Authors: Susan Barrie
“But it’s good sherry,” she assured him. “Even when circumstances are very difficu
l
t
madame
wouldn’t dream of offering anyone—well, cooking sherry.
”
“You intrigue me,” he said softly, and then to her astonishment he lifted her hand and carried it up to his lips. “I regret, however, that I have an appointment. Convey my regards to Her Highness, and tell her to cease worrying her head over Seronia. If she has anything to sell, tell her to sell it and enjoy the proceeds herself. And share them, of course, with you!”
For one instant his eyes flicked over her shabby suit.
“Goodbye,
mademoiselle
.”
CHAPTER IV
THAT night the Countess insisted upon a celebration dinner. She sent Augustine out to buy a small, plump chicken, some mushrooms, and a bundle of asparagus. She also instructed her to call in at a confectioner’s for a very rich gateau to serve as a sweet, and a wine merchant’s for half a bottle of champagne.
“Tonight we will drink to the future,” she said to Lucy. “To your future, and the future of Seronia! We will not bother about mine, because I
shall be eighty-eight next birthday, and that is eighteen years beyond my three score and ten. What little future lies ahead of me is not important.”
Lucy had refrained from passing on to her the advice of the man who had brought her home in a
ta
x
i
that morning concerning Seronia. Her own private opinion was that the Countess had a perfect right to do what she pleased with her own possessions, and if it pleased her to further the cause of Seronia—or to delude herself into believing that she was furthering the cause—then that was her affair, and outside advice was hardly called for.
At the same time, the Countess’s reaction to the sight of so much money had been a little surprising, and a hopeful portent for the next period of leanness.
She had called Augustine into the room while she counted every one of the notes, and they had then been locked away in a drawer of her desk. She had then sat beaming and looking bemused in her chair, and said that there were several rings and other smallish items in the
jewelbox
which she might part with now that the mood was on her, only this time she would send for Mr. Halliday to come and see her, and not ask Lucy to conduct the negotiations for her. She had been obviously very perturbed when Lucy told her about the incident of the morning, and the man in the loud suit; but the girl was careful not to lay too much alarming emphasis on the whole episode, and only Augustine guessed that she was soft-pedalling things, and was loud in her praise of Lucy’s rescuer, whom the Countess seemed inclined
t
o overlook.
“And you say that he brought you all the way to the door in a taxi? What a pity you couldn’t persuade him to come inside and receive Her Highness’s thanks! Her Highness should most certainly have thanked
hi
m!”
“He didn’t want any thanks,” Lucy said quietly.
And for the first time she remembered—and now it struck her as odd—that before saying that final, “Goodbye,
mademoiselle
,”
the dark-eyed man had asked her to convey his regards to Her Highness.
Her Highness?
How did he know that the Countess von Ardrath had the right to be referred to as ‘Highness’?
Before she went back to her kitchen, looking very much happier than she had done in the morning, Augustine took the liberty of giving Lucy’s arm a squeeze.
“It was an adventure,
mademoiselle
,”
she whispered. “And what is life without the little adventure?”
The dinner that night seemed a fitting rounding off of such a day, or so Lucy thought. The dining-room of the maisonette was a grim apartment, containing some of the ugliest furniture she had ever seen—including a huge mahogany
chiffonier
with a cracked mirror, and an old
fashioned round table covered, when it was not in use, with a chenille tablec
l
oth edged
w
ith bobble fringe—but Augustine went to a lot of trouble to give it a festive appearance. She draped the portraits of the Countess’s mother and father—the last King and Queen of Seronia—with some swathes of purple velvet, and put a vase of somewhat stunted daffodils in the middle of the dinner table. The cloth itself was heavy white damask, and the cutlery gleamed. So did the silver napkin rings beside each plate.
Finger-bowls were brought out, too—exquisite, fragile affairs of Venetian glass—and over the damask cloth went lace table-mats. The half bottle of champagne was immersed in a silver ice bucket, and up to the very minute when the cork was withdrawn Augustine kept examining the cubes of ice to make certain they weren’t melting. As usual the room was over-warm, for the Countess couldn’t live in a moderate atmosphere, and Augustine kept plunging down the stairs to the kitchen to fetch fresh ice, until the Countess ordered her to stop being ridiculous and open the bottle.
“We’ve drunk champagne before,” the old lady reminded her tartly. “Years ago I could have ordered you to fill my bath with it if I’d fancied a champagne bath. Our cellars were stocked with some of the noblest vintages.”
It was then that she lifted her glass and uttered her toast.
“To the future!” A wistful expression clouded her eyes. “And to my one and only grandson, Stanislav, who is far away in America, and whom I’ve never seen, but whom I hope to see before I die.”
Lucy had often wondered about the Countess’s family connections, and now it transpired that she had a grandson. The champagne was loosening her tongue, and she confided:
“It is he who pays me my allowance. Not a very large allowance, I will admit, but there are those who wouldn’t bother at all about an old woman like myself, and Stanislav has continued what his father started before him. My son Boris amassed quite a considerable fortune as a result of some enterprise he went in for, and the family is now settled in America.”
“I’m surprised they haven’t sent for you before this,” Lucy couldn’t resist observing.
The Countess’s eyes flashed, as if her pride was up in arms.
“Why should they?” she demanded. “When I would be nothing but a nuisance to them. They have their own lives to lead, and I ... I have had my life. It would be different if my son were still alive. But he is dead. He was killed in some sort of a road accident a few years ago.”
“And your grandson is married?” Lucy asked, not so much because she was curious but because she had the feeling her employer wanted to talk of the only blood relatives she could claim nowadays.
The old lady shrugged her shoulders.
“
He was married. There was some talk of divorce. However, I do not know what happened.”
“And you don’t even know whether you have any great-grandchildren
?”
An
unusually soft half-smile flitted across the Countess’s lips.
“If I had I should be very happy, but I think it is almost certain there are no great-grandchildren. When Stanislav wrote to me, three years ago, there was no mention of them.”
“And he hasn’t written to you since?”
“Not since that last letter. Very likely he has had nothing to write about,” the proud old woman defended the neglectful Stanislav.
“And you have no other relatives? No daughters who had children—?”
This time the Countess tightened her lips, and looking down at the bread roll on her plate broke it into pieces deliberately.
“I had two daughters. They both married well, and one of them kept in touch with me until a few years ago, when she died. The other married a man I could not approve of, and there was no question of her keeping in touch with me. Her son—and she had one son—is no doubt somewhere in the world, but where is a matter of supreme indifference to me. He and I have little interest in one another.”
Lucy felt shocked. She too crumbled her bread roll, and then she put forward a suggestion:
“But you might—if you saw one another—like one another!”
The Countess’s eyes flashed sparks at the very thought.
“Never!” she said.
Lucy gave it up. Quite obviously the Countess’s daughter had married very unwisely—even if she had married well—and her mother would never forgive her. The old lady who hoped one day to see the monarchy restored to Seronia, and could deny herself the ordinary everyday comforts of life in order to see a dream realised, was not the type to forgive and forget easily. On the contrary, she was the type to carry on a vendetta, as Lucy realised.
“One day,” the Countess said with great pride, “Stanislav will be King of Seronia. And that will be a wonderful day for all loyal sons and daughters of Seronia!”
The Countess seized hold of the champagne bottle and divided the little that remained in it between her own and Lucy’s glasses. Her be-ringed fingers—and she was wearing many rings tonight—shook with sudden excitement.
“To King Stanislav the Fourth of Seronia!” she cried in a ringing tone. “May it not be long before he comes to his throne!”
Lucy obediently chinked glasses with hers, but her private thoughts were less optimistic, and less complimentary to the uncrowned king. Since the allowance he made his grandmother was so niggardly, and the interest he took in her practically non-existent, she could even find it in her heart to hope that the Republic would flourish, and continue to flourish, for many a long year yet.
She could tell that the old lady who employed her had suddenly become very tired, and gently but firmly she suggested bed.
“You have had an unusually exciting day, madame,” she said, “and our celebration dinner has exhausted you. In the morning I think you should lie very late in bed.”
“In the morning we are going shopping,” the Countess announced, with a resurgence of spirit. “I am going to buy you that outfit I promised you, and because this is a very dull way of having a celebration, tomorrow we will go
out
to dinner! We will dine at the Ritz or the Splendide. It is many years since I dined at the Splendide, and the food there used to be magnificent. You shall telephone directly after breakfast and book a table.”
Lucy felt slightly alarmed.
“Oh, but,
madame
,”
she protested, “is that really necessary?”
Her employer fixed her with almost a belligerent eye.
“Of course it is necessary,” she returned. “Look at you—a young woman in her early twenties, sufficiently attractive to be quite a sensation if properly introduced in the right circles, wearing that appalling grey dress which has been a serious offence to me ever since you came to this house. The one thing I long to do is hand it over to Augustine to burn in the incinerator
...
and with it can go that miserable suit you wore this morning. By this time tomorrow you will have a wardrobe fit for a young woman of your class!”
Lucy decided to say nothing further, but helped her into her bedroom and saw her finally settled for the night between her lace-edged sheets. Augustine took her in a glass of hot milk with a dash of brandy in it, and Lucy herself retired to bed.
In the morning, although she had hoped the Countess would have undergone a change of mind, she found her employer sitting up in bed and waiting for her breakfast when she took in her tray. Instead of examining the contents of the tray and commenting on the size of the rasher of bacon, or the quantity of toast in the toast-rack, the Countess called for her clothes, and said that she had a fur stole somewhere in the wardrobe, and somewhere on the top of the wardrobe itself there was a box full of hats.
“You’d better get a chair and stand on it and
reach it down,” she said. “Only blow off the dust before you take-off the lid, otherwise the hats will need brushing.”
They needed that, in any case, and as Lu
c
y wielded the clothes-brush she wondered how the Countess was going to look. So far, she hadn’t seen her dressed up in outdoor things—in her auburn wig, and with one of the feathered monstrosities sitting on top of it. She wondered still more when the Countess insisted on the protection of a fur coat, in preference to the fur stole, that most certainly could not have been mourned if anyone had consigned it to the incinerator, and a pair of shoes with perilous heels that sent Lucy’s heart into her mouth when she saw her attempting to descend the stairs in them.
But at last they were ready, with Augustine’s energetic assistance, to set off on the morning’s shopping expedition, and the same taxi-man who had been summoned the day before arrived at the door to place himself at their disposal for the entire morning. At the sight of Lucy he winked broadly, and then enquired of the old lady whether she was about to hit the high spots.
She froze him with a single glance, and ignored him. It was Augustine who gave him his instructions, and as Lucy took her place beside her employer in the back of the cab, the Countess expressed herself forcibly on the subject of democracy and the ills that resulted from it.
But by the time they were set down outside the old-established store which she had patronised for years—and which, as she informed Lucy, she had known when it had a much less impressive fa
c
ade, and was full of deferential assistants who knew nothing about democracy—she had recovered her good humour, and was plainly looking forward to an orgy of spending.