Flower for a Bride

by Barbara Rowan

  “Who is Miss Matilda Gregg? And why do you think she would like to meet me?”

  “The answer to your second question is that she hardly ever meets English people nowadays, and to your first—she was my governess years ago, and my little boy Jamie is at present being taught English by her. Or perhaps I should say he was taught English by her almost as soon as he could open his lips.”

  “Then she has stayed with you—or your family, rather— all these years?”

  “All these years,” he echoed her, with rather mocking soberness. “And by comparison with your years they must seem many indeed.”

  “I’m twenty-two,” she told him, a little primly. “I shall be

  twenty-three in September.”

  “A great age,” he agreed. “And if you were here in September you could celebrate in a suitable fashion, for then is the time of the wine harvest. You would enjoy it, I think.”

  A shadow fell on her, for she knew she would be far away.

  “You own vineyards, senhor?” she enquired.

  “Much of the country round about belongs to me, yes,” he agreed. “But to return to Miss Mattie, as we have always called her. She is too old now to be very much use as a governess, but my son is devoted to her as, indeed, I was, and she occupies a somewhat unique position in my household. She is something of an autocrat, but we do not of course bow very noticeably before her authority. But we like to pretend that we heed all that she says, so I hope you will bear that in mind. She is aware that sooner or later she must be replaced.”

  “But you will not let her go?” in a shocked voice.

  “Of course not,” with a surprised arch to his eyebrows.

  “Where would an old lady of over seventy years go if she was suddenly turned loose upon the world? How would she

  support herself?”

  “You could, of course, make her an allowance,” Lois murmured. “But I expect you prefer to keep her on as a kind of old retainer?”

  “She is an old friend,” Dom Julyan told her, a note of rebuke in his voice. “It is as an old friend that I shall present her to you.”

  “I understand,” Lois said, in a very small voice, but her opinion of Dom Julyan mounted steadily. He was not too proud, or too conscious of family, to look upon his old governess as a friend, and his son was being brought up to look upon her as a friend, also. No wonder Jay had found so many things to disagree with—she was not the type to harbor either old retainers, or governesses who had entwined themselves about the hearts of a family.

  “I’m afraid I’ve caused you to alter your plans for the afternoon,” she said, her conscience troubling her as she recollected that he had been proceeding in the opposite direction when he came upon her. “Wouldn’t some other afternoon do for me to meet Miss Mattie?”

  “Not unless you would prefer it to be another afternoon?”

  “Oh, no, no!” she answered him immediately, and, perhaps a trifle unguardedly. “This is a treat for me,” she confessed, naively, “for I’ve never ridden in a car as magnificent as this one before, and I suppose I have been a little bit lonely since Aunt Harriet and Jay left. I haven’t had a single conversation in English since I said goodbye to them until I met you this afternoon.”

  “Why didn’t they take you with them?” he asked, with apparent casualness.

  “Why?” She looked sideways at him in surprise. “Because I’m no concern of theirs, you know. I came out for the—for the wedding—and Aunt Harriet paid my fare, but I support myself, and their future plans are nothing to do with me. ’

  “And are your future plans nothing to do with anyone at

  “No one,” she admitted, with just a hint of emptiness in her voice.

  “You have no parents? No other relative who is responsible for you?”

  “No one,’’ she repeated. “My father and mother were both killed in an accident when I was two, and Aunt Harriet brought me up. But, of course, I couldn’t expect her to keep me when I was old enough to earn money to keep myself.”

  He frowned at the road ahead.

  “And how long have you been earning money, as you put it, to keep yourself?”

  She smiled in a rather reminiscent fashion.

  “Since I was seventeen. I left school at sixteen and a half, had six months office training, and then got myself my first job. Since then I’ve managed to be completely independent.”

  “Which pleases you?” he demanded.

  “Of course,” in faint surprise. “There’s nothing quite like being independent—when the only alternative is accepting a

  kind of charity from relatives.” “I see.” His lips tightened. “But you are very fond of your cousin Jay, if not of your aunt?”

  “I am fond of both of them.”

  “And you are also fond of your work?” a little dryly. “You enjoy laboring in an office?”

  “There are other things I would prefer to do,” she confessed.

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” with a faint sigh. “Things that wouldn’t keep me in one place all the time— things that allowed me to use my imagination a little, and were not so mechanical. Things that involved human relationships.” “Instead of attachment to a typewriter?”

  "Yes.”

  They had arrived at the wrought-iron gates through which she had passed once before, and as they were standing wide he swung the car between them and then brought it to an effortless stop at the foot of the flight of steps before the front door. He got out and went round to her side of the car and held open her door.

  Once again—although with altogether different sensations this time—Lois found herself entering the Quinta de Valerira. On the only other occasion when she had been permitted to stand for a few moments in that gracious hall, she had felt compelled to admire the beauties of the staircase and the vaulted ceiling, but her nervousness had prevented her from wholeheartedly admiring, as she did today. Her host saw her looking with wide, pleasure-filled eyes at the portraits she had previously had only a swift glimpse of, at the patina on the furniture that looked dark as ebony, and the flower arrangements that provided splashes of color in the restful gloom.

  But she did not visit the ante-room today. She was taken straight through an impressive reception room

  where the light after the somewhat brazen glare outside was also dim and tranquil, to a brilliant enclosed garden, where the air was heavy with spicy scents and alive with fluttering butterflies’ wings, and white-painted garden seats were disposed invitingly in the shade.

  On one of the garden seats, a shrunken figure in black was seated, peering through old-fashioned steel-rimmed spectacles at some marvellously neat buttonholes she was working in the front of the boy’s silk shirt. The boy himself was lying on a little square of lawn, studying his own reflection in a triangular pool that—like all the other pools Lois had so far seen—was lined with tiles, and seemed magnetically to attract all the light. There were some violently scarlet blooms floating on the pool, and the boy’s thin hand reached out to caress one of them while he smiled at his own pointed fact in the water.

  Don Julyan stood quietly at Miss Mattie’s elbow, and she lowered her sewing to her lap while she blinked up at him in surprise.

  “I thought you were to be absent for the entire afternoon,” she said, as if she were reproving a child. “Have you forgotten something?”

  “No Mattie, I haven’t.” He neatly removed a lemon-yellow butterfly that had settled on her grizzled hair with a very long index finger and well-shaped thumb, and watched it flutter away into the clear blue atmosphere as he replied, “I’ve brought you a visitor.”

  “A visitor?”

  “Yes; an English visitor. One who can talk to you about London, and your favorite Hyde Park and Piccadilly, while you give her some tea. And although she’s only staying here for a short while she may come and see you again if you insist on the tea being of just the right brew, with cream and sugar instead of lemon, which I feel cert
ain somehow Miss

  Fairchild doesn’t really like.”

  “Miss Fairchild?” Instantly, or so it seemed to Lois, the old eyes swivelled round to her with suspicion—and just a touch of hostility—in their short-sighted depths; and then, at the sight of the slightly tousled girl in the pink frock that made her look like a very slender schoolgirl on holiday in the sun, and one, moreover, who didn’t look at all sure of herself or her welcome, the hostility vanished, and surprise stamped the lined face. “Is this another Miss Fairchild?”

  “It is, Mattie. My—er—ex-fiancee’s cousin, Miss Lois Fairchild.”

  “And she is staying in Alvora?”

  “She arrived for the wedding, but remained to enjoy herself,” with a dry note in his voice that made Lois blush for her cousin, and wish suddenly that she had had the strength of mind to resist his invitation to his home this afternoon.

  But, seeing the embarrassment in the girl’s face— reading aright the distress in her eyes—Miss Mattie patted the seat beside her and said:

  “Come and sit down, Miss Fairchild. It’s hot, and you’re probably not used to heat—not if you’re straight out from England. What made you decide to stay on once all the wedding plans were cancelled? Do you like it out here? Do you find it colorful?”

  “I find it so colorful that it bewilders me,” Lois admitted, sinking gratefully on to the cool seat beside the tiny black-gowned figure.

  “That’s the way I reacted to it all at first,” Miss Mattie told her. “After the semi-tones of England this sort of thing”—she waved a hand to indicate the flaming growth that rioted in the garden—“all but knocked me endways. And by the time I became accustomed to it I knew I could never leave it behind, and here I am—a very old woman, and a nuisance to everyone, but still with a place in the sun, and as much color as I can absorb! And I’ve never grown tired of it!”

  “You’ll never grow tired of it now, Mattie,” her employer remarked, with a glance at her that was a mixture of amusement and affection. “You’ll leave your bones here.”

  She nodded, with a satisfied air.

  “I propose to do just that. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t often think of England, and wonder how things are going on there. I used to love walking on Hampstead Heath, and my very first pupil lived in a very grand and imposing house in Grosvenor Square—long since, I believe, converted into flats or offices—and when I had a whole day off I used to spend it gazing hungrily at the shops in the West End, finishing up always when it was fine with tea near the bandstand in Hyde Park.”

  “The sort of thing no well-conducted Portuguese young woman would ever have done without a suitable escort,” Dom Julyan declared lazily, throwing himself down on the shaven turf beside his son, and sharing his absorption in the pool. “Certainly not half a century or so ago.”

  “Is it as long ago as all that?” Miss Mattie enquired, with a wistful sigh.

  He smiled round at her gently.

  “I wouldn’t let it worry you. Time doesn’t really mean much to you—you just let it drift past you.”

  “Do I?” She looked a little vague. ‘Well, perhaps I do.” “And talking of your pupils, this one hasn’t yet been formally presented to Miss Fairchild.” Dom Julyan was ruffling the child’s hair, and while he did so Lois studied the picture they made as if something about it had for her an absorbing interest She had never before seen such a strikingly handsome child—such a beautiful child, as he undoubtedly was; and although his pointed chin lent him a fawn-like air, and his enormous eyes looked a little too large for his face, the velvet blackness of those eyes, the incredible eyelashes, the little straight nose and the faultless mouth were direct bequests from his father. The tinge of red in his curls had probably been bestowed on him by his mother, but otherwise Dom Julyan had reproduced himself in miniature.

  Lois wondered whether that was the reason why he was so devoted to the boy, and when the latter struggled to his feet to come and make her acquaintance she caught sight, for the first time, of the cage on his small left foot. And she noticed how pitifully thin his left leg was, and that he dragged it as he moved across the grass.

  Her heart turned over with instant pity and because, in spite of his physical handicap and his fragility, he tried to hold himself so sturdily and was such a perfect little gentleman as he held out his hand to her, the pity grew until nothing could prevent it from showing in her face, and the grey-blue eyes went soft with a melting tenderness.

  “How do you do, Miss Fairchild?” the boy said, as if someone had instructed him to utter the words carefully in English.

  “How do you do, Jamie?” Lois replied, and her smile won an instant response, and a flash of white teeth that promised to be as perfect as his father’s.

  “You’ve been gathering wild flowers,” he said, looking with interest at her blossom-filled lap, for she had not neglected to remove her afternoon’s harvest from the floor of the car. And although some of the gaily colored blooms were wilting a little by now he touched them gently. “I like them better than the kind we have here in the garden,” he admitted eagerly. “And it’s fun picking them, isn’t it? Fun looking for the ones you don’t so often see.”

  “You have so many here in Portugal that it hardly seems necessary to do any looking,” Lois replied, restraining an urge to put her arms round him and lift him on to the seat beside her, because he was slightly undersized, and that cage on his foot struck her as heavy.

  “And you don’t have so many in England?” he asked.

  “Not nearly so many,” she had to confess, and his large eyes regarded her with a look that was suddenly rather enigmatic.

  “You are not like the lady my father was going to marry,” he announced. “She was pretty—I think she was very pretty—but I don’t think she ever gathered wild flowers. I never saw her do so, anyway.”

  “Jamie!” his father exclaimed, but even to Lois his voice sounded more amused than reproving. “It is not within your province to make observations of that sort, and instead of doing so it would be an excellent plan, I think, if you went round the garden and picked a fresh bunch of flowers for Miss Fairchild. By the time she leaves here those poor things in her lap are going to be quite dead, and even if you prefer the wild variety Miss Fairchild, I know, likes camellias. Pick her a large bunch of camellias.”

  As his eyes rested on Lois’s face with an extraordinary expression in them—partly quizzical, partly provocative, partly made up of something she couldn’t even begin to understand—she felt herself coloring faintly. For in spite of his recommendation he was not to know how long she had kept that other camellia she had rescued from the gravel of the driveway in water in her room.

  “I will leave you now,” he said to his old governess, rising and dusting his immaculate person with his fine hands. “But on my way into the house I will instruct Maria to bring you tea.”

  “But, no—you will have tea with us,” his governess responded, laying a small but determined clawlike hand on his arm. “And afterwards you will drive Miss Fairchild back to her hotel.”

  “Very well.”

  He submitted with an immediate and very good grace, but Lois was not surprised to see a faint twinkle in his eyes as they rested on her this time.

  “Little as I share your English passion for tea, I will stay, and afterwards I have every intention of driving Miss Fairchild back to her hotel.”

  Lois found the afternoon, and tea under those shady trees that made the garden a haven of coolness even on such a hot day, an extremely pleasant experience, and perhaps because she had been feeling a little lonely and unwanted—of no particular importance to anyone—it was good to have a series of eager questions fired at her by Miss Gregg, who was determined to find out all she could about her homeland while the opportunity was hers. And Jamie, having picked her camellias, and rested the bunch on a cool patch of grass to await the moment of her departure, came and sat beside her and seemed to derive a curious kind of satisfaction f
rom listening to her answers to the old lady’s questions.

  He was rather a solemn boy, and Lois suspected that he was a highly intelligent one, with an eagerness amounting to hunger for absorbing information. And Lois had always had a very happy knack with young people, perhaps because they appealed to her very much indeed, and she broke off frequently during the conversation that took place to smile at him, and once to reach out with a purely instinctive movement and push back one of his curls from his forehead because it was tumbling into his eyes.

  But the thing which interested her most about the afternoon—and which, she knew, surprised her—was the obvious fact that Dom Julyan was rather more than devoted to his son, and that for long moments at a time his eyes would linger on the boy, and while they did so the whole of his face was softened, and very gentle, and there was nothing in the least unreadable about his expression, and certainly nothing mask-like.

  In fact, he unbent in rather a charming way to Lois herself, and to Miss Mattie he was affectionate and teasing, with no hint of the employer which he actually was.

  On the way back to the Hotel Rosso in the car Lois was conscious of wanting to say something to him, but she found it difficult to phrase an opening sentence. It was Jay who had said to her that a first wife was different—and, judging by his affection for his son, he must have been very fond of his wife—but, even so, to have asked another woman to marry him and then been jilted by her was an experience many men would not have stood up to very well.

  But he seemed to have stood up to it with remarkable composure and fortitude. In fact, it was an experience which seemed to have left hardly any scars at all—which was extraordinary, and quite beyond Lois to understand.

  Unless no part of his heart had been involved! . . . But that was even more extraordinary!

  “Senhor ------ ” she said suddenly, while he stared

  at the road ahead.

  “Yes?” He turned his head sideways for an instant, and she thought he was smiling rather strangely. “You have been silent for several minutes, and I realize there is something you wish to say. What is it?”