To Journey Together (25 page)

"Yes, I know, that's wonderful," Elinor agreed uncertainly. "You mustn't think I don't rejoice for you, or that I--that I presume to tell you what you should do with your inheritance. But—"

"Suppose I offered you the right to tell me what to do with some of it, anyway?" Rudi said quietly. "I don't understand."

"Don't you, Liebling? Would it be such a surprise to you if I told you that I have it in mind to offer you myself and my fortune, to do with what you will?"

His arm was round her now, and Elinor felt, as she had once or twice before, the full force of his personal fascination.

"Rudi—are you—asking me to—marry you?" she said slowly. And, as she did so, a voice out of the recent past—a soft, laughing, indescribably beguiling voice—said, "All the charm in the world, but no real stability. They don't make good husbands, child. I know—I married one."

Against the background of that voice she heard Rudi say, "Of course I am asking you to marry me! Didn't you know that was what I was crazy to do all along? Only, until Leni died and left me half her money, it was just a lovely, impossible indulgence which I could not allow myself."

Elinor was silent, groping in her mind and consciousness for the right reply.

His attraction was indescribably strong upon her. She knew she had only to turn her head and his lips would be on hers. Already she savoured the moment with a delicious thrill of anticipation. But, even while the feel of his nearness excited and fascinated her, his words blew a strange, chill breath upon her eager enthusiasm.

A lovely, impossible indulgence! That was how she had seemed to him, if it meant working or making sacrifices for her.

"You mean," she said gently, "that you love me very much, so long as marrying me entails no discomfort for you?"

"Elinor! I don't understand you. What possible discomfort could marrying you mean for me?"

"None—now. It would have been quite different if you had had to work for me."

He frowned.

"You're being rather hard on me, my darling. I never pretended to be other than I am. I'm not the stuff of which struggling, self-sacrificing husbands

are made. And, frankly, I'd never ask any woman I loved to share such an existence. But the position doesn't arise now. I can offer you myself—and a reasonably comfortable life. I do that, with all my heart. Must you hold it against me that I'm not offering you a noble and struggling existence?"

"No, Rudi. I don't hold it against you. I like you very, very much as you are," Elinor said slowly. "I just don't love you—or else I shouldn't be so regretfully aware of the weaknesses in you."

He drew away from her sharply.

"You do love me! Only you've set some sort of ridiculously idealized standard of behaviour which you think I should live up to. You mustn't expect people to be heroes, Liebling. Take them as they are and love them with their faults as well as their virtues."

"I do," Elinor said, almost gently. "But I couldn't really love and marry a man I didn't respect."

Most men would have been angry at that point, but Rudi took the implied criticsm quietly.

"You don't respect me, then? Because I can keep you in reasonable comfort without working for you?"

"No." She smiled a little. "I'm not so unreasonable as that. There are certain things which test us—and our friends, Rudi—and however much we like them and excuse them and try not to judge them, we assess our friends by the way they react to those tests."

"And, to you, the test was that I wouldn't ask you to share my life until I knew we could do it in comfort together?"

"I was thinking of Anton, too," she said almost absently.

"Anton? What has he to do with this?"

"Only that it was more to you to have all the money, knowing that Anton had been done out of his share by a fluke, than to have part of the money and the reassuring knowledge that Leni's real wishes had been carried out."

"The will was explicit enough," Rudi exclaimed impatiently.

She did turn her head then and look at him, but her expression did not encourage him to kiss her.

"We are not talking the same language, Rudi," she said, in that curiously gentle tone. "You have been a good and charming friend to me, and I know that I owe a great deal to you for the development of the last few weeks. I'll always be grateful to have known you, and you've given me the most wonderfully happy hours—you and Ilsa. But I am not the wife for you, my dear, and you are not the husband for me. We think and feel too differently ever to be one. That's all there is to it."

He stared at her in wordless astonishment, longing evidently to find words in which to refute her arguments. But, even as she spoke and he remained silent, the balance between them seemed subtly and curiously to shift. She was no longer the young, unknown girl, feeling her inexperienced way under the careless, kindly guidance of the man of the world. She spoke from some inner wisdom beyond his grasp —and it was he who seemed suddenly young and unsure.

"I'm sorry." He got up, accepting defeat as gracefully as he had accepted all the other unwelcome things in his life. "There's nothing else to say, is there?"

"Nothing. Except that I shall always like you and remember you." And, putting her hands on his arms, she reached up and kissed him almost tenderly.

"Darling—" his arms went round her—"are you quite sure of your decision?"

"Quite sure."

"It's the other fellow, isn't it?—Kenneth."

She thought of Kenneth, speeding through the night, carrying with him the anger and hurt which she had inflicted upon him, and she winced as though she herself were hurt.

"Perhaps. It isn't for me to say."

Rudi smiled down at her. "He'll never love you with quite the romantic understanding that I should,

you know. It isn't in him to do so," he said with a touch of outrageous self-appraisal.

"If he should love me with the integrity that is in him, I shouldn't ask more," Elinor retorted. Then she regretted the frankness of her confession, and putting her hand against Rudi's lips, she said, "Please don't say any more. I have said too much already."

Even then, Rudi would have held her and pleaded his cause again, but she gently freed herself from his grasp.

"Good night, Rudi."

"Good night." He caught her hand for a moment. "There is always tomorrow, and I shall not cease to hope."

She did not answer that. It was not for her to start a fresh argument by the assertion that for them there was no tomorrow. Instead, she smiled at him with all the genuine friendliness she felt, and then left him and went to her room.

As soon as she was there and safely alone, she went over to the open window and stood looking out over the shadows and lights of the city. A subdued hum drifted up to her, that indefinable mixture of sounds which belongs to every city and which holds a different note for each.

"I feel old," Elinor said aloud. "At least, I no longer feel young and inexperienced. It isn't only that I've had my first proposal and refused it. It's that, however stumbling my words and explanations might be, I arrived at my own scale of values and measured it against that of someone else. I wish," she thought, with a sigh, "that I'd been half as sensible and well-balanced in my dealings with Kenneth."

And then she fell to thinking what Rudi had said about her being in love with Kenneth, and for the first time she allowed herself to reflect how much Kenneth had come to mean to her in the last—days —weeks?—which was it?

Hard to say exactly when it was that each thought and action had taken on a special significance if

associated with him. He had just been there and so she had taken him a little for granted, she supposed now. But how completely at one they had been during these happy days in Rome. How inevitably they liked the same things, thrilled to the same discoveries.

No wonder he had looked as though she had struck him when he thought she was telling him that it was nothing to her if he went or stayed.

"If only I could take that back," she thought restlessly. "Take it back much, much more quickly and completely than by letter."

Even though she had written at once, it must be so long until he knew that a mistake had been made, and that she was not the callous, uncaring girl she must have appeared to be.

Not that she wanted him to know how much she cared. Just—that she cared. Just to put that right, and then to go on from there. Perhaps with a much more formal and remote relationship, such as there was bound to be in the office, but at least with kindness and understanding between them.

She stepped out on to her little wrought-iron balcony and leaned her arms on the rail. It was quiet in the street below, and quieter still in the grounds of the big villa opposite, so that the sound of a taxi turning the corner and drawing up before the hotel sounded unnaturally loud.

Idly Elinor leaned over further and watched while a man stepped out of the taxi and stood there for a moment paying the driver. Then he turned, as someone came from the hotel to collect the luggage, and in a moment was gone from her range of vision.

But even the glimpse had been enough. Or surely, surely she was right in thinking it was enough! By every rule of cause and effect, Kenneth should be in the aeroplane, halfway between Rome and London by now. And yet—she could not have been mistaken —surely it was he who had stepped from the taxi and come into the hotel below.

Turning back into the room, Elinor ran to the door and wrenched it open. She left her handbag on the bed, her key in the lock, thereby violating every rule Lady Connelton had carefully instilled into her about caution when travelling, and ran along the corridor to the lift.

There was no answer to her urgent ringing of the bell, and, unable to wait, she started down the several flights of stairs.

She could not have been wrong, she told herself as she ran. However unreasonable her belief might be, it refused to be shaken. Kenneth had come back, for some inexplicable reason, and she must see him and explain.

The last flight of stairs stretched before her, and beyond them an uninterrupted view of the almost empty entrance hall. Almost empty—but one person at least was there. The only one who mattered. As she literally jumped the last three stairs, Kenneth came towards her.

"Oh, Ken—Ken--" She ran to him with outstretched hands, all thought of reserve or discretion gone in the immensity of her relief. "You came back —you came back! It wasn't true that I didn't mind your going. It was a mistake. I thought you meant something else. I hated your going.

"For heaven's sake, my darling!" He stopped dead as he saw her coming. Then he opened his arms and she ran straight into them, aware suddenly that she was crying and that he was kissing her over and over again.

"I DON'T understand a thing you're talking about," Kenneth said, kissing the top of her head, as she gave a luxurious sob or two against his shoulder. "But it isn't necessary, I daresay, if you feel like this."

"Where did you come from?" Elinor gasped, hugging him tightly. "I thought you were miles away."

"I should be. But there was engine trouble and we had to turn back. I've been cursing all the way from the airfield. But now I'm glad. Here—" suddenly he became aware that a delighted and romantically inclined clerk at the reception desk was enjoying all this immensely—"suppose we go somewhere where we can talk."

Inevitably he led her towards the little paved garden. But so absorbed was Elinor in the joy of the moment that she forgot all about the fact that it was here that Rudi had proposed to her no more than an hour ago. And although they sat down on the very same bench together, she never even noticed the fact until long afterwards—when the thought gave her more amusement than embarrassment.

"Now," Kenneth said, taking out his handkerchief and drying her tears with more efficiency than romantic tenderness, "will you tell me what this is all about?"

So she told him—still catching her breath on an occasional after-sob—how she had thought he was referring to the arrival of the von Eibergs, when all the time he was gloomy over the sudden necessity for his own departure for England.

"And when I found that I must have made you

think I didn't mind if you went or stayed, I didn't

know what to do! I wrote at once, but I knew it

would be ages before you got the letter. I couldn't

bear to think I'd hurt you so much and couldn't—"

"Did you know how much?" He smiled and

ruffled her hair very gently. "Did you know that I

thought the girl I loved best in the world had just given me the brush-off?"

"Oh, Ken—is that true? That—that you think of me like that, I mean?"

"Of course, it's true, my silly little sweet. Didn't you know it?"

"One never knows it until it's actually said, Ken." She smiled rather tremulously at him. "One wonders, of course—and hopes—"

"Did you hope, darling?"

"I wanted you to love me," Elinor said simply.

"Oh, how sweet you are! You never pretend," Kenneth exclaimed, and scooped her up in his arms. "What about that confounded Rudi von Eiberg now?"