No Just Cause Page 7

  She glanced with contempt at Carole’s dress.

  “It is charming, and will come in useful later on ... when she meets those boy-friends! But if you ask me I do not think it is the right sort of dress for an occasion such as this... an occasion on which you deceive your friends! But not me, chéri,” she added contemptuously. “Not me!”

  He looked at her with dark blue eyes that were positively glacial, and if Carole had been in a sufficiently detached frame of mind just then to work the matter out for herself she would have tried to arrive at an explanation of the reason why he could look like that only a few minutes after holding the lovely Frenchwoman in his arms.

  When she entered the room without taking the precaution of knocking beforehand, and her startled eyes had informed her what was happening, it had not struck her that the man who was passing himself off as her fiancé had been acting under any unwelcome kind of compulsion. He had looked perfectly relaxed, and by no means an unwilling victim. It was true that Chantal’s arms had been round his neck, and that she had appeared to be holding him rather than he her, but the kiss they had been exchanging had had in it all the ingredients of mutual desire and willingness.

  And yet now that he was standing several feet away from her his face looked bleak—even grim; and there was no doubt about it, he was very much annoyed ... and he appeared to be almost as much annoyed with Chantal as with Carole.

  “Kindly refrain from expressing your unwanted opinions in the hearing of Miss Sterne,” he requested icily. And then, to Carole: “What did you come here for? Who sent you?”

  “No one,” she replied, with sudden composure. Surprise and disdain looked at him out of her eyes. “Why would anyone send me here?”

  “You couldn’t have stumbled upon this room by accident.”

  “I was—exploring the house.”

  “Not a very wise thing to do when it’s someone else’s house.”

  “Why don’t you admit you were looking for James?” Chantal said, putting away her compact and her mirror, and snapping the clasp of her bag shut. She smiled curiously at Carole. “After all, he is a very personable man, isn’t he? And it must be fun having him for a fiancé ... even if it’s only for such a very short time!”

  “I wasn’t looking for anyone,” Carole said stiffly, wishing it was no more than the truth, for she hated lying about anything. “However,” she turned on her heel, “I’ll leave you alone again. You’ve probably got a lot to talk about...”

  “We have,” Chantal assured her. “You’d be surprised how much!”

  “Don’t listen to her,” James urged curtly, once more seizing her by the wrist. “And unless everyone is to get the wrong idea you’d better come with me and we’ll rejoin the others. Goodnight, Chantal,” he addressed her over his shoulder.

  “Goodnight, darling,” she called back softly. “Goodnight, but not goodbye! I’ll be seeing you!”

  James half led, half dragged Carole along the corridor once they got outside the room, and before they entered the main hall she snatched away her arm.

  “Is it really necessary to keep up this farce?” she demanded, standing still and regarding him with hostile eyes.

  His own eyes, utterly without expression, gazed back at her.

  “What farce?”

  “The farce that we’re engaged? After all, since you and Madame St. Clair seem to understand one another very well you don’t need the protection of a mock engagement, and one evening like tonight deceiving people on the grand scale is enough for me!” She examined her wrist, that his careless fingers had bruised. “For one thing, I object to being bear-led, and for another—”

  “Oh, be quiet!” he snapped, as if his nerves were very badly on edge. “You’re being paid for your services—or you will be!—and surely that’s enough?”

  “Well!” she gasped, and banners of red flamed in her cheeks. He looked down into her stormy eyes, and was surprised by the sight of bright tears of resentment actually rising like a spring. “I think that’s an unspeakable thing to say!”

  “Yes, it is,” he agreed quietly—very quietly. “You’ll just have to forgive me, Carole,” and he smiled at her fleetingly.

  “Anything I’ve done for you I’ve done because—because of Marty!”

  “Exactly,” he agreed, almost tonelessly.

  “And if you think I need paying...” She wrenched the opal ring from her finger and thrust it at him. “Take this! I won’t ever wear it again! You’ve made me feel as if I—as if I’m unclean!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, in the same toneless voice. He accepted the opal ring and stood holding it in his hand as Marty came hurrying along the corridor. Her glance seemed to inform her at once of a good deal of what had taken place.

  “You’d better take Carole home,” she said, speaking urgently. “I’ll make an excuse for you both and say Carole wasn’t very well, or something of the sort. Did you have lobster at dinner?” she asked Carole. The other girl shook her head bewilderedly.

  “No. I don’t like lobster.”

  “All the same, I’ll say you had some, and it always upsets you.” She looked hard and suspiciously at her brother. “It wasn’t lobster, was it? It was Chantal St. Clair?”

  He smiled with a faint glimmering of humour.

  “It’s the first time I’ve felt tempted to agree that Chantal can be as upsetting as lobster. But there’s no real reason why she should have upset Carole. However,” looking down at her from the superior elevation of six feet two inches, and inclining his sleek dark head towards her a little, and speaking in a voice that was suddenly marvellously gentle and understanding, “I do agree she’s had enough to try her for one evening. All that mob in there—” jerking his head towards the door of the salon—“looking her over, and Lady Bream putting her through the hoop. Oh, yes, I know she took you away to her own room and asked you every pertinent question she could think of,” feeling for Carole’s hand and squeezing it gently—particularly the cold fingers, that she withdrew as if contact with him was something that might actually contaminate her. “I’m sorry, Carole, really sorry you’ve had such an evening! But I’ll take you home now, and tomorrow we’ll do something nice ... something you’ll like doing to make up!”

  The promise did little to restore either Carole’s composure or her lost dignity. She marvelled that he imagined she would permit herself to be talked to one minute as if she was a thing of no account, and the next as if she was almost as important to him as his sister.

  In any case, she was not his sister ... and never again would she give him the chance to tell her that he was paying her for something she was doing for him.

  But in the car on the way home she grew a trifle calmer. He dropped the engagement ring into her lap and spoke with a pleading note in his voice.

  “Play it my way, Carole ... for just a little longer!” he begged. “I promise you it won’t be for too long, and I won’t submit you to any more ordeals in Paris. I’ve decided to return to England almost at once, and we’ll go home to Ferne Abbey. You and I and Marty. You’ll love the Abbey. It’s belonged to my family for generations, and I think it’s the most beautiful house in England. You’d like to go home to England, wouldn’t you? For a holiday, at least!” slowing the car so that he could bend forward and peer into her eyes, and ascertain for himself whether they really were as hurt and humiliated as he suspected.

  She averted her head to prevent him making such a discovery.

  “You’re so very English, Carole,” he said gently, “You don’t really belong in Paris at all.”

  She bit her lip hard, so that it hurt. She was inclined to agree with him. Paris and Madame St. Clair ... Paris was for people—women, anyway—who were beautiful and chic and acclaimed by society; wholly desirable women who could make men like James Pentallon long for them so badly that they had to have protection from them ... when they didn’t wish to marry them. At Ferne Abbey perhaps even Chantal St. Clair would not seem so absolutely righ
t.

  Carole could not imagine her in country tweeds and low-heeled shoes, out with the dogs on a day of misty English rain, a headscarf tied over her head, her stockings spattered with mud. She couldn’t even see her astride a horse, or doing any of the things country-lovers normally did, even in France.

  But perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps Chantal fitted in anywhere. Perhaps she was adaptable, and her beauty glowed like a star wherever she was.

  Carole bit her lip again. She herself was so homesick for England that the mention of Ferne Abbey had shaken her ... Ferne Abbey in high summer, with all the splendour of high summer in the rolling woods and fields and fells around it. She had heard so much about it from Marty, who had grown up there, that she already felt she knew it as well as Marty did. And to spend even a short time there ... a few weeks, during the summer vacation...

  But there had to be a condition.

  “Would you expect me to continue to pretend to be your fiancée in England?” she asked.

  James thought about it, while the graceful white car snaked through the silent thoroughfares of Paris, and late strollers peered at their reflections in the Seine.

  “No,” he answered, at last. “No. All I ask is that you should accompany us to England.”

  A little of Carole’s tension seeped away from her.

  “Very well,” she answered, almost with a sigh of relief in the words—a sigh of relief that brought a tiny, twitching smile to the corners of his lips. “Very well. In that case I’d love to see Ferne Abbey.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  MISS DOVE’S establishment closed for the summer vacation two days later, and the girls who had filled its rooms and the small, formal garden with happy bursts of feminine laughter for several months without a break dispersed to their homes that were scattered about the globe. Their luggage filled the hall and the corridors for days before they left, and Mademoiselle protested fruitlessly and looked forward to her own trip to Venice. Miss Dove had accepted an invitation to the chateau country, and every member of the staff—the teaching staff, that is—was going somewhere.

  Only a skeleton domestic staff would be left behind, and that meant that the house would be virtually shut up until the girls returned to it in September.

  Marty was as enthusiastic as everyone else about packing up and going home. Carole—who seemed to have been without a home of her own for a long time now—went about the business of her own packing with a rather more thoughtful mien, for she was not entirely happy in her mind about the visit to Ferne Abbey. For one thing, owing to the fact that it was generally believed she would be marrying soon, she had decided to offer her notice. To return to Miss Dove’s in September minus an engagement ring, and with a lot of explaining to offer, would have been too much. Much, much more than she could have faced up to.

  Marty looked a little concerned when she realised that she had handed in her notice.

  “But what will you do?” she asked. “When the holidays are over? You’ll have to have some sort of a job.”

  “I’ll find one,” Carole replied, and bent to add another neatly folded garment to the smooth layer on the top of her trunk.

  “But you haven’t any real qualifications,” Marty pointed out, sitting on her own trunk and thoughtfully lighting a cigarette. “You might not find it so very easy to find the sort of job you’d really like, and Miss Dove’s has been a kind of home for you for so long.”

  “Then I’ll find another home,” Carole observed a trifle shortly, and began a businesslike search for her keys in the desk she shared with the other occupant of the room.

  Marty blew smoke rings and watched them thoughtfully.

  “It’s high time you became really engaged, Carole,” she told her, and her friend turned and looked at her in genuine amazement and slight amusement.

  “Who to?” she asked.

  Marty frowned and waved a hand, indicating that she could get on with her packing.

  “I’ll think of someone,” she said. “I’ll give the matter a lot of thought.”

  Carole smiled and locked her trunk, and then struggled with it outside into the corridor.

  The day before they left a carton of white roses was delivered at the house for Carole. At first she barely glanced at them, feeling certain they were from James ... and flowers from James had been delivered in such profusion during the past fortnight that, knowing very well that they were all part of a game, she had ceased to feel even mildly excited when the maid carried them up to her.

  But it was Marty who discovered that these roses were not from James. She had lifted them out to inhale their perfume when a card fell out, and having picked it up and read it she emitted a long, low whistle.

  “Well, well!” she exclaimed. “Well, well!”

  Carole looked round at her in surprise, and Marty waved the card at her.

  “You have an admirer,” she declared. “A genuine admirer!”

  Carole snatched the card away from her, and a slight pink flush invaded her cheeks as she read:

  ‘From one who remembers you, and wishes you well. I would have called to say goodbye, but these roses will do it for me.’ Armand de Sarterre

  Marty thought the whole thing a gorgeous joke.

  “I’ll simply have to tell James,” she exclaimed. “If you and he were really going to get married he’d have every cause to feel madly jealous. White roses! Um!” and she inhaled their perfume ecstatically. “If only there hadn’t been this little mix-up with you and James you might have nailed the Comte.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Carole tried to snatch her roses from her, but Marty held them well out of her reach.

  “No, no, not until you give me your word that you’ll let James see them! It will entertain him, and he’ll perhaps realise that some men have more sense than he has ... And if he’s going to get seriously mixed up with that awful St. Clair woman he hasn’t any sense.”

  “Give me my roses!”

  “What will you do with them?”

  “Give them to one of the maids to put in water. I can’t possibly take them with me.”

  “You can select one—” Marty herself detached an exquisite, half-opened paper-white one—“and we’ll show it to James. Also the card! For goodness’ sake don’t let the maid have the card as well as the rest of the roses.”

  But Carole—for some reason that she did not quite understand herself—was determined that James should not see either the rose or the card, and after a certain amount of argument and some sprightly badinage she succeeded in winning a promise from Marty that she would not mention the gift of roses to her brother. She said mutinously that she thought it was quite absurd, since James ought to know the impression Carole made on some of his men friends; but Carole would not give way, and short of rescuing the rose and damaging it in an actual tussle Marty realised that there was nothing she could do but give way. But she did it with a very bad grace.

  “All right,” she agreed. “I won’t mention the roses ... to James.”

  “Or to anyone else?”

  Marty smiled at her mysteriously.

  “Not to anyone you wouldn’t wish me to mention them to.”

  Then she vanished to say farewell to one of her regular escorts, who was waiting below in Miss Dove’s exceedingly English-looking drawing-room, and looking depressed and glum because this was Marty’s last term in Paris, and she would not be returning after the holidays.

  They left Paris by air for London, and from London James drove them all the way to Ferne Abbey, which they reached so late at night that Carole was unable to form any real opinion of it, except that it seemed to her so vast she was completely overawed by its dimensions. It was a night of thick black cloud, with thunder muttering ominously in the distance, and the main drive to the Abbey was like a long, dark tunnel with trees meeting overhead. Lights streamed out and penetrated far down the drive when the noise of their car wheels warned the domestic staff that the master and his sister were approaching—with a you
ng woman guest who rumour had it was engaged, or about to be engaged, to the master.

  Bradshaw, the butler, appeared against a background of a church-like hall when the car stopped. Carole, who was seated beside James, received the impression that the hall was firelit as well as lighted by a great, swinging lantern of tremendous candle-power and archaic appearance before the door on her side was whipped open, and the butler’s voice spoke softly in her ear.

  “May I have your hand luggage, miss? Ah, thank you, miss! It’s been raining very heavily and the ground is a trifle wet. Be careful where you place your feet, miss!”

  Marty had sprung out and was greeting the housekeeper as if she was an old friend.

  “Oh, hullo, Bennett, how are you? You look as if you’ve put on weight!”

  As the housekeeper’s figure was very angular, and she preferred to keep it that way, the faintly tart note in her voice as she replied was no doubt justified.

  “I haven’t done anything of the kind, Miss Marty! I’ve been dieting, and very strict about it I am, too. But you look very well, and much more grown-up than when we saw you last. Quite the young lady, in fact!”

  Marty pirouetted for her benefit, and then grinned in the soft light and gave her a careless hug.

  “I am grown up, Bennett ... as grown up as I’ll ever be! No more school for me—finishing or otherwise!—and in future I’m the mistress here, and you can take it for granted that I’ll let you know it!”

  “Heaven forbid, miss,” Bennett replied, but not in the least as if she was really apprehensive.

  They were escorted inside by the butler, housekeeper, and a chauffeur who had stayed up to put the car away in the garage. Once inside the hall and Carole could see that it was extremely luxurious as well as possessing an open timber roof that seemed to recede into some remote fastness above her head; and faded banners fluttered away up in the fastness, and the walls were lined with shields and crossed broadswords, and the fireplace was a magnificent escutcheoned affair that proclaimed the right and title of the Pentallons to live where they did.