Red Lotus (6 page)

There was still no sign from behind the closed door, but the violent sobbing had ceased. They waited.

"Is her sister with her?" Felicity whispered.

"Conchita? No." Philip turned to look at her. "Conchita would not take her father's death in this way."

She felt uncertain and at a loss again. Was he trying to tell her that Conchita would not care?

There was a small, groping movement within the room

and the handle of the heavy door began to turn, slowly at first and then with an abruptness which suggested final decision. The door opened and a small, forlorn yet wholly dignified figure stood in the aperture.

Sisa was fourteen years of age, but already she seemed to be curiously mature. She had a small, oval face which had been touched lightly by the sun, giving her skin a golden-brown cast which accentuated vividly-blue eyes, red-rimmed now from weeping. Her hair was straight and very black, and it was braided severely in two tight plaits which fell over her shoulders almost to her waist. The ribbon which bound one of them was untied, but otherwise Sisa's appearance was fastidiously neat. It was almost impossible to believe, save for the evidence of the reddened eye-lids, that she had been weeping in unhappy abandonment less than a moment ago.

The strange, incongruous dignity of the child trying to hide her sorrow from a stranger touched Felicity as nothing else could have done, but she knew that she must leave the next step to Philip Arnold. He knew and loved Sisa. Of that she was sure.

"Please come in." Sisa spoke in stilted English, in spite of the fact that Philip's appeal through the closed door had been made in Spanish. She would not inflict a barely-understood language on a guest, although she could probably have expressed herself better in the tongue she had used since earliest childhood. "We knew you were coming."

The room they entered was much like Felicity's bedroom, with the addition of a prie-Dieu beside the bed and a desk between the two long windows. There was also a motley collection of dolls set along a low shelf, most of them in the native costumes of the other islands or of Spain itself, presents brought, no doubt, by a returning parent for a waiting child. Some of them were sadly tattered, those, Felicity knew, that were best loved and most often handled. Others had been scarcely touched at all.

Conchita's, she thought, without knowing why. She had noticed the second bed in the far corner of the room. Conchita had never had a great deal of time for dolls.

"Your cousin has not eaten anything since her arrival, Sisa," Phillip said. "Do you think you could order for her while I have a few words with Doctor Cambreleno? He

may wish to go away soon because he has a long journey to make."

"And his task here is finished." Sisa gnawed a quivering lip. "I understand that, Philip. There is a baby coming at El Tanque. It is a happy event for these people."

Felicity went forward into the room.

"If you would rather not come downstairs, Sisa," she said, "I shall understand."

"That would not do." Sisa was re-tying her hair ribbon with a new determination in her eyes. "There is no one else to greet you, so I must come—Felicity."

The final word was all that Felicity needed. She put her arm about the younger girl's thin shoulders and they went down the stairs together. A priest in a black cassock met them in the hall. He was old and bent and looked vastly troubled as he laid his hand in blessing on Sisa's dark head.

When he passed Philip Arnold on the stairs he gave him an odd look, half questioning, half perturbed, but Robert Hallam's agent was already escorting the doctor to his car. They were speaking in rapid Spanish with a good deal of native idiom thrown in, so that Felicity could not even .begin to understand what was being said.

"Tomorrow," Sisa announced at her side, "Señor Perez will come from La Laguna and we will know what is to happen to us. My father has made a will, but no one knows, of course, what he has put in it. We do not know what he wishes us to do. Whether we are to stay here or go away."

Her voice had faltered on the suggestion of departure and Felicity's arm tightened about her.

"I don't think your father will wish you to leave the home you love, Sisa," she said, not quite knowing why she should have given her cousin the assurance she had so obviously sought. "He loved San Lozaro, too. He has lived here nearly all his life."

"Yes," Sisa agreed, but she did not seem wholly convinced. "If it depended upon Julio or Conchita, we would go away."

The revelation disturbed Felicity, but she was determined not to ask any more questions. Sisa escorted her to the kitchens, where a tearful domestic staff managed to pull themselves together, including, presumably, the person who

had broken the harsh news of her father's death to her cousin. The preparations for an evening meal were set in motion, although there was still no sign of the other members of Robert Hallam's family.

Towards ten o'clock, Julio came in from the fields, to be met in the patio by his father's agent. Felicity and Sisa were in the drawing-room, a vast place of many mirrors and much solid old furniture which was rarely used in the ordinary way, and so Felicity saw nothing of that first meeting between Philip and Julio after his father's death.

When her cousin came into the drawing-room to meet her he looked sullen and angry, his mouth drawn down in a petulant line, his black eyes smouldering. Julio was all Spanish, from the crown of his black, curly head to the soles of his gaily-shod feet, and he did not seem to relish the idea of her presence.

"You've come too late," he said, "if you wanted to see my father."

Felicity got to her feet.

"Yes, Julio, I know," she said. "That is my loss. But I hope I can be of some small help to you now."

He shrugged indifferently.

"What can you do?"

"I'm not sure. I thought, perhaps, that I could ask Mr. Arnold."

The suggestion had been entirely spontaneous and she could not understand why she had made it. Unless it was because only Philip Arnold and Sisa had shown any real feeling at her uncle's death. Conchita, it would appear, had not yet come in.

Julio turned slowly to look at her. He had gone to the window to gaze out over the moonlit garden, but when he came back across the room his face was convulsed.

"He has no power in this house now!" he cried. "It is broken with my father's death! He must go away." Suddenly he drew himself up to his full height, which was no more than her own. "I shall be in charge at San Lozaro now that my father is dead," he announced. "I shall be the head of the family. I shall give the orders. Philip Arnold must go away."

The smouldering hatred in his eyes could not be ignored, and Felicity found herself recoiling from it with a hopeless

sense of her own inadequacy to deal with the situation rising in her heart.

"I don't think we ought to talk about such things just now, Julio," she warned, glancing in Sisa's direction. "Your sister is tired and we must go early to bed. Tomorrow will be a heavy day for us all, but we will help each other best by—by trying to forget our prejudices. Everyone has little differences of opinion," she added lamely.

"This is more than just a difference of opinion, Miss Stanmore."

She wheeled round to find Philip standing in the doorway, and Sisa ran to him immediately.

"Please, Philip, do not let us quarrel to-night," Sisa pleaded. "Julio will say he is sorry. He did not really mean that you should go away."

Felicity saw the older man's lips tighten almost cruelly as he looked at Julio.

"I hardly think it is for Julio to say how and when I should go," he answered thinly. "Your father's will is yet to be read, and then we will know just where we all stand."

Julio gave him a look of the most utter hatred as he picked up the manta he had discarded on one of the sofas and went out.

"I'll get what I want to eat in the kitchens," he said harshly. "Perhaps that is really my place."

The tension he left behind him in the quiet room could almost be felt.

"Poor Julio!" Sisa sighed. "He cannot love anyone." Philip's mouth relaxed as he looked at her.

"And you, querida," he answered gently, "are in love with the whole world!"

In the moments of his tenderness to Sisa he was a different being, Felicity realized. There was no harshness in him, no guile. Even his habitual arrogance of manner was softened by Sisa's smile; he had made an adoring slave of her cousin.

Their belated meal was brought into the dining-room beyond the pillared archway at the far end of the room where they sat.

"I have ordered entremeses because I thought that Felicity would not care for soup on such a warm evening," Sisa informed Philip

It would seem that Sisa accounted to Philip automatically

for all that went on at San Lozaro, and he nodded absently as the food was served, his thoughts obviously busy with something else.

That they were disturbed, even angry, thoughts was not too difficult to imagine. He had followed them through the pillared archway and taken his place in the heavily-carved armchair at the head of the table with only a second's hesitation. It was probably her uncle's chair, Felicity decided, and she supposed that he had hesitated before the choice of occupying it or leaving it tragically empty for the duration of the meal.

Or shouldn't Julio have occupied that chair? Anger flooded her heart for a moment until Sisa said with evident relief:

"You are going to take care of us, Philip. You are not going to leave San Lozaro now that Papa is taken away?" Philip's face remained inscrutable.

"For the present, querida," he said, "I shall remain with you."

Sisa applied herself half-heartedly to her plate of hors-d'ruvres, and the two other chairs at the table remained unoccupied for the duration of the meal.

Their coffee was served on a tray in the drawing-room, but although it was now eleven o'clock, neither Julio nor his sister had joined them.

Once or twice Felicity saw Philip glance at his wrist watch, but he made no comment on her cousins' absence. Sisa began to yawn.

"Had you not better go to bed?" Philip asked. "Carlota will go up to your room with you till Conchita returns."

"Conchita will not return," Sisa said with conviction. "She is afraid of death. She will not come until the morning, until Father Anselmo brings her back."

Philip's mouth hardened.

"We shall see," he said. "Meanwhile, do you wish your cousin to go up with you?"

Felicity wondered if this was dismissal. Philip seemed to have so much power in the house and he used it ruthlessly.

"It is not necessary," Sisa returned with a smile in Felicity's direction which was meant to soften the refusal. "I am in no way afraid."

Unlike Conchita, she was not disturbed by death. After

that first heartbreaking abandonment to grief which she had conquered behind the closed door of her room, she had turned her face resolutely from fear, but less than an hour ago she had confessed to an uncertainty about living. With her roots torn up by her father's passing, she had appealed to Philip for help, and he was evidently not the man to fail her, for the present at least.

"I'll follow you upstairs in a minute, Sisa," Felicity said as the stout old woman she had first met came to the drawing-room door in response to Philip's ring. "May I come and say goodnight?"

"Yes, please come," Sisa said solemnly. "I shall not be asleep."

Felicity felt that she had to speak to Philip alone. There was so much that she had to clear up in her mind, and she believed that it could be done best by the direct approach. It was how Philip himself would handle a similar situation, and she expected him to be frank.

"Mr. Arnold," she began as soon as Sisa and Carlota had left the room, "there are a good many things that puzzle me about San Lozaro. I feel that they would have been cleared up by now if my uncle had not died so tragically as soon as I got here, and I think that you might be able to help me to make a few adjustments."

She paused, waiting for his reply, hoping that he would help her over what was, for her, at least, a difficult moment. She did not want to probe into his affairs, but she had to know something about her uncle's family and it seemed that he was quite closely connected with it.

He did not answer her at once, pouring another cup of coffee for himself before he strode with it to the window overlooking the terraces and the district plantations.

"What is it you want to know?" he asked.

He was not going to be particularly helpful, she realized. He would answer her questions and no more.

Once again anger stirred in her, the anger of frustration and uncertainty, but she knew that it would be useless to voice it. Philip Arnold was not the type of man to be browbeaten into a revelation he had no desire to make.

"It—would be helpful if I had some definite idea just what my uncle expected me to do," she confessed. "He said he had work for me. That was how he put it in his

letters, and I admit that I found it easier to accept his invitation under these conditions."