Rose in the Bud (16 page)

In point of fact, Cathleen’s answers were so vague and unsatisfactory that the customer appeared to resent them, and being unfamiliar with this form of treatment—she was not the kind of traveller who had to wait for a legacy before she set off on a journey—she declined to purchase the book that would have solved most of her problems for her and walked out of the shop.

Cathleen realised that for the first time since he engaged her she had failed her employer without any real excuse, and when she took his afternoon tea into him in his inner office she felt strongly tempted to apologise. The reason she didn’t do so was because he might have asked embarrassing questions.

He was a man about the same age as Edouard Moroc, although not the least like him in appearance, and ever since he first set eyes on Cathleen he had been toying with the idea of marrying her. She was pretty, she was businesslike—when her mind was free from cares—and she would make an excellent partner in the shop, perfectly capable of being left in charge during the not infrequent occasions when the pursuit of elusive manuscripts took
him
down into the country, or even abroad, to attend the sales that could increase the valuable side of his stock.

Once, and once only, had Cathleen listened to a fairly impassioned plea from him to be allowed to
take
her out. But the evening had ended in such a way she vowed never to be tempted into feeling sorry for him again. It was on that celebrated occasion that her first kiss had been thrust on her, and it was not at all the kind of kiss she had allowed herself to dream about. If it had been repeated, or she had had any difficulty in restraining her employer’s ardour, the girl would have found it necessary to exchange him for another employer, and the fact that she had not so far done so was undoubtedly one of the reasons that he still lived in hopes of wearing down her resistance one of these days. After all, as he argued to himself, for a girl in her position he was not a bad catch; and when she told him about her recent legacy it was he who advised her to take a short holiday and then put the rest in the bank.

He didn’t suggest that she handed over half of it to her mother.

Cathleen was always a little loath to enter his private sanctum when she knew he was alone there, because she was secretly reasonably certain that he had not entirely given up hope where she was concerned. But to-day she was too preoccupied and too unhappy to be capable of behaving with her usual caution and withdrawing immediately, and on the point of telling him about the customer she had unwittingly offended she realised that he didn’t want to hear anything about books from her just then.

He allowed her to place his teacup on his desk in front of him, and then skilfully captured her fingers before she had time to withdraw them.

“Cathleen,” he said softly, “why do you look as if the end of the world happened while you were away? Was it because you expected too much, and it didn’t materialise
?
”

“Perhaps,” she replied cautiously, and snatched her hand away and hid it behind her.

He smiled at her.

“Come, come, you can be more specific than that! Did you, or did you not, have a good time?”

“Y-yes.”

“A very good time?”

“A very good time.”

He sat looking up at her for a moment, and then he shook his head.

“I don’t believe you, Cathleen,” he said bluntly. “I believe the whole trip was a disappointment to you, and that’s why you came back sooner than we expected you. And now that you’re back I think you and I ought to start to get to know each other a little better. I think it’s high time you forgot that I made a fool of myself the last time I took you out and let me take you out again. What about to-night
?
”

Cathleen made a tremendous effort not to let him see that she actually recoiled from the very idea.

“No, I’m afraid not,” she answered.

“To-morrow night?”

“I won’t be free.”

He sat back in his chair—and that fact in itself annoyed Cathleen, for Edouard Moroc—and even Paul di Rini—would never have remained seated while she stood in front of them. He adopted an attitude of patience, and reminded her that he had been patient for three years.

“But I’ve everything to gain and nothing to lose by waiting for you, Cathleen, and if you don’t want to be hurried
... well, I won’t hurry you. But surely it wouldn’t hurt you to be a little kinder to me sometimes, to allow me to take you out to dinner, say, once a week, and to the cinema occasionally. The winter’s coming on—” Cathleen shivered, recalling Italian skies and the liquid golden light of Venice—“and you must find it very dull just going straight home and sitting watching television, or something like that. When will you agree to come out with me?”

“Never,” Cathleen answered, in the clear, cold decisive accents of one who had already been driven hard that day, but declined to be driven any longer.

She backed out of the door, closed it behind her swiftly, and then turned to make the discovery that the shop was entirely empty apart from her fellow assistant, who was cataloguing new books in a
corner
, and a man who had obviously just come in and was approaching a shelf of books in the opposite
corner
.

As Cathleen, seething with resentment because her employer had seized upon this first day of her return to work to press his unwanted attentions, glanced curiously in the direction of the customer who was more elegant than most who found their way to the shop—with a curious, rather un-English kind of elegance—she thought that there was something fa
miliar
about him, and she realised that it was the way he held his reasonably broad shoulders, the glimpse of a lean dark cheek that was averted from her, and the beautifully barbered back of a well-shaped dark head and tanned neck disappearing into an immaculately laundered collar.

She felt as if her whole inner being dissolved into a kind of jelly inside her, and at the same time her heart gave a tremendous, utterly unbelieving leap.

Edouard! It couldn’t—it couldn’t be Edouard...
?

He turned towards her, and she realised that it was indeed Edouard. A little smile, half rueful, half whimsical, and wholly pleading, appeared to curve his lips. He walked swiftly across the floor to her and asked in a voice with a very, very faint and infinitely attractive accent:

“Do you, by any chance, happen to have a good book on Italy,
mademoiselle
?
”

The books on the shelves whirled round Cathleen. She put out a hand to steady herself on the tiny desk at which she often worked.

“What—what are you doing here
?
” she demanded. Edouard smiled at her. It was the dark, attractive smile she remembered, and for the first time it was wholly tender.

“I’ve come to collect you, little one,” he said softly. “Where do you keep your hat? Or don’t you bother to wear a hat in London
?
”

CHAPTER X

Cathleen w
as never afterwards quite clear what she said or did in those moments of utter astonishment. She had some vague idea that her fellow assistant stood gaping on the other side of the shop, and her employer emerged from his lit
tl
e room and stood staring, too.

Because she had had nothing to eat all day, and had been living in a state divorced from reality and highly charged with emotional anguish since she left Venice, there were even a few moments when the shop was inclined to sway round her, and Edouard’s face—if it really was Edouard’s face!—constituted for a brief while a kind of dark familiar blur in front of her eyes. And then her employer stepped forward and said, rather sharply:

“Is there something wrong, Miss Brown? Is this gentleman—?”

The gentleman turned on
him.

“You’ll have to excuse Miss Brown for the remainder of the day,” he said. “In fact, I don’t
think
she’ll be coming back at all.” The lofty disdain for anything so unimportant in the Comte de Moroc’s scheme of things as a rather uninspiring little
man in horn-rimmed
spectacles, who dealt in musty, if valuable, tomes, as well as brightly jacketed
modern
novels, with which he elected to surround himself, was so blatantly expressed in his arrogant tone that Cathleen’s fellow worker allowed her mouth to actually drop open. As for her employer, he began to protest indignantly.

“But really, this is most unorthodox in the middle of the afternoon! Cathleen, if you wish to go home you can do so, but I must have a satisfactory explanation in the morning.”

“Get your things,” the Comte commanded, giving Cathleen a gentle push.

For one moment she was prepared to yield to the push, and then her sense of the fitness of things asserted itself, and she also protested.

“But I can’t! Not until after five o’clock!..
.”

Edouard took her by the arm and conducted her towards the shop door.

“In that case we won’t wait for them. You can come back and collect them to-morrow.”

For the first time she realised that a taxi was ticking over at the kerb, and she found herself not actually thrust into it, but insinuated into it. All the same, the insinuation was very purposeful, and it left a small, angry red mark on her wrist where his fingers had grasped it. He saw her rubbing it automatically as she sat in the taxi, and instantly his face underwent a complete change.

“Sweetheart, you’ll have to forgive me,” he implored, “but you were a trifle obstinate back there, and I had to get you away from that pompous little man who seemed to think he had some special claim on you. If he’s your employer, I should have thought you could have chosen someone less blind and obstructive than that
... someone with, at least, a little sensibility
!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she exclaimed, finding her real voice at last, and feeling her indignation bubbling up like water in a well. “Mr. Simmonds is a perfectly reasonable man, and I’ve found him a very good employer for three years now.
It’s you who had absolutely no right to walk in there and drag me out like this!”

She wondered whether she ought to bang on the glass for the taxi to stop, but Edouard had anticipated that she might feel tempted to do this and once more possessed himself of her wrists. She found that she was unable to free herself, and his moment of conscience because he might hurt her had passed in the face of her unco-operativeness, and the flaming indignation in her face. He felt she was quite capable of actually hurling herself out of the taxi, and so he hung on to her with slightly ruthless determination, and recommended that she stopped behaving like a child.

“I have an explanation to offer you, and you have but to listen,” he said.

“I don’t want to listen! I won’t listen!” She wondered whether if she shouted the taxi-man would take any notice, and then decided that, as the Comte had probably already tipped him heavily, he would ignore her. She subsided, and Edouard instantly changed his own tactics and spoke to her soothingly.

“That’s better, little one. It is foolish to fight me, when you have no reason to fight me. I am not your enemy. I am the man who has come haring off without even a single suitcase because you refused to do what I asked and thereby involved us both in an unnecessary salutary experience. I had arranged for you to catch an afternoon flight to London—or rather, Paris!—and I would have been with you when you reached the airport because I have my own private plane and that would have reached there at the same time. But no, you had to tear up my reservation and scatter the pieces at my feet, and then take Bianca into your confidence and leave the
palazzo
that very night! When I heard I could have throttled Bianca—she took such an obvious pleasure in informing me you had gone!—and I marvelled you were so simple as to take in everything she said to you as if it was unimpeachable truth! You are a very impetuous young woman to deal with, Cathleen, and I am very angry with you—!”

She stared at him. His dark, almost beautiful, and certainly very arresting eyes were gazing at her more in sorrow than in anger, and there was such an expression of tenderness round his attractive mouth that it caused her heart to miss several beats.

“I simply—don’t understand what you’re talking about,” she said, her breath catching in the middle of the sentence.

“That is very obvious,” he replied. He glanced for a moment at the taxi-man’s back, and then partially released Cathleen while he leaned forward to tap on the glass. “Continue several times round the park,” he instructed, “and if necessary you must be prepared to continue several more times. I will let you know
!”

The taxi-man’s teeth flashed in his driving-mirror.

“That’s good enough for me, sir,” he replied.

Edouard turned again to Cathleen. By this time with her free hand she was making hurried gestures in the direction of her hair, which the wind from the slip-stream that was coming in through the open window had badly ruffled. And as she had had no opportunity to attend to her make-up since lunch she was afraid her appearance was at its very worst.

But Edouard didn’t seem to think so. He carried her hand up to his lips, kissed it gently, and then kissed it again and held it against his face.

“Did it never once occur to you that I love you, Cathleen?” he asked, a trifle huskily.

She found it utterly impossible to say anything at all.

“Didn’t it?” he insisted.

She shook her head, rather helplessly.

“You—you made it very clear to me that you were not interested in women—seriously,” she reminded him. “You told me you didn’t
want
to fall in love with me!”

He looked amazed at his own stupidity ... and hers for believing him.

“My sweet, it is perfectly true that I once valued my freedom to such an extent that I didn’t want to
get married
; but as soon as I met you I knew that didn’t apply any longer. You see, I loved you
at sight,
Cathleen. You were all and everything I had ever dreamed of, and just being with you was a kind of exquisite pleasure. That morning at my
palazzo
I was still confused about what I really wanted, but I know perfectly well that if nothing had happened to ruin that day for us I would have offered you my heart and hand before it was night. In attempting to resist you I was putting up a kind of false screen
... a weak defence that crumbled the instant I touched you, or you looked at me with those clear, appealing
-
eyes of yours. When you picked out Arlette’s portrait from amongst those others I realised I should have told you about her before, but the truth was I thought that once you found out everything you wanted to find out about her you would go home!”