Bride in Waiting
Page 12
Constancia’s eyes lost their laughing look when she saw the way in which April’s fingers reposed in the crook of her guardian’s arm, and when she saw the sudden frown of displeasure on his face the sullen look returned.
“We are leaving, Constancia,” he said curtly, as if the sight of her behaving in a natural manner with a young man who was not even her own countryman displeased him. “April is unwell, and I am taking her home.”
Constancia did not answer, but her lower lip pouted and the look she darted at April was hardly one of sympathy.
“Oh, what a pity!” Jessica exclaimed, looking rather curiously at April, but also refraining from pouring out sympathy. She introduced her cousin, and the young man bowed gallantly over April’s hand. “We have been putting our heads together and trying to think up something unusual for Constancia’s birthday ... an unusual way of celebrating it, I mean. And I suggested a trip somewhere.”
“Oh, yes?” Don Carlos murmured politely. “But it does not strike me that a trip is a very good way of celebrating a birthday.”
“I was thinking of Granada,” Jessica admitted. “Mark has been staying there recently, and painting the Alhambra. In fact, he has painted a whole series of pictures, and they’ve fired me with enthusiasm to have another look at Granada myself—before,” she added, with an oblique glance at the Spaniard, “I go home in a few weeks’ time. Constancia doesn’t seem to have been taken there very recently, Miss Day has probably never seen it, and it might be a good idea to make up a party and stay a night at an hotel. We could have a special dinner, and dance afterwards. That would be a real birthday celebration.”
“Would it?” Don Carlos said sceptically, plainly anxious to be gone. “I think not!” And then, as Constancia’s face dropped, and she looked at him pleadingly: “Who would make up this party?”
“Yourself, of course,” Jessica replied swiftly, looking at him under her thick eyelashes, “and, naturally. Miss Day, Constancia, Rodrigo, Mummy and myself ... although I hardly think Daddy would consider it. He’s not fond of driving two or three hundred miles nowadays, just to see the sights. And Dona Ignatia might not care for the drive, either. But Mark ... Mark would be willing to make up our numbers.”
Mark smiled into Constancia’s eyes, and agreed with the utmost fervour that he would be very willing to make up their numbers.
Don Carlos looked even less inclined to agree to the plan, and it was probably because Constancia smiled back at the Englishman. April could have warned him that no man who appeared in the least eager to win the favours of Constancia would be in the least likely to find favour with her guardian, and she also experienced a wry twinge because she was fairly certain she knew the reason.
The only thing she was not certain about was just how widely awake to the true nature of his attachment for Constancia Carlos himself was. And she wondered whether he made very big efforts to deceive himself ... herself being linked up with one of those efforts!
“In any case, we have at least a couple of weeks before we need make a decision about Constancia’s birthday,” he said. “And she might think of something herself that will please her long before that.”
But Constancia assured him she had already made up her mind.
“I wish to go to Granada,” she said, and April wondered whether the look she gave him—compounded of childish coaxing, a faint touch of pleading, feminine witchery, and something much more arch ... perhaps a hope that she was woman enough to influence him, dear enough to make it impossible for him to refuse her, and feline enough to be intrigued by the possibilities of arousing his purely masculine jealousy—was a deliberately calculated look to break down his resistance.
Anyway, it made April feel suddenly sick, and Don Carlos turned away abruptly.
‘We will see,” he said, his tone unyielding, although his words were rather more than a half-promise ... an indication, in fact, that she had the power to win.
April saw the triumphant smile that flashed into Constancia’s eyes.
The dinner party, two nights later, at which her betrothal to Don Carlos was formally announced, was even more of an ordeal for April.
Dona Ignatia was a wonderful hostess, and when preparing for an important event she undertook many of the tasks that, in other households, might have been deputed to servants. She personally inspected every piece of silver and every glass that found its way to the long, polished dining table. The lace table mats and the crystal finger bowls were placed in position by her long white fingers, and the arrangement of the flowers took her so long that April offered to help. But Dona Ignatia smiled at her politely and declined any assistance. She added a white gardenia to the bowl in the centre of the table, placed bowls of roses at each end of the table, set a single gardenia at each lady’s place card, and then gathered up her refuse and departed with it to the kitchen, where she devoted another lengthy period to inspecting the contents of refrigerators and side tables.
Before she left the dining sala she suggested to April that she went upstairs and commenced her dressing, and April took the hint that she was in the way and climbed the handsome baroque staircase to her suite of rooms in a corner of the large white villa. Her dress for the evening had already been laid out over the bed, and it was the pale pink crepe that she had once despised because it had cost so little. But tonight it would have to do, for she had had no opportunity to do any real shopping, and in Madrid she had been afraid to make inroads on her money for a really expensive evening gown, or anything at all that was expensive.
She looked like a wild rose when the dress was on, however, and it was wonderful what the soft lighting effects did for the dress itself. No one would be deceived into thinking it a creation, but the colour—like the inside of a shell, or the heart of a china rose—was infinitely kind to golden-brown hair and a complexion with which few people could find fault.
April brushed her hair until it shone as if moonbeams were caught up in the brightness of it, and she creamed her skin more thoroughly, perhaps, than she had ever creamed it in her life, and then added a touch of astringent lotion. The hot nights tended to make one perspire, and although she had never participated in an interminably long Spanish dinner to which large numbers of guests were invited, she had witnessed their effect on Venetia Cortez when she was acting hostess at just such a dinner party. She had frequently rushed into her bedroom with the perspiration shining on the tip of her nose, and her elaborate hair-style damp and flattened on her brow.
“Give me a simple three-course meal,” she had declared, flicking powder all over her face, and using a perfume spray wildly. “These Spanish dinners go on half the night!”
So when April descended to the ground floor of the house, shortly before nine o’clock, she was prepared to be exhausted, and prepared to face up to her second real ordeal since becoming engaged to Don Carlos.
Although she sometimes thought that the ordeal of making the acquaintance of the members of Don Carlos’s family—on the female side—was the biggest ordeal she had yet undergone.
There was no one about, and she wandered through the quiet rooms. They smelled heavily of flowers, and underlying the flower perfume was the scent of beeswax. There was a swish of satin skirts on the stairs, and Ignatia joined her, looking as if she had done nothing all day but rest and prepare herself for the evening ahead of her, and had not recently had a somewhat tiresome interview with the cook, who had failed to carry out some of her instructions to the letter. She eyed April carefully, then told her she looked very nice.
“That is a charming dress,” she murmured, but from her expression April could not make up her mind whether she meant it or not. She never did know where she was with Ignatia, whether she approved of her or otherwise, whether she resented the thought of her brother’s marriage with a comparative stranger ... an unknown alien girl with no background whatsoever! Or whether, on the other hand, she thought it a good thing for her brother to marry, even if he had to pick on a stranger.
Then Constancia came gliding into the sala, young and exquisite in pure white silk, and she had a string of lustrous pearls about her slender throat. For once she was not wearing any flowers, but she had never looked more beautiful. April felt her breath catch as she gazed at her, and a small ache of envy made her throat feel tight and uncomfortable for a moment.
For although she knew that she herself was quite attractive—she was too modest to rate her appeal for the opposite sex as any higher than that—she could never compare with Constancia. With those glorious dark, melting eyes, those breathtaking eyelashes that fluttered nervously when she looked demurely down at her feet, that perfect skin that flushed so easily and divinely, and her arresting red mouth.
Even Rodrigo, his eyes prepared to mock at her when she entered the room, grew grave and thoughtful—as April had seen him do once before—when she acknowledged his presence with the merest little half-curtsy. She looked up at him with a smile, her ripe lips curving over her faultless teeth, her eyelashes fluttering a little.
“You had a good time in Madrid?” she inquired, and for a moment he didn’t reply.
“It was not unamusing,” he returned at last, and she sent him a more calculated look between her thick eyelashes. “But I am quite glad to be back,” he added.
Don Carlos entered the room, and Constancia instantly forgot all about Rodrigo, and dropped a curtsy for the benefit of her guardian. He tweaked her ear, and then touched her cheek with the tip of a long forefinger.
“You are very charming, cara,” he told her.
Her eyes glowed.
April felt his eyes rest upon her, but all she could think of was that he was comparing her dress with the super-elegance of the dresses worn by his sister and his ward. She wanted to stammer out an apology, that she hadn’t arrived at the house prepared for elegant occasions, but she realized in time how foolish that would be. How his eyebrows would ascend in mild surprise, and his sister’s also. These people were used to elegant occasions, and were always prepared for them.
And Constancia would look down her little straight nose in delighted contempt if she made a faux pas.
The guests started to arrive in earnest, and after that it wasn’t long before they went in to dinner. Don Carlos was displaying consideration for his English fiancée in curtailing the period devoted to sipping aperitifs and chattering in rapid Spanish in the big sala, and at dinner she found she was close to him, given the place of honour at his right hand.
Ignatia sat at the foot of the table, and Constancia was somewhere between Rodrigo and another young and admiring Spaniard. The dinner was an affair of many courses, all of them justifying Ignatia’s insistence on collaborating closely with her cook, and champagne filled the glasses that sparkled before anything at all was poured into them. Afterwards there were speeches and toasts, and then came the moment the whole dinner table was awaiting. The moment when the host stood up at the head of the flower-decked, glittering table, and made the announcement they had all heard already, but on this occasion was strictly formal.
“I would like you to drink to the health of my wife-to-be,” he said, and April underwent a most curious experience. She ceased to be aware that there were other people in the room, and that every one of them had his, or her eyes fixed upon her, and all she saw were the eyes of Don Carlos, as he lifted his glass high to her. He was looking down at her, a straight, tall, commanding figure, impeccable in his evening things, and tonight he had a white rosebud in his buttonhole. It might have been an accident, but the finger of his free hand touched it as he called the toast.
“To you, amada,” he said softly, as he sank into his seat again, and continued to hold her soft brown eyes with his velvety black ones. “To us both,” he added, in so low an undertone that nobody else could possibly have overheard it, and touched her glass with his own. “Now drink, little one,” he urged her, and removed the white rosebud from the front of his dinner jacket and laid it beside her plate. “That is for you to keep. It is wilting already, but press it in a book—do something with it!—only don’t throw it away!”
His voice was light, and to the rest of the room it must have sounded bantering, but his eyes were deeper and darker than she had ever known them before with earnestness. As he put her champagne glass into her hand his fingers touched hers.
April felt as if a whole series of electric shocks sped up and down her arm, and her whole being was dissolved in wonder and delight. He had selected a white rosebud to wear in his buttonhole—what was that supposed to symbolize?—on the occasion of an announcement of a betrothal that should have meant nothing, and he had given the rosebud to her. He had charged her to keep it! Not to destroy it!
What did that mean?
Her brown eyes developed a light that must have dazzled him, it was so like that of a star peering at its reflection in limpid water, and her pale English complexion was suddenly suffused with rose ... the most revealing rose. She found it difficult to summon up a voice to answer him, and when she did it was the merest, shyest whisper, while she clutched at the rosebud and wanted to hold it up against her face.
“Of course, if you ... if you want me to keep it!...”
“I do.”
The world rocked while he deliberately kept her glance chained to his, and in the dark depths of his eyes she saw so many things that she had never imagined she would see there. Urgency, a touch of tenderness, possessiveness ... a promise that set her heart pounding. And then, halfway down the table, Constancia created a diversion by turning as white as a sheet and letting out a choked gasp, as if she was about to faint.
“I ... You’ll have to excuse me!... Please!”
She stood swaying on her feet, clutching at the edge of the table, while her eyes looked tormented, and her scarlet lower lip started to bleed because she had torn at it ruthlessly with her hard little white teeth. She turned to Rodrigo imploringly, as if he was the only one who could possibly help her, and he rose to the occasion by leaping to his feet and catching her in his arms as she collapsed, a small white silk heap, against him.
She started to sob bitterly and wildly, and by that time the whole company was on its feet, and Don Carlos wrenched his extraordinarily revealing look away from April and strode down the length of the table to the further assistance of his ward. April heard her moan and let out a wild appeal to be permitted to retire to her room, Don Carlos said something firmly but soothingly, and a bewildered Rodrigo handed her over to him and he led her from the room.
Everyone present saw the tender way in which Carlos attempted to soothe his ward, and everyone heard her passionate stream of reproaches as he led her from the room.
“I hate her, I hate her!... I’ll die if you really marry her!...”
Looks were exchanged, eyebrows weren’t merely raised, they flew up, and Dona Ignatia, her expression quite unreadable, quietly left the table and went hastening after her brother and Constancia.
April, a nasty sick sensation at the base of her stomach, seized the opportunity while no one was looking at her to escape through the open french windows into the garden.
CHAPTER XII
SHE had no idea how long she wandered out there in the moonlight and the starshine, the soft, silken warmth, and all the heady scents of the garden, before Rodrigo found her, and apologized anxiously for his half-brother.
“You mustn’t blame Carlos for leaving you alone like this! Constancia has been so spoiled. Our girls are not normally as spoiled as she is, and not many of them would behave as she did tonight. She gets so worked up...” His English was good, but in moments of stress it deserted him a little. “She has what you call a ‘thing’ about Carlos ... that is, she has for him an affection...”
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�I’ve been aware of that ever since I met her,” April replied, with a good deal of dryness. “But it was rather inconsiderate of her, if her affection is very real, to upset him tonight, don’t you think?”
Rodrigo agreed with her.
“Nevertheless, her affection is very real.”
“Too real, would you say?” looking him straight in the eye. “The affection of a young girl for her guardian does not normally overcome her on occasions such as tonight, when he announces his engagement. Not to the extent that it overcame Constancia, anyway!”
Rodrigo agreed again. In the moonlight his dark eyes were not particularly happy, and his handsome if rather weak mouth drooped at the corners.
April touched his sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” she said gently, realizing suddenly that he had followed her not only to offer her some comfort, but to derive some comfort for himself. He and Constancia might fight together, might provoke one another with their eyes, provoke one another still more with ill-chosen words, but Rodrigo was very well aware of the charm of Constancia, the beauty of her. It was a stormy sort of beauty that matched his own deep and slightly stormy eyes, and together—such a very handsome pair—they should have been very happy if there was no Don Carlos.
But for Constancia Don Carlos had been the most important thing in her life since she was a child, and she knew that her mother—whom she so closely resembled—had been the dearest thing in life to him. If she had grown up with the idea—the secret aspiration—of replacing her mother in his heart one day she was not entirely to be blamed, for there were not many men who revealed their affection for a ward as Carlos de Formera y Santos did. It was in his eyes whenever he spoke to her, his touch for her was especially tender. He refused to face up to the idea that she might marry one day.