Flower for a Bride (17 page)

Lois looked away from him, and he could tell by her stiffness that she was very much the reverse of being pleased to see him.

“Did it annoy you a little because I didn’t fall over myself to make your acquaintance?” He offered her a cigarette, and at sight of the expensive gold case he held in front of her she shook her head. He might be a medical student, but he was a very wealthy medical student who was probably only playing at learning medicine, because there would be no reason why he should have to practise it later on.

“I wasn’t to know that you were as charming as you are, and as I’ve more or less given you to understand my family are always trying to persuade me to marry some girl and settle down. I’m not in the least anxious to settle down—at least, I don’t think I am—and when I do it won't be with one of the local beauties I’ve known from childhood! You

English have a far more sensible way of approaching marriage than we have—you allow it to be an adventure, not a dreary consummation of something that’s been hanging over you from your cradle!”

Lois was inclined to agree with him about that, but she wouldn’t, of course, say so. Instead, because she had to say something, she asked:

“Have you ever been in England, Senhor Fernandes?” “The name is Duarte,” he replied, softly. “And, yes, I think I can say I know England fairly well. I had two years in a London hospital.”

So that explained why he spoke English without any trace of accent, and without even the slight but noticeable touch of formality that characterized Dom Julyan’s method of making use of her language.

“I was also sent to school in England when I was ten, and stayed over there for a year or so.”

"I see,” she murmured, inspecting her fingers. “Then that is why you have such an excellent command of English idiom.”

“To you, who have seen little so far but the formal side of Portuguese life, I should be something of a relief,” he commented.

Lois looked through the arch and saw that Jamie was once more back on the brink of the pool, and she called to him:

“Take care, Jamie! Your papa will not be at all pleased if you catch a chill as a result of falling in the water!”

Jamie looked back at her and laughed, showing his little white teeth. He nodded his head in a polite manner to the newcomer, but that was all the notice he took of him, and Duarte ignored him.

“A child like that,” he commented, in an aside to Lois, “always puts my back up a little when I think of my own, rather grim, early days. I had no attractive governess to keep an eye on me, and amuse me when I felt bored. I was packed off to school when I couldn’t do much more than toddle, and it was my sisters who were allowed to stay at home, and had all the fuss made of them.”

“But, then, presumably, you were completely sound in wind and limb?” Lois remarked, with a touch of asperity, and no sympathy at all for the sorrows of ms childhood.

“True,” he agreed. “But even if I hadn’t been,

I doubt whether I would have been cosseted.”

“You forget that Jamie is an only child, and motherless,” she said just as stiffly.

“Oh, no, I don’t!” he assured her. “I happen to be well aware of my sister’s plans, and if it’s left to her Jamie won’t be motherless much longer!” There was a lazy smile in his eyes as he looked sideways at her. “Perhaps it has already struck you that Gloria has plans? She and Julyan have known one another for years, you know, and she’d like to be mistress here. But, one thing I can tell you, when—and if—she becomes mistress here, Master Jamie will be packed off to some suitable establishment that will receive him with almost as little compunction as I was!”

Lois felt horrified suddenly. Although she had more or less made up her mind that it was only a question of time before Donna Colares became Donna Valerira, the impression she had so far received of the curiously fascinating widow had done nothing to fill her with any forebodings where the son of Dom Julyan was concerned. Donna Colares had actually seemed to be fond of him, and with that wide, generous, impulsive mouth she was not a cold personality. And Jamie was such an attractive child. . . .

“You mean,” she asked, with a disturbed note in her voice, “that she isn’t fond of children?”

“Not other people’s children—very few women are, you know! ” Then, as she sat looking at him in concern, he bent forward and picked up her hand, and examined the delicate finger nails. “But let’s forget other people’s children, Gloria and everyone else, and talk about us! Will you let me look after you on the night of the picnic? My father’s birthday picnic? It should be quite good fun, because there will be heaps of guests, the moon will be at its full, and Gloria is very clever at planning all the details for that sort of thing. I will call for you in my car. You will wear one of these pretty dresses of yours

that make you look so very English, and ----------------- ”

But at that point, just as Lois succeeded in wrenching away her hand which he had exerted a good deal of masculine strength to retain firmly in his own, he was interrupted by a sharp, childish scream, and Lois leapt up and raced beneath the arch to discover Jamie sitting, as she had more than once feared, up to his waist in water in the tiled basin of the pool.

“Oh, darling!” Frantically she bent over him to null him out, but once his initial surprise had passed he looked up at her and actually laughed.

“It’s beautifully cool, Lois,” he gurgled. “And there’s a fish in my lap! . . .”

But a shatteringly quiet voice behind them demanded: “What is this, Miss Fairchild? Aren’t you capable of

preventing my son from falling in the pool?”

Lois's face was scarlet as she turned after fruitlessly striving to lift Jamie out of the pool—and the weight of the support on his undeveloped foot made this a physical impossibility so far as she was concerned. Duarte made to go to her assistance, but Dom Julyan put him arrogantly aside. He bent over Jamie and with ease—but to the sad detriment of his exquisitely tailored light grey suit—lifted him clear of the water, and then set him in the middle of the smooth green turf that formed a complete surround to the pool.

Jamie, still enjoying his experience, although he was soaked to the skin, beamed complacently up at his father, and Lois cried almost hysterically:

“I’ll get you inside at once! You’ll have to be dried and changed without delay, or you’ll catch cold. Oh, darling, how on earth did it happen ... ?”

“Yes—how on earth did it happen?” Dom Julyan echoed her words, in the coldest voice she had yet heard from him. “Perhaps you are not aware, Miss Fairchild, that my son’s incapacity makes accidents of this sort very likely to occur, and for that reason, amongst others, you were engaged to look after him! It is your duty to see that they do happen!” “I’m terribly sorry,” Lois managed, but beyond that speech seemed to have dried up in her throat, and she hardly knew what she was doing.

“Oh, I don’t think he’ll take any harm,” Duarte attempted to pour oil on the troubled waters by observing. “Not if you get his clothes off pretty quickly, give him a hot drink, and perhaps put him to bed for a short while.”

“Thank you, but we do not require any advice from you on the subject of what should be done next.” Dom Julyan returned, as if he was peaking behind clenched teeth. Once more he lifted Jamie in his arms, but before carrying him across the lawn towards the house he turned a blank, hard face on Donna Colares’s brother. “If that is your car all but blocking the driveway, Duarte, I’d appreciate it very much if you’d remove it. Other people may wish to call here during the course of the day, and at the present moment it’s impossible to get anywhere near the front entrance.”

“I’m sorry,” Duarte murmured, but he didn’t look in the least sorry, and his eyes actually sparkled with amusement as he looked towards Lois and made a faint shrugging movement with his shoulders.

But Lois had no time to waste on him—she had even forgotten his existence, and in those moments— the most humiliating moments in the whole of her life she afterwards decided, when she looked back upon them—she even wished that she might throw herself in the pool, and that it was deep enough to cover her and her humiliation, as she hurried after her employer across the lawn.

Later that day, when Jamie was perfectly dry and freshly clothed, and playing with an electric train set on the floor of the big day-nursery, she sat in the opening of the glass doors that gave admittance to the balcony outside, and pretended that she was reading a book.

But she wasn’t reading. Even Jamie sensed that, and he looked at her once or twice as if something about her perplexed him a little.

“Was my papa very angry with you when he took you downstairs to the library?” he asked once. “Did he speak to you as he spoke to Josie once when she put me to bed without a light, and I had a bad nightmare and wakened and screamed because I was all in the dark and I didn’t know where I was?”

“How old were you when that happened?” Lois asked, smiling at him a little listlessly.

“It was not very long ago, but I had been ill, and I had a lot of bad nightmares as soon as I went to bed.”

“Then it was very wrong of Josie not to leave you a light,” Lois told him, and he clambered to his feet and limped across to her.

“That is what papa said.” He leaned against her knee, and looked up into her face. “Was papa very cross?”

She smoothed his unruly dark curls back from his brow, and smiled at him this time in a manner that troubled him.

“I deserved it,” she answered. “I should have kept a closer watch on you, although I have warned you frequently, haven’t I?” As he nodded his head in instant agreement with her she gave him a little hug, and then sighed. “But I don’t think your papa thinks I’m a very suitable person to look after you any longer.”

Jamie looked alarmed.

“You don’t mean that he will send you away?”

Lois sighed again.

“He may not send me away, but the question is— ought I to remain?”

“Of course you ought!” Jamie clutched at her with both hands. “I don’t want you to go away, Lois—it wouldn’t be nearly so nice here if you went away!”

“Wouldn’t it, darling?” She was grateful for the impulsive warmth of his speech, and she didn’t want him to see how it moved her. “Well, perhaps if I promise not to

drown you in the pool. . . .”

But when Josie had collected him for his bath and his supper, and she was alone with her own thoughts, Lois felt far less optimistic about the chances of her remaining. Those twenty minutes in the library with Dom Julyan had been extremely unpleasant, and she was not likely to forget them for a very long while. Her employer had paced up and down the library as if every movement he made was impelled by some inner, seething resentment, and she realized that it was as much as he could do to be polite to her. Only his natural good breeding and innate good manners prevented him, she felt sure, from lashing out at her in a very harsh manner indeed.

As it was, he had contented himself with being icily condemning, and that was much worse, she thought, than any other attitude he could have adopted towards her. If he had said to her, as an Englishman would:

“Look here, Miss Fairchild, I don’t approve of you kissing your escorts on my doorstep at three o’clock in the morning, and I’m very much incensed because you dropped my son in the pool! Or, rather, you allowed him to fall into the pool because you were too preoccupied with listening to flatteries from yet another man who has taken to calling on you—in working hours!—and you hadn’t time to be bothered with Jamie, and what was happening to him!”

If he had said all that she could have defended herself. She would have taken the accusations one by one and proved to him that they were not her fault, and that in actual fact she was more sinned against than sinning. She had not wished to be kissed in the drive the night before, and she had certainly not wanted to devote any time at all to Duarte Fernandes, whether he flattered her or not. He was the type of young man whose intentions she mistrusted from the very moment she set eyes on him, and the only thing that amazed her was that Dom Julyan himself had raised no objections when Gloria had suggested pairing her off with her brother.

But he had not done so, and perhaps that was one reason why she stiffened into a kind of immobility when he hurled his polite accusations at her.

“If you were Portuguese, Miss Fairchild, you would have, I feel sure, a greater sense of responsibility, but as it is your sense of responsibility does not seem to be very well developed. I am quite sure you wouldn’t deliberately neglect my son, but I employ you to keep a constant eye on him, and that is something you do not seem capable of doing. It might well be you were tired this morning after your evening out.

“I was not tired,” she told him, not altogether truthfully. “But in future I shall not accept invitations of that sort, and then the danger of my being tired the following day will be non-existent.”

He looked at her with a faint pucker between his brows, and she had the feeling that for a moment he didn’t quite know what to say. And then his flow of condemnation continued.

“You do realize that yours is a position of trust, and if I cannot trust you what am I to do?”

“You can replace me,” she murmured, with a small, pale, inscrutable face.

He turned away and walked to the window, and standing in the opening of the wide glass doors he said:

“Of course, I saw that you were allowing Duarte to hold your hand when I arrived on the scene this morning— as a matter of fact, I had been observing you for several minutes before Jamie fell into the pool! And it struck me as strange that a girl of your type should permit one comparative masculine stranger to kiss her after a dance or two, and an even greater masculine stranger to behave familiarly the following morning! Is that the sort of thing you do in England? If so, we people of Portugal must strike you as very out of date!”

“Perhaps,” she heard herself answering, rather stonily.

Once again he turned and looked at her, and his look was sharp and penetrating.

“You don’t deny that you were offering encouragement to Duarte this morning?”