Dennis Wheatley - Duke de Richleau 07 (4 page)

At once he
decided to scale the tower and call her bluff.

“You poor little
rich girl,” he said softly. “It is high time that someone opened your prison
doors for you, and I am prepared to do it if you will let me.”

She started,
looked at him in evident surprise, then asked with a low laugh: “Am I to take
that as a proposal of marriage?”

“Hardly!” he
laughed back. “It is customary for a man at least to see a lady’s face before
he asks her to marry him. But from the very moment when you fell into my arms
on the staircase, I felt greatly attracted to you; and I ask you now to accept
me as your beau.”

“I appreciate your
offer, and would be glad to have your friendship,” she said gravely. “But,
unfortunately, it is most unlikely that any future occasions will arise where
we could talk like this in private.”

“Why? Are you,
then, returning to the Continent almost immediately?”

“Oh no. I shall
be staying in England for some time yet.”

“Then we are
certain to meet at lots of places. London society is not large, and the season
will be opening shortly. You must let me know to what parties you are going,
and I shall make it my business to get myself invited.”

“As soon as it
was noticed that you were paying marked attention to me, my people would
formally request you to desist.”

“From fear that
I was after your millions, eh? Then we must manage matters so that they suspect
nothing. We must refrain from dancing together sufficiently to make ourselves
conspicuous. Sometimes it might be wise not to do so once in a whole evening;
but we could sit out together, like this. Besides, Roehampton, Hurlingham,
Ascot and Henley would offer us a score of opportunities to meet, get lost in
the crowd, and slip away for a while together.”

As she remained
silent he took her hand and pressed it. A tremor of excitement ran right up her
long kid-gloved arm to the elbow, and she let her hand remain in his; so he
hurried on, “Even after this brief meeting I feel myself near to being in love
with you already. You say you have been starved of romance. I offer it to you
now. I beg you not to reject it.”

Her voice came
almost in a whisper. “I am sorely tempted to say yes. But I am frightened. Not
for myself, but that I might become involved in a scandal, and so bring
disgrace on my family.”

“I swear to you
that I will be the very essence of discretion.”

“And—and I
believe you. But I am sure that for you to see me alone will be far more
difficult than you suppose.”

De Richleau did
not doubt that she and her money-bags were well protected from amorous assault;
but he thought it certain that she was deliberately exaggerating in order to
keep up the role of snow-white innocence, and test him to the utmost. Yet, even
had he fully believed her, no difficulties, real or imagined, would have
deterred him now. His ardour was aroused to a greater degree than it had been
for a long time, by the temptation to enter on what, for him, would be an
entirely new-kind of love affair.

Smiling into
her eyes, he said firmly, “Leave everything to me. I promise you I am no
rou
é
; but I would be a poor sort of beau if, at my age, I had never been
in love before. And I am rich enough to bribe servants so lavishly that I have
never yet known one to betray me. It would not be the first time, either, that
I have scaled a garden wall to keep an assignation with a lady on its other
side in the middle of the night.”

She caught her
breath. “I—I can believe that too. The moment you unmasked I knew you to be
bold and determined. But if I consented to let you play this dangerous game, nothing—nothing
could come of it.”

“Do you call
love
nothing?”

“I mean it could
lead nowhere, and there would be a bitter aftermath for both of us. As an
honourable gentleman, which I now feel sure you are, you would not expect of me
anything—anything, the memory of which would cause me shame when I come to
marry. Yet, if we were found out, people would believe the worst; and that risk
is too high a price to pay for a few stolen conversations.”

He raised her
gloved hand to his lips, and kissed it. “My beautiful unknown, I beg you not to
act your part of sweet innocence too faithfully, by pretending that you would
forbid me all but talk. Tender embraces and gentle kisses never ruined any girl’s
marriage yet, and stolen kisses are the very salt of stolen meetings. They
afterwards become the sweetest memories of our lives.”

As she did not
reply, he felt that the time had come to call her bluff. Slipping an arm about
her waist he swiftly drew her to him, and added: “That you may have a sample to
think about tonight, I am about to steal one now.”

“Wait!” she exclaimed,
jerking herself erect and throwing back her head. “Rather than you should
regret what you are about to do, I will unmask.”

For a second he
paused, dreading that in boasting of her beauty she had lied, and now intended
to disclose some horrid scar or blemish that disfigured her face. But, as she
ripped away the black satin with her free hand, he found himself gazing on
features that were delicate but strong; sensuous, yet chaste; with a skin as
smooth as her kid gloves. She was still a little flushed but her blue eyes, now
calm and serene, met his without a quiver.

The thought
flashed through his mind that she had been wrong in supposing that he would
know her at sight, as he could not recall ever having seen a photograph of her
in any of the weeklies that featured the doings of society people. But, as he
had spent the greater part of the past two years in the Balkans, that seemed
hardly surprising, and entirely irrelevant to their present situation.

He smiled at
her, and murmured: “I thank you for that gracious gesture—and the sweet
surprise of your dazzling beauty.” Then, crushing her against his chest, he
pressed his mouth firmly on her half-open lips.

Her hands
swiftly gripped his shoulders, and for a moment he felt her resist him. But
under the pressure of his mouth hers opened wider, her head fell back and her
whole body went limp in his arms. Overjoyed at her complete surrender, he
tightened his embrace and showered more kisses upon her. She made no response,
and he took her lack of it for shyness. Then he asked her to tell him her name.

She did not
reply. Suddenly, with a start of dismay, he realized that she had fainted.

Next moment his
distress and alarm were increased a hundredfold— he had heard the sound of
approaching footsteps. His right arm was caught between the basket-work back of
the settee and the girl’s limp body. Before he had time to pull it free, the
footsteps halted and a woman’s voice cried excitedly in German:

“Here she is!
Ach! Gott im Himmel!
But this is terrible!”

At a glance the
Duke recognized her as the grey-haired dowager whom his partner had pointed out
to him in the ballroom. Beside her was a distinguished-looking elderly man. His
voice now came sharp and angry, in good English but with a heavy accent.

“What has
happened? How dare you, sir! What have you done to her?”

De Richleau
considered himself an adept at slipping out of awkward situations; but rarely
had he been caught in quite such an embarrassing one, and for once his habitual
sang-froid deserted him.

“Nothing,” he
stammered. “Nothing very reprehensible, I assure you. I—I would not harm her
for the world. She must be a very sensitive young lady to faint just
because—because I whisked her mask off. But really, she will be quite all right
again in a few minutes.”

Ignoring his
protests, the elderly woman ran forward, pushed him aside, and took the
unconscious girl in her arms. Producing a bottle of smelling salts from her
bag, she administered first aid, while the man continued to stand there glaring
at the Duke.

After a moment
the girl’s eyes flickered open. Raising a hand, she pushed the smelling salts
aside, hurriedly sat up, and murmured in German:

“Oh,
Fran Grafin
, how—how do you come to be here?”

“For the past
half-hour we have been looking for you everywhere,” the
Grafin
replied in tones of mingled concern and reproach. “We
became alarmed by your disappearance, and with good cause it seems. I cannot
say how distressed—“

“Please!” the
girl interrupted. “Please say no more. I was quite enjoying myself until— Oh,
it was absurd of me to faint. But—but it is the first time I have ever been
kissed like that.”

Then, burying
her face in her hands, she burst into tears.

‘Now the cat is
really out of the bag,’ thought the Duke grimly. ‘I could at least have saved
her that, had she not become hysterical. How damnably annoying that her people
should make such a fuss over so little. I hope they don’t put the poor child on
bread and water for this, but they are probably quite capable of it. Still,
from all she said, they must be appalling snobs; so perhaps when they know who
I am they will regard her little lapse more leniently.’

These thoughts
coursed through his mind in a second as he turned his glance from the girl to
the elderly man. At her words his lined face had taken on a look of
consternation that almost amounted to horror. Trembling with anger, he
confronted De Richleau, and burst out:

“Did you hear
what she said? Your conduct is outrageous—unpardonable. Do you not realize that
it is
l
è
se-majesté
to have
forced your vile and brutal attentions on Her Imperial Highness?”

At
that moment, attracted by the raised voices, two other men appeared
round the corner of the banked-up mass of orchids that hid the seat from
passers-by. One was a good bit over six feet tall, with greying hair: the
other, of medium height, with a bulging forehead and chubby face. Both were
masked, and remained standing at the bend of the alley; silent spectators of
the scene.

Amazement and
swift realization of the seriousness of his offence temporarily robbed De
Richleau of words. When Sir George Holford had invited him to the ball that
morning he had omitted to mention that he was giving it in honour of the
Archduchess Ilona Theresa. The Duke had not even known that she was in England,
but the revelation of her identity explained a multitude of things that had
puzzled him in the past half hour.

The person of
the fair-haired young man who had fallen down stairs had seemed vaguely
familiar and, by association, De Richleau now realized that the Archduchess’
partner must have been one of the Royal Princes. The unusual combination in her
of maturity and innocence, which had attracted him so strongly, was explained
by her royal upbringing. Naturally, photographs of her were always appearing in
the Press, and when she had said, ‘l am accounted the most beautiful...’ she
had stopped short of adding ‘Princess in Europe’, only in order to preserve her
incognito. Naturally, too, as the future bride of some crowned head or heir apparent,
she would have been kept with the utmost strictness, and any young nobles who
began to pay her attentions at the Court of Vienna would have been promptly
banished to some distant province. It was probably true that she had spent much
of her youth in Munich, as the Royal Bavarian House of Wittelsbach was more
closely tied by a series of marriages to the Habsburgs of Vienna than to any
other family, and she had obviously refrained from telling him that she was an
Austrian in the belief that he would then guess her identity. It was now clear,
too, that on removing her mask she had expected him to recognize her
immediately, and so desist from kissing her.

Recovering his
wits after a moment, De Richleau drew himself up and said: “My attentions, sir,
were neither vile nor brutal. You overstate the case. My fault arises solely
from the fact that this lady happens to be a royal personage. The liberty I
took was no more than any man might be tempted to take at a masked ball, where
partners are not always known to one another.”