Flower for a Bride (8 page)

“I shall never get used to Portuguese ways,” she admitted. And then she remembered Jay, and her amazement increased. “Even my own cousin—that, too, was to be a kind of marriage of convenience! It is extraordinary.”

“But happily it came to nothing,” Miss Mattie observed complacently. “I don’t mind telling you, my dear, that I was never attracted to your cousin, and I knew very well she was not the right sort of wife for Dom Julyan. Because I know him very well I consider that his first marriage was a mistake, and I didn’t want to see him make another. I’ve always hoped that when he did marry again he would choose someone he could—well, let us say ‘care’ for.” “And you know that he didn’t care for Jay?”

“I knew it, yes.”

“Then perhaps he will—choose someone else before long?”

Miss Mattie put down her sewing and looked rather more seriously at Lois. In fact, she even looked, for an instant, a trifle grave.

“That is what I am inclined to believe,” she confessed. “In fact ----------------------- ”

“Yes?”

“Today he is visiting a family we know very well—a family almost as old as the Valeriras. The eldest daughter married a couple of years ago, but her husband was killed in an air crash about a year after the marriage, and she has just returned a widow from the United States, where she has been living with his parents. Fortunately she has been left very comfortably off, but she will undoubtedly wish to take another husband, and there was a time when everyone supposed that she and Julyan—well, many people believed that he would pick upon her instead of the wife he did pick upon, and there is no doubt, I think, that they have a great admiration for one another. They have what I think can be best described as a kind of mental attunement.”

“Meaning that they think alike on—on important subjects?”

“On most subjects, I would say. They have similar temperaments.”

“I—see.” Lois was glad of the temporary diversion caused by Miss Mattie’s sewing falling from her lap, and as she bent and retrieved it and the color became heightened in her cheeks it was simple for anyone to decide that it was merely the result of bending her head forward swiftly. “And is she—is she as beautiful as Donna Valerira was?”

“She is not in the least beautiful,” Miss Mattie replied calmly. “But she is attractive—very attractive.”

“I—I see,” Lois said again, and was almost passionately thankful for the sight of Maria advancing towards them across the lawn with the tea things.

She didn’t know why, but the rest of the afternoon was not nearly as pleasant as the early part, but Miss Mattie—studying her when she was unaware that she was being studied—could have told her if she had chosen to do so why it was that the flowers seemed less brilliant, the sunshine less golden, and the butterflies less gay and abandoned. And inwardly the old lady sighed, and wondered whether she ought to issue a stronger warning.

But she had no opportunity to do so, for hardly had they started tea than Dom Julyan himself returned, and seated beside him in the blue car as it sped up the drive was Donna Gloria Colares.

Lois found herself plunged into a kind of confusion, for having only just finished discussing the very person she now found herself presented to she was certain that a kind of selfconsciousness showed in her face. Donna Colares, on the other hand, having been fully prepared for meeting her, and perhaps just a little curious to know what she looked like, gave her a rather more than casual glance, followed y a smile and a brief handshake, and then to Lois’s surprise actually embraced Miss Mattie, and kissed her as if she was genuinely pleased to see her again.

“You are the one thing about Alvora that doesn’t change, Miss Mattie,” she told her. “You remain as I always seem to have known you, calm and content and with your hands always occupied with something useful,” indicating the garment that was intended for Jamie. “That child,” smiling at Jamie, “must have a wardrobe vaster than any small boy really needs.”

“When Mattie sits with her hands in her lap, then she will no longer be Mattie,” Dom Julyan remarked, but although his glance rested affectionately on his old governess, it travelled almost immediately to Lois, and he enquired with rather flattering concern: “Your ankle is no longer troubling you very much, I hope, Miss Lois? You have been obeying instructions and resting it?”

Lois answered with a flush she felt was infinitely revealing rising in her cheeks:

“I have been having a deliciously lazy afternoon, thank you, Senhor, and Miss Gregg has been more than kind to me.” Donna Colares stretched herself gracefully in a chair, and looked across the tea table at her.

“A sprained ankle is a great handicap,” she said, “especially if you happen to be on holiday. I understand that you are on holiday here, Miss Fairchild?” “I am going home the day after tomorrow,” Lois replied, and she thought the Portuguese girl’s eyebrows ascended a little.

Although she must have been somewhere in her middle thirties, to be a contemporary of Dom Julyan, she really looked little more than a girl. She was as slender as a willow wand, and every movement she made was one of infinite grace. There was no true beauty in her face, but it had something much more than beauty, for it was alive and alight with all sorts of constantly changing moods and expressions, and the tawny eyes were so clear that they were disconcerting. She had black, sleek hair that reminded Lois of a wet seal on a rock, and she was so beautifully made-up that irregularities in the contours of her face didn’t seem to matter. Her mouth was wide and generous, the lips curving swiftly into a smile, and her upward glance—even when it was directed at no one of greater importance in her scheme of things than Miss Mattie— had something tenderly caressing about it.

Lois felt, with a strange sinking of the heart, that she was a woman with so much warmth in her personality that, to a man who was starved of warmth, even to sit near her was like basking in the friendliness of a room filled with sunshine. A room that would tempt him to relax and be himself.

The conversation at tea was light and pleasant, and Jamie divided his attention between the two female visitors. But when Lois, during a lull in the talk, said rather awkwardly that she thought she had intruded long enough, and if Dom Julyan would be good enough to either drive or send or send her home—and as she knew he employed a chauffeur, and had more than one car, that, she decided was a good enough ‘let out’ if he needed it, and excuse not to desert the attractive widow—she would be most grateful, the small boy did not look so pleased.

“But, it is early!” he protested, catching at her arm. “Miss Mattie promised that you would stay, perhaps, for dinner!”

Lois smiled into the child’s eyes.

"But you will be in bed long before dinner time, and I have had a wonderful time as it is. I must go now.”

Dom Julyan leaned forward.

“Why?” he enquired, politely. "Is there some reason why you should be back early?”

“I—why, no, but. . . .” She didn’t quite know what to say, aware of tawny eyes watching her—of something bright and, perhaps, faintly amused, in those eyes—of Miss Mattie looking a little uncertain, and her determination strengthened itself. “But it was extremely good of you to bring me here for lunch, I have had, as I said, a delicious afternoon, and it would be unreasonable to expect anything more. Besides, I—”

“Yes?” insistently.

“I feel that I should go. . . .”

“You are perhaps tired?” he suggested.

“Y—yes!” She seized upon the suggestion quickly. “I haven’t slept very well for the last three nights, and—and I think I am a bit tired! I shall go to bed very early tonight.” “Very well,” he said, quietly, and rose. “I will bring the car round to the side of the house, and in the meantime sit still and rest your ankle.”

When he had gone, striding away across the lawn, Lois felt as if emotion that wanted to spill over into actual tears was rising up inside her like a well, and when she caught Miss Mattie looking at her with something that was undoubtedly sympathetic in her old but still very shrewd grey eyes, that emotion threatened for a moment to get out of hand. Miss Mattie leaned across to her and patted her on the knee, and:

“If I don’t see you again,” she said, “I do hope you have a good journey home to England—and that everything goes well with you, my dear! Perhaps some time you might write to me.”

“Yes,” Lois answered eagerly, “I will.”

Donna Colares said:

“If I don’t see you again, I hope your ankle will soon cease to give you any trouble, Miss Fairchild. But

somehow I think I will see you again!”

Lois stared at her, and her inexplicable smile, and Jamie said regretfully:

“I did so want you to stay. ...”

Dom Julyan, when he left the car on the gravel sweep and came back across the lawn, said nothing, and under the eyes of his attractive fellow countrywoman he did not lift Lois into his arms and carry her to the car, but formally offered her his arm.

Low was very silent as they drove slowly back to Alvora.

The big car was capable of a good deal of speed, but she realized that they were taking it slowly, and that Dom Julyan seemed to be frowning over the wheel. All at once he said to her:

“You are very quiet, Miss Lois. Is it your ankle that is hurting you?”

“Oh, no, no,” she denied instantly, “it doesn’t hurt at all now!”

“Then you are not quite happy about something?”

“I am—perfectly happy,” she assured him, and felt once again that rising of an emotional well inside her, for he and Miss Mattie had been very kind, they represented a way of life she was never likely to know again, and the prospect of going back to a lonely one-room London flat was not a very bright one just then. Once again she was terrified lest the well should reveal some evidence of itself.

He increased his speed a little, and the flower-bounded cottages flashed by on either hand, the sea appeared at intervals, and the wonderful arc of blue sky, paling a little because the sun was slowly westering, provided a triumphant canopy overload. Lois was saying to herself that she wouldn’t bother about dinner that night, she would go straight to bed, and the next day she would get up early, finish her packing, and perhaps catch an afternoon plane instead of waiting for the following day, when Dom Julyan said suddenly, above the rush of wind that stirred up a deliciously cool air on either side of them as he put on a burst of speed, and instead of making for Alvora she realized that they were actually turning inland:

“I have a plan that I wanted to put before you in more suitable surroundings than this, but since you refused to remain to dinner, and I couldn’t very well ask you inside to

the library, I shall have to put it to you now. Do you really wish to go home to England, Miss Lois?”

“Go home to ---------- ? But I must go home to

England!” she answered in amazement.

“Not if a proposition was put to you that would keep you out here! You said yourself that you were

not really keen on office work—that you would prefer something that involved human relationships—and I can offer you something much more along those lines! Very much more along those lines!”

“You c—c—can... ?”

The road was winding upwards, the cottages were being left behind, and apart from the prospect of vineyards and cultivated fields that fell away on either side of them they seemed to be leaving civilization behind them. No one passed them on the white, dusty road, distant cork forests rose on the skyline, and the sea became a blue thread behind them. But Lois was so amazed by what she had just heard—or imagined she had heard—that she scarcely noticed.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said, a little dryly, “I am not trying to abduct you. We will stop the car in a minute or so, and then we can talk.”

When he did stop the car the silence seemed absolute, and Lois looked about her as if only half believing that she was where she was. There were banks of brilliant flowers bordering the road, and her eyes lighted on a blue jacaranda tree—an amazing sight to her, shaped as it was like a huge oak tree, and covered with trumpet-shaped flowers that were an exquisite powder-blue. The jacaranda blossoms before it comes into leaf, and in a short while the froth of coloring would be over; but seeing it as she saw it then Lois thought of it as a tree that epitomized for her all that she would be leaving behind when she went home to England.

But Dom Julyan was saying something that caused her to forget that jacaranda tree altogether.

“How would you like to take on a position as governess?”

He produced his cigarette case, that was embellished with a crest, and as she watched the sun glinting on the fine platinum of which it was constructed, and saw it

extended towards her, her eyes grew wide as if she was being hypnotized.

“A position as governess?”

“To my son—Jamie!”

“But he already has a governess. . . .” Dom Julyan smiled, and his smile was affectionate. Lois had accepted a cigarette, but when he held his lighter to the end of it she was so astounded that she merely stared into his eyes for a moment.

“You must realize as well as I do that Miss Mattie is past coping with children. And there is absolutely no reason why she should. For the rest of her life she is safe and secure, and that is all that matters where she is concerned. But Jamie needs someone young to be with him, and it is only fair that he should have someone young. Mattie herself recognizes that, and we are both agreed that you would be ideal for the purpose.”

“Then you have discussed—you both discussed me?”

“We did,” he admitted.

“But. . .” Why hadn’t Miss Gregg warned her, prepared her? She had said goodbye as if she never expected to see her again! “But would Miss Gregg honestly be pleased to

see herself superseded?” “Certainly, because she is very fond of Jamie.

“But I have no qualifications whatsoever for being a governess.”

“You have the qualifications that are needed. You have, I should imagine, a good deal of patience, and above all you are obviously fond of children. Jamie took to you immediately, and he doesn’t do that to everyone.”