Flower for a Bride (23 page)

Her hand was clutching at the front of her linen jacket, but she was able to answer truthfully:

“I left a note with Miss Mattie which I asked her, in a covering letter, to give you about lunch time.” “Once you had had a chance to get clear away?” She was silent.

He wheeled upon her, and for the first time she saw that his dark eyes, instead of being blazingly angry with her, were not even slightly angry, but hurt—so hurt, and so dark, and so bewildered that a wild feeling of remorse assailed her, and her heart all but turned over in her breast.

“But, why, Lois? Why?”

She stood up and gripped the arm of her chair once she was on her feet. She looked very young in her linen suit, that was a kind of pale strawberry pink—strawberries that had been covered with lots of cream—and instead of a hat she had a ribbon of the same shade looped through her curls. She didn’t look in the least like a governess, but she looked incredibly fair, helpless and vulnerable—and as distressed as he was.

“Why?” she echoed. “Do you—do you really need me to go into all that?”

“Before you go into anything,” he answered, standing very close to her and looking down at her from his infinitely superior height, “let me tell you something! When I got back to the house last night, after searching everywhere for you before I left the picnic spot, it was to be told by my uncle that he had

brought you home, and that you had gone straight upstairs to bed. He was of the opinion, which he made no attempt to conceal, that you were distressed, and when I said that conventions didn’t matter and that I must have a word with you before morning he absolutely refused to allow me to knock on your door.” For an instant a faint smile slid into his eyes, and then vanished as if it had never really done so. “He is of the very Old School, and there are some things with him that are not done under any circumstances—and also he felt that you had to be protected! You have made a tremendous appeal to him, and he will go out of his way to ensure that, if possible, nothing upsets you.”

“That—that is very kind of the Marquiz,” Lois heard herself stammering, but she was trembling inwardly, and she dared not look upwards and meet his eyes.

“Kind! When he allowed me to live through a night of mental agony, and you . . . ? What sort of a night did you have, Lois, that made it a comparatively simple matter for you to steal away this morning? Leaving me nothing but a note which I was to receive when, and if, I came in to lunch!”

She swallowed, and looked helplessly down at her shoes.

“I didn’t want to see you before I left!”

“You have made that very obvious!”

She found that the marble floor, with its design of black and white squares, was inclined to spin round her a little after bending her head downwards too long—unless it was the fact that she had eaten no breakfast at all—and she looked up at him agitatedly, her dove-like eyes telling him

far more than she found it possible to put into words.

His hand went out and fastened upon her arm, the taut fingers hurting her a little.

“Lois! . . . Last night, before I held you in my arms, and that sweet mouth that is like a fresh pink rose,” with his eyes dwelling upon it in a kind of open hunger, “responded to the touch of my own mouth, I saw something in your eyes that dissolved the many doubts I have had to battle with ever since you first came to live in this house—no; ever since I first set eyes on you in this house!—and it seemed to me that a whole world of happiness was opening out before me! Happiness such as I have never known in my life before, and had given up all hopes of ever knowing! But, then, Gloria came along the path, and you rushed away—”

“But—but . . .” Her eyes were confounded, incapable of believing what she was actually hearing. “I thought that you—and Donna Colares. . .”

“What did you think, I wonder?” looking at her broodingly, and almost sombrely. “Am I permitted to know what you thought—and have, apparently, been thinking for some time?—my little English flower!”

Lois felt the color rushing up over her face and neck.

“I thought—I thought,” she stammered. “Everyone seemed to think. . . .”

“Yes?”

“That you intended to marry her!”

"I see.” The words were very quietly spoken, but they revealed whole depths of amazement. “And who is ‘everyone’ in this case, may I also ask?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She lowered her head, but the color stinging her cheeks was almost painful, and it was quite easy for him to see that her lower lip was trembling. “But it seemed a very natural thing

—you obviously admire her, and ------------- ”

“And admiration is a sufficiently sound basis on which to found a marriage?”

“You thought so at one time,” she reminded him in a whisper.

“But one look into your clear eyes and I knew that I had been mercifully saved by providence for a far more wonderful fate! A man who has never known love—who is not even sure that it exists! —can talk glibly about marrying without it; but once love in the person of a five-foot-two English girl with corn-colored hair, and an infuriating capacity for being kind to fellow countrymen like Rick Enderby—and even undeserving medical students like Duarte Fernandes—walks into his life, then there is only one thing he wants to do about it!”

“Oh!” she said. The word was jerked out of her as if she was too surprised to prevent it. “And that is?” she asked faintly.

“He wants to possess her for all time, and he is agonized when any other man shows the smallest desire to do so! He loses all sense of proportion and becomes harshly critical when every instinct he possesses cries out to him to declare his love, and when he doesn’t receive the amount of encouragement he looks for he is tormented and lashed by doubts of the very woman he adores! That is what love does to a man when it comes to him for the first time in his middle thirties, and when he is Portuguese, as I am, and as inflammable as tinder when his blood is ready to be set alight!” His hand had dropped from her arm, and he had taken both her hands and was holding them so tightly that the feeling seemed almost to desert her fingers. “Last night I behaved as no true Portuguese who knows how to behave should have done, but the temptation, when I have been so unhappy, was too great to resist. And I have been bitterly unhappy ever since that night when I caught you in tears, and you refused to listen either to my apologies or my pleas to remain in Portugal. It seemed to me that night that however close you had been to learning to like me, as I craved for you to like me, your feeling had turned as a result of injustice to something that was more like hatred.”

“Oh, no, no!” she assured him, at that. “Never, never!”

His eyes looked down into hers, tormented suddenly with the doubts that had assailed him that night.

“Then last night, when your eyes and your lips put an end to my anguish, I should have told you I loved you, and implored you to marry me soon. But Gloria interrupted us, and although, as you say, I have an admiration for Gloria, I know very well what she is capable of thinking. And the last thing I wished her to think about you was that you were the sort of young woman I would kiss at a picnic, in the middle of a pine wood! And as I could not be absolutely certain you would marry me I could not present you to her as my future wife. Therefore I had to let her think that we—that we had been aimlessly talking. . . ”

“O—-oh!” Lois exclaimed again, but this time it was on a long, shuddering breath of exquisite relief. And a light like starshine was creeping into her eyes as she looked up at him. The unbelievable had happened—or was happening—and she was secretly terrified lest it was not happening to her in reality.

But Julyan’s hands were still imprisoning hers, and his voice was still half agonized as he asked: “But when you decided to go away without seeing me again—and you have admitted that you didn’t wish to see me again!—was it because you thought I was the sort of man who could kiss as I kissed you last night, and then forget all about you? Or was it because”—his voice growing actually a little hoarse—“because last night was something you didn’t wish to repeat? Oh, Lois, your eyes have always struck me as clear fountains of truth, and in them I thought I saw your heart last night! Was I mistaken?”

She shook her head, unable for a moment to formulate words because of the emotion that was rushing up over her.

“No—no, you were not mistaken!” She heard him draw in his breath. “But I had to go away because— because I couldn’t be sure—of you. . . .” She had to make the admission, however much it might hurt him, in order to save him a greater hurt.

“But I was so desperately miserable that--------------”

And then the agony was over, and she didn’t need to complete the sentence, for she was in his arms, and they were holding her closer even than they had held her the night before. He shut his eyes as he pressed his cheek against her hair, and he murmured:

“To love as we do—it is a torment! Something that tears one apart! But all this is behind us, my beloved, and the future holds only the rapture of belonging! You came to me when the camellias were at their best, and you rescued one from the drive, and from being trampled on— do you remember? And I knew when I saw you holding it

in your hand that one day you would be mine. All mine!” He opened his dark, brilliant eyes, and his lips moved down until they were resting just above her lips.

“Say you love me, Lois,” he pleaded.

She put up a hand and gently touched his cheek, and her eyes were alight with love.

“I love you, Julyan—I love you so much!” she whispered, and then his lips were pressing hard on hers and fire and sweetness was speeding along all her veins.

Later he put her into a chair, and then went and fetched her a glass of wine, which he insisted on her drinking.

“I don’t believe you had any breakfast this morning,” he said. He carried one of her hands up to his face and held it there, while he looked at her reproachfully. “Oh, Lois, my little one, how could you doubt me? But I forgive you, because I’ve had so many doubts myself. In future, however, there will be no doubts. For me there will be the joy of taking care of you—for you the tenderness of a husband’s love!”

She looked away shyly from the adoration in his eyes. “And Jamie?” she asked. “Will he—will he, do you think, be pleased?”

“He will be in a seventh heaven of happiness! A mother of his own at last! ... I told you when I first met you,” looking at her delicate pink fingertips, and then kissing each one separately, “that I wanted a mother for Jamie. And could a more perfect mother be found for him than you?”

“I’ve loved him,” she confessed, “from the beginning. But I think the reason why I love him so very much is because he is your son! ”

“One day,” he told her, studying the clear pink glow in her cheeks as he did so, “you will love our son, too—I hope! And then Jamie will have a brother!”

But this resulted in much more than a glow in her cheeks, and her obvious embarrassment seemed to amuse him a little. He bent and kissed her hot cheek softly.

“And—who knows?—a sister, too, one day! A sister with corn-colored hair and grey-blue eyes and a rose-petal skin like my adorable Lois!”

But footsteps were moving up and down in the hall, over the marble tiles, and when at last the sound of them penetrated the mantle of absorption in one another which surrounded them Dom Julyan looked up a little guiltily.

“That is my uncle,” he said. “He is so anxious about you, darling, that he is prowling up and down like a tiger, ready to defend you if need be! I honestly believe that if you hadn’t just promised to marry me he would propose to you himself before night! And Mattie must be put out of her state of anxiety, too.”

“Mattie?” she asked.

“Yes.” He looked smilingly into her face. “Have you no curiosity as to how it came about that I was sitting waiting for you when Ricardo drove through the gates this morning? It was Mattie who not only saw that I received your note straight away, but came to me with it herself. I’ve more than a suspicion that she has not been blind for some time to the bond that has been growing between you and me. The bond that really never needed to grow, because it was a full-sized plant from the beginning!”

“Oh,” Lois exclaimed, her eyes glistening with pleasure. “Did she really do that? Dear, dear Mattie!”

“We’ll have a little luncheon party today,” he said, “and invite her, and my uncle, and Jamie— and no one else! A celebration between ourselves! A purely family occasion!” He drew her to her feet and held her close, while the Marquiz continued his restless promenading in the hall.

“Do you like the sound of that?” Julyan asked, looking deep into her eyes. “You and Jamie are my family! And you are my beloved woman!”