The Passionate Pilgrim E-Book

Barbara Cartland

• Herausgeber: Barbara Cartland Ebooks Ltd
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: The Eternal Collection
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 461

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Exhausted by his success as a playwright and tormented by the persistent love of two women, Randal Gray goes to the South of France to recover from his exhaustion. But his privacy is invaded by D'Arcy Forest, one-time actor and rascal and his green-eyed waif of a daughter. As Randal returns to London for the rehearsals of his new play, the plane he is piloting crashes and D'Arcy is killed. Now the unofficial guardian to D'Arcy child, Sorella, Randal's return is further complicated as he is torn between his glamorous leading Lady, Lucille Lund, and the elegant socialite the Hon. Jane Crake. As rehearsals of his new play start to unravel, Randal is entangled and besieged with worry and doubt. What was he seeking this passionate pilgrim, as he travelled the difficult path to success? How Randal finds answers and solace from an unexpected person, how he disentangles himself from the chains of success that bind him, and how he finds the happiness and the peace he has searched for, are all told in this captivating and beautifully told story by Barbara Cartland.

Leseprobe

1

There were footsteps on the terrace above.

Randal Gray was suddenly tense and began to swear softly beneath his breath,

“Damn! Damn! Damn!”

Despite his most explicit instructions that nobody, however important, should be admitted, he was about to be interrupted. But French servants were all the same, he thought savagely. If one tipped them enough, they would allow the Devil himself to creep through the door.

“Damn!”

He was so tired, so inexpressibly weary that his desire for rest and solitude had become an almost unbearable craving. He wanted nothing else in the world but just to lie here in the sun, to enjoy the warmth of it seeping through his naked back, to feel himself drifting away into a dreamless sleep after those interminable days, nights and weeks of noise, music and the chatter of tongues.

It was that, more than anything else, which had reduced him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. The incessant talk going on and on, ceaseless and undiminishing, until the time came when, even if he were alone, the echo of those voices still rang in his ears.

There were voices now, voices coming nearer, and Randal realised that his hands were clenched fiercely while a wave of hatred swept over his whole body. With a tremendous effort of willpower he forced himself to relax.

This was being ridiculous. He was letting himself be theatrical and dramatic. How often had he sworn never to let himself become temperamentally unbalanced as were so many of those with whom he came in daily contact. Usually his practical common sense and his unfailing sense of humour were an armour and a safeguard – but now he was so tired, so terribly, terribly tired.

They were coming nearer to him now, the footsteps and the voices encroaching upon him, disturbing him, so that he knew that in a moment he must rouse himself to greet his so-called friends. For one moment he hoped with a kind of hopeless desperation that, seeing him lying still with his eyes closed, they might believe him asleep and go away – but even as the thought was formulated in his mind, he knew it to be ridiculous.

In his world no one went away, not from him at any rate. They stayed to be bright and cheerful and maddeningly persistent. It was then that Randal laughed at himself.

‘God! I am getting spoilt,’ he thought.

With what was almost superhuman effort he sat up on the red striped mattress on which he had been lying beside the swimming pool. Two people were watching him and for a moment he stared at them blankly.

He had expected to see some of his many acquaintances from Cannes or Monte-Carlo. There were a number of people who he had expected might call when he instructed Pierre to let no one, under any circumstances, into the villa. Even as he gave his orders, he had suspected that they would be disobeyed. Pierre had been too long at the Villa d’Azur as manservant to Madame de Montier, not to know and be known by the majority of the socialites who flocked to the Riviera in search of sunshine and cosmopolitan conviviality.

Pierre would doubtless find it more advantageous, Randal reflected dismally, to keep in with someone whose generosity he had already tested. Someone who was likely to prove a fruitful source of income in the future, rather than with the strange, unaccountable guest whom Madame had left in the villa when she departed precipitately to America.

Pierre could not understand a young man who did not wish to entertain, who wanted to keep the famous swimming pool to himself, and who could hardly be roused from his slumbers to eat the delicious meals prepared for him. Yes, Randal had expected that his solitude would be invaded sooner or later. The only thing that was surprising now was that the intruders should at first sight appear to be complete strangers. The man was tall, elderly and dressed in the inevitable blue blazer with brass buttons and white flannel trousers as if he had just stepped from one of the luxurious yachts lying in the harbour. Beside him was a child, an overdressed, rather ridiculous-looking child in a frilled frock of organdie and lace that would have been far more suitable in Paris than in the shimmering afternoon heat of the Riviera. The visitors stood watching him gravely – at least it appeared to Randal that the expression on the child’s face was peculiarly grave.

Then the man held out his hand and began to speak. Instantly he was no longer a stranger, but familiar in that he was one of a type that Randal knew only too well.

“My dear boy, you must forgive us for barging in like this,” the man said. “Your manservant told us you wished to be alone, but I persuaded him that I was one of your oldest friends, one who I might almost say had been a father to you and whom you would not wish to turn away.”

Randal got slowly to his feet.

He shook hands, trying as he did so to recall where he had heard that deep, hearty voice before – where he had seen that somewhat dissolute face, which had once been exceedingly handsome. It seemed impossible that he could have forgotten those deep-set, glittering eyes, that held some strange, almost mesmeric charm within them.

Randal found himself smiling, and without effort as he listened.

“I said to your man,” the deep voice went on, “‘No, Mr. Gray won’t be expecting us! How in Heaven’s name could he be when he had no idea that we were here? It must be nearly twenty years since we met, and twenty years in the life of a young man is a long time.

“‘Yet I can claim that, if Randal Gray had not known me twenty years ago, he would not have been here today, would not have been taking a well-earned rest after his outstanding and brilliant success in two continents.

“‘He would have been … well, what would he have been doing? Shall I tell you? He would have been sitting on an office stool adding up accounts.’”

There was a dramatic gesture to accompany the last words and a lowering of the voice for effect that would have told even an impartial listener all too clearly that the speaker had been trained for the stage. There was a pause, a theatrical pause, and then Randal gave an exclamation.

“Of course, I have it! You are D’Arcy Forest!”

“Got it in one!” The elderly man laughed. “And have you forgotten me?”

“No, of course I haven’t,” Randal replied, “but it is a long time since we last met. Fourteen years to be exact, not twenty!”

“What does it matter, my dear fellow?” D’Arcy Forest enquired grandiosely. “What is of importance is that I believe I was of service to you then.”

Randal nodded.

“You are quite right! If it had not been for you, I would have gone into a solicitor’s office as my father wanted me to do. As it was, I went to Oxford.”

“And all thanks to me!” D’Arcy Forest exclaimed. “Well I often wondered what became of you. I could, see that you had great promise even at eighteen, and now you have justified my belief. I was reading about you a week ago and of your success in New York, so, when I saw in the Continental Daily Mail that you had arrived here, I said to Sorella, ‘I will introduce you to a very famous young man, my dear, a young man about whom I had a hunch many years ago.’

“Sorella knows all about my hunches, don’t you, my poppet?”

He turned to the child standing beside him. Randal also looked at her for a second time. She was not as young as he had thought at first.

‘She must be about twelve or thirteen,’ he decided.

It was her dress that made her look younger. Its ridiculous frilled sleeves, ribbon insertions and lace-edged hem, made her appear as incongruously garbed as if she were wearing fancy-dress.

She stared at him gravely. She was not a pretty child, he decided. She was small and thin to the point of ugliness – her hair, which was nearly black, hung in untidy, straight wisps to her shoulders, and her cheeks, surprisingly untanned, were very pale. Only her eyes were outstanding – deep-fringed with long, dark lashes, they were green, the colour of the sea before a storm. Her father threw a big, enveloping arm round her shoulders.

“You have not met my little Sorella before,” he said. “She was only a baby when I knew you, a baby happy and secure in her mother’s love, a mother whom she was to lose in the most tragic circumstances.”

He paused for a moment, and although he did not move his hand, Randal felt that figuratively he wiped away a tear from his eye.

“I can’t begin to tell you what little Sorella has meant to me,” he said a moment later with a sob in his voice. “We have been everything to each other. God knows how I would have survived the blows that life has given me, had she not been at my side. But we have been together, and that has been enough, and perhaps we have been more fortunate than many.”

Randal felt uncomfortable. The man was overacting and yet there was something so sincere about his emotion that one could not help being moved by it. With the ordinary Englishman’s dislike of a display of feeling, Randal turned a little restlessly towards the canopied swings and cushioned chairs set invitingly beneath the flower-hung terrace. But before he moved, he noticed that Sorella was standing stiff and unyielding within her father’s embrace. There was, too, an expression in her eyes that almost shocked him.

Randal was not sure that he interpreted that expression correctly. It might have been shyness, embarrassment or boredom – and yet he knew it was none of these things. It was something deeper, something perilously near contempt.

But why should Sorella be contemptuous, and of whom? Was it of her father, or him? Randal had no idea of the answer and he told himself that he had no desire to concern himself with this rather unprepossessing child. Yet as he and his guests seated themselves on the cushioned chairs, it was Sorella he was wondering about.

He remembered D’Arcy Forest now quite well. An actor of the old school, Forest had made the acquaintance of his mother over some charitable entertainment at the local theatre. Randal’s parents had been living in Worcester in those days. His father was the manager of a bank. He was a dull man with an inferiority complex, which made him both dogmatic and pompous – he was content with the mediocre success he had attained in his profession and asked nothing further of life.

It was Randal’s mother who had ambitions for her son. She had belonged to a poverty-stricken county family but was determined, from the moment that Randal was born, that he should go to a good public school. It had meant a great deal of sacrifice on the part of both his parents, and Randal had just finished his last term at Marlborough when D’Arcy Forest came into their lives.

Mrs. Gray was on a committee of benevolent ladies who had persuaded the manager of the local theatre to make the opening night of A Tale of Two Cities into a gala performance, the proceeds of which were to go to the local children’s hospital. The manager, as it happened, did not require much persuading. The company that was coming to the theatre were not in his opinion particularly good. He was also not sure if A Tale of Two Cities, revived after many years, was going to appeal to the citizens of Worcester. The fact that he could charge enough expenses against the gala night to prevent his being out of pocket, and at the same time obtain a remarkable amount of free publicity, appealed to his business sense.

It also appealed to him, although he was by no means a socially ambitious man, that the Lord Lieutenant of the County, the Mayor of the Borough, and a number of titled supporters of the hospital should grace his theatre in their official capacity.

What was more, he was by no means averse to being publicly thanked for what was considered to be an act of generosity on his part. The company was as delighted as the manager of the theatre. As the opening night in any town was a Monday, they usually played to a half-empty house in an atmosphere of chilly gloom, so that by the time they came to the third act they were all depressed, longing only for the performance to be over so that they could get back to their lodgings or into the more cheerful atmosphere of the pub round the comer.

D’Arcy Forest looked handsome and had given a blood-and-thunder performance as Sidney Carton. Mrs. Gray, as had many other ladies present, felt the tears prick her eyes as with a throbbing voice he made his famous speech from the scaffold steps.

When she accompanied the other members of the committee to his dressing room afterwards to congratulate him, she had been so carried away by his charming manners that she had stammered an invitation to luncheon almost before she realised that she had given it.

D’Arcy Forest had accepted with alacrity. Although Mrs. Gray had regretted her impulsiveness several times during the week that followed, she had not been able to help feeling a sudden flutter of excitement the following Sunday when she saw him enter her small drawing room overlooking the High Street.

It may perhaps have been relief too that made her welcome D’Arcy Forest so effusively. For three days before his arrival the household had been torn in two. Father, mother and son had talked of one thing and one thing only, until it seemed as if there was nothing more to say on the subject. It was a domestic crisis that affected them far more profoundly at that moment than anything else could possibly have done – not even the imminent danger of war had the power to divert their attention from themselves and the problem that beset them. It was not an unusual problem. It was one that was likely to crop up sooner or later in practically every middle-class home in, the country.

It was, quite simply, what was Randal to do in the future? His father had had it planned for some time. Mr. Gray’s elder brother was a solicitor in Kidderminster. He had written several years earlier suggesting that when young Randal had finished his education he should come into the office. It appeared to Mr. Gray to be an eminently satisfactory state of affairs. He had accepted his brother’s offer and had spoken frequently to Randal of the future that lay ahead of him.

Now, at the very moment when Randal should have been packing his bags and setting out for Kidderminster, things had been changed. During his last term at Marlborough, Randal had sat for a scholarship for Oxford. He had told his parents about it at the time, but he had not stressed the point unduly and they had paid little heed, as neither of them considered their son to be exceptionally intelligent.

And now like a bombshell had come the news that Randal had won the scholarship. To be honest, no one was more surprised than Randal himself. He had entered for it chiefly because he had been pressed into it by his Form Master who had a high opinion of his ability. One of Randal’s chief characteristics was that he liked to please. It was so much easier to do what people wanted, as long as it was within one’s power to give them pleasure.

On this occasion, at any rate, his desire to give pleasure had far-reaching results. His mother was determined that he should accept the scholarship. She had fought courageously so that her boy should go to a public school – she had not dared to look further than that, but a university was all that she would have wished for him, had she dared to voice such an outrageous suggestion.

Mr. Gray on the other hand declared it to be a lot of nonsense. The scholarship was not a very large one and there would be a great many other expenses. He considered that he had forked out enough for young Randal one way and another. It was time the boy earned his own living and there was the job waiting for him at Kidderminster. Randal himself was hardly allowed a voice in the matter.

Being devoted to both of his parents, he found it difficult to side with either the one or the other, without inflicting what appeared to be a bitter blow on the one he did not support. He   remained silent and let the tempest rage around him.

“I have asked Mr. D’Arcy Forest to luncheon,” Mrs. Gray said at breakfast. “I am glad he is coming for one reason at least if not for any other, that we shall have to talk of something else besides Randal’s future. I am sick and tired of that argument. He is going to Oxford and that is the end of it.”

“He is going to Kidderminster!” Mr. Gray roared, bringing his fist down on the table so that the breakfast cups jumped in their saucers.

They were still arguing when luncheon time came – and although Mrs. Gray said they would be obliged to talk of something else, D’Arcy Forest had not been in the house more than ten minutes before he, too, was involved in the momentous matter of deciding Randal’s future.

He was no half-hearted partisan. He came down with a tremendous force and overwhelming eloquence on the side of Mrs. Gray.

“Can’t you see what this means to a young man?” he asked Mr. Gray.

He went on to acclaim for over five minutes on the wonder and traditions of Oxford, its place in civilisation and the part it played in the training and equipping of those standing on the threshold of a fuller and wider life.

He spoke so fervently that even Mr. Gray was impressed.

“You were perhaps at Oxford yourself, Mr. Forest?” he ventured.

“Would that I had had the opportunity,” Mr. D’Arcy Forest replied wistfully. “I have earned my own living since I was fifteen – but had I a son, I would work my fingers to the bone, I would even starve that he might have the opportunity of learning those things that I have never learned, that he might reap a harvest of what had been sown by all the great scholars of the centuries.”

It was undoubtedly due to D’Arcy Forest’s eloquence and to Mrs. Gray’s incessant nagging, that Randal had gone to Oxford. He had never seen D’Arcy Forest again until this day and he was doubtful if either he or his parents had given him a thought after the company of A Tale of Two Cities had left Worcester. That the actor’s visit had been the turning point of his life, Randal would be the last to deny.

“And are you still on the stage?” Randal asked D’Arcy Forest now, as with cigarettes alight they narrowed their eyes against the brilliant sunshine glittering on the sea and on the water of the swimming pool at their feet.

“No, I left the boards many years ago,” D’Arcy Forest replied. “It is a long story, dear boy, so I won’t bore you with it. Sufficient to say, that when my wife died and left me alone with my little baby daughter, I was forced to give up the stage so that I could look after my child.

“There were other reasons too, ill-health amongst them – but although I often regret the footlights, I know I did the right thing in abdicating when I did. There is no room for real acting on the stage today.”

Randal gave a little sigh of relief. He had been half afraid that D’Arcy Forest was going to ask him for a part in one of his productions. It was heart-breaking when one had to say no, and yet how often he had to say it! He did not mind so much when those who sought his patronage were young. He could steel himself to tell a young man or a young woman that it would be better for them to find another type of employment rather than the stage – but the pathos of those who were old, tore him to pieces and hurt him almost unbearably. They had acted all their lives, so what else was there for them to do?

What was also so pathetic was the fact that they never lost faith in their own ability to act. Crippled with arthritis or so weak that they could hardly make their faltering tones heard beyond the first row of the stalls, they still believed that they were capable of obtaining, and sustaining, an arduous part. Faith was indeed often the only thing they had left – and often Randal knew, that if he took that faith away from them, there would be nothing else left for them to do but to go home and die.

Now he could feel himself sink a little lower in the cushions. D’Arcy Forest did not want a part and he could relax. As he did so, he found himself laughing light heartedly at what the older man was saying. D’Arcy Forest was amusing, there was no doubt about that, and he had, too, a way of holding his listener’s attention.

It was with a genuine start of surprise that Randal realised that it was after half past four and he had been listening to his uninvited guest for over an hour and a half.

“We must have some tea,” Randal said, “or would you prefer a drink? I ought to have offered you one when you first came. Do forgive me.”

“Don’t apologise, my dear fellow,” D’Arcy Forest said. “Little Sorella and I had just had luncheon when we arrived, but I won’t say no to a drink now.”

Beside the swimming pool there was an elaborate, ornamental grotto, which contained a house telephone. Randal spoke to Pierre in the pantry.

“Bring down the tray of drinks,” he said, “and also some tea for me. Wait a minute.”

He turned towards D’Arcy Forest.

“I have forgotten your daughter, what would she like.”

Randal looked for Sorella as he spoke, but the child seemed to have vanished. He had not given her a thought this past hour while her father had been talking, but now he saw her at the far end of the swimming pool. She had her back to them, Randal noticed, and was sitting very still, her legs dangling over the high rocks out of which the garden had been constructed. Below her the waves lapped lazily against the cliff side. He thought of shouting to her and then decided that the effort was too great.

“Two teas,” he commanded Pierre and put the telephone down.

“What does your daughter do down here?” he asked casually as he walked back to D’Arcy Forest.

“Do?” For a moment D’Arcy Forest looked surprised at the question – then he smiled. “Oh, she finds plenty to occupy herself.”

There was something in the smooth easiness of his reply that made Randal suspicious.

For the first time he looked at D’Arcy Forest a little speculatively, regarding him not as an amusing acquaintance and a man of the world whose charm and eloquence made him very easy to listen to, but as a father, a man in sole charge of a young child.

Randal’s success as a playwright had transplanted him into the theatrical world. He had lived to the age of twenty-five without knowing a single actor or actress with the notable exception of D’Arcy Forest. But once his first play The Cow Jumped Over The Moon had been a success, he found himself living, eating, sleeping and thinking in the theatrical atmosphere of the theatre.

It was a world so utterly different from anything that he had ever known before, and so excitingly different, that even now after seven years it could still enchant and delight him, as if he were a child at his first pantomime. He found that the theatre left its stamp ineradicably upon all who came in contact with it.

He would have known D’Arcy Forest to be an actor, he thought, if he had met him in the middle of the desert or in the backwoods of Alaska. There was something that proclaimed his profession in the way D’Arcy walked, the way he talked, and the very manner in which he set his hat at an angle on his greying hair. And yet there was something more than ‘actor’ stamped on D’Arcy Forest, and immediately the right word rose to Randal’s mind – adventurer.

He was sure he was not mistaken. D’Arcy was a type that went out of date at the turn of the century. Nowadays the Smart Alecs and slick spivs had no charm about them. D’Arcy would rob you with such elegance, eloquence and good manners that one could almost persuade oneself that it was a pleasure to be robbed. Perhaps robbery was too harsh a word – a loan that was never returned, an investment that never paid a dividend, a guest who never returned hospitality – that would be D’Arcy Forest’s line of country.

Listening to him talk and watching the quick speculative glance of his eyes, Randal guessed that somewhere behind that ingratiating smile, his agile brain was at this moment pondering how to turn this encounter to its very best advantage.

There were no signs of poverty about D’Arcy Forest and he certainly did not appear to be impoverished, and yet Randal was sure that he was in need of money. There was for instance something almost too carefully calculated about his appearance. The rich can look poor and it does not matter – but the poor must always look rich.

As Pierre brought the drinks and set them down on a low table beside the two men, Randal guessed that sooner or later D’Arcy Forest would ‘touch’ him. If it was not to be for a job, then it would be for money.

The moment would come inevitably, as it always did – and yet for once Randal did not feel embarrassed. Randal had not been rich long enough to find it easy to play the part of a generous benefactor. He loathed the look on people’s faces when they were about to ask him for a loan – a look of greed and hunger and at the same time of resentment because he could give, while they must take.

He had sworn at himself a thousand times for being so sensitive, but every time it happened, he hated it the more. Yet now, quite unexpectedly, he found himself not apprehensive, but amused. It must be D’Arcy Forest’s extraordinary charm, he thought.

Looking back over the years, he could remember his father listening while D’Arcy had talked that day at luncheon. He could remember his mother’s close attention and his own half-reluctant admiration for anyone who had such a ‘gift of the gab’. Now that he was older and more mature, he could appreciate the full the effect that this man could create by using his tongue. And yet he could see, as he had not been able to see at eighteen, that D’Arcy Forest in many circles would be considered a bounder and an outsider to say the very least of it.

There was something intrinsically wrong about him – one realised that even while one was mesmerised into liking him. Yes, mesmerised was the right word. Pierre finished arranging the tea things and stood back to look at his handiwork.

“Les gâteaux, c’est assez, Monsieur?” he enquired.

“I expect so,” Randal replied. “If not, I will ring for more.”

“Tres bien, Monsieur.” Pierre bowed and turned away.

As he did so, he glanced meaningly at D’Arcy Forest. When he was out of earshot, Randal asked,

“How much did you give Pierre to let you in? Forgive my asking, but I am curious.”

“Give him? My dear boy, I’m no Croesus,” D’Arcy Forest replied. “I never tip if I can help it out here. It is so disconcerting for the French not to receive what they expect as a matter of course. No, I merely talked to your man and if he is disappointed when I leave, it will be a lesson to him in the future.”

Randal threw back his head and laughed. This was the sort of frankness he appreciated. How few other men in D’Arcy’s position would have confessed to their meanness! He took up the teapot.

“I insist on my afternoon tea, even in France,” he said. “I suppose it is useless to offer you a sandwich or a piece of cake?”

“I seldom eat between main meals,” D’Arcy Forest replied, “and never when I’m drinking.”

“What about your daughter?” Randal asked.

D’Arcy Forest raised his voice.

“Sorella, come and have your tea!”

She did not move or pay the slightest attention, and he shouted again.

“Sorella!”

Still she sat, for a second or two longer and Randal suddenly remembered his own reluctance to move or open his eyes when D’Arcy Forest had come down to interrupt him. But she was not asleep, he told himself, watching her swing her legs slowly over the wall. And yet he knew that she was experiencing the same reluctance that he had felt when she had to forgo her solitude, to be drawn back by voices and noise into the world of other people.

She came walking towards them, her low-heeled strapped shoes making only a faint sound on the slabbed path. As she drew near Randal could see the expression on her face. There was a kind of radiance in her eyes, but it vanished when her father spoke to her, and Randal wondered if he had imagined it.

“Mr. Gray, with characteristic kindness, has ordered you a delicious tea,” D’Arcy Forest said.

Sorella did not answer and Randal realised that he had not yet heard her speak.

“Are you hungry?” he asked her deliberately.

“Yes,” she replied, “for I have not had anything to eat since breakfast.”

Her voice was very soft and low. It had a quietness about it that was very unlike the ringing vitality of her father’s tones.

“Nothing since breakfast!” Randal ejaculated. “You must be famished!”

He remembered how D’Arcy Forest had said that they had just finished luncheon and knew him for an old liar. Sorella sat down on a low stool by the tea table. She put out her hand, took a sandwich and began to eat it, apparently concentrating on her food to the exclusion of all else.

“What will you drink?” Randal asked. “Tea, or would you prefer a cool drink?”

He waited for her to answer, but her father replied for her.

“Give her tea,” he said. “She’s English and should like English ways. I am all against the foreign habit they have over here of allowing children to drink wine at meals.”

“Do you like wine?” Randal asked Sorella in surprise.

There seemed to be some reason for D’Arcy Forest’s remark.

Sorella shook her head.

“No,” she said. “Father is only saying that because the waiter poured me out a glass of wine last night and he thought it was included in the price of the dinner, but it wasn’t, and he had to pay for it.”

She spoke, Randal thought, as a woman might speak of an unreasonable husband. For a moment there was silence, then D’Arcy Forest threw back his head and laughed.

“The serpent’s tooth!” he said. “Oh, deliver us from the devastating frankness of childhood.”

Sorella went on eating and Randal poured himself another cup of tea.

“Where are you staying?” he asked by way of making conversation.

There was a tiny pause and then D’Arcy Forest said,

“Nowhere! That, my dear boy, is what we really came to see you about?”

Randal felt his hand tighten on the handle of the cup. Now it had come! The moment he had been expecting, the moment when D’Arcy Forest would ‘touch’ him.

Afterwards, looking back, he could never quite remember what happened next. He had come down to the south of France for rest, for quietness and above all other things to be alone. Alone after all those sweltering weeks in New York when the temperature had soared to the most unnatural and unmanageable heights – when tempers had been frayed and rehearsals had gone from bad to worse.

When Randal had asked himself, not once but a thousand times, why he had undertaken such a thankless occupation as play-writing. If the six weeks in America had not been preceded by the three months’ solid grind of producing a film at Elstree it would not have been so bad. But the two things had come one on top of the other and he had known himself to be for the first and only time in his life, in a state of collapse. Finally, he had flown home after an exciting and triumphant first night, when he had been fêted and acclaimed in a manner that left him even more tired than he had been before.

It was all too ridiculous, he had told himself, that a healthy, strapping young man of thirty-two should go to pieces because he had worked twelve hours a day – but often to be truthful it was more like twenty-four. It was not only the work on his play which was tiring, but the people connected with it, who expected him to be an inexhaustible source of strength – mental, physical and intellectual.

And if he were honest there was another reason for his weariness.

A feminine reason, or should he put it in the plural? Jane and Lucille were both responsible in part for his lassitude, for his lack of sleep, for an over-tired, restless mind.

There were two women in his life, and most men find one quite enough. He had run away from both of them – from Lucille in New York and from Jane in England, and he had come down to the south of France merely because on the spur of the moment he could not think where else to go. He had a sudden longing for the sun, the warm, glowing, comforting sun of the. Mediterranean, which could soak the tiredness out of a depleted body and bring a tranquil peace and contentment to over-tense nerves.

He had met Madame de Montier only a few times at social functions in London, but he had liked her and he had known instinctively that she liked him.

“Come and stay with me when you can escape from all this nonsense,” she had said the last time they met in England. “You can lie beside my swimming pool, look at the sea, and forget everything else in the world. That is what I do – only sometimes I like to remember my past.”

Madame de Montier’s past was certainly something to remember. She had had four husbands and survived them all. She had been a spectacular and much-acclaimed, if not a great actress. She had been the mistress of a Grand Duke and the chère-amie of a Balkan King.

She had lost in her old age, not only her husbands, but her looks and her figure – her wit, however, had survived and her sense of humour. She was one of the few women who made no demands upon the men who surrounded her. She had known so many in her youth that in her old age she asked nothing more than that they should listen when she talked and be silent when she had nothing to say, which was not often.

Randal had been but a few days at her villa, before Madame de Montier had been called to America.

“I must go,” she said, as she had read the telegram. “This concerns my second husband’s fortune. It is a very large one. When one is old, Randal, money is a very important thing in one’s life. I like money and I intend to keep what I have got. I must go to New York.”

He had expostulated with her, but she had brushed his arguments on one side.

Two days later she left the villa accompanied by two personal maids, a secretary, a chauffeur, twenty-four pieces of luggage and two lovebirds in a cage. The lovebirds were the pets of the moment. Once Madame de Montier had a monkey, but it had tormented her guests and escaped one night from the villa, only to be set on by stray dogs and left mangled and dead.

Madame de Montier had sworn she was heartbroken, but her friends believed her to be secretly relieved. The lovebirds were far less trouble. They sang prettily in their cage and the servants did not mind cleaning them out and feeding them, as they had the monkey.

It was typical of Madame de Montier to take the lovebirds with her to America and leave behind her valuable pictures, a unique collection of snuffboxes and some exquisite pieces of silver. She also left Randal in full possession of the villa.

“Stay as long as you can,” she said. “Pierre and Madelaine will look after you. Make them do some work or they will get fat and lazy and when I want to give a party, they will tell me it is too much trouble. It is always people who have nothing to do who find the little more intolerable.”

Randal had laughed, but he had resolved that Pierre and Madelaine would have very little to do as far as he was concerned. All he wanted was rest, sleep and the joy of being alone. It was strange, he thought, how seldom one was alone in life. At his flat in London there was his secretary, the incessant strident call of the telephone, and a thousand daily interruptions and disturbances.

At his house in the country – a very recently acquired possession – it was much the same. People would motor down just for a word with him. He needed a secretary there as well as in London because the servants refused to answer the telephone, saying that if they did, they had no time to work.

It was all the penalty of being a success, Randal knew that, and up to now he had been far too happy enjoying that success to realise that there was another side to it, a side that was unfortunately very human and commonplace. It was just a case of endurance, he thought, and realised how in his desire to miss nothing and to do everything, he had overstepped the bounds of common sense.

It had not only been his work, but being a social success that had drained his strength. He had not anticipated that in becoming a well-known playwright, he would become a social figure too – but that was exactly what had happened. He had been taken up by a certain coterie with whom he had never in his wildest dreams expected to become au fait. He had met them through Jane Crake, and he had known at once that she was going to matter very much in his life. She was very attractive and he was sure she was exactly what his mother would have called “the right person” for him.

He had meant to talk about Jane to Lucille when he went to New York, and yet there had never been a moment. It was ridiculous, he knew, to be afraid of telling Lucille exactly what Jane meant to him, or rather what she was going to mean in the future – but to be honest, he had funked it.

Then almost before he knew it, Lucille had been signed up for his new play to be produced in October and was coming to London at the end of August.

“I can’t wait to be with you, darling, in dear, dirty, ol’ London,” she said when he left New York.

And still he had not told her about Jane. It was perhaps the thought of Jane and Lucille that had made it difficult for Randal to relax, to rest, as he might have rested during those days after Madame de Montier had left for New York. Even when he slept, he seemed to hear their voices, to see their faces, to feel that they were reaching out towards him, one on one side and one on the other.

Afterwards – a long time afterwards – Randal asked himself, if it was because he was afraid to go on thinking of Jane and Lucille that he had agreed to D’Arcy Forest’s outrageous suggestion. A suggestion that had left him gasping and astonished, and yet to which he had acquiesced, though why and how he had no idea.

It was against everything he had planned, everything he wanted and yet he allowed D’Arcy Forest to move into the villa with his daughter because he said they had nowhere else to go. Randal had not really realised that he had consented, nor believed himself capable of such insanity until bedrooms had been allotted to them and the boxes had been carried upstairs.

Then, coming into the sitting room from the terrace, Randal found Sorella curled up in the window-seat with her face turned towards the sea. For a moment she did not hear him – and when she did, she started, as if he brought her thoughts back to Earth from some far-distant horizon.

For a second she appeared hardly to see him, then she jumped to her feet. Randal had the impression that she was not frightened of him or anxious to be gone, but was merely withdrawing, as a child might do from the presence of someone who could not be bothered with her. There was something about this self-effacement that struck him as pathetic, and rather over-heartily, because he meant to be kind but was not quite certain what tone to use, he said,

“You will enjoy being here, if you don’t find it too lonely.”

She had half-turned towards the door before he spoke. Now she stopped and her eyes met his.

“I think you are very stupid,” she said slowly and distinctly.

Without waiting for his reply, she went from the room.

2

There were two letters on Randal’s breakfast tray when Pierre put it down beside him.

Sunshine, golden and already overpowering, shone through the window to glitter dazzlingly on the silver coffee-pot and to illuminate the valuable, colourful porcelain, which was characteristic of Madame de Montier’s taste throughout the whole villa.

Two letters were propped against the toast-rack. Without looking at the writing, without even picking them up, Randal knew from whom they were. There was no mistaking the florid blue paper of the one or the neat, created severity of the other. He lay back among his pillows to look at them – and as he did so, he realised that he felt calm and complacent about both the writers, and that his nerves had, over this as over his other problems, ceased to jangle.

Randal was not particularly introspective, nor had he ever worried unduly about his health – but the fatigue and exhaustion that had been his a week ago, had frightened him, so much so that it was an almost inexpressible relief to know that he was now himself again.

“Believe it or not,” Randal said to the letters, “this cure is in many ways attributable to D’Arcy Forest.”

D’Arcy and Sorella had been at the villa now for over a week, and Randal had not only enjoyed their company, but had found in it something that was the last thing to be expected – a relief and a cure for his weariness. It was obvious, Randal supposed now, that what he had needed was not solitude but a change of company. D’Arcy Forest had certainly been refreshingly different from all the people with whom he had spent his time in London and New York.

In fact, D’Arcy Forest was an amazing and unusual character. There was no doubt that Randal’s first impression had been correct – he was an adventurer! But that, in itself, was an understatement. D’Arcy was also a buccaneer, a pirate and a highwayman.

One needed but to shut one’s eyes when he was talking, to see him only too clearly in velvet and lace, with high boots and feather-trimmed hat. He might be a braggart and a swashbuckler, but he had a romantic, dashing air about him that fascinated those who looked into his deep-set eyes or listened to his warm, vibrant voice.

D’Arcy might well swagger about his conquests, for Randal could understand all too easily why few women could resist his roistering virility. He robbed them, or rather made them pay through the nose for the pleasure of knowing him, but if one judged people by what they received as well as by what they gave, D’Arcy Forest was by no means the only beneficiary.

To be in his company was to find oneself enthralled, amused and entertained.

Randal had found himself this past week laughing as he had not laughed for a long time. He was used to conversational brilliance, for he had recently been admitted to a certain set in Society that prided itself on choosing its members for their wit and wisdom, rather than for their birth and prestige.

D’Arcy’s humour was, however, of a very different brand from theirs. Richer and saltier, it had a Shakespearean quality about it and was often as full-blooded as he was himself.

D’Arcy might have lived the life of the libertine, and undoubtedly he was a liar in that he would elaborate and build up a story or anecdote to make it more sensational, but beneath his showmanship, over-coloured as it often was, there was a foundation of hard, solid truth and experience. He had lived what he talked about and that was far more important than having a pretty turn of phrase or being able to raise a laugh at someone else’s expense.

D’Arcy’s tales were not always by any means suitable for the drawing room. Sometimes when Sorella was with them Randal would look embarrassedly at the child and then at her father, trying with a warning glance or a raising of his eyebrows to convey the fact that he thought the subject unfit for young ears. But D’Arcy, catching his meaning without difficulty, would merely laugh.

“To the pure, sex is a bore,” he would say. “Besides, Sorella is not listening. She never does listen to me. She has heard it all too often, haven’t you, my pet?”

Sorella seldom answered such questions, but merely stared at her father with her strange green eyes. She betrayed so little of her feelings, was so quiet and retiring, that more than once Randal found himself speculating as to what she thought about while he and her father drank, smoked and talked from midday to midnight. He knew very little about children, but he would have been a fool not to realise that Sorella was an unusual child. For one thing, she was completely unobtrusive.

She appeared at meal times, and as soon as they were over, vanished without stating where she was going or why.

At first Randal was delighted, believing her to be excessively tactful out of respect for his desire to rest. Then he became curious.

“Tell me about your daughter,” he said to D’Arcy Forest one afternoon.

Having finished a delicious lunch of oysters, baby lamb and ripe brie, they stretched themselves out in two comfortably-padded chairs and lit their cigars.

“My poor, little motherless Sorella!” D’Arcy said emotionally. “It is hard for me to tell you how much she means to me – not that the possession of her has not required great sacrifice of me. But let such matters pass.

“A child is a great responsibility, my dear boy, a great responsibility, especially when one has to be father and mother rolled into one. However, you must admit she does me credit.”

“After your wife died, had you no relations who would look after her for you?” Randal asked.

“No, none at all,” D’Arcy replied. “My wife, as I think I have already told you, ran away from home to marry me. Her parents cut her off with the proverbial shilling, believing that she was allying herself with the Devil.

“It was not the first time, nor the last, in my life, that I have been accused of being that somewhat reprehensible gentleman. Nevertheless, I think I made my wife a happy woman.

“She had been trained to dance and became a ballet dancer after we were married. Had she begun earlier in life and had better masters, she might have become famous. As it was, she enjoyed a brief, if gratifying success, and died as a good trouper should, for refusing to disappoint her public. She had a chill and a temperature but insisted on playing to both houses because it was Boxing Day.

“She died forty-eight hours later and I was not prepared to fail her trust and forsake the child she left me.”

Randal glanced at D’Arcy speculatively. He could not accept these heroics at their face value. If Mrs. Forest had gone on dancing when she should have been on a sick bed, it was doubtless because her husband was out of work and they needed the money.

Randal wondered, as he had wondered before, what sort of a father D’Arcy Forest had made to his motherless child. It was one thing to listen to tales of adventure and excitement, of love affairs and intrigues, of gambling and roistering, but quite another to remember that this old libertine had been trailing round with him at the same time a child, and a girl at that.

Randal guessed that Sorella had proved an asset in so far as she excited sympathy. He guessed that the extraordinarily unsuitable clothes that she wore had been provided by D’Arcy’s lady friends, who had found it conveniently endearing to pet the poor, little motherless child of a man, whose embraces and attentions they were all too ready to accept.

It was nice to think that Sorella had enjoyed even that much attention, for when Randal saw her in a bathing suit, he was frankly shocked. She looked thin and emaciated in the frilly, extravagant organdie and lace frocks she wore, but without them she appeared to be nothing but skin and bone.

It was true that her skin had that unusual magnolia quality that never seemed to burn or tan and which undoubtedly added to the pathos of her sharp little elbows and pointed shoulder-blades. But there was no doubt in Randal’s mind that the child was under-nourished and he suspected that D’Arcy’s bawdy, voluptuous stories of the past held many discrepancies in them.

“How old is Sorella now?” he asked.

D’Arcy hesitated before he answered, and Randal guessed he was debating whether to tell the truth or risk a lie.

“Fifteen,” he said at length, rather grudgingly.

“Fifteen!” Randal exclaimed. “I thought she was younger than that.”

“Sorella takes an unnatural interest in her birthdays,” D’Arcy said drily, and Randal’s lips twisted in a smile.

He could well imagine that D’Arcy did everything to keep his daughter a winsome child – a girl budding into womanhood was not likely to be a useful adjunct to his clandestine love affairs. Women were notoriously jealous of their own sex, and a lover’s daughter must be very young to be acceptable.

“Yes, fifteen,” D’Arcy said again resentfully. “I tell her she is getting old, and soon we shall have to begin to think about her future.”

“Do you intend her to go on the stage?” Randal asked.

D’Arcy shook his head.

“She has not the right temperament for it – besides, a good actress is born, not made, and Sorella has little or no idea of acting and art. She has, too, a devastating habit of being truthful. It was a quality I found particularly irritating in my wife, and in that Sorella takes after her.”

Randal laughed. He could not help it.

“What then? he enquired.

D’Arcy shrugged his shoulders.

“I wouldn’t say my daughter’s education has been neglected,” he smiled. “But shall we say it is hardly commercialised enough? Sorella can play a first-class hand of bridge, she is a good poker player and you shouldn’t trust her to shuffle the cards if you are playing after her.

“Besides that, she can speak most European languages – enough of them, at any rate, to find her way about a strange town. All useful achievements, you must admit, my dear Randal, but hard to turn into a weekly wage.”

“I’m sorry for the child,” Randal said.

“Good, then perhaps you can find something for her to do,” D’Arcy responded instantly. “We can teach her to type and she can become your secretary.”

“God forbid!” Randal exclaimed and wondered, as he said it, what Hoppy would think of Sorella.

The same thought crossed his mind this morning as, reaching across the breakfast tray to remove the two letters that were propped against the toast-rack, he found there was another hidden behind them.

It was a small, unassertive letter, the envelope being inscribed in the neat, unpretentious writing that was more familiar to him than any other writing in the world. He picked it up, and opening the envelope, took out the letter and started to read it as he poured out his coffee. There was, as he did so, a faint smile on his lips and an expression of affection on his face.

Mary Hopkins had come to him as a secretary when he first started to make a name for himself in the theatrical world. Hoppy – as everyone called her – told him afterwards that she had accepted a much smaller wage than she had been used to, simply because she believed in him.

Randal was sure this was true, for it was so characteristic of Hoppy, because she was in every way an exceptional and unusual person. She was middle-aged, gaunt and grey-haired and yet it was impossible to be with Hoppy for more than a short time without both admiring and loving her.

It was Hoppy who had made Randal work until he almost pleaded with her for mercy. It was Hoppy who arranged his life and his publicity, dealt with his managers and agents, and finally even with his love affairs. As he told her once, in a fit of exasperation, she was far more persistent than a wife, and, far more demanding than a mistress. She had merely laughed at him and continued to drive him on to greater and more outstanding successes.