Bride in Waiting

by Susan Barrie

  April watched Jessica and Mark Ferrers walk towards them, and she smiled deliberately up into her fellow-countryman’s face. Her smile was an invitation, and he could not but ask her to dance, and she whispered in an aside to Rodrigo:

  “Make the most of your opportunity! I’ll keep Mark away from Constancia ... for a while, at least!”

  She managed to keep Mark away from Constancia for quite a long while, looking innocently into Don Carlos’s face when he frowned blackly as he saw her accept the Englishman’s invitation, and then smiling brilliantly once more up into the latter’s face as they danced. She even permitted him to dance her—long before the music ceased—out on to the terrace, and in the quiet and serenity of moonlight, with dark cypresses waving above them, and on all sides of them, they disappeared into the fastness of the hotel garden.

  “Whew!” Mark exclaimed, when they were well away from the hotel, and the lights of the ballroom no longer reached them. He put a finger down inside his collar as if to loosen it, and mopped at his face with a silk handkerchief. “That young woman, Constancia, has the shattering charm of quite a number of Spanish women—particularly at her age, when they’re like ripe fruit dangling on a. tree!—but I find that a little of them goes a long way! You...” and he looked at April’s cool dark head, barely on a level with his dinner-jacketed shoulder ... “thank heavens you’re English, and don’t expect me to make love to you. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy making love to you,” frankly, his eyes glistening just a little, “if we hadn’t had such a day! But quite honestly, all that sight-seeing ... and with your noble fiancé being so suave and smooth about everything! But when I go sight-seeing I like to admire the things I want to admire, and preferably not in company—or not such a phalanx of company!”

  “I know.” April sank down on a white-painted garden seat and spread the skirts of her pink dress that looked pale as a moth’s wing in the moonlight. “That’s to say, I understand what you mean, as you’re an artist.”

  “And although you’re not an artist, you’re terribly soothing.” He sat down beside her on the seat. “I think you feel as I do about all that colour and warmth we saw this morning, the beauty of all that Moorish craftsmanship ... the urge anyone like myself has to paint, and go on painting it!”

  They went on talking about Moorish craftsmanship until quite a considerable while had elapsed since they left the hotel. April appeared to be paying a great deal of attention to every sentence uttered by Ferrers, and she felt sure he was extremely flattered by her attentiveness, but what she was actually thinking about was Rodrigo ... and how clever he had been at detaching Constancia from the rest of them, and carrying her off somewhere into the garden.

  Her guardian might be furious—and no doubt would be when he discovered what they had been up to—but just then, it didn’t seem to April that Carlos had any real right to be furious, since Constancia was, after all, only his ward, and Rodrigo was in love with her. She had to marry some time, and why not Rodrigo ... who was so charming and friendly, and very much in love with her?

  Here April felt a sudden twinge—a little upsurging of regret because she had absolutely no right to interfere in the Don’s affairs, to encourage disobedience in his ward behind his back. But when it also occurred to her that Carlos, as a man betrothed had no right to feel active jealousy of any man who approached Constancia (and she was quite sure it was jealousy—naked and rather primitive) the feeling of uneasiness and betrayal slid away from her, and she became convinced that, in a way, she was doing a good thing for Constancia.

  The girl was coming alive to the world about her, and she wanted to be free. And if Carlos wanted to marry her—if, that is, he would have preferred to marry her to any other woman—why then hadn’t he asked her to marry him, instead of asking her, April? Why hadn’t he waited for Constancia’s seventeenth birthday—an age when she was ripe for wedlock, having been brought up in the south and the hot sun of Andalusia!—and asked her to marry him then?

  Without complicating the lives of other people ... impressionable people like herself, who would never cease to be desperately in love with him, although she understood now that he could never be in love with her!

  It was Constancia he loved! And before Constancia, it was Constancia’s mother. A very natural evolution, and something that should not have been ignored, or any effort made to overcome a state of affairs that was quite inevitable!

  But it made April feel lost and alone and very sick at heart as she sat there in the moonlight, listening to Mark Ferrers exclaiming over the wonders and the beauties of Granada.

  She answered automatically at intervals, and she was saying to herself: “It would be the best thing in the world if I went right away ... as quickly as possible. Senora Cortez’s offer is the way out!” when Carlos’s voice spoke harshly behind them, and she stood up guiltily and whirled round.

  “So there you both are!” Carlos’s voice was full of carefully contained rage. “I’ve been hunting all over the grounds for you, April, and I find you here ... with Senor Ferrers!”

  April looked at him quietly.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why have you been looking for me?”

  For one instant she thought the look from his dark eyes would wither her, it was so full of concentrated resentment.

  “Why?” He repeated the word icily. “Constancia and Rodrigo have both disappeared, and I am determined to find them! If you can bear to interrupt your absorbing conversation and join in the search perhaps you will be good enough to do so at once ... while they are still somewhere in the immediate vicinity!”

  April looked at him queerly.

  “Why?” she asked again. “Are you afraid,” a strange, unbalanced note of lightness entering her voice, “that they might have eloped?”

  “The women of my family do not elope,” he replied disdainfully.

  “No,” she said, while her wide eyes regarded him, and her long hair was gently stirred by the night breeze, “the women of your family do as they are told, don’t they, Don Carlos? They marry when they are ordered, and they decline to marry when they are ordered!” She forgot Mark Ferrers was standing there beside her, looking increasingly uncomfortable as he became aware of his host’s wrath, and because she couldn’t stop the words she rushed on: “I agreed to marry you because you ordered me to do so!... I don’t think it ever seriously occurred to you that a refusal on my part was possible! You are the great Don Carlos de Formera y Santos who can offer so much, and I’m the little nobody who should have been overwhelmed because you offered it all to me. But I’m not! Not in the very slightest degree overwhelmed, and if I can find Constancia for you...” she turned, as if about to rush blindly off into the darkness “... then you can take it all back and offer it to her. For unless you marry Constancia, and put Rodrigo out of his misery once and for all, nobody’s going to be happy ... least of all me!”

  She took a few steps into the darkness, but Mark Ferrers caught her wrist.

  “I say, I say!” he protested. “I didn’t meant to cause all this bother!...”

  She wrenched away her wrist.

  “You haven’t caused any bother. This was something that had to happen. But I’m going to find Constancia!”

  “April!” Carlos called, his voice entirely different, but she had disappeared in the blackness of the trees, and by the time he started after her she already had a good lead.

  Half sobbing, more upset than she had ever been in her life, April flew down the path between the dark lines of cypresses, and when she heard him coming after her she hid behind a tree. Then she doubled back to the hotel and almost collided with Jessica Hartingdon, who was standing in the entrance. She looked as if she was trying to make up her mind about something.

  CHAPTER XIV

  “CONSTANCIA?” April demanded, appealingly. “Have you any idea where she is?”

  Jessica smiled.

  “Just gone off in a taxi to a well-known night spot ... well-known in these parts, I mea
n. I suggested to her that she be really rash and go off and enjoy herself with Rodrigo.”

  April gasped.

  “Carlos will never forgive her!”

  Jessica smiled less pleasantly.

  “That was something I had in mind,” she said. “And if you,” she added, “don’t want to become involved in his wrath, you’d better go and bring her back, hadn’t you?”

  April looked bewildered.

  “How...?”

  Jessica indicated a taxi that had just arrived with a passenger in the forecourt.

  “Take that,” she suggested, “and tell the man you want to be dropped at The Golden Cockerel. It’s terribly new and terribly exciting ... but it won’t matter that you haven’t an escort if you’re simply looking for Constancia. Don’t spoil their sport too soon, but you’d better bring her back!”

  There was a mocking note in her voice which April didn’t wait to listen to further. She ran down the hotel steps and entered the taxi, giving the driver the name of The Golden Cockerel. If he looked at her a little oddly it never occurred to her, and she was too upset to realize that she was without the means of paying for the taxi when they arrived because she hadn’t any money with her. All she did was grip the edge of the seat hard as the taxi shot out of the forecourt, and eventually appeared to lose itself in a maze of narrow streets which were like dark tunnels to April, although they were lighted at intervals by a lantern over a doorway, or a light that streamed from a window

  The night was very hot, and through the open windows of the taxi came the all-pervading scent of tobacco-plant, as well as the heady scents of countless other flowers that bloomed in tucked away courtyards and gardens. When they flashed past the mouth of a very dark alley-way—or so it seemed to April—she caught the sound of a guitar twanging, and a man singing softly to the darkness and the night ... almost certainly underneath a lady’s window, as she realized.

  Then the taxi stopped abruptly, in the very middle of that network of narrow streets. The driver got out and lifted his bonnet and looked at his engine, and when April made anxious inquiries he shrugged his shoulders. They had broken down, and he was not at all sure what the trouble was, but if she would have patience he would find out.

  In desperation she stood there waiting until a long cream-coloured car came nosing its way down the narrow street, and behind the wheel she recognized Don Carlos. The most absurd panic overtook her, and without stopping to think what she was doing—and risking—she darted off down the intersecting and even narrower way. But Carlos was out of his car and after her—to the taxi-man’s utter astonishment—before she had gone twenty yards, and after forty yards he had caught her up. By that time she was in a state of panic far exceeding anything she had felt before, and this time the panic had to do with the sudden realization that had beset her that she did not know where she was going, and if she continued she would almost certainly be lost in a labyrinth of utterly strange houses, and even more alien people. Lost, and without any money, and in a filmy evening dress!

  She turned just as Carlos caught up with her, and in a state of wild, unreasoning fear she threw herself into his arms. She burst into a torrent of weak sobs, and he held her protectively close. It didn’t matter to her now that he might be angry with her, but it astounded her that he could be so wonderfully, exquisitely tender and understanding.

  “I was so afraid!” she sobbed. “I suddenly realized that I’d lost my way...”

  He stroked her hair with a hand that trembled slightly.

  “Amada,” he demanded softly, “do you think I would allow you to be lost? I came after you at once, and I saw you as soon as you slipped out of the taxi. But oh, my heart,” reproachfully, “why did you run from me? Why did you run away from me at all?”

  “It was Constancia,” she replied, leaning against him in luxurious abandon, while they were both surrounded by the darkness of the night—and, not far away, the man with the delightful tenor voice went on singing, to the accompaniment of his guitar. “She—she has gone to a place called The Golden Cockerel ... with Rodrigo. I—I was going after them, to bring her back.”

  “Oh, amada,” he said again—and there was no mistake now, his voice trembled. “But Constancia is at the hotel, and Mark Ferrers—who, Jessica suggested, should come after you—is there too. It was a whimsical idea on the part of Miss Hartingdon ... that I should get the impression you and Ferrers had arranged to meet away from the hotel. But, unfortunately for her, I happen to know you better than she does, and it was I who came after you!” She put back her head and looked up at him, her eyes bright with tears. The pale rays of a street lamp showed him quite clearly her tear-streaked face.

  “But—but why?” she stammered. “Why did she...?”

  He shrugged.

  “Women are inexplicable sometimes.” That was all he permitted himself to say about Jessica Hartingdon. “And now I will take you back, my dear one.” April borrowed his handkerchief and wiped away a tear. He would have done it for her gladly, but she preferred to keep her face hidden just then.

  “You said ... you said Constancia is at the hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “And ... Rodrigo?”

  “Is with her. They never left the gardens. Of course, she would never have dreamed of leaving them without my permission. And, contrary to some strange idea you seem to have formed, I do not wish to offer her all I possess ... I have already offered it to you. And you are the woman I love ... no,” correcting himself with great soberness, “adore! I wonder if you have the faintest idea how I felt just now when I saw you rush blindly away from me into the darkness of these narrow streets rather than be seen by me? I wonder if you know how much you hurt me tonight when you spoke as you did in front of your countryman, Ferrers!”

  She looked up at him this time in a kind of glorious bewilderment. She was trembling with unbelief and the desire to press closer to him, to be taken even more possessively into his arms.

  “Oh, Carlos, I never thought ... I mean I thought it was Constancia you ... well, you would rather have married, although perhaps you had some reason for not doing so. I thought you only asked me to marry you because ... well, it was a way out of a difficulty ... a sensible solution to a problem!”

  “Instead of which,” taking her face between his hands and devouring it with his eyes, “I asked you to marry me because...” And then he caught himself up sharply. “But you shall say it first! You have treated me abominably—not only tonight, but for several days past!—and now you shall tell me why you agreed to marry me. It was not because I forced you to, amada”—his lips twisting wryly at the remembrance of things she had said to him—“for you are not a young woman to be forced! If you were, I would not have felt this wild desire to make you my wife! Now tell me, why did you agree to marry me?” She felt, as she had felt once before, as if her whole being was eager to be dissolved in his.

  “Oh, Carlos,” she breathed, her eyes hanging upon his in the lamplight, “it was because I love you. I love you so very much, Carlos, and I—I think I must have done so ... always!”

  She heard him utter a sound like a long-drawn-out “A-ah!”, and then he was holding her fiercely in his arms, caring little if anyone saw them, aware only of the flaming love-light in her eyes, the eager lips upraised to his. And when he finally lifted his head and drew a deep breath after devouring her mouth with his own the stars were spinning round April, and the dark street was a corner of paradise.

  “We will go now, my darling,” he said. He looked round him regretfully. “Although I shall probably never know a happier moment than this place has afforded me.”

  He led her back to the car, and when he had put her into the seat beside the driving-seat he got in beside her and took her quite naturally into his arms. The taxi-man had somehow or other repaired his taxi and driven off into the night, and they were still alone in a corner of Granada that seemed to them both like a lost world at that late hour of the night ... or rather, mornin
g. For, when she glanced at the clock on the dashboard, April saw that it was nearly three a.m.

  “Darling,” Don Carlos said, as if he liked the sound of the English endearment, lifting her chin with his long brown fingers and looking at her adoringly, “we will have no more of Constancia, is that agreed? No more unhappiness about her, I mean? Tonight I told Rodrigo that he can marry her in a year’s time, but not before ... I simply will not permit her to marry before she is eighteen. She is still a child to me, you know.”

  “And I thought—”

  “I know what you thought! But that was because I did not tell you the truth, that I recovered from my infatuation for Constancia’s mother long, long ago. She was but an infatuation, you know ... I was a boy in love with a woman far older than himself. And when I grew up I knew that when, and if, I fell in love again, it would be a very different thing ... not woman-worship, but a man’s desire for a woman! The years passed, and it did not seem to me that I would find my love ... until that afternoon in Madrid, when I saw her standing anxiously in the hall of an empty flat, her hair like sunshine all about her! And then I think my heart dropped right out at your feet, and I wanted you more than anything else in life.”

  She gazed up at him in astonishment.

  “But I thought you regarded me as a perfect nuisance! ... I thought you asked me to marry you simply and solely to ... because you thought you had compromised me!”

  “Or you had compromised me?” He smiled, but his smile was very tender. “Even in Spain we do not go.to such extreme lengths, my dear one, unless we are sure that the woman is an excellent match, and will make an ideal wife for the most prosaic of reasons, or because she is as necessary as breathing. Because we are in love!”