Flower for a Bride (12 page)

The garden was laid out regardless of expense, and the roses made Lois think of England, save that the hot sun in which they were displaying their perfection was not in the least like English sun. They were returning to the inviting coolness of the house, and she was just thinking that she would have to make her farewells to her host and hostess—and to Donna Colares, too, if she was not surrounded by a little knot of her friends—since it had been arranged that a car was to call for her at six, when a young man stepped from some bushes bordering one side of the path and confronted them.

“Hello,” said Rick Enderby casually. “I wondered whether you were anywhere about. I suppose you think your support isn’t really needed on occasions like this?”

“It can be dispensed with,” the young man replied, in rather an indolent tone. He was looking at Lois, and his tawny-brown eyes were openly appreciative. She guessed at once that he was a close relative of the Fernandes family, for in about twenty years time he would begin to bear a distinct resemblance to his father, and just then he was sufficiently like his sister to make the resemblance almost ludicrous. He had the same black patent-leather hair, the same restless sparkle in his eyes, faintly derisive quirk to a rather sensual mouth, the same irregularity to the rest of his features that prevented him from being good-looking, although he was very far from being the opposite.

“This is Miss Lois Fairchild,” Rick said, regarding him with a gleam of amusement in his eyes. “I gather you knew you were expected to meet her this afternoon, and for that reason you kept out of the way?”

Duarte Fernandes grinned unrepentantly, while still taking in all the details of the English girl’s appearance.

“I like to make my own friends.” he said, “and Gloria has a habit of rather forcing hers on me. But I didn’t intend to absent myself altogether.” He held out his hand to Lois, and she put hers into it. “I’m Duarte, the black sheep of the family, and rather extra black at the moment. I saw you two amongst the roses, and it was then I decided I was missing something.”

Lois couldn’t resist smiling slightly at him, but she thought his admission was in rather bad taste. She also thought those brown eyes of his that made her think of brown velvet with the sun on it were a little too bold to be the sort of eyes she could ever trust. Or anyone else could ever trust, if it came to that.

“You’re too late, old chap,” Enderby told him carelessly. “Miss Fairchild and I have spent a very pleasant afternoon, and now she’s got to leave. Unless my eyes are at fault that’s one of the Valerira cars coming up the drive now, with Ricardo at the wheel, and he’s probably got instructions to be back on the dot. So you’ve wasted quite a lot of time.”

Duarte looked round at the car, and then frowned slightly. Then he looked back again at Lois.

"But do you have to leave?” he asked. “I understand you are a governess, not a slave to the whim of an employer.”

“My employer is very considerate, and I’ve already had several hours off duty this afternoon,” Lois replied, rather stiffly, because she resented his manner of referring to Dom Julyan. And all at once she was glad that she was leaving, and that she would soon be back with Jamie in the nursery—Rick Enderby was very pleasant, and the afternoon had been a break, but she had no desire to repeat it.

“I’m sorry your sister’s friends usually turn out to be rather a bore,” she couldn’t refrain from adding.

Rick laughed as he helped her into the car, after promising to convey her farewells to her hostess for her.

“You deserved that one, Duarte,” he told him, and Duarte’s eyes gleamed.

“Nevertheless, there will be other occasions when we will meet, Miss Fairchild,” he told her, through the open window of the car. “And sometimes my sister has excellent taste! In future I will have to be a little more careful!”

Lois looked away from him, and smiled at her fellow countryman.

“Don’t forget that you’re going to have dinner with me one night this week,” he called, before the car rolled away. That’s a date!”

“Is it?” Duarte looked with a hint of vexation in his eyes at the other man, and then shook his head regretfully. “I do seem to have wasted my afternoon, don’t I?” he remarked.

C H A P T E R NI NE

It was mid-week when Lois was summoned to Dom Julyan’s library, and as the summons came just before lunchtime one morning she wondered what it was he wanted to say to her that could not well have waited until they met in the dining room if he was going to be in to lunch.

But as she walked along the corridor to the library, over the glistening marble floor that was strewn at intervals with rich rugs, she decided that he evidently wasn’t going to be in to lunch. He hadn’t been in the day before, or the day before that; and she sometimes wondered why he had made his stipulation about her bringing Jamie down to share the midday meal with her.

She tapped on the library door, and was instantly bidden to enter by a quiet voice that called to her to “Come in.” As soon as she had obeyed the invitation and found herself in the immense room with its painted ceiling, and fluted pillars that supported it, she realized that she had all at once become extremely nervous. Her throat felt dry as if she had committed an offence and was expecting to be called upon for an explanation of her lapse, and she was conscious of not knowing quite what to do with her hands when she stood in front of the man who had summoned her. Her pulses seemed to be pounding a little uneasily, too.

Dom Julyan, who had been standing in the opening of the tall French windows, looking out at one of the most attractive vistas of his garden, when she opened the door, turned as soon as he realized that she was within a few feet of him. As the weather was now very hot he was wearing a thin silk suit, and to Lois he looked handsome—almost painfully handsome—remote and a trifle austere.

“I sent for you, Miss Lois, because I’ve just received a request over the telephone,” he told her, coming to the point at once. “A request to spare you for an evening in order that you can be taken out to dinner by someone you met on Sunday afternoon.”

“Oh!” Lois exclaimed. She realized at once to whom he was referring. “You—you mean Mr. Enderby?” “Then you have already agreed to dine with him provided my permission could be obtained?”

The censoriousness of his tone—the coolness of his voice that actually made her think of the coldness of icicles—had the effect of arousing a feeling of resentment deep down inside her, and suddenly it bubbled up and showed in her clear grey-blue eyes, and the sudden stiffening of her slight shoulders.

“Is it absolutely necessary that your permission should be obtained, senhor?” she asked, looking him deliberately in the face. “I mean, I quite recognize that you are my employer, but surely my private life is my own?”

"Agreed,” he answered silkily, “but so long as you live in my house I’m afraid a strictly private life is not possible for you, because I hold myself responsible for you. You are English, and accustomed, no doubt, to a good deal of freedom—in England you would probably accept an invitation from Rick Enderby without a moment’s hesitation, and without consulting anyone—but here you cannot behave in the same fashion as you would behave in your own country. For one thing, it is not customary for our young unmarried women to accept casual invitations, and for another the very fact that I do employ you, and that you live in my house, gives me the right to watch over you to a certain extent, and to safeguard your interests. Or, at least, to attempt to safeguard them,” rather more dryly.

Lois felt an angry color burn her cheeks, and she bit her lip rather hard.

“You seem to forget, senhor,” she reminded him, “that the ‘casual invitation’ comes from a friend of a very close friend of yours—a Portuguese lady whom I imagine you esteem highly! And when she informed you the other night that she proposed to find ‘escorts’ for me you didn’t appear to have any strong objections to raise! Yet now you accuse me of behaving in rather a doubtful manner!”

She looked at him with so much unconcealed resentment in her face that he frowned, and then protested sharply:

“I haven’t accused you of behaving in a doubtful manner! I have accused you of nothing beyond accepting an invitation to dine with a man after you had known him at the outside for no more than a couple of hours!”

“And is that a crime?”

“Of course it isn't. But in Portugal, as I have explained, our girls do not do that sort of thing.”

“Then why did you not point out to Donna Colares that

her suggestions were unorthodox to say the least? Why did you permit me to go to tea at her parents’ house on Sunday in order to meet two men whom she specifically named?”

“And apparently you met them both?” he said, as if he were attempting to subdue annoyance as keen as her own.

“I met Mr. Enderby, and I met Donna Colare’s brother just as I was leaving. But he explained that his sister’s selections in the way of girl friends for him did not always meet with his taste, and he kept out of the way until I was leaving for that very reason. I can’t say that I blamed him,” she added, Dom Julyan’s eyebrows rose.

"Why not?”

“Well, you can hardly expect a young man of spirit to do just as his sister tells him, can you? Any more than I liked the idea of having someone more or less forced to pay me attention.”

He looked at her for a long moment with a curiously penetrating, and rather uncertain regard, and then he walked away to the window and stood once more looking out at the garden.

“Yet you quite obviously got on very well with Enderby,” he remarked, after several long-drawn-out seconds of silence.

Lois said nothing.

Suddenly he turned and looked at her again.

“Just tell me one thing,” he requested. “Do you wish to have dinner with this man who paints pictures?”

Lois shrugged slightly, but she felt a little indignant on Rick’s behalf.

“The fact that he paints pictures has nothing whatever to do with it,” she answered. “And the fact that he invited me to dinner hasn’t very much to do with me. I imagine he asked me because Donna Colares made it clear that she wished him to do so.”

For the first time a gleam of humor lightened Dom Julyan’s expression, and the corners of his handsome mouth quirked upwards a little.

“Do you honestly believe that?” he asked.

The way in which he looked at her caused Lois to grow pink for another reason altogether, and she glanced away from his dark eyes hurriedly, and replied this time in a certain amount of confusion.

“I—I don’t know at all why he asked me . . . except that we’re both English, and perhaps that’s a sort of a bond. And, in any case, I found him very pleasant,” she felt that she had to add in all truthfulness.

“Indeed?” Dom Julyan murmured.

“But I explained that I couldn’t accept an invitation until I had been given to understand that it was convenient for me to have the free time,” looking at him more boldly. “That’s why Mr. Enderby decided that it would be best to ring you himself.”

“I see,” her employer remarked, but his lips curved a little cynically. “All very correct and out in the open, and so forth!”

“You have just been pointing out that as a young unmarried woman no longer living in England, but in Portugal, I should be careful to behave with the utmost correctness,” she reminded him with just a hint of smugness.

Once again he turned away and walked to the window, and once again she could almost feel him frowning out at the view.

“You haven’t answered my question,” he said to her at last, without turning. “Will it brighten your life very much to be taken out to dinner and to spend the evening in the company of a man you hardly know? Do you find life here very dull, and are you conscious of being restricted? Is it very boring?”

“It is not in the least boring,” she assured him, with the ring of truth in her voice. “But surely I may be permitted to meet someone else sometimes—apart from the occupants of this house, I mean?”

“You may,” he answered, almost curtly, “and I have told Enderby that he can collect you at the hour he proposes tomorrow evening. But there is just one other point I would like to raise with you.” “Y—yes?” she enquired, as his back remained rigid, and she had the feeling that he was still not too pleased with her.

“No doubt your days are a little dull here. You see no one apart from Jamie, the servants and Miss Mattie in the daytime, and in the evenings the monotony is hardly broken by your dining with Miss Mattie in her own quarters. On the first night you were here I suggested that you had all your meals in the main dining room, but Miss Mattie informed me that you would prefer to take your evening meal with her. Naturally, as you had expressed a particular desire for doing so, I agreed that you should do so, and that at present is the arrangement. But you have only to meet Rick Enderby for a very short while to feel it would be pleasant to dine with him—alone!—while my society in the evenings is quite obviously not to your taste.” Lois stared back at him—or his back, rather—not at first gathering the full import of his words; and then, when she did, she felt herself flushing wildly, and growing agitated. At the same time she also felt

once more just a little indignant.

“But is that so difficult to understand?” she asked, and he turned and regarded her narrowly. Her eyes stared at him, soft and confused, but determined to get this matter straight somehow. “You are my employer. ... On the only occasion I did dine with you I had the feeling that you were a little bored by—by the necessity of dining alone with me! After all, I am merely an employee—your son’s governess. . . . And there will be occasions when you have guests when neither they nor I would feel happy.”

“Why not?” he enquired, in a stern, sharp voice. “Because”—she made a little helpless movement with her shoulders—“because, from the point of view of your guests, I am just an employee. And from my own point of view I haven’t the right sort of clothes.... I mean I haven’t enough clothes for evenings.”

“You always look very well dressed to me,” he told her. She flashed him a look that was tinged with gratitude. “Nevertheless, senhor, I could hardly compare with your friends. And I’d feel happier if you wouldn’t insist upon my dining in the main dining room at night.”