But Not For Me Page 6

  He looked extremely astonished, particularly as she held out her hand impulsively.

  Rather slowly, he took the hand.

  “You’re either a very clever girl, Ariane, or else a generous enemy.”

  “I’m not an enemy at all!” Ariane exclaimed in distress.

  He smiled faintly.

  “Do you really expect us to call ourselves friends?”

  “I wish—we could.” She couldn’t quite help that silly little choke in the middle of her sentence.

  “A praiseworthy desire to live at peace with all your in-laws,” he suggested faintly mockingly.

  “Not even that—exactly,” Ariane said slowly, almost as though she were speaking to herself.

  “What, then?”

  “It’s really that, in spite of everything, I like you, Harvey.” That came out with miraculous calm. “And I just hate being at daggers drawn, I suppose.”

  He gave a half-annoyed little laugh.

  “You certainly have your own way of forcing one to sheath the dagger,” he told her. “What is there left for me to say after such a disarming speech?”

  “You might say ‘Pax,’ ” Ariane suggested.

  She saw the annoyance slowly give place to a much gentler expression.

  “Pax, Ariane—if only temporarily,” he said. “And now may I walk back with you?”

  “I thought you were going in the other direction.”

  He frowned impatiently. “I was not actually going anywhere. I was just walking.” Something in the way he said that struck her as terribly dispirited.

  She didn’t say anything, but, remembering how purposefully he had been striding along, she thought that if he had not been going anywhere, he must have been hurrying from something.

  “Running away from his own thoughts, I suppose,” she told herself with a sigh. “I know what that is like.”

  “Hello, you two.” Ariane looked round to see Frank coming towards them. “Nice to see you in friendly converse. I was just coming along to your place, Ariane.”

  “Were you? Then come now. And,”—she glanced a little doubtfully at the other silent figure strolling along beside her—“perhaps Harvey will come too.”

  “Thanks. I’m afraid I must be getting home.”

  Ariane bit her lip. It had been so obvious before that he was in no sort of hurry.

  “By the way, Maurice and Sally are at home,” Frank offered carelessly. “They arrived early this afternoon.”

  “Hell,” was Harvey’s sole comment.

  “Don’t you like your brother?” Ariane said involuntarily.

  “I don’t care much about his wife.”

  “Really, the human race seems in rather a bad way so far as you are concerned. Don’t you like anybody?” Ariane asked amusedly.

  She half expected him to resent her teasing, but perhaps it was something new to him. At any rate, he looked a little startled for a moment. Then he smiled, slowly and very attractively.

  “I’m sorry. Was I being ridiculous?”

  “Very. You usually are,” his brother told him. “As cheery as a Russian drama, with all the loving-kindness of a Scrooge thrown in.”

  “Nonsense. Don’t listen to him,” Ariane said quickly, and she impulsively took Harvey’s arm.

  He glanced down at her, amused and rather sarcastic.

  “What is it, Ariane? Afraid for my sensitive feelings?”

  “N-no. Only Frank doesn’t really think that. And nor do I.”

  “No,” Harvey agreed thoughtfully. “No. If I remember rightly, your expressed opinion of me was that I was a pompous, conceited ass.”

  “Quite right too. Very penetrating criticism at a first glance,” declared Frank delightedly.

  “Oh, Harvey,”—Ariane looked really distressed—“why will you dig that up? I wish you would forget it.”

  “I shouldn’t dream of it,” he assured her. “I enjoyed the occasion. It was the one rousing moment in a dull evening.”

  Ariane looked at him doubtfully, unable to decide if he meant that or not.

  You mean you don’t bear any malice?”

  “Not for that,” he told her carelessly. “In fact, I am charmed to find that the elegant and aristocratic house of Dobson can be human enough to lose its temper and be darned rude.”

  “Look here, I won’t have you speaking to Ariane like that!” Frank was suddenly indignant.

  “She likes it,” Harvey said coolly.

  “She does not. And in any case, instead of sneering at her, you might remember that she was human enough and brave enough to save your life.”

  “Oh, Frank, don’t!” Ariane’s voice trembled. “If you bring that up again I’ll scream.”

  “So shall I, probably,” remarked Harvey. “And if I had hysterics it would be much more sensational than if you did.”

  “Of all the damned ungrateful—”

  “I’m not ungrateful.”

  “Well, you have an exceptional way of showing your gratitude.”

  “Oh, please, please don’t wrangle over me,” Ariane cried desperately. “It makes me utterly miserable.”

  “Nonsense. You like your role of little peacemaker,” Harvey told her contemptuously. “It makes you feel gloriously superior to the common, impossible Muldanes.”

  “It doesn’t,” Ariane said, and unexpectedly burst into tears.

  “Ariane!” exclaimed Frank in utter horror.

  “Oh, lord!” observed Harvey with what Ariane took to be disgust.

  Overwhelmed by shame and dismay, she stood there for a moment with her hands pressed against her face.

  And then, suddenly, somebody’s arms were round her. Her reason told her it must be Frank. But her instinct said it was Harvey.

  “Hush, you little idiot.” He was speaking to her quite softly. “You mustn’t weep every time someone tells you the truth.”

  “It—it’s not the truth.”

  “Will you please leave Ariane alone.” That was Frank, perfectly furious by now. “I don’t know why you should be hugging her.”

  “Shut up,” Harvey said without looking up.

  “Confound it! Is Ariane your fiancée or mine?”

  “Yours, yours. I’m not disputing that. But it was I who hurt her and—”

  “I’m all right. Really I’m all right.” Ariane looked up quickly. “I don’t know why I was such a perfect fool.”

  “Because Harvey was an utter cad, I imagine.”

  “I’m sorry, Ariane. I hate to agree with Frank, but I think perhaps he’s right for once.”

  “Never mind.” She wouldn’t look at him, but she spoke calmly now. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I should say it did matter,” Frank declared. “I wouldn’t let him off as easily as that if I were you. I’d make him grovel.”

  “I don’t think he knows how to,” Ariane said with a faint smile.

  “Quite right, and he doesn’t intend to learn,” Harvey said coolly. But he took her hand and kissed it rather gently. “I’m sorry all the same, little Ariane,” he told her in a whisper. “Forgive me for being—impossible.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes. Quite sure.” She drew a deep breath. “Will you come home with us, after all?”

  He made a little grimace.

  “Clever child,” he observed.

  But he came.

  Ariane knew her mother well enough to see that she was slightly put out by Harvey’s presence, but, after the first shock, she behaved with admirable calm. And to tell the truth, he made himself very charming to Mrs. Dobson in an impersonal way.

  “I really came round to say that now my sister-in-law is home and can play hostess, we want to give a sort of engagement party,” Frank explained.

  “How very nice,” Ariane said dutifully. But actually her heart sank a little at the thought of everything becoming even more irrevocably fixed.

  “Nothing very formal, you know.” One couldn’t imagi
ne anything very formal in connection with Frank in any case, of course. “Just the two families and a few personal friends from both sides.”

  Only Frank would contrive to speak so cheerfully about the two families meeting in friendly intimacy, Ariane thought.

  However, all she said was:

  “I should like Caroline and Dick Ventnor to come, if that’s all right.”

  “Why, of course. You arc to ask anyone you want,” Frank assured her. “I expect you’d better come up and discuss things with Sally.”

  “How about Julie?”

  That was Harvey, breaking quite a long silence.

  “Oh well, Julie is at school, you know,” Mrs. Dobson explained.

  “I know. But I gather she feels she has a distinct place in any celebration.” Harvey smiled slightly.

  Ariane was amused and somehow a little touched to hear Harvey, of all people, voicing Julie’s claims.

  “I shall never understand him, after all,” she thought.

  Aloud she said:

  “The school is a good way away, you know. And it would mean having the party at the week-end if Julie came.”

  “There’s no objection to that,” Frank said.

  “In any case, I don’t like to have Julie travel alone.” Mrs. Dobson was very firm. “And I’m afraid no one will be free to fetch her.”

  Both the Muldanes looked politely astonished. It was obvious that there had never been any objection to their travelling unaccompanied at a much earlier age than Julie’s.

  “Well, that does rather settle it,” Frank had to admit. “We’ll make it up to her in some way when she comes home later. We might—”

  “Where is this school?” his brother interrupted coolly. “I’ll fetch Julie if you will let me.”

  “You!” exclaimed his brother with unflattering emphasis. “I can’t quite see you as a guardian of the young, even for an hour or two.”

  “It’s very kind of you,” began Mrs. Dobson, “but really, I don’t think—that is—” It was perfectly obvious that her views were Frank’s, in a more intensified form.

  Ariane saw a slight colour come into Harvey’s thin cheeks, and a dark, remote look, which she suddenly recognized as nervousness, made his face very hard. Then, a second before he could speak, she got her words out.

  “Would you really fetch Julie? Oh, Harvey, I wish you would I It wouldn’t be at all the same thing without her. Mother, do give permission for her to come. It’s an ideal arrangement if Harvey would be so very, very kind.”

  “Well—I don’t know—” Mrs. Dobson was still doubtful.

  “I will take good care of her.” A very slightly sullen look had come into Harvey’s eyes, and Ariane guessed that it went sorely against his natural impulse to press the question. He would much rather have adopted a take-it-or-leave-it attitude even towards Mrs. Dobson.

  Then why was he bothering? She could only suppose it was his odd way of showing his contrition for the earlier scene.

  “Please, Mother.”

  Mrs. Dobson looked slightly surprised at her elder daughter’s urgency, but at least it had the effect of convincing her.

  “Very well. It’s very kind of you to take the trouble,” she told Harvey stiffly, although she was evidently not in agreement with Ariane about its being “an ideal arrangement.”

  Harvey just inclined his head coldly, and Ariane greatly feared that the Dobsons sank back to their former extremely low place in his estimation.

  “It’s very little trouble, really,” he said formally. “I can easily arrange one of my business visits to London at the end of that week, and can collect Julie on the way back. But you’d better warn her that I’m not such enlivening company as Frank,” he added dryly to Ariane.

  “Oh, don’t worry. Julie can easily supply conversation for two,” Ariane assured him with a smile.

  When Ariane and her mother were once more alone, Mrs. Dobson glanced at her daughter with a rather dissatisfied little frown.

  “I don’t very much like the idea of Julie with that elder Muldane.”

  “But, Mother, she’ll be perfectly all right.” Ariane felt more than a little irritated by her mother’s attitude. “What objection can you have?”

  “I don’t know, exactly.” Mrs. Dobson refused to be explicit. “But I don’t like him at all. He’s nothing like Frank.”

  “He is very nice in his own way,” Ariane retorted a trifle sharply, and not altogether truthfully. “He’s not so obviously cheerful and good-tempered, of course, but I don’t think we need condemn him for that.”

  “He was very rude to your father once,” Mrs. Dobson reminded her inexorably.

  “But surely we can forget that sometimes,” her daughter cried impatiently. “Perhaps he was irritated or worried or had neuralgia or a thousand things.”

  “Really, Ariane!” Mrs. Dobson’s tone was genuinely displeased. “It’s not like you to make excuses for someone who is rude to your own parents.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean it that way,” Ariane said in some distress. “But somehow everyone seems anxious to think badly of Harvey, and—”

  “Possibly that is his own fault,” her mother pointed out a little dryly.

  “No, I don’t think it is. At least, not entirely,” added Ariane, remembering one or two things that were not very easy to explain. “Anyway, anything like—well, your obvious reluctance to trust Julie with him must hurt. He was hurt, you know.”

  “Nonsense, my dear. I think you credit him with altogether too sensitive feelings,” Mrs. Dobson said firmly.

  And, feeling suddenly unable to pursue the subject, Ariane relapsed into silence.

  A few days later, when she met Sally Muldane for the first time, it took less than ten minutes to find that, if anything, she thought less of Harvey than Mrs. Dobson did.

  “Are all these people better judges of character than I?” Ariane wondered. “Or do I really know him just a little better than they do?”

  Sally, for her part, was not the kind of person to think anyone knew better than she on any topic at all.

  Very fair, very pretty and very positive, she ruled the easygoing Maurice with one hand. And, with the other, she made a not very successful attempt to bring the other Muldanes into line.

  Frank and his father tolerated her—the former with good-tempered amusement and the latter with indifference. Harvey loathed her, and, as usual, made no attempt whatever to hide the fact.

  “He’s a very ridiculous person, don’t you think?” Sally observed to Ariane. And then, without waiting for an expression of Ariane’s opinion: “Most of the characteristics he displays ought to have been thrashed out of him in his schooldays.”

  Ariane ventured to say that he had good qualities too, but her statement was swept aside by Sally’s positive—“You don’t know him as well as I do, of course.” And then the subject was changed to a discussion of the engagement party.

  It seemed to Ariane, by the end, that she herself was to play quite a secondary role compared with Sally. Although she felt a little annoyed, she was anxious to keep the peace, and she felt it was not the most tactful way of putting things when Harvey came in and inquired carelessly:

  “Has Sally decided which people you can’t ask to your party yet?”

  Sally, however, merely accorded him a look of intense dislike, which was returned by a glance, crushing in its supreme indifference.

  Ariane was very faintly amused by the look, and when, later in the week, he went off on his business trip to London, she thought with real curiosity: “I do wonder how he and Julie will get on.”

  On the day of the party itself, she felt sufficiently nervous on her own account not to worry about Julie—who was, in any case, admirably equipped to look after herself.

  It was difficult to say why this engagement party seemed to make everything so entirely irrevocable. Perhaps it was the publicity of it. Perhaps it was the fact that her father and Frank’s father would almost certainly come to some sort
of understanding then.

  But as Ariane slowly dressed for the occasion, it seemed to her that the last avenue of escape was closing. For some reason inexplicable to her mother, she had firmly refused to wear white. So that when Julie finally arrived, and came tearing up the stairs to their room, it was to find Ariane fastening herself into a simply cut dress of soft blue, very much the colour of her eyes.

  Julie was evidently in a state of almost unbearable excitement. She paused a moment in the doorway, however.

  “Ariane, you look lovely! Can I hug you without spoiling everything?”

  “Of course.” Ariane came across with a laugh, and kissed her. “What sort of a journey did you have? And why the air of suppressed excitement? You look as though you might rocket through the roof at any moment.”

  “I could,” Julie declared positively. “That’s exactly what I feel like. Who—do—you—think was in the car with me all the way from school?”

  Ariane gave a puzzled little smile.

  “Well, Harvey Muldane, I suppose.”

  “Yes, of course he was there too, just to drive the car,” said the grateful Julie. “But who else? Oh, you’ll never guess so I’ll have to tell you. Marta Roma herself!”

  “Marta Roma!” repeated Ariane with a stupefaction that obviously gratified Julie beyond expression. “Marta Roma? But what on earth is she doing here?”

  “Well, coming to the party, of course,” explained Julie with admirable composure.

  CHAPTER V

  “She’s coming to the party?” Ariane said, unable to do anything but repeat what Julie said. “But she couldn’t. Harvey must be mad even to think of asking her.”

  “I think she asked herself,” observed Julie, beginning to peel off her clothes with great rapidity. “She’s frightfully nice, Ariane. She says I’m much funnier than most professional comedians. Do you think she means I ought to go on the stage?”

  “But what does he suppose people will say?” Ariane spoke her thoughts aloud, ignoring Julie’s anxious query about her own future. “His father and Sally and Frank and—well, everyone?”