonies of jealousy several times a day, and last night only Willi Hochenberg had saved her the humiliation of coming upon the man she loved with the woman he didn’t pretend to love in his arms.

The whole thing was becoming an impossible, revolting, one-sided experience from which she recoiled as she would recoil from the thought of something definitely amoral and wrong.

She decided to ignore the outburst.

“Why have you brought me here
?
” she asked.

“We’re not staying here,” he told her. “This is no place for the kind of conversation you and I must have. The facing up to a few truths!” There was a thickness in his speech that was new to her, and she was aware that he was perfectly sober. He was not greatly interested in the contents of his wine cellar, and
—
in point of fact
—
apart from his love of luxury in his surroundings, his apparently incurable weakness for fine linen and high quality clothes, ease and elegance in his daily
l
ife, he was no true lot
u
s-eater, and not even particularly self-indulgent. He was fastidious
—
far more fastidious than Lou could ever be!
—
and perhaps that was one reason why she could never honestly appeal to him; and there was even a degree of asceticism in him at times, which Valentine had detected from the first. It warred with his sybaritic instincts, and showed up plainly when he was either bored or dissatisfied
...
possibly, more often than not, with himself! “There is a fire in the library
...
”

She laughed, briefly, and a little cruelly, for she regarded this as the final straw.

“You’re not in the least original, are you
?
” she said. “Why, do you know that, last night, when I was being shown over the house by Count Willi, we both very nearly blundered into the library where you were so busily engaged in making love to Lou that I don’t suppose you even noticed the interruption? And now you suggest that you and I have a little ‘conversation’ in the library!”

The mockery in her voice was so rasping, and so undisguised, that he actually turned paler. He caught her by her slender shoulders, and his fingers dug hard into her soft flesh.

“Listen to me,” he said, in that strange, muffled voice of his, “I didn’t ask Willi to take you to the library! And I wasn’t making love to Lou!
She
was
making love to me
—
Or trying to!”

“That’s a caddish thing to say,” Valentine told him, contempt in her golden eyes.

“Very likely,” he agreed at once. “But then, according to you, I am several different kinds of cad, and all of them quite beyond the understanding of anyone like yourself!” A look flashed into his eyes that hurt her so much that she wanted to reach up and touch his face and beg him not to look like that. And if only it had been possible to forget, even for a moment, everything but himself, she would have caught his face between her hands and done something about that twisted look of unhappiness that altered the shape of his mouth
...
perhaps touched it with her own lips, and even the thought of doing that made her heart labour heavily. So heavily that she was certain he could see the result of it in the quickened pulse at the base of her throat. “You couldn’t understand your father’s inability to cope with things, so how can you understand me
?
”

“My father, at least, had a moral code,” she answered stiffly.

His fingers released her shoulders.

“If you have so strong an objection to the library we will not talk there,” he said, almost as if she had done or said something to sting him. “But to-morrow we will have to talk. I will arrange something.”