“I like to hear about two people loving each other like that,” she said quietly when he paused.
She stood leaning against the heavy mahogany desk, watching him. He took a small ivory elephant from the desk and when he did not speak she went on in the same quiet dreaming voice, her eyes on his hands — good hands, thin and strong and clean.
“Not that I know anything about such things, except what I’ve heard of my parents. My mother loved my father, or she’d never have married him. He was beneath her station.” She hesitated, and then said shyly, “She was a lady, but I don’t know why I keep telling you things.”
He looked at her quickly. “Why shouldn’t you tell me? I knew you weren’t — what you’ve tried to make me believe you are.”
“Oh, but I am,” she insisted. “My father was the son of the butler here in the castle, remember?”
“Wells?” His voice was incredulous.
She nodded. “He is my grandfather.”
They exchanged a long look and John Blayne turned away. “What does it matter?” he asked impatiently.
“I think it matters here in the castle,” she said softly, “but not to me.”
John Blayne began to pace the floor, acutely aware for the first time of why he was allowing himself to stay on in the castle. He wished she had not told him about her parents, and then he found himself wishing she would tell him more.
“What were they like, really?”
“From what I’ve been told,” she began slowly, “my father was tall and handsome and very proud. I’ve seen ever so many pictures of him — as a boy — then after he grew up — then in his Air Force uniform. He never wanted to be a servant, so he ran away to London when he was twenty. He wanted to be an artist, and he even had an exhibition once in London. Most of his pictures were of the castle.”
“Have you seen them?”
“No, they were destroyed in the blitz. Then he married and …” Her voice suddenly halted.
“And?”
“That’s almost all there is to the story, except me.”
“What was your mother like?”
“Her name was Diana Knowles. She was a lady, my grandfather always said, but I’ve never seen a picture of her and I gave up asking about her as my grandfather would tell me nothing. I think she was small and dark and slender and — distant-like.”
“Why?”
“Because, for one thing, my grandfather told me her people were offish and that they didn’t approve her connection with Colin Wells.”
She had been looking anywhere but at him while she spoke, now she lifted her gaze and sought his. He smiled, then moved across the room to glance out of the window. Kate followed him with thoughtful eyes.
He was almost too handsome, she decided, as she watched him. One must be careful when one was a woman, especially a woman such as she, in a strange and anomalous position such as hers in the castle — at times almost a daughter, yet always the maid and grandchild of the butler.
Ah well, she thought wistfully, she had told him the truth. He had asked for it. Now that he knew it he could think what he liked. While she drove the sword thus into her heart she kept looking at him as he stood by the window against the background of the castle and the green lawns, a tall slender figure, elegant even in his casual gray slacks and jacket and his shirt open at the throat.
“You look like an Englishman,” she said softly. “You could belong to the castle, standing there.”
“I’ve been off and on in England all my life,” he said. “My mother and I came in the summers quite often — we had a place in the Cotswolds — my father sold it when she died. He couldn’t bear to see it again without her. They met in the Cotswolds, it seems — her family was English originally and came from that region.”
“That explains you.”
“It doesn’t, as a matter of fact. I’m American — fundamentally and by choice.”
“Now why do you insist upon that?” she demanded. “Is it a disgrace to be English?”
“Of course not, but I like American ways — the directness, the simplicity, even the selfishness, if you want to put it that way, an innocent sort of selfishness, I often think — like a child’s. My father—” he broke off to laugh with a reluctant tenderness—“he knows what he wants and he sees to it that everyone else knows, too.”
“Ah, but you’re like that, you know,” she said eagerly.
“I? Like my father? Come, now—”
“Yes, you are. You’re well-spoken, and all that, but you’ve let us know what you want and I don’t put it above you to get what you want in the end.”
He had turned when she spoke and they were gazing sidewise into each other’s eyes, half laughing. What a pretty thing she was, the way her dark hair curled about her head, the depths of the blue of her eyes, an English beauty, sprung from what contradictory roots! It would be difficult not to grow up beautiful here and yet not even the castle could have shaped the delicacy of her lips, the small straight nose, the finely etched brows.
He felt a dangerous pull at his heart, a rise in the temperature of his blood, and was alarmed. As if he had not complication enough now without allowing himself a romantic attachment, however temporary! He had long ago discovered that he was attractive to women and after an experience or two in college had developed a wary half-humorous technique for self-defense. Alas, the difficulty now was not to ward her off. He saw no sign of her approach to him. On the contrary, she had taken great care to insist that she was only the maid here in the castle, a notion which he was alarmed to discover was increasingly repulsive to him. He was disgustingly pleased to know that whatever her father had been, her mother — he checked himself. As if such distinction mattered in his own country!
No, what he must remember was Louise; and what he must ask himself was whether he had an obligation to her which he was honor bound to fulfill. His father and Louise’s father were lifelong friends and business enemies. It had been taken for granted that the one’s son and the other’s daughter, who had played together as children, would some time be married. “A merger,” the elder Blayne had called it.
Thinking about Louise, John realized that though he had often kissed her formally he had never kissed her spontaneously or uncontrollably as now, damn him, he could imagine himself kissing Kate!
He turned to her. “Was your mother a princess, by any chance?” he inquired with a desperate attempt at playfulness.
She sat down on the ottoman in front of the fireplace. “Perhaps …” She was about to say “entirely possible, one never knows about princesses,” and then she checked the involuntary gaiety in her heart. “We began by talking about you,” she reminded him, “not me. I was saying you are like your father.”
“And I tell you I am not. Although …” He forgot her for a moment at this mention of his formidable father and stood looking down at her, hands in his pockets and frowning to remember. “I wanted to be like him when I was growing up. I tried to he interested in business, competition — all that — even football. I felt I was odd because I simply couldn’t be interested in winning games. He always has to win, you know. Well, wanting to be like him, I had to resist him or he’d have ruled me like a slave. I have had to grow stubborn and argumentative in my own fashion—”
He broke off and looked down at her as though he had never seen her before.
“You’re very clever,” he said slowly. “Because you’re right. In my own way I am like my father. Is that repulsive to you?”
She looked up at him, immensely tall above her, and was shocked to discover that she longed suddenly for — what? For his touch, for his hands to reach for hers to pull her gently to her feet, to … to …