Rose in the Bud Page 6

  Since Cathleen hadn’t a coat Edouard had wrapped a light fur rug over her knees, and when he thought she shivered slightly he took his own coat off and slipped it about her shoulders.

  “We can’t have you catching cold,” he said, as he had said once before.

  To Cathleen it was all completely unreal. Edouard’s hand under the rug felt for, and encompassed, hers, and she made no attempt to remove it, although he was still holding it half an hour later. Their desultory talk died, finally, into silence, and they sat beneath a dreaming palace with the sunrise not so very far off and for a time there was absolute silence between them.

  He had asked her whether she had enjoyed the Count’s party, and seemed faintly amused when she said hurriedly that she had hated it.

  “There was no one I knew, and it was all so strange...” She sounded a little pathetic, as if she had needed support.

  “Would you have enjoyed it better if I had been there?”

  “I ... Yes.” After a moment of hesitation she answered emphatically. “I would. I would probably have enjoyed it very much.”

  He turned and smiled at her. It was a faintly caressing smile, but there was also something withdrawn about it ... reserved.

  “You are transparent, little one. But you must not confuse glamour with the essential things of life. All this—” he waved a hand to indicate the sleeping canal —“all this is enough to turn any young woman’s head, particularly when she has been brought up in England where the climate is not very dependable, and the male element is essentially practical. Here in Italy the sun shines for most of the time, and the nights are such as this. But deep down the basic things are not so very different from the basic things in England, or France for that matter. Men and women meet and fall in love, or are attracted...” She felt a slight squeeze on her fingers. “They want to see more of one another. They want to go on seeing one another...”

  She felt her heart beat fast, but deep down inside her there was an uneasy feeling, almost as if she was preparing herself for disappointment. She knew—or she thought she knew—what he was trying to tell her.

  “Men like Paul make love instinctively, and it is advisable to be wary about them. I do not think you are attracted to Paul, but—there is the attraction of his title, his family? You are not like Arlette—you have the means to feel on an equality with Paul, but unless you find something about him particularly irresistible do not allow anything he or his sister says to you to influence you in any way. That is something I would like to impress on you, for the sake of your future happiness.”

  Cathleen answered a little stiffly:

  “You know very well I am not in the least interested in Count Paul. I came here to Italy for one purpose, and I have not yet succeeded in doing what I set out to do. But that doesn’t mean I don’t intend to!”

  Edouard smiled again. It was difficult to see his face in the prevailing gloom, but she could catch the white flash of his teeth.

  “Then there are men like me.” He lifted her hand from beneath the rug and held it up to what little light there was since the moon was waning, in order to examine the delicate shapeliness of her fingers. “You have such soft little hands, and so well cared-for...” He kissed them lightly, while the gondolier rested for a moment in the bows and sat tuning his guitar. But the kiss, light though it was, caused Cathleen’s heart to somersault. “Men like me are more unpredictable than the Pauls of this world. For one thing, they don’t always know themselves very well, and therefore they should bear the label of the unknown quantity. I’m many years older than you, too, Cathleen.”

  “I’m twenty-two,” she said, as if she was asserting something that had to be asserted.

  He laughed, and although it was a kindly laugh he shouldn’t have been capable of it just then.

  “A great age,” he agreed. “An age when many members of your sex are married and have families of their own. But I am thirty-seven ... fifteen years older than you are! And in actual experience of life I suppose I’m about a hundred years older.” He sounded suddenly quiet, and a little depressed, even profoundly gloomy. “Cathleen, what I am trying to get across to you is that when you return to England I don’t want you to feel hurt in any way. You must remember the glamour, but you mustn’t remember anything else!”

  “What do you mean?” she inquired, in a small voice.

  He turned and looked at her again. He shrugged his shoulders slightly, rather helplessly.

  “What do I mean? I don’t know that I’m altogether clear myself. I...” He issued an order to the gondolier, who immediately started to propel them on their way again, and as dark water slid past Edouard slipped an arm behind the girl’s shoulders, drew her lightly to rest against him and turned her face towards him. It seemed to her that he was smiling crookedly as his face came close to hers. “If it’s experience you’re after, well, I’m as qualified as the next man to increase your store of it, despite my advanced years. Paul may be closer to you in age, but I don’t think he should be the first to kiss you on a Venetian canal ... or anywhere else, for that matter!”

  And while the gondolier—no doubt thoroughly well trained in diplomatic behaviour on an occasion such as this—averted his eyes and concentrated on the technicalities of his profession Moroc bent forward and lowered his mouth to Cathleen’s. She had been kissed before—once or twice, rather clumsily, after a tennis-club dance and by the owner of the book-shop for whom she worked (although he had afterwards been put very firmly in his place)—but never in all her wildest dreams had she imagined that contact with an attractive pair of masculine lips could be like this, or the feel of a man’s well-shaven cheek pressed close to her own a revelationary experience.

  There was a moment when she wanted to gasp and resist him, as if an unexpected tidal wave had swept up over her and was threatening to remove her from her safe anchorage ... the safe anchorage of her youth and lack of experience. And then, with his mouth pressing firmly upon her own, and his arms drawing her closer, she actually did give a little gasp and clutched at him.

  The kiss was short-lived, in actual fact, but when Moroc withdrew from her a little her eyes were bemused in the last of the light, and his fingers stroked her cheek unsteadily.

  “You are adorable,” he told her huskily. “But that was merely by way of experience. Now I must return you to your hotel!”

  He kissed her eyes, and an end of her soft brown hair that had blown into them, and then he sat well away from her and ordered the gondolier a little impatiently, in Italian, to increase his rate of speed.

  “It is late,” he exclaimed, “and at this rate you will not be in bed before the sun is up! You will have to forgive me, Cathleen, for being so extremely thoughtless and keeping you up so late!” Although his voice was perfectly steady there was a strained note in it, and she was not entirely deceived. “At home in England, I have no doubt, you would have been safely tucked up in your bed long before this.”

  “Yes, but I am not in England,” she reminded him, a faint, emotional bubble of laughter in her voice. “I am in Italy.”

  He glanced at her, and his expression softened again. He reached for her hand and squeezed it hard.

  “I had no right to do that, Cathleen,” he admitted wryly, “but you should not be so entrancing if you do not expect to be kissed. It was the first time, no?” a little more sharply, with rather a harsh query in his voice.

  She decided to be strictly truthful.

  “It was the first time it—it mattered.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The other times they were very young men ... men who were merely being polite after a dance. That sort of thing happens, you know. It—it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I am not the one to whom you should pass on information of that sort,” he commented drily.

  She said a little flatly:

  “You mean you know...? Even in Italy it is a kind of custom? All part of the—the glamour you were talking about just now?”
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br />   “What else?” But the brutality of his rejoinder was softened by his hand reaching out and again touching her cheek. “Cara, you are attempting to be serious, and this is not a serious hour. It is the hour when people should come to terms with themselves, but not with—other people.” He glanced upwards at the sky, the density of dark blue velvet that hung like a canopy above their heads, and it was already paling before the approach of dawn, and low down on the horizon a line of gold was extending and would shortly become a mixture of rose and flame and orange, and fill the whole of the eastern sky. In a matter of less than an hour the wonderful light of Venice would spring into being, and the hot sunlight would be soaking itself into every corner of the canals.

  “Dawn is for reflection,” he said soberly, “not for commitments.”

  He left her at her hotel—and she suddenly found herself curious as to where it was that he lived himself, and why in the course of their conversations she had never yet attempted to find out.

  Perhaps she assumed that he was staying in an hotel. Perhaps she assumed that he had an apartment somewhere.

  “The plan we made yesterday is no longer practical,” he told her, smiling at her in the increasing, revealing light. “You will sleep now until nearly noon if you are wise, otherwise we shall have you with dark circles under your eyes when you wish to be at your best. But I promise I will call for you soon after lunch, if that is what you would wish yourself?” His formal method of phrasing reminded her sometimes that he was not a fellow countryman, and although he was an Italian—she was glad of that because it prevented him being voluble and theatrical—his French ancestry (particularly Norman French) gave him a certain distant glamour which was a little like pure glamour overlaid with common sense.

  Edouard Moroc would never be stampeded, and she doubted very much whether he could be cajoled. But he was a man—an extremely personable and strangely attractive man—and she knew he admired her.

  As she ran lightly up the hotel steps and then turned to wave to him she saw that he was staring up at her very gravely.

  Sleep well,” he called. “And be ready by three o’clock!”

  CHAPTER V

  She slept so late that her lunch was a hurried affair, and when Edouard called for her she had barely had time to make herself as presentable as she wished. She would have liked to have had time to pay a visit to the hotel hairdresser, but as that was not possible she gave her hair a quick wash herself and set it while her bath taps were running.

  Then she manicured her nails, agonised over the contents of her wardrobe—which suddenly seemed to her to be horribly limited in view of the fact that she was leading such a social life—finally selected a lemon-yellow dress with a little jacket that went with it, white shoes a white handbag, and was in the act of putting mascara on her lashes when the telephone beside her bed rang and she was informed that Monsieur Moroc was awaiting her in the hotel vestibule.

  Monsieur Moroc, she repeated to herself. Of course. He must have thought her a trifle crude when she insisted on addressing him as Mr. Moroc, although for the last forty-eight hours it had been Edouard.

  When she joined him, looking a little breathless after her rush, he, by contrast, struck her as completely relaxed and composed, and as if he had slept well. For once he was wearing a light silk shirt open at the neck, and he looked almost as careless and casual as the Count looked while he was splashing paint on his many canvases that never afterwards saw the light of day, because they were stacked away in a cupboard.

  “Come!” Edouard exclaimed, as he caught Cathleen by the wrist and drew her towards the entrance. “Giovanni is waiting, and I don’t want to waste any time. I thought we would do something quite different this afternoon, and I would permit you a glimpse of my private life. It is private in so far as I do not normally entertain visitors in the place where I live, perhaps because I look upon it as an intrusion ... or an opportunity to get to know me a little better than I wish to be known!” His white teeth flashed as he grinned at her. “But you—you are different! You shall see my palazzo, and if you do not fall in love with it I shall be surprised.”

  “Then you live in a palazzo?” She did not know why she was surprised, but she was.

  “Yes; and it is all mine.” The white teeth flashed again. “I told you I had a little Italian blood in my veins. My grandfather, as a matter of fact, on the maternal side, was pure Italian, and it was he who left me my palace. It is not perhaps as large as the Palazzo di Rini, but I think it is more desirable, and it is certainly in better condition. Many quite famous people have stayed there on various occasions ... Browning amongst them. It is a little more tucked away than the Palazzo di Rini, and therefore more inaccessible.”

  No wonder he had a fast motor-boat, she thought, when they were on their way to the palazzo. Even in that it took some time to reach their destination, and shortly before they reached it she wondered whether she was being altogether wise in allowing him to whisk her off like this.

  She glanced at him. He was smiling, bronzed, and it struck her that he was curiously content ... and in the golden light of the Venetian afternoon her qualms were banished.

  The whole of the Adriatic was a shimmering blaze of blue. The surface of the water suggested that a million diamonds had been ground into powder and scattered all over it ... in fact, many millions of diamonds. The canals, that were such dark, mysterious waterways at night, were almost as blue as the sea, and the sky overhead was so brazenly blue that it hurt the eyes. Cathleen put on her dark glasses, but Edouard instantly removed them.

  “No,” he said, “you shall not conceal the expressions that come and go in your eyes from me even for a moment.” Giovanni was attending to his engine, the motor-launch was sending up showers of spray as it sliced through the water, and Edouard bent forward and touched a bright end of hair that lay close to Cathleen’s cheek. “Do you know,” he said, very, very softly, “I have done nothing but think about you since I left you. Instead of going to bed I sat and drank endless cups of coffee and gave myself up to thoughts of you ... and the feel of your lips when they met mine.”

  There was a quality in his voice that caused her to shiver, despite the heat of the sun. She didn’t understand the shiver, or the reason why her fingers trembled as Moroc possessed himself of them.

  Giovanni, who had directed several smiling glances at them over his shoulder during the course of the journey, was now tying up at a landing-stage, and Moroc helped her to alight and stand on the steps that were partly awash with the afternoon tide. Above them hung baskets of flowers and lace-like windows and balconies broke up the plain pink facade of a singularly beautiful, small palazzo. The great front door, when it was opened, disclosed a marble staircase that was so wide at the foot it could have accommodated a team of horses abreast, and unlike the Palazzo di Rini the ground floor rooms appeared to be used, although it was to one of the upper ones that Edouard conducted Cathleen.

  She didn’t know quite what she expected, but by this time she was growing used to Venetian gilt and plush, and it took her by surprise when she found that Edouard’s studio was furnished in a completely modern manner, with accent on comfort rather than elegance, although the elegance was certainly there ... but not quite the elegance the di Rinis understood.

  The carpet that had been laid over the marble floor was thick and plain, and the curtains well drawn back from the windows were nevertheless lush and beautifully fitting. There were several settees and equally comfortable armchairs, a giant easel in a corner, a cocktail cabinet in another. The one or two pictures on the walls were modern, but not painfully modern ... and Cathleen was not very impressed by modern art. There appeared to be a large number of stacked canvases around the walls, and on the easel there was a nearly finished and extremely clever picture of a corner of one of the waterways just before the light died out of the sky following the last of a sunset.

  The corner, in broad daylight, would be scarcely glanced at, overlooked, but in the
afterglow it acquired enchantment. It was as unreal as if it didn’t actually exist.

  “Oh, but I like that!” Cathleen exclaimed, as she stood in front of it.

  “Do you?” He sounded pleased as he came up behind her. “I paint for pleasure, more than anything else. It is as perhaps as well,” he added a little drily, “since they do not sell very well. I am no Picasso, nor yet a Velasquez. I am simply Edouard Moroc.”

  She turned and met his eyes, and her own opened wider with curiosity ... curiosity that she was unable to conceal.

  “You say your pictures do not sell well,” she observed. “That, I’ll admit, surprises me, because I think they’re tremendous. They have a quality that is indescribable. You yourself probably know that.” He smiled a little more sardonically as if he would not, or could not, agree with her. “But judging by the fact that you own this palazzo, that its furnishings must have cost a great deal of money, that you own a fast motor-boat and seem to employ the man Giovanni all the time...”

  “Quite right,” he told her, smiling now in amusement. “Giovanni is on my regular pay-roll, and so is his mother and a couple of his brothers. A place like this—” he waved a hand—“does not run itself. So what do you deduce from all that?”

  “That you do not need to sell pictures.”

  “Quite right.”

  “Therefore you don’t bother to find purchasers for them.”

  “Right again.” He moved closer to her and caught her chin and held it in his hand. “What does money mean to you, little one?” he enquired softly. “Now that you have enough of your own to make life pleasant what does it mean to you?”