But she wasn’t reading. Even Jamie sensed that, and he looked at her once or twice as if something about her perplexed him a little.
“Was my papa very angry with you when he took you downstairs to the library?” he asked once. “Did he speak to you as he spoke to Josie once when she put me to bed without a light, and I had a bad nightmare and wakened and screamed because I was all in the dark and I didn’t know where I was?”
“How old were you when that happened?” Lois asked, smiling at him a little listlessly.
“It was not very long ago, but I had been ill, and I had a lot of bad nightmares as soon as I went to bed.”
“Then it was very wrong of Josie not to leave you a light,” Lois told him, and he clambered to his feet and limped across to her.
“That is what papa said.” He leaned against her knee, and looked up into her face. “Was papa very cross?”
She smoothed his unruly dark curls back from his brow, and smiled at him this time in a manner that troubled him.
“I deserved it,” she answered. “I should have kept a closer watch on you, although I have warned you frequently, haven’t I?” As he nodded his head in instant agreement with her she gave him a little hug, and then sighed. “But I don’t think your papa thinks I’m a very suitable person to look after you any longer.”
Jamie looked alarmed.
“You don’t mean that he will send you away?”
Lois sighed again.
“He may not send me away, but the question is— ought I to remain?”
“Of course you ought!” Jamie clutched at her with both hands. “I don’t want you to go away, Lois—it wouldn’t be nearly so nice here if you went away!”
“Wouldn’t it, darling?” She was grateful for the impulsive warmth of his speech, and she didn’t want him to see how it moved her. “Well, perhaps if I promise not to
drown you in the pool. . . .”
But when Josie had collected him for his bath and his supper, and she was alone with her own thoughts, Lois felt far less optimistic about the chances of her remaining. Those twenty minutes in the library with Dom Julyan had been extremely unpleasant, and she was not likely to forget them for a very long while. Her employer had paced up and down the library as if every movement he made was impelled by some inner, seething resentment, and she realized that it was as much as he could do to be polite to her. Only his natural good breeding and innate good manners prevented him, she felt sure, from lashing out at her in a very harsh manner indeed.
As it was, he had contented himself with being icily condemning, and that was much worse, she thought, than any other attitude he could have adopted towards her. If he had said to her, as an Englishman would:
“Look here, Miss Fairchild, I don’t approve of you kissing your escorts on my doorstep at three o’clock in the morning, and I’m very much incensed because you dropped my son in the pool! Or, rather, you allowed him to fall into the pool because you were too preoccupied with listening to flatteries from yet another man who has taken to calling on you—in working hours!—and you hadn’t time to be bothered with Jamie, and what was happening to him!”
If he had said all that she could have defended herself. She would have taken the accusations one by one and proved to him that they were not her fault, and that in actual fact she was more sinned against than sinning. She had not wished to be kissed in the drive the night before, and she had certainly not wanted to devote any time at all to Duarte Fernandes, whether he flattered her or not. He was the type of young man whose intentions she mistrusted from the very moment she set eyes on him, and the only thing that amazed her was that Dom Julyan himself had raised no objections when Gloria had suggested pairing her off with her brother.
But he had not done so, and perhaps that was one reason why she stiffened into a kind of immobility when he hurled his polite accusations at her.
“If you were Portuguese, Miss Fairchild, you would have, I feel sure, a greater sense of responsibility, but as it is your sense of responsibility does not seem to be very well developed. I am quite sure you wouldn’t deliberately neglect my son, but I employ you to keep a constant eye on him, and that is something you do not seem capable of doing. It might well be you were tired this morning after your evening out.
“I was not tired,” she told him, not altogether truthfully. “But in future I shall not accept invitations of that sort, and then the danger of my being tired the following day will be non-existent.”
He looked at her with a faint pucker between his brows, and she had the feeling that for a moment he didn’t quite know what to say. And then his flow of condemnation continued.
“You do realize that yours is a position of trust, and if I cannot trust you what am I to do?”
“You can replace me,” she murmured, with a small, pale, inscrutable face.
He turned away and walked to the window, and standing in the opening of the wide glass doors he said:
“Of course, I saw that you were allowing Duarte to hold your hand when I arrived on the scene this morning— as a matter of fact, I had been observing you for several minutes before Jamie fell into the pool! And it struck me as strange that a girl of your type should permit one comparative masculine stranger to kiss her after a dance or two, and an even greater masculine stranger to behave familiarly the following morning! Is that the sort of thing you do in England? If so, we people of Portugal must strike you as very out of date!”
“Perhaps,” she heard herself answering, rather stonily.
Once again he turned and looked at her, and his look was sharp and penetrating.
“You don’t deny that you were offering encouragement to Duarte this morning?”
“I don’t think it would be any use,” she said.
He frowned so that his dark brows met in a line above his displeased eyes.
“You do realize that you are making it very difficult for me to—well, to place confidence in you in future?”
At that she lifted her small chin a little and looked him straight in the eyes.
“I think you should have been forewarned when my cousin Jay let you down, and not offered me any sort of position in your household,” she told him in a tight, rather choked little voice. “As a family we do not measure up to any of your standards, and for that reason you will be wise if you look for someone else to look after Jamie. Of course, I will remain until you can replace me—that is if you feel that it is safe for me to remain!—but in your best interests, and the interests of your son, some local young woman might be found, in whom you need have no hesitation in placing all your confidence. And now— unless there is something else you particularly wish to say to me, senhor— may I go and make sure that a lunch tray has been taken up to Jamie, and that he is not any the worse for his accident this morning?”
As he did not reply immediately she turned away and walked slowly towards the door. But as she neared it he called to her abruptly:
“Lois!”
She turned and looked at him in obvious surprise.
“I hate to think that I might be accusing you unfairly,” he said, in a more rapid voice than he had used so far. “You say so little, and you are in an unfavorable position here. You are in a strange country, and you have no real friends of your own. As I have told you before, I feel responsible for you. . . .”
“There is no need for you to do that, senhor,” she responded, but already about to turn the door handle, and as if she were feeling a little weary. “I have been responsible for myself for a year or so now, and the fact that I am in a strange country doesn’t weaken my ability to look after myself. I can study my own interests—you must study yours!”
And as she actually did turn the door handle and walk out she had the impression that a tide of rather dark color rose slowly in his face—but whether because he was annoyed, or because he felt snubbed, she couldn’t tell.
C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N
BUT IN view of the fact that she had termina
ted that unpleasant interview herself, and that she had stated quite clearly that she thought it best that she should be replaced, she had little hope of remaining as Jamie’s governess for long, although she had told Jamie that there was a possibility she would carry on.
Sitting there by herself, therefore, her thoughts were hardly of the type to warm her own heart, or give her comfort. And once Jamie was in bed and she had kissed him goodnight, her supper had been brought to the day nursery because she had sent a note to Miss Mattie asking to be excused on account of a headache from joining her for the usual meal. She had left it practically untasted on the centre table and then gone back to the window seat and sat staring out at the dusk.
It was blotting out all the color and warmth of the garden, and she felt as if something insidious were creeping into her own life and eliminating all promise of color in her future. As the moon rose, and the paths below her were outlined with silver, a mood of remoteness descended on her, and she didn’t greatly care what happened in the future.
Yesterday she had spent a few hours in the sunshine with a man and his son and been happy. It had seemed to her that if they were the only two people in the world, and they belonged to her, then even if the world was bereft of everything else—every form of comfort—Life would be one long sweet song, and she could live it gladly.
But tonight there was only the silvery impartiality of moonlight, scents that floated in the warm air and were disturbing because she knew she would recapture them at some distant future date, and the almost oppressive silence of the quinta to inform her that the master of the place was probably out, and that she and her problems were not doing very much to disturb his mind. Save that he would probably discuss her with Donna Colares, if he saw her, and that they would talk over the advisability of taking her at her word, and begin looking without delay for someone suitable to replace her.
She leaned her head against the cushions behind her, and the slow tears welled in her eyes and started to run down her face. If only, when she left, she wouldn’t be departing in disgrace, but for some other reason!
There came the lightest of knocks on the door, and before she could call out permission to enter it swung wide, and Dom Julyan came in and closed it behind him. She was sitting without a light, and his hand went out and pressed the switch.
Lois blinked in the sudden rays of the light, and the diamond drops that were hanging on her lashes instantly caught his attention, and he walked over and stood looking down at her.
“Why were you sitting without a light?” he asked, very quietly.
Lois swallowed hard, made as if to rise, but his hand went out and touched her shoulder, pressing her back into her chair.
“Stay where you are,” he said. “But tell me why you don’t appear to have eaten any dinner, and why you choose to sit in darkness—or comparative darkness, since there is, after all, a moon?’
“I like the moonlight,” she replied, making a tremendous effort to steady her voice once she had found it, “and I wasn’t very hungry tonight.”
He sat down in a chair near to her, and leaned towards her with his hands clasped between his knees. There was an expression on his face which puzzled her, but she could make no mistake about the note of apology in his voice.
“Duarte came to see me this afternoon, and he explained that he was rather making a nuisance of himself this morning, and that you were in no way whatsoever to blame for Jamie falling into the pool.
He says that you warned him repeatedly, and that you obviously take your job very seriously. He denied emphatically that you permitted him to hold your hand, but insists that he would welcome the opportunity. It seems that he is a better judge of character than I am.”
Lois was amazed, but she was too emotionally exhausted just then to be very much impressed.
“That was very nice of Senhor Fernandes,” she said. “I hadn’t a very high opinion of him, but it seems that I ought to count him amongst my friends.”
“Will you accept my apology because I was too hasty this morning?”
She made a slight, shrugging movement with her shoulders.
“If you feel that you were too hasty.”
“I do.”
“Well, then—well, then, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Because I blotted my copy-book last night!” “What you did last night was really no concern of mine.”
Once again a weary light of amazement flashed into her eyes.
“I think it was. I ought to have insisted on being brought back earlier. And since you have been so kind and are prepared to overlook this morning’s episode”—with a dryness, however, which did not altogether pass him by— “I’d better admit that I was as much surprised by Mr. Enderby’s method of saying goodnight to me as you were, when you came up behind us. I don’t normally permit that sort of thing—in fact, it’s the first time it’s ever happened to
me—but I don’t think any the less of Mr. Enderby because he kissed me. In fact, I think he’s rather nice, and very kind.”
“And you were feeling in need of someone to be kind to
you?”
“You said this morning that mine is rather a lonely position,” she reminded him.
“So it is,” he agreed. He was frowning as he had frowned during the morning, but his eyes were troubled and not critical. “Why were you crying when I came in just now?”
She lay back amongst the cushions of her chair and looked up at the silvery slice of moon.
“Oh, possibly just because I’m a woman—and women are weak and silly sometimes. Even English women!” with a flickering glance at him, and then away.
“I apologize for what I inferred this morning about English women.”
Suddenly she decided that the situation was undignified from his point of view, that from hers it was dangerous because she was at a low ebb and in a mood when a word of sympathy might cause her to reveal something she must at all costs conceal—at any rate from him! So she sat up and said stiffly:
“Senhor, please don’t keep apologizing to me. The one thing we really did agree about this morning, and for which neither of us need make an apology, is that I am not the right type to be responsible for your son, and as soon as you have found someone else in whom you can have greater confidence I should like to leave and return home to England. Or if you feel that Miss Mattie could take over Jamie again until someone else is found, then I could leave at once.”
She looked up at him, as she spoke, with utterly expressionless grey-blue eyes, but there was a look of unmistakable tension round her mouth, and the marks of the barely dried tears were plainly discernible on her cheeks. Dom Julyan’s own expression revealed mounting concern, and he stood up and moved so near to her that she had to put back her head in order to continue to meet his gaze—which seemed to her important just then.
“Lois”—there was unusual hesitation in his voice—“are you saying all this because I’ve upset you? Because I’ve
been unreasonable? Have I hurt you?”
She shook her head mutely, but she swallowed hard.
“I have hurt you, haven’t I?” Suddenly his hand went out and he touched her cheek, very lightly and gently, where the brightest of the tears had clung for a moment before it splashed into her lap. “If I have, please forgive me, and stop talking about going home to England. You know very well that you are doing splendidly with Jamie, and he is already very fond of you.”
But she shook her head again, more vigorously than before.
“There is no question of your having hurt me, senhor— anything you said to me was probably deserved. But I honestly don’t feel I fit in here, and it is better that I should go home.”
“But you have no real home—you told me that yourself!”
'“Nevertheless, I—England is my country, and . . .” She bit her lip, because she knew that at any moment it would behave traitorously and tremble. “I am not right here,” she repeated, after a silence of nearly half a minute.
&
nbsp; “That’s nonsense!” he exclaimed. As she lowered her eyes she did not see that the concern in his dark eyes was even greater than it had been. “Lois, are you homesick?” he asked, rather abruptly.
“Perhaps,” she answered, not altogether distinctly.
“I see,” he said, and took a turn or two about the room. When he came back to her he was biting his lower lip. “You really mean that? You are homesick?”
“I suppose I could be,” pleating the skirt of the dress with the scarlet poppies with nervous fingers.
“Portugal has disappointed you after all? It is not, as you first imagined, a country of constant sunshine and happiness?”
“I am not in the least disappointed in Portugal,” she assured him, refraining rigidly now from looking at him, “and no one could reasonably grumble about the amount of sunshine one gets here. And as I didn’t come here to look for happiness I have no complaints on that score, either.”
No,” he said, with sudden harshness, “you came here
to attend your cousin’s wedding, but it was you who remained, and not she. And now you, too, want to go away?”
She felt vaguely resentful.
"I don’t think that’s altogether fair,” she said, rising quickly and moving away from him. “You yourself expressed the utmost disapproval of me this morning, and because tonight you have, apparently, changed your mind—Donna Colares’s brother having gone out of his way to clear me of one of the charges you brought against me! —I also am expected to change my mind, although today I have become convinced that there is only one course open to me. And I very much regret, senhor, that I cannot change my mind!”
She moved closer to the window, and while absolute silence filled the room, and she could have no idea of the expression on his face, she stared out rather wildly at the breathless beauty of the night—such a night as she would remember often, with the most painful nostalgia, when she got back to England! —and thought with a feeling of desperation:
If I did change my mind I would deserve all the suffering that came my way! ... As it would!... When he married Donna Colares!
Flower for a Bride Page 14