Nurse for the Doctor
Page 11
Josie felt as if her throat, and the whole of inside her mouth, had gone absolutely dry, so that for a few moments no words would pass her lips. Surprise had turned her rigid, too, and only one thought hammered at her brain: he thought she was in love with Michael. He hadn’t even guessed how she felt about him. That long look they had exchanged, the moment when she felt certain her heart was in her eyes, the moment when she had had to fight against begging him to remain with her, had passed him by altogether.
He hadn’t guessed ... And she must have imagined what she thought she saw in his eyes. He was making it clear now that it was his sister he was fighting for—his sister’s preserves she was poaching on (or so he imagined) and he was concerned about his sister’s happiness. Not hers ...
She felt bewildered. She wasn’t fit to cope with this just now. And then she felt a wave of gratitude roll over her because at least she was spared the humiliation of his ever learning how she felt about him! She had only to let him continue in his belief that what she felt was for Michael... Michael, who had at least asked her to marry him.
She wondered what the marquis would say if she admitted suddenly that the man to whom Dona Maria was so almost pathetically attached had already proposed seriously to her—Josie.
But the marquis only saw how pale she had suddenly turned, and that she had shut her eyes as if she wanted to shut out the sight of something unpleasant—or weakness had rushed up over her.
He moved to her quickly, and bent over her.
“I am so sorry ... I beg your pardon, Senorita Josie, for upsetting you like this. Duveen would be right if he threw me out. But I—” She could not see his face, which was working strangely as he bent over her. He put his hand out and lightly touched her hair. “There are other men in the world,” he told her, “so many men ... And you are so very English, and so...”
“If you wish me to assure you that I will not interfere with Dona Maria’s chances of becoming Dr. Duveen’s wife, then I promise you, senor, that I—”
“No, no!” he said, quickly, as if she had placed him in an impossible position. As a man of chivalry, of deep sensibility, he pitied her; but as a devoted brother he hardly knew what to do. “It is not that. I do not wish—”
“But, all the same, I will promise.” She was staring straight ahead, and he was behind her chair. “I feel that Dona Maria might be right for Dr. Duveen. He—I—”
“It is his mother’s wish, not his.”
“Nevertheless, there is an attraction—he likes her. I know that. If it would make Dona Maria happier to tell her, then I think you should do so. And tell her also that she might have to fight a bit, but—it could be worth it in the end.”
She bent her head, and clutched at a fold of her dressing gown, and once more his hand went out and touched her hair.
“Poor child,” he said.
“As soon as I am well I will go back to England,” she said.
“As soon as you are well you will enjoy a period of convalescence,” he told her. And then the door opened and Michael himself came in, and the strained atmosphere at once communicated itself to him.
“Well, well,” he said, his eyes narrowing so that they looked like blue jewels between his thick lashes, “how’s the patient?” And then he looked hard at the marquis. “I think perhaps a period of rest is indicated, Carlos,” he told him rather curtly. “Josie is not exactly a hundred per cent fit yet, you know.”
“No, I—agree.” The marquis seemed to have some slight difficulty in articulating, and Michael’s eyes grew cold like blue ice. “Your pardon, senorita, if I have proved an exhausting visitor.”
“You have done nothing of the kind, senor,” Josie answered him flatly, but the dull look on her face, and that very flatness and weariness of her voice, told an entirely opposite tale. Michael went to hold open the door.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have allowed visitors just yet,” he said in the marquis’s hearing. And then, when he went back to Josie, he looked genuinely concerned. “These Spaniards!” he exclaimed. “Their intensity is boring, at times. Who was he pleading for—Maria?”
Josie nodded silently.
He looked down at her sideways. She looked shocked—and stunned, he thought.
“He might have chosen another occasion, he said. “But Maria’s happiness is an obsession with him.” He strode over to the window. “Life is complex, isn’t it?” he remarked suddenly, and sighed as if there were moments when he found it very complex and a little irritating, too. “I don’t like this sort of thing. I like orderliness, and routine, and dignity, and—a little light dalliance when I’m in the mood. But not otherwise.” He tugged at the bell rope. “And you—you ought to be in bed. I’ll get Magdalena.”
A few days later Josie told everyone she was completely herself again, and although she still looked a little fragile most of them—including Mrs. Duveen—were prepared to believe it. Mrs. Duveen thought it was high time she was herself again, and Sylvia Petersen looked a little bored when the usual questions were put to Josie on her entry into a room, or when she made her appearance in the big square patio where they always forgathered for drinks.
“Do you feel like staying up for dinner tonight, or would you rather have it served to you in your room on a tray?” This was Dona Maria, genuinely concerned because she thought the English girl’s eyes were much too large, and rather shadow-haunted, and she seemed to have lost every scrap of the light tan she had acquired since her arrival on the Costa Brava. “It’s no trouble to Magdalena, you know, and you really mustn’t allow yourself to get too exhausted.”
“I think Josie’s had enough of her own company for the time being,” Michael remarked, and carelessly flicked her cheeks as if she were one of his very junior patients with whom it was permitted to take such liberties. Only Mrs. Duveen did not regard Josie as a junior patient of her son’s, and she frowned, thinking it might have been much wiser after all if they had selected someone much more starched and competent-looking to attend to Michael during his convalescence. It was not at all the thing that he should have to be responsible for her, and he really ought not to call her Josie.
Dona Maria looked suddenly rather grave, and her large grey eyes grew just a little wistful, Josie thought, as she witnessed that flick on the cheek. According to her upbringing, that was not correct behaviour, either, but Michael did these things with such absolute naturalness. Dona Maria had once entered the room when he was bending over Josie and lightly stroking her hair, and that had made her pause.
But Englishmen, she told herself, were different to her own countrymen, and one had to recognize that.
The marquis treated Josie with meticulous politeness, and his inquiries were always made in the company of others. He never made any attempt to seek her out and talk to her alone—perhaps, Josie thought, because on the one occasion when he had really sought her out he had made himself clear enough, or so he hoped.
The weather remained brilliant, and still very warm, and Michael seemed to have benefited extraordinarily from this Spanish holiday. He hardly ever used his stick nowadays, and when he and Dona Maria went off together in her car they looked like a couple bent on amusement. Whether they enjoyed themselves Josie wondered, but Michael had not again suggested that she, Josie, should marry him, and she thought it highly likely that Maria’s spell was gaining on him. If his self-centredness, and his love of freedom, could be overcome, Maria might be the very wife for him, for, whatever else she did not do, she would put his interests first.
Spanish women were like that. A home, husband, and children—and even a successful doctor needed a wife and a family. Maria would look lovely at the head of his dinner table, and the weight of her wealth added to his would give him even more prominence. For in every profession wealth counts, and when added to ability it positively shouts to attract success.
Josie, as she strolled about the grounds and the beach alone those days, often said those three words over to herself that she had decide
d were the aim and ambition of every Spanish woman: a home, husband and children!
She wondered whether she would ever possess them, and knew a kind of agony when she saw Sylvia Petersen clinging as if she had already staked her claim on the marquis’s one sound arm.
The thought of Sylvia Petersen producing that heir for the marquis that Michael had talked about made the English girl feel slightly sick.
Don Luis paid several visits to the villa, and he tried every means in his power to persuade Josie to go out with him. He had a new car—the gift of his noble cousin—and he would take the utmost care of her, he promised. He would take her shopping to San Fernando, where at least she could come to no harm, or they could have dinner together at a little restaurant that had been newly opened, and where she could listen to traditional guitar playing. If she would not consent to anything more exciting, he would take her to see his Great-Aunt Amelie, who had several times asked after her.
“That was very kind of her,” Josie said, recalling the dignified old lady in the shawl of fine black lace, who had concentrated so fiercely on the patience cards. But she would not be persuaded to go anywhere with Don Luis, and he looked at her with mournful eyes and told her she had damaged his heart to no purpose—which picturesque expression she accepted at its face value; although on the lips of Don Luis it made her feel a little regretful.
It wasn’t his fault that she had got soaked through on their one and only outing together, and afterwards very nearly developed pneumonia. But she had already been accused of endangering Dona Maria’s prospects with Michael, and she was not going to become involved with Don Luis. Not even with the marquis’s blessing.
Sometimes in the evenings, when the entire company was gathered in the elegant drawing room, she had the feeling that the marquis was watching her closely, and he was always very attentive if she lacked anything. He had never treated her as if she was anything other than an extremely honored guest, and sometimes the realization brought a lump to her throat.
He was naturally kind. He wouldn’t hurt anyone—particularly not anyone without the power to do very much about sticking up for themselves. For Sylvia Petersen there was always the extra touch of deference, the extra gentleness in the voice, admiration in the eyes, and possibly a certain amount of genuine feeling in the heart. He treated her as if she were a piece of delicate porcelain, rather than a woman he felt an urge to adore, and sometimes Josie wondered whether, if he eventually did marry her, the American girl would find that sort of attitude sufficient. Her own slanting-lashed, greeny-blue eyes could glow quite warmly when they were turned upon the marquis, and she did not give the impression of being porcelain right through.
She was a young woman of flesh and blood, needing to be loved as well as worshipped. And in the same way that Dona Maria was a little pathetic, offering so much unstinted adoration to Michael Duveen, who would probably never really appreciate it, so the lovely American girl was pathetic, also. It was so plain that she wanted the marquis to marry her, not only because of his position. It would be a mating of beauty, and a certain amount of ingenuity, dignity and poise, and unless there was a very warm link between—especially on the man’s side—it wouldn’t be an altogether enviable outlook for the girl. Or so Josie—so much of a looker-on these days—decided.
From her observation they seemed to have very little in common. Sylvia’s main interest in life was clothes, the various fashionable events she had attended and hoped to attend, cities such as Paris where she thought life was gay, and nothing very much else. The marquis had a keenly adventurous spirit, although nowadays it had to be held in check, was scholarly, and cultured, and, on the whole, serious, and the thing that gave him the most pleasure away from the mental stimulus of his home in Madrid and the many other estates he possessed, was his daily visit to his horses while he was at the villa on the Costa Brava.
It was Luis who had told her this, and the marquis himself had told her that so far as he knew Miss Petersen was not particularly interested in horses. He had not even—so far as Josie was aware—placed a mount at her disposal. And therefore the shock was all the greater when wandering alone in the garden one morning before breakfast, she saw the marquis and Sylvia up on Ramirez come cantering beneath the arch into the paved yard on to which the stable buildings abutted. She recognized them immediately, because the horseman had only one arm, and the girl riding pillion was very much Sylvia Petersen’s size and shape, and although she wore a brightly colored skirt and a bandanna, beneath the bandanna there streamed a lovely mass of red-gold hair.
Josie felt as if the final stage of disillusion had been reached. The marquis had asked her once to ride pillion with him on horseback, but he had never mentioned it again. And at that stage he had admitted that he had not so far asked Miss Petersen.
Now she was well ahead of Josie, in the most important possible way. She had ridden with the marquis through the splendour and freshness of the early morning, and her laughter rang out when a groom came forward to .lift her down from the velvet cushion that had been provided for her, and Carlos de Palheiro laughed, too.
So, after all, they had something in common!
Josie stood as if mesmerised by what she had seen, for fully half a minute, and then she turned to retrace her footsteps swiftly towards the house. But although she never found out by what manner of means Sylvia reached the house, the marquis, having surrendered his mount to his groom, came quickly after her along the path, and she heard his voice call out to her as she made to fly.
“Good morning, Miss Winter!”
She had to stop, because he was plainly trying to catch up with her, and when he reached her, for the first time since she had known him she thought there was something boyish and eager about his expression. His eyes were bright and full of a happy light, and in his tight-fitting sweater and riding breeches she once more saw easily what a splendid physique he had.
“It seems a long time since I came upon you in the garden like this, at this hour of the morning. The other occasion was when you had only just arrived here. Do you remember?”
“Yes; I remember,” she answered, rather stiffly.
He was looking down at her from his superior height, his keen eyes taking in the returning color in her face, the light coating of creamy tan that she had once more acquired, and above all the fact that her eyes no longer looked quite so enormous. But her mouth was set primly, and his eyes went to it.
“On that occasion—perhaps you also remember—I asked you if you were keen on horses, and suggested you ride pillion with me one morning.”
“Yes, I remember that perfectly, too,” she replied more stiffly than ever.
His dark eyes grew frankly puzzled, although behind the puzzlement there was a sudden eager light in them.
“Then, if you have not changed your mind, will you?” he asked. “Perhaps tomorrow morning?”
“I’m afraid I have changed my mind,” Josie answered. “I don’t think I should care for it.”
And without looking at him she had the feeling that his mouth dropped open a trifle.
Then she heard his voice saying, icily curt: “I see.” And just before they reached the house he bowed and begged to be excused to leave her.
“There is a side door here which I find very useful,” he said. “I am anxious to get changed as quickly as possible, so you will pardon me if I bid you adios for the time being.”
“Of course,’” Josie heard herself saying, in the same prim little voice as before; but when he had left her it seemed to her that a shadow fell across the garden, and there was no singing of birds, or surging of the sea, or anything else except the bitter, anguished wailing of her heart within her.
Why, why, why had she spoken and behaved like that?
CHAPTER XII
A FEW evenings later Dona Amelie de Manzanares gave a dinner party at her villa further along the coast, and to it, of course, she invited her nephew the marquis, as well as all four of his guests.
Although the marquis had behaved so admirably about the whole thing, and put himself and the whole household out in order that Josie should have the best attention and get well as quickly as possible, he could hardly have felt like applauding the episode himself. The young man was his cousin, and a girl who was only a nurse might get ideas into her head, and in the end the whole unfortunate business might recoil upon the marquis himself, if he had to intervene to prevent some unfortunate attachment; some highly unsuitable attachment.
Mrs. Duveen wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if the marquis had spoken to her on the subject of the young woman she had brought with her from England, and perhaps requested that in future she should be discouraged from making herself familiar with his relatives.