Doctor at Villa Ronda

by Iris Danbury

  “Yes, but I don’t love you.”

  Nicola said the words lightly, for she felt that Patrick was not entirely seriously inclined. There was a mutual attraction between them, and had they met elsewhere, in England, say at the local tennis club or a dance, they might easily have found more than mere companionship. But Nicola had irrevocably given her heart to Sebastian, and there was nothing for it but to put a thousand miles between her and the doctor.

  CHAPTER X

  The last few days of Nicola’s final month at the Villa Ronda became sultry and oppressive with heat. Everyone went about sighing and muttering that thunder was on the way, but no storm came.

  Suddenly, with the impact of an emotional thunderclap, Adrienne’s father, Eduardo, returned from his long exile in South America.

  Nicola was in Sebastian’s study when she was conscious of someone standing by the arched window. At first she thought it was Sebastian returning early from his clinic.

  “Buenos tardes, senorita.” The man’s voice sounded much older than Sebastian’s.

  “Buenas tardes, senor,” she returned, standing up ready to find out what he wanted. It was unusual for strangers to approach the Villa through Sebastian’s study windows. Then she saw the likeness. “Senor Montal?”

  He nodded and asked in Spanish where his brother Sebastian could be found.

  “No aqui,” she replied. “Not here. At the clinic.”

  She pulled out a chair for him, for he looked tired, his face was grey with fatigue; his almost white hair prematurely aged him so that he looked more like Sebastian’s father than brother.

  Nicola rang the bell and immediately a maid appeared. Nicola told her to fetch Rosana, the elderly housekeeper. She would certainly know what to do.

  “Adrienne is out somewhere,” Nicola told Don Eduardo, “but she will return to lunch.”

  Rosana came bustling in, her arms outstretched. She ran to Eduardo, folded him in her arms and crooned broken phrases as though he were a child lost and now found again.

  After that, pandemonium raged through the Villa. Maids were sent scurrying about like feathers out of a ripped bolster. Menservants brought wine, dozens of bottles for Eduardo to make a choice. Food was set before him, with Rosana sitting beside him to tempt him to this morsel or that. Telephone calls were made to every possible place where Adrienne might be and to the clinic where Sebastian could not leave his patients unattended.

  Nicola effaced herself again in the study. This was a family matter in which she had no part, yet she was delighted for Adrienne’s sake that the girl’s father had returned.

  Adrienne did not return until early evening, and as Nicola saw her come across the patio, she ran out to warn her.

  “My father? Oh, what happiness!” she exclaimed, rushing indoors, seeking Eduardo.

  Dinner was a reunion at which Nicola felt she had no right to be present. Father and daughter smiled and gazed at each other, Dona Elena and Ramon had been hurriedly invited, Sebastian quietly surveyed the others. Was it Nicola’s fancy that he was less cordial in his welcome to his brother, or was it merely that he was less demonstrative of his emotions?

  “My faith was justified!” cried Adrienne excitedly. “I knew you could not be lost in the jungle,”

  “No, I was never lost.”

  “But you never communicated with us for more than two years,” Sebastian pointed out.

  Eduardo shrugged his frail shoulders. “It was difficult. I was in a remote village on a river bank. I set up my headquarters there and treated the natives as well as I could in a simple way.”

  “But your supplies must have come to you,” Dona Elena said. “Could you not have had your letters also sent out?”

  “Oh, I did, but pieces of paper with words written on them do not seem important to such practical tribes. What supplies I could get from the nearest settlement I had to sketch, to indicate what part of the body they were for.”

  Eduardo retired to his room immediately after dinner and Adrienne accompanied him, for she needed to talk with him.

  Nicola again decided that she was de trop in this family celebration and went to the balcony of her room. A few more days and then she would never again see the gardens, the patios, the innumerable curves and arches and red-tiled roofs of the Villa Ronda.

  Tonight the sky seemed dark and opaque with few stars and the trees were motionless. Somewhere below voices floated up.

  “... that was why Eduardo stayed away so long.” Dona Elena was speaking in Spanish, but Nicola understood.

  The listener replied, and now Nicola caught the tones of Ramon’s voice. He and his sister were discussing Eduardo. Nicola could not avoid hearing fragments and isolated words that she could translate ... forgiveness ... Sebastian ... Heloise ...”

  Surely Heloise was the name of Adrienne’s French mother? Or had Nicola heard some other word that sounded like the name?

  Next day Nicola made a sudden decision to leave quickly, without fuss or farewell. Sebastian’s book was completely finished. She had fulfilled that part of the contract.

  Ramon and Adrienne were now on the best of terms and ready to announce their betrothal. As Adrienne had confided to Nicola only a day or two ago, “Your sister Lisa made me so furious about Ramon that I found I did not want her—or anyone else—to put hooks into him.”

  “Poor Ramon! You make him sound like a fish that you want to land.”

  “Well, Ramon is my fish!” Adrienne declared possessively. “We shall be most happy. We love each other.”

  The entire household was so involved with Eduardo that Nicola’s departure would never be noticed. She would leave letters for Sebastian and Adrienne, explaining her action in going away a couple of days before the due date.

  She would have to wait until after dinner before she could slip away unobserved and during the day she packed her suitcase. She included the terra-cotta water jug that Adrienne had given her and hesitated over the few pictures she had painted. The only one she wanted to take home with her was that of the Villa, and Sebastian had asked for that. She propped the canvas on her dressing table and set the note for Sebastian by the side. It was not a very good picture, she thought critically, and probably later on he would laugh at it. The paint was not dry, anyway, and would only smudge.

  After dinner, she managed to slip out of the Villa gates and hoped no car would reveal her in its headlights. Suddenly, as she was halfway down the hill towards the village and the station, rain which had been threatening all day now began to fall in great drops, then in a curtain of such tropical intensity that Nicola was taken by surprise. Her thin nylon raincoat which she had brought from England and never worn while she was here was now in the bottom of her suitcase, and she was already soaked to the skin before she could even begin to unlock the case.

  Lightning illuminated the road in a blinding mauve flash and thunder roared overhead. A figure bent almost double hurried past her as Nicola cowered against the wall of a house.

  A voice shouted “Venga aqui!” and in the next lightning flash she saw someone beckoning her towards a house a few yards away. Nicola ran, glad of any shelter. Downpours as violent as this never lasted long, she thought.

  The woman pulled Nicola into the house and banged the door shut, standing against it for a moment to get her breath back. In the dim light of a lamp, Nicola now saw that the girl was Micaela, Barto’s sister.

  Barto’s mother, Senora Gallito, rose to help Nicola out of her soaked clothes, talking rapidly about the bad storm. Nicola gathered that Micaela had been down to the harbour to try to persuade Barto not to go out this evening with the fishing fleet, but he was obstinate and had gone.

  Micaela gave Nicola a cup of hot soup and, glancing at the suitcase, asked if Nicola was leaving Orsola. When Nicola nodded, the girl asked why not by automobile.

  Nicola answered vaguely that she had not wanted to bother anyone at the Villa to take her down to the station.

  “But there are no trains!”
exclaimed Micaela in Spanish. “The last one goes at twenty hours.”

  Nicola mentally kicked herself for not finding this out sooner. Eight o’clock. The train had already gone before dinner at the Villa Ronda.

  She had made the best of a bad job. “Perhaps when the rain stops, I can go to the station and wait until the morning.”

  A glance passed between Micaela and her mother. “You must stay here,” said Senora Gallito. “The storm will last a long time.”

  The two women made up a bed for Nicola and Micaela promised to wake her very early in the morning for the first train, but there was no sleep for anyone in the house.

  Thunder shook the walls and the noise of heavy rain was like a waterfall. All the windows were shuttered and Nicola could see nothing, but she could hear the constant drumming on the roof. She was glad when at last, after only the most fitful dozing, she could see daylight through a chink in the shutters.

  Micaela brought her hot coffee and rolls and explained that Nicola’s clothes were not yet dry.

  “No importa,” replied Nicola. She added that she could find dry clothes in her suitcase. She wondered how she could repay the Gallitos’ hospitality and decided to leave a little money in an unobtrusive place where they would find it after she had left.

  When Nicola said her thanks and goodbyes and stepped out of the door she was amazed at the scene. The road was still awash although the rain had stopped, the sun shone as though there had never been a storm. But boulders and stones had been washed down by the torrent and Nicola found it difficult to thread her way through the debris.

  Micaela caught her up, saying that she must come to the harbour and wait for the boats to come in. Nicola guessed how anxious the girl was about her brother Barto.

  At the foot of the hill where the road led into the village the devastation was something that Nicola had only read about or seen on newsreels. The harbour was dotted with wrecked or capsized boats, the railway line was completely submerged and down the wide Rambla, normally a dusty street, the river had returned to its old bed and was coursing down lapping against the walls of shops and houses. Tree trunks and boulders had acted as battering rams and destroyed the footbridge over the lower end of the rambla.

  Nicola and Micaela stared at the damaged village, then at each other.

  “There will be no trains,” said Micaela.

  “Nor anything else,” replied Nicola quietly. Several cars had been caught by the flood and were overturned or jammed against a tree. The whole roadway that came round the coast and led to Barcelona had risen in a great bulge, then cracked with the force of water above and below it.

  Micaela said she must now join her mother at the harbour to wait for Barto’s boat, and Nicola stood disconsolately on part of a wall from which the water had slightly receded. What on earth was she to do now? She was unlikely to find any kind of transport at all in this flood-devastated village, and to crawl back to the Villa was unthinkable.

  It occurred to her that the floods farther up the railway line might not have been so bad and perhaps there were trains running along that part of the coast. If only she could cross this roaring river somehow, she might be able to skirt the worst flooded areas by keeping to the higher parts.

  Encumbered as she was with the suitcase, it was not easy to pick her way over the rough, slippery ground and when she was faced with another fast-moving stream, she retraced her steps to the centre of the village. Scores of men and women were either barricading their shops and houses against the rushing water, or where it had receded, they were baling or pumping out the basements and cellars. One enterprising boatman was already ferrying people from one side of the rambla to the other, and Nicola shouted to catch his attention. She had to wait her turn until he had made several journeys. Then she scrambled in, dragging her suitcase with her.

  Somebody shouted, “Nicola! Nicola!”

  She shaded her eyes from the sun and peered up. Sebastian stood there, dressed in yellow nylon oilskins.

  “Come back! Come back!” he shouted.

  But there was no turning back now, for the boatman had started his precarious journey. Nicola realised that the most sensible thing to do was to stay in the boat on its return journey. Naturally Sebastian would be down here at the earliest moment for as a doctor he was needed in such an emergency as this. Then the decision whether to return to safety or try to continue her crazy journey was taken out of Nicola’s hands. A fully grown tree, its boughs turning and twisting helplessly, came swirling down the wide stream. Before he could evade the branches, the boatman was caught, his loaded boat pushed towards the walls of a house and jammed there.

  Something hit Nicola a heavy blow on the head and the sun was blotted out.

  Nicola opened her eyes. It was a curious sensation to imagine that she was back in her former room at the Villa Ronda, instead of on this jogging, throbbing train. How had she managed to get on the train? she wondered. There were floods and the line was torn up.

  She blinked, trying to focus the passing landscape, but the walls that enclosed her were cream. Here was the pale green carpet, the green and white curtains at the half-shuttered windows. She tried to sit up and the top of her head nearly jumped off.

  A quiet voice said in Spanish, “Please lie still.” Inez, Adrienne’s maid, was by the bedside. “You are safe at the Villa Ronda,” murmured Inez.

  A few moments later, or perhaps it was hours, Adrienne came towards the bed.

  “Oh, it was such a fright!” she exclaimed. “You are now much better?”

  Nicola nodded, but even that hurt her head. She put up her hand to feel a bandage around her forehead. “What happened? How did I get here?”

  “We did not even know that you had gone away, but Sebastian went to the village as soon as it was daylight. Many people have been injured, so he went to help.”

  “Of course.” Nicola had a vague impression of seeing Sebastian in yellow oilskins, and he had shouted at her.

  “Then,” continued Adrienne, “I sent Inez to your room to find how you had slept through the terrible storm. You had gone and there were your letters. My father—” and even in her present vague state, Nicola noticed the pride in Adrienne’s voice. “My father advised us to send someone down to the harbour to find Sebastian so that he could look for you.”

  “Micaela took me to her house when the storm began. I stayed there all night.”

  Adrienne sighed. “They have trouble, too. Barto is missing and all the men on his boat. Other boats are also missing.”

  “Poor Barto,” murmured Nicola. “His family were very kind to me.”

  “You must now sleep or else Sebastian will scold me for talking,” said Adrienne.

  Nicola must have dozed, for when she was next awake she became aware of someone holding her hand in a firm grip. Sebastian sat by the bedside and his clasp was totally unlike that of a doctor taking a patient’s pulse.

  “Querida!” he said softly. “Darling Nicola!” She could not believe her ears. She was still dreaming. Then he spoke again. “Why did you run away? And why did you choose such a stormy night? Did you want to drown?”

  “No.” She gave him a timid smile. “I started out before the storm broke.”

  “Then why didn’t you turn back?” he demanded, his eyes bright with concern.

  Her gaze fell. “I—I hadn’t the courage, I suppose.”

  “But you knew how much I wanted you to stay here for always. Couldn’t you see that I loved you?”

  Nicola’s heart thumped about so much that she was sure that Dr. Sebastian Montal could hear it.”

  “I thought you’d be glad to be rid of me—both of us, my sister and me.”

  “I loved you long before your sister came here. Oh, Nicola, there is so much to tell you, but it can wait. First I must hear something from you.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you love me? Enough to marry me and stay here at the Villa?”

  Nicola’s face became radiant. “How cou
ld you doubt it? Of course I do!”

  He stood up, then stared down at her. “It is most improper for a doctor to embrace his patient, but perhaps he may be allowed to kiss his future wife?”

  With his arms around her, his lips against hers, his tender words of endearment, she forgot her aching head, her foolish, false pride, and remembered only that her own love for him had brought far more than its just reward. She was luckier than she had ever imagined in her wildest dreams.

  “What happened to my head to give me such a knock?” she asked.

  “The boat crashed into a building at the foot of the rambla. Luckily no one was drowned, but most of the passengers were knocked about and you were thrown against the wall.”

  “Have they found Barto yet?”

  He nodded. “Yes. All the others, too. The three boats kept together and decided to go far away from land and ride out the storm. But they’re home now, although Barto has a broken arm.”

  “I’m glad he’s safe, for his mother’s sake and Micaela’s.”

  “Not Adrienne’s?” he teased.

  “Not now. She’s happy enough with Ramon, her fish.”

  “Her fish?” he echoed, puzzled.

  But she would not explain to him, fearing that he might also believe that he had been successfully hooked and landed.

  It was another two days before Sebastian would allow Nicola to get up, and then only to sit in the garden. She did not rebel, for she realised that he had scores of casualties to attend to in the village.