White Rose of Love

by Anita Charles

  They stopped for lunch at a little mountain inn, and afterwards they penetrated even deeper into the mountains. Steve had the feeling that she was escaping from something—or trying to escape—and she was reasonably certain that Tim was trying the same experiment.

  He wanted to forget Senhorita Madelena Almeida, just for one

  day, and he trusted to his over-worked little car to work the oracle for him. He certainly put it through its paces, and there were one or two occasions when Steve feared the queer groaning and grating noises that emerged from under the bonnet were an indication that the car was protesting. More than once she wondered what would happen to them if they broke down so far from a garage or any likely means of help; and then she decided that it didn’t matter very much, since neither she nor Tim were responsible to anyone for their actions, and there was no one who would be in the least concerned if they failed to return by an appointed hour—or even failed to return the following day!

  It was a lonely thought, and it added to the strange feeling of vulnerability that had been hers for days now. She could hurt no one, but she herself could be badly—mortally—hurt by someone. That ‘someone’ might protest that it wasn’t his fault, and it was entirely due to the cruelty of Fate that she had made her impact on his life too late; but that didn’t make things any easier for her. To her there was something revolting about a man with the will to choose for himself—and, not merely with the will, but the means, the income, the position, the freedom—to choose for himself, and make or mar his own life, choosing to spend it with a young creature for whom he admitted nothing but fondness, in addition to her obvious suitability for the ‘role’ of Senhora Manoel de Romeiro.

  But, there it was. . . . He had chosen to do that very thing, and Steve was out in the cold and the loneliness for the rest of her life because of it. She shivered, despite the warmth of the sun, and Tim glanced sideways at her and elevated his eyebrows.

  “Is the prospect as bleak as all that?” he asked, and when she glanced sideways at him in astonishment patted her knee and told her that it didn’t matter.

  “I’m not curious. I don’t want to know anything that you’d prefer not to tell me. . . . But if Portugal’s going to make you unhappy I think you’d better leave it and go home, don’t you?”

  Steve realized that this was well-meant advice—not interference—and it also made it clear to her Tim had seen things from his window that morning. Or perhaps he had suspected how matters were going even before that.

  She looked away from him, swiftly, and decided she hadn’t the courage to talk—not yet. Everything was too new and overwhelming. Which probably meant she hadn’t the wish to talk. But even the thought of leaving Portugal hurt her, and made her wince. . . . Tim could actually feel the sudden movement that she made when she drove the nails of one hand into the palm of the other, and bit her lip hard because of the pain of it.

  He patted her knee again . . . a gesture that was meant to be consoling.

  “All right, don’t talk. . . . But don’t stay here and break your heart, either! If you do I shall wish you’d never come out to visit me.”

  “Don’t worry, Tim,” she said quietly, at last. “I’ve always been rather tough. . . . I’m not in the least likely to break my heart.” “Brave words,” he commented. “But hearts do break sometimes.”

  “Not my kind.”

  His lips curved a little whimsically.

  “And what is so special about your kind?”

  “It’s well surrounded by an armour of pride!”

  “Pride cracks. . . . Unexpectedly sometimes. Even I’ve found that out in the course of a not very long life.”

  “But you’ve never been in—in love, have you, Tim? You told me so!”

  “Did I say that?” His lips, still curving whimsically, contrasted strikingly with the sudden sombreness of his eyes. “Well, well! ... It just goes to prove that one shouldn’t make admissions—not verbally, anyway. It exposes weaknesses, and the axe is likely to fall at any moment after that!”

  “Meaning that someone—someone is likely to come along suddenly. . . .?”

  He swerved sharply to avoid a stray goat that had wandered on to the road.

  “Or has already come along? I don’t know! Like you I’m not making any admissions. Let’s stop for tea, shall we? There’s a village we’ll be passing through any minute now, and I believe there’s an hotel. You won’t get very good tea, but at least you’ll get something to drink. . .”

  On the way home they passed a stationary pale-blue car that had come to rest on the very brink of a far, far darker blue ocean. Its driver had descended on to the road and was standing beside her elegant means of transport and looking ten times more elegant herself in a chic little Cambridge blue suit and an enormous shady white hat that cast attractive shadows across her flowerlike face. She signalled with a white-gloved hand when they drew abreast, and they had no difficulty at all in recognizing Senhorita Almeida.

  In fact, Tim had recognized her long before they were anywhere near her car, and had slowed and was prepared to stop altogether before her imperious little signal would have brought him to a halt.

  She smiled at him brilliantly, dazzlingly. . . . And for a moment it seemed to the watching Steve that the Senhorita had no eyes for her at all.

  “Ah, Senhor Tim! . . . I beg your pardon, I should say Senhor Wayne, should I not?” She had advanced eagerly to the side of the car, and her perfume reached Tim in a positive cloud before he had a chance to leap nimbly from the car and walk round to join her on her side of the white, dusty road. And no sooner were they standing side by side than the full strength of the perfume, combined with the allure of a pair of thickly-lashed eyes and a luscious scarlet mouth below which was a dimpled chin, acted on Tim like the sudden assault of a narcotic—or an unfamiliar charm—and had him almost literally buckling at the knees.

  “Senhorita,” he assured her, “we are utterly at your service! What’s wrong with your car?”

  Madelena suddenly remembered her manners. She extended a gloved hand to Steve through the window of the disreputable old car that belonged to Tim, and apologized because she hadn’t recognized her immediately. . . . Or so she said!

  “I’m afraid I was so relieved to see Senhor Tim that I could think of nothing else. Ah, I said to myself, here is someone—a man! —who will make my car go!”

  Tim smiled a little wryly at this description of himself as a mere man, and asked her once again what was wrong with her car.

  “I don’t know. Except that it will not go. . .” She smiled at him in a way that made his heart actually lurch a little. “It is a present from my fiance—from Dom Manoel—and I cannot understand, since it is so new, why it should behave in this fashion. I was driving along quite smoothly and then it started to knock, knock, knock ...” She made a little gesture with her hands, and an expressive movement of her shoulders. “Do new cars sometimes behave in this fashion, Senhor Tim?”

  “Sometimes,” Tim answered.

  He lifted the bonnet flap, and examined the engine of the brand new car. It didn’t take him long to discover what was wrong. The car should have been driven-in carefully, and apparently the beautiful Madelena was not that type of driver.

  “I’m afraid there’s only one course open to you,” he told her. “We’ll have to leave the car where it is, take you along with us, and call at a garage. They’ll send a truck along and deal with it. I’m sorry, Senhorita,” he emphasized, as she pretended to look extremely concerned. “The car will be perfectly all right where it is— no one, short of a mechanic with a touch of genius—could move it, and you need have no fears on its behalf. There’s plenty of room in our car—Steve won’t mind climbing over into the back seat, will you...?”

  There were a lot of oil cans and other un-engaging implements cluttering up part of the back seat, and also most of the floor space in the back of the car, but Steve realized she was not expected to object. Although Madelena object
ed charmingly to her being disturbed, and Tim made light remarks about any stains on her clothes being got out by cleaners afterwards, she climbed with her brother’s assistance over on to the back seat—there was only one door through which one entered and left the car—and Madelena subsided thankfully on to the seat she had vacated, and turned the full force of her devastating smile on Tim.

  “But this is kind, kind!” she declared.

  “Nonsense,” Steve returned, feeling so secretly resentful, and so utterly unable to enter into anything in the nature of light conversation with the Portuguese girl that she had the greatest difficulty in concealing the extent of her irritation with her.

  If it had been her pale blue and silver car—a present from Dom Manoel de Romeiro—nothing would have induced her to leave it sitting in such a lonely fashion beside the road. She would have sat in it until someone arrived on the scene with the power to help her, and not turned seductive smiles on an already dangerously susceptible young Englishman who practically started to stammer every time she leaned a little nearer to him, or accidentally brushed his shoulder with her own.

  Steve lay back against the shabby upholstery in the back of the car and listened to the conversation of the two of them as

  they drove to the Quinta Rosa.

  Just before they reached the cottage where Tim and his sister lived Madelena turned round and said brightly to Steve: “You did not come to the quinta to continue your modelling this morning, Miss Wayne. I expected you, and it was only later that Manoel said he did not think you would be keeping your usual appointment this morning. Why was that,

  I wonder? You were not indisposed, I hope?”

  Her eyes were bright and alert with curiosity, and it was Tim who answered for Steve.

  “Not a bit of it! Steve is never indisposed. . . . She’s as tough as a horse, aren’t you, Steve, old girl?” Steve simply loathed being referred to as ‘old girl’, and she sat biting her lips in the back of the car. “As a matter of fact,” he confessed, “it was I who persuaded her to go for a drive. It seemed a good day, and we haven’t been out and about very much since she arrived. But I’m sorry if you were disappointed this morning,” he concluded, with an earnestness that brought an immediate response from the girl by his side.

  “But of course it did not matter.... Not one little bit! I am always happy to see Miss Wayne, and it was simply that I wondered whether everything was all right with her.”

  She smiled so brilliantly at Steve that the latter felt suddenly guilty. For the first time she wondered whether this enchanting Portuguese girl was really in love with the man she was to marry ... whether she was old enough, and matured enough, to fall in love in the way Steve now understood one could most unhappily fall in love.

  To her, Madelena was a bright bubble who could simply ooze affection, but whether she could ever pour out love was something the English girl doubted. Certainly not when the man treated her as Dom Manoel treated his fiancee, preventing any adult development on her part.

  But, perhaps, once they were married. . . .!

  Steve brought herself up short, determined not to think along such lines—for that way lay torment—and Madelena said with a simplicity that was almost graceful:

  “I realize that I am not a very worthy subject for your modelling, Miss Wayne, but Manoel has expressed a desire to possess a model of my head. I do not want him to be disappointed.”

  “Of course not,” Steve said, hastily, aware for the first time of a surge of actual shame. “I’ll have another go at it in the morning unless you have some special appointment you wish to keep. That is to say, if it’s convenient?”

  “But, of course,” Madelena replied. She clapped her hands. “I shall look forward to your arrival in the morning!”

  After calling in at the garage and arranging about the collection of the car they drove on to the cottage, and Tim suggested to Madelena that she accompany them inside for a drink before allowing him to drive her home. Madelena looked delighted by the invitation, although as she reminded them she did not drink.

  “But, a glass of orange juice! ...”

  She looked delightedly at Tim.

  “And perhaps Senhor Tim will show me some more of his paintings?”

  “It will give me the greatest pleasure,” Tim replied with real fervour.

  Inside the cottage Steve wandered away to change while Tim got down to the task of bringing out all his portfolios and showing Madelena some of the most promising examples of his work. He then persuaded her to sit for a brief while while he made a hurried sketch of her. It was so much more successful than Steve’s earlier sketches that the sitter clapped her hands in delight, and declared that she would love Senhor Tim to paint her.

  “If you are not too busy. . . ?”

  Her great eyes appealed to him, her voice held a note of coaxing—warm, persuasive coaxing. Tim looked as if he would have set aside all his work in order to paint her, and when Steve rejoined them he had his model posed in such an attitude that the sheer, artistic appeal of it drew forth almost impulsive approval from her. And when she glanced over her brother’s shoulder and saw his sketch she knew that whatever he had said about his inability to do justice to Madelena he could do her more than justice if he improved on the sketch and painted her.

  Madelena was making excited suggestions about the hours she could devote to him for sittings when the clock in the hall chimed eight, and Dom Manoel drove up in his car.

  To Steve, watching him approach the house, there was little about him to remind her of the Manoel de Romeiro into whose eager arms she had flung herself in the early hours of the morning. Then, it is true, he had been wearing

  a casual sweater, and his thick, black, slightly waving hair had been blown about by the breeze. Now he was dressed for the evening in a beautifully cut white dinner jacket and cummerbund, his hair was sleek and orderly, there was a white flower in his buttonhole, a scarlet silk handkerchief tucked colourfully in at the end of his sleeve. He looked what he was. . . . A man of great wealth and a considerable amount of power in the district. But he also looked arrogant to the point of haughtiness, and his dark brows were bent together as if his mood was one of acute annoyance.

  It was Steve who opened the front door to him, and instead of regarding her with a magical lightening of his expression he regarded her as if she was not much better than a stranger.

  “Is Senhorita Almeida here?” he asked, and Steve informed him that she was.

  “She’s in the studio with my brother. He’s making a quick sketch of her. Won’t you come in, senhor?”

  She deliberately over-emphasized the last word, but he apparently didn’t even notice it. He bowed a courteous acceptance of her invitation to come in, and bent his tall head a little as he stepped in through the door. With a sensation of utter bewilderment Steve turned and led the way along the passage to the bright little

  studio-living-room, where Senhorita Almeida was laughing with keen enjoyment at some little joke made by Tim. At sight of her fiance she looked amazed, concerned, and finally a little alarmed.

  She jumped up off the model throne and spoke to him hurriedly.

  “Oh, Manoel, is it late? I’m sorry if I’ve forgotten the time, but Senhor Tim is going to do a portrait of me. . . . He’s already started on the rough sketches.” She glanced anxiously at the clock, realized that she ought to be dressing for a highly important dinner engagement, and clapped a hand to her mouth.

  “Oh!” she gasped. “It is very late, isn’t it?”

  “I heard some story about your car breaking down this afternoon, and Mr. and Miss Wayne coming to your assistance, so I’ve come here to find out precisely what happened?” Dom Manoel said with a note of arctic coldness in his voice. He glanced at Tim as if he barely liked him, and the latter hastened into an explanation of what had happened, and apologized for being so inconsiderate as to make Senhorita Almeida late for her dinner engagement.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t rea
lize it was so late,” he said. “When I become preoccupied with a model I forget the flight of time.”

  “I thought it was your sister who was modelling my fiancee’s head.” Dom Manoel remarked, and once again glanced pointedly at his watch. “I’m sorry, Madelena, but punctuality is a virtue, and to be late is a vice,” he reminded her. “It was good of Senhor Wayne to take so much trouble over your car, but you had no right to be out in it on your own in any case. Not yet. . . . Not until you can be trusted to know what to do when a crisis occurs!”

  He picked up her little cambridge-blue jacket and held it out to her. Looking like a guilty schoolgirl she slipped her arms into it, and Tim’s lips suddenly became thin and rather tightly pressed together. Making it absolutely clear that he had no intention of detaining them for a moment longer he strode along the passage to the front door and held it open for them.

  “A thousand apologies, senhorita, for involving you in the wrath of Dom Manoel,” he said clearly, bending over her hand, and for one moment she looked so distressed by his obvious annoyance that Steve thought she would say something on her own account to offset the unfortunate impression Dom Manoel had created by his indignation with her.

  But as if, after all, she hadn’t the courage, she merely said something quickly about hoping he would finish her portrait, and allowed herself to be stowed away in Dom Manoel’s cream-coloured car. Dom Manoel then returned and said his farewells to the Waynes, bowing with a sort of

  negligent grace to Tim, and then looking towards Steve.

  “My apologies, Miss Wayne, because you and your brother have been troubled.”

  Steve looked back at him for a moment, completely ignored the apology, and then turned away. Without offering her hand or saying a word of farewell herself she went back to the studio, and when Tim joined her she was striving to light a cigarette that refused to light, and looking as if the hot flush in her cheeks might actually burn her skin.