The Stars of San Cecilio

by Susan Barrie

  The tears were trickling down her cheeks, and she tried to conceal them from him with her fingers, but he took the fingers back into his own warm clasp and removed them firmly and looked at her.

  ‘Even if all this is right, why do you catalogue these things?’ he asked. ‘And there is one thing you have forgotten. On the night of the Espinhaco’s party you allowed me to kiss you! ’

  ‘Y-yes!’

  Her eyes swimming in tears, she looked at him pleadingly. Whether she was pleading for another kiss, or apologizing for her weakness on the night of the Espinhaco party, they were neither of them ever afterwards quite certain, but he did know that he couldn’t bear the sight of the pathetically quivering lower lip any longer, and she knew that if his arms hadn’t closed round her she would have hurled herself into them.

  He held her with a mixture of fierceness and tenderness.

  ‘My darling,’ he said softly, into her hair. ‘My sweet and most precious darling! Oh, Lisa, I love you so much, and you must have known - you must have known! Right from the beginning I knew you were a challenge to me, but I’ve grown into a routine way of life that didn’t want anything to do with challenges, and I refused to accept it. But for weeks now I’ve known that I could never let you go out of my life! . . .’

  ‘But you’re going to marry Dona Beatriz,’ she stammered feebly into his neck.

  ‘Am I?’ He sounded interested. ‘That is news to me, my dear one! How did you hear it and when?’

  Lisa burrowed deeper into his neck. If it wasn’t true it seemed pointless to involve Dona Beatriz at this stage. But on the other hand---But he was insistent now that he began to get an inkling of why she had run away.

  ‘Where did you hear it, and when?’ he persisted. ‘You’ve got to tell me. Because if I am already pledged to another woman, how can I ask you to marry me?’

  ‘M-marry you?’

  He looked deep into her eyes, tilting up her chin.

  ‘ I want you for my wife more than anything in this world,’ he told her almost solemnly, ‘and if you hadn’t run away when you did I was coming to tell you so that very same night! I bought a mass of scarlet roses to send to you that morning after the dance, but somehow I hadn’t the courage. . . . Not until I was absolutely sure that

  you loved me, too. Oh, Lisa, my darling------ ’

  ‘Scarlet roses!’ she gasped, sitting upright in his arms. Suddenly she knew that she had seen those scarlet roses and one of them had been emphasizing the whiteness of Dona Beatriz’s hand on that morning when she called at Juilo’s flat! And now she wondered, had Dona Beatriz known for whom those roses had been originally intended? Suddenly she sank back against him. ‘Scarlet roses! ’ she whispered.

  He held her strongly.

  ‘You must tell me all there is to be told,’ he insisted with a note of sternness in his voice, ‘ You came to my flat on that last morning in Madrid, didn’t you?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Never mind how I know. But you saw Beatriz, didn’t

  you?’

  ‘I — she was there, yes. ’

  ‘And what did she say to you?’

  ‘She ------- ‘ Helplessly she hid her face again.

  ‘Oh, never mind, now! So long as you are not going to marry her! ’

  ‘I do mind, and I am not going to marry her! Lisa,’ forcing her face into the open again, ‘ you have suffered badly, and I have suffered badly, and I must know the reason. What did Beatriz say to you, apart from inventing a story about marrying me?’

  ‘ And there never has been any truth in it? You never did intend to marry her, I mean? Although she practically ran your house and your daughter?’

  ‘ No, never — and I can explain these other accusations later, But for the moment we shall stick to the point, and what did Beatrice say?’

  ‘ She — she said that I was running after you, and that I embarrassed you! That you had confessed to her how much I embarrassed you, and that you had appealed to her to take Gia away, so that you could get rid of me! Oh, Julio,’ she told him, her whole face quivering as well as her voice, ‘it was horrible! ’

  ‘It was very horrible!’ he agreed. He rested his face against her hair, and she felt as if his arms were straining her to him protectively. ‘ But although it was almost criminal, why did you believe her? Have I ever given you reason to believe that I would discuss you with another woman? Am I the type of man, do you think, who would do that? Especially when you must have known that for me you had a charm that was more powerful than anything that had entered my life! ’

  ‘But I didn’t know!’ she told him. ‘Julio, I didn’t know! I thought you were kind. ... I thought perhaps you liked me sometimes, but I

  didn’t think you were the sort of man who-----------------‘

  ‘Would look for the one perfect rose in the garden?’

  She lifted her head and gazed into his eyes. His were black and lustrous, and they seemed to possess her. Hers started to glow.

  ‘Am I — I that to you?’ she asked.

  ‘You are! And what am I to you?’

  Suddenly courage came to her, shyness vanished, and she lifted her arms and wound them round his neck. Her eyes weren’t merely transparent now, they were abject, adoring.

  ‘ You are the only man I could ever love in the whole of my lifetime! In a dozen lifetimes! You are the reason why I wished I had the courage to throw myself into the sea when I was part-way down the cliff just now, and why I couldn’t even start to make any plans for the future. I hadn’t any future without you, and without Gia. I love you both, but I love you more than life! ’

  ‘Querida! ’ The word was jerked out of him as if it was part of a long-suppressed inner turmoil, and then once again his lips came down upon hers, and she savored the bliss of surrendering to a man who would possess her always, and completely. There would never be any half measures between them — only utter belonging, and desire that was like a flame. Her whole body trembled with it, and his arms tightened to give her the final shred of conviction she needed that this was something far more vital than the dreams she had indulged in, and her mouth was like a scarlet flower when at last he lifted his head. He looked down at it broodingly. ‘Why does a man love one woman, and one only?’ he wanted to know. ‘Why is she so important to him that without her he never really comes alive?’

  She put up a hand and touched his face.

  ‘But — but it is possible to love more than once, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not as I love you! ’ His olive skin darkened, and for the first time it was really borne in on her that he was no Englishman, but a Spaniard who could become fiercely jealous if the cause was provided — perhaps if it was not provided!

  ‘Lisa, if you think that it is possible to love more than once------ ’

  ‘I don’t — I don’t!’ she assured him immediately, her fingers slipping up into the thickness of his hair and delighting in the vital feeling of it as it sprang back crisply against the back of her hand. ‘But you — Julio,’ she faltered, although now that she had got so far she had to go on, ‘you were very much in love with Gia’s mother, weren’t you?’

  He put her away from him rather suddenly, and sat and looked at her.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  She was about to say, ‘Dona Beatriz’ when he made it unnecessary for her to do so.

  ‘My good friend Dona Beatriz de Camponelli has been putting in rather a lot of work on my behalf — or, rather, against me, I should say!’ with a dryness that made her feel secretly glad she was not Dona Beatriz de Camponelli. ‘Lisa, I’ll have to tell you the whole story about her, and about my wife, because otherwise there will always be doubts between us, and without complete faith there will never be complete accord. ’ He drew her back into his arms, and stroked her face gently. ‘ Darling, if Beatriz has made you unhappy I can only say that I am so much more than sorry. You see, you and I were meant to love one another from the beginning, and I think she must
have guessed it. She has always been my good friend

  — or so I have always believed her to be! — and it would be foolish of me to pretend that I didn’t know she wanted to marry me, but as I have already told you I never had the smallest intention of marrying her. She is not the type of woman I would ever wish to spend my life with, but I was beginning to wonder just when you made your impact on my life — how I was going to convince her of that. You see, my darling, perhaps I have been a little weak, but she was good to Gia, and I thought she was a good friend, and a busy professional man doesn’t have much time to cope with problems in his private life. Also Beatriz was a connection of my wife’s, and that gave her some sort of a hold over us. And another excellent reason why she took such a proprietorial interest in my affairs was because She knew how unhappy I had been, and what a failure my marriage was -- ’

  ‘A failure?’ Lisa interrupted him.

  ‘Yes; a failure!’ He looked a little grim. ‘You have talked to me more than once of arranged marriages, my dearest, and I told you that they were often a success, but that is not always so. My marriage was an arranged marriage — our families had been lifelong friends, and I don’t suppose we would either of us have stood a chance if we’d tried to break away from What had been planned you might say in our cradles. And it was a bitter failure! My wife didn’t really want marriage — she would have preferred a career, if she could have had one, and she didn’t want children. When she knew that Gia was coming she did everything that might endanger her own life, as well as make it impossible for her to have the child, and within a week of the birth she took out her car and drove for so many miles that she exhausted herself and crashed into another vehicle, and when Gia was born she did die! ’ He looked away. ‘Not many Spanish women are like her, but then she was partly English. ’

  ‘I am wholly English, ’ Lisa reminded him in a whisper.

  ‘Yes, but you are also my Lisa, my woman, and my love! ’ He looked down at her with a yearning tenderness that caused the color to fluctuate in her cheeks, and she made an impulsive movement towards him and clutched at him.

  ‘Oh, Julio, if you really want to marry me I swear I’ll think only of you, and make you happy! That is all I want to do!’

  ‘I believe you, sweetheart.’ He carried her small hands up to his lips, and kissed the fingers of each one separately. ‘ And you will also make Gia happy? Gia needs you, you know! ’

  ‘I know. And — Julio, you do love her, don’t you?’

  ‘I think I have loved her more since you came into our lives,’ he admitted, a little strangely. ‘You see, my marriage bewildered me, recoiled on me. Everything about it made me resentful, and I’m afraid I’ve allowed a certain amount of resentment to affect my attitude to Gia. But you can teach me to look upon her in a different light

  — you have already done that. ’

  ‘You must love Gia,’ she whispered. ‘We will both love Gia!’

  ‘And one of these days-----------‘ he began, but she

  colored so much that he refrained, and kissed her long and passionately instead.

  Suddenly she realized that she hadn’t even asked him how he had got there, and when he had arrived. When he admitted that he had followed her almost immediately and spent the night before at the local inn, because it had been too late to look her up in the cottage, the further realization struck home that it was so early that he probably hadn’t had any breakfast.

  ‘Food is unimportant when you’re in love, ’ he told her, a faint twinkle in his dark eyes. ‘And in any case, my dearest heart, I can never feel sufficiently grateful to a sleepless night that caused me to get up early and determine to start looking for you without delay, and by good luck I saw you as soon as you started down that cliff path. ’

  ‘I think it was because I haven’t had any breakfast either that I felt a bit dizzy, ’ she explained. ‘I don’t ever remember losing my nerve like that before. ’

  He drew her to her feet.

  ‘And how much food did you have yesterday?’

  ‘I — I can’t quite remember!’ She dimpled suddenly, feeling so radiantly happy that everything had suddenly become a joke, a huge and glorious joke. ‘I think I opened one or two tins, but I don’t remember sampling the contents. And Mrs. Pendenis’s youngest was preoccupied with the dentist, so she couldn’t come up to cook or do any cleaning. ’

  Julio looked puzzled.

  ‘I’ll confess I can’t see the connection between a Mrs. Pendennis — who sounds as if she might be some sort of a daily help! — her youngest’s toothache, and your not sampling the contents of the tins you opened! But if this same daily help isn’t due to arrive soon, don’t you think we ought to go in and concoct something in the nature of breakfast for both of us? I presume, Miss Waring, that you can make coffee, if nothing else, and after that we can go to my inn and have breakfast. ’

  ‘But that would make the villagers talk,’ she said, dimpling afresh. ‘No, Dr. Fernandez, I will cook breakfast

  — an English bacon and egg breakfast! — and we will both eat it, and then if Mrs. Pendennis doesn’t arrive I’d better start tidying up the cottage.’ She looked up at it. ‘I thought it an ugly cottage when I arrived, but I don’t think so now. I think,’ breathlessly, ‘that it’s a lovely cottage!’ He looked up at it, too; and then he observed in a smooth tone, as he drew her close to him once more:

  ‘ Your friend Miss Tracey offered it to me as a honeymoon cottage, but I explained that I would have to take you straight back to Madrid, as there are a great many things there which I have to attend to during the next week or so. But the most important thing I have to attend to is to get you safely married to me, and after that we will be delighted to have her, and then go off somewhere where we can be really alone. . . .’ He looked deep into her eyes, longingly, searchingly. ‘Do you yearn, as I do, for the moment when we will be really alone, and really the property of each other, my golden-headed Lisa?’ She put back that same golden head against his shoulder, and looked up at him.

  ‘You know I do! ’ she said, so simply that he crushed his mouth hungrily against hers. And for fully another five minutes they forgot about breakfast, and Mrs. Pendennis, toiling up the hill from the village, wondered whether there was something wrong with her eyesight.

  THE END