Rose in the Bud Read online

  “Let me put things more clearly to you,” he said. “The di Rinis are out to contract rich marriages. It doesn’t matter very much to either of them whether it is Bianca who contracts the marriage or Paul, so long as they both benefit as a result of it. They are devoted to one another, although you may not believe it, and their way of life will not change when they finally settle down. For some reason they have decided that you will do very nicely for Paul—possibly because Arlette often talked of an aunt who planned to leave her considerable fortune to either her or her sister, and quite obviously you were the one finally selected—but only I know that the fortune left to you by your aunt was not really a fortune at all. It was a matter of a thousand pounds in English money. Correct me if I am wrong.”'

  She fairly gaped at him.

  “But how can you possibly know that?”

  Once again he shrugged.

  “My dear girl, I’m not going to let you into that secret at this juncture, but I am going to insist that you pack up your things and leave the di Rini palazzo for good and all.” He slipped a hand inside his pocket and produced an envelope. “Inside this is an air ticket to London, and I suggest that you make use of it without delay. It is, as a matter of fact, for a flight leaving at noon to-morrow. You will touch down in Paris, but that is the only halt you will have, and once back on your home ground you will have no difficulty in making your way to your mother’s flat. If she wants news of Arlette tell her that information concerning her will soon be on its way ... but I don’t think she will ask you for news of Arlette!”

  Cathleen was bereft of words. She could only gaze at him speechlessly.

  He held out the envelope to her.

  “Make your excuses to Bianca,” he suggested. “Just a simple excuse. Tell her you want to go home!”

  Cathleen bit her lip again, and this time it was quivering. She felt as if tears of actual mortification were rising behind her eyes.

  “I think you’re ... horrible!” she told him.

  “Why?” he enquired, almost mildly.

  She fought to keep the tears from doing anything apart from hurting her eyes.

  Because you’ve obviously been making inquiries about me and—and my money, and because you’re so blatantly trying to protect your friends.” She swallowed, and her voice quavered. “I should have understood quite clearly when I first met you that you’re hard ... Paul is weak, but you’re hard. You’re also a snob. It isn’t only my lack of money—if I had money you would still think I wasn’t good enough to become a di Rini. Not that I ever had any intention of becoming one!”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” he commented, in the same mild tone of interest. “You would make a very pretty little Contessa, but somehow I do not think you would be happy as an Italian one ... and Paul, most certainly, would not be happy with you. Therefore I am protecting both your interests by asking you to fly away to-morrow.”

  She took the envelope out of his hand, and under his eyes tore it across and across. With flaming cheeks she tossed the pieces at him.

  “When I leave Venice I shall leave without your assistance, Monsieur le Comte,” she told him.

  His eyebrows ascended.

  “Someone has been talking?”

  “Does it matter?” she inquired idly. “But in order that you shall have no qualms where you yourself are concerned I do assure you I never at any time had designs on you. It was not to be expected I would fail to be dazzled by a title as old as the di Rinis’, but even if I’d known right from the beginning you were generally considered something of a catch—those are Bianca’s words!—I would have been less inclined to suspect you of pure motives when you condescended to notice me than I later became. You are very clever at warning people, monsieur, but Bianca warned me only last night that a favourite hobby of your women friends is to pursue you, and only one is likely to win in the end.”

  He frowned swiftly.

  “Who and what are you talking about?” he demanded.

  She ignored the question.

  “As to the time and method by which I will return home, I choose to look upon the former as strictly my own concern, and with the little that is left of my own thousand pounds I shall pay for my own ticket.” She spumed the pieces of paper that littered the floor with her foot. “I don’t think there was any need to insult me with that ticket!”

  If she had been a little less carried away by her own eloquence she would have realised that he looked concerned.

  “The very last thing I wish to do is to insult you,” he protested. “Cathleen, you must know that the very last thing I would ever do is to hurt you—”

  But she swept past him without a single glance in his direction, and grasped the handle of the studio door.

  “I think Bianca is anxious to leave,” she said, her voice a mere frozen thread of sound. “I thought I heard footsteps in the corridor just now, and I don’t wish to keep her waiting.”

  She was right. Bianca was just outside the door, and her expression was most curious. She glanced at Cathleen’s small, set face with a kind of open interest, and then directed rather a longer look at Edouard. She spoke with a queer note of dry amusement in her voice.

  “Don’t think I was eavesdropping,” she said, “but it sounded to me as if you two were quarrelling.”

  “We were not quarrelling,” Edouard told her curtly. “We were simply discussing aspects of Miss Brown’s future. I have an idea she wishes to go home.”

  “Of course,” Bianca agreed soothingly, deliberately misunderstanding him. “I, too, am anxious to return to our palazzo, so if you will forgive me, Edouard ... if you will forgive us both for tearing ourselves away,” a good deal of dryness in her voice, “I’ll have our boatman called in order that he can take us back at once. We’ve enjoyed ourselves tremendously, and it was a wonderful lunch.” She directed at him a bleak, cool smile, and then smiled quite warmly at Cathleen. “Come along, my dear. I had an idea you might be looking for me, so that’s why I came in search of you.”

  It was an excuse offered without any expectation on her part of having it believed by either of them, and the ironic gleam in her eyes as she once more looked towards Edouard made it perfectly clear that she knew he suspected she had overheard every word of his recent conversation. It was not until they were in the gondola on their way home, however, and Paul was sitting moodily facing them without paying much attention to either of them that she made her admission to Cathleen.

  “I was beginning to suspect there had been a mistake, but I still think Edouard need not have been so brutal about it. It was not your fault that we suspected you of having money, and since your legacy was really quite small you are to be commiserated with rather than rebuked. If you take my advice you will go home and never see Edouard again. He is a little inhuman, I think,” and she sounded as if she had genuinely made a recent and surprising discovery about the Frenchman.

  Cathleen, too numb with her own private misery to care very much that Bianca had at last found her out—although it certainly did arouse a faint surprise in her that the Count’s sister did not appear more concerned, and even had a faintly whimsical look on her face as a result of the afternoon’s discovery—said nothing of the kind, since it was not her fault that the mistake had occurred in the first place. It was entirely due to the di Rinis’ avarice, and their determination never to let a likely opportunity escape them.

  Bianca pressed her hand.

  “Don’t think we haven’t enjoyed having you as our guest,” she observed a little drily, “and I think that perhaps you have enjoyed staying with us for a short time. But now I think you have almost certainly had enough of Venice, and I advise you to go home.”

  It was one way of telling her she was no longer welcome as a guest.

  But Bianca was capable of surprising her still more.

  “And since we have, I’m afraid, conspired against you I feel we should make some attempt to make it up to you. If it were not for the fact that we simp
ly cannot afford to part with it I would say keep the bracelet Paul gave you last night ... but since I cannot do that would you be very much offended if I say keep the dresses I pressed upon you yesterday? After all, when you get home to England you will need to dress up sometimes—”

  But Cathleen shook her head fiercely.

  “No, thank you,” she said. And at that moment, in the depths of her bitter unhappiness, and while she was still smarting under the lash of Edouard’s coolly contemptuous tongue, and his brutal unfairness, she was fairly certain that she would never want to dress up again.

  Certainly not in borrowed plumes.

  CHAPTER IX

  Her departure from the Palazzo di Rini was as unceremonious as her arrival. Paul, who had had the situation explained to him by Bianca, kept out of sight until Cathleen had had an opportunity to pack her things and say farewell to Bianca, and even then he failed to appear as if either his courage or his conscience was not up to it.

  Or else, perhaps, it was sheer consideration for Cathleen’s feelings. There had been moments when he had been very nice to her, as well as moments when his Latin temperament had got a little out of hand, and he had irked her with his attentiveness ... over-attentiveness, she had looked upon it. And she could never forget that, whatever had happened to Arlette, he had been at least partially responsible for her disappearance, and therefore the ease with which he transferred his attentions from one woman to another could hardly be regarded as a compliment by the current recipient of those attentions.

  Bianca, who was much more strong-minded and purposeful than her brother, was the one who saw her off. She also arranged for Cathleen to catch a night flight to London, and that made it unnecessary for her to wait until the following day, or to spend any time at all in Venice before she was finally airborne.

  The di Rini boatman took her to the landing-stage, a taxi took her the rest of the way to the airport, and there was no one to see her off or fill her with any sensations of regret as she said her silent farewell to the brilliant early Republic of Venice.

  But that didn’t mean there were no regrets in her heart. She knew she would never forget Venice, and most certainly she would never forget Edouard Moroc. He was the only man who had ever kissed her and filled her with unutterable longing to become a part of his life, but she didn’t blame Edouard for declining to become a part of her life. It was she who had been unbelievably naive when she imagined—and there had been moments when she was fairly convinced—he was as attracted by her as she was by him. Perhaps if she had known his reputation from the beginning she would have been more cautious, and certainly she would not have allowed him to kiss her. But that wouldn’t have prevented her falling in love with him.

  To fall in love you had to be vulnerable, and she was certainly that. To continue in love you had to have fallen very deeply and completely under the spell of the man or woman who failed, however, to respond to the same stimulus, and without doubt she was going to find it exceedingly hard to recover from her absorption in everything that concerned Edouard. Not even her pride had been critically injured by his treatment of her ... only the small, wounded creature inside her who was going to be bitterly unhappy for days to come. Perhaps months to come, years...

  No wonder the future was bleak when she landed at London Airport. She wished her old aunt who had died and left her her life savings had left them to someone else, and then she would never have gone to Venice, not even to look for Arlette.

  She realised her mother would be very critical about her failure to find Arlette. She had to brace herself for the criticism as her taxi drew up outside the grey London house. Her mother would have received her telegram by now, and would be looking out for her. But to her surprise Mrs. Brown, although certainly looking out for her, was in quite an amiable humour as she greeted her younger daughter. She asked her whether she had enjoyed herself in Venice, seemed interested in all the little details connected with her trip—although naturally Cathleen said nothing about Edouard Moroc—and was even grateful for the length of Italian silk and the other small presents that Cathleen had bought for her in Venice. She inquired after Arlette, but seemed curiously unsurprised when Cathleen had to admit that her search had been unsuccessful.

  They had tea in the somewhat overcrowded sitting-room—from the point of view of furniture, that is— but still Mrs. Brown refrained from mentioning Arlette again. If Cathleen had not been too tired and dispirited, she would have wondered about her mother’s strange lack of concern. She told herself that the following day they would have to devise plans for doing something further to trace Arlette. It was true that, being of age, she could disappear if she wished, and her family had never meant an overwhelming amount to her. But of her two children Mrs. Brown had always preferred Arlette, and it was not in Cathleen’s nature to be jealous of her half-sister who had taken her own father’s name. And she was fond enough of her mother to want to restore her peace of mind.

  But, as she sat making brave efforts to chatter about Venice as if it really was a place of glamour that was unforgettable and entirely satisfying, she felt as if she was deliberately failing to come to grips with reality. She was failing to pursue the subject of Arlette, and she was failing to recognise the finality of the thing that had happened to her ... the one hundred per cent certainty that she would never see Edouard Moroc again.

  The thought actually appalled her, shook her so much that she felt as if something vital to her own continued existence had been lost without hope of recovery. Her speech gradually dried up, and instead of looking glowing and tanned after her holiday in the sun even her coating of delicate bronze seemed to fade away and she appeared to wilt under her mother’s eyes. Mrs. Brown was sympathetic, said something about the possibility of her having caught a chill and ordered her off to bed.

  She took her up aspirins and hot milk, and Cathleen finally sank into deep but disturbed slumber as a result of their combined effects.

  In the morning she still looked a little pale, but there were no signs of her having caught a cold. It was Saturday, and she took the shopping-basket and went shopping for her mother as she normally did on her free day from the bookshop, and in the afternoon, grateful for the fact that her mother still refrained from mentioning Arlette, and acting upon her advice, she went to the local cinema, and sat through a film about Italy with a kind of stifled anguish in her heart.

  On Monday morning she had her breakfast at the usual hour and set off for the bookshop. It had never been finally decided how long her holiday was to last, but her employer—who valued her services—had suggested two or three weeks—even a month if she felt she needed it. But when she walked in after less than three weeks he couldn’t keep the surprise out of his face.

  He was about to ask her how much she had enjoyed herself when he realised something was wrong. Young women who went off on holidays abroad fortified by a recent legacy usually had a lot to talk about when they came back. But Cathleen, who seemed to move and speak mechanically, plainly had little to say.

  Her fellow assistant in the shop was curious to know whether anything had gone wrong, but Cathleen assured her in a completely toneless voice that nothing had gone wrong. The other girl refrained from commenting that if everything had gone swimmingly Cathleen was a poor example of a contented traveller returned to tell the tale ... or rather, not to tell the tale ... and Cathleen was left alone until lunchtime.

  She lunched, as usual, since it was summertime, off a few biscuits and an apple in the park, only on this occasion the biscuits were fed to the swans and the apple was returned to her pocket. As she stared unseeingly ahead of her and deliberately wondered what it was going to be like as day followed day and each day had to be lived through and the anguish of the knowledge that she would never see Edouard again grew stronger and took hold of her to such an extent that she couldn’t endure it, a tall man dismissed a taxi not very far away from her, and walked up and down on the gravel path—apparently admiring the swans— righ
t in front of her for at least ten minutes before deciding to withdraw to a more strategic position and watch her departure for her place of employment.

  Cathleen had no idea she was followed as she walked back to the shop where she had worked for three years. She was not in a particularly noticing mood, for one thing, and for another she had no idea that anyone would dog her footsteps.

  The afternoon was rather trying because she had one or two difficult customers. Most of them seemed to imagine she knew the contents of every book as it came off the lists, and was capable of recommending or otherwise without giving the matter much thought. One elderly lady with two poodles who was a frequent visitor at the shop wanted to know specifically why a certain book was not easily obtainable, and another was thinking of making a tour of the Continent and wanted to read about all the worthwhile places to visit. In particular she seemed to fancy Italy, and this was too forcible a reminder of what had happened to her in recent weeks, and how utterly impossible it would be for her ever to visit Italy again herself, for the customer to receive the kind of answers to her inquiries she obviously expected from Cathleen.

  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.