To Journey Together (16 page)

With her heart thumping almost audibly, Elinor stood stock still. She thought that could not possibly be the voice of an old lady—and yet who else but the mistress of the place would call in that authoritative manner?

As she waited, the words were repeated, and although Elinor did not know their meaning, there was no mistaking the tone.

"She heard my footsteps, and she's calling me!" thought Elinor, in sudden scared comprehension.

With frightened reluctance, and yet unable to resist the command in that tone, she went forward to the door. Here she hesitated again, but as she did so, the voice said unmistakably, "Herein!" And even Elinor knew that was an order to come in.

With the blue taffeta dress still draped over her arm, she pushed open the door and entered.

IT was not until later that Elinor looked around and noticed anything about the room itself. In the first moment her attention was riveted by the sole occupant — a slim, straight, exquisitely elegant woman who sat in a high-backed chair by the window, her beautifully modelled hands resting with natural grace on the arms of the chair.

Her hair was white and piled rather high on her head, but her skin had the warmth and texture one associates with a young woman, and the beautiful bone structure of her face and the almost terrifyingly keen dark eyes gave an air of alertness and vitality impossible to attribute to a woman in her eighties.

"So," she said, speaking in English, but with an accent, "you are the little English girl of whom Rudi and Ilsa were speaking?"

"Yes, Madame," agreed Elinor timidly, instinctively according her this form of address.

"There is no need to be afraid. Come here and let me look at you. I am curious to see anyone who can make Rudi fall in love with her."

"Oh, Madame!" Elinor obediently came nearer. "Rudi is not at all in love with me. He thinks I am quaint and nice because he has not met anyone like me before. But that is all."

"Sometimes it is enough," said the old lady, and laughed softly. A laugh so infinitely attractive that Elinor guessed she had once been famous for it.

"You are very young. And very serious for one so young. Young people should be gay," went on the old lady arbitrarily.

Elinor smiled then.

"I am twenty-one," she said. "And I am not always serious. I was a little—scared to meet anyone so famous as you are."

"Ai, ai! My fame, as you call it, was fading before you were born. What do you know about it?" was the reply, but she was not displeased, Elinor saw.

---.

"I was also feeling a little guilty because you find me holding something which belongs to you—" Elinor indicated the blue taffeta dress—"and I feel that I ought to have had your permission before I touched it."

"So? Ilsa gave you this, of course?"

"We—we were both looking for something to wear at a fancy dress dance," Elinor explained, bravely taking half the blame. "Ilsa thought you would not mind, provided we asked your permission before we actually borrowed the things."

The old lady laughed sarcastically.

"Ilsa is not always so correct. The von Eibergs are all the same. They take first and explain afterwards. All the charm in the world, but no real stability. Don't marry Rudi, child. They don't make good husbands. I know—I married one."

Elinor felt profoundly uncomfortable at this casual disclosure.

"They are delightful and amusing. They are even warm-hearted, in their way. But as husbands —" she shook her head and smiled reminiscently—"no!"

"I assure you, Madame, I have no intention of marrying Rudi," Elinor exclaimed. "Also I am perfectly certain he has no intention of marrying me. So—"

"No?" The old lady looked considering. "In practical fact, of course, he cannot think about it, because it will be necessary for him to marry money whenever he does marry. But, though I have seen many girls intrigued by Rudi, this is the first time I have known him speak as though he were intrigued in return."

Elinor thought passingly of Lady Connelton's use of the same word.

"Please don't tell me
anymore
," she begged. "It embarrasses me, and will spoil my very nice friendship with him. Will you tell me instead if you mind my trying on this very beautiful dress, which I'm afraid I really have no right to be carrying."

"Not if you let me see you in it."

The old lady put out a hand and softly smoothed the folds of the dress Elinor was holding.

"I looked very well in it," she said without false modesty, and smiled. "A very stupid play, I think, if I remember rightly. All about Marie Antoinette as a girl. But I made all Vienna cry in the scene where I left my native Austria to go and marry in France." And she repeated a few phrases to herself in German, and the incredible voice took on the fluting, melancholy tones of a homesick girl.

"Oh, I wish I could have seen you!" Elinor exclaimed.

"Well—you see me now."

"But I mean on the stage—when you were a famous actress."

"Before I became old and ugly," suggested Leni Mardenburg, secure in the fact that she was still infinitely attractive.

"No, of course I didn't mean that! You are marvellous still. And when you said those few phrases you sounded like a girl. I just meant that I wish I had known you before you retired."

"Ai, ai—" the half sighing exclamation seemed a favourite one with her—"that was a long time ago, my child. I retired soon after I married Julius von Eiberg."

"That was the father of Rudi and Ilsa?"

"Yes."

"Was he—like them?"

"He was good-looking in the way they are. He had even less sense of responsibility," the old lady explained without rancour. "By nature he was a gambler."

Elinor looked slightly startled and said quickly, "They are neither of them that."

"They cannot afford to be," was the dry retort. "Were Rudi and Ilsa quite children when their father married you?"

"They were in their teens. Rudi was already as handsome as the devil, and Ilsa a very pretty girl. They came to Vienna sometimes, but we preferred,

their father and I, to have them remain in Hungary with their grandmother as much as possible." "Why?" Elinor could not help asking.

She received an amused glance from those brilliant dark eyes.

"For one thing, I liked, as you English say, the centre of the picture, and intelligent children in their teens are very much to be noticed. For another thing," she added practically, "I thought it was not good for them to see how their father wasted his money. This is something very easy to learn and not so easy to forget. "

"You thought of their own good, then?"

"At this date, I could not tell you whether I thought of their good or mine," the old lady retorted with smiling candour. "I did not have them—that is all. Now, of course, they are welcome to stay here from time to time. But they are really no concern of mine." And, although she continued to smile, she seemed almost literally to wash her hands of them.

"I should have thought," Elinor ventured to say, "that it would be nice to have them as part of one's family."

"But that, I don't doubt, is because you are a kind, warm-hearted child," replied the old lady, her dark eyes snapping and sparkling with amusement. "In all probability, you think naturally in terms of family life."

"Yes," Elinor said soberly. "I belong to a very happy family myself."

"This is something different." An almost indulgent look came into the older woman's eyes for a moment. "For me there was never anything like that. All my life I stood alone. I worked—as only stage people work—for everything I have now around me. I owe nothing to any man, except perhaps to the stage director who gave me my first chance. For such as I am it is better to remain alone."

"But you did marry," Elinor pointed out.

"We all make one mistake," was the quick retort. Then the old lady laughed, without rancour. "He was charming, and I will not say that I would wish

to have been without the years with him. But you will find, my child, as you grow older, that there are really only three kinds of people in every country and every society. They are the able, the weak and the lazy. If you are yourself among the able, you pity—you may even love—the weak or the lazy, but you will always in your heart despise them." She paused for a moment. Then she drew herself up slightly and said, with a simplicity that was somehow superb, "I was among the able."

"I think," Elinor said slowly, "that no one could improve on that as a final verdict."

"Well—I am aware that it is not complete." Again the dark eyes sparkled with amusement. "In my time, I have also been vain and selfish and capricious." She said this carelessly, almost as though she were listing virtues. "But I have never been lazy. That is why you see so much that is beautiful in this apartment now. And that," she admitted with a faintly malicious little chuckle, "is why it amuses me to keep them all guessing about what is to happen to all this when I am gone."

"O-oh," said Elinor, to whose warm and generous heart it seemed a rather doubtful form of pleasure.

"Sometimes they think I will live for ever, and they are a little impatient

"Oh, no! I am sure they are not!"

"—but until I am gone none of them will know how all this—" her comprehensive yet graceful gesture seemed to embrace the whole of the crowded apartment—"has been left. And so they are all nice to me, and make me feel important still."

Elinor was somewhat shocked by this frank exposition of the situation, but she looked upon the one-time feted, admired and courted Leni Mardenburg with compassion too. For it must be sad, she thought, to know in one's heart that one's principal power now rested simply on the promise of favours after one's death or the threat of their withdrawal.

She was just wondering what suitable comment she could make upon it all when they both heard Ilsa's light, quick step coming down the stairs.

"There is Ilsa. Call her in," the old lady said commandingly.

So Elinor went to the door—somewhat startling Ilsa, obviously, by her appearance there—and said, "Your stepmother would like you to come in, Ilsa. She called me in when I came downstairs first, and she has been talking to me."

Ilsa recovered herself almost immediately—it took a great deal to disconcert her entirely—and merely murmured as she passed Elinor and came into the room, "Don't mind her if she tries to scare you. It's just her way of feeling power still."

Elinor thought that, on the whole, she had not found old Madame Mardenburg scaring. Only very interesting and a little startling in her unexpected confidences and her frank expressions of opinion.

Upon Ilsa the old lady bent a rather sarcastic glance. And, although she spoke in German, Elinor thought from the tone that she was being somewhat caustic about the easy appropriation of her property.

Ilsa, however, was smiling and apparently at ease as she made some explanation.

Elinor, watching the expressions with all the more attention because she could not follow the words that were being said, saw the old lady smile dryly in her turn. She inclined her head, as though accepting the explanation, but as Ilsa turned away, Elinor saw those bright, knowledgeable dark eyes follow her with a glance of speculative amusement that was completely without illusion.

To Elinor, however, she said quite gently, "Go now, child, and try on the dress. And then come back and let me see you in it."

"Thank you so much." For a moment Elinor stood beside the handsome, high-backed chair, and smiled into those beautiful, dark, yet disconcerting eyes which had seen so many, many things and people. "I hope so much that it fits me. I can't even imagine what fun it must be to wear anything so perfectly lovely."

"It is fun," the old lady agreed, giving the word a peculiar and engaging intonation. "Particularly

when there is someone special there to share the fun. But—" she glanced after her stepdaughter who was just going out of the room, then, leaning towards Elinor, she added, with a charming air of conspiracy —"but not Rudi, remember, except for very light and passing fun."

Then, with a peremptory little nod, she dismissed Elinor, who, half embarrassed and half amused, flushed slightly and laughed, but made no real reply before going off in the wake of Ilsa.

Back in Ilsa's room once more, they began immediately to change into their masquerade dresses, and while they did so, Ilsa asked how it was Elinor had come to be involved in a visit to her stepmother.

Elinor explained.

"I suppose she felt curious about you," Ilsa said. "Sometimes she is like that. And then at other times she obstinately refuses to take the faintest interest in anything we are doing."

Elinor smiled and made some suitable reply. She saw no necessity to repeat the old lady's remark that "she was curious to see anyone who could make Rudi fall in love with her". That, after all, was simply the inquisitive and rather mischievous fancy of an old lady who had nothing better to think about. Instead, she said, "She was very kind to me, really, and spoke most interestingly about the time when she herself wore this dress."