“That is Manoel’s grandmother,” she observed. “Is she not beautiful?”
“She was certainly very beautiful,” Steve replied, unable to conjure up a large amount of enthusiasm just the same. For the sitter had obviously been very much under the influence of her husband, and she wondered whether in a few years time Madelena would be so much under the influence of Dom Manoel that it would show in her portrait.
For these women might start off—sometimes—by being gay; but they were all reduced to the same mould in the end. Or so it would seem.
Madelena’s apartments, at any rate, were full of brightness and sunshine. It was quite obvious she lacked for nothing. Her mother, a faded beauty with a gentle manner, was sitting with some embroidery in an elegant carved chair near the window of the sitting-room when they entered, but she rose at once and bowed to Steve. She did not attempt to offer her slim, white
hand—so heavily be-ringed. But her smile was sweet.
“Miss Wayne is going to make a model of my head, Maman,” Madelena explained almost casually, and Steve was surprised because she spoke in French. “I am dying to see the results.” Senhora Almeida merely continued to smile.
Some little time was wasted in discussion as to where Madelena should sit, and which aspect of her face she should turn to Steve for the preliminary sketches. Actually, Steve found it rather more difficult than she had anticipated to capture the slightly wilful charm of the Portuguese girl’s face on a sketch-block, and she realized it was because she was a little nervous, and also a little unsure of herself. She tore up sketch after sketch without being satisfied, and she still had nothing to show on paper for her morning’s work when Dom Manoel himself walked into the sitting-room.
He knocked politely before entering, and Senhora Almeida was plainly thrown into an instantaneous flutter by the sound of that light, peremptory tap. She was on her feet when he entered, looking as if his very presence filled her with awe, and although he walked across to her and kissed her wrist with all the charm in the world, her agitation did not leave her while he was in the room.
Madelena, on the other hand, was quite undisturbed by his arrival, and held out a hand to beckon him over to her. He took the hand, fondled it, kissed it, held it for a moment against his cheek, and then dropped it in order to greet Steve. His fingers closed firmly, purposefully around her fingers when she held them out to him.
“You make progress, yes?” he asked, his eye alighting somewhat quizzically on the waste-paper basket full of hastily crumpled pages from her sketch-book. But Steve had to admit that, so far, she had made no progress, and she was annoyed with herself for having to make such an admission.
He walked to the waste-paper basket and extracted one or two of the sheets, smoothing them out with a deliberate air, and studying them with undisguised criticism. But instead of offering any comment he merely screwed them up, returned them to the basket, and then turned to his fiancee.
“We are lunching with the D’Castelos, little one,” he reminded her. “I’m afraid it is high time you changed your dress.”
She jumped up at once, obviously quite eager to be off somewhere with him—even if it was only a rather dull and formal luncheon party—but at the same time apologetic because she could devote no more of her time to Steve.
“I’m afraid you are not pleased with your morning’s work, Miss Wayne. . . . But you will come to-morrow, won’t you? At the same time.”
Steve hesitated.
“I’ve a feeling I’m not going to make a very good job of this,” she admitted. “And perhaps it would be better if I confessed to failure now, rather than waste a lot of your time—”
But Dom Manoel wouldn’t hear of that, and neither would his fiancee.
“Naturally, you must come again,” they both insisted. And Dom Manoel added, a little drily: “Rome was not built in a day, Miss Wayne. You must give yourself plenty of time to get used to your subject. If it is perfectly convenient to you we shall expect you again to-morrow, and please don’t let it disturb you if you fill another waste-paper basket with your preliminary sketches. We have a large number of waste-paper baskets, and we are very patient.”
He dismissed Madelena almost as if she was a child, and her mother followed her with alacrity from the room. As soon as they were alone, and while Steve was still trying to stifle the feeling of rebellion that surged through her because of his calm way of denying her the right to refuse a commission, and his reference to waste-paper baskets, he asked her whether she had been served with any refreshments since her arrival.
“No, and I didn’t require any, thank you, Senhor,” she returned.
He frowned.
“But that is most inhospitable of Madelena. . . . And her mother might, at least, have remembered that you are also a guest. However, they are both very much preoccupied with other matters at the moment.”
He pressed a bell for a servant, and then suggested that they go down into the garden where it was cool.
“It is a trifle hot in these rooms, and the garden is shady. The terrace in particular. I’m sure you feel a longing for something long and cool to drink?”
“But you are going out to lunch,” she reminded him, “and I mustn’t make you late. Please, Senhor. . . . It isn’t-in the least necessary to provide me with a drink. You sent your car for me this morning, and that was kindness enough. . . . I’d feel much happier in my mind, and less agitated in case I make you late, if you’d let me go now. Especially as I’ve been such a failure.”
But he merely looked at her—a long, and rather a curious look—and she said no more. She accompanied him down to the quinta gardens, where the shade was certainly delectable, and the riot of colour so bewildering that it ought to have proved trying on such a day, only the greenness of the lawns and the clipped hedges prevented any such effect. Steve feasted her eyes on the greenness, commented on the remarkable freshness of it, considering the climate, and the number of gardeners he must find it necessary to employ, and then lay back in her superbly comfortable garden chair and deliberately forced herself to relax.
It would be a pity, in such surroundings, to remain tensed up and antagonistic. Her long, cool drink, when it arrived, was exactly as she liked it, the sound of ice cubes chinking against the sides of the glass was like music with the sun falling so brazenly beyond the protection of her sun umbrella, and some bright fish disporting themselves in a pool of clear water near at hand made her feel cool just to look at them.
She heard herself give vent to a sigh, as some of the tension passed out of her, and Dom Manoel smiled.
“You are feeling a little happier now, Miss Wayne? You are not so annoyed because I am insisting that you model my fiancee’s head?”
She had the grace to feel slightly ashamed of herself and her transparency.
“It isn’t that I’m annoyed,” she denied. “It’s simply that—that I’m not at all sure I can satisfy you. And Senhorita Almeida is so beautiful . . . so much more than beautiful! I would like to make an exquisite head of her, and present it to you both as a wedding present, but I’m afraid I’ve met my Waterloo. Senhorita Almeida is confronting me with a challenge!”
“Then you ought not to turn your face away from such a challenge!”
Her blue eyes met his dark ones. Not merely were they intensely dark, but they seemed to have depths in which it would be possible to drown if one flung oneself into them, and there was a little quirk of amusement at one corner of his mouth. Rather a cool quirk of amusement.
“I’m not good at facing up to challenges,” she admitted.
“That I decline to believe,” he told her. “There was a challenge in your eyes the day we met, when you defied me to find anything to object to in the very brief shorts you were wearing.... Oh, yes,” nodding his sleek head slowly, “you were very self-conscious that day, very much aware that I might object. Your brother had, perhaps, warned you?”
“He warned me that you were ... rather, narrowminded
out here,” she replied, just a little defiantly.
“Is that what he called it? Just because we protect our women, because we acknowledge their vulnerability and like them to be all and everything one can desire when we marry them?” His eyes roved over her, quite deliberately. Her hyacinth-blue dress matched her eyes, and the slim lines of it emphasized the grace and shapeliness of her figure. At the same time it could not have been more correct, or done more to draw attention to her Dresden china loveliness. “You are very beautiful,” he said, as if he found himself forced to make the observation. “You make me think of an English rose in a very English rose-garden.”
“Thank you,” she returned, obviously surprised by the compliment. “That is quite the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“Any man, you mean?”
“Well, women don’t pay compliments.”
“And an Englishman would consider a compliment of that order a little out of date? Belonging to the Victorian era, perhaps?”
She flushed delicately, although she didn’t quite know why.
“I think I would have liked to live in the Victorian era,” she remarked slowly.
“And then an Englishman might have said that sort of thing to
you?”
“If he thought there was any truth in it.”
“What would he be likely to say to you to-day?”
“I don’t know.” She laughed a little awkwardly. “I don’t go around collecting compliments.”
“Even although they are so very well merited? That, to me, is most strange!”
Senhorita Almeida came along the terrace, dressed for their luncheon date, and looking utterly and breathtakingly enchanting. Beside her, Steve thought, any attractions she herself possessed paled into utter insignificance. Even if her clothes came from Paris, and she paid frequent visits to the most exclusive beauty-parlours, she could never look like that ... Chic and golden as a rose or a black and golden orchid. And certainly she would never have the confidence in the effect of her beauty that Madelena had.
The Dom took one look at her, and forgot all about Steve. He rose with an impatience he could barely conceal, and put her into one of the well protected chairs. He asked her whether she would have something to drink before they left, but she refused. Then he pressed a bell for a servant, and the car was brought round for Steve. As he put her into it he said a little curtly:
“We shall expect you to-morrow at the same time, Senhorita. You will not disappoint us, or let my fiancee down? This head must be modelled even if it takes many weeks to get you into the mood.”
“In that case, you will be married long before the head is completed,” Steve replied, with a note of dryness in her voice. “And I shall probably have returned to England.”
“You would be foolish even to think of returning to England when Portugal is so lovely at this time of the year,” Dom Manoel commented, with the loftiness that ignored other people’s possible commitments. “Very foolish!”
But Steve was not so sure. As the luxurious car swung her away from the front of the house and she lay back and stared a little bleakly ahead she wondered whether she and Tim wouldn’t both be wise if they decided to pack up and return to England straight away, before any irreparable damage could be done to either of them.
CHAPTER FIVE
EVERY morning for the next week the Quinta Rose car collected Steve and set her down for a morning’s work at the quinta. It didn’t matter that she still found it extraordinarily difficult to do anything like justice to her sitter, although the latter was very amiable and never objected to either prolonged or short sittings, and seemed to grow more disturbingly lovely every day.
Steve filled sketch blocks and filled the waste-paper baskets that were provided for her, and then at last managed to hit on a pose that she liked. She reproduced it fairly faithfully, and the actual modelling of the head began.
Senhorita Almeida’s mother grew enthusiastic. Senhorita Madelena herself seemed highly pleased, but Dom Manoel said nothing to encourage Steve. She had the feeling that he was, in fact, being rather more critical of her efforts than was entirely fair to her, when she had been so unwilling to accept the commission. But every morning, when he had made his silent study of her work, he rang the bell for the refreshments that were served outside in the shade of the terrace, and every morning he made polite conversation, and sometimes—even when his fiancee was present—she looked up and caught him looking at her a little oddly.
There were moments—odd, breathless moments—when she recalled that night when she had bumped into him on the beach, and he had held her closely and protectively for several seconds. During those seconds the world had stopped still for her, and she knew she would never forget them. And now, when she glanced up suddenly and caught those dark, inexplicable eyes of his studying her with the thoughtfulness and the deliberate concentration of a connoisseur of . . . what?
What was he a connoisseur of? Women? She hardly thought so. . . . Women, even Madelena, were nothing very much more to him than a charming diversion, an excuse for indulgence and a show of tenderness. A sudden softening of the eyes, a light, caressing movement of a hand. . . . He was not a man who needed women—Steve was somehow certain of that—and he could exist very comfortably on a desert island without them! Passion and tumultuous tenderness were quite outside his experience . . . possibly because that would mean someone had a real hold over him, and he refused to take kindly to demands. He liked to bestow and notice, and to feel rather more the benefactor than the lover.
And then, when she thought these things, she again remembered that night—that night of moonlight and magic!—and Dom Manoel’s warm and sustained grip of her. And she felt as if she had been running upstairs or racing blindly along the shore ... every pulse pounding!
The invitation to dinner came at the end of that first week of her modelling efforts at the quinta. Both she and Tim were invited. Tim was inordinately delighted by the invitation, but Steve’s first thought was entirely connected with what she should wear. One of the two little black ‘numbers’ she had mentioned to her brother . . . ? She supposed she would feel correct in either of them, and they did wonders for her hair and her complexion. But they would be rather like playing for safety . . . and she did not feel like playing for safety. She wanted to be rebellious, reckless.... She didn’t even mind if she shocked everyone.
She spent a whole afternoon in her room, going over her wardrobe. She discarded dress after dress . . . and it was true that she had been extravagant recently, and bought far too many. The little ice-blue brocade was too cool—it suggested a coolness that didn’t exist; the pearl-coloured net stood for moonlight and roses, and she was determined not to make Dom Manoel think of English rose gardens. A slim white sheath that she possessed was too blatantly virginal. In the end she decided on a dress that was composed of layer upon layer of whirling scarlet chiffon, with a close-fitting bodice embroidered lavishly with gold thread. It had nothing in the nature of shoulder straps, and left a delectable expanse of her slim white body bare. With it she wore scarlet satin shoes with perilous heels and a bracelet with rubies inset in it that had once belonged to her grandmother. She sprayed herself lavishly with the only expensive perfume she possessed, and felt that she walked in a positive cloud of it when she went out to the car.
It was Tim’s car, wholly unworthy of her drifting layers of scarlet, and not altogether worthy of Tim himself, in his well-cut dinner jacket and immaculate linen. Steve had the feeling that he was nervous when they started off, and it made him swear at the car when it started to behave badly half way between his cottage and the quinta, and his sister sympathized with him to a certain extent, for she, too, was unaccountably nervous.
The car, coughing and spluttering and making other odd noises beneath its bonnet, nevertheless got them to the quinta, and there were already several other cars before the house when they sped up the drive. Steve’s heart sank. So this was to be an occasion—a
really formal, Portuguese occasion! For the first time she would meet really formal Portuguese—apart from Dom Manoel—who would no doubt look at her with curiosity because she was English, and possibly elevate their eyebrows a little when they caught a whiff of her rather too heavy perfume. For the first time she wished she was wearing the white slipper satin and sprayed delicately with lavender-water.
But it was too late now Dom Manoel had appeared at the head of the steps, and it was he himself who handed her out of the car when it came to rest. The whole sky was ablaze with the fires of sunset, and even the sea, as it heaved a little below them, was blood red where the path of the sun cut across it. Steve felt as if the skin of her throat, neck and shoulders was likewise stained a little with the hot colour that was palpitating around them, and the fact that she carried some of that colour into the quiet house, in the shape of swirling skirts and breast-hugging swathes of chiffon, destroyed a little more of her confidence.
But Dom Manoel’s smile was the polite, welcoming smile of a host. She felt his cool fingers grip hers, and there was nothing about that grip that could make her feel that she was either more welcome than anyone else, or not as welcome. She felt absolutely certain he extended the same rock-firm, considerate hand to the plump little woman and her husband who followed them up the steps once they had been received, and to all the others who had arrived before them.
The stares and the slightly raised eyebrows she had anticipated were not as noticeable as Steve had feared when the introductions took place. The elegant women —not one of whom was wearing anything but black— and the sedate, carefully-groomed men were meticulously cordial to her, and if they stared at all it was merely out of a sort of interest. Tim was fairly well known to them already, and possibly for his sake they accepted his sister without question. It never once occurred to Steve that they could accept her for herself, because she was young and fresh and attractive, despite the slight flamboyance of her clothing.
White Rose of Love Page 4