by Susan Barrie
And tonight he had been upset because she had been upset. April had caught a glimpse of his face before he left the dining sala with his arm about the weeping girl’s shoulder, and the concern in it had almost startled her. It had certainly given her a lot to think about as she paced the garden paths.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, as Rodrigo’s expression grew even more revealing. “I don’t suppose it made you very happy to hear that outburst tonight, did it? Constancia probably didn’t mean to hurt you at all, but she did hurt you, didn’t she?”
He smiled crookedly.
“I’ve known her for years, and I think she ought to be spanked occasionally, but...” His expression grew wry. “One day I hope to marry her, and then perhaps I’ll do a little spanking myself, but it may be too late! Carlos will not consider me as a future husband for Constancia, but if only he would I could handle her ... I feel certain of that. She is not all fire and resistance ... at least, not always. And it is high time she married.”
“But she is very young,” April demurred.
“She will be seventeen in two weeks’ time, and at seventeen a young woman of Constancia’s temperament is old enough for marriage. She needs a husband to discipline her, and I would do that.” He was speaking very earnestly, and April refrained from smiling slightly at his choice of words. “She is like a young horse that needs to be broken in, and whereas Carlos would ruin her I would be good for her. In time we would be very happy,” he concluded simply.
“Then why will not Carlos let you marry her?”
He looked at her closely, in the moonlight that was silvering her pale dress.
“You have not heard?” he asked quietly. “About her mother? Carlos would have married her, only she chose someone else.”
“Yes, I know all about that,” April admitted, a long sigh in the words. She was wondering whether she had allowed herself to be deceived at the dinner table, and those moments when Carlos looked at her with a whole world of meaning in his eyes had been moments that she imagined, and he had not intended that his eyes should convey anything at all to her.
And then something pricked her fingers, and she looked down to discover that she was still holding the rosebud, and although it was wilting fast it still had a delicate perfume which came up to her. Her heart started to beat faster.
“I—I suppose men forget disappointments of that sort in time?” she suggested, a sluggish hope lifting up its head, while she took a kind of delight in the feel of the rose thorn embedding itself in her flesh. “Women too, if ... if that sort of thing happens to them.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you there, senorita,” Rodrigo told her, the wry twist clinging to the corners of his mouth. “I’m hoping I will not have to get over such a disappointment myself!”
“Of course.” She looked up at him swiftly, sympathy and understanding throbbing in her voice. He was young—even younger than she was herself—but the hurt was just the same. Unrequited love is a painful pill to swallow, and judging by that night’s exhibition he might have to gulp his down somehow or other. Just as she ... but she had never even hoped that Carlos would love her. That would be too much to expect from a man who proposed as Carlos had proposed to her! For some reason that seemed good to him at the time, but had nothing to do with human emotions.
She tried to speak encouragingly to Rodrigo. “Constancia is so very young that she is bound to turn to someone young in the end. Don Carlos has been good to her almost all her life, and naturally she clings to him. It is the clinging of a daughter to a parent!”
“Is it?” His dark eyes were very sober as he peered at her, and just a little cynical. “Do you see Carlos in the role of a parent to a young woman like Constancia? He is barely old enough to be her father. Her mother was several years older than he was when he conceived his infatuation for her, and today there is hardly a woman in Andalusia who would not be eager to marry him! You yourself, several years his junior, have consented to marry him! Then why should not Constancia hope that one day... or shall we say she hoped, until tonight!”
April licked her lips.
“But she knows now that he is no longer free.”
“Does she?” Cynicism fairly blazed in his eyes. “Then why did he permit her to make that scene without one word of rebuke? It was a scene—put on solely for his benefit!—and he left his guests to escort her to her room. He left you—to whom he had only just announced his betrothal!—to wander out here in the garden alone, while he undertook the task of quietening the hysterics of a tempestuous girl who, but for his consistent spoiling, might have known how to behave herself tonight!” His voice sounded intensely grim. “And apparently he is still with her, soothing her, reasoning with her, making half-promises to her ... or perhaps they are not half-promises!”
Then he caught a glimpse of April’s expression in the moonlight, and he apologized softly.
“I’m so sorry, April, cara! I was forgetting that you ... that you really are betrothed to him!”
“It’s all right,” April said huskily. “I realize that you’re upset.”
“And you...?” He touched her arm gently. “You have every cause to be upset. All those women in there, with their upraised eyebrows and their tight little smiles, talking amongst themselves! Constancia really does deserve to be punished, for she has placed you in an intolerable position. Carlos must realize—”
But at that moment Carlos materialized at his elbow, and whatever he realized it did not prevent him from addressing his half-brother curtly and coldly.
“It was good of you to see to it that April was not entirely neglected, Rodrigo, but now you may safely leave her to me! I think it would be a good idea if you returned to the rest of my guests inside. They are now drinking coffee in the sala.”
Rodrigo looked almost rebellious for a moment, as if he wanted to accuse Carlos openly of pandering to the whims of Constancia to such an extent that she might one day be impossible to handle, but his brother’s austere looks obviously caused him to change his mind, and he bowed to April and withdrew into the house.
Carlos offered his arm to his fiancée, and suggested that she might enjoy a further stroll in the moonlight.
“I have something to say to you, and it can be better said out of doors,” he remarked.
April felt as if the muscles of her face had stiffened like the whole of her body, as she refused his arm and walked at his side and asked after Constancia.
“I hope she has recovered from her agitation at dinner. She does rather enjoy creating scenes, doesn’t she?”
Don Carlos was silent for a moment, biting rather fiercely at his lower lip. And then he frowned.
“She is quite calm now,” he admitted, in an expressionless voice. “She is attending to the ravages all those tears wreaked upon her appearance, but in a short while she will rejoin our guests. I have requested it.”
April felt very much as Rodrigo was plainly feeling a minute or so before, seething with indignation but bereft of speech. A kind of impotence connected with her vocal chords.
“I regret that I had to leave the dinner table as abruptly as I did,” Carlos observed.
April clenched her hands down at her sides.
“I have made up my mind that I can’t possibly marry you, Don Carlos,” she said stiffly—and, now that she thought about it, she had never yet called him simply “Carlos.” “It would be ridiculous for you and me to think of marrying when there isn’t the slightest reason why we should even contemplate it. And as for Constancia ... I’m sure she would be happier if you told her at once that—”
“I shall tell her nothing,” Don Carlos said quietly, taking her arm very determinedly and leading her to the remote corner of the garden where they had talked once before. “I shall tell her nothing, and I’m going to ask you to look at that remarkable moon up there, and think how much larger and brighter it is than your cold English moon! I remember, when I was in England—and I was at school in England, you know, and
I have paid it several visits since—I used to think the moon had shrunk when I saw it climbing into the sky above your quiet English fields. Over here in Andalusia we are accustomed to vivid contrasts, to brilliant moonlight, and sunlight that hurts sometimes ... or it can hurt, if you are unwise enough to pay it little respect, and ignore our excellent rule about siesta, and so forth.”
April stared up at the moon as if compelled, and, also as if compelled, she stood quite still beside him when they reached the white-painted garden seats that were arranged in the protection of the arbour. She heard him continue softly:
“There is so much that you have not yet seen that I wish to show you here in Spain ... in Andalusia! For, to us, Spain is Andalusia. The wine harvest, that will take place very soon now, the spring fair—the Sevilla Feria—that lasts three days, with corridas each afternoon and songs and seguidillas that go on until dawn. Cordova ... that is a lovely district, and was once an Arab settlement...”
“Yes, I know,” she answered, as softly as he had spoken. “I’ve read about it.”
He smiled and looked down at her shining hair, stirring softly in the night breeze, and brushing against his shoulder.
“And when did you read about Spain?” he asked. “Was it before you left England, or since you arrived here? Many of the books in my library will give you a lot of information about this country if you are interested.”
“Oh, I am interested,” she assured him. Her breath caught. The moon was exercising its magic, and she felt strangely excited. “But I did most of my reading about Spain before I left England. It was the reason why I wanted to come here and see it all for myself.”
“And now that you are here do you feel the urge to go away again?”
She put back her head and looked up at him, and their eyes came together as if at a pre-arranged signal.
“No. No, I don’t want to go away again ... not back to England, where there is no one.”
“You mean ... no one belonging to you?”
“Yes.”
The word was like a soft sigh, and he ran his hand down the smooth side of her throat, and then cupped her chin with it.
“But here I am! And in a short while you are going to marry me. So you will say no more about reasons for contemplating marriage! And you will remember that here in Spain is your future husband!” He stroked her cheek, then touched her hair almost wonderingly. “Oh, amada, why will you not believe that you and I can be so very, very happy?” he breathed, and lowered his mouth to hers. She gasped at the sweetness of it as his lips touched hers, and then she clung to him because her instincts cried out to her to do so, and even if her will had been strong enough she couldn’t have resisted him.
The kiss went on and on, deeply satisfying—satisfying a need that had become an obsession ... with her, at any rate. And Don Carlos’s arms held her so closely that she might suddenly have become a part of him, her slim body pressed hard against him, her eager mouth responding rapturously to his. And then she heard him whisper again.
“Amada, amada!” He rested his cheek against her hair, and she felt the slight, exciting roughness of it, the deep beating of his heart against her slender ribs. “My little love, my pale flower.” His voice was full of tenderness, and then he said quiveringly tender things to her in Spanish, and she wished she had a better grasp of his language, while the moonlit world swayed round her, the stars performed an eccentric dance, and but for his arms she might have fallen, for she was caught up in a giddy whirl of ecstasy that was unlike anything she had ever known before.
And then his arms slackened, she felt him draw away, and the ecstasy was dissolved in something quite ridiculous, something humiliating.
“Forgive me,” he said, peering into the shadows at the end of the paved path which led to the secluded arbour, “but I thought I saw ... Constancia!” There was a vague blur of white at the end of the path, and beside it was a dinner-jacketed form. Don Carlos’s whole body stiffened, and he put April quite finally away from him. But for the fact that she was feeling vague and bewildered she would have noticed how his nostrils suddenly flared, and his eyes flashed. His voice, however, was bleak enough to jerk her back to the harshness of reality when he spoke again. “It is Constancia! She promised to behave, and now she is wandering about the garden with Rodrigo. I will not have it!...” This time she noticed the concentration of anger in his eyes, the tautness of his mouth. All tenderness had fled from him, and he was the Don Carlos she had first met in Madrid, icily angry because some people he had counted amongst his Maids had behaved in a manner he could not approve ... a manner that was alien to his own code.
“Wait here,” he said to April, and leaving her in the shadows of the summer-house he strode forward along the path until the two figures, startled by his approach, separated until there was at least a couple of feet between them.
“Go to your room!” Carlos ordered Constancia. “Go to your room and stay there!”
She gave one frightened glance up at him, and then fled in obedience to the order.
Rodrigo, left face to face with his half-brother, attempted for the second time that night to protest:
“This is too much! Carlos, you have no right—”
Carlos, towering above him, assured him that he had every right.
“Constancia is my ward. She does what I say! You, amigo, will be well advised to do what I say, also! Leave her alone, and as the hour is growing fairly late you may consider that you have done your duty here long enough. I suggest that you go home, and in the morning I will drive over and have a talk with you!”
Standing before the arbour, April watched and waited for Rodrigo to find the courage to defy his brother—the head of the House of Formera!—but it was quite obvious he hadn’t the courage. Or the force of habit, and constant deference, was too much for him.
He turned on his heel and strode off along the path.
April experienced a strange revulsion of feeling. That night she had known a few minutes of astonished happiness while dinner was in progress, had suffered a nasty jolt and felt herself badly affronted and neglected when Carlos elected to devote himself to the task of soothing Constancia, and had apparently forgotten her existence for very nearly half an hour. Then, with his reappearance, she had forgotten resentment and tasted purest bliss, and now she was suddenly revolted by the proof she had been given that Constancia—and only Constancia!—could so affect the head of the House of Formera that he forgot everything—even an interval in the garden with his fiancée!—when something she did, or did not do, aroused emotions that were far more important than any other emotions.
In fact, everything else—everyone else—had no importance at all by comparison with the importance of Constancia!
April gathered up her skirts in her hands and ran blindly along a secondary path, back to the house which was blazing with light and the chatter of many people, to the seclusion of her own room.
CHAPTER XIII
For an hour or more she sat crouched in a chair by the window, half expecting him to come knocking on her door. She was well aware that this was a Spanish household, and even a fiancée’s room was sacred at that hour of the night; but after those moments in the garden—that sudden release of feeling in ecstatic kisses—she felt that he must want to apologize, to explain.
But he did nothing of the sort, and April crept into bed at last feeling numb and unhappy, like a wounded creature. But even so she comforted herself with the thought that—in the morning—in the morning he must explain! He would say something about Constancia ... something that would throw light on his attitude towards her!
But again he did nothing of the kind, and when he met her after breakfast—and she always, nowadays, breakfasted in her room—in one of the broad verandas that flanked the central courtyard or patio, he merely looked at her very levelly, and inquired whether she had had a good night.
April wanted to gasp. She looked at him for a moment almost appealingly, and he hastened to pl
ace a chair for her with his usual impeccable politeness, and then he said something about the chaos after a dinner party. Apparently Ignatia had been making herself personally responsible for the clearing up of quite a lot of it, and she had been up at a fantastically early hour.
“Whatever she does, she does thoroughly,” he said, “and, thanks to her, the party was, I believe, quite a success. But it was a pity you felt it necessary to retire to your room quite so early. I explained to our guests that you were indisposed.”
April sat very still in her chair and studied him with amazement. That makes two of us, she thought! Two of us so indisposed that we had to retire to our rooms! Only Constancia had made a brief reappearance, before finally seeking sanctuary in her room!
April felt she wanted to laugh suddenly, hysterically ... it was all quite fantastic! Don Carlos, in his finely tailored light grey suit, his Old Etonian tie, looking at her with a certain amount of undisguised reproach in his eyes, while his mouth was very cold. Cold and set like a steel trap; and unless one had had experience of the way that mouth could lift one to the heights of bliss ... right up amongst the stars!
She trembled as her fingers grasped the rattan arms of her chair, and then she attempted to meet his eyes with a long, level look from her own brown ones. But the bleakness in his aroused a sensation like acute dismay.
“I’m sorry you had to ... make apologies for me,” she got out stiltedly.
He made a faint, shrugging movement with his shoulders—a coldly dismissing movement—and then walked to the veranda rail.
“I have agreed to the proposed plan for Constancia’s birthday celebrations,” he said, the brilliant morning sunshine making his features appear very harsh indeed. “Miss Hartingdon was unable to attend our dinner last night, but she sent a note reminding me that, if the plan is to be put into action, arrangements must be made fairly soon. Hotels in the south are still fairly full, and we must make a reservation for our party. I have agreed to make the reservation myself, and to undertake all necessary arrangements for the outing.”
