Mountain Magic Read online

  “Yes, I know that now,” Tom admitted, in the same stiff tone. “But all the same, you shouldn’t have interfered.”

  He smiled in the dark.

  “It was worth upsetting you just a little to see Antoine’s face when I ran into him just before lunch and had the pleasure of informing him that your uncle, General Darcy-Cunninghame, had arrived and wanted to see him,” he reminisced. “I think he was completely taken aback! He was probably beginning to look upon himself as your sole protector!”

  Toni, who on one occasion at least had thought of Antoine as her sole protector, observed that he had been very kind. He could not have been more considerate to her since her accident.

  “Kurt?” Philip scoffed at the very suggestion. “The man’s as hard as nails, as I’ve said before, and incapable of any detached kindness. If he treated you decently over the past few days it was because he knew you’d had a pretty raw deal since you came here, and I, at least, was aware of it!”

  But Toni chose to allocate to Antoine motives other than a sense of guilt ... and in many ways she thought she knew Antoine better than Philip did.

  Hard he was—he had admitted it himself! But on one occasion—on one occasion—he had called her ‘darling’!

  The next morning the General insisted on hiring a car and being driven to Innsbruck. Toni accompanied him, and she had to submit to being lavishly treated by her uncle, who wanted to buy her quite a number of things, including a few additions to her wardrobe.

  “You look charming, my dear, of course,” he assured her, with a soldierly blue-eyed glance of approval at her fair skin and soft hair, “but I’m sure there are one or two things you need. All young women need things. Especially pretty ones like you. And I’m proud of my niece!”

  Toni wanted to refuse, and then she had a mental picture of Marianne Raveaux in one of her ravishing dinner dresses, and she knew she wanted to acquire a ravishing dinner dress too. Her time at the Rosenhorn might be short, and Kurt Antoine almost certainly had no real interest in her whatsoever; but if only he could see her once—just once—looking like someone who need not be pitied, or held in a certain amount of half-kindly contempt, she felt that she could return to England in a happier frame of mind than she would do otherwise.

  So when her uncle urged her to make a list of some of the things she badly needed, and which he realised she badly needed, she suddenly made up her mind and added a really smart evening dress to the list.

  They had lunch at Innsbruck’s leading hotel, and then did a whirlwind round of shopping. Toni acquired many things she would have given her eyes to possess in the past few weeks ... some really smart linens and sun-suits, a delectable little afternoon dress, a couple of soft, yielding sweaters and slacks, and a dress in which to make her appearance on the dance floor at the Hotel Rosenhorn which would no doubt rivet the attention of some of the guests.

  There was to be another gala dance at the hotel at the end of the week, and Philip Gresham had already received her promise to dance with him. Not that she wanted to do so, but her uncle obviously expected it of her. Philip Gresham was a prime favourite with him at the moment.

  The dress was a swirl of chiffon the colour of a ripe apricot, and it suited her perfectly—so perfectly that she was startled when she saw her reflection in the tall mirror in her new bedroom at the hotel. It had touches of gold embroidery, and with golden shoes and a glittering golden handbag she would look like a golden rose when she wore it.

  It did things to her hair and that clear, pale skin of hers so lightly warmed with summer tan. And in some curious way it made her look even more vulnerable than she had looked in the absurd outfit she had worn to carry drinks to and fro on the terrace.

  After their shopping expedition they returned to the hotel, and Gresham was not merely waiting for them when they got back but attached himself to them for the remainder of the evening.

  Toni, appearing in the dining-room in black georgette—a slim sheath that emphasised her pallor and made her look like a willow-wand—was instantly conscious of Antoine’s eyes seeking her out as he stood in the far doorway watching his guests assemble, but she kept her eyelids lowered and had no idea what his reaction to her appearance was.

  Only once during dinner did she look up and catch him watching her thoughtfully, and Marianne looked positively bad-tempered. She smiled, however, on meeting Toni’s eyes, but it was an empty, shallow echo of a smile, and had the effect of putting Toni off the rest of her meal.

  The next day her things were removed from the bedroom that had been allocated to her by her erstwhile employer, and placed in a room that was part of the suite taken over by General Cunninghame. Toni felt as if this was a kind of final rebuff and reminder on the part of the Rosenhorn’s proprietor that she was no longer employed by him, and therefore nothing at all to do with him.

  The same morning she met him when she was drifting somewhat languidly up the steps of the terrace, and he paused to bow to her a little stiffly. It was the strange, foreign bow that had always seemed to place them in different sections of the world, albeit it was the same bustling, striving world of tension that everyone seemed to be mixed up with nowadays.

  “Good morning, Miss Darcy,” he observed, and she knew he was taking in all the details of the attractive, casual outfit she was wearing, and the fact that she wore dark glasses as if they were a defence rather than a protection from the glare of the hot noonday sun. “I hope you’re completely recovered from that nasty little incident the other day, and are enjoying the company of your uncle.”

  She knew that what he meant was enjoying the novelty of knowing she was someone who had the right to be waited on in the hotel, and not an utterly insignificant member of the staff.

  “Thank you, I’m perfectly fit again,” she returned, but her voice sounded languid—even dispirited—and to her surprise he drew forward one of the terrace chairs for her, and asked her with a keener look at her whether she would like some sort of refreshment. “Coffee, or a drink? You have only to name it.” He stood leaning on the back of a chair near to her, and then all at once he subsided on to it and addressed her more earnestly.

  “You don’t look quite fit to me yet, Toni, and I’m glad you’ve got your uncle here to decide what ought to be done about you.”

  She shot him rather a curious look, at the same time removing her dark glasses and smiling wryly. “You think I should have told you about my uncle when we first met, don’t you, Monsieur Antoine?” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “It was your business. I’ll confess I always had the feeling there must be someone ... A girl like you!” Her heart gave a queer, almost excited leap when he said that, and for a few seconds afterwards her pulses fluttered absurdly. But he brought her down to earth with a thump. “After all, it is difficult to imagine you really coping with situations involving survival in this world, and your movements must have been taken care of by someone who had the right after your parents were killed.”

  “You’re wrong there,” she said quietly. “It was after my parents were killed that I felt I had to get away from my uncle. You see, he and my father—well, they never saw eye to eye, and I was devoted to my father. I always knew that if my uncle had been more—generous—to my father during his lifetime he might not have arrived at the state of mind which was more than partly responsible for the accident.”

  “You mean that—like you—your father was not capable of running his own life without outside assistance?”

  Instantly she resented this, and bit her lip hard.

  “Nothing of the sort,” she returned hotly. “My father was exceptionally capable in many ways, but life used him badly ... and my mother. They never had enough money, for one thing, and they got into difficulties. My uncle could have helped, or so I thought—”

  “But he didn’t?”

  “No.” And then she defended the General hastily. “Now I think he realises that he might have done something, but it’s too late. It
need not have been too late, and the knowledge made him unhappy when I—”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Yes. I meant to do it more successfully, but apparently I wasn’t clever enough even for that.” There was slight but unmistakable bitterness in her voice. “I had to run into Philip Gresham—quite literally, when I entered his bedroom!—and his father is a close family friend. Unfortunately, too, he decided he had to do something about me—”

  “Like most people,” Antoine observed dryly.

  She looked down at her pink-tipped hands in her lap.

  “At least Philip didn’t think I was stupid. He merely thought I needed a little help.”

  “And now that the situation has resolved itself and your uncle plainly thinks young Philip a thoroughly admirable young man—one of his own kind, of course!—and you probably think so, too. Will you be tying up all the knots neatly by marrying him and becoming Mrs. Philip Gresham?”

  She lifted her head with a jerk and their eyes met. “Why ever should you think anything of the kind?”

  Again the shrug.

  “He obviously admires you, and you seem right for one another somehow. You look right—I feel certain you are right!—and it would be a splendid solution to all your future problems—”

  “Except that I personally wouldn’t look upon it as a solution,” she bit out, and after a long, steady sideways look at her he took her completely aback by putting out a hand and covering one of hers, giving it a warm and quite unmistakable squeeze.

  “Good for you!" he exclaimed, his dark eyes confusing her utterly because they seemed to melt and become pools of liquid light as she gazed into them. “Good for you, Toni!” And then abruptly he stood up, and indicated the pine wood where she so often wandered in the heat of the day. “Let’s go for a walk, shall we? I don’t seem to have had much opportunity to talk to you lately, and I’d like to hear something of your future plans. After all, you were a kind of protégée of mine, weren’t you?”

  As she walked side by side with him along the path to the wood she wanted to blurt out that she wished she still was, but although his eyes had melted his manner was still reserved, and apart from anything else she wouldn’t have risked a serious rebuff from him for the world.

  For one thing, there was Marianne Raveaux, who quite obviously considered him her property.

  Inside the wood he asked his second really pertinent question.

  “Are you going home to England when your uncle leaves here?”

  “I don’t know.” This was perfectly true, because although she and the General had discussed her future plans, and the General had intimated that he would like her to accompany him back to England and his London flat, nothing had so far been actually settled. Toni regarded future plans as something to shrink from, because they would almost certainly involve farewell to Austria.

  “Then give me your word that you won’t let yourself be rushed into anything,” Kurt said, and he stood still to exact the promise. “If there’s really no question of your marrying Gresham, don’t let yourself be coerced into anything. I know it must be wonderful for you to find yourself back on good terms with a relative who can do a lot for you, but please take your time in thinking any suggestion over before finally committing yourself and agreeing to it.”

  “Oh, I will, I will!”

  There was a note almost like dedication in her voice as she gave him her word.

  “I’ll do nothing in a hurry—I promise you!”

  His mouth twisted a little oddly.

  “I know I’ve no right to ask this of you, but for a short time you were a sort of responsibility of mine, and—well, perhaps I’m unwilling to be rid of the responsibility.”

  They were quite alone in the wood, and very close. In the pine-scented dimness beneath the trees she could feel the strong grip of his fingers encircling her elbow, and his head was inclined towards her to enable him to watch her face. His breath seemed to fan her cheek, and she knew a moment of panic because there was danger in such proximity—it might cause her to give herself away and reveal how madly her heart was racing and how great was the temptation to turn her face towards his.

  So she broke away from him as if impatient to penetrate deeper into the depths of the wood, and so sudden was her movement that she stumbled and would have fallen but for the fact that his arm surrounded her like a steel band, and despite a certain amusement in his voice she heard him rebuke her sternly:

  “Sweet idiot, why can’t you look where you are going? And why, in any case, are you in such a hurry?”

  She looked up at him while he held her strongly and her heart thundered against him, and their eyes clung together. She saw him smiling twistedly, and then the smile vanished and his eyes were darker than she had ever seen them. He said something which she failed to understand—possibly because it was in a tongue still alien to her; and then he said something which she understood perfectly:

  “Liebling! You can’t keep running away!”

  His mouth came down on here, and the kiss was hard and swift and satisfying. It provided her with the curious conviction that the wood was full of singing birds like nightingales and full-throated warblers instead of being hushed because of the heat of the day, and the patch of blue sky she could see between the leaves above her head was a magical island sea in which she was drowning with a magical churning of blue water.

  She put up her hands to clutch at him just as he lifted his head, and the illusion of drowning was banished because she knew they were simply standing in the wood. Strong arms no longer held her, but dark eyes looked down at her with a mixture of triumph and mockery in their depths.

  “Tonight I shall expect you to dance with me,” he said. “You must tear yourself away from Mr. Gresham and say yes to me when I ask you nicely if you will give me the pleasure! They are old-fashioned words, but we use them out here ... And it will be a pleasure to dance with you, Liebling. Something tells me it will be a very great pleasure!”

  SHE took a long time over her dressing that night, and the General was looking quite impatient when she joined him at their table on the lantern-lit terrace for a pre-dinner cocktail.,

  Philip Gresham was with him, and he interrupted the older man’s vague cluckings of amazement because a young woman could take so long over the business of adorning herself for the evening, with a somewhat stunned expression of approval because the time had been so obviously well spent.

  “You look wonderful, Toni! Absolutely wonderful! Doesn’t she, General?”

  The General, after a more comprehensive study of his niece, admitted with almost as much appreciation that she did. She was wearing the apricot chiffon dress, and with the lighted windows behind her, the star-spangled night sky above her, and the lantern light shining on her hair, looked arrestingly, glowingly lovely. A golden girl, Gresham thought, and was pleased because she made him think of a golden rose.

  A golden rose rescued from drudgery. He liked to think that he was most certainly responsible for that! General Cunninghame smiled at his niece.

  “Well, I’ll go so far as to say you could hardly look nicer, my dear,” he told her.

  They dined in an atmosphere of balloons and streamers, and beside every lady’s plate was a small gift that added to the general festivity of the evening. Afterwards, in the flower-decorated ballroom, the real business of the evening began.

  A troupe of singers and accordion players came up from the village, and before general dancing began they entertained with some time-honoured songs and dances, and got the guests into a sufficiently relaxed and abandoned humour to see the rest of the evening through a golden haze of carefree enjoyment.

  Toni caught sight of Marianne dancing with a lively young man from the village, who swung her round and had her laughing and as carefree as himself in a matter of minutes, although only a short while previously, while dining with Kurt at his table, she had been looking as if something not particularly pleasant was weighing on her mind, and as if
Kurt himself had transgressed in such a way that merited her paying him little or no attention.

  And then, as more and more couples took the floor, Philip seized Toni and drew her out into the middle of it, where she had to submit to a flood of bottled-up admiration that pleased her less and less as she listened and danced, because Philip had oiled his tongue with rather a lot of champagne at dinner and his compliments struck her as very fulsome indeed.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this evening all day,” he told her, “and now that at last it’s here I mean to make the most of it.” He abandoned the Austrian style of dancing and swung her into his arms. “By the way, what were you and Antoine doing just before lunch? I saw you disappearing in the direction of that wood at the side of the house that I like to look upon as our wood, because it was there in the early days of our acquaintance that we met on two occasions.”

  Toni could tell by the suspicious tone of his voice that he was working up a resentful fit of dislike of the man from whom he liked to think he had rescued Toni, and in addition he obviously considered that having rescued her and restored her to the bosom of her family he had the right to take a further active part in her future. She had known for some time that he was interested in her, and that his interest had grown from the moment that she entered his room in response to his summons on the chambermaid’s bed.

  She would never forget the acute sensation of distaste her first encounter with him had filled her with, and because of it she knew she was never likely to feel anything but a quite unconquerable repugnance whenever he was anywhere near to her. And when he looked at her with a smouldering kind of possessive jealousy in his eyes she felt frankly revolted. She resented being held by him as if she belonged to him, and she wished her uncle wasn’t so obviously keen to throw them together.

  “In a short while now your uncle will be taking you back to England with him,” he said, as if he knew all about the General’s plans for her. “He thinks you might like to do a spot of travelling before you settle down with him. There’s no doubt about it, you’ve had a rotten time in the past few months, and you could do with a little light relaxation. But what you really need is someone to take care of you.... Someone apart from an uncle, I mean—”