“There is absolutely no reason why we should
rejoin the others -------- ” he began, and then he seemed
to feel her quiver, and he looked down quickly to peer into her face, but she averted it. She felt his fingers tightening about her arm, almost digging themselves into the soft flesh above her elbow, and it seemed to her that he was silently compelling her to look round at him, but she knew that she daren’t. Her defences were temporarily down, and he must never know it.
“There is absolutely no reason why we should rejoin the others,” he repeated—“yet!”
“But, I—won’t they . . . ?”
“Won’t they—what?”
He felt her quiver yet again, and by sheer strength of will he forced her to look round, and up, at him. The wide eyes were panic-stricken, but there was something else in them—even in the faint, silvery light beneath the trees— that caused his own to light up suddenly in a strange way. He uttered something quite incomprehensible to her, and then in the soft voice that was the voice he sometimes used to her in her dreams, he breathed her name:
“Lois! . . . Little Lois! . . .”
She felt his arms go round her, and she was held tightly against a heart that seemed to be beating almost as wildly as her own. His fingers stroked her hair, and she knew that it was his lips that pressed themselves to the soft curls, and over and over again he whispered her name with so much exquisite tenderness, and such a silken caress in the single short word that she wondered whether she were indeed awake, or whether this were really no more than a dream.
“Lois! . . .” His arms strained her to him so that even if she had wished to do so she could not have escaped them without a violent struggle, and then his hand was beneath her chin, forcing her face up into the open so that he could look down into her eyes. His dark ones were blazing with a fire that set her own veins on fire, and delirious ecstasy took possession of her as his mouth came down upon hers.
She knew that she clung to him—that the kiss was a mutual exchange of passion, and longing, and a hunger that was almost unbearable. Or so it seemed to her in those moments when the world about her ceased to exist, and there was no Senhor Fernandes and his birthday picnic, no
Duarte almost certainly looking for her somewhere amongst the trees, and no dreadful tomorrow when she would come awake and discover that none of this was actually real. Only an extraordinary light-headed phase when the world had been laid at her feet!
“Oh, my darling—my little one! —my white flower! . . . ’ Julyan lifted his head at last, but his lips hovered close to hers, and he held her as if he was afraid she might make some attempt to get away from him, and he would frustrate that attempt at all costs. She put back her head and looked up at him, wonderingly, huge-eyed, and then because the temptation to do so was too strong, and she simply could not overcome it, she put up a shy hand and touched his cheek—a thing she had longed to do so many times in the past few weeks—and he caught the hand with a passionate gesture and carried it up against his lips.
“My beloved! . . .”
And then footsteps sounded in the quiet path, and they were quick, women’s footsteps, and a woman’s voice carried clearly to them, although still a good many feet away.
“Julyan! . . . Julyan, where are you? Are you anywhere along this path . . . ?”
Lois drew a kind of long, shuddering breath— although first her breath came as if petrified—and she knew that this was the moment of her awakening. But, even so, she wasn’t really prepared for the completeness of that awakening.
There was one moment when the man she loved above everything else on earth, and whose lips had devoured hers but a moment ago, held her crushed against him, so that she felt small and helpless and irrefutably claimed; and then there was a moment when those arms started to slacken, and finally fell away from her altogether. She had an impression, as she ventured to look up at him in the dim light, that his face was pale, and there was a queer, tense look round his mouth. But after a silence of several seconds he answered that demanding feminine voice that called to him.
“Here, Gloria!”
“Oh!” said Gloria Calores, when she emerged from the gloom and came upon them standing stiffly facing one another in the narrow path. “Oh! ...” Her eyebrows
ascended. “I hope I’m not interrupting something?”
“Of course not.” His voice sounded harsh to Lois, and cold. But all in a moment it regained its normal smoothness and politeness—at least when addressing Donna Colares. “Of course you’re not interrupting anything! Miss Fairchild and I were merely—having a little talk!”
“I see,” Gloria acknowledged the explanation, but she didn’t sound as if she saw at all, and her eyes were narrow and curiously searching as they looked towards Lois, whose control over her own facial expression was not very good just then. In fact, she actually looked a little stunned—stunned and bewildered.
“I’m sorry you had to come and look for me,” Julyan said. He moved a step nearer the new arrival on the scene, and his hand went out to her in a light, conciliatory gesture, and rested on her arm. “Is it that you wish to go home? Your papa is tired, and the party breaks up?”
“No, although the older folks will be going home very soon now. But I thought that you and I were to take a walk? It was all arranged. . . . And then you disappeared!” She looked up at him reproachfully, and all at once Lois seemed to return to life. The wildest embarrassment rushed up over her—a positive agony of embarrassment— and the only other thing she was conscious of was a passionate desire to escape. Without looking towards Dom Julyan, and not even looking in the direction of the formally dressed, graceful women who was standing so dose to him, she moved swiftly past them, formulating a jerky sentence as she did so:
“I am sorry to have kept you, senhor ...” she apologized. “I expect Duarte is looking for me. I’ll go and find him. . . ”
She thought that behind her her name was spoken sharply, commandingly, and that it was the man’s voice that uttered it, but she took absolutely no notice. She fairly ran along the path until it emerged into the clearing, and the first person she encountered was the Marquiz de Valerira. In fact, she almost hurtled into his arms.
“Why, little one! . . .” He steadied her with his hands. “What is wrong? Has something startled you?—frightened you. . . . ?”
He stopped and looked into her face in a concerned fashion, and she said the first thing that came into her head.
“No, but I—I twisted my ankle along the path, and it’s rather painful. Please, senhor Marquiz, do you think that I could go home now? Do you think there is someone who would take me home?”
“But of course, child.” His voice was very gentle, and almost soothing, and although she didn’t realize it his eyes were immensely shrewd. “My own car has just arrived to take me back to the quinta, and I have already said my goodnights. I think that you might be excused from saying yours—a little note of appreciation in the morning will do just as well—and you shall come back with me now, at once.”
His hand was inside her arm—a very comforting, plump white hand—and he guided her to the place where several cars were parked, and his own long black limousine, chauffeur-driven, was awaiting him. He helped her in, said something to the chauffeur that she took to be instruction to be as speedy as possible, and then climbed in beside her and, as it was turning a little cooler, put a light rug over her knees. After which he patted her hands beneath the rug, watched her turn her face away to the window, as if anxious to avoid any sort of a scrutiny, and subsided quietly on to the well-sprung back of the seat and said nothing at all until they reached the house.
Then he helped her out of the car in the same courteous manner that he had helped her in, and because she still looked pale and a little bemused kept his arm about her as they went up the steps. But once inside the softly lit hall, as she felt him guiding her towards the door of the big sala, she stopped short and for the first time resiste
d his kindly intentions.
“No, please, senhor, I would rather go straight upstairs to my room!”
“But you are upset,” he protested. “Just a little upset, shall we say, because no doubt your ankle is hurting you, and I think perhaps a glass of wine------”
“No, please, senhor!” She tried to smile up at him, but it was an unfortunate attempt, and his face grew grayer. “You are more than kind, and I have troubled you enough, but now I would like to go upstairs and—and change out of
these high-heeled sandals,” not knowing what else to say.
“And after you have changed out of them you will come downstairs again?” he suggested.
“No, I’d rather not,” and her shake of the head was so firm, and her anxiety to be alone as quickly as she could was so transparent that he said nothing more to persuade, only wished her goodnight in a way that actually warmed her heart a little. “Sleep well, little one!” he added, but he had very grave doubts about her sleeping well as he walked alone towards the door of the great sala.
Upstairs Lois shut her door and then turned the key in the lock—for a reason that was not altogether clear to her at the time—forgot about removing her sandals, and threw herself instead into her favorite armchair near the window.
Her ankle was paining her a little still, but she hardly felt it, and it was merely a nagging background to the wild confusion of her thoughts. She felt like someone who had been subjected to so much humiliation that she actually squirmed, and at the recollection of that moment when Donna Colares had stepped from amongst the trees and Julyan had let her go so abruptly, she dropped her face in her hands and bit back something that was almost a groan.
If Duarte had behaved like that—if Duarte had led her off amongst the trees and then made love to her, and tried to pretend that he had done nothing of the sort when they were unexpectedly discovered—she could have understood it! But in her heart she felt certain that Duarte would not have behaved like that! She might have formed a poor opinion of him when she first met him, but since then she had come to realize that he was a law unto himself, and he was not afraid of anyone knowing what he did. Also—and tonight she had been more or less certain of this also—he liked her, and it was because he liked her that he had refrained from making love to her.
But Dom Julyan, her employer—the man who set such high standards for himself and the people who lived under his roof!—had been so horribly embarrassed when Donna Colares burst out on them that he had hardly known what to do!
Not surprising, if he was planning to marry Donna Colares, as so many people seemed to think! . . .
She got up and started to pace about the room, even more heedless of that nagging pain in her ankle, and all she could think of was the wonder of those moments when Julyan had held her in his arms, and the rapture of that kiss they had exchanged. Although she had been quite unprepared for such bliss she had surrendered herself to it without a qualm, because it had seemed to her that their need of one another was as great in those moments as their need to continue their existence. There had been no difference in the tempest of their individual feelings—they had carried them along on a wild wave of ecstatic happiness that had been the shortest-lived thing she had ever known, and even now her lips seemed to burn as a result of that kiss.
And his whispered words: “My darling—my little one!—my white flower! . . .”
The silence of her bedroom—the whole silence of the quinta, that at that hour of the night was all pervading— seemed to echo those words and throw them back at her meaninglessly.
It couldn’t have been more than half an hour after she and the Marquiz returned to the quinta that the silence was broken by the sound of a car sweeping up to the front of the house, and with a wildly beating heart she returned to her chair and sat there, huddled, while, first, a car door slammed impatiently, and then footsteps crunched on the gravel, and voices reached up thinly to her from the hall.
The voices sounded to her sharp and hollow, and then they faded away as if a door had been securely fastened between her and them, and she could imagine the old Marquiz making polite rejoinders to his nephew’s enquiries as to whether Miss Fairchild was back.
For, after she had rushed away along the path he might have felt just a little bit anxious about her— concerned, very likely, lest she should indiscreetly reveal what had taken place in the heart of the little wood! Or he might be hoping vaguely that she would allow Duarte to bring her home at a late hour, in which case he could come over all critical and employerish again, and let her know that he disapproved.
But, as she dropped her head into her hands again, feeling lost and bewildered, one conviction began to take
root inside her.
No man—no man—could hold a woman in his arms in the way Dom Julyan had held her in his arms, and afterwards experience the spiteful wish to humiliate her deliberately!
That, at least, was not possible—or she would not believe it was possible.
But the fact that the last thing he had desired was that someone should steal upon them while she was in his arms was only too true! There were no excuses she could possibly think up that could alter that!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Emotionally exhausted, and physically weary, she must have fallen asleep in her chair, the utter silence of the house acting as a kind of sedative, for when she awoke she was stiff and cold, and it was nearly four o’clock in the morning. She undressed without turning on her light, and crept into bed, too burdened by misery to believe that she would sleep any more that night. But she did sleep for another couple of hours, and when she awakened this time the sunlight was streaming into her room, between her undrawn curtains, and she realized dully that it was a new day.
But the dullness passed, and her mind became almost feverishly active as she took a shower and dressed. She selected a linen suit in which it was possible to make her appearance almost anywhere, and then emptied her drawers and wardrobe and packed everything away in the couple of suitcases she had brought with her from England. Her mind was made up, and the one thing she knew she had got to do was to leave the Quinta de Valerira without delay, and sever all connection with the man who had treated her in a way which she was utterly at a loss to account for.
For one thing, to go on living in his house while he evidently imagined he had the right to make casual love to her whenever the desire to do so overcame him—as on the night before—was impossible. Her dignity would not permit that. And to allow herself to stay just for the agony of remaining near him was a form of luxurious self-torture she would not permit herself to endure.
What she really hoped to do was to get away before the moment arrived when she would have to come face to face with him again, and with this objective in view she laid her plans. She would give Jamie his breakfast as she normally did, and have hers with him, and then she would send him down to Miss Mattie with a note. Josie would convey the note, and she would also escort Jamie to his old governess.
There would be no need to say very much to Miss Mattie, for she was immensely shrewd, and she had known that lately Lois was anything but happy. She had probably long ago expected that unhappiness to come upon her, and now all she would experience would be a sharp twinge of sympathy for her young fellow countrywoman, and secretly, Lois felt sure, would wish her well.
Once Jamie was disposed of she would order for herself the dust-colored car, and hope against hope that no one would see her leave in it for Alvora. In any case, if she left instructions for her heaviest suit case to be sent on after her, her leave-taking would not be very noticeable, and to the eyes of the servants it would appear that she was merely driving in to Alvora, possibly to do some shopping.
The worst moment arrived when she found she had to say goodbye to Jamie without letting him realize that it was goodbye, and as it was the warmth and impulsiveness of her farewell hug seemed to surprise her. He looked up to see tears in her eyes, but he said nothing. He had seen tears in her e
yes before this, and had wondered about them in his childish mind, but it was not in his nature to comment on them.
“Be a good boy, darling,” Lois said, before she handed him over to Josie, and when she was left alone in the big day nursery after they had gone she felt as if something vital to her continued existence had vanished out of her life, and for a few moments she was appalled by the thought of the years of loneliness that lay ahead of her.
Years of living only in memories! . . .
Then she gave herself a determined shake, set her lips as if she was in physical pain but was exerting all her will to ignore it, took a last look round the familiar room, with its sunny balcony, and then walked towards the door.
She was hoping against hope that she would meet no one on the stairs, especially as she was carrying her lightest suitcase. She had waited for the moment when the house seemed very quiet, and Dom Julyan was likely to be occupied in his library, if he had not already gone forth on some business which might keep him away until lunch time, and if Ricardo was late with the car she could remain out of sight in some patch of shrubbery. Her plans were so vague at that moment that she hardly knew what she was going to do once she got to Alvora, save that Lisbon and an air passage to England was her ultimate objective. Fortunately she had spent very little of her salary, and she would be able to keep herself for a few weeks once she got home to England.
The important thing at the moment was to get well away from the quinta before she was in real danger of coming into contact with Dom Julyan.
This feeling that at all costs she must avoid him made her look rather like a hunted creature as she stole down the stairs, and by the time she had crossed the hall and actually reached the drive without being observed or intercepted by anyone her heart was knocking almost painfully.
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