by Susan Barrie
Kathie was concerned when she returned one morning from a drive with Sebastiao, wearing only a simple navy blue linen dress and a row of pearls about her neck, to find an absolutely exquisite young woman awaiting them in the cool recesses of the hall. In some ways she resembled Bridie, but she was ten times more beautiful than Bridie, and her outfit would have made the latter yearn to have the opportunity to model for the famous Paris house who was responsible for it.
It was black and white — but not the heavy black affected by the Dowager Marquesa de Barrateira. Part of the ensemble was a white lace parasol that she opened and used as a frame for her face as she stepped out on to the terrace to greet the returning husband and wife, and she wore white elbow-length gloves and tiny shoes with dizzy heels with the sheen of patent leather. Her hair was like patent leather also, short and sleek and feathered to her head beneath a small hat of white flowers, and her eyes were like great black sloes, brilliant with smiles, soft with the pleasure of being rewarded after some considerable while of waiting.
“I was told that you would be back for lunch, so I decided that I must wait,” she said. She shut up the parasol, tucked it under her arm, and held out both hands to Sebastiao. “I wonder if you realize how happy I am about this?” she said softly.
Sebastiao retained possession of her hands for fully twenty seconds before he said anything. He seemed to be gazing at her with a kind of wonder in his eyes, an admiration that mounted with every second, an unconcealable delight. She even found it necessary to blush deliciously under his eyes, and standing quietly by, Kathie was reminded of the gold and pink of a peach, a tea rose that had started to blush.
“Sebastiao!” the girl said, even more softly. “You are hurting my hands!”
Sebastiao let them go. He let out a kind of a sigh of pleasure.
“Inez!” he exclaimed. “You are like water in the desert, a cool breeze on a hot dry day! And I didn’t even know you were in Portugal!”
Inez explained that she had been staying in the South of France with a very dear friend, and then she turned determinedly to Kathie. “But your wife!” she said, with gentle reproach. “When are you going to introduce me?”
Sebastiao turned to Kathie with the look of wonder slowly passing from his face, and he smiled and drew her forward.
“Here she is,” he said. “This is Kathie! And this is Senhorita Peniche, Kathie — or Inez, as she must of course be to you! I’ve known her all my life, and it’s unthinkable that there should be any formality between you two.”
“Unthinkable,” Senhorita Peniche agreed, smiling at Kathie. She had a faint, enchanting accent that made her otherwise faultless English most appealing, and nothing could have been more appealing or heart-winning than her smile. “I might add that everyone expected us to marry, but the fact that Sebastiao has contracted two marriages since then is proof that boy and girl romances are seldom if ever serious.”
Kathie murmured something — she wasn’t quite certain what — but she was conscious of a slight sensation of shock, because this was the girl Paula de Barrateira had gone out of her way to mention so specifically to her. And not only had she mentioned her to Kathie on the very eve of her wedding, but she had insisted that Sebastiao had always loved her, and that when he married Hildegarde, the Austrian baroness, he had broken Inez Peniche’s heart.
If that was true, Inez was concealing it beneath a very untroubled exterior, and looking lovelier and more sure of herself than any young woman with a broken heart ought to look. But the very fact that she was so lovely prevented Kathie recovering her poise very quickly, and the way Sebastiao had greeted her had given her pause. In the short time she had known him, she had never seen him come alive as he did for Inez.
But now all at once he noticed Kathie, looking rather pale in the strong sunlight, and drew her into the shade. She was particularly conscious of the simplicity of her linen dress by comparison with the other girl’s chic, and she felt annoyed with herself for having chosen it. But she hadn’t been very interested in clothes for the last few days, and it hadn’t seemed to matter what she wore.
Now she heard Inez say quickly, “Yes, you do look pale! Do you find our climate trying? It’s so cold in England, isn’t it?” and felt the faintest breath of resentment because there seemed to be implication that she was not a very glowing bride. And why, therefore, had Sebastiao — with numberless girls to choose from — married her?
“Kathie’s from Eire,” Sebastiao said, a slight note of amusement in his voice. “And she’s just suffered a very close personal loss, so she isn’t feeling very bright,” he added more gravely.
“A loss? Oh, I’m so sorry!” the Portuguese girl exclaimed.
“My father,” Kathie explained.
The other looked extremely sympathetic.
“You must forgive me if I didn’t realize. But you are not wearing any signs of mourning.”
“There was no point in Kathie plunging into mourning,” Sebastiao said a little curtly.
“No, perhaps not ... under the circumstances,” Inez agreed. “But what a very unfortunate beginning to your marriage!” she added, looking straight at Kathie. “I suppose if you were superstitious, you might say it was a bad omen.”
“What rubbish!” the Marques exclaimed, and took his life-long friend by one slim arm, and his wife by the hand. “You will lunch with us, Inez,” he insisted. “It is so marvellous to see you that we simply cannot let you go yet, and I have to hear all your news. Mine is epitomized by Kathie!”
“But I haven’t come here to thrust myself upon you — newly-weds!” She flashed him an enchanting, apologetic smile from her gorgeous eyes, while his fingers were warmly clasping her arm. “And, as a matter of fact, I have a luncheon engagement. But I will stay and have a drink with you — a celebration drink! Your marriage, and my introduction to your wife. I hope that we are going to become close friends!”
In the great sala she looked still more charming, with her little white hat cast carelessly aside, and her gloves and the parasol. She was typically Portuguese so far as her looks went, but she didn’t appear to have been brought up along very strict Portuguese lines. She told them that in France she had been dabbling in art studies, and she had had a very nice time. There was a perfectly charming Frenchman ... And then she broke off, looking almost impishly at Sebastiao.
“Papa does not approve, but he is charming! He is a lawyer ... not one of the more successful ones, you understand?”
Sebastiao frowned.
“You are not telling me you propose to do something your papa would not approve of, are you, Inez?” he demanded, rather sternly. “Even if your mother is willing to aid and abet you!”
Inez dimpled at him delightfully.
“Mother has a very kind heart — a very soft heart — and she does not think that money and position are everything in life. Of course, if I had married you, the money and the position would have been there, and in addition she could have been very proud of her son- in-law!” She spread fluttering white hands, with scarlet nails, and peeped at him through startling eyelashes. “But you and I had never any intention of marrying one another, had we? It was just that we were always together, and you burdened yourself with my problems. Now you will have to burden yourself with the problem of Etienne.”
Sebastiao regarded the tip of his cigarette, and then crushed it out in an ash-tray.
“I shall simply advise you to have nothing to do with a man you have met so far from home,” he remarked, with a sort of finality in his tone.
A Mona Lisa-ish smile touched the corners of Inez’s mouth.
“But he is so handsome,” she protested. “So very handsome!”
“The world is teeming with handsome men.”
“But not all have the power to capture my heart! I am very much afraid I have lost it, Sebastiao — this time!”
Sebastiao said nothing, only lighted himself a fresh cigarette.
Inez sighed.
“
It is not easy,” she lamented, “to please everyone over this question of marriage. If a man has what I approve of, then he is suspected of being after my private fortune. If he has not what I approve — then he is not suspect!” She refused another glass of sherry, and drew on her long white gloves. “It is easy for you, Sebastiao. You choose whom, and where you please, and everything goes well with you.”
“It has not always gone well with me,” he observed curtly.
“No.” She studied him thoughtfully. “It has not always gone well with you. But perhaps that is because you are not always wise.” She stood up. “I am so happy because I have seen you and met your new Marquesa.”
“When will you lunch with us, Inez?” His voice was still curt. “Tomorrow? The day after?”
“I will lunch with you tomorrow, if that is all right with Kathie?”
“Of course it is perfectly all right,” Kathie said, with the right amount of politeness and empressement in her voice.
Inez smiled at her warmly.
“You are so kind. And if you can bear it, I would like you to have dinner with us one day next week. We are having a few friends to dine on Thursday night — nothing formal — and I would be so glad if we could expect you, too.”
Kathie hesitated, appalled by the thought of meeting the ‘few friends’, as well as the father and mother of this fantastically beautiful girl, when she was so unsure of herself, and everything in her new life was still so strange, but Sebastiao said firmly, after accepting the invitation. “I think it will be good for you, Kathie. You need something to divert you just now.”
And he didn’t apparently notice the wide-eyed look of surprise Inez cast — first at him and then at herself — as if it was something new in her experience to hear of a bride who had been married for less than a fortnight requiring something to divert her.
When she had gone, and they were waiting for the luncheon gong to sound, Kathie asked her husband suddenly:
“Why didn’t you marry her, Sebastiao? Before you met Hildegarde, I mean.”
He looked at her as if she hadn’t merely surprised him, but astonished him.
“Isn’t that rather an extraordinary question for a wife of two weeks to pose to her husband?” he asked, his golden eyebrows meeting.
“No,” she answered, “I don’t think so. No more extraordinary than that a husband of two weeks should consider his wife needs something to distract her.”
“You know very well I was thinking of your recent loss.”
“Yes, I realize that, but to an outsider it must have sounded strange.”
He frowned at the exquisite rug beneath his feet. “Inez will not remain an outsider for long. You will soon get to know her very well indeed.”
“And won’t that create its own problems?” she suggested quietly.
He frowned still more.
“How do you mean? Oh, I see!..”
“Inez is shrewd. She won’t be deceived about our marriage for long, and then she will begin to wonder. I think she is wondering already.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, and helped himself to another drink as if he didn’t quite realize what he was doing.
Kathie bit her lip.
“No, I don’t suppose it does. And that brings me back to the question I asked you just now ... Why didn’t you marry her, Sebastiao? She is so beautiful, she appears to have everything. And your stepmother wanted you to marry her ... her people wanted you to marry her! You might have been very happy, and spared yourself all the anguish of the past year.”
“I might,” he agreed, tossing off his drink. He looked at the empty glass in his hand. “But supposing she never wanted to marry me?”
Kathie couldn’t be certain, but she did think the hand holding the glass trembled, and having seen the way he greeted Inez she was not prepared to believe that it was just a trick of her imagination.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
That same afternoon their second visitor arrived, and this time it was a man, with a very English name — Robert Bolton, and he was as English as his name. He had dark brown hair and level grey eyes, a pleasant firm chin and an attractive mouth, and her very first sight of him was oddly reassuring to Kathie.
He followed the servant out on to the lawn where they were having tea, and sat down in the shade of the great tree that spread its branches overhead when invited to do so by Sebastiao. He was a very confident Englishman, well dressed in a fine grey tailored suit, and although it later transpired that he was an artist, Kathie knew she could never think of him as an artist. He was too immaculate, too serene, too composed, too successful-looking. Artists do not, as a rule, wear an aura of success, but this man did, and he wore it with grace. And when he handed over a beautiful little bit of the coast reproduced in water-color, and said it was a wedding-present, he did so with the air of one without any doubts about the appreciation it would arouse.
“I heard you were back, Sebastiao,” he said, “and I wanted to be one of the first to greet you — and your bride!” He smiled charmingly at Kathie. “Welcome to Portugal, Marquesa! If you have never been here before, then I hope you will derive as much unalloyed pleasure from the scenery as we all do!”
“Thank you,” she replied, and smiled back at him with a spontaneity she had not felt capable of for several weeks. “I am in love with it already, and this is the first time I have ever been here.” She studied the enchanting water-color. “This bit of coast is heavenly, and I shall never tire of looking at it — even with the original out there to gaze at! And your name is familiar. You must be the Robert Bolton who paints portraits?”
He admitted that portrait painting was his ‘trade,’ if she liked to put it that way, but owing to a severe illness he had had to give up serious work for a time, and was renting one of the Marques’s cottages along the coast, and doing a certain amount of dabbling to keep in his hand.
“You must come and see it one day,” he said — “you and Sebastiao. I’ve dug myself in very comfortably, with a local woman to look after me, and the most breathtaking sunsets and dawns always there for me to paint when I feel like it, and you’ll have the greatest difficulty in dislodging me when the time comes that you want the cottage for some purpose or other, Sebastiao.” Sebastiao, who was born to be the perfect host, and who looked at the afternoon visitor as if he was definitely fond of him, waved a dismissing hand.
“I am not in the least likely to require the cottage, Robert. It is yours for as long as you want it.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Bolton admitted. “It’s so well equipped that you could use it as an overflow for guests, and I know you have done so before today.” He turned to Kathie. “Your husband loves entertaining on a large scale when the mood is on him, and I’ve seen this place looking more like a holiday camp than a quiet quinta. But that, of course, was in the days when...”
“Before my first marriage,” Sebastiao said quietly, grinding out a cigarette beneath the heel of his shoe.
“Well, I don’t seem to have seen very much of you in between,” Robert Bolton observed, looking rather more wry than uncomfortable. “Your travels have been pretty extensive, and I’m hoping that now you’re married for the second time you’re going to settle down, and we shall see something of you.”
“That all depends upon Kathie,” the Marques said rather curtly.
Bolton elevated his eyebrows, and glanced at Kathie.
“Don’t tell me that you too get bitten by the wanderlust, Marquesa?”
“Please call me Kathie,” she interposed swiftly, and flushed like a very shy schoolgirl as she did so.
He smiled at her.
“That is kind of you. And if Sebastiao has no objection?”
“I have none,” Sebastiao assured him, but he still sounded a little ungracious, as if that indiscreet reference to his first marriage had either ruffled or upset him a little. “And Kathie is completely untravelled, so she doesn’t know what it’s like to get bitten by the wanderlust.”<
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Bolton lay back in his comfortable wicker chair and regarded her with a fresh look of interest.
“Really?” he said softly. “But that doesn’t altogether surprise me! You have the look of one for whom adventure still waits,” he observed a little strangely. And then he added, even more softly, “For whom the whole world waits! Which is exciting at your age!”
Kathie didn’t like the dark look that flashed into her husband’s eyes, nor the cold look of hauteur that overspread his face. He might be very friendly with the English artist, and have known him for some considerable while, but that didn’t prevent him taking advantage of his rank occasionally, and treating him distinctly distantly.
“Kathie and I are still on honeymoon,” he remarked with cool preciseness. “We didn’t expect to receive visitors so soon.”
“Of course not,” Bolton agreed smoothly. (He was obviously the type whom it was not easy to ruffle.) “But Senhorita Peniche told me she intended to call on you, and I didn’t want her to be the only one to welcome you back.”
