by Susan Barrie
It had been agreed that Kathie should know nothing for several days, and it was left to the discretion of her husband as to how, and when, the news should be broken to her. When he did break it to her she looked so stunned and incredulous that he wished the news could have been shelved for a still longer period.
They had had two days at his villa on the coast, a pink washed villa that was more like a summer palace than a seaside holiday home. It stood in a garden that descended in terraces to the sea, and the emerald of square-shaven lawns, the darker green of neat clipped hedges that enclosed fountains playing in basins lined with colorful tiles, and the riot of spring flowers that were everywhere, formed such a pageant of color against the deep blue of the sky that it was like an assault on unaccustomed eyeballs, and Kathie had been glad to resort to sun-glasses for the first time in her life.
The glasses showed up the light tan she had already acquired, for Sebastiao had taken her bathing that morning, and the previous day they had spent a good many hours out of doors. They had had lunch on a sheltered terrace that looked towards the sea — an incredible sea, like a blue blaze of larkspur — and tea under a shady tree on one of the delicious square lawns; and in the early evening they had sipped aperitifs on the broad main terrace on to which the windows of the great sala opened.
And after dinner — her first dinner alone with her husband in one of his own houses — Kathie had been walked in the moonlight beneath a dark velvet sky powdered with stars like little golden lamps swung aloft, and the sea had murmured and all the flowers in the garden had given off a special intoxicating scent that had gone a little to her head.
Kathie had fallen in love with Portugal, and their two days in Lisbon had charmed her. The Quinto de Barrateira was just outside Lisbon, but they had not gone to it because, according to Sebastiao, it was dust-sheeted and more or less shut up, and no word had been sent for any of the rooms to be prepared for them. Instead, they had spent a couple of nights in one of Lisbon’s oldest and most dignified hotels, celebrated for its food and its wines and its quiet but unmistakable opulence. Outside the windows there were jacaranda trees like giant blue powder-puffs, and the handsome fisher-girls whom Sebastiao called varinas walked beneath them, balancing creels of fish on their heads.
Lisbon was delightfully noisy, with knife-grinders and tram-cars and sellers of lottery tickets; but the color was enchanting, the warmth of the sun like a golden caress, and everything was purest magic to the girl from a cooler clime. After twenty-four hours of almost unendurable strain she felt that this was her passport to sudden relaxation, a foretaste of a leisurely way of life that must have many compensations if she was prepared to turn her back on the excitements and the stresses and the demands of a completely full life.
But she would never forget those twenty-four hours, and the growing sensation of unreality as they drew to their close. Without knowing anything at all about her mother’s and sisters’ loss — and her own! — she had thought that her immediate relatives were laboring under a fairly similar strain to her own, although Eileen had seemed the most determined to make the day a memorable one. Eileen could not have looked lovelier in a lavender silk suit, and her golden hair had flowed to her shoulders under a cap of cyclamen pink flowers. There had been a gloriously handsome young man at the wedding, with Portuguese dark eyes and curling black hair, who had been quite unable to take his eyes off her throughout the entire ceremony and the brief wedding breakfast that followed, and whenever he could get close enough to do so he had filled her ears with the most outrageous compliments.
Bridie had looked pale and remote and dark in honey- colored silk, and the little cap on her head had been composed of deeper yellow sunflowers. Mrs. Sheridan had looked distinguished in grey, Lady Fitz like a delicate china figure in pastel mauve, and the Marquesa de Barrateira was almost a funereal figure in black.
Lady Fitz had wanted Kathie to be the traditional bride in white, but because it was a civil marriage, had compromised on heavy cream silk, made up rather severely, so that it was a little like a tailored cocktail dress. Kathie’s headdress was a Juliet cap in cream velvet, and she carried cream suede gloves and a small cream handbag. There were no flowers, save those that were delivered to Kathie in her hotel room before breakfast on her wedding day, and this was an enormous bouquet of pure white roses. Attached to them was a card with ‘Sebastiao’ in her future husband’s neat, masculine hand written firmly on it.
In place of flowers, Eileen and Bridie received a diamond bracelet apiece from the bridegroom. Eileen watched hers fascinatedly as it sparkled on her wrist during the ceremony.
There was nothing either special or moving about the ceremony. To Kathie it was over almost before it began, and she could hardly believe that she was the Marquesa de Barrateira when asked to sign the register. Sebastiao glanced at her with a queer little sideways smile, and held her gloves for her as she fumblingly added her signature — Kathleen Sheridan for the last time — to the record of many other brides before her. And then the registrar congratulated her and shook her hand, the old Marques de Marialva, who had delighted in the task of giving her away, and had an elderly twinkle in his eyes, snatched a most determined kiss before even her mother and sisters could offer her anything similar, and Lady Fitz embraced her tenderly.
“I am very proud of my goddaughter,” she said in an undertone.
Sebastiao had waited for these effusions to cease before lifting both of her ungloved hands and touching first one, and then the other, with his lips. She was a married woman now and could have her hands kissed, as well as the creamy spot on the inside of her wrist where it is customary to salute a married woman in Portugal. But he did not avail himself of a husband’s privilege and kiss her lips, or even drop a light, feather’s touch of a kiss on her brow.
After the ceremony there were the usual toasts in champagne, and a speech from the Marques de Marialva, in the flower-banked sitting-room of the suite at Claridge’s, and then they set off for the airport. Or the Marques and his new Marquesa did. The others said goodbye to them in the hotel suite.
So it was not until five days later, when Sebastiao decided that she could stand the shock, that the news of her father’s death was broken to Kathie. At first she couldn’t take it in — it was incredible to her that it should have been unanimously decided that anything that affected her so vitally should be kept from her. And when Sebastiao explained calmly that it was he who had taken the decision, she stared at him as if she was seeing him through new eyes.
“But — but — what right had you to take such a decision? I find it impossible to believe!...” She ran a hand across her eyes. “Surely this isn’t really happening to me? It’s not true!”
“I’m afraid it is, Kathie,” he said gravely. “Your father had been failing in health for some time, as you know, and at the end it was his heart that gave out. And it was his wish that nothing should interfere with our marriage. His last conscious words were that the marriage was to go on.”
“And — my mother agreed?” She sounded as if that was quite beyond her.
“Your mother was very brave, and so, I think, were both your sisters. Particularly Bridie.”
“Eileen didn’t seem as if she — as if anything was wrong!” She remembered Eileen flirting with the handsome young Portuguese, and then she felt herself start to tremble. “You knew Daddy was dead when I told you the only reason I was marrying you was because you could do certain things for him!” she accused. “Why didn’t you let me know then, and I could have gone straight back to Eire?” Her trembling was becoming noticeable. “It was cruel of you!”
“I didn’t let you know then because I knew that was what you would insist on doing,” Sebastiao replied, in the same level voice. “Nothing would have prevented you from going straight back to Eire. And our marriage would never have taken place.”
She didn’t answer, but she was weeping painfully, and her fingers were clutching at the balustrade of the terrace as if
for support.
“Believe me, it is better this way, Kathie,” Sebastiao said softly. “I appreciate that you have just received an appalling shock, but what good would it have done if I’d broken the news to you on the eve of your wedding? Your mother was brave, and even Eileen was brave — in her way! — and you would have let them all down if you had rushed back to Eire. You would have made things ten times more difficult for them, and as it is, they know that you are safe and secure, and as soon as it is practicable your mother will go away with Eileen and Bridie. All that is arranged, and it is exactly as your father would have wished it.”
This time Kathie stared at him through the agonized tears in her eyes as if he was something not quite human, and she asked for information about the funeral arrangements in a choked voice.
“Did you — make yourself responsible for those, too?”
“I assured your mother that I was behind her financially, but naturally I didn’t presume beyond that. She was in her way very fond of your father, and she had her own grief to bear with.”
“Financially!” Kathie choked. “The word is horrible!”
“Nevertheless, money can be very useful. I would like to think that in future your family will have few financial cares.”
Kathie buried her face in her hands, and at that moment she felt that cares would be welcome in place of this oppressive grief. For her there was a spreading sea of desolation that was as yet only dimly felt, and behind it the inability to grasp that this thing that had happened to her was really true. Her father was dead — her father whom she had adored! — and there was no longer anyone in the world who was really close to her. Lady Fitz was someone she was fond of, Sebastiao was a strange person called a husband ... But otherwise she was alone.
And she had sold herself into a loveless marriage for a reason that had ceased to be a reason even before she was married!
She lifted a drowned face and looked at Sebastiao. All her features were working.
“I’d — like to be alone!” she got out.
“Of course.” He took her by the arm, and half guided, half assisted her into the house. Her feet seemed to stumble every few steps, and at last he swung her up into his arms and carried her. The cool dimness of the house received them, and the marble floor echoed to the steady purposefulness of his footsteps. He bore her up the magnificent baroque staircase to a gallery that was decorated with great coffers in Portuguese oak embellished with mother-of-pearl and banded with silver, tall presses in richly carved wood and great thronelike chairs upholstered in silk and velvet, and at the end he turned into a wing of the house that contained his own private apartments. And these now included a bedroom for Kathie, with a bathroom of her own and a tiny boudoir that looked out over one of the pleasantest corners of the grounds.
He set her down on the low French bed with its satin damask coverlet, and when he had gone she simply turned her face into the coverlet and gave vent to the grief that was all the more intense because she had been so utterly unprepared for it.
When the storm had abated a little she rose and mechanically smoothed the coverlet, conscious that under normal circumstances she would never have lain down on it, nor permitted herself to be deposited on it, without removing it first, and then went into the bathroom and immersed her face in cool water. She returned to the bed room and, without any real knowledge of what she was doing, applied powder to her blotched and swollen cheeks, and a light touch of lipstick to her lips, ran a comb through her hair that had been shorn by a famous London hairdresser into a semblance of a feathered cap clinging close to her head — a cap with the sheen of a polished chestnut — and sat down in a chair near the window and tried to come to grips with reality.
She would never see her father again. Gerald Sheridan was dead, and the old days at Little Carrig had become a part of her past. She had no real idea when she would see her mother or her sisters again, but somehow that couldn’t arouse any ache in her heart. She was fond of them, she supposed — they were her people. Of Bridie she had sometimes thought she could become very fond if Bridie would allow her, but her eldest sister had been the one to go away from home — the one who wanted to make a career for herself.
Now Bridie’s career was temporarily halted, but Kathie’s husband was going to make the immediate future smooth for her. Kathie’s husband!...
It was fantastic, of course. She who had been expected to marry a local boy, if she ever married anyone at all, was now a marquesa!
She pressed the tips of her fingers to her burning forehead, and then against her fluttering eyelids. That first night of her marriage, in the Lisbon hotel, she had been so utterly bewildered because she didn’t know what to expect. She had behaved like a gauche schoolgirl, afraid to sample the wine at dinner lest it should go to her head, and she had already had champagne with her lunch, unable to appreciate the delicate cuisine of the hotel because she hadn’t any appetite, and her fingers had trembled every time she picked up a piece of cutlery. She had been certain that Sebastiao watched her with amusement, and the amusement had turned shyness into a positive agony.
After dinner he had suggested that she would like to go to bed early, and she had grasped at the excuse to get away from him, and then blushed crimson when she suddenly remembered that she was married. It was true they had two bedrooms adjoining — or rather, separated by an ornate sitting-room — but in all the talk of marriage, and the plans for marriage, she had never been given cold-bloodedly to understand that her husband would exert no rights over her. She had assumed that he wouldn’t, because he had told her he was not in love with her; but did a man have to be in love with a wife before he made her one in something more than name?
She knew absolutely nothing about men, she suddenly realized, and she remembered Paula had talked to her about the Barrateira heir. The Barrateira heir! ... Sebastiao himself had mentioned the need to produce one once!
She began to go hot and cold, and then to shiver. She wore a delicate pink evening dress, like the inside of a shell; it was the one pink she could wear, and with her copper head and flawless skin was quite perfect. Sebastiao began to watch her through narrowed eyes, noting her winged eyebrows, and the bright tips to her lashes. Her slim white throat was as graceful as a flower-stem, and her bare shoulders were as creamy as the heart of a china rose. His eyes dwelt on them for a moment, and he saw that a nervous pulse was beating at the base of her throat. Her lips were unsteady, and there was no disguising the panic in the limpid brown eyes.
He looked away from her, and pressed the bell for the waiter. When the man appeared, he ordered a brandy for himself, and suggested to Kathie that she should have something as well. But she declined.
“I’d—like to go to bed.”
“Very well.” He walked to the windows and the balcony that overlooked the dimly seen jacaranda trees. Outside the moon was climbing like a slice of melon into a breathless May sky, and the stars were fantastically bright. The sea was murmuring placidly on the white beach, and the clangor of the trams had died away, and the voices of the lottery sellers. It was all very still, with silent high-prowed fishing-boats waiting for the tide farther along the coast, and black-eyed varinas waiting in the shadows for dark shapes to join them. There was a strange potency about it, the very stillness and the silence, like the liqueur brandy in Sebastiao’s glass, the champagne at lunch. Unless it was the fact that Kathie had only been married that day, and this was her first experience of night-time in Portugal.
Sebastiao repeated almost impatiently, without looking round:
“Very well, Kathie! I suggested some time ago that you went to bed. You must be tired after such a day.”
“Yes,” she whispered, and knew a sudden longing to step with him out on to the warm balcony, and to stand with him beneath the stars — clinging on to his arm! The thought made her tremble deep down inside her, in spite of the nervous shivers that at the same time sped up and down her spine. And then she wondered what he would do —
how he would react — if she did follow him out on to the balcony and touch his arm.
He was her husband ... He wasn’t just the Marques de Barrateira. He was her marques!
She waited a moment longer, and then fled across the luxuriously carpeted floor of the sitting room to the door of her room. He heard her fumbling with the handle, and then called casually:
“Goodnight, Kathie. Sleep well!”
But she hardly slept at all, and she felt appallingly lonely as she lay there in the darkness in a strange room and a strange land. It was the thought of it being a strange land that affected her most, for she knew that she couldn’t run away from it. It was her land now, and however much or however little it appealed to her, and however quickly it palled on her and the magic of the color faded, and she began to yearn with all her heart for the familiar places and home, she couldn’t run away from it. She never would be able to run away from it!
In the morning Sebastiao was at his most charming, and somehow she forgot all her qualms of the night, and the unmistakable resentment because he hadn’t even kissed her goodnight. Yes; she had expected him to kiss her, even if it was only a very light kiss — a mere peck! But he hadn’t, and he would never know how she had yearned to join him on the balcony, and how persistently she had thought of him all through the night, while he was only a few feet away from her.