The Exiles Return (29 page)

‘I am coming straight to the point,’ he said, again taking her hand. ‘I have come to ask you to marry me.’

‘To marry you, Mr Kanakis? You want to marry me?’

She stared at him, and there was a long silence. Then a sob rose in her throat and she burst into tears. He waited a few minutes and then offered her a handkerchief.

‘Don’t cry, my dearest,’ he said, ‘just listen to what I have to say. I am very fond of you, Marie-Theres, in fact I can truly say that I love you. I love you dearly. I think, I hope, you have felt that ever since I have known you, ever since you came to my house with your cousin that winter evening, and all through the months since then. Whenever I saw you, whenever we were together, a wave of tenderness for you rose in my heart. Did you not sense that, Marie-Theres?’

‘You were always so kind to me, Mr Kanakis,’ she whispered between her sobs, which were gradually abating.

‘Don’t call me Mr Kanakis. Call me Theophil. It is a nice name, don’t you think? You probably wonder why I never told you of my love for you? Well, dearest, you are so young, and I, in comparison, am so old, nearing forty, almost old enough to be your father, and there were many, I am sure, nearer your own age, who pestered you with their love. I say “pestered” because, if I understand you, you disliked it rather than enjoyed it, as so many girls would have done. All except me – and I didn’t “pester” you.’

‘No.’

‘I would have looked a fool, wouldn’t I, if I had tried to press my attentions on you, for all the love I felt for you?’

‘You have always been so kind, Mr Kanakis.’

‘Theophil.’

‘Theophil.’

‘You have regarded me, as a sort of kind uncle, haven’t you? But now I am asking you very seriously, and with all my heart, to allow me to be a father to your child.’

She was startled, and jerked herself upright in her chair.

‘So you know?’

‘Yes, I know. The boy told me. I will say nothing against him to hurt you. You were, perhaps you still are, in love with him. I will only say that he is irresponsible, and in difficult circumstances himself. He may have misunderstood you, and you may have misunderstood him yourself. But we need not go into all that. All I am asking you now is: please marry me, Marie-Theres – marry me, but don’t be frightened. Don’t be afraid of me, I shall not ask anything of you as your husband that you are not willing to give. I know this is very unexpected, very sudden. But it has to be sudden, doesn’t it? Time passes, I hope that in time you will become fond of me – I think you are, in a way, fond of me already, and I don’t want this incident to cast a shadow over your whole life, your life, Marie-Theres, which is all in front of you. I can give you a marvellous life, a great life, a wide life, full of beautiful things.

‘I am not saying this in order to bribe you, my dear. I respect you too much to believe that my wealth would influence your decision. You know that I am very rich. It is not an attribute that I take special pride in. It happens to be so. But I will not say that it doesn’t make a difference. Of course it does. A large fortune, a very large fortune enables one to do things one could not do without it. It enables one to look at the world, to look at life in a way a person of moderate or slender means could not look at it. You may not quite understand that at present because such a situation has not come your way. But I can assure you that it makes many things easy which in ordinary circumstances would be difficult. Let me suggest, for instance, a circumstance which will confront us almost immediately if you do me the honour – if you confer the great happiness upon me – of accepting my proposal. We shall have to inform your aunts of our engagement and enlist their assistance in obtaining your parents’ consent. Now your aunts, being women of the world, will look more favourably on my suit because of my fortune than they would without it.

‘In fact, you know,’ and here Kanakis interrupted himself with a little laugh, inviting Resi to join him in making a joke, ‘in fact, if I were not so rich, they would probably not think of me as a suitable match for you at all. And if they do, as I’m sure they will, it will be
because
of my fortune, which will override the disadvantage of my years. They cannot object to my family. Both the Baroness Simovic and the Countess Lensveldt will know who my father was, and my grandfather. They may not have known them personally, but they will soon discover that one of my uncles was an Ambassador and another a Privy Counsellor of His Majesty the Emperor, so they will be able to reassure your mother and father on that account. Of course I know nothing much of what your father’s attitude will be, but there, my dear, I must rely on you yourself to persuade him that you are doing the right thing.’

Kanakis kept up this flow of talk, quietly and evenly, while holding Resi’s hand, making no move to embrace her and not inviting any response beyond the silence which he encountered. He was not sure whether she was listening to what he was saying, but he saw that she was hearing his voice; that it was soothing her, and a weight was being lifted from her shoulders. She only had to acquiesce. So she looked up at Kanakis and with tears still brimming in her eyes, she smiled.

Her fiancé put his fingers in his waistcoat pocket and brought out a small leather case. It contained a smooth gold ring with a large cabochon ruby of the deepest, purest red, set off on both sides by a diamond embedded in the gold. He lifted her left hand and slipped the ring on her fourth finger. It was a little too loose.

‘I knew your fingers were slender, but even so I misjudged them. We shall have to get the ring made tighter, so that you don’t lose it. Now let us speak to your aunt.’

Resi went to her aunt’s bedroom and asked her to come back to the drawing room. In doing so she held out her left hand for her aunt to see the ring, at the sight of which she gave a little gasp. She came into the room in which Kanakis was standing up, looked from him to Resi and then, still speechless, saw that Kanakis wished to take her hand. He bent over it ceremoniously and kissed it.

‘May I ask for your blessing, Baroness?’ he asked, and Resi, who had at last regained her composure, said, ‘Yes, dear Aunt Fini, it is true, Mr Kanakis has asked me to marry him. We are engaged.’

Then Kanakis said: ‘Marie-Theres has done me the honour of accepting me. But you understand that we must keep this private until we obtain her parents’ consent. And that is where we hope to enlist your help and your most valuable influence.’

The Baroness then sat down and motioned him to do the same. He went on to speak to her in his smooth, persuasive voice, much as he had a short while before to Resi herself, speaking of his family background in the first place and then about his wealth, with a little more detail and emphasis than he had used before. The Baroness interrupted him from time to time with short ejaculations such as ‘I am so surprised’, ‘I never thought you were seriously interested in the child’, ‘I could never have imagined’ and, finally, ‘I must talk it over with my sister Francisca.’

‘Yes, please do that, Baroness, and write, as soon as possible, to your other sister, Marie-Theres’s mother, and your brother-in-law. And now I will take my leave and let my dearest one tell you that she is perhaps not as surprised as you are, since she has known of my devotion to her ever since we first met.’

When he had gone, the Baroness sat and looked at her niece in bewilderment, then with approbation. She did not ask her whether she loved Kanakis. Resi would not have had the courage to say that she did. All she managed to say was that he was kind and good and that she liked him.

‘You are a very lucky girl,’ her aunt said, again and again. ‘It is a marvellous match for you: he is very, very rich. What a fortune has fallen into your lap. Well, of course, you are very pretty and men go crazy about a pretty face, but somehow I should have thought that for a man like Kanakis that would not be enough. However, you are being very sensible, you seem to have a head on your shoulders, and that is more than I gave you credit for. And you are very, very lucky. So now I’ll write to your Aunt Franzi and we’ll see what she says and how we should tell your parents. Perhaps you would like to go to Wald and tell Franzi yourself?’

‘Oh, no, no,’ Resi said very quickly and almost with alarm. She didn’t mind her Aunt Fini talking and speculating about her, but she felt that in the presence of her Aunt Franzi she might break down and blurt out everything that had happened. And Uncle Poldo would have to know, and she would be back in that agonising situation from which Kanakis had just saved her, and she would be so ashamed, so dreadfully ashamed. No, no, nothing must happen now to upset her marriage. Kanakis was really very nice, and he loved her, while Bimbo, oh, Bimbo, Hanni had warned her and Nina had warned her, but she had thought she could do what others did, and she had betrayed herself. Aunt Franzi, of all people, must not know.

‘Well, then, I will write to your aunt and to your mother, but I think the first thing you must do is write to your mother yourself. Oh dear, there are so many things that will have to be done. Your mother will want to come over, or perhaps you had better go home, and Mr Kanakis too, after all he is an American, isn’t he? Although he was born Austrian. He will probably want to get married in America, won’t he? That is a pity for me, for then I shall miss the wedding. I should be so sorry to miss it, I’d enjoy it, there are not many things for me to enjoy these days, and, dear child, you will look lovely as a bride. I’d like to see you –’

The Baroness rambled on and didn’t notice that Resi had, very quietly, gone out. She went to her room and there, at last, gave vent to the pressure of so many mixed emotions in a long silent fit of crying. She wept for her lost innocence, though that was not what she thought about. What she did think about was her Aunt Franzi, the only person in her life in whom she felt complete trust and confidence. She thought of the tall, stately figure, the smiling eyes, the upswept hair, fair and interwoven with a few strands of white giving it a silvery sheen in the gold, the wide mouth showing those lovely strong teeth, and she heard the deep voice, so lovingly scolding: ‘Resi, you lazybones, come bestir yourself.’ Ah, if only she could go to her! But no, that was impossible, quite impossible – better let her garrulous, busybody aunt, her fussy Aunt Fini, deal with it all, and above all she must not betray herself. Let Kanakis and Aunt Fini manage. All she must do was to keep a hold of herself and never, never again – cry.

Resi sat down and wrote to her parents, and so did the Baroness Simovic, and the most incongruous pair of letters they turned out to be. The letter from the bride-to-be, the young newly-engaged girl, was a stiff statement of fact – her great good fortune in becoming engaged to an extremely rich man who was devoted to her and who promised to make her very happy. Then, as if realising that something more was needed, she added that he was good-looking, kind and gentle, and as he was a bit older than herself she felt she could lean on him and feel safe and protected. There was not a word of love. All the enthusiasm and exhilaration expected in the announcement of a prospective marriage was in the aunt’s letter. She simply overflowed with joy at her niece’s good fortune. She extolled the virtues of the suitor, explained his family background, which lent so much dignity to his person, and stressed the advantage of Resi marrying a man of an established position in life. He was capable, she concluded, of turning any girl’s head. The two letters were put, at the aunt’s suggestion, in the same envelope, to save postage.

The Countess Lensveldt read her sister’s enthusiastic letter with some surprise, but not with dismay: in fact, after thinking it over for a while by herself, she felt a sense of relief. When she had told her husband of Resi’s engagement to Theophil Kanakis and they had discussed the news with each other, Count Lensveldt’s approval confirmed her confidence that this was indeed a good thing for Resi. While Resi was living in Vienna she felt rather anxious about her. She was inexperienced and vulnerable, she was beautiful, she would be meeting many young men of all kinds in those classes at the University she was attending, and God knows with whom she might fall in love.

Count Lensveldt said it was a good thing she had not accepted Lucas Anreither, he really could not have faced his sister-in-law if he had allowed her daughter to marry the grandson of the family gamekeeper. He knew his wife disagreed on that point, and indeed she did. She had thought it would be good for Resi to settle with such a reputable, steady young man whom she had known from boyhood and who would protect her from unforeseeable adventures. Hanni had told her that Resi was seeing a lot of Bimbo Grein. Now that was a boy who would definitely not do her any good! He was far too attractive and certainly wouldn’t marry her. But Theophil Kanakis was in a different category altogether. Actually, he wasn’t in any category at all. Older men with large fortunes were rare and did not lightly make offers of marriage to young girls, however attractive.

But her main reason for surprise was that Resi had been sensible enough to accept him. Of course she had, said the Count, think of the pretty clothes and jewels and the big cars he will have offered her. She has grown up in America, she knows what all those things are worth. Count Lensveldt also knew the name of Kanakis, as the Princesses Altmannsdorf, who had lived as girls in a very restricted circle of aristocratic society, did not know it. He had met members of the wealthy Greek community of Vienna, he had actually met the late Ambassador of that name who, he said, must have been a great-uncle or some other relation of the present Theophil. At any rate, he was quite as prepared to approve the match as was his sister-in-law Simovic, and so he would tell his other sister-in-law, Resi’s mother, should she want his opinion.

Kanakis’s forecast of Resi’s family’s approval proved correct, and he hoped they would not delay in paving the way for him to make a formal application to her parents for their consent. It was clear that the marriage had to take place as soon as possible, and since both he and Marie-Theres were American citizens, he wanted the ceremony to be at the American High Commission in Vienna which, until the conclusion of a Peace Treaty, was the equivalent of an Embassy and by international usage American soil, and in the presence of the High Commissioner himself. He counted on this prestigious arrangement for being an important, in fact the decisive, argument he would put forward to Professor Larsen for his consent (essential because Resi was under-age) for having the wedding in Vienna instead of in America. He would say that he hoped Professor and Mrs Larsen would themselves come over for the occasion. He would be able to elaborate the advantage of their doing so by pointing out that all Mrs Larsen’s family would be able to attend, that he himself had no relations in America, but that he had two distant cousins still living in Austria, that he had a town house in Vienna and a house in the country where he would be very happy to welcome his parents-in-law and Marie-Theres’s brother and sister as his guests.