Red Lotus

by Catherine Airlie

  He had not looked in her companion's direction, but Felicity was quite sure that he had recognized Don Rafael and disapproved of him It was even more than ordinary disapproval, she felt, as the suggestion of an intense and bitter antagonism rose between them, making her feel unsure and curiously at a loss as she sought for something conventional to say with which to bridge the gap.

  "It was very kind of you to come to meet me, Mr. Arnold," she acknowledged, holding out her hand. "But—my uncle—"

  The expression in the blue eyes changed as Philip Arnold glanced back towards the car he had just left. The engine was still running, accentuating the suggestion of impatience which she had felt so strongly at their first contact, and it seemed that he was eager to drive away.

  "I'm afraid my news is not good," he said. "Your uncle had a serious relapse during the night and the doctor was still with him when I left San Lozaro just over an hour ago."

  "Oh—!"

  The colour ran swiftly out of Felicity's cheeks and only the firm pressure of Philip Arnold's strong brown fingers seemed to steady her as she stood there with the cold little wind from the mountains brushing against her. In some way it seemed to have entered her heart, like the chill premonition of disaster, although the sun still shone brilliantly above her and the wide expanse of the heavens was very blue.

  "We can talk more easily in the car." Philip Arnold released her hand and turned towards the waiting vehicle. "I should like to get back to San Lozaro as quickly as possible."

  For the first time he looked in Don Rafael's direction, and the Marques bowed and smiled a little mockingly.

  "Good day, Philip!" he said briefly. "We have not met for quite a long time. But then, I have been much away from the island and you are not socially inclined. Is it not so?"

  "I have little time for the gay whirligig, if that's what you mean," Arnold returned with the briefness of dismissal. "We have been more than busy on the estate."

  "Ah! the estate," Don Rafael mused. "Of course, I must not forget that its welfare is very near to your heart!"

  Suddenly Felicity felt her nerves on edge. Why were they fencing with words like this? Or wasn't it Don Rafael who was sparring, thrusting with those queer double-edged innuendoes which meant nothing to her who did not really know either of them, but seemed capable of increasing the other man's wrath. Philip Arnold, she realized, was not even trying to hide his dislike now. He possessed none of the Marques de Barrios's finesse where words were concerned and no desire, perhaps, to hide the fact that they had little in common but their mutual hatred.

  The last word sprang out at her with unguarded ferocity. Why should she imagine that such an emotion existed between them after such a short time in their company? Was it because she realized that her uncle's agent was the type of man who would not try to conceal such a thing,

  even for convention's sake, and because she felt instinctively that a man of his calibre would not hate easily?

  As she got in the car beside him she wondered what there could possibly be between these two which would occasion such bitter enmity.

  Don Rafael came to stand beside her, holding her hand and raising it slowly to his lips as they said goodbye.

  "You will permit me to see you again," he asked, "even in the face of opposition?"

  The colour ran swiftly into her cheeks and a small hard core of resentment took root in her heart.

  "Why not, Don Rafael?" she returned. "You have been very kind. I should have found the journey much more difficult if you had not been so helpful at Las Palmas." She drew her hand away, trying not to feel embarrassed by his kiss. "Thank you for my first real Spanish meal," she added with a smile.

  "I hope it will not be the last meal we will enjoy together," Don Rafael said as her new escort let in his clutch. "You will pass on my deepest felicitations to your uncle, I hope, and I sincerely trust that he will soon be well enough to manage his own affairs again."

  He had made the little speech without looking at the stern man behind the wheel, but Felicity knew that the sharp barb had been deliberately directed at Philip Arnold. Now, beyond doubting, she was sure of bad blood between these two, stirred deliberately by the Marques for his own amusement.

  Yet, behind the façade of the Spaniard's smile, a strange sort of caution lurked, the reflection of which was not to be seen in Philip Arnold's hard blue eyes.

  As the car moved away Don Rafael made her a small, half-mocking bow and she lifted her gloved hand in salute almost with a feeling of relief.

  For several minutes, while the big, open car gathered speed as it travelled westwards, Philip Arnold did not speak. The land on either side of the arrow-straight roadway was rough and covered in gorse until it sloped upwards to the edge of the deciduous forest which clothed the mountainsides to the north and west, and it was all so suddenly and so unexpectedly like her native Devonshire in high summer that Felicity caught her lip sharply between her teeth as a nostalgic flood of memory swept over her.

  The high reaches of Dartmoor made just such a picture, with Ryder's Hill and High Willhays windswept in the distance. She had not expected the sudden change of scene, the familiarity of landscape which rushed her thoughts back to the past, to home and friendship and the memory of the mother she had lost.

  "Can you tell me about my uncle, Mr. Arnold?" she asked when she could trust her voice. "You said just now that he was seriously ill."

  Her companion kept his eyes fixed steadily ahead, although he could have turned them for a moment from that long, straight road to look at her. She felt that his anger was still perilously near the surface, that it had been curbed only by the utmost effort of will-power, and that he would not trust himself to speak until he had put as much distance as possible between them and the airport.

  The thought also occurred to her that he had not offered Rafael de Barrios a lift, although they were going in the same direction, but, of course, he might have seen the Marques' car waiting for him among the many others at the airport.

  "Your uncle is more seriously ill than I care to admit," he said stiltedly. Most of the anger had gone from his voice, but there was still a reserve in him which bordered on distrust. "He has had these seizures at recurring intervals during the past six years, but lately they have been getting more severe. This present one has left him very weak."

  Felicity pressed her hands tightly together as the car began to go steadily downhill.

  "Are you trying to tell me that my uncle—may not recover?" she asked.

  The blue eyes were suddenly narrowed.

  "We have to consider that possibility," he said.

  "But—his family? The responsibility for the estate and the children's future?"

  "I don't think you need to concern yourself about that," he said abruptly. "Your uncle will have made adequate provision for every emergency."

  It was not what she had meant. She had suddenly been concerned with loss, with roots being torn up and a home abandoned. The events leading up to her own recent bereavement were too close, too near at hand, for her not

  to be able to feel for her cousins in similar circumstances. The loss of their only remaining parent would be the chief tragedy, and even if her uncle had already put his house in order, as this man suggested, there would still be the problem of holding a young family together.

  "I'm afraid I'm not being very helpful," she admitted. "I'm even rather vague about why my uncle wanted me to come here—apart from the fact that I was alone after my mother died. It was generous of him to send for me because of that, but I do know he had work for me to do here. He said so in his letters, but I wish I knew a little more about the family. It seems so incongruous to be so vague about one's relations."

  He smiled at that, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but he slowed down the car a little as the distant coastline came into view, saying almost conversationally:

  "Your uncle sent for you to preserve the status quo at San Lozaro, Miss Stanmore. I hope you are going to succee
d, of course, but it is no use my pretending at this stage that you are going to have an easy task."

  Felicity drew in a deep breath. His reticence and the quite maddening reserve in him was not helpful, but until she knew more about San Lozaro and what her uncle expected her to do there it was impossible for her to approach the situation with any degree of confidence.

  "Perhaps if you would suggest where I might fail," she challenged, "it would be helpful. You obviously think that I am not the right person for the job."

  "I haven't the vaguest idea about your capabilities, one way or another," he told her with apparent indifference. "I was offering some sort of warning, I suppose, but perhaps it would have been better if I had let you find these things out for yourself."

  "Because you think I am the sort of person who won't take advice?" she queried, aware that she had set the seal on their animosity by her previous remark. "You're quite wrong about that," she added half angrily when he made no immediate reply. "I do need advice. I am in a strange country. I have no knowledge of Spanish ways, and I feel that I owe it to my uncle to learn."

  "That will not be easy," he said, "but I would advise you to approach it by some other way than by accepting tuition from Rafael de Barrios."

  The swift colour of angry embarrassment flooded Felicity's cheeks.

  "I have known the Marques for only a few hours," she pointed out stiffly, "and I have no reason to believe that his kindness was anything but kindly meant!"

  The line of his jaw hardened aggressively as his hands tightened their grip on the wheel. She saw the knuckles standing out white on them for a moment before he said, with apparent indifference:

  "As you will. But it would be just as well to realize that he is not a welcome visitor at San Lozaro."

  She could not ask him why, because the dark tension on his face left her no room for doubt about the seriousness of the enmity which existed between him and Rafael de Barrios. She could not probe for the truth because she knew that this man would not be drawn, that what lay deeply in his heart would not be easily exposed.

  Looking at the dark, closed face and the stern brows drawn above the narrowed blue eyes, she was suddenly reminded of the barren places of El Teide, the remote giant of a mountain which stood aloofly apart from the ordinary doings of mankind.

  "How far have we to go?" she asked, wishing already that their journey was over.

  "I'm afraid we have quite a way to go yet," he admitted. "San Lozaro is a remote valley running inland from the coast. It is cut off completely by the Pico de Tiede."

  The word "isolated" hung between them for a moment, drumming in Felicity's ears. Don Rafael had warned her to expect loneliness, but she had not really thought about it until now. The fact that San Lozaro was "cut off" seemed to convey even more than ordinary loneliness and isolation, yet it might only have been Philip Arnold's remote approach which suggested a valley beyond contact with the outside world.

  The car was going rapidly downhill now, on a road that wound, in a series of hair-raising bends, towards the coast. A wide, fertile valley opened at their feet. Mile upon mile, a green sea of banana fronds undulated in the sunlight in waves of light and shade, sweeping down to the very edge of the Atlantic to be arrested on the dark shore by a band of lacy white. The true waves broke here, gently, caressing-

  ly, as if the great ocean itself approached these fortunate isles with respect.

  "It's utterly lovely!" Felicity exclaimed involuntarily. "Far more beautiful than I had ever dreamed."

  "Orotava is a show-place," he agreed, "but we have other valleys equally picturesque in the south."

  He had not said that San Lozaro was beautiful. In fact, Felicity thought, he had said very little about San Lozaro at all.

  "Mr. Arnold," she asked abruptly, "what exactly is your position in my uncle's household?"

  He negotiated a bend in the treacherous road before replying.

  "In his household, none at all," he said, "at the present moment."

  "And the plantations?"

  "I am your uncle's agent and the estate manager." "And, in most things, your word is law?"

  The compressed lips relaxed a little.

  "If you care to put it like that," he agreed.

  So, now we know where we stand, Felicity thought. She was still far from feeling at ease in this man's company, and she had the unnerving impression that her arrival in the care of the Marques de Barrios had more than a little to do with the chilly reception she had received.

  They could sort that out later, however. He seemed to be anxious to reach their destination in the shortest possible space of time, and she sat back in the car by his side giving herself up to the wonder of the drive in silence.

  Once they had reached the coast road every turn of the way became a new miracle of lavish colour and long, unexpected vistas of deep valleys running far in from the sea. It was spring, and the rains had come, and all the terraces were a living sheet of emerald, with the almond trees above them smothered in pale pink blossom, as if they wore a cap of snow flushed with sun, like El Teide himself.

  The shadow of the great mountain was everywhere, sometimes benign, sometimes terrible in its isolation. Broad streams of lava lay greyly arrested in silent barrancos that were grimly devoid of life, but in others it seemed that nature had been almost too prolific with her gifts. Masses of bougainvillaea tumbled over garden walls in the villages

  through which they passed, and she caught intriguing glimpses of creeper-covered patios and the soft green of shutters on balcony windows, from behind which the inhabitants peeped at them as they sped on their hurried way.

  There were so many flowers that she could not name them with any certainty, and she could not ask her silent escort to enlighten her. Here and there he named a village for her—Realejo Bajo and San Juan de la Rambla, hugging the steep, indented coastline, and Icod with its ancient Dragon tree, reputed to be over a thousand years old. But always there was the sense of tension between them, the desire in him to reach the end of their journey so that he might pass on his responsibility for her to someone else.

  Of course, he could be feeling concern about her uncle, she conceded, and her own concern deepened as they neared their destination.

  For the past few miles the road had been extremely lonely, although no less lovely in character. It had turned away from the sea and faced The Peak, and here and there Felicity had caught glimpses of silent, devastated valleys whose sheer sides ran blackly down to a narrow plain, dominated always by one of the lesser peaks which skirted El Teide. The great range of ragged red pinnacles all but circled them, and not so long ago, she realized, these smaller peaks had been active. They were the blow-holes leading from the main volcanic mass, the giant mountain's safety-valves, but they were capable of wreaking their own destruction in a minor way. The earth surrounding some of them was burned black and the grey lava lay like a terrible, dark river flooding over the hillside.

  "In time," her companion told her, following her shocked gaze, "these valleys will be workable again, and then it is the most fertile land in the world."

  "Is San Lozaro volcanic?" she asked.

  "We have our resident peak," he smiled, "but it is at the very head of the valley, too far away to cause any real trouble. It hasn't erupted for over a hundred years."

  They drove on in silence, still with El Teide rising grandly above them, majestic, aloof, disquieting in so many ways. Then, abruptly, Philip Arnold turned the car off the wider road into a deep green valley.

  The whole impression was one of swaying leaves as the

  deep-green fronds of the banana trees lifted like a slow-moving tide beneath the paler green of the palms. Higher up, on the slopes of the hillsides, the narrow terraces which she had come to expect ran in their neat, parallel lines as far as the eye could see, clothed with vines, and here and there a vivid scarlet splash of colour rose up as if in defiance of the eternal green.

  Felicity had noticed these vividl
y-red blossoms all the way along the road, but never in such profusion as this. They had flared in a field or over the wall of a cottage garden, but here they seemed to dominate the whole valley. She wanted to ask her companion about them, but they were approaching an archway in a high pink stucco wall and she knew that they had reached San Lozaro, at last.

  They drove into an enclosed garden full of flowers, and rioting everywhere, over walls and ancient steps and seats and ornamental urns, flared the bright-red blossom which she could not name.

  "The native lotus," Philip Arnold said with a shrug. "It grows everywhere and is at its most flamboyant at this time of year. The people in the valley call it the 'flower of love.'

  His voice, hard with sudden cynicism, had thrust love out. He had no use for it, Felicity supposed, no desire to be entangled in its delicate web, as the groping, grey-green fronds of the lotus entangled the valley where he made his home.

  She turned away, curiously disappointed, curiously chilled, and they drove steadily towards the house.

  It stood on a narrow terrace looking down across the plantations towards the distant sea, its mellow, golden walls almost hidden by hanging vines and creepers. Purple bougainvillaea cascaded from little carved balconies almost to the tiled floor of the central patio, where a fountain splashed into a carved basin to keep the air moist and cool, and two white doves rose and circled above the garden at their approach.

  It was all so still and beautiful that the raucous voices issuing from the house seemed doubly harsh in Felicity's ears, and she saw her companion frown as he glanced beyond the patio into the coolly-shaded interior where,

  apparently, the arrival of the car had been the signal for the disturbance.

  "You will grow used to the noise made by the average female Spanish servant in time," he observed. "They appear to believe that if they rush around and talk a lot it gives the impression of tremendous diligence."

  In a second or two the squabbling ceased and a small, rotund woman with anxious, fearful eyes hurried out to the pavement.