Paris - And My Love Page 10

  “You must be mad!” she went on, her voice rising a couple of tones. “Do you realize what monsieur will say,—what he will do? That brooch was a wedding present from him to Madame Florian. It was of immense value to them both. He may dismiss us all for incompetence. And you remain calm and—”

  “Madame Rachel, I don’t feel in the least calm,” Marianne interrupted quietly. “If you want to know, I feel rather sick. But there is no question of our all being sacked for incompetence. You, at least, were not even here. Monsieur Florian is a reasonable man—”

  “Monsieur Florian, like all men, is not reasonable when he is angry,” declared Madame Rachel. “He can be a fiend—a monster—at such times.”

  Used as she was to the exaggerations and dramatics of her world, Marianne blanched slightly at this prospect, and poor Marcelle actually uttered a slight sob.

  “Well, we shall soon see,” said Marianne, as calmly as she could, “Mr. Senloe has gone to find Monsieur Florian, and they should be here any minute now.”

  “Monsieur Senloe knows about it?” Madame Rachel became a little less excited. “And he has gone for Monsieur Florian?”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “Pray heaven he finds him before he goes into the theater itself.” Madame Rachel cast up her fine eyes, as though drawing heaven’s special attention to this plea. “The overture must be about to begin.”

  But evidently the efficient Roger had found Florian in time. For at this moment they both entered the great mirrored hall, and with them came Gabrielle Florian herself, attired in a fantastically beautiful dress of peacock-blue brocade.

  There was a grim air about Florian, and Marianne found herself trembling as the three approached.

  “Monsieur, I am appalled—desolated,” exclaimed Madame Rachel, as they came up. “I have only just heard the story from these foolish girls, and—”

  “All right, madame. I will now hear the story myself,” interrupted Florian curtly. “Tell me what happened, mademoiselle.” And he fixed Marianne with such a cold and steely glare that she was uncomfortably reminded of Madame Rachel’s saying that he could be a monster on these occasions.

  Even so, she strove to keep her voice steady as she said, “I’m afraid the fault was mine, monsieur.” She heard Madame Rachel gasp, but whether at the stupidity or the effrontery of this statement it was not possible to say. And then she went on to tell him, as she had told Roger, what had happened.

  “You mean—you left the stall and went to speak to someone?”

  “A customer?”

  “No, monsieur. A private friend,” Marianne said, resolutely.

  “Had you any instructions as to what you were to do when Madame Rachel was absent?”

  “Yes, monsieur.”

  “Just a moment.” Florian put up his hand to stop the eager words that were obviously trembling on Madame Rachel’s indignant lips. “Mademoiselle will answer for herself. What were those instructions?”

  Roger Senloe shifted from one foot to the other and began to look oddly sullen.

  “I was to be responsible for the stall, and I was not to leave it until madame returned.”

  “Voila!” exclaimed Madame Rachel triumphantly. “But you deliberately disobeyed those instructions?”

  “Look here, Florian, I think—” began Roger Senloe.

  “Allow me to deal with my own staff,” Florian said coldly, and even Roger subsided into silence, though reluctantly. “Well, mademoiselle, you deliberately disobeyed your instructions?”

  “Monsieur Florian, it was not deliberate,” Marianne explained unhappily. “I just didn’t think—”

  “Mademoiselle, I have no room in my firm for people who just do not think. Thanks to your disobedience and thoughtlessness—”

  “Georges,” said the girl in the peacock-blue dress and she lightly took him by the arm so that she was much more difficult to ignore than either Roger Senloe or Madame Rachel, “I should like to ask one question.”

  “Very well.” Florian shrugged impatiently. But although he did not even glance at his wife, something about him insensibly softened at her touch.

  “Marianne,” said Gabrielle Florian, and the friendly, intimate use of her Christian name brought a sudden lump into Marianne’s throat, “was it very important that you should speak to this friend of yours?”

  “Well, it—it was rather,” Marianne admitted, a little huskily.

  “In fact, it was an opportunity not to be missed?”

  “I—I thought so.”

  “Then that’s the answer. We all do these things occasionally,” said Gabrielle Florian, looking around at the others. “We’ve all been madly sorry for something, or ready to kick ourselves when it’s too late. As a matter of fact, I was wrong to insist on lending the brooch. It was too much of a responsibility for other people. You said so at the time, Georges. You were right, as usual.”

  “But ... one moment.” For once Florian refused to respond to his wife’s coaxing smile. “I’m afraid one cannot leave it there.”

  “But I have left it there,” retorted Gabrielle smiling still. “And it’s my brooch we’re dealing with.”

  “We are also dealing with my staff,” returned her husband grimly. “And—”

  “Don’t be tiresome, mon chèr,” said Gabrielle. “Remember the incident of the green dress.”

  “What green dress?” inquired Florian disagreeably. But Roger Senloe laughed suddenly and said, almost genially, “To be sure! It has a certain parallel.”

  “You know perfectly well what green dress,” Gabrielle told her husband calmly. “The green dress that I borrowed for the collection without permission, and that got wine spilled all over it. You were even more furious with me than you are now with Mademoiselle Marianne. But later you admitted you were wrong, and you gave me the dress. Remember?”

  “Yes, of course I remember. But that has nothing whatever to do with the present occasion.”

  “It has, in a way. Because that was when I fell in love with you,” Gabrielle said on a note of calm reflection. “And if I hadn’t fallen in love with you, I wouldn’t have married you. And if I hadn’t married you, you wouldn’t have given me the brooch—and none of this would have happened.”

  “Is that what you call logic?” inquired her husband with a reluctant laugh.

  “No. It was only meant to make you laugh—which it has done. But the real point of the story is that sometimes, even if people have done something quite wrong under strong compulsion, one must understand and forgive them. Particularly if they make no attempt to evade the issue. It is not easy to tell an unpalatable truth to you, Georges. I know! Mademoiselle Marianne was brave to admit her fault. It would have been equally easy to say she had not left the stall, but that she had been too busy to notice what was happening.”

  “It seems to me,” growled Florian, “that you are putting too high a value on a simple statement of truth.”

  “The simple truth is not told so often in our world,” replied his wife dryly. “And this you know as well as I do.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Florian said rather disagreeably, “Then what do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing, really,” replied Gabrielle with a quick smile at Marianne. “Except that I suppose you should report the loss to the police who are on duty here. But I’m afraid—” just for a moment her lip trembled “—I have seen the last of my rose spray brooch.”

  “Madame Florian,” Marianne said in a low voice, “you are being most extraordinarily generous. I simply don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Well, find some way of doing so,” exclaimed Florian curtly. “For without her intervention you would have been dismissed from my employ.”

  “I know, monsieur.” And Marianne tightly clasped the hand that Gabrielle held out to her.

  “One gets over everything in time,” observed Gabrielle, with an impartial glance around. “And now perhaps we can slip into our box in time for the end of the first act. Ar
e you coming, Roger?”

  It seemed, after a second’s hesitation, that Roger was. And as Marianne looked after the three, she thought, No wonder he’s still in love with her!

  “You are a fortunate girl,” observed Madame Rachel acidly, by way of bringing her back to earth.

  “I know it, madame,” said Marianne earnestly.

  “If Madame Florian had not been here, it would have gone very badly for you.”

  “Madame Florian is an angel from heaven!” exclaimed Marcelle emotionally.

  “She knows how to manage Monsieur Florian—which is even more important,” replied Madame Rachel, with a short laugh that showed that she was gradually returning to her usual state of comparative good humor.

  After that, the rest of the evening seemed almost uneventful. In a somewhat subdued mood, Marianne and Marcelle dealt with the flow of customers who came to their stall during the intermissions and for the half hour that the fair remained open after the gala performance was over.

  At twelve-thirty, however, the stalls closed, the small amount of merchandise remaining was packed away, and the hall was cleared for the final models’ parade that was to close the evening’s proceedings.

  The top five designers, in an atmosphere of false smiles and bitter rivalry, had combined to put on a superb show, consisting of the forty dresses that each considered to be the flower of his collection.

  Here Lisette at last came into her own. And here at last the two girls from the boutique found that they could sit down and rest their aching feet and watch someone else work, without any uneasy feeling that they were not attending to their own responsibilities.

  Just before the show began, someone slipped into the empty seat beside Marianne, and Nat’s voice whispered, “Well, at last here’s a chance of speaking to you!”

  “Oh, Nat, hello!” She turned her head and smiled at him. “Have you had a nice evening?”

  “Pretty good. With two terrific highlights. One was Peroni’s singing of the Addio, and the other was my first glimpse of you in that stunning dress.”

  “You’re going to see lots of other stunning dresses now,” she reminded him.

  “The girl inside makes something of a difference, though.” And though she did not look at him at that moment, she knew from the sound of his voice that he was smiling reminiscently.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. And then, still without looking at him, “You’re going to see Lisette in one of the most fantastic dresses that even Florian ever created.”

  “Am I? So what?”

  “N-nothing. Except that I thought you’d be interested.”

  “Never mind about Lisette now. Marianne—are you still mad at me about that pen?”

  “N-not really. Not if there’s an explanation.”

  “Maybe it will sound feeble to you. But I lent it to her to write down something I wanted—and we were fooling around rather—and it was before I’d met up with you again. In a way, I thought that chapter was over. I was feeling sore and silly about Yvonne—and in some stupid way I seemed to attach the same feeling to you. Can you understand or does it all seem too silly?”

  “No, I think I understand,” Marianne said gently.

  “Well, then, she—Lisette—took a fancy to the pen, and wanted to keep it. I didn’t really want her to have it, but I guess I didn’t insist firmly enough. Anyway, it ended with her hanging on to it. And then, when you asked about it, I knew I’d been in the wrong and—”

  “Oh, Nat dear, you don’t have to say anything else at all.” Silently she slipped her hand into his. “If there’s any apologizing to be done, I should be apologizing, too. I behaved very badly the other night. Berating you like—like a fishwife.”

  “Not at all like a fishwife,” he told her in an amused whisper. “Just like a freeborn British lass, standing up to her man in a way that’s good for him.”

  Then someone said, “Ssh, ssh,” and the first announcement was made and the show began.

  But Marianne hardly saw the first half dozen designs. She was aware only of Nat’s hand in hers, and of that queer way he had described her as “standing up to her man in a way that’s good for him.”

  Did he just mean that in a general way of speaking? Or had he really been wishing to identify himself as “her man”?

  It was impossible to say. But even to speculate on such an enchanting theme made her happy. Worn out by the varying emotions of the evening, lulled by the sense of contentment that his nearness gave her, she sat there almost in a dream, watching the glamorous figures of the models pass and repass.

  Until Lisette appeared. And then a sudden sharpening of all her senses literally made her sit up straighter.

  Lisette made her very first appearance in the strangely beautiful red and green dress, and as she glided past, people leaned forward as though some almost magnetic influence from her drew them literally toward her.

  ,Marianne heard Nat laugh softly beside her.

  “Good Lord, you have to hand it to her, don’t you?” he murmured. “She’s got everything.”

  Marianne tried to find a suitable reply to that, and failed. And at that moment applause broke out around them. Lisette’s was the first gown to draw applause, and although she did not actually smile, the tribute brought an expression of feline contentment to her face. But she kept her green eyes demurely lowered, until she came abreast of Nat. Then, as though she knew by instinct where he was sitting, she swept up her long lashes and smiled faintly at him.

  Marianne was almost sure she heard him gasp slightly as Lisette passed on.

  It was a performance that was to be repeated half a dozen times during the ensuing hour, and each time Marianne felt her nerves and her self-control stretched to breaking point.

  If Nat had remained either amused or indifferent, it would not have mattered. But she knew, as clearly as if he had told her so, that Lisette got under his skin every time she batted her ridiculously long eyelashes and looked at him with those cool green eyes.

  I mustn’t say anything, Marianne kept on telling herself. She’s trying to provoke me, as well as stir him.

  She’d like me to put myself in the wrong with some catty remark about her. But I won’t, I won't, I won’t!

  And at that moment Nat grinned thoughtfully and said, “Lisette certainly makes all the other girls look ordinary. It must be tough having her around.”

  “Were you including me in that general bit of commiseration?” asked Marianne. And she tried so hard to make that sound unworried that she succeeded in making it sound cold.

  “Good heavens, no!” He sounded genuinely astonished. “I would never think of you and Lisette in the same category.”

  And she spent the rest of the time wondering exactly what he meant by that.

  She was disappointed later to find that he was committed to seeing Lisette home. But as least he was perfectly frank about it this time.

  “I’m sorry, Marianne, dear. I made the arrangement before I knew that you and I were going to meet here and make up,” he said with an endearingly rueful smile. “But I’ll call you up in the next day or two, and we’ll go out and celebrate in a big way.”

  There was nothing to do but to assure him that she would be perfectly all right and that—as indeed was the case—she was sharing a taxi home with Marcelle.

  Late though it was—or, rather, early now—Marcelle was still chattering happily about the events of the evening.

  “In spite of the terrible incident of the brooch, it has been wonderful,” she said to Marianne, balancing several purchases on her knee, while she grasped her bag with her free hand. “I have been able to buy several things for maman, and so she will not mind so much that I had to leave her for the evening. In this Monsieur Florian has been very kind.”

  “Yes, he can be kind,” agreed Marianne abstractedly.

  “Of course, when he is angry he is very frightening,” Marcelle prattled on happily, “but then it is wonderful how she subdues him. He must love
her very much.”

  “Yes, I suppose he does.”

  “It must be beautiful to be loved like that.” Marcelle sighed sentimentally. “Is that how your fiancé loves you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Marianne, rather startled by the direct question. “And, anyway, he isn’t my fiancé—yet.”

  “But it is the young man with the romantic eyes, who sat and held your hand during the dress show, isn’t it?” Marcelle pressed.

  Marianne laughed protestingly.

  “I don’t know that he’d choose to be described that way,” she said. “And anyway—it’s unlucky to take too much for granted, Marcelle. Is this where you live?” she added, as the taxi drew up in a quiet street.

  “Oh, yes.” Marcelle tried to gather all her things together and succeeded in dropping her bag, which Marianne picked up for her.

  “Shall I come and open the door for you?” Marianne volunteered.

  “If you would, that would be kind. The key is in my bag. In the little pocket at the back.”

  “Inside the bag, you mean?” inquired Marianne, as she opened the bag and stepped out of the taxi after Marcelle.

  “No, no—at the back. Not inside,” Marcelle said over her shoulder.

  But Marianne hardly heard what she said. She was staring down into Marcelle’s slightly shabby little handbag. For at the bottom, winking and glittering in the light from the nearby street lamp, lay Gabrielle Florian’s rose spray brooch.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Marcelle,” said Marianne, in a queer, stifled sort of voice, “do you know what you have in your handbag?”

  “In my handbag?” Marcelle turned and looked at her over the parcels. “But of course. My purse, my key, my—What is it?” Suddenly her tone changed and a note of alarm was sounded. “Why do you ask that question? And why do you speak so—so queerly?”