by Susan Barrie
“I have said that we can neither of us retreat!”
If she took his money and flew home to England she would leave him with a lot of explaining to do to his friends. She would have compromised him and walked out on him, a proud man who wouldn’t find it an enjoyable situation to be walked out on! He was depending on her not to let that situation arise.
She found herself making her way out into the blinding hot sunshine of Madrid and feeling as if a net had closed round her. She was no longer, however much she tried to assure herself that she was, a free agent. The Cortez family quarrel had recoiled on her in a way she could never have imagined that it would recoil on her!
That evening Don Carlos dropped in on her at the cocktail hour, although he had said she would see nothing of him that day, and he presented her with a breathtakingly beautiful ring that exactly fitted her finger, although he had had no guide at all to the size of it.
It was a large milky pearl mounted in a claw of platinum and diamonds, and when April first saw it it was lying on a bed of velvet in a satin-lined case. The sheer loveliness of it widened her eyes, and she could say nothing at all for several seconds. Then she ejaculated, “Oh, how beautiful!” and Don Carlos reached for her hand and slipped it on to her finger.
“It fits?” he inquired, as if he had no doubt at all that it would fit.
“Perfectly.” Then she looked up at him, and concern filled her face. “But you don’t mean that it’s for me? That I’m to wear it?”
“But of course.” That coldly amused smile curved his lips. “It is usual, when a betrothal takes place, for the prospective bridegroom to place a ring upon the finger of his prospective bride. Even in England I believe that is the custom, is it not?”
She nodded dumbly.
“Well, then, why do you look so amazed?”
“I—I hadn’t realized that you would be giving me a ring. I—I can’t really believe that I’m engaged to you!”
He studied her with a curious intentness, and yet at the same time there was a faintly whimsical gleam in his eyes, and it added a little upward quirk to the corners of his lips.
“Shall I tell you something?” he said.
She nodded, her own eyes very large and golden as she gazed at him, and just a little cloudy, as the result of her mixed emotions, rather like cloudy amber.
From her he glanced swiftly round her room ... and, somewhat to her surprise, he had ascended to her sitting-room today.
“I see you have made the most of the flowers I sent you,” he said, noticing how beautifully she had arranged them in bowls and vases. “But I will be honest with you and admit that I was fully prepared to find that you were no longer here when I arrived this afternoon. I expected to find a polite little note awaiting me, informing me that you had seized the opportunity to fly home. I even telephoned the airline company’s offices this morning to inquire whether a young Englishwoman named Day had booked a seat on one of the earliest flights that would leave Madrid.”
“You ... did?”
“Yes.” His eyes were infinitely dark as they met and held hers, but they were still smiling. “Are you going to tell me that it never once occurred to you that now was your chance to break away from me for ever? I would not have come after you, you know! And in England you would have been able to laugh at me and my stupid Spanish ideas of what is done, and what is not done!”
“I ... I’m quite sure your ideas are not stupid,” But she was forced to lower her eyes before the probing, searching quality in his regard, and a guilty conscience sent a revealing food of delicate colour stealing up into her cheeks. “But it’s perfectly true I did make an early call at the airline offices, and I did fully intend—when I arrived there!—to buy myself a ticket back to England. You had placed a sum of money for me in the bank, and I ... I thought I could pay you back.”
“Then why didn’t you do so? Why didn’t you buy your ticket to England?” he asked her. “What stopped you?”
“Nothing ... At least, I don’t quite know what stopped me...”
“But you came out without a ticket, and you came back here to await the moment when I would get in contact with you again?”
“Yes.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed, and let out a strange sound like a sigh, and also partly like a long-drawn-out murmur of incredulity. “I find that interesting! I also find it almost unbelievable.”
He walked across to a vase of carnations, and snapped one off and attached it to his buttonhole. He was gazing down at it admiringly when he spoke to her again.
“I think you told me that your father was a clergyman, Miss Day,” he said. “And only this morning the clergyman’s daughter could not bear to let me down! She thought more of the embarrassment of the situation I would be in than her own urgent desire to get away back to her own country. Nothing else that you could have done or said, Miss Day—April!” walking back to her, “could have so convinced me that I am a lucky man to have met you. Perhaps a very lucky man!”
His eyes were alive and bright with interest as he gazed at her, and she felt her pulses quicken absurdly, as if a half-hearted race that she had been running had developed suddenly into an important effort. She felt her cheeks begin to burn under the strange brilliance of his eyes, and, partly to cover her confusion, and partly because she wanted to know the answer, she said:
“Will you tell me something else, senor? Apart from your sense of chivalry, and the extraordinary belief that you seem to hold that you owe me the opportunity to marry you in order to remain respectable, is there some other reason why you yourself were not entirely appalled by the thought of marrying a young woman you knew little or nothing about? Did I, perhaps, ‘happen’ to you at just the right moment?”
“Your phraseology is a little strange,” he told her, “but the unequivocal answer is yes! You ‘happened’ to me at a moment when I had problems of my own, and it seemed to me that you might solve those problems.” He took her hand and lifted it, and gazed at his ring intently. “I would prefer not to discuss those problems with you if you do not mind, but I would also like you to know that this arrangement we have entered into is not entirely one-sided. Where you are concerned, I can give you security, promise that you will be well taken care of for the rest of your life, and that no future Senor and Senora Cortez will ever be able to plunge you into difficulties. And, where I am concerned, you can take your place at my side as a wife. I am rather badly in need of, to entertain my friends, transform the several houses I own into homes where it is pleasant to reside, and lend a little colour to my existence. Does that make sense to you?”
This time it was she who let out a sound that was half sigh of relief, half sheer incredulity.
“It makes more sense,” she admitted.
“And in time we will get to know one another, and then you will not feel that it is all too bizarre for words. You might even cease to credit me with the remarkably chivalrous qualities you credit me with at the present time, and in you I might discover a companion for the years that lie ahead who could not have been bettered had I had all the world to choose from.” His eyes were mocking, but when he carried her hand up to his lips and kissed it the touch of his mouth had the queerest and most unexpected effect on her. She felt as if every nerve in her body tingled, and she was quite unprepared for such an experience. “So will you now look upon our engagement not as something that has been forced upon us, but as something remarkably fortuitous which we may live to be very happy about?”
“I—I’ll try,” she said, but even so she could not really believe that he meant to marry her, and that, with the placing of his ring on her finger, she was committed to marry him. She looked down at the ring, and was bemused by the size and quality of the pearl. “How—how did you manage to guess my size so accurately?” she asked.
He smiled.
“You have very small hands, very lovely hands ... I wouldn’t have been a man if it hadn’t struck me how unusually lovely they are! Quite unsui
ted to performing menial tasks for Senora Cortez and her offspring. And, of course, if the ring had not fitted I would have had it altered.”
He bent once more and brushed his lips lightly against the tips of her fingers.
“And now I think you might enjoy a short drive before sunset,” he said. “There is a full hour yet before it will be dark, and already the atmosphere is cooling.”
They drove slowly along the fragrant avenues, growing noisy with the crowds who were pouring into them from shops and offices, out to where the Royal Palace stands upon a rocky eminence and is surrounded by a noble park of pine and eucalyptus trees. From there April could look across to the sierra and see the snow that lies there glinting in the changing light of sunset, and on their way back the whole of Madrid was bathed in a lovely pinkish-mauve light like the petals of the Judas trees that rain gently upon the heads of customers frequenting the open-air cafes on the Recoletos.
April found the courage to ask Don Carlos shyly: “Do you live in Madrid, senor?” It seemed an extraordinary question once she had asked it, for he obviously must have some place of residence in the capital, and it was the more extraordinary since it might one day be her own place of residence as well. “I mean, have you a house here?”
“Yes,” he answered, driving very carefully in the confusing light. “I have a house here, but it is at the moment undergoing extensive alterations, and is not really habitable at the present time. For the past few weeks I have been living at my club.”
“I see,” she murmured.
He glanced at her for a moment sideways.
“One day I will take you to see my house. But tomorrow I am flying to Majorca, where I have a fruit and flower farm which, also you must see one day, and when I return I plan to take you south to Seville. I will place you in the care of my sister, who will be a very adequate chaperone for you until our marriage can be arranged.”
It sounded quite fantastic ... Until our marriage can be arranged. But it was the mention of his sister, and that “very adequate chaperone,” that destroyed her mood of near-complacence. She couldn’t tell why, but they aroused a hollow, uneasy feeling inside her, and even after several seconds that hollowness remained. And the formal little speech went on echoing in her ears.
“I know nothing about you,” she said suddenly, uneasiness in her voice. “I don’t even know about the members of your family!”
He smiled, but this time he did not glance round at her. He was concentrating on the road ahead.
“You will meet them all in time,” he said.
CHAPTER VI
THEY arrived in Seville about a week later. During that week April had had so much spare time on her hands, experienced so many emotions that were new to her, and resisted so many impulses to forget that she was, after all, a clergyman’s daughter, and put a period to this extraordinary interlude in her life, that she felt completely unlike herself and was not at all sure that she was capable of appreciating this glimpse of an entirely different Spain.
At least, that was the way she felt during the journey, when Don Carlos was overwhelming her with polite attentions, and yet seemed spiritually miles removed from her at the same time. She was not accustomed to travelling by air, and she was secretly nervous, but he sensed it and distracted her attention with pleasant conversation before they took off, and afterwards he continued the conversation until she was more relaxed, and fell silent when she wished he would go on talking to her about Majorca and the island’s flowers, about his villa beside the sea and the peach groves he had so recently been inspecting.
He had a voice which she found almost soothing to listen to, carefully modulated, the diction smooth and precise, and his very faint accent when he spoke English intrigued her. She found herself waiting for the moments when he spoke her name, seeming to linger over it for an unnecessary second or so, and when he called her “mia cara.” There was nothing in being called “my dear” by the man you were to marry, but when the man was as elusive, as unreal, as picturesque as Don Carlos de Formera y Santos, and when she couldn’t believe even for a moment that she would ever marry him, it was vaguely exciting to be thus addressed.
And once—he probably didn’t realize what he was saying, she thought afterwards—he called her “amada,” and took possession of her nervous, fluttering hand when their seat belts were fastened, and she was feeling rather sick.
Instantly the sickness passed, and she was able to appreciate that swift climb into the brazen blue above Madrid, and the golden sunshine that—although it was also uncomfortably hot—flooded all around them.
But by the time they arrived in Seville he had grown quiet and remote... almost as remote, if not quite as icily cold, as when she first met him.
Seville was just coming to life after the heat of the day, and the lamp standards were already lit and shining like stars amongst the greenery of palms. Hundreds of other wrought-iron lanterns sent out pale beams in quiet patios, and ornamental gateways had a light shining above them. The narrow streets that open into squares full of rustling foliage were pin-pricked here and there with light, and growing intensely black in the shadows.
April caught the eternal scent of flowers floating on the warm air, and as she and Don Carlos tunnelled deep into the heart of all this light and shadow in a big, black, glistening car that had met them at the airport—Don Carlos’s cream car had been left behind in Madrid—she remembered that this was Andalusia, the land of flowers and gardens overflowing with colour, just as every balcony was draped with it, and every trellis had its climbing rose.
On the back seat of the car, sharing it with her, Don Carlos said nothing as they tunnelled deeper into the heart of the city. Although he was so close to her that she could have put out a hand and touched him April had the feeling that he was far removed from her in spirit.
Something was preoccupying him to an abnormal extent. She wondered whether it was the thought of his sister, and possibly other members of his family—since he had not denied that he had a family—and the way they would react when he presented to them his future bride. Someone they had never even heard of before!
The car was chauffeur-driven, and if anything else was needed to convince the English girl that he was a man of wealth and substance, the subservience of the chauffeur would have convinced her. He was even dressed in livery, and the interior of the car was so luxurious that April felt positively lapped about by it, as if she was travelling on a cloud of opulence and ease.
In a remarkably short time she realized that they had left the city and its outskirts behind them, and were heading into the country. It was by now quite dark, and although she could see stars shining up in the violet-blue sky, and the golden crescent of a young moon hung like a brooch in the same unclouded immensity, she could make out little or nothing else. She had an impression of openness and space, of the sky hanging low above the earth, and in through the open windows of the car came the salt breath of the sea.
Don Carlos spoke at last.
“We will soon be there.”
April said nothing at all.
He put out a hand and touched her lightly, as if to make certain she was still there beside him.
“You are tired, cara?”
“Not really.” How could she tell him that she was full of uneasy forebodings, that the thought of meeting possibly, a mother as well—filled her with near panic? The only Spanish people she had ever lived with were Senor and Senora Cortez, and Senora Cortez had been no more Spanish than she was. She had run her home on free-and-easy American lines and atmosphere had been altogether free of formality. But one could not expect the mother and sister of a man like Don Carlos de Formera y Santos to be free of formality. Almost certainly they would be frighteningly stiff—paralysingly stiff was a better word, for excessive good manners and an overpowering belief in correctness have the effect of freezing the blood in the veins of a more impulsive person. Or so April herself had found.
She lay back against the yie
lding upholstery of the car, and to her surprise Don Carlos touched her again. Only this time he took possession of her hand.
“What is it?” he asked. “What is troubling you, April?”
She swallowed on the nervous lump in her throat.
“Your sister,” she managed. “I’ve been thinking ... I’m a complete stranger to her, and why should she put herself out to receive me, to have me in her house?”
“It is my house,” he corrected her quietly.
She felt a slight sensation of relief.
“But even so... what will you tell her about us? Will you tell her the truth, that we hardly know one another?”
“I shall tell her nothing beyond the fact that we are to be married,” he replied quietly. “And, as a matter of fact, so much she already knows.”
“You have ... written to her?”
“I have been in touch with her.”
The car travelled another half mile, and then she asked through the uneasy darkness:
“Is your sister married?”
“No.”
After that she attempted nothing further in the way of conversation, and they swept between a pair of entrance gates and up a short dark drive to a house that shone startlingly white in the starshine. April could make out no actual details, but she had an impression of a courtyard with white buildings ranged on four sides of it, and a wide arch beneath which they disappeared to reappear in the middle of the courtyard.
A door opened, and a flood of golden light cut like a golden swordblade across the courtyard. As she stepped from the car April saw dark red roses growing in ordered beds close to the house, and roses wreathed the white columns of the verandas which the light refused to penetrate. Before the dark figure appeared in the entrance and held out its hand to her she cast a swift glance at the usual star-like lanterns which hung at the various angles of the courtyard, as well as above the entrance arch, and thought that they looked like jewels against the velvety night sky.
