by Susan Barrie
“And it would have — mattered?” She still couldn’t believe it, couldn’t even be sure that her recent troubles hadn’t set up a whole series of delusions.
“Of course it would have mattered.” He put a hand beneath her chin and forced her face out into the open to meet his. “It would have mattered so much that I knew I couldn’t bear it — not on top of all the hopes I’d been building up. Watching you growing lovelier every day — not that you weren’t at your loveliest when you wore that funny little black frock in Eire! — feeling that we were drawing near to one another — beginning to need each other. Daring to believe that our marriage would be a sort of heaven for us both!”
“But you didn’t want marriage to be a heaven,” she reminded him, while he cupped her face in his hands. “You wanted” — once more the color scalded her cheeks — “nothing but companionship.”
“Did I really and truly say that was all I wanted — of you?” She could tell that she had astounded him utterly. “Oh, my precious girl, how blind a fool can a man be? If I really said it — if I honestly believed it at the time! — then these past few weeks have been a kind of fitting punishment! Knowing what I wanted — and yet not daring to take it! Feeling you shrink from me when I kissed you!”
He looked so agonized that she was able to rise above shyness and admit:
“But that was because I — because I had no idea at all that you loved me!”
“You thought I wanted to make love to you, without loving you?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes looked bravely into his, and she only colored very lightly.
“And I thought Robert Bolton was attracted to you, and you were turning more and more to him! I’ve always liked Robert, but I loathed him that day he came here and met you!”
“Oh, Sebastiao!”
“I know.” She felt his cheek crushed to hers. “So you see, we’ve both suffered. We’ve both been the victims of unreasonable jealousy.”
She didn’t at that moment ask him about Inez — as a matter of fact, in those moments she had almost forgotten Inez, and the reason why she had not been to bed all night — and she permitted him to draw her so close to him that their bodies seemed to melt and merge and become one. She felt herself trembling so much that she needed the support of his arms, and only when his mouth came down and claimed hers in their first lover’s kiss — their first kiss of overwhelming need and absolute understanding — did the trembling cease, and a whole world of bewildering bliss open up before her. And him!
She knew that when he lifted his golden head and looked at her.
“Oh, Kathie! ... Oh, darling, darling!”
“Sebastiao,” she whispered. “I love you so much!”
“And for the first time in my life I know what it is to love a woman far, far more than I could ever love myself,” he told her, with such sombreness that she knew he was speaking nothing but the truth.
Suddenly she recollected that he had spent hours outside in the chill darkness of the garden, and his dinner jacket was still wet from the benison of early morning, even in a country that could be as fiercely hot as Portugal later in the day.
She once more ran her hands across his shoulders, and anxiety showed in her face.
“Sebastiao, you must go and change — get out of these things!” she said. Her mothering instinct was temporarily paramount to all other instincts. “And I honestly think you should have a hot bath immediately.”
He laughed.
“I’ll have my hot bath when you consent to turn the taps for me, but first we’ve a lot to talk about!” He disappeared into his adjoining suite, and when he came back he was wearing a Paisley silk dressing-gown over his shirt and dress trousers. He held out his arms to her, and with the color once more palpitating in her cheeks, she went into them, and he drew her down into a deep armchair. She nestled close and hid her face, for she knew that now, at last, they must discuss Inez.
“Darling,” he said gently, stroking her hair, “there mustn’t be any more shadows between us, and I’ve got to tell you all that I can tell you to set your mind at rest. In the first place, I think I’ll begin with Hildegarde...” He stared sombrely out through the open windows to the balcony, beyond which all the splendor of a new day was getting into its stride, with a murmur of birdsong before the heat became too great, and the falling of water in tiled basins. “I thought I was in love with Hildegarde, and possibly I was for the first two months of our marriage. But it wasn’t a love that made me happy ... It was just a kind of hunger because she was so extraordinarily attractive, so vital and vivid! She was a widow, you know, and several years older than me, and I know I wasn’t the first young man she had deliberately caught up in her toils. She knew all the tricks ... How to drive a man frantic, without knowing quite why he was frantic.”
Kathie lay very still in his arms.
“There was no peace about it, no contentment ... And I knew one day the bubble would burst. I knew also that the last thing Hildegarde wanted to do was settle down here in Portugal and have children — she loathed the very thought of having children. And she had a weakness for all men, young or old, who admired her. We quarrelled constantly and bitterly, and the last two months of our marriage were just a disaster. By that time I think I actively disliked her, and when we were in the Bahamas and she persuaded me to buy a yacht, I didn’t mind that it was other men who went sailing in it with her, and not me. And when it overturned one day during a race and she was drowned — well, I was profoundly shocked, but apart from that conscious of overwhelming relief!
“But knowing her had put me right against marriage, and the experience of knowing her had upset me considerably. When I arrived in Eire to stay with Lady Fitzosborne I was, as Lady Fitz herself was quick to tell me, a changed man, and when I met you, although you attracted me instantly, I wanted to turn you against all thought of love, and all thought of a normal marriage. I conceived the idea of asking you to marry me — for our mutual advantage, I thought, but nothing else — and then I fell in love with you, and ... Well, that is all about Hildegarde!”
“Poor darling,” Kathie whispered, into his neck. “Oh, Sebastiao, I’m so sorry!”
“You don’t have to be, sweetheart,” Sebastiao reassured her. “Through Hildegarde I have arrived at a safe haven at last, and one that I shall never want to leave.” He closed his eyes as he pressed his cheek to the softness of the hair he had been caressing, and Kathie’s fingers fastened tightly around his. “And now we come to Inez. She was, in a way, my worst problem ... once I recognized how deeply I felt about you. You see, she’s always had rather an exuberant devotion for me, and she thought that our boy and girl affection for one another would end finally in marriage. But I never had any illusions about Inez ... I couldn’t love her if I tried for the rest of my life, but I’m very, very fond of her, or I was until yesterday, when she deliberately tried to hurt you as much as she could.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Kathie whispered.
“No, it doesn’t matter now — but it might have mattered. I’ve no doubt Inez is already heartily ashamed of herself, but she believed in using whatever weapons she possessed. I went away to Austria — where I met Hildegarde! — to cut loose from her eternal efforts to trap me, and aided and abetted by my stepmother, she might have done so in the end if I hadn’t met you. I was beginning to grow tired of thinking up excuses why we weren’t suited to one another, and I knew that when I married you and took you back to Portugal, you would inevitably meet Inez, and there might be trouble.
“She is spoilt, and turbulent, and accustomed to getting her own way eventually, and sensing that our marriage was not quite all it should be, she planned to separate us as quickly as she could. I was afraid of that when I saw how she reacted to her first meeting with you — the way she continually showed her claws! — and I thought that if I was patient with her, interested myself in her concerns, and tried to get you and her to become friendly, everything would work out
. But it didn’t ... I saw that you made up your mind very quickly I was in love with Inez, and that night of the dinner party at her parents’ house complicated things still further. She was determined to get me alone, and I had to endure a very bad hour with her. On top of that I had to endure a very bad hour with you!”
Kathie was terribly contrite.
“If only I’d known!...” Then she admitted, “I heard what she said to you that day of the picnic. Just before you opened the door of the car she was pleading to be alone with you, saying you were stupid to have married me!”
“I was afraid you heard that,” Sebastiao confessed with a sigh, “and it kept me sleepless for the whole of the following night. So that’s two sleepless nights I’ve had on your account!” rubbing his finger with great gentleness against her cheek nevertheless.
She caught the finger, and impulsively kissed it.
“Sebastiao, you’re not the only one who has had two sleepless nights!” Then she looked up at him with faint pleading. “But now...”
“Now all that is over. Inez will come to her senses, and we probably shan’t see her for some little while in any case. I’ve had a talk with her father about that Frenchman she was keen on, and he’s checked up about him, and is going to invite him to stay. And if Inez doesn’t console herself with him, she will console herself with someone. You know,” he added gently, as further explanation, “what she really wanted was to be a marquesa.”
“I rather gathered that,” Kathie said softly, against his shoulder. “I gathered it the day she talked to me about children, and providing you with an heir.” She blushed as soon as she had got the words out, and wished she hadn’t, particularly as Sebastiao looked down at her with a strange gleam in his dark blue eyes. “And you didn’t give her permission to buy furniture and things for the house in Lisbon?”
“I most certainly did nothing of the kind. I told her she could help you with color schemes — she is very keen on interior decoration — and that the two of you could go shopping together once we all returned to Lisbon.”
“Then what will you do with the furniture?”
“We’ll send it to her as a present.”
Kathie had another intrusive thought:
“The ring you gave her for her birthday. Was it really your mother’s betrothal ring?”
“Yes, darling, but in my opinion it was far too ugly for your slender finger, and I remembered you were superstitious about pearls in rings, and moonstones. So, as I knew Inez coveted it, I gave it to her from us both.” Kathie felt the final shadow had been banished at last, and she turned her face contentedly into her husband’s shoulder and felt a delicious kind of drowsiness steal over her. If only she could go to sleep, and sleep for hours, held safe in his arms like this!
But Sebastiao had other thoughts.
“Darling,” he breathed against her ear, “we’re going to have breakfast together, but before that how would you like to slip down to the beach and have a bathe? As we did once before! ... And then I can carry you back up here in my arms — just as I did once before — and we’ll tell Bridie and Robert all about our happiness, and that we’re going to have a real honeymoon this time! Somewhere where no one can intrude on us. Where would you like to go?”
“I don’t mind,” she answered shyly.
“Well, to begin with, I think I’ll show you Paris — it’s possible to be wonderfully alone in a crowd! — and then we’ll plan the rest of our itinerary from there. The world is wide — there is so much I have to show you, my beloved Kathie! — and when at last we come back here, we’ll start thinking seriously about my stepmother’s greatest desire, and see what we can do about an heir for the Barrateira estates and title.” He watched her with unconcealed enjoyment as she blushed vividly, and then kissed her tenderly. “To think that you’ll be the mother of my son, Kathie! I wonder whether he’ll have red hair,” touching the red head just below his chin adoringly.
“I’d far, far rather he had golden hair,” Kathie whispered. Then she remembered her sister. “But what will happen to Bridie if we go away?”
“She’ll marry Bolton,” Sebastiao replied at once. “A little late in the day I recognized the way in which his thoughts were turning, and now I know that he wants to marry Bridie — and she could do a lot worse than marry him. He’ll never disillusion her.” He tilted his wife’s smooth chin in his hand, and looked at her as if he could never look long and often enough. “Tell me what you would like them to receive from us as a wedding present, sweetheart, and then kiss me,” he said huskily. Kathie complied without much delay.
“I’d like you to give them Robert’s cottage, if that isn’t asking too much?”
“It’s asking very little. I intended to give it to them in any case. We’ll have an extra wing built on to accommodate their children.” And then, hungrily: “And now what about my kiss, Kathie?”
This time Kathie complied with her arms tightly clasping his neck.