Love is for Ever (6 page)

There could have been another reason why he met her at the harbor, took it upon himself to dismiss the Cortina car, and transported her himself on the last lap of her journey.

“Miss Howard is very beautiful,” she said suddenly, as if she expected him to react in some way to the statement, which was no more than the truth.

But his blue eyes remained smiling and veiled.

“Yes,” he agreed, "very beautiful."

“The Senora Cortina is a little afraid that her beauty has had some effect on the Senor Cortina—I find it so difficult to call him Mr. Errol!” she explained. “She is a little afraid that he might decide to marry her.”

“Oh!” Neville exclaimed, and one of his eyebrows went up, and his voice sounded suddenly dry. “I don’t think the Senora Cortina need really concern herself with the marriage prospects or plans of her grandson. When—and
if
-—he decides to marry, he will let his decision become known in the forthright manner he has of letting other decisions become known. And as he has a reputation for finding young women with the charms of Miss Howard an irresistible magnet for a short while only, I don’t think the
senora
has cause to worry overmuch at the present time.”

“I see,” Jacqueline murmured, and stared hard at the cake she had commenced to nibble, seeing in it curiously enough the challenging blue of Dominic’s eyes, with their sooty eyelashes, and the perfect whiteness of his teeth when he smiled in his crooked fashion.

Neville let his eyes rest on her thoughtfully. “And whatever
you
do, my dear, don’t allow yourself to be led astray by any interest he might suddenly display in you,” he warned her. He smiled to soften his words, or perhaps to make light of them. “And as you come into the same category as Miss Howard there’s a strong possibility that he might do so!”

Jacqueline felt herself stiffen.

“I can’t imagine Mr. Errol taking any notice of me at any time,” she answered. “So far, I’m sure, he regards me as an unnecessary guest, and but for his natural politeness would ignore me altogether.”

“Oh, he has a great deal of natural politeness—I’ll grant you that,” Neville admitted. “But wellborn Spaniards regard politeness as an essential virtue. The important thing to remember about Dominic is that he is only half Spanish, and the other half of him is English. Many of his instincts are at war with one another—or so I sometimes think. He has the cool-headedness of an Englishman allied to the unpredictableness of a Spaniard. He is also dangerously good-looking, and was born with what is generally known as a silver spoon in his mouth—only in his case I’d say it was a golden one!”

“You make him sound quite a menace,” Jacqueline remarked, swallowing the last crumb of her cake and declining to be tempted to another.

“A menace?” the doctor echoed, and stared at the glowing tip of his cigarette. “Well, he could become a menace—if a young woman like you, for instance, ever decided to think seriously of him!”

And then car wheels sounded outside on the gravel of the drive, and looking up quickly Jacqueline saw that an enormous, pearl-grey colored car had come to rest at the foot of the verandah steps, and the next moment a tall, spare figure in an immaculate white suit descended from the driving-seat and slammed the car door behind him with a movement of unrestrained impatience.

Jacqueline looked quickly at her host. Her eyes, also a little surprised, said:

“Talking of menaces!...”

CHAPTER FIVE

Jacqueline was looking demurely down at the skirt of her dress and brushing a few crumbs from it when Dominic Errol appeared in the doorway to the living room. She heard Dr. Barr greet him coolly:

“Oh, good afternoon, Errol!” He stood up rather lazily. “You haven’t come to collect Miss Vaizey, have you? I telephoned to say she was here.”

“That’s what I have come for,” Dominic answered, and to Jacqueline his voice sounded cold and clipped and almost harsh. “My aunt thought it desirable that I should collect her at once, as we are dining out this evening and Miss Vaizey will have insufficient time to dress.” He looked directly at Jacqueline, and his blue eyes seemed to her to sparkle like stars on a frosty night. “Are you ready to leave, Miss Vaizey?”

Jacqueline’s slim eyebrows met in a tiny pucker above her grey eyes.

"But isn’t it rather early,” she suggested, “to be thinking about dinner? I’ve only just finished tea, which Dr. Barr kindly gave me. And last night, if I remember rightly, it was quite late when we dined.”

“Nevertheless, I’d be glad if you could drag yourself away now!”

There was no doubt about it, his voice was edged with noticeable sarcasm, and he was plainly displeased about something.

She stood up. She looked across at Dr. Barr, but apart from the merest suspicion of a smile in his eyes—a rather odd smile at that—his expression gave away little. She held out her hand to him a little hesitantly.

“Thank you, Doctor,” she said, “for giving me tea. Another day I should like to see the clinic if you have the time to spare to show me round.”

“I can always make time to show you round. Miss Vaizey,” Neville Barr replied, with what she thought was a faint emphasis on the ‘I’.

She moved down the verandah steps to the car, and Dominic held open the door beside the driving-seat for her. She felt the superbly sprung seat yield beneath her light weight, and Dominic looked at her carefully to make sure she was quite comfortable before he closed the car door upon her. Then, as if his natural good manners had surged a little to the fore, he turned to Jacqueline’s recent host and said: “My aunt would be glad if you would dine with us one evening this week, Barr, if you are not otherwise tied up. Any evening, so long as you let us know beforehand that we may expect you. ”

“Thank you,” Neville replied, in that rather indolently pleasant voice of his. “That will be delightful. I will get in touch with your aunt and thank her personally, and suggest tomorrow evening if that is not too soon.”

Then the big grey car slid away from the foot of the verandah steps, and Jacqueline felt her breath catch as the instant acceleration caused them to skim like a bird up the brief rise which led to the broader main road. And once on that Dominic proceeded to let her see what the car was really capable of, and she watched the speedometer swing from fifty to sixty miles an hour, and finally touch eighty. As it was an open car, and the heat of the afternoon had not yet even started to abate, the rush of air past her ears and over her head was, Jacqueline found, both pleasant and exhilarating, but after only a few minutes devoted to this sort of thing Dominic slowed the car and glanced at her sideways.

“If we travel too fast we shall get there too soon,” he remarked, “and there is something I wish to say to you.”

“Oh, yes?” Jacqueline enquired, and sent a sideways glance at him also. She had the feeling that something was coming.

“Were you so anxious to see Dr. Barr again that you had to rush off and visit him on only the first day after your arrival here?” he asked.

Jacqueline was so surprised that for a few moments she found it impossible to frame a reply. Then a quick little spurt of anger leapt in her.

“How—how dare you say a thing like that?” she demanded.

He shrugged his white-clad, beautifully held shoulders.

“Because it is obvious that you were touched by the fact that he met you yesterday, that you found his appearance—or something else about him—charming, and today you could not resist the temptation to see more of him. You are as transparent as that!”

“I—I—” Jacqueline stammered, anger causing her to do so.

The car was now doing no more than a gentle thirty miles an hour, negotiating the rough surface of the road with effortless ease, and he sent her another deeply blue look—and this time she thought it was full of contempt, and his lips curled also.

“If it were not so nothing would have induced you to visit your father’s bungalow so soon—the place where he lived and died, and which must be full of memories for you, some of them a little painful to recall! And certainly if you had felt you must visit it you would have contented yourself with seeing over his clinic, which he not only started but regarded as his life-work, and not taken tea instead with Dr. Barr!”

“Dr. Barr assured me that there was nothing in the bungalow which would remind me of my father.” Her hands were clasped tightly together in her lap, and she had actually turned a little pale. “I—I did not want to be reminded—so soon! —but I was out walking by myself and his car caught me up and he offered me tea. It never occurred to me that to take tea with one of my own fellow countrymen would be to present you with an opportunity to insult me!” she concluded, with a slight tremor in her voice.

“Oh, come now—” his voice was smooth and drawling, and his beautifully-shaped hands looked relaxed on the wheel—“it isn’t insulting to suggest that Dr. Barr has made a conquest! Or that you were a willing victim!”

“I think you’re insufferable,” she told him.

“And I think you’re far too attractive to be permitted to wander alone on our island roads. Why was it that you decided to take a

solitary walk?”

“Because there was no one else to walk with,” she shot back at

him, in a kind of triumph. “And presumably I
may
take a walk

when I wish to do so?”

“Only when there is someone to accompany you.” His black brows were frowning at the road ahead. “And I imagined that with
Tia
Lola and my grandmother you would find enough to occupy

you for today.”

She looked at him in amazement.

While he, and Martine, went out on some excursion together—which she realized was nothing at all to do with her!—
he
expected
her
to conform to some undiscussed plan, and display no initiative on her own account! Even his grandmother had not laid down hard and fast rules as to how she was to amuse herself during her visit.

“I think,” she said, quietly, “that you forget that I am not Spanish—and that goes for sudden infatuations, too! In England,

when you've been brought up to earn your own living, you don’t form them all that hurriedly!”

“Don’t you?” There was a sudden note of whimsicality in his voice, and all at once he sounded a trifle penitent. “I’m sorry,” he said, “if I’ve annoyed you.”

“You haven’t annoyed me,” stiffly. “But if my visit here means that I am not to be permitted any freedom I think it would have been better if I hadn’t come.”

“But, most decidedly not!” he told her. “I think it would have been a great pity if you hadn’t come, and it is merely that I object to your taking solitary country walks which result in your being overtaken by enterprising young men like Neville Barr.” She was so obsessed by her resentment that she hadn’t noticed that, once more increasing his speed, he had allowed the car to sweep past the rosy-roofed villas she had admired earlier that day, and even the curly wrought-iron gates leading to the Cortina villa had been left behind, and that the country was becoming far less civilized, but infinitely beautiful. “Tell me,” he said, before she suddenly realized that instead of being in a hurry he was taking her on a kind of tour of the island, “what would a young woman like you do in order to earn her own living in England?”

“I was a shop assistant,” she answered, and felt that she had staggered him a trifle.

“A—shop assistant?”

‘Yes.” She looked round at him in cold amusement. “I sold antiques in a little shop off the King’s Road, Chelsea. I imagine you do know London?”

“Oh, yes,” with a return of the bent brows. “I know London very well. But how long have you been disposing of antiques in Chelsea?"

“Oh,” she made a rough calculation, “about three years. For two of them I lived with my mother, but for the last year my employer, a dear old man called Maplethorpe, let me occupy the tiny flat above his shop.”

“Alone?” he asked.

“Why, naturally, alone!”

He brought the car to a sudden standstill, and she looked about her and uttered a little gasp of appreciation. They had climbed, without her realizing it, from the level of the waterfront to a peak of the island from which all the beauties of it fell away from them on all sides, and wherever they turned their eyes it meant looking over a wilderness of color to the sea which surrounded them. Amongst such a collection of hues green predominated, for there were so many trees on the island—the dark green of pines, the dusty green of palms, the shimmer of eucalyptus. And here and there were the vivid clumps of hibiscus, of jacaranda, of plumbago, and the unexpected white of arum lilies.

The scents of heavenly perfumed growing things floated on the air, and Jacqueline thought suddenly that such intoxicating perfume might well drug the senses if one inhaled deeply enough of it. But nevertheless she inhaled deeply, while her charmed eyes followed the path of the sun as it slipped westwards over the sea. Already the blue of the sky was turning to gold low down on the horizon, and the sea itself looked like a blaze of larkspur.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “What a—what a wonderful view!” And then she turned to him. “But I thought you were in a great hurry! Why have we come up here?”