Royal Purple (18 page)

CHAPTER XVI

WHEN he opened the door of her room without waiting to knock, Lucy was not engaged in packing. There was an open suitcase on her bed, and a few items of wispy underwear were draped across it, but her main preoccupation was powdering her face after bathing it in cold water following a short spell of agonised feminine weeping.

Her eyes were still red when she turned to confront the man who was responsible for the weeping, and her complexion was a trifle blotchy, but she had combed her hair and it looked ridiculously soft and silky framing her face, and her eyes were like
drowned blue lakes. And after so much crying they were a very bright and brilliant blue.

Paul took a step towards her, but she retreated towards the window. She looked absolutely appalled that he should be there.

“I don’t know what you’re doing here! If the Countess knew
...”

“The Countess does know,” he assured her gently.

She came up against the faded curtains, and she had to stand still.

“Then I don’t understand why she let you come up.”

He opened his arms wide.

“Lucy, I told her I love you! I told her I love you more than anything else in life! I also apologised to her for this afternoon, and now I’m—apologising to you!” He swallowed. To her amazement his handsome mouth seemed to quiver. “My grandmother has forgiven me, Lucy, so—won’t you?”

She made a little gesture with her hands to her throat as if she couldn’t believe him; her blue, blue eyes remained disbelieving.

“You’ve never said you love me before,” she remarked slowly, reaching out for a
corner
of the old-fashioned dressing-chest to cling on to. “This afternoon you said quite a lot of things, but you didn’t say you loved me. You didn’t even ask me whether I loved you. I don’t suppose it matters to you very much whether I do or not!”

His mouth twisted wryly.

“You’re a woman, Lucy, as well as an enchanting child, and I refuse to believe that words mean as much to you as all that
...
words that could wait, I mean. If they do, I seem to have blundered badly.
I wanted to tell you that first afternoon we met in Kensington Gardens that you were the loveliest thing that had ever happened to me, but I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me
...
not then. I thought you’d make up your mind that I said that sort of thing to impressionable young women, and you’d be wise if you didn’t see me again. I also thought you were too young to be alarmed.”

“And what was there to alarm me in a statement of that sort, if it was the truth?”

“It was the truth! But I should have had to add that I meant to possess you one day, and that might have alarmed you!”

She looked away from his pleading eyes, and shrank a little nearer to the window.

“And this afternoon? You weren’t trying to frighten me this afternoon when you first accused me of being an adventuress, and then made the sort of love to me you might have made to a—to a kitchen-maid in the days when your grandmother was a princess of Seronia!”

“This afternoon I admit I lost my head. But I wanted to hurt you because you’d destroyed an illusion, and it was an agony for me to have you toppling from the pedestal on which I’d placed you and hear you talking like any vulgar little husband-hunter of making a good marriage in Italy, and being quite prepared to allow my grandmother to spend her money on you.”

“But I wouldn’t have allowed her to spend her money on me, and I only said that to hurt you, because—”

“Because I failed to say an all-important thing like, ‘I love you’?”

She nodded her head, and then she put her hands up over her face to hide it and the marks of tears, the flush of humiliation that stained her cheeks, and the distress in her eyes.

“If I say it every morning, every afternoon, and every evening for the rest of my life, will that make up for such a colossal piece of stupidity?” he asked. He moved across the room until he stood beside her and the ungainly piece of furniture that all but blocked the window, and he waited until she uncovered her eyes and looked up at him mistily. “If I say, ‘Lucy, I love you
,’
at breakfast, ‘Lucy, I love you,’ at tea, and ‘Lucy, I love you
,’
at some hour in the evening when we’re quite alone, with the world shut out, will you say, ‘Paul, I love you!’ now?”

For an instant Lucy’s lip quivered, and she drew the sort of breath people often draw after they have been shaken by an emotional storm of weeping; and then the mistiness vanished from her eyes and they grew bright as stars. He opened his arms to her again, and they grew brighter still.

She hurled herself into his arms, and as they closed round her she managed to satisfy
him
on one point, at least.

“I love you, Paul! ... Oh, Paul, I love you!” she told
hi
m almost desperately, and he held her protectively, remorsefully, tenderly, his cheek hard pressed against her hair.

After several minutes of finding it impossible to do anything but cling to one another, he drew her down on to the side of her own bed, and then he made her look at
hi
m.

“Darling, I must make you understand about Sophie. What she did t
hi
s afternoon was typical of her, for she’s been horribly spoilt, and t
hi
ngs have always gone her way. But I don’t think she would have behaved as she did if she’d had the smallest inkling of how matters really stood between us. She’d only seen you once before, and I’m afraid she rather gathered
...”

“That I was nothing more nor less than a light diversion,” Lucy supplied with a wry look.

“I’m afraid so,” he agreed unhappily.

She put up a hand and touched his dark cheek.

“It doesn’t matter,” she assured him softly, “so long as she was never anything more than a light diversion to you?
”

“Not even that,” he answered, without the smallest hesitation. “I’ve always been fond of her, and I’m afraid I’ve allowed myself to be made use of occasionally. Her mother was quite certain I would look after her when she came over here to London, and Sophie herself never had a doubt. I think she takes a kind of pleasure in ordering me about, as if I was some sort of possession!”

“A prospective husband, for instance?” Lucy couldn’t resist asking.

He shook his head.

“Perhaps her mother would have liked it if we’d married, but Sophie and I never thought of it, I assure you. She’s not my type at all.” From the safe shelter of his arms Lucy could believe him, but there had been another occasion when it hadn’t been so easy to believe. “She’s brilliant and beautiful and restless, but I want a wife I can adore, and who will adore me.”

He kissed her lingeringly on each of her eyes, the tip of her nose, the lobes of her ears, and her soft red mouth. Lucy reassured him about the amount of adoration she was prepared to pour out over him, and then he returned to the subject of Sophie.

“She’ll apologise when she sees you again. But I’d have cut off my right hand before I’d have had such a situation as developed this afternoon stumbled upon by her.”

“Did you
...
have to do a lot of explaining?” she asked, keeping her face hidden.

“I explained that I was going to marry you, if I could persuade you,” he added humbly.

“Why did you let her have the key of the cottage?”

“Because I’m hardly ever there, and she was welcome to stay there if she wanted to do so. I knew that Mrs. Miles would look after her. But it never occurred to me that she would choose this week-end to break in on us.”

“Paul,” she said, clasping both hands around his arm and looking up at him. “About your grandmother. Why didn’t you tell me the truth about yourself, and about the Countess? In a way I
thin
k
I guessed, but I couldn’t somehow believe it. She was so bitter about your mother, and yet she allowed you to take me out. It was odd.”

“It was certainly odd that you and I should run into one another the way we did.” He removed her hands from his sleeve and carried them up to his lips and held them there. “Of
c
ourse I knew where my grandmother lived, and I could hardly believe it when I discovered that you were trying to sell her jewels for her
...
someone who looked like you, who ought to be smothered with jewels!” He kissed her fingers hungrily, and she laughed with a sudden burst of amusement.

“Paul, I’m not at all the type to be smothered with jewels!”

“Aren’t you?” He gazed at her with so much undisguised adoration in his eyes that she lowered her own eyes hurriedly. “One day we’ll see about that. One day we’ll try some very perfect pearls about that slender neck, and I think your eyes would be really blue if you wore sapphires
...”

“Mr. Halliday told me that I ought to wear sapphires,” she confessed breathlessly.

“Halliday obviously knows what he’s talking about,” Paul smiled. Then he grew serious again, and returned to the effort of explaining.
“
That my grandmother should choose you to sell her jewels was extraordinary, but when I discovered that you lived with my grandmother it was wonderful. The old lady is so obstinate that none of us have ever been able to do very much with her, or for her; but I wanted to do far more, and through you I got the idea that I might in time be able to do that. She obviously trusted you, and was fond of you. And you were plainly devoted to her, or you wouldn’t have stayed with her under such conditions.”

“I love her,” she said simply. “I don’t know quite why, but I always have.”

He smiled.

“I’m beginning to have quite an affection for her too ... or I will have, if she’ll let me. She’s impossibly arrogant, and dictatorial, and she said some pretty unfair things about my mother, which annoyed me, when we had our interview together after I brought you home late from the cottage. But I discovered that she has your interests at heart, and that pleased me. She thought it best you shouldn’t know about our relationship until she herself decided that the time was ripe.”

“I wonder why?” Lucy asked wonderingly.

He shrugged his shoulders slightly, while he studied her carefully.

“It could be that she wanted me to be entirely free of glamour.” He asked if she objected to him smoking a cigarette in her bedroom, and when she said “No” immediately he lighted one thoughtfully. “Not that I personally consider there’s very much glamour attaching to any member of a royal family who no longer has the right to consider itself royal. As things are, I’m an exile from my own country, and I haven’t been home since I was a child. I was taken to America when I was six, and brought up there, and Americans are not particularly interested in princes
...
certainly not ex-princes. I grew up like any other young American, and I suppose I feel far more American than Seronian.”

“But why did you take on a job as a waiter, Paul?” she asked, unable to contain her curiosity any longer.

He smiled with more amusement.

“I wondered when we were coming to that! I took on a job as a waiter because I’m interested in hotel running; and as a matter of fact I’ve just bought rather a large hotel on the French Riviera which will be opening in about six months’ time. There are a lot of alterations that are essential, and the place is being reconditioned
...
but I shall keep on my job at the Splendide until the opening. I have a flat in London, and as you know, I have a cottage in the country, and although I can’t offer you my country, I can offer you complete security for the rest of your adorable life, and all the love in the heart of a man who wasn’t really
born
to high places. In fact, he’s been very happy as a waiter!”

He slid off the bed and knelt down beside her. He took her hands and held them gravely.

“Lucy, my most precious Lucy, will you make the waiter a very, very happy man soon?” he begged.

Lucy found it impossible to answer. She could only look at him and love him with her eyes, and he kissed her hands lingeringly, the palms, each slender fingertip, and finally the finger on which his ring would fit snugly when he slid it on to it himself.

“I’ll buy you a sapphire,” he said softly.

He sat beside her on the bed again, and took her back into his arms. Lucy felt so overwhelmed she couldn’t speak for several seconds, and then at last she said:

“Paul, above everything else I want to be your wife, and I want to live with you in the cottage in Surrey, and—and cook for you, and look after you.
I hope you won’t expect me to keep on Mrs. Miles as a full-time help, because it’s such a little cottage, and
...
oh, Paul, I love you!” she finished in a whisper. “I can’t believe this is really true!”

“You’ll believe it’s true enough when you’re sewing on my buttons, and mending my socks,” he told her, seeing the golden head just below his chin through an adoring mist. “But when we go to France you’ll have to allow someone else to take on the job, because I shall want you at my side, and we’ll both have to be a bit more formal. But, for a few months, I think we’ll have a wonderful honeymoon!”

Her arms were round his neck, and her lips were under his, when the Countess knocked on the door. She knocked impatiently with her stick.

“Let me in!” she insisted. “All this is very irregular!”

Paul let her in, and he put her in the one comfortable armchair the room contained, while she demanded a full account of all that had transpired.

“When I was young,” she said, “if I’d allowed a young man to propose to me in my bedroom I’d have been put on bread and water for a week. But I realise these are slightly different times, and I’ve ordered Augustine to prepare something eatable for dinner tonight, and sent her to the off-licence for a bottle of champagne, and I hope you’ll stay and celebrate with us, Paul. Your own engagement, I mean!”

“Nothing would delight me more,
madame
,”
he assured her. Then he knelt down in front of her as he had knelt in front of Lucy, and he kissed her hands
...
only instead of soft little hands that held his heart they were gnarled and wrinkled, and perhaps because of unaccustomed excitement, they trembled a little. “Your Highness,” he said gently—
“
Grand’mere
!—when Lucy and I are married will you come and live with us? In the South of France. It will be warm for yon there, and life will be easy
... I’ll
see to that
!
You shall have a glass of champagne every night, if you want it, and
I
promise you the venison will be entirely to your taste!”

T
ears trickled down the withered cheeks, but the Countess von Ardrath winked them away impatiently.

“Good gracious, boy,” she exclaimed, “anyone would think I was a gourmand!” Then she held out her hand to Lucy. “Give me a kiss, child!”