And Be Thy Love (3 page)

“You seem to have found out quite a lot in a short time” Caroline remarked, regarding him for the first time a little suspiciously. “You—you know your way about the house! Are you”—a fresh suspicion entering her mind—”a friend of the Comte de Marsac... ?”

“You have hit upon it right away,” he declared, making her a small, formal bow. “I am Robert de Bergerac—if not de Marsac’s closest friend, at least sufficiently close to win his permission to stay here occasionally—very much at your service! And one of the complications confronting us is that your and my plans seem to have coincided, for I, too, have arrived on a visit...”

“You mean,” in a small, dismayed voice, “that you plan to stay here?”

“Did plan to stay here,” he reassured her, “but, naturally, now there will have to be some amendment to my plans. There is a small cottage in the woods not far from here where I have put up before, and I have no doubt I shall find it fairly habitable.”

“But that wouldn’t be fair to you!” she declared agitatedly. “You are a friend of the Comte, and you have stayed here before. Whereas I -- ”

“‘Whereas you, Mademoiselle Darcy,” with a whimsical gleam in his eyes, “must be a friend very highly esteemed by our excellent Marthe, judging by the preparations she has made for you! There are at least two hot-water bottles in your bed— according to Pierre!—a couple of cooked ducklings in the larder, and enough tarts, cheeses and savouries to propitiate the appetite of a regiment! And what I suggest is that you go straight upstairs to your room, and although old Pierre has an invalid sister whom he cannot leave for long, I will persuade him to bring you a tray of something light—that is if you have no objections to a very withered, very gnarled old man whose age none of us can guess at visiting you in your apartment...?” “/have no objection at all,” she assured him, thinking that he really had got the situation in hand, but feeling horribly guilty because she was about to exclude him from his rightful quarters. “But if the cottage has not been looked after for some time, and is perhaps damp, and in any case not ready for you-------------------------------?”

“Don’t give it a thought,” he said carelessly, as if a damp, unprepared cottage was something he could take in his stride, although from his appearance a far more luxurious background was his daily lot. “After driving all the way from Paris I could sleep like a log in a bivouac to-night! But if you will tell me if there is anything I can do to be of assistance to you ?”

And then she remembered her case, and told him all about it, and the pile of leaves beneath which it was concealed. She looked so concerned at this belated recollection of her few worldly possessions that he promised he would set off and recover them for her without delay; and not for the first time she thought that, although he was obviously a very debonair man of the world, and a little more humour occasionally dwelt in his eyes than the situation, and this disaster that had overtaken Marthe, seemed to call for, there was also something warmly practical about him— as, for instance, when he had prevented her from collapsing on the drive, and decided immediately that she was suffering from pure exhaustion and nothing else. That ought to have commended itself to her, even if she was a little loath for it to do so.

He insisted on holding her arm as they walked out into the hall, and there old Pierre was waiting, as if he had been ordered to do so, and looking a little bewildered, as if the passage of events had stunned him a little. He had a goatee beard, and shoulders so bent that he was practically a hunchback, and his eyes were dim with rheumatism as they looked towards Caroline.

“If you will follow me, mademoiselle, I will show you to your room,” he said.

And then Robert de Bergerac took him aside and said something to him in such rapid French that the English girl couldn’t possibly follow it, and the old man nodded several times.

“It shall be as you say, monsieur. If that is as you wish, monsieur, it shall be as you say!”

But he sounded rather more than surprised, and his rheumy eyes blinked as if he had been taken aback.

Then Caroline was following him up the magnificent staircase, that uncurled like a fan until it reached a gallery overhanging the well of the hall. Their footsteps echoed on the stone floor; faded tapestries fluttered a little on the walls as they passed—father like banners stirring in a sudden current of air—and giant coffers and chests encroached upon the uncarpeted space over which they trod in order to reach a distant wing of the house. But once they reached it, it was well worth it, for the entire dying light of day was concentrated there, like a golden, last-minute benison.

Caroline’s room, with a decidedly old-fashioned bathroom adjoining, enchanted her the moment she entered it. It overlooked a pleasance at the back of the house, and although from the window it was a very overgrown pleasance, its unkemptness, she felt sure, would provide a compelling charm in the daytime. She felt sure she would love to wander there whenever the opportunity was hers.

A smell of white, climbing roses reached her as she stood for a moment beside the open window, and she inhaled deeply. A bat flew past the window, and an owl hooted in some trees close to the house. And as there were so many trees crowding close to the house she had the feeling that there would be many owls hooting.

But she was not one of those people who found the noise of them mournful, and they emphasised the fact that she was deep in the heart of the country at last. All at once, in spite of Marthe’s accident, the concern she felt for her lying in her narrow hospital bed, the depression that had overtaken her because there was to be no one after all to welcome her after her long journey from England,

and the peculiarity of her position in this strange house, a little glow of warmth stole round her heart because she was actually here. She was happy because she had arrived.

Pierre said something about Marthe keeping the boiler so well stoked during the early part of the day that the water would be hot enough for a bath if she wanted one, and she thanked him for the information. He hung about awkwardly, saying he would bring her a tray, as Monsieur de Bergerac had requested; but after that he would have to leave because his sister was nervous of being left alone for long, especially after dark, and her health permitting he would be along in the morning. He was not much of a cook, but he would attend to the breakfast.... An English breakfast if the English mademoiselle insisted upon it....

Caroline tossed her hat on the bed, and slipped out of her jacket, and suddenly she made up her mind. She no longer felt as if the fumes of brandy were clouding her brain, and she no longer felt that overpowering desire to slide between some sheets. The sheets were there on the well-made bed, and they looked as if they would smell fragrantly of lavender or dried rosemary when at last she tested the comfort of the mattress. But in the meantime she could, and would, bestir herself, and Pierre needn’t bother about a tray for her, but could go home at once to his invalid sister. There was food in the larder, and she could make some coffee, and that slim, dark friend of the Comte de Marsac—who, incidentally, might object to her making free with his house when his housekeeper was no longer there; and she would probably have to look for some hotel accommodation in the morning—would probably like some coffee also before seeking that benighted cottage he had mentioned in the woods.

She wasn’t happy about the cottage, and she wondered whether she ought to be the one to offer to spend the night there. But somehow she couldn’t quite see the curiously feline gentleman who called himself Robert of Bergerac agreeing to that.

But she was able to insist on Pierre going home to his sister, and he looked plainly very relieved as he allowed himself to be dismissed. She heard his footsteps echoing along the gallery as he scuttled away, and it wasn’t until she watched him making his shadowy way across the terrace immediately below her window, and taking advantage of a gap in some shrubbery to disappear altogether, that she knew a momentary feeling of nervousness because she was alone in the chateau. A very, very old chateau, with woods shutting it in on three sides.

The primordial forest, as she had thought of it earlier. CHAPTER III

BUT she was in the kitchen, competently getting down to the task of making the coffee when Robert de Bergerac returned with her suit-case.

He stood in the doorway watching her as she stood beneath the cavernous roof, one of Marthe’s aprons tied round her slender middle, her bright hair making a kind of halo for her face as the naked electric-light bulb sent its rays down upon it. The stove was very black and very shiny, and Marthe’s saucepans and kettles were all very shiny also. The big scrubbed kitchen table looked white as milk in the centre of the room, and at the far end the dresser was crowded with china that looked like Willow Pattern.

Caroline had brought out one of the cooked ducklings, and a bowl of salad. She had cut up a crisp, long loaf, and placed butter in a crock, and sliced new potatoes she had found already prepared, and garnished them with mayonnaise and sticks of celery. And now she was watching the coffee bubbling in the percolator, and the smell was filling the kitchen, and Robert de Bergerac remembered once more that he hadn’t stopped for

lunch.

His eyes looked almost wistful with hunger as he stepped into the middle of the kitchen, but he said disapprovingly:

“What is this? Did we not agree upon a tray for you upstairs? Where is Pierre?”

“I sent him home,” Caroline told him. She looked into the brown velvet depths of his eyes, and was glad she had sent Pierre home. “I thought you might need something to eat yourself.”

“I could have attended to myself.”

“Instead of which I have made you some coffee!”

“It smells good,” he admitted. He had left her suit-case in the hall, and now he stood within a foot of her. He looked at her searchingly. “You have recovered,” he said, in faint surprise. “I imagined you were going to be in need of a great deal of attention—perhaps a doctor’s attention!—instead of which you are all at once quite fresh!”

“You gave me rather a strong dose of brandy,” she answered, smiling. “And I’m not used to neat spirit.” “Perhaps not to spirit of any kind?”

“No. Mineral water is my only departure from tea and coffee.” “Mineral water? Ugh!” He made a face, and then pulled out a chair for her at the table. “But you must sit down at once, because you still look as if a strong puff of wind might blow you away.” And then his look gloated over the spread she had set out on the table. “All that is lacking is a bottle of wine, which I have in the car. If you will start carving the duck I will fetch it.”

When he returned she protested that it might be safest if she didn’t touch the wine, but his insistence carried the day. Then, although she hadn’t very much appetite herself, she watched him eat hungrily. The cold duck became less easily recognisable as a cold duck, the bowl of salad emptied, a fruit tart served with cream practically vanished. De Bergerac sighed a little over the quality of the pastry, which, he declared, did Marthe Giraud more than justice.

“But she always had a wonderfully light hand with this sort of flaky pastry that melts in the mouth. I have even watched her make it, and been amazed at her expeditiousness. She is an extraordinary woman—a most capable woman!”

“You know her well?” Caroline asked, as he helped himself to cheese.

“Well?” He paused with his knife poised above a very ripe Camembert. “Of course I know her well! I have known her for years. That is, I have stayed here many times in the last few years.”

“And you also know the Comte de Marsac well?” “Armand?” He inspected the cheese as if he had never seen anything quite like it before. “I have explained that we are close friends, but to say that one knows a man well would be a little unwise. How few people know even themselves really well? Armand has, no doubt, several sides to him, but the side I know I have found reasonably easy to get on with. But that may be because I am reasonably easy to get on with myself.”

He flashed her one of his slightly crooked smiles, which certainly proved that he was not difficult to get to know at the outset, anyway—perhaps because there was something queerly infectious about the twisted attractiveness of that smile, and his eyes were all mellow charm when they were not slightly inscrutable.

“You are not drinking your wine, Miss Darcy,” and he pushed her wine-glass towards her. “Believe me, it is quite innocuous, and there is no slightest danger that you will have to be carried upstairs to your room.”

She flushed, her pale cheek warming as if the blood actually rose in a rush to the exquisitely fair skin, against which the chestnut curls tapped gently with every slightest movement of her head.

His eyes twinkled at her with sudden mischief.

“But I promise you that should it become necessary I will deposit you inside your room without your even noticing how many bends there are to the staircase here, or what a distance it is to the wing in which you have been placed.”

“It seems absurd,” she said quickly, “that I should be occupying an entire wing, while you have to spend the night in a derelict cottage.”

“I haven’t said that it is derelict, but the conventions demand that I do spend the night there even if the roof has collapsed since I last saw the inside if it!” his eyes twinkling still more.

But she looked concerned.

“Is there any likelihood that it has collapsed?”

He shrugged slightly.

“In this world all things are possible, and on the de Marsac estate a great many things are highly probable! You were right about the place going to rack and ruin, but that is because de Marsac has other things to occupy his mind. He is a playwright, you understand? And a playwright has many things to think about that have nothing to do with the preservation of ancient bricks and mortar.”

“Then it is high time he did start thinking about preserving them,” Caroline said a little hotly, with a return of her resentment against the Comte.

“You could be so very right,” de Bergerac agreed, offering her a cigarette from a gold case that appeared to have some sort of a monogram, or crest, engraved on it. “But”—and he shrugged again—”you could also be a little unrealistic, for how may a man keep track of the many cottages he possesses—and the condition of their roofs!—when he lives so many miles away in a big and bustling city?”