White Rose of Love

by Anita Charles

  Steve was silent. She was reasonably sure the Dom would not ask them again before his marriage, and the only thing she wondered about was whether he would still expect her to go ahead with the model of his future wife’s head.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SHE found it impossible to sleep that night, and at last she got out of bed and sat by her window and watched the waning of the moon over the sea.

  She had no doubts whatsoever as to what had happened to her . . . She was in love with Dom Manoel de Romeiro, and although she couldn’t flatter herself that he was in love with her she had done something to upset the even tenor of his days. She knew that. . . . Just as she knew that his very presence in a room set her whole body trembling with an eagerness to be nearer to him, and her heart aching almost unbearably because even when he was standing within a foot of her there was a wall between them that

  could never be scaled.

  Whether or not he was in love with his future wife she couldn’t tell, but she was certain that if he was it was the sort of love that would have meant little to her. A love compounded of admiration, the good-humoured desire to indulge and occasionally fondle; and which—he hoped—would one day bring him an heir to his possessions.

  The actual thought that another woman would one day bear the child of Dom Manoel hurt Steve as nothing in life had ever hurt her before. Anything she had imagined she had felt before for a man who had appeared for a brief while on her immediate horizon was nothing to the storm of feeling a man of an alien race had aroused in her.

  A man of cold, hard principles who thought of love as she understood it with casual contempt.

  Or did he. . . ?

  She moved closer to the window, and saw that the dawn light was breaking over the sea and filling the sky with colour. Everything glowed redly in the radiance of the dawn, and the promise of a brilliant new day, and as she leaned from her window the sweetness and coolness of the atmosphere awoke in her the urge to be out in it and away from the suffocating confinement of the tiny house. Down there on the beach, with its shining sand, she could walk and shut her mind to the problems that beset her, and a little of her unhappiness might be eased by the murmurous voice of the sea and its silken cool breath on her face.

  She dressed hastily, and in order not to disturb her brother crept down the stairs with her open-toed sandals in her hand. Once outside the door and the coolness rushed at her, the fact that she had not closed her eyes all night meant nothing when the salty freshness put colour in her cheeks and banished the fullness from her dark blue eyes. She pushed the brown curls back from her face, huddled herself in her thick cream sweater, and made for the door in the garden wall. Once on the other side of it she became aware for the first time that someone else was sharing the silence and the beauty of the wide expanse of beach with her, and that someone was standing near the edge of the tide and looking up at the cottage which belonged to him.

  He, too, was wearing a thick sweater, and because of his intense darkness it was obvious that he hadn’t yet shaved. His eyes, dark as brown velvet, slightly almondshaped and thickly lashed, looked haggard and empty until he saw her, when they lighted up. He moved swiftly to meet her, taking the sharp rise in the beach with the ease of an athlete, his long limbs moving gracefully over the firmly packed sand.

  Within a few feet of her he looked as if he was about to call out something, and then changed his mind, and came to a standstill. He waited for her to join him, and Steve broke into a little run and fairly raced into his arms that came out to prevent her actually cannoning into him. But the moment they received her they held her close, and Steve gasped and lifted her face to his and looked up at him with all the wonder of the morning shining in her eyes. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “At this hour!”

  And for answer, as his arms strained her fiercely up against him, he asked:

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I couldn’t sleep....”

  “Neither could I!”

  “I tried. . . . But I couldn’t sleep at all!”

  “Oh, Stephanie,” he breathed jerkily into her hair, and then stifled any further confessions she might have to make with his lips. For long moments they clung together like two people who had been drowning, and were now saved, and in her wildest dreams she had never imagined that a man’s mouth covering her own and devouring it as this man’s mouth devoured hers could feel as if it was a reward for all the good in her life ... all the moments devoted to selfless things, that merited a reward.

  But there was nothing selfless about her craving for him to go on kissing her. His lips were hard and cool and sweet, and yet they created a fire in her veins . . . his arms bruised her, and yet she could have cried out with the ecstasy of it, and the way they held her. As once before she felt the roughness of his jersey beneath her cheek, smelt the saltiness of it . . . and as once before she was aware of a rock-like security in his arms, although the emotion that consumed her was a despairing passion, and she knew that he was experiencing the same sort of emotion.

  “Oh, Manoel!” she choked, into his jersey, and he drew her into the shelter of a rock.

  Her blue eyes opened wide at him, and when he looked into them and saw how brilliantly and deeply blue they were, and how unconcealed was the need under the fluttering, golden-brown eyelashes, he started to tremble a little, and his arms pinioned her once more.

  “My love,” he crooned to her, “my little English love! You are the sweetest and the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me, and I couldn’t even begin to tell you how much you mean to me! How madly I love you!”

  “Why didn’t you tell me last night?” she whispered, her face hidden against him.

  “Last night you ran away. . . .”

  “I know. But it was you who ran away first. . . . You remembered Madelena!”

  Even the actual mention of Madelena couldn’t interfere with their bliss this morning. Later it would do so, but that was time enough. . . . For the present he wanted only to know just how much he meant to her.

  “I love you,” she told him, her whole face glowing with her love, her eyes misty with it. “I think I must have loved you from the beginning, although I told myself you were impossibly arrogant and conceited, and I hated you—”

  “And I told myself you were a hard-headed little English girl it would be well to avoid. But I couldn’t avoid you. . . . Day after day I thought of you, night after night I’ve dreamt of you!”

  “Was it because of that that you insisted on my modelling Madelena’s head?”

  “Of course. I had to have you near me. . . . Right from the beginning it’s been a kind of agony—an ecstasy if only you were near enough for me to see! Your soft, bright hair—” he touched it with an unsteady hand—“your skin as pale and soft as the early dawn light, your eyes like twin blue lakes!” She felt his lips—no longer cool but burning now—covering them with kisses, and then he forced back her head and kissed her neck and the litle hollow in her throat that was revealed by the open collar of her cardigan. She shut her eyes and shivered a little when he did this, and then she drew a little away from him.

  “Manoel,” she reminded him, “we’re still within view of the cottage windows, and Tim might be up early, too, and watching us!”

  His face grew grave and set.

  “That’s something I had to risk. I had to see you. . . . Or I hoped I would see you! Last night we both knew what had happened to us, and I didn’t think you would wilfully deceive yourself. Two people who fall in love as we have done are seldom blind, and some sort of satisfaction they must have . . .

  even if it is only the satisfaction of confessing what they feel and admitting its futility.”

  Steve shrank as if an expected blow had fallen and she was unable to avoid it.

  “You mean that—that nothing that we feel for one another can make—make any difference?” she whispered. “To your plans to marry Madelena, I mean?”

  “Of course not.”
His face wasn’t merely grave now, it was stony. “My plans to marry Madelena will not be affected in any way, because she is my affianced wife, and only her own desire to withdraw her promise to marry me could prevent our marriage. The ceremony will take place as arranged on the date arranged. But—”

  Steve put her hands up over her eyes.

  “On the date arranged? I didn’t know you had already fixed— fixed the date. . . .?”

  “Yes. It is to be on the fourteenth of next month— in about three weeks time. But I want to make it clear to you that, if you and I had met in the normal way— I mean, if there had been no contract of marriage binding me, and I was free to do entirely as I please—not merely would I be begging you to marry me at this moment, but I would have implored you to do so at our second meeting—the night we met on the beach here!” She turned away. As the sun rose, and the day got into its stride, a feeling of normality returned, and she was covered in humiliation because she had literally hurled herself into his arms.

  “In that case, why—why did you engage yourself to Madelena?” she wanted to know, a trifle jerkily. “If she means so little to you that—two days after our meeting!—you would have proposed to me, why were you so impatient for marriage, and why did you decide she was the right wife for you?”

  He smiled slightly.

  “In Portugal we do not wait to fall in love before we decide to marry. Marriage is important, and emotion has little to do with it. And as to my being impatient for marriage”—his smile became touched with dryness —“I am thirty-six, and by the standards and traditions of my country I have waited a long time.”

  “Then you admit that you—you are not in love with Madelena...?”

  She turned once more to face him, and although her expression was agonized there was a kind of wild, hopeful appeal in her eyes.

  His intense dark eyes reproached her.

  “How could I be in love with her when I am in love with you? She is enchanting—yes! She is everything a man of my age could desire in a wife; but if you ask me whether the sight of her fills me with ecstasy—whether my every waking thought is concerned with her, and all my happiness in the future wrapped up in her— then my answer will have to be ‘No’. I wish to protect her, I am happy to bestow my name on her . . . But that is all!”

  “Then I think you are behaving immorally in marrying her!”

  He shrugged slightly, patiently.

  “I have told you that love has little to do with marriage in Portugal. If love is there—if the man and the woman mean everything to one another—then they are fortunate. But if it is not—”

  “It doesn’t greatly matter?” Once more she covered her face with her hands. “It sounds horrible to me!” Gently, but very determinedly, he removed her hands from her face. He kept tight hold of them.

  “If you and I are married,” he told her, his voice shaking uncontrollably with the intensity of the emotion that rushed up over him, “it would be almost unbelievable happiness!”

  “Oh, don’t!” she exclaimed, and turned away as if she couldn’t bear to meet the adoration in his look, and know that she had no right to such a look.

  “Nevertheless, it is true,” he said softly, and kissed the small, lightly tanned hands he was holding fast with his own. “You know it, too, Stephanie. . . . You who feel as I do, and could give me so much! Oh, my darling—my little love!” a thick note of anguish in his voice, “what are we going to do? How can we bear to be apart when every instinct we possess cries out to us to seize every opportunity to be together? At this very moment I am endangering your reputation. . . . But I can’t tear myself away from you! As a man of honour I despise myself because Madelena, too, might be made unhappy. . . .”

  She tore away her hands.

  “I shall go home to England,” she cried. “It is the only thing I can do!”

  But he caught her by the shoulders, and gripped them hard.

  “No, no, you can’t do that, Stephanie . . . you mustn’t do it! It would disappoint your brother, and you are safe here with him.... At least I know that with him you have a certain amount of protection, but in England I wouldn’t know what you were doing, or how greatly you might need help or assistance at any time. And there is the promise you made to my fiancee. . . . She is childishly looking forward to seeing the completed model of her head.”

  “I couldn’t complete the model of her head.” Her voice sounded wild, rebellious. “Manoel, you must realize that that is an impossible task. . . .”

  “Not impossible, because you are very skilful with your hands, and you are almost as good an artist as your brother. It would be an achievement—a great achievement! —if you overcame your distaste for your task sufficiently to do one of your finest pieces of work. And I believe you could, Stephanie . . . to please me!” His eyes pleaded with her. “If you stay in Portugal I can put other offers of work in your way, and see to it that you get high fees. I know you need work, and your brother needs works. . . . I will help both of you as much as I possibly can. You can depend on me... ”

  She kept her eyes lowered to their hands.

  “You are very kind, senhor, but I can find my own customers,” she told him stiffly, formally, and he dropped her hands as if he had only suddenly realized he was retaining such close possession of them.

  “Very well,” he returned, very quietly indeed. “But if you remain in Portugal I shall do my utmost for you just the same.”

  “I have no intention of remaining in Portugal.”

  He glanced away from her, up at the cottage on the cliffs, and suddenly his face was remote and withdrawn . . . and something a trifle haggard about it smote her in some acute but curious way.

  “You had better return home to breakfast,” he said, trying to speak as normally as if this was a perfectly normal meeting. “In a few days I will get in touch with you. . . . I will suggest a meeting where we can talk without fear of interruption, and discuss these problems that beset us. In the meantime, try and not think too harshly of me. . . . I may not measure up to the standards of an Englishman, but at least I am a man of honour. I do not callously break my word just because it would make me ten million times happier if I did, and the thought that my beloved is being made bitterly unhappy through me is not going to add to the pleasure of living—for me!”

  “Oh, Manoel,” she whispered, “please!”

  He took her hand again and kissed it, as if it was made of porcelain, and he valued it above everything else; and then he said even more quietly:

  “Go back to the cottage, and I will wait here and watch until you are safely inside. If Tim has seen us, you can tell him the truth—if you like! If not, say nothing.”

  Before she left him she looked up at him with blue eyes swimming with appeal.

  “I will see you again—sometime—soon?”

  He smiled at her.

  “I have promised you, my darling. Now go!” Inside the cottage she found that Tim was waiting for her. He had already set the milk on to boil for the breakfast coffee, and he looked at her a little curiously as she came in.

  “You were up early,” he observed. “I heard you go out about an hour ago.” She thought his eyes were unusually shrewd and searching. “What was the trouble, Stevie? Couldn’t you sleep?” She leant against the kitchen door and studied him just as searchingly.

  “No, as a matter of fact, I couldn’t,” she admitted. “Not very well. It was hot last night.”

  “Very hot.” He poured the milk into a jug, and set it on the tray. “How far did you walk? I always find exercise clears the mind, and makes one ready for the day’s work. At least, it generally works that way. . . .” He glanced at her. “But you look as if you might have walked just a little bit too far. You look pale.”

  He could have added: “And thoroughly well kissed!” but he decided to say nothing of what he had seen from an upstairs window a short time before. All the same, his face clouded, and he felt anxiety surge through him. Steve was his only lit
tle sister, and she looked ready to cry bewildered tears—like a child who has just had it explained to her that such and such a toy is not for her. Or such and such a treat!

  He frowned ferociously at the slice of bread he popped into the toaster.

  “I’ll tell you what, old girl,” he said. “You and I’ll take a day off . . . we’ll get out the old bus, and I’ll show you something of Portugal. I’ve been stuck in quite a lot lately, and I could do with a break myself. How does the idea appeal to you?”

  “Very much,” she confessed. She felt overwhelmingly tempted to tell him the truth, but somehow the words wouldn’t form themselves. Instead, she moved closer to him and asked him a rather abrupt question.

  “Tim, what do you really think of the system of marrying out here? I mean, marrying because it seems a satisfactory arrangement, but for no other reason?”

  “I think it’s barbaric,” Tim answered, shortly, and then told her to look inside the cupboard for the marmalade. “Absolutely barbaric!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THEY set off about eleven o’clock, and drove for the greater part of the day. Tim showed his sister some of the most beautiful scenery of the district, particularly the inland scenery, which as yet she was scarcely familiar with. Cork forests, mountains clothed with misty blueness, their foothills gnarled with olives. And the coast road was always a delight, the sea curling inwards on the beaches and piling up like cream before it deposited its surf.

  And everywhere there were flowers, of such brilliant hues that they dazzled the eyes. They formed formal parterres in dignified gardens behind curly iron railings, and they grew in disarray in cottage gardens. They spilled over on to the roads, and grew amongst tall grasses beside the way. Nearly every other house was pastel-coloured, and there was a wonderful sense of orderliness and neatness even where Nature was inclined to have its way.

  Steve knew she would never forget the intense deep blue of Portuguese skies, or the hot caress of the sun as it fell across the bonnet of the car. Everything glittered, even the shabby paintwork, and the clouds of dust that were stirred up by their passage didn’ t seem to have the power to dim the general brightness.