Royal Purple (7 page)

“In the taxi the other day you referred to the Countess as Her Highness,” she reminded him. “You said, ‘Convey my regards to Her Highness
...
’ How did you know that she is entitled to be addressed in that fashion?”

He smiled down at her.

“Perhaps be
c
ause I am a Seronian myself. Now,” he put his fingers under her elbow, “shall we go and find some tea?”

Lucy enjoyed having tea with him more than anything that had ever happened to her in her life before. For one thing, he took her in a taxi to the Ritz, and it was only the second time in her life that she had entered such a haunt of the fashionable and the well-to-do.

As she sat opposite
him
pouring out the tea, the one thing that puzzled her—and in which she found it hard to believe—was the strange paradox he himself presented, with his elegant clothes and his confident, well-bred manner, his air of ease and familiarity with such surrounding—from the point of view of the patrons of such establishments, not those who attended to their wants—and the position she knew that he filled as a waiter.

She supposed that in these
modern
days a lot of people held down jobs for which they were not by birth entirely suited; but in the
c
ase of Paul Avery it wasn’t so much that his birth and upbringing had ill fitted him for his chosen method of earning a living, but as a result of some accident of birth it would be hard to imagine him filling any of the roles a well-bred man can fill and support a family and himself without attracting attention to himself, or giving rise to speculation.

She tried to see him as a bank clerk, or as a doctor or lawyer. Admittedly he had the quiet gravity of a lawyer, and as a doctor his bedside manner would probably be well-nigh perfect, but he was not essentially cut out to be one or the other. That slight imperious lift of the hand when he was summoning a waiter—something the Countess von Ardrath had done the night before, and with considerable effect—the way his eyes remained cool and unabashed whatever the circumstances, and his well-marked brows lifted occasionally as if in surprise at something that in itself was not surprising, were things that set him apart.

And he had an exceptionally attractive, beautifully modulated voice, rendered even more attractive by his slight accent. He spoke English perfectly and effortlessly, but anyone could tell that he was not an Englishman by birth. And the darkness of his hair and eyes was an intense darkness, alien to Englishmen.

And there was another thing that had struck Lucy the night before. His fellow waiters had accorded him a deference that was rather in excess of the deference accorded by an underling to a superior. Or so it had struck Lucy.

She found that he was smiling at her in amusement as she confronted him across the table with the teapot still clutched in one hand and poised midway between the tray and the tip of her nose.

“What is it?” he asked. “You look as if something is puzzling you, bewildering you. Is there something about me that demands an explanation?”

“I can’t understand why you are a—waiter,” she admitted, with simple truth. “I was absolutely astonished last night when you came to our table after the Countess had insisted on making a complaint to the head waiter.”

“Dear me,” he remarked, helping himself to a chocolate
éclair
and licking his fingers where some of the chocolate had come off on them. “I begin to suspect that you are something of a snob. The next thing you will be telling me is that you can’t see me again because a young lady in your position has her reputation to think about, and the whole of Alison Gardens would be shocked if they knew you were consorting with a waiter.”

“Don’t be silly!” she protested at once, and the colour rushed to her cheeks and burned there under the lively amusement in his handsome dark eyes. “As if anyone in Alison Gardens would ever dream you were a waiter!”

“But it would perturb you considerably if they did? You
might
have to tell me you couldn’t see me again?”

“You’re making fun of me,” she said, and set down the teapot quickly because the heat of the handle was burning her fingers. “You know very well that isn’t what I meant.” And then, with slowly widening eyes and a diffident, hopeful note in her voice: “Are you likely to want to see me again? I mean—this isn’t just something you won’t want to repeat—?”

“With your concurrence I shall hope to meet you many times after this,” he told her, the amusement fading from his eyes, although one corner of
hi
s mouth twitched slightly.

“O-oh!” she said, and her eyes that were
n
either blue nor grey nor green began to glow as if the sun had come up behind them, and she was too inexperienced to conceal it from
hi
m.

He leaned towards her across the table. He spoke to her with sudden gravity.

“You don’t know much about men, do you, little one?”

She shook her head.

“Will you
think
me very impertinent if I ask you how old you are?”

Another shake answered him.

“I was twenty-two last birthday.”

“And I was t
hi
rty last birthday.” He took out his cigarette-case and lighted a cigarette. “That gives me an advantage of eight years over you, and so far as experience is concerned I think we might call it eighty years. You are a mere infant who has not yet begun to live, and I sometimes feel that I have lived a very long time
...”
He extended a finely-fingered hand to her across the table, and when she put hers into it he said: “I hope you will allow me to see you as often as we can arrange it, little one, and I hope you won’t find it difficult to stomach the fact that I am only a waiter.”

Again his lips twitched.

“Please!” she begged, and he gave her fingers a little squeeze.

“If that proud, patrician employer of yours thinks you are sinking too low, tell her I can afford to take you out sometimes. And although our meetings may have to be arranged somewhat suddenly, and occasionally I may have to disappoint you, you won’t mind very much, will you? You won’t suddenly decide that the whole thing isn’t worth it, and tell me to find someone else to take out?”

“
Of course not,” she breathed, and the brilliance of his dark eyes looking into hers made her feel as she had felt once before—on the occasion of their first meeting, in fact, when he was choosing a tie-pin in Mr. Halliday
’
s jeweller’s shop—as if her bones were melting, and her heart was labouring to force the blood through her veins, so that all at once there was a strange breathlessness in her throat.

“We’ll get a taxi, and I’ll take you home,” he said. He stood up, smiling at her. “I’m on duty tonight. Let’s hope a lot of kind-hearted patrons will reward me with as much generosity as your Countess did last night!”

Before he helped her to alight from the taxi, and they said goodbye, he asked:

May I telephone you to arrange our next meeting
?
And may I telephone you sometimes in any case?”

“Of course,” she answered.

“Her Highness isn’t likely to object?”

“As a matter of fact,” she confessed, “I
think
she’ll be intrigued.”

He was though
t
ful for a moment, and then he admitted:

“I think you are very probably right.”

CHAPTER VII

BUT the Countess wasn’t so much intrigued as sharply curious about the progress of Lucy’s little affair, as she called it, with a waiter who didn’t look the part, and who was too independent to appeal to her.

“Years ago I would have known how to deal with him,” she declared, her old eyes flashing fire as she put endless questions to Lucy after her meeting with Paul Avery in the park. “I dislike arrogance on the part of those whose lot in life it is to attend to the wants of their betters, and that young man is arrogant. I would have complained about him if I’d thought it would have done any good, but this is a democratic age, and he certainly wouldn’t have been dismissed. I should have been told it is difficult to find these people nowadays, and that he has some specia
l
talent which renders him indispensable.”

Lucy was almost aghast.

“You don’t honestly mean that you—that you would have lost him his job if you could?” she demanded in shocked tones.

The Countess regarded her with a cynical gleam in her eyes.

“
Oh, what a thing it is to be young!
”
she exclaimed. “My dear, you don’t need to be quite so transparent. This Paul Avery is personable, and he has you eating out of his hand after you have known him only a few hours! What will it be like after you have met him another half-dozen or so times? You will have lost your heart to him so completely that there will be no regaining it!”

Lucy felt herself flushing scarlet. She denied anything of the sort.

“I—I think he is very pleasant,” she insisted. “He has been very kind to me
...”

“Kind?” the Countess sneered. “In what way? He bought you tea, and walked with you in Kensington Gardens, and you talked about the ducks and things together.” Lucy had rather naively revealed that Avery had arrived prepared to feed the swans, if that was what she wanted. “Such an afternoon’s excursion I find wildly exciting!” with increasing sar
c
asm. “What will you do next. Take a bus to Hampton Court and get lost together in the maze there, or a trip on a river steamer that will involve you with all the other passengers, singing lustily on the way home? Especially if there’s a moon! Young lovers always adore the moon!”

Lucy stared at her, wondering at the harsh note in her voice, and the unfeeling mockery in her eyes. At the same time, the glow in her cheeks grew more brilliant.

“We are not in the least likely to become lovers,” she stated stiffly.

“Oh no?” The old lady ca
c
kled. “Then what will you become? Duck fanciers? Or connoisseurs of afternoon tea? Believe me, I didn’t buy you an entire new wardrobe of clothes to enable you to throw yourself away on a hotel waiter.”

At this Lucy felt indignation rise up in her, and she spoke indignantly.

“I didn’t ask you to buy me any new clothes,
madame.
And if that is the way you feel about my private concerns I would rather that you took them back.”

The Countess smiled at her suddenly, and rather humorously.

“My sweet child, there is nothing I could do with them,” she observed complacently. “You will have to wear them, and go on wearing them, and I will admit that I have formed plans which will provide us both with a lot of distraction in the future. I think it is high time we shut up this dark little maisonette for a few months, or allowed Augustine to remain behind and take care of it, and went abroad to the Continent to stay in some smart hotel, or perhaps rent a villa. Then you can meet the kind of people I wish you to meet, and perhaps marry well. In that way you can justify all the expenditure I have been put to on your account,” as if some justification was essential after such an orgy of spending.

Lucy experienced the chill of dismay.

“But you don’t really want to go abroad, do you,
madame
?”
she asked. “I mean ... why should you?”

“Why should I not, if it comes to that?” Her employer helped herself to a sugared almond from a dish on the centre table. “I have discovered how easy it is to raise a little money by the sale of some of my jewellery, and for years I have lived in a state of poverty and misery which I now deplore. In future we will live very differently, and you, because you are young, must have some fun
...
lots and lots of fun! And I shall be so much amused looking on at you having it!”

She beamed at her companion.

“And now take the dogs for their usual walk, and don’t look so upset. This question of where we shall go will take some little time to decide, and in the meantime you may go on seeing your waiter ... so long as you remember that I cannot allow you to become serious about him!
And most definitely I could never allow you to become serious about a waiter
!”

Lucy bit her bottom lip hard, to keep back a retort which might lose her her job and seriously offend the Countess. Instead, she said very quietly:

“Mr. Avery may be nothing but a hotel waiter, but he is also a Seronian. I thought you might be interested to hear that.”

The Countess smiled again.

“Dear child, it wasn’t difficult to guess. He is probably the son of one of my old gamekeepers, full of ambition to become a gentleman.”

“He is a gentleman,” Lucy insisted.

The Countess directed at her a shrewd look.

“Are you old enough to be able to tell?” she enquired.

Lucy went off to exercise the dogs, and on her return Augustine met her with a conspiratorial look in her face. She was also unusually flushed and excited.

“These came for you soon after you went out,” she said, and produced a carton of spring flowers. There were jonquils and narcissi, violets and scillas, white lilac and hyacinths, and at sight of them Lucy looked utterly astonished. She allowed Augustine to po
u
nce upon the card that was lightly attached to the pale green stems, and she even allowed the o
ld
servant to read aloud the message that was written above the signature.