Heart Specialist Page 11

  “Whether or not I would like to see myself surrounded by a family?”

  Her dark eyes twinkled as she divided her glance between him and Valentine.

  “But think how much more satisfying that would be than an endless round of engagements when your professional day is over. How much more rewarding than taking someone like Madame Faubourg to the opera!”

  “Madame Faubourg is capable of appreciating opera, and a wife might not have that same capacity,” he returned, his voice very smooth as he continued to turn the pages of the book.

  His aunt shook her head.

  “He is quite hopeless, Valentine. I have tried so often to get him to change his views about marriage, but apparently it is quite useless.”

  “You should turn your attention to Valentine herself,” he recommended. “For whereas I haven’t altogether forsworn marriage, she is determined to have nothing to do with it. That, I can assure you, is nothing less than the truth, for she made the admission to me herself.”

  The marquise shook her head again, but this time she also laughed gently and patted Valentine’s hands. “Whatever admission Valentine may have made to you, with her looks, her delightful freshness and her English charm, the matter will certainly not be left to her. Men have eyes, my dear nephew, and occasionally they have persuasive tongues. Valentine will listen one day, and then I shall have the happiness of sending her a wedding present. And now, my dear,” as the tea trolley was wheeled in, “will you pour for me, because I feel so very awkward on this couch, and it is a little painful for me to move?”

  Valentine told them about the arrival of Jane, and the marquise said she would be giving a dinner party before long—just as soon as she felt up to it—and Valentine and Jane would both receive invitations,

  “And we will invite Madame Faubourg for Leon,” she said with a kind of tired dryness, “and Philippe must of course be included, because I am very fond of him; and if you, my dear child, know of anyone particular whom you would like to be included ...? Preferably a man, because it is not always easy to get enough men for such occasions! Not young personable men!”

  “What about Peter Fairfield?” Leon suggested, looking downward at Valentine.

  “He is someone special?” the marquise asked. “And English, of course. Therefore he must be invited! You must provide me with his address, my dear, and I will see that he receives an invitation.”

  Leon’s voice developed a note of brusqueness.

  “You are tired, ma tante, and we will go.” He rose abruptly. “I will drive Valentine home.”

  “Oh, but I needn’t trouble you,” Valentine said quickly. “I will get a taxi.”

  “I have said that I will drive you home,” the doctor said even more brusquely, and in spite of the exhaustion that had quite noticeably descended on his aunt, she looked suddenly very much amused.

  “Don’t argue with him, child,” she begged Valentine. “He can be very obstinate, and if he says that he will drive you home he will drive you home!” She drew Valentine down to her and kissed her affectionately. “Come and see me again soon.”

  In the car Leon appeared to be in the blackest mood Valentine had yet been permitted to see him in, and he said coldly, “You cut off your hair in order to annoy me, and now you will permit my aunt to invite your fellow countryman to her dinner party! I suppose you feel that you are being very clever, n’est-ce pas?”

  “I?” Valentine was so surprised that she almost gaped at him. “But it was you who suggested Peter! I never even thought of him and I would certainly not have suggested to the marquise that she invite him to her party. She was obviously trying to think of making up numbers—for you, Madame Faubourg, for me, someone I know. And as for my hair ...”

  “Yes?” he said tautly, gripping the wheel. “As for your hair?”

  “It is, after all, my own hair, and you should be grateful to me, if it was a temporary cause of distraction to you. Now that there is so little of it you are not in the least likely to be distracted.”

  He laughed, but it was rather a harsh laugh.

  “There are still the eyes, and the rest of you! Didn’t I imply that your eyes could be a cause of distraction? And you may cut off a golden cloud, but Miss Valentine Brooke remains!”

  “Do you,” she asked as if she was interested, “advise Madame Faubourg about her hairstyles? I noticed that she wears her hair very long, twisted into a sort of coronet around her head! Have you a weakness for long-haired women?”

  “Women are not a weakness with me at all.” he answered curtly.

  “That was what I first decided about you,” she told him. “You are not a man of weaknesses—not many, anyway. I should think you are terribly self-contained and terribly self-satisfied. You are occasionally moved by impulse, however.”

  “Oh, indeed?”

  “To me you were at first abominably rude, and then you decided I needed awakening. I should like you to remember, Dr. Daudet, in future, that lessons in the art of awakening are not lessons I desire to take from you, and the fact that I cut my hair should prove it to you. That I happen to like myself with a new short hairstyle is quite beside the point.”

  “You feel that you have acquired a new personality?”

  “Whatever personality I may have acquired. I do not require any more lessons. I hope you will remember that.”

  “I will endeavor to do so,” he returned suavely. “I will make every endeavor to remember it.”

  And thereafter they were silent until they reached the apartment.

  She expected him to drop her and drive off when they reached the entrance—she having made herself particularly clear about a matter that might have piqued his vanity—but he didn’t do so. He asked coolly, “May I come in and meet your friend?”

  “If you can spare the time.”

  “I can,” he assured her.

  Jane had had tea by herself, after which she had given Fifi a vigorous brushing and combing. She had the poodle in her arms and was in the hall just as Valentine turned her key in the lock.

  “Oh, darling, there you are,” she said. “A young man—at least, I presume he’s young—who calls himself Peter Fairfield has telephoned to say that he has a couple of tickets for a new show—not terribly French, and therefore terribly shocking—that he thinks you’d like, and if convenient he will collect you tomorrow evening. I said he’d better ring again ... Oh, I beg your pardon!” she said as the tall figure of Dr. Daudet loomed up behind Valentine. “I didn’t realize you had someone with you.”

  “This,” Valentine said in an unusually clear voice, “is Dr. Daudet. Dr. Daudet, this is my friend Jane Beverley.”

  “How do you do, madame,’ He bowed over her hand. “I am very glad to know you have arrived at last!”

  “And I,” she assured him with a bright interested sparkle in her eyes as she gazed up at him, “am very glad to make your acquaintance. Valentine has mentioned you several times.”

  “Has she indeed?” he said with unmistakable dryness.

  “I think,” said Valentine, flushing brilliantly and almost painfully for no reason that she could think of, “I’ll go and telephone Peter, if you’ll both excuse me for a few minutes. Perhaps you might offer Dr. Daudet a drink, Jane, if you ... if you don’t mind, please,” and she fled precipitately.

  In the elegant gray drawing room that had been Miss Constantia’s, the other two looked at one another. In Jane’s eyes the sparkle of interest had become a sparkle of humor; in Leon Daudet’s dark ones the humor might have just been a reflection.

  “Sorry about that disparaging reference to French shows,” Jane said.

  “Don’t mention it,” he returned, making himself thoroughly comfortable in a chair. “Do you know, Mrs. Beverley, I really meant it when I said I was glad you had arrived to take charge of Valentine!”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE NEXT FEW WEEKS passed in a more lighthearted fashion for Valentine than any she had ever known before. Spring mer
ged into summer and Paris was gay. The Tuileries Gardens were gay, the gardens of the Luxembourg Palace were gay, the Bois was the happy hunting ground of eager young things and those who loved to ride. It created an illusion of space and rural delights in the midst of more sophisticated pleasures.

  And among the more sophisticated pleasures were the shops—perennially gay, but a sore temptation to tourists during the summer months—the theaters, nightclubs, the opera and the races.

  Valentine found, once the first of May was past and Paris celebrated by filling its flower-sellers’ baskets with bunches of lilies of the valley, and the whole atmosphere swam with the perfume of these delicate harbingers of perfect days in store, that she got to know the Paris calendar fairly well. In June there were fetes and gala performances at the opera, in July more fetes and a big race at Saint Cloud; in August fashionable Parisians left the capital behind for the beaches of the south and even farther afield; and in October they drifted back in earnest and the winter season began. More shops, more theaters, more dinner parties, more gala evenings.

  But for the fact that she had recently had fifteen million francs left to her, and Chaumont might one day be hers, Valentine was hardly likely to have been caught up by this Paris calendar, and Jane would certainly not have been caught up by it. Jane would have gone on working in her accountant’s office, and Valentine’s only outlet for surplus energy would have been exercising Fifi on the end of a silk-covered lead.

  But now that she occupied Miss Constantia’s apartment by right, and her name was printed beside the doorbell instead of Miss Constantia’s, her life was very different. It became still more different immediately after Jane had arrived, and sometimes she wondered whether Jane’s arrival hadn’t been absolutely necessary before she could acquire a new personality. Before the old Valentine Brooke with the silky cloak of hair and the diffident manner could give place to someone more poised and much more aware of what she really wanted from life, although she was certain that she would never get it.

  Jane had arrived on the night when she had made a big discovery, and it was Jane who said of Leon Daudet that he was a man who would never confuse the issues, because he knew what it was that he wanted, and just how much of it would be good for him. This so tallied with Valentine’s own secret opinion of him that, after discussing him once openly, the two friends decided not to introduce him in future as a topic of conversation unless it was impossible to avoid it. Jane because she thought it might be best, Valentine because she thought in that way to spare herself.

  But if Jane approved obliquely of Dr. Daudet, she approved wholeheartedly of Peter Fairfield. He was a nice, honest, open young man, she said, and Valentine could safely go around with him. And Valentine did. Sometimes Jane was included in the outings, the trips in a rented car, the expeditions up and down the Seine, the little dinners in a Left Bank cafe. (No more expensive restaurants, Valentine had decided, when Peter was paying, which he always insisted on doing!)

  Peter became a frequent visitor to the apartment, and sometimes his visits coincided with the visits of the Comte de Villeneuve, who had a noisy red sports car in which he proclaimed to all the other occupants of all the other apartments in the block that he was paying a call on Miss Brooke and her companion. He was the most unsnubbable person either young woman had ever met, but whereas Valentine found him amusing and likable, although she was not in the least deceived about him, Jane continued to look upon him as “eminently undesirable” and made no attempt to welcome him when he arrived at the apartment.

  After his first visit he sent two dozen red roses to each of them, and Jane said that just proved it. She said it with a tightening of the lips that Valentine found surprising, for the roses were gorgeous, with a heavenly scent, and she placed hers straightaway in a crystal container in the drawing room, where they looked perfect against the pearl-gray damask.

  “It’s typical of a man of his sort that he thinks red roses are a way to almost any female heart,” Jane explained, and Valentine elevated her eyebrows.

  “But surely he wouldn’t want to find a way to both our hearts at the same time?” she pointed out in an amused voice.

  Jane, however, tightened her lips still more.

  “Sometimes two heads are better than one, and two hearts turning a little soft at the same time could prove a valuable investment!” she remarked. “But I don’t expect you to follow that, because you’re too young and innocent!” Then she gathered up her own armful of flowers. “I shall take mine down to the concierge. His wife is having a baby, and as it’s her fifth child they’ll probably cheer her up.”

  But even Jane couldn’t always refrain from laughing at some of Philippe’s wittiest sallies. Having a keen sense of humor, which she had to admit he also possessed, she saw the point of his jokes even before the others did—sometimes long before the others did—and he was not slow to discover how she reacted, and he played it up blatantly. And when he told them of some of his exploits and his methods of earning hard cash, she had to marvel with the other two at his toughness and the spirit of recklessness that undoubtedly took possession of him at frequent intervals.

  He took them to lunch at some of the smarter restaurants, insisted on hanging around and carrying their parcels when they went on shopping expeditions, gave advice although it was not asked for about cosmetics and the colors that went with different skin types, and had a weakness for thes dansants and the cream cakes that went with them. Valentine learned to tango expertly under his tutelage, and Peter thought he wasn’t half such a showman at heart. Jane would be preparing to resign herself to the possibility that there were one or two admirable qualities in his makeup when, after a day at the races—when he never failed to have a sufficient number of first-class tips, for which Peter at least was always grateful—or an afternoon’s drive into the country in the noisy red car which took them all four at a squeeze, he would suddenly remember an appointment that had to be kept and race back to Paris at the hazard of their necks. And as it was always an evening appointment, and he never attempted to conceal from them the fact that it was with a member of the girls’ own sex, Jane was always glad that she had handed over his roses to the concierge, and more than once she thought of letting him know what she had done with them.

  But even that wouldn’t have disconcerted him, as she realized. He would probably have replied that he would send her another two dozen, and then look at her audaciously and tell her that her eyes reminded him of something, and it was something he always found pleasant to gaze at. Very, very pleasant indeed.

  Jane put on her armor against him and vowed that she, at least, would never dine alone with him in Paris.

  But Valentine found him a help and even a source of strength on all sorts of occasions. The Marquise de Rullecourt’s dinner party, for instance, she didn’t think she could have got through without him.

  She hadn’t seen the marquise, or Dr. Daudet, since the afternoon of the day she had had her hair cut short, and that, when she received the invitation, was at least half a dozen weeks before. April had stolen into May, and May had become June, and her conscience had troubled her more than once because the marquise had so particularly asked her to call, and she would have done so but for her fear that she would find Leon Daudet there also. Where Leon Daudet was concerned, she had seen the red light—the red light that had warned her that the whole of her future life might lie in ruins if she continued to obtain more than an occasional glimpse of him. She was also, at the very bottom of her heart, conscious of a dull ache of disappointment in connection with him.

  At first, she had thought him hard, arrogant; and then she had thought him unexpectedly kind, and her heart had warmed to him. He had introduced her to his aunt, who was hardly the sort of person one expected to take kindly to casual acquaintances, and had suggested to her that she have someone to live with her, because he didn’t apparently like the idea of her living alone. He had concerned himself with her affairs, shown her a rather delightf
ul, whimsical side of himself, made her realize how attractive he was as a man—and then had kissed her because she disturbed him! And only a few minutes after the kiss that had altered her life and not merely awakened her but left her transparently palpitating with the desire to be kept awake, he had told her that she would have to think seriously about marrying one day, but urged her not to be in a hurry about making her choice!

  Her choice ...!

  As if there was any possibility now of any choice for her!

  She went hot all over when she thought of his casual farewell to her that night, and the blush was almost painful when she recalled how quickly he had withdrawn from her when her hands had gone out to him!

  She had wanted to be held in his arms—really held in his arms—and he had withdrawn! He had lit a cigarette and apologized for kissing her!

  Often the memory of that kiss set her trembling. She wondered whether she would ever forget it. And she wondered how much Jane had deduced from her face when she had arrived home that night.

  Jane never deliberately referred to Dr. Daudet.

  But when his aunt’s invitation arrived, they knew it could not be ignored. And Valentine knew that it could not be declined. She felt it in her bones that in a very short space of time she could become really fond of the marquise, and of course her invitation had to be accepted.

  Peter, too, received an invitation.

  He collected them at the apartment, and it was in his taxi that they arrived at the Marquise de Rullecourt’s slightly feudal mansion. Jane had never seen it before, and she was very much impressed with the brilliantly lit interior. The thick carpets and the antiques, the paneling and the staircase looked well under the swinging chandeliers, and for tonight the house was massed with flowers, and the perfume of them filled every room.

  The marquise, Valentine thought when she welcomed them, gave her a slightly reproachful look, but it wasn’t so reproachful that Valentine felt uncomfortable. In some curious way she even thought that her hostess understood why she had not been to visit her, and that the reproach she imagined was actually a silent expression of sympathy, even commiseration.