Next day they lunched there with the King and afterwards watched him play polo. Soon after they entered the reserved enclosure a number of Gulia's friends came up to her in turn. All of them asked where she had been for the past three weeks and reproached her for declining invitations they had sent her. She explained that she had been looking after a guest who had been seriously ill, and introduced de Quesnoy to them. This resulted in a dozen invitations to lunches, dinners and bathing parties; but each trip in de Vendome's car had brought on one of the Count's headaches, so he begged to be excused from any social engagements until he had had a further week's convalescence.
Afterwards, while watching the game, his headache wore off, and he wondered a little uneasily if his refusal had been less due to that than a preference for spending long hours on the Cordobas' private beach with Gulia rather than to re-enter the social whirl.
That evening an episode occurred which gave him further cause for some uneasiness. For some time past he had been well enough to change and dine with the family, and at dinner that night de Vendome remarked to Gulia:
'I hear you have put off the Villalobars from coming to stay. Isn't that rather a pity? It was so jolly here in August with the house full of people; but for quite a time now we've had no company at all - not even a dinner party.'
De Cordoba promptly replied for his wife. 'My dear boy, you seem to forget that we have had other things to occupy us. When our friend Armand arrived he was at death's door; so naturally we got rid of the people who were staying here then as soon as we decently could.'
'Naturally,' agreed the Prince. 'I should have been the last to expect you to do otherwise. But he has been well enough to enjoy talking to other people for quite a while now, and I should have thought you might open up the house again.'
'Yes,' de Cordoba nodded, 'I see no reason why we shouldn't.' Then he glanced at his wife and added, 'Why did you put the Villalobars off, Gulia? After all, it was a long-standing engagement.'
She shrugged the superb shoulders that rose from her green chiffon frock and replied, 'Having cancelled our invitations to half a dozen other people during the past three weeks I suppose it has become a habit, and I did it without thinking. But, anyway, the burden of entertaining falls much more heavily on the hostess than you men realize, and I've been very glad of the respite.'
De Quesnoy had been about to express his regret that his presence there should have upset their autumn programme, but in view of Gulia's last remark he felt that it might be a little tactless to do so. As far as the other two were concerned he felt no qualms of conscience. The Conde, when not immersed in big financial deals, was always happy to go off on expeditions to hunt butterflies for his collection, and the young Prince led a very full life. Being deeply religious he spent several hours a day at his devotions, and in the role of an extremely active President on the councils of numerous Church charities; then he was frequently in attendance on the King and for the rest of the time enjoying himself at parties, mostly in Biarritz, since far greater numbers of the Spanish nobility spent this season of the year over the frontier in the smart French watering-place than in San Sebastian.
However, after their bathe next morning he did raise the matter with Gulia by saying, 'In spite of what you said at dinner last night about entertaining meaning a lot of hard work for the hostess, I fear that devoting your time to me, as you have during my convalescence, must have deprived you of a lot of enjoyment. Even if you hadn't had people here to stay, you must have refused many invitations to luncheons and dinners, and could often have driven into Biarritz.'
'No,' she replied. 'I can see most of my friends any time and a great many of the invitations come from acquaintances whom I wouldn't mind if I never saw again. In Spain, as you must know, except over a luncheon or dinner table women of my class are given little opportunity to converse with men. We are expected to be quite happy making small talk with our own sex; and you can have no idea how ill-educated, stupid, narrow-minded and altogether boring most of the women of the best families can be.'
'From having met a number of them I think I can,' he smiled.
'Then you will understand how greatly I have enjoyed escaping from them to be with you.'
'In spite of the fact that if we carried our political beliefs to their logical conclusions we would cut one another's throats?' he twitted her.
She laughed. 'Yes, in spite of that. After all, politics aren't everything in life. There is another side to it, the personal one; and that is much more important.'
'I agree; and we certainly have a great many things in common.'
'We have; but I should never have found that out if you had not been temporarily incapacitated for ordinary activities, which has led to us spending so many hours alone together. You can't think how I shall miss our talks when you have gone.'
'And I shall too.' He spoke with complete honesty. 'There can be few women of your age who have such a good brain - except perhaps for professional blue-stockings - and as far as I am concerned they don't count. To have heard sound argument on a great variety of subjects coming from the lips of a woman of your beauty and distinction has been a wonderful experience, and one that I shall long remember.'
'Thank you for the compliment,' she smiled. Then, with a little sigh, she added: 'I don't get many these days.'
'Then I'm to blame for that. It's because you have given so much of your time to me instead of getting out and about.'
She shook her head impatiently. 'I don't mean the vapid expressions of admiration with which I am bombarded by Jose's friends. I was thinking of the honest compliments that I used to receive before I married, from young professors and women who were making something of their lives.'
'None of us can have everything,' de Quesnoy brought out the old platitude philosophically, 'and surely the acknowledgement of your mental attainments while living in your uncle's circle at the University cannot have meant more to you than being the Condesa de Cordoba.'
'I suppose not,' she murmured a shade uncertainly.
'Oh, come!' he rallied her. 'You have palaces, servants, jewels and beautiful clothes. You bear one of the greatest names in Spain, and that of a charming and intelligent man who adores you.'
Suddenly she turned her head and looked straight at him. Her big dark eyes held his as she asked, 'What grounds have you for assuming that he does?'
For a moment de Quesnoy was nonplussed, then he answered a shade uncertainly, 'Well, it is obvious that Jose has no interests other than his bank, his butterflies and yourself.'
'Ah!' her eyes flashed. 'You would have been nearer the mark, my friend, if you had stopped short at "butterflies". To have a flutter with his favourite specimen is his real reason for going each week to Madrid.'
There was no mistaking her meaning, and the Count felt acutely embarrassed. The very last thing he wished to do was to discuss with her the private relations between her husband and herself, and he thought it in the worst possible taste for her to have let him have even a glimpse of them.
Yet, after a moment he found excuses for her. Although she looked the part of a youthful great lady to perfection, she was not so by birth. She had been brought up in a very different atmosphere: one in which people were guided more by reason than by inherited prejudice, and were courageous enough to say what they thought frankly - even if it meant being sent to prison. She was a clever woman forced to choose her friends from a circle of, mostly, pleasant fools. She was by nature independent, but now shackled even in her home to a duenna. She was an anarchist in theory and a Republican by conviction, who lived surrounded by die-hard Monarchists.
It struck him, too, that she had paid him the rare compliment of confiding to him her views on many matters; views that sfie could not possibly have aired to her husband, much less her sister-in-law, the Infanta, or any of the people with whom she came in frequent contact. For some reason that he did not attempt to fathom she had singled him out from all the others and treated him as a truste
d friend. If, then, she now wished to tell him of her private life, and he refused to listen, it would destroy the delightful bond that had been established between them and hurt her grievously. After all her kindness to him he could not possibly do that.
Having swiftly collected his thoughts, he said, 'You mean that Jos6 keeps a mistress?'
She nodded. 'Yes. I found out only by accident. I came upon a letter from her which he had most stupidly left lying among some other papers he gave me to look through. When I charged him with it he did not deny it. I gather that she is an Andalusian dancing girl and quite a star turn with the castanets.'
De Quesnoy was mildly surprised to learn that his staid friend kept a mistress, but it did not even occur to him to doubt Gulia's statement. Although it was no longer considered comme il faut for a noble openly to take pride in being the accepted lover of some leading ballerina or song-bird of the opera, it was still an age in which all over Europe great numbers of rich men, more or less secretly, kept pretty young women in small houses or pleasant apartments; and their wives had been brought up to accept such a situation as nothing to make a great fuss about.
Meanwhile Gulia was going on. 'I feel sure that he conducts his affaire most discreetly, and would not admit to it even among his best friends. But he did not marry until getting on in life, and I suppose having a girl who is outside his own circle with whom he can entirely relax had become a habit with him.'
'How long ago is it since you found out?' the Count inquired.
'Just on fifteen months, but I imagine that it had been going on for a long time before that; or if not with this particular woman, then with others.'
'And how long have you been married to him?'
'A little over three years.'
That was not very long, de Quesnoy reflected. But he knew well enough that a man who for twenty years or so had lived with a succession of pretty women could still tire of one who was exceptionally beautiful in a comparatively short time. Only a mental bond created by true love could hold a couple together for a long period of years, and evidently no such bond had been created between Jos6 and Gulia. It could only be that he had desired her, marriage had been her price, and she had accepted him for the wealth and position she would enjoy as his Condesa. After a moment, de Quesnoy asked:
'Did you not make an effort to persuade Jos6 to break off this
liaison?'
She shook her Titian gold curls which, after taking off her bathing cap, fell like an aureole round her pale face. 'No, I fear I was too proud for that. I told him that I would not share his embraces with any woman, and drove him from my room. I told him that I would not allow him to return to it until he could give me his word that he had decided for good to give up sleeping with harlots. But he never has.'
While she spoke she was looking away from de Quesnoy, and his glance ran over her as she lounged in the deck-chair. She had a face and figure that might even have tempted Saint Ignatius Loyola to rise from his shrine at not far distant Pamplona. 'What a waste,' he thought. 'What a waste, for this divine creature to be leading the life of a nun.'
At that moment Ricardo came over to tell them that their luncheon, which they were having on a table outside the bathing huts, was now ready; so the conversation proceeded no further.
It was Ricardo who, a few days later when helping the Count to dress, told him that an intruder had been seen the previous night in the garden. The old man who planted and tended it with the assistance of two youths had left his cottage to walk across it to his potting shed for the purpose of sowing some seeds in boxes, because he subscribed to the ancient belief that certain plants thrived better if their seed was inserted in earth by moonlight.
He had come upon the intruder outside the drawing-room, peering into it through a chink between the curtains. On hearing him approach, the man had turned and run off; but the gardener had seen him well enough to be certain that he was no one employed about the place, and described him as a tall, broad-shouldered dark man in his early twenties.
Later in the day de Cordoba discussed the occurrence with de Quesnoy and they speculated on whether the fellow was a local rogue contemplating burglary, or an anarchist who had learned the Count's whereabouts and had come from Barcelona with the object of endeavouring to put him out of the way.
Fearing that the latter might be the case, the Conde was in favour of asking for police protection for his guest, but de Quesnoy said that to have police constantly about the place would be unpleasant for everybody, and declared that he was again quite strong enough to take care of himself. But he willingly accepted the loan of de Cordoba's revolver to keep handy in his bedside cupboard.
On Monday the 27th the Conde again left for Madrid. That day de Quesnoy motored into San Sebastian with de Vend6me to lunch again with the King, but on this occasion Gulia, not having been included in the command, remained at home. This time the Count found the Queen also present. He had known her as Princess Ena, but it was the first time he had seen her since her wedding, just previous to which, on accepting the Catholic faith, she had taken the name of Victoria Eugenie. He thought that in spite of her youth she looked amazingly regal and, with her mass of golden hair piled high above her milk and roses complexion, indisputably beautiful; so it was no wonder that her husband was in love with hef.
She received him very graciously, condoned with him on his accident and congratulated him on his recovery. Don Alfonso also remarked that with his sun-tanned face he now looked the picture of health, and that his limp was hardly noticeable. The King then took him aside and told him that the trial of the Barcelona anarchists had been fixed to open on Monday, October the 11th.
After lunch de Vendome accompanied the King into Biarritz, where they were to play polo that day, but de Quesnoy excused himself from joining their party because had he crossed the frontier into France he would have risked arrest. Instead he spent the afternoon strolling and sitting in the delightful Miramar gardens with other luncheon guests who had not wished to go to Biarritz. Later he went down into the town, did some shopping for himself, bought a huge box of chocolates for Gulia, and returned to the de Cordoba villa in a hired carriage.
Before changing for dinner, when the weather was fine, the family always had drinks out in the garden by the fountain. Gulia and Dona Eulalia were already seated there when he returned. After presenting the chocolates and receiving Gulia's smiling thanks, he helped himself to a glass of Manzanilla, then gave them an account of the luncheon party. A few minutes later Dona Eulalia tactfully remarked that the light was failing and carried her work and the Moscardo she was drinking off to the back porch of the house, in which a lamp had been lit. De Quesnoy continued to tell Gulia about his afternoon, then for a while they talked of various things.
It was just before they were due to go in to change that she inquired casually, 'Do you ever have dreams?'
'Yes,' he replied. 'Not very often, but occasionally.'
With a smile she asked, 'Have you ever dreamed about me?'
'As a matter of fact I have, once,' he admitted. 'It was on the night that I was brought here.'
She arched her eyebrows. 'Really. I hope it was a nice dream?'
'It was . . . very.' He finished his second glass of sherry. 'I was terribly ill, of course. You appeared at my bedside like a ministering angel from Heaven. After you had gone my fever seemed to abate and I felt much better.'
Rising from the stone seat, she picked up the big box of chocolates and said, 4Ah well; perhaps sometime I will make another appearance in your dreams.'
That night he woke out of a sound sleep. The house was very still and the room was faintly lit by moonlight coming through the french windows. He heard a soft rustle and, fearing an attack, turned swiftly on his other side. She was standing by his bed again.
11
Bedroom Scene at Midnight
For a moment de Quesnoy remained absolutely still. This, he knew, was no dream, and the full implication of her midnight visit ru
shed upon him. Yet his words denied it. Sitting up with a jerk, he exclaimed:
'Gulia! What are you doing here?'
She smiled at him. 'Need you ask?'
The moonlight filtering between the pillars of the patio outside and coming through the french window was sufficient for him to see her quite clearly. Her hair, as on the previous occasion, was parted in the centre, Madonna fashion, and fell in long plaits on either side of her pale face. She was wearing a dressing-gown of dark material, the collar and cuffs of which were trimmed with heavy lace. As she spoke she put out her hands to take his.
'Yes,' he murmured, ignoring her gesture. 'Yes, I know why you've come. But. . .'
'But what? You love me, Armand. I know you do. And I love you.'
'I... After our long days together, I feared it might be so.'
'You feared it. Why? To love and to be loved. What is there in life more glorious than that? You do love me, don't you?'
He drew a deep breath. 'Yes, Gulia. I confess it. I would not be human if being constantly with you all through the past month had not played the very devil with my emotions.'
She smiled again. 'Oh sweet confession. I knew it; but what joy to hear you say it. I will confess, too. I've loved you since the first moment I set eyes on you. How I have managed to control my impatience until you were really well again, I cannot think. But now, at last, I am here. To have your arms about me will be no longer a restless dream but a divine reality.'
'No, Gulia; no!' He gave a violent shake of his head. 'However much we love one another, we can't, we mustn't. There is Jos6.'
'What of him?' Her dark-eyes flashed and a sudden note of anger crept into her voice. 'I have already told you that he is nothing to me. Nothing!'
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