Flower for a Bride (3 page)

“But you do realize that she—she is confined to her room?”

“Yes,” he admitted, quietly. “I understand that she is recovering from some sort of an indisposition.” Lois stared at him. He was standing beneath the only portrait on the reposeful wall facing her, and once again his look was completely masklike. She told herself that there was something strange about this—or was it merely Portuguese? Was it incorrect to display anxiety about a woman he had contracted to marry, or could there be genuine indifference behind that look? Impossible! ... When Jay was so utterly lovely and most men found it impossible to resist her. And he wouldn’t have asked her to marry him at all if he hadn’t found her irresistible.

Then was it because she had refused to see him, and he was feeling rather worse than hurt? It could be that.

“She—she is a little better today,” she heard herself stammering.

“Then in that case perhaps she will see me tomorrow,” was his almost bland response, and he touched an electric bell, which brought a servant, and he ordered that tea be brought. “For the Senhorita Fairchild,” he said, smiling down at her. “You English

find it difficult to survive without afternoon tea, and you must have left the hotel before it was served.”

But Lois barely waited for the servant to leave the room before she stood up.

“No, please. . . .” There was a note of agitation in her voice. “I didn’t come here for afternoon tea. . . .”

“But, nevertheless, you must permit me to offer you refreshment before you go away again.”

“And I didn’t come here to—to make you’re your acquaintance. . . .”

“No?” He looked down at her out of those intensely dark depths of eyes that were about as revealing as the eyes of the Sphinx, and standing close to him she was impressed by his height, and by the fact that he seemed to tower above her. “Then you have perhaps a message from your aunt.”

She shook her head, and the rippling movement of the muscles of her slender throat gave away the fact that she swallowed hard.

“No, I haven’t any message from my aunt.”

“Then may I be permitted to enquire, Miss Lois”— abandoning the more formal and rather picturesque mode of address—“why you have come to see me?”

The question was reasonable enough, and she plunged into speech. Looking down at her large white handbag that she was maltreating with her nervous fingers, she got as far as:

“Naturally, under normal circumstances, I—I would have looked forward to meeting you, and Jay isn’t so lacking in a sense of fitness as to ignore altogether what would be expected of her. That is to say if the circumstances were normal she would probably have brought me here to meet you this

afternoon, but as----------” She floundered, swallowed

again, decided that there were some things that were better dealt with in a rather brutal manner, and went on: “Senhor— do you mind if I say what I have to say straight out?”

“But, of course.” The quietness of his reply should have calmed her, instead of which it filled her with sudden deep pity for him, and that made her task ten times more difficult.

“Senhor, I—I’m afraid you won’t find this very pleasant! Jay hasn’t been really ill—in fact, she hasn’t been ill at all!”

"She preferred not to see me for a little while, is that it?” he asked. “So she shut herself up in her room at the hotel, and her mother informed me that she was indisposed!”

“H—how did you know?” she gasped.

He lifted his shoulders slightly in an almost indifferent shrug.

“Oh, one gets to know these things, and I have been aware for some time that Jay was not quite happy about the thought of our marriage.” He turned and started to pace up and down the room, a graceful, slightly feline stride that actually fascinated her a little, because it was so soundless on the thick carpet, and although plans of his must have come crumbling about his ears—even although they had apparently started to crumble many days ago now—his shoulders were well back, and there was nothing more than a thoughtful expression on his handsome dark face. “Miss Fairchild,” he paused and turned and looked at her for a moment, “I have a little boy, and although Jay found him quite attractive at first, I do not think she sees herself in the role of mother to him. And I—one of my principal reasons for wishing to marry again is that someone shall mother him. . . .”

Lois looked as if she felt slightly taken aback.

“But you don’t mean—you can’t expect anyone like Jay. . . .” Her voice failed her. “One doesn’t marry for a reason like that, surely, senhor?”

“Doesn’t one?” She thought his voice mocked her all at once as he stood looking at her. “But then, you are English—very English, I should say!—and so is Jay. Jay is also very beautiful, spoiled a little by an over-indulgent up-bringing, and for her—and for you, apparently— marriage is just an exciting adventure to be entered into heedlessly, and conducted carelessly. But in Portugal we think a little differently about these matters. You may go back to your cousin, Miss Lois, and tell her that I hold her to nothing, and that she is as free as air to go back to England tomorrow! There is no longer any need for her to shut herself away behind a bedroom door.”

Lois felt the humiliating color sting her cheeks— humiliating because she suspected there was contempt in his tones, and perhaps even much more than contempt. There was certainly a bite in them.

“You mean that you will let her go?”

“There are no chains on her, Miss Lois.” This time the bite was a rasp. “And I would not inflict upon myself an unwilling bride.”

“B—but. . . .” Although the color mounted until it actually burned her cheeks, and she felt as if it were she who was being judged and found wanting, she could not accept the fact that he was making it beautifully easy for her to escape quickly, and that he was apparently willing to relinquish the beautiful Jay without a struggle. Without even the semblance of a struggle, or any appearance whatsoever of regret! It was extraordinary! “But I must make it clear to you, senhor,” feeling that she had done little so far to support Jay, or to make her behavior look a little less despicable than it was, “that my cousin is not—is not happy over this. . . . Naturally it has upset her very much to think that she might be making you unhappy. But you will admit that she is young, and perhaps you rather swept her off her feet, and—and then let her feel that you expected rather more of her than she could possibly give. . . .”

She felt the words were meaningless and stilted, and they appeared to make him smile. Not, however, a nice smile.

“We will agree that what I wanted Jay was not prepared to give, and as for making me unhappy . . . I am fortunate to be spared greater unhappiness! Don’t you agree, senhorita.”

Lois looked at him for a moment as if she wished she could understand the riddle that he represented to her just then—and would always represent because she would probably never see him again— and then fumbled in her handbag for the ring case that contained the enormous diamond ring, set in shoulders of platinum, that had been the seal of the betrothal, and handed it back to him.

“Jay asked me to return this to you,” she said, deciding that it was best to say no more in her cousin’s defence.

But Dom Julyan waved the ring aside.

“Tell your cousin that I would like her to keep it as a souvenir—perhaps a guard against future imprudence! And tell her also that she is fortunate in the possession of a cousin who is somewhat braver than she is, and willing to undertake unpleasant tasks for her!”

But Lois looked at him for the first time in quite noticeable concern, and with eyes that were wide with a desire to correct a wrong impression.

“But of course, I had to help her when she—when she badly needed my help!” she said. “What else could I do?”

“Unless you whole-heartedly agreed with her that this was a suitable manner in which to break off an engagement you could have declined to come here this afternoon,” he told her in a stern voice. “Although I do not think you were very happy about coming here, were you?”

‘ ‘No,” she admitted, in a whisper.

“And if you had promised to marry a man and then changed your mind about him, you would not permit someone else to convey your altered decision to him, would you?”

“No,” she admitted again, in a less audible whisper this time.

“Then in case, you are certainly braver than your cousin!” He turned away, and his manner became cool and dismissing.

“If you will not take tea, may I show you out to your car?” On the way to the car his shoulder knocked against the camellia hedge, and one of the waxen stems fell to the ground, and Lois all but put her foot onto it. She stopped with an exclamation to retrieve the fragile thing, and as he put her into the car he looked at her oddly.

“Flower for a bride,” he said—“or that’s the local name for it. Don’t you think, under the circumstances, you’d better leave it behind?”

But when she drove away she was still clutching the camellia, and one of the first things she did when she entered her room at the hotel was to put it into water.

CHAPTER THREE

Aunt Harriet and her daughter left for Lisbon early the following morning. They had got from Lois sufficient to make it clear that Jay was in no danger of being held to a bargain she had entered into without giving the matter the right amount of thought beforehand; and although there was evident relief when the ring was restored and Dom Julyan’s message that she was as free as air was conveyed to her, the apparent ease with which she had gained her freedom did seem to occasion Jay a certain amount of pique, which she found it difficult to conceal.

“You say that he was not in the least upset? Or that he didn’t appear upset?” she asked Lois, more than once. “But, of course, he was upset. . . .”

“If he was he concealed it admirably,” Lois, who was more than disgusted with the whole business, could not refrain from saying a little unkindly.

Aunt Harriet looked with rather accusing eyes at her niece.

“Perhaps you didn’t put Jay’s case very tactfully to

him,” she suggested.

“He hardly needed to have it put to him,” Lois told them. “He had apparently already made up his mind that Jay wasn’t really ill and was just trying to avoid him, and it seems that he also wanted a mother for his child. That was important! Jay doesn’t seem to have aroused in him the conviction that she would fill the bill to perfection.”

“Well!. . .” Jay exclaimed, her deep blue eyes looking angry. “Naturally I didn’t want to be married to supply the place of a parent to somebody else’s child! And, in any case, I didn’t greatly take to the child. He’s rather precocious, and I don’t think we should have got on.”

“Precocious? I can’t imagine the child of Dom Julyan being precocious.” And recalling the quiet strength of that handsome mouth and jaw Lois couldn’t. “How old is he?” “Oh, about seven or eight, I think. A handsome enough boy called Jamie, who wears a kind of cage on one foot. He’s a cripple—or a near cripple—and that's why no plans have been made to send him to school, and why Julyan dotes on him, or so I think, absurdly.”

“But, if he’s a cripple—naturally he dotes on him,” Lois said quickly. “And motherless into the bargain!”

Jay shrugged.

“Perhaps you would take more kindly to that sort of thing than I would—or did! I felt it was unfair to expect me to pour out devotion over the child when I didn’ t particularly like him. Julyan, of course, looked at the matter differently—he’ d already had a wife and I suppose a second wife is never quite the same thing as a first. Although it’s rather like defrauding when a man isn’t prepared to give everything to the woman he asks to share his life.” She bit hard at her scarlet lower lip for a moment, and Lois looked at her as if she was trying to solve a mystery. “I’ve made up my mind that when I do marry I’ll have the whole of a man’s heart or nothing.”

Lois’s look grew suddenly enlightened.

“Then you didn’t have the whole of Dom Julyan’s heart?”

Jay flushed, as if she had been caught unawares, looked momentarily annoyed, and then answered peevishly:

“How could I, when he reserved so much for the child?” “But you could hardly expect him not to reserve

something for his own child.”

“Well, an Englishman, I feel sure, would have made the reservation much smaller. And if you must know I don’t think a Portuguese of Julyan’s rank is capable of giving the whole of his heart to a woman. Not even a first wife. . . . Women are important only in the home, to bear children, and go on bearing children. It’s not the sort of life I could face up to with anything approaching equanimity.” She tossed back her rippling strawberry-blonde locks that she wore swinging to her shoulders, and looked like someone who realized all at once what a very lucky escape she had had. “No, I realized the snags in time, and Mummy agreed it was best to cut our losses and forget all about them.”

“And you have no regrets that you won’t one day be the wife of a Marquis after all?”

“Well, naturally that would have been rather nice ...”

“The only thing that worries me about the whole affair, now that it is as good as over, is that we have spent rather a lot of money on unnecessary clothes and so forth,” Aunt Harriet cut in, before her daughter could really begin to regret the fact that she wouldn’t one day be a Marquis’s wife after all. “But if we become really hardpressed we can always sell your ring, darling,” pausing to admire it where it once more sparkled on Jay’s white hand—but not on her engagement finger this time. “It should fetch quite a bit in an emergency, and fortunately the expenses of the wedding itself were to be borne by Dom Julyan. But as he would probably have invited hordes of relatives—and no doubt had! —and we had only Lois to represent our family, that was exactly as it should be.”

But Jay had followed the direction of her mother’s eyes, and she was staring down at the ring as if already the faintest feeling of regret was stirring in her. And she knew that if the day ever dawned when they had to sell the ring they would be rather sorely up against it—which was not a pleasant thought when she had recently been living with the idea of becoming not merely rich, but quite vulgarly rich.