by Susan Barrie
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. The past — the present — and the future. But why the future? Just now, at any rate! Surely that can be left to take care of itself?”
“Not if you happen to be Sebastiao Antonio Luiz Carlos de Barrateira, Marques of!” There was almost a helpless note in his voice, as well as a note of fierce protest. “I can’t be allowed a decent interval to get over things. It’s a similar situation to when a king dies ... The King is dead, Long live the King! In other words, I must marry again as quickly as possible, and satisfy all those people who are living and breathing for the sole purpose of thrusting me into matrimony!”
“You don’t happen to be referring to your stepmother, the Marquesa, do you?” Kathie asked, quite certain that he was.
“Oh, Paula’s only one of them...” Sebastiao looked down at his brown hands, locked together between his knees, and Kathie was aware of the sunshine doing dazzling things to the dark golden head beside her. “There are others! But, perhaps because she’s with me all the time, Paula does seem sometimes to be the most insistent.”
“Do you have to travel around with a stepmother?”
He glanced at her with a faint uprising of his eyebrows.
“Paula is my father’s widow, and it is my job to look after her. In Portugal we do not shelve these problems as you do over here.”
“Aren’t you forgetting that you’re half Irish yourself, and a woman of your stepmother’s age should be capable of settling down on her own, particularly as there is no lack of money or means for her comfort?” Kathie didn’t know why all at once she felt impatient rather than sympathetic with him, but she did. “And you are certainly old enough to plan your own life, I should have thought!”
“You would have thought...?” He glanced at her this time with astonishment. “What an extraordinary young person you are, and how very forthright! But it’s one of the things I like about you — I find intriguing! Yesterday I told you you are beautiful, but in a good light I can see that you are not — yet you have something far more than mere beauty to commend you. When I look at you you remind me of that rather bewildering light down there on the loch — and I agree with you it is unmatchable anywhere else in the world — and you don’t seem to weigh your words, which are, however, quite sound. Lady Fitz told me she is fonder of you than any other person in the world.”
“Did she?” She looked at him in astonishment. “But I thought you were the one person in the world she is really devoted to...”
He smiled in a twisted, cynical fashion that made him seem years older, and she judged him to be somewhere in his early thirties.
“Oh, undoubtedly, she was — once!” with a calm acceptance of devotion that somehow shook her a little. “But I seem to have undergone a change. She tells me I have changed, anyway.”
“That seems rather a pity, because it is important to keep affection once one has aroused it.”
He smiled at her with superior incredulity.
“You are obviously very young, and very untouched to talk like that. As you go through life you’ll find that you must change. Other people will change you, contacts will change you, experience will change you — suffering will change you.” His face altered again, grew haggard with self-pity.
“How long is it since your marriage ended?” she asked quietly with the strange composure and forthrightness he had commented on. “How long since your wife — died?”
“A year,” he replied briefly.
“A year is a long time,” she mused reflectively. “In childhood it seems like an eternity. It should have enabled you to get over things a little, particularly as you move about so much, and have so much change and variety. Don’t you look forward to the future at all?”
“For me there is no future,” lighting another cigarette with shaking hands.
“I think that’s rather an absurd thing to say,” she said gently. “There’s always a future.”
“When you’re twenty-one, yes.” He glanced at her sideways. “Is that your age?”
“No, I’m twenty-four.”
He seemed surprised.
“Perhaps it’s those three extra years that make me want to talk to you — tell you things I’d never tell anyone else. And one thing I’ll tell you is that I shall never again contract an ordinary marriage. If I have to marry it won’t be for love, or even to provide an heir, but because they thrust me into it. It will be a marriage in name only, and that’s a pretty comfortless thing, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“A very comfortless thing, I should say,” with a sigh in the words, “and very unfair on yourself. Very unfair, too, on the woman you marry. I could find it in my heart to pity her.”
“But you forget the material benefits that will be hers,” with a harsh note of pride in his voice. “She’ll be the Marquesa de Barrateira, with half a dozen homes of her own, and all the money she wants to spend. Surely, to a secretary like yourself, doesn’t that spell something?”
Her grave, clear eyes held his. She seemed to be thinking.
“I don’t know. As a secretary I find all that too much for me to grasp.”
Instantly he looked ashamed of himself for his touch of hauteur, his touch of condescension, and his hand went out and covered hers lightly.
“I’m sorry. I seem to have become a very unpleasant person lately. Believe me, I wasn’t always so self-absorbed.” He squeezed her hand. “Now tell me something about yourself ... Not the conventional things you told me last night, like the books you enjoy and the way you endeavor to kill time here in this backwater. Tell me about yourself!” His quiet voice, with that attractive formal accent, grew insistent. “What do you plan to do with your life — your life not mine! Have you ambitions, aspirations? Have you ever been in love?”
She felt startled by the question. It seemed to hang in the air around them, was caught up like an echo and thrown back at her from the quiet surface of the loch. Have you ever been in love? No; she hadn’t ever been remotely near to the fringes of love, but being a young woman of twenty-four she thought of it often, and felt little shivers of expectancy creep over her when she allowed herself to dwell on the possibility that one day she would fall in love. And — what was perhaps more important — that one day someone would fall in love with her.
But now, with a queer foreboding at her heart, and the echoes from the lake ringing in her ears — was she, perhaps, more than a little bit fey — she knew that it would be better if she never did fall in love. That somehow she must escape it. Escape it, escape it, said the echoes from the loch.
She shook her head, so that the bright hair swung against her neck.
“There’s never been anyone to fall in love with!”
He smiled, as if he could accept that as an explanation — as if he found it easy to believe in such a spot. But it was not, in itself, enough. “Then, for heaven’s sake, don’t,” he said. “I wish I could ensure for you that you would never know the misery of falling in love, the agony that it brings in its train. If I could do so here and now I would do so.”
“Why?” she enquired, a trifle breathlessly.
“Because it will change you, and I would prefer that you were never changed. Because it will take away that ‘Wings of the Morning’ look that you have, that heart- whole look of serenity that is so pleasing to one who is not serene, and such a constant challenge to your red hair. For red-headed people never do things by halves, you know ... Or perhaps you didn’t know?”
She nodded, thoughtfully.
“I may look serene, but I am not always serene at heart. I can and do feel violently about a lot of things — one thing in particular!”
“And that is?” he asked.
“My father’s health. He was very ill a few months ago, and we thought we were going to lose him. The doctor says he should not live in a climate like this — that he should be sent somewhere where it is warm and dry. He himself would like to go and live in the Bahamas — or he would li
ke to take a cruise to the Bahamas, and stay there for a while. If I had the money I would send him there.”
“And you have no means of raising the money?”
She shook her head.
“Not a hope in the world!” She clasped her small slim hands together. “But I spend hours and hours thinking up ways and means of getting a sufficient amount of cash together. Little Carrig belongs to my mother, or I would persuade Daddy to sell it. We girls could always live somewhere.”
“You could,” he agreed. He stood up rather abruptly. “How many girls are there in your family?”
“Three,” she answered, and smiled up at him.
The Marques was looking down at her with curiosity. “And are your sisters as attractive as you are?” he wanted to know.
“Oh no,” she replied instantly to this, “they’re beautiful. Really beautiful!”
Sebastiao’s eyebrows lifted.
“You intrigue me,” he assured her. “As a family you must be unique! I must certainly meet your sisters.
He met one of them the following day, for Eileen turned up unexpectedly with a chunky wool cardigan of Kathie’s over her arm. She explained that their mother had thought she might need it, and when Kathie looked quite taken aback smiled at her with limpid affection and reminded her how easily she caught cold.
Kathie — who couldn’t remember when she caught cold last — tried to smile back naturally, and to appear grateful, and Lady Fitz looked slightly but definitely amused. She invited Eileen to remain and have tea with them, and Eileen — who was wearing her blue woollen and the sheerest stockings she possessed, and her hair in a swinging golden page-boy — sank down gracefully on a Hepplewhite chair, and turned her translucent blue eyes on the Marques.
He didn’t appear actually taken aback by her looks, but he quite plainly found it an enjoyable occupation studying her. His stepmother treated her to the stony air of disapproval she reserved for young women who were not of Portuguese birth and in the very top flight where family was concerned, and Kathie found it unnecessary to join in the conversation because she had to deputise behind the tea-tray for Lady Fitz, whose arthritis was troubling her.
Eileen had a peculiarly soft and very attractive voice, and she chattered on about affairs of the district, assuming (apparently in innocence) that the Marques and his stepmother would be staying on for a while, and mentioning the O’Shaughnessy dance on the twenty- sixth. She lowered her eyelids and fluttered her eyelashes apologetically because there was such a paucity of events in the neighborhood, but Sebastiao assured her that he wasn’t looking for organized entertainment, and paid a compliment to the local scenery that was not in the least the sort of compliment he would have paid it on Saturday afternoon, when he had had a surfeit of local weather.
Eileen took it that he was certainly not averse to remaining on at Mount Osborne for longer than a weekend, and she also took it — no doubt because of the way he looked at her — that amongst the local features he praised was the enchanting appearance of at least one of the local young women. And being slightly but genuinely overcome by the astonishing good looks of the Portuguese nobleman she had been determined to meet somehow or other, she said with a burst of attractive shyness that if he was not leaving them too soon her mother and father would be delighted to make his acquaintance (and the Marquesa’s, of course! Although the Marquesa responded with a continuance of her stony silence that would have disconcerted anyone but Eileen). And she even issued an invitation to lunch at Little Carrig that was so charmingly and appealingly phrased that it earned Kathie’s admiration, although she was astounded when Sebastiao accepted.
“That is very kind,” he said. “I should be delighted to meet your parents.”
Eileen could scarcely believe her luck, and she gazed at the shapely golden head, the perfect tan and the dark blue eyes of this unusual and elegant widower and wondered why it was that her heart beat a sudden nervous tattoo inside her breast. Was it because he was so personable? — or because he was a widower, because she knew him to be exceptionally wealthy, and a marques?
She had never met a marques before, and had certainly never had the effrontery to invite one to lunch.
“And my sister,” she murmured, with engaging simplicity. “That is, my other sister, Bridie,” as if she scarcely expected him to be impressed by Kathie. “She will be delighted when I tell her you are coming to Little Carrig.”
His handsome mouth curved a little oddly, and a look stole into the dark blue depths of his eyes that could have been compounded of still greater admiration. A wholesale acceptance of something unique and rather unbelievable that had by no means passed over his head!
“Of course I must meet the Senhorita Bridie,” he said softly. “I shall not be happy until I have met all the members of your family.”
And at that slight but deliberate emphasis on all the members of your family, Eileen began to wonder whether her luck was unbelievable also. Whether she had been inspired to pay her casual afternoon call — risking a snub from Lady Fitz, who could administer very cutting ones when she felt like it, and the occasion seemed to warrant a departure from her usual urbanity — and whether the fortune-teller who had once told her that she would marry ‘very well indeed’ had not been simply romancing. The nervous tattoo inside her breast became a tremble of excitement. She fixed a day for the luncheon party.
CHAPTER FIVE
If Lady Fitz was surprised when her godson announced that he was prepared to stay on at Mount Osborne for another week or a fortnight she did not betray herself. She simply said she would be very happy indeed to have as much of his company as he could spare her, and left it to his stepmother, the Marquesa de Barrateira, to display mild symptoms of genuine horror.
“But it is so bad for the rheumatism which has begun to affect me,” she wailed — “this damp and this cold! And I long to get back to Portugal!”
The Marques regarded her with an implacable smile on his too-long unsmiling mouth.
“All in good time, Paula,” he returned smoothly. “And if you wish, you can always go ahead.”
“But I do not travel well alone,” she protested. “And, besides, there is nothing to keep you here!”
The Marques lit a cigarette and said nothing. His godmother stole a questioning look at him.
“You forget that I am half Irish,” the man said, mildly. “I find that the Irish half of me is impressed by certain things that I have found here — certain qualities, shall we say?”
Instantly the Marquesa looked quite violently alarmed.
“Not the golden-headed sister of the red-headed secretary?” she demanded, not even attempting to conceal her alarm. “That one is a designing minx! I warn you about her here and now!”
Lady Fitz could have looked quite pained, since the young woman in question had been known to her for years, and was the daughter of close neighbors — to say nothing of the ‘red-headed secretary’ being her own secretary and protégée (fortunately by this time returned to Little Carrig, so she couldn’t possibly overhear the description applied to herself). But it was seldom Lady Fitz displayed any sort of emotion apart from imperturbability, and now she suggested that it was impossible to form an opinion of anyone on such a short acquaintance. The Marquesa had barely exchanged two words with Eileen, and because a girl was pretty, it was both unwise and unfair to designate her a minx.
Or was Eileen a very clever minx? Lady Fitz wondered.
“Bah!” exclaimed the hard-eyed little Marquesa rudely. “I know women — especially badly brought up young women who exist outside Portugal! — and Sebastiao is a very great ‘catch’, as they would call him. He is rich, with vast estates, and has been widowed a year. In America they chased after him shamelessly ... on the boat it was the same — always it was the same!...”
Her disgust seemed to incline her to choke.
Sebastiao regarded her gravely.
“And men soon forget!” dabbing at her over-bright eyes with her
handkerchief. “They do not take long to forget...” And a tear actually rolled down her cheek.
“I shall never forget!” Sebastiao said, so fiercely that his stepmother started to tremble, and she realized she had been unwise.
“No, my dear one, you will never forget,” she agreed, sniffing into her handkerchief. “Poor Hildegarde! ... It is because I would replace her with someone suitable that I — I...”
But Sebastiao turned, and walked out of the room.
Lady Fitz said quietly:
“If you do not wish to drive him in entirely the wrong direction you should refrain from interfering in his purely personal affairs, Paula. I offer that to you as a piece of advice!”
But Paula didn’t look as if she could ever accept it, and the next day she refrained from accompanying him to Little Carrig, and so never knew what an instantaneous success he was with the Sheridan family. Even Kathie could hardly believe in the way he unbent, and the charm he exerted to beguile her mother, and the touch of deference that crept into his manner when he addressed her father. Gerald Sheridan, in his well-worn hacking jacket with the leather patches on the elbows, but wearing a very crisp collar and an Old Etonian tie, seemed to cough less than usual in his enjoyment of the opportunity to converse with the younger man on a variety of subjects. He discovered that they both enjoyed fishing, and they both had a particular aversion to dining out when the mood was not on them.