Love is for Ever (7 page)

“Because I thought you would like to see the view,” he told her. “Because it’s one of the finest views on the island, and this being your first day here is surely the day when you should receive your most favorable impressions.”

She had the feeling that he was laughing at her a little—that his indignation with her was over, and that now he was extracting amusement from her.

“Tell me,” he said, “something more of the kind of life you lead in London.”

“It would be too dull to offer you any diversion.”

“I am not seeking diversion. I am seeking information—about you!”

She looked sideways at him again under the sloping brim of her coolie-shaped straw hat, and her grey eyes looked all at once a little perplexed and doubtful.

“There is no reason why you should seek information about me, Mr. Errol. I am your grandmother’s guest. My father worked here on Sansegovia—”

“I’m sorry about your father,” he said quietly, with sudden complete seriousness. “In fact, I’m terribly sorry. I should have told you so before.”

“That’s all right,” she said, and fumbled with the clasp of her handbag.

He looked at her thoughtfully.

“For you it has meant a complete change of plans. Instead of the shop and the antiques you had hoped to come out here and keep house for your father?”

“Yes,” Jacqueline admitted, but checked the sigh that rose up in her throat.

Dominic produced his cigarette case and offered it to her. As she was about to refuse he said:

“Smoke a cigarette with me—it is companionable,” and there was a hint of persuasion in his voice.

"Very well,” she said, and somewhat to her surprise he lighted one for her and passed it to her.

For one instant before she put it to her lips, after coming straight from his, she felt the oddest sensation attack her. She found herself looking at him, noting the sheer beauty of the lines of his face, and particularly the lines of his mouth—the hint of a curious kind of sweetness at the corners, especially when he was half smiling and looking at her, as he was looking at her just then. And his eyes seemed to be set a little obliquely, unless it was the way his eyelashes grew, and his eyebrows were beautifully marked. And his hair grew in a slight, interesting wave back from his forehead.

“Well?” he said, as she hesitated before placing her cigarette between her lips; and then she drew at it rather hurriedly and looked away.

“Tell me,” he said again, “why was it you waited so long before you joined your father? Why did you not come to him, for instance, straight from school?”

“Because,” she answered, with a sigh which she was unable to check this time, “there was my mother, and I couldn’t leave her. ”

“Yet your father—” a little dryly—“had to fend for himself!”

“That,” she admitted, “was something which always worried me, but there was nothing very much I could do about it. You see,” she explained, “my father and mother parted when I was very young.”

“That,” he admitted, “was unfortunate.” His voice sounded sober. All at once, she thought, as she stole a look at him, his whole expression was extremely sober, and he looked away from her out over the island and the sea. “It is always a pity,” he observed, “when two people who marry—no doubt for love in the beginning—find it impossible to go on living with one another. That is why one should be very careful about choosing a marriage partner.”

“But in Spain,” she reminded him, “there is not very much question of any choice, is there? These things are arranged.”

“In many cases they are arranged, but in just as many cases a man, or a woman, is selected because—at the time he or she seems to be the most desirable of his or her sex! And that means that even in Spain men and women marry for love, and love

alone!”

“Which doesn’t always prove sufficient to keep a marriage on an even keel!”

“That is because it is the wrong sort of love. Love is for ever—or should be once it is actually acknowledged!” He was still staring dreamily at the skyline, where the phantom shape of a passing vessel showed up against the widening band of gold. “Love, like lightning, devastates when it strikes, and having struck creates havoc which can never be repaired, and therefore the mark it leaves is there for all time.”

Jacqueline felt faintly amazed to hear him utter words of this kind, and when he turned and looked at her some of the amazement was plainly written in her eyes for him to see.

He smiled in his attractively crooked fashion. “Is it that you do not agree with me?” he asked. “You have, perhaps, a poor opinion of love?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, simply. “I've never been in love.”

‘You feel that it is necessary to be cautious, looking upon the experience of your parents as something which should warn you to take care?”

“No,” she answered, after a moment’s pause, looking down at the flower she had tucked into her belt, and which now was sadly wilting. “I shouldn’t think it is possible to take heed of warnings when one meets someone with something so compelling about them that all one wants to do is to link one’s life with theirs.”

“I quite agree with you, little one,” he told her, and reached out and took the flower she was gently caressing from her fingers and fastened it in his lapel. “In love it must be ‘all or nothing’! There can be no retreat and no pretense, and no shrinking even from the thought of disaster.”

She looked at the crumpled pink blossom in his buttonhole. ‘You can’t wear that,” she said. “It is practically dead.”

“Never mind," he replied. “I shall keep it and press it in a book and it will remind me always of this afternoon.”

Jacqueline studied his face carefully, but although she was sure there was a little mockery in his eyes the curve of his mouth was almost gentle.

She looked away from him and out once more across the island of Sansegovia. For perhaps five minutes they both sat there without saying a word, a curious peacefulness in the atmosphere between them, a feeling that although their acquaintance was so brief—and she, at least, had disapproved of him in the beginning, and been indignant with him only a short half-hour before—their minds just then were entirely in tune, and the beauty surrounding them was more than enough for them both. In his case familiarity might have bred contempt, but it obviously had not, because of the absorbed expression on his face as he sat beside her and quietly enjoyed one of his favorite views, and Jacqueline forgot to wonder what he had done with Martine, and why at that moment he was not dancing attendance on her, and felt the spell of the island growing moment by moment. Until at last he roused himself and asked her, with a faint smile:

“And what are you thinking of now, little Miss Jacqueline Vaizey?”

“I was wondering,” she admitted at once, her small face a little shadowed, “whether perhaps you could tell me where my— where my father ...?”

“Over there,” he said at once, indicating the pink tower of a church, and she felt instant appreciation because he understood her so readily. “It is a little village called San Agariu, and your father was particularly fond of it. I will drive you to it whenever you wish to go, as naturally you will wish to do.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Errol,” she responded gratefully.

“My name is Dominic,” he told her, as he started up the car.

“Nevertheless, I think I—I think I would prefer to call you Mr. Errol!”

“It was Senor Errol last night,” he reminded her, with a faintly amused smile. “Do you feel that I have grown a little more English overnight?”

She did not reply to this, but as they drove back by the way they had come she turned his question over in her mind and decided that, even if he still did not strike her as particularly English, at least there was something—at times—very likable about him.

Which, Dr. Barr would no doubt have warned her, was one of Senor Cortina’s grandson’s dangerous attractions. He could be extremely likeable at times.

They dined that night at the house of Senor Montez, where his nephew was still staying, and Jacqueline found it a far pleasanter evening than the evening of her arrival. For one thing she was feeling considerably more relaxed and refreshed than just after her journey from England, and Senor Montez laid so much emphasis on the fact that she was a particularly welcome guest that she could not but feel a little flattered, although the nephew was still sunk in moroseness and was not much help to his uncle when it came to entertaining guests.

And Dominic, to her amazement, accorded her almost as much attention as he accorded Martine. This might have been because Martine was plainly in rather a bad temper about something, and was inclined to snub him when she came down from her room after changing for dinner, and he offered to provide her with a drink before they left.

“I don’t want anything to drink,” the American girl answered pettishly, “and I can’t think what happened to you this afternoon after we got back from our picnic. I told you I was going to rest, but I didn’t expect you to disappear altogether, and you where nowhere about when I came down after tea.” She was looking so lovely in an emerald gown that left her shoulders quite bare, and fitted the rest of her body like a glove, and so almost childishly injured that Jacqueline found herself wondering how Dominic could content himself with merely smiling at her as if he was quite undisturbed, when she herself felt almost guilty. For it was she who had been responsible for keeping the host away from his own particular guest.

Dominic, as he had done the night before with Jacqueline, insisted on Martine accepting a drink, but she was not easily mollified. She looked across at Jacqueline and enquired rather sulkily:

“Have you had a good day, Miss Vaizey? And do you think you’re going to like Sansegovia?”

“I’ve loved Sansegovia since I was twelve,” Jacqueline answered truthfully.

Martine’s slim eyebrows ascended a little. “I’ve never been particularly fond of islands. They give me a feeling of being cut off.” She glanced at Dominic as if expecting to see him betray concern, but his expression remained quite unrevealing as he quietly smoked a cigarette. “And island peoples are rather primitive.”

Jacqueline felt a little shocked. Surely she wasn’t referring to the Cortinas and their friends, who in any case hailed from Toledo and looked upon the island as a kind of summer paradise?

But Dominic merely continued to smile thoughtfully at the tip of his cigarette.

“Tell me exactly how you've spent your day?” Miss Howard demanded, still addressing Jacqueline, and lying back in her chair as if she was bored in any case, but could stand just a

little bit more boredom. Jacqueline complied with the request.

“I visited the Senora Cortina this morning—”

“Oh! I thought she was ill!”

“She’s better today—much better.”

“But I should have thought visitors were a bit of a strain. How long did you stay?”

Jacqueline looked surprised, but answered truthfully:

“About an hour—perhaps a little longer. I can't be certain."

She saw Martine’s green eyes grow coldly surprised.

“On the only occasion when I was invited to visit the Senora I was asked to sit down for a bare few minutes,” she said, “and then the Senora appeared exhausted, so I was politely requested to terminate my visit.”

She looked at Dominic almost accusingly.

“My grandmother tires easily,” he murmured smoothly.

“But not, apparently, on the occasions when Miss Vaizey visits her!”

“Miss Vaizey is rather different—” he glanced at Jacqueline as if trying to decide where the main difference lay—“and, in any case, she is not a stranger to our island. Her father lived here for years, and that I think gives her the right to be considered as an islander herself!”

His smile at the English girl was the nicest, she decided, she had yet received from him. And then he rather spoiled the impression of shared friendliness and warmth by informing Martine with a dry note in his voice:

“Miss Vaizey had tea with Dr. Barr this afternoon, and that was undoubtedly the highlight of her day!”

“Oh, really?” Martine exclaimed, and the expression on her face altered instantly. A kind of sparkling amusement appeared in her eyes, and her voice, too, grew dry with amusement—backed by something which might have been an unacknowledged relief. “So you find him as attractive as all that, do you?” looking across at the younger girl. “Personally, I think he is
very
attractive—but, then, doctors usually are, aren’t they? And in this case he must seem more like an old friend of your family ...”

It was plain, as she went on studying the embarrassed and faintly annoyed Jacqueline, that her amusement was growing, as well as for some reason her satisfaction. And then she added that if that was the way the wind was likely to blow they must get Dr. Barr to join them on bathing picnics, and other outings, and Dominic must make a point of inviting him to dinner fairly often—much more often than he had hitherto done.

“In fact, you haven’t been terribly kind to poor Dr. Barr, not since I arrived here, anyway,” with the pettish note returned to her voice, and sliding her green eyes round at him reproachfully. “But as Miss Vaizey’s interests must be studied, and he is an old friend of her father’s, you’ll have to revise some of your ideas and be a little more hospitable to one of her own fellow countrymen.”