The Passion and the Flower Page 7

  Miss Anderson seemed about to refuse and then, as if the golden wine in the engraved glass, persuaded her almost against her will, she raised it to her lips.

  “I don’t think I really like champagne,” Lokita said.

  She had drunk it once or twice with her father and found it disappointing after all she had read about it being the ‘wine of happiness’ and the ‘nectar of the Gods’.

  The Prince smiled.

  “When you have passed through a great many different emotions in your life,” he said, “you will find that champagne is the only wine you can express delight or sweep away sorrow with. Tonight I drink with delight and gratitude because two such charming ladies are my guests.”

  The last word was in the plural, but he looked at Lokita.

  As the servants brought in many exotic and delicious dishes, which were surprisingly ready, although Lokita imagined that the Prince had ordered them earlier for himself, their host set himself out to be agreeable.

  He talked to Miss Anderson, exerting the irresistible charm that he was famous for and with a perception that was almost clairvoyant, finding the subjects that interested her.

  He asked no awkward questions, he merely talked as if he was in a salon surrounded by the greatest intellects of Paris.

  No woman, whatever her age or however prejudiced she might be against him, could have resisted such an insidious compliment.

  As the meal drew to a close, Mss Anderson was laughing and responding to the Prince in a manner that made Lokita stare at her wide-eyed.

  Never had she known Andy to be so animated or in fact look so young. The years seemed to have slipped away and the lines of worry had vanished from her face.

  “Will you have French or Turkish coffee?” the Prince asked as the dessert was taken from the table.

  “I think Turkish coffee would be a treat,” Miss Anderson replied.

  “And you, mademoiselle?” the Prince asked Lokita.

  “I have always longed to taste real Turkish coffee,” she answered.

  The Prince gave an order and the servants brought in the coffee and set it on a side table just inside the door. Then they removed the table that they had dined at.

  Miss Anderson moved into the more comfortable armchair that she had occupied before they had had supper.

  “I will bring you your coffee,” the Prince said with his back to them, “and also a small liqueur.”

  “No, no!” Miss Anderson protested. “I must not have anymore and it is time, Your Highness, that we left.”

  “Only when you have finished your meal,” the Prince answered, “and what meal in Paris would be complete without coffee and liqueurs at the end of it?”

  He carried in one hand a handleless cup set in a holder of gold ornamented with emeralds and in the other a glass containing a liqueur and set them down on the small table at Miss Anderson’s side.

  Then he brought Lokita her coffee, but he did not persuade her to have a liqueur.

  “Surely these coffee cups are unique?” she said raising the gold and emerald holder in her hand.

  “They were given to me by the Sultan of Turkey,” the Prince explained, “and it was when I was staying in Constantinople that I learnt exactly how Turkish coffee should be made.”

  “It is certainly delicious,” Miss Anderson commented.

  She drank a little, sipped her liqueur and drank a little more coffee.

  Lokita took a few small sips and decided that she would not be in a hurry to finish her cup, for when she had done so she was sure that Andy would insist on returning home and she had no wish to go.

  It had been an excitement she could not explain to herself to have supper with the Prince, even though he had talked all the time to Andy and indeed had hardly looked at her.

  In an effort to prolong their visit Lokita asked,

  “Do you think I could look again at your treasures?”

  “Of course,” the Prince replied.

  He rose to his feet and glanced at Miss Anderson as if expecting her to protest once again that they must leave.

  She was, however, sitting back comfortably in the armchair with a smile on her lips.

  She said nothing as Lokita passed her to walk towards the table arranged with the valuable snuff boxes that she had been examining before supper.

  As she looked down at them, the Prince was beside her and because he was so near she felt a little quiver go through her.

  “You have so many beautiful things,” she said, feeling that she must say something.

  “But nothing as beautiful as you!”

  She was so surprised that she turned up her face to look at him.

  She found that her eyes were held by his so that it was hard to look away.

  “Come and sit down,” the Prince suggested. “I want to talk to you.”

  Lokita looked over her shoulder at Miss Anderson and saw to her astonishment that her head was lying back against the soft cushions of the chair and she was asleep.

  The Prince followed her glance.

  “It often happens,” he said, “when someone has been through a time of mental or physical stress that they fall asleep.”

  As he spoke, he took Lokita by the hand and drew her to another sofa by the window opening onto the garden.

  She sat down and he seated himself beside her turning sideways so that he was looking at her.

  “You are so lovely!” he said in his deep voice. “Incredibly unbelievably lovely!”

  Lokita blushed.

  Then she said,

  “I would like to thank Your Highness for the basket of orchids you sent me.”

  “But you left them in your dressing room.”

  “Miss Anderson – thought that your present was an – insult. I know you did not mean it like that – but it made her angry.”

  “She was right! It was an insult,” the Prince declared.

  Lokita looked at him in astonishment and he went on,

  “It was an insult to think that I could ornament you with anything so commonplace as diamonds when what I wanted was to take the stars from the sky to make you a necklace and to give you the moon to hold in your arms.”

  There was a depth of emotion in his voice that seemed to vibrate within Lokita.

  “Only the rays of the sun could make a wreath for your hair that is worthy,” he went on and there was a passionate note in his voice as he exclaimed, “Lokita! What have you done to me?”

  Now it was not only impossible to look away from him but impossible to breathe.

  “When I saw you dance,” the Prince said, “you spoke to my soul and I knew that I had been looking for you all my life. I want you, Lokita, I want you as I have never wanted anything before. But I am afraid!”

  “Afraid?”

  “You are like a flower,” he said, “if I touch you, will you wither and fade?”

  Lokita drew in her breath, but she could not speak and now very gently the Prince took one of her hands from where it lay in her lap and held it in his.

  He looked down at it, at the long thin fingers that could be so expressive when she danced and the small, soft pink palm with the lines of Fate etched on it.

  Then he raised it to his mouth.

  He did not kiss it, but just barely touched her skin with his lips, moving them up each of her fingers and then round the outside of the palm and down to her wrist.

  He felt her quiver and he asked,

  “Does that make you feel?”

  “Y-yes,” she whispered.

  “What do you feel, do tell me.”

  “It is very strange it is almost like when I am dancing and I feel – there are angels and someone whom I love near me – but they are outside me – what I feel now is inside – inside my heart.”

  “Oh, my darling! My sweet! My Drouska! That is what I want you to feel!”

  “But – why?”

  “Because it is what I feel for you. Do you not realise, heart of my heart, soul of my soul, that this
is love?”

  As he spoke, the Prince pressed his lips passionately into the palm of her hand.

  Lokita felt as if a streak of lightning ran through her body, passing through her breast and rising in her throat until it reached her lips.

  The Prince raised his head.

  “I said you were like a flower and you are my flower, mine, and no one shall ever take you from me.”

  “Andy!” Lokita whispered.

  The Prince glanced over his shoulder.

  “Leave everything to me,” he said. “Like everyone else she will think it too soon and that we do not know our minds. But you know as I do that this is Fate and that we have known each other not only for a few hours but all through Eternity.”

  “Do you – really believe – that?”

  “I swear it to be true,” the Prince responded positively, “and if I could I would sweep you up in my arms and carry you away to somewhere where no one could find us, where we could be alone and where I could teach you, my Drouska, about love, the love that burns in me like a flaming fire.”

  “Can love – happen so – quickly?” Lokita stammered.

  “It is not quickly, my star from the sky. It is a love that has been there for centuries in perhaps a million lives before this one.”

  His fingers tightened on hers and he went on,

  “In claiming you I am merely re-claiming what is already mine.”

  “You really – believe that?”

  “I believe it as I believe in God above,” the Prince said. “I believe it as I believe in life itself!”

  He kissed her hand again and then he put it in her lap and said,

  “You know that I want to hold you in my arms and you know that I want to kiss your eyes, as I know no other man has ever done. But because I love you to distraction, because I know that we shall be together until the stars fall from the skies and the seas run dry, I must give you time, my beautiful darling, time to think.”

  “I have – thought about – you ever since I first saw – you,” Lokita murmured.

  She saw the question in his eyes and explained,

  “When you came to the theatre, you walked past – us as you went up to my – dressing room.”

  “If only I had known.”

  “It was better that you did not know. Andy was very angry – and she might have been – rude to you.”

  “And you were not angry?”

  “I thought that you were different from any man I had ever – seen before,” Lokita said simply.

  “As I know you are very different. Oh, my precious, life of my life, my little flower, I want to kneel at your feet and to kiss them because everything about you is so infinitely precious, so perfect and so indescribably beautiful.”

  “When you talk to me like that,” Lokita whispered. “It is like listening to – music.”

  “There is so much I want to give you,” the Prince said, “and so much, my perfect little love, that you can give me.”

  He was about to say more when a sound came from Miss Anderson’s lips and they both knew that she had yawned and opened her eyes.

  Before she could turn her head the Prince had risen to his feet and walked towards her.

  “I think by now,” he said in the conventional charming voice that he had used during supper, “it will be safe for you to return home.”

  “Then we must go at once,” Miss Anderson declared.

  She appeared not to realise that she had been asleep, but her eyes blinked for a moment as if they felt heavy. She smoothed down her gown with busy fingers.

  “To make quite sure that you are safe,” the Prince said, “I am taking you home myself.”

  “There is no need, Your Highness,” Miss Anderson replied, but her voice was not peremptory, it was but a formal protest.

  “I think there is every need,” the Prince answered, “and never again must you both be subjected to the dangers that you have encountered tonight.”

  As he spoke, he lifted Lokita’s velvet cape from the chair where he had put it.

  As he helped her into it, she felt his hands against her shoulders and she trembled.

  She also thought, although she was not sure, that he kissed her hair.

  Then she was following Andy from the salon into an enormous marble hall where there were a dozen footmen in a livery ornamented with gold braid.

  One of the footmen handed the Prince his hat, another his driving gloves and then they walked out of an impressive door onto some marble steps.

  Waiting in the drive outside the house were two carriages.

  One was closed and drawn by two horses, the other was an open chaise drawn by four.

  The Prince looked at Lokita with a smile.

  “Which shall it be?” he asked.

  “I have never driven behind four horses,” she answered.

  “Then this will be a new experience.”

  She knew by the look he gave her that he meant that it was another experience to add to the one she had already had tonight.

  There was room for three of them in the chaise and to protect them from the night air the servants put a rug of white ermine over their knees.

  Then driving superbly with an expertise that Lokita recognised as being exceptional the Prince drove along the Champs-Élysées.

  He drove very fast, the horses moving, Lokita thought, like the wind and she felt that she were being carried across the sky by Apollo himself.

  Indeed she was sure that the Prince was enveloped with the same mystical heavenly light as Apollo.

  She knew that he had brought a strange and wonderful light into her life and, if she ever lost him, there would only be an unutterable darkness.

  Chapter Four

  As Lord Marston stepped out of the carriage, he yawned with relief that the evening was over.

  He always disliked the more intimate parties that he had to attend at the Tuileries.

  The old Palace of Catherine de Medici had for three hundred years housed a succession of French Sovereigns.

  When the Second Empire came into being, the Emperor Napoleon III had to create a Court.

  He restored the pomp and ceremony of his uncle’s Empire and, as it was a vital and brilliant age, his Court, which was to be the last, was the most resplendent ever known.

  But in spite of all the pomp and circumstance, the food and wine that was served at the Emperor’s table was second rate and, as one guest wrote afterwards, ‘the cooking was simple, plentiful and the slightly dated cooking of a conscientious hotel.’

  After the superlative chefs employed by the Prince and the outstanding cuisine at the British Embassy, Lord Marston had found the food as unappetising as the conversation.

  The decor had been theatrical and impressive, the ladies in full evening dress glittering with jewels, the gentlemen in tailcoats and decorations, but what was more sensational was the exotic figure of Scander, the Empress Eugénie’s Nubian attendant.

  In his gold embroidered robes he looked as if he had stepped out of some eighteenth century painting.

  With such a background it should have been easy to make the conversation interesting, Lord Marston thought. But the Empress made no effort and, although the Emperor attempted to talk, there was little to say.

  Politics and all delicate subjects were forbidden in front of the servants and art and literature, except in the Salon of Princess Mathilde, were not socially acceptable and anyway nobody knew very much about them.

  When dinner was over, the evening seemed to drag on in the salon, which was unpleasantly hot from the candles of four chandeliers and a huge fire.

  It was an inexpressible relief to Lord Marston, when finally he saw that the Emperor and Empress were retiring and he could leave.

  Now as he walked into the hall the Prince’s Major Domo informed him,

  “His Highness is in the salon, my Lord.”

  Lord Marston handing his hat and cloak to a footman and walked through the door held open for him by anoth
er flunkey.

  He was surprised that the Prince was at home, for he thought that he had intended to spend an evening with one of the many ladies whose invitations on colourful, scented writing paper flooded into the house almost every hour of the day.

  As he entered the salon, Lord Marston found his friend standing at the open window looking out into the garden.

  “I am surprised to find you here, Ivan,” he said aloud.

  The Prince turned round and Lord Marston saw by the blazing look in his eyes and the expression on his face that something untoward had occurred.

  “I have seen her! I have talked to her! I have kissed her hand!”

  The words seemed to flow from the Prince’s lips like a triumphant oratorio.

  Lord Marston moved across the salon towards him.

  “I presume you are speaking about Lokita. But how is it possible?”

  “She is beautiful, Hugo, more beautiful close to than she could ever look on the stage, and she is mine, mine as she was meant to be since the beginning of time!”

  His voice seemed to ring out so rapturously that Lord Marston almost expected the crystal drops on the chandeliers to tinkle an accompaniment.

  “Suppose you tell me all about it?” he suggested with a smile, sitting down on the sofa and taking a cigar from a gold box set with huge amethysts from the Siberian mines.

  The Prince did not speak and Lord Marston went on,

  “It seems incredible that she should have agreed to meet you when everyone else has been refused.”

  “She did not exactly agree, not at first,” the Prince replied a smile on his lips.

  “I have a feeling that you have been doing something extraordinarily reprehensible,” Lord Marston said. “You had better tell me about it, Ivan.”

  “You frightened me so much with your stories of the dragon who guards her, the very English Miss Anderson that I knew that there was only one way to storm the Fortress and that was by indirect attack.”

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” Lord Marston remarked.

  “It was not difficult to abduct the two ladies,” the Prince went on, “My three secretaries played their parts as bandits most convincingly.”