by Susan Barrie
This was so much part of a daily ritual that Lisa and her charge often listened for it at about the hour when they knew that that shrill and rebuking voice would shatter the drowsy silence of the garden. Following the grating of wheels on the rough surface of the lane, the creaking of the gate, and then leisured footsteps making their way to the side door, they would cease whatever they were doing, lift up their heads, and then smile at one another when the tirade broke out.
‘This is a fine hour of the day in which to bring vegetables for lunch! ... For lunch!’ The voice would reach a pitch of indignation. ‘It is the laziness in your bones that you are suffering from, Pedro Gonzalez, and the sooner you do something to overcome it the better for us all! The better for my cooking!...’
Then would follow wheedling compliments in a sleepy male voice on the undoubted quality of that cooking, and more often than not the offender — in spite of the lateness of the hour — would be invited inside for some refreshment which he had scarcely earned. And when he emerged, after the lapse of a quarter of an hour or so, at least, and he caught sight of Gia peeping through a gap in the hedge, with Lisa standing more properly a little way from her, he would wink at them both with one of his handsome black Spanish eyes, and then climb back on to his cart and grind leisurely away.
Spain is the country of manana — tomorrow!
— and with Pedro Gonzalez tomorrow could just as well be the day after tomorrow, judging by the perpetual sleepiness of his expression, and the deliberate care with which he avoided any sign of anything approaching haste. He was, Lisa supposed, typical of a good many young men in that part of the world, a Catalan, indolent by nature, with little purpose in the beyond the day-to-day routine, and the occasional bullfight and fiesta. She would imagine his lassitude slipping from him a little at fiesta time, or when he was encouraging a favorite matador in the bull-ring, and his black eyes could certainly work overtime if a pretty girl was anywhere in his vicinity.
Lisa he had eyed casually at first, and then with increasing interest when he saw her on several occasions. Gia described him, giggling at her own description, as ‘Pedro the vegetable man who liked the look of Lisa! ’ But Lisa saw nothing either apt or funny in this, and apart from smiling at Senora Cortina’s outbursts when he arrived with the vegetables, she preferred to keep out of the orbit of his black glance if possible when he was in the vicinity.
She wasn’t used to men of his type — down-to-earth, sensual types, with a look of brutality at the corners of a handsome mouth—and she shrank from being silently approved of. Also, for some reason, she had an active mistrust of Pedro, and this wasn’t anything at all to do with the looks he directed at herself.
One morning he arrived at the side gate with a huge black mongrel dog sitting up beside him in the cart. The dog wasn’t merely a mongrel of the worst vintage — and there were many mongrels whom Lisa had fallen in love with on sight!
— but he was shamefully neglected, and he looked bad-tempered. He was sitting on a sack of onions when the cart drew up, and he lifted his lip and showed his teeth in an ominous manner when Pedro thrust him aside in order to lift the sack on his back and deposit it inside Senora Cortina’s kitchen, and a low growl left his throat. Pedro gave him a hearty slap that sent him into a corner of the cart, and when he looked round and saw Lisa attempting to persuade Gia away from the hole in the hedge he treated her to a display of his hard white teeth.
‘You like dogs, senorita?’ he asked, in his languid manner.
‘ All English people like dogs, and make the great fuss of them! Is that not so? Si?’
Lisa did not reply, and he settled the sack of onions more comfortably on his back, gave the dog a second thrust away from a box of lettuces, and then with his eyes still on her continued conversationally:
‘This fellow not good-tempered fellow. Very bad-tempered dog. Yesterday he fight and kill another much smaller than himself, and I give him a whipping. Today he not forget, and growl at me. Tonight I give him another whipping! ’
‘Then it’s no wonder that he’s bad-tempered!’ Lisa could not prevent herself from saying in a burst of indignation.
‘You think so?’ He leaned against the cart, the sack of onions dangling like an indolent cloak from his broad back, and his black eyes blazed with a mixture of amusement and mockery. ‘Ah, but that is because you are English, and in England it is the habit to fuss the dog! The little pet dog! Si?’ ‘That is no pet dog,’ Lisa told him, eyeing the mongrel apprehensively, for Gia was making overtures to it, and they were not being well received. She drew Gia back from the gap in the hedge, and, while Pedro thought up more provocative things to say, became aware out of the tail of her eye of
Senora Cortina’s recently acquired puppy (also of doubtful ancestry) emerging ahead of its owner from the partly opened side door and preparing to take a stroll along the path. Senora Cortina hadn’t yet heard the iron gate creak, and the puppy was temporarily free and obviously filled with a sense of adventure, and its small paws padded happily along the path until it heard the growl of the older dog. Only when it heard that growl and paused, its long spaniel-like ears twitching alertly, its terrier eyes displaying sudden uncertainty, did Lisa realize that something had got to be done about it — and done quickly!
Most well-trained dogs respect the inexperience of a puppy
— even when its appearance is distinctly odd, as in the case of Senora Cortina’s pet, which had been acquired because her husband had taken a fancy to it, and she did occasionally give way to her husband. But not so Pedro’s big, ugly-looking black dog, who followed up his first growl with a violent, annoyed bark, and then leapt through the air and landed upon the puppy.
But not before Lisa had anticipated the leap, and herself moved like an uncoiled spring in order, to secure the safety of the puppy. As she snatched it up — and it felt like a bundle of soft bones in her hand, covered by extra-ordinarily silky skin—Gia let out a shriek of warning, which was, however, much too late. For the black dog landed upon Lisa instead of the puppy, and it bore her to the ground with ease, since its proportions were massive and it was full of a kind of frenzy. Without being clearly aware how she had even forced her way through that gap in the hedge to reach the path, Lisa found herself sprawled at full length on the ground, with the cause of the trouble now seriously threatening her as well as the tiny creature she sought to preserve.
Gia shrieked again, and then called upon Pedro to do something. But his movements were leisurely as he moved to the assistance of the English girl, and it was only something he said softly in Spanish that caused the dog to become immobile as if by magic, while still displaying its ugly yellow teeth.
Pedro put out a hand and helped a dazed Lisa to her feet, and he addressed her in the same soft tone.
‘Next time it will be as well if you do not interfere, senorita. ’
But he got no farther, for a furious voice behind him ordered him to get outside with his sack of onions, and his dog, and stay outside; and Gia flew to her father’s side and caught at his arm and held it tightly while she explained exactly what had happened, and how brave Lisa had been.
‘It was the puppy, Papa! She thought the big dog would do it some harm — that it would be killed! ’
‘It might very easily have done you some harm, Miss Waring! ’ Julio Fernandez said, with a tight, enclosed look about his face, and utterly inscrutable eyes, as Lisa stood awkwardly hugging the puppy and looking up at him in a bewildered way. As she thrust back a long end of her hair that had fallen across her forehead and he caught sight of the ugly graze on her arm his expression tightened still more, and his voice was short and clipped as he demanded: ‘Are you quite sure that brute didn’t touch you? That mark on your arm --’
‘Just contact with the gravel of the path, I think,’ she answered, looking at it ruefully, and then attempting to smile lightly. ‘Yes; that’s all it is. No worse damage! And the puppy’s quite safe — trembling all over, but otherwise
quite all right!’ She gave the little animal an affectionate look, and then as the strand of golden hair fell forward again put it back with slim fingers that were shaking noticeably. Inside herself she was also feeling a little sick, for the whole affair had happened very suddenly, and she had no clear warning that it was going to happen until it was practically over. She still felt bewildered; her own movements had been purely instinctive, and she had no idea how she had thrust her way through the gap in the hedge in the very nick of time to be of service to the puppy.
But the important thing was that she had been of service to the puppy.
‘I don’t think Pedro’s dog likes puppies,’ she said, rather foolishly, and then felt a powerfully persuasive arm about her shoulders, and knew that she was directed towards the house.
As the pleasant dimness of the interior of the villa closed round them Senora Cortina’s voice could be heard scolding the vegetable man unmercifully, and he was protesting as his onions were once more stowed away in his cart. Lisa thought it a little hard that, as the result of the intrepidity of the puppy, he should lose a valuable customer, and as a brandy glass was placed in her hand, after she herself had been installed in a comfortable leather chair in the library, she heard herself making feeble excuses for him.
‘It wasn’t really Pedro’s fault. His dog is untrained and naturally unpredictable, I’d say. But it did obey him when he called it off. I don’t know what he said, but it did obey him. And, in any case, I don’t suppose it would have touched me. ’
‘Drink up that brandy,’ the doctor ordered quietly, and when she had done so took the glass away from her. He stood looking down at her. ‘In this country it is not wise to interfere in animal disputes. Our people are not trained to regard them as your people at home. You must remember that in future. ’
‘I will,’ she promised, and an embarrassed color struggled into her cheeks as his grave dark eyes studied her. He was Spanish in such a dignified, attractive way, she thought, almost wistfully — not flamboyantly Spanish, like Pedro! Even had he been born into a similar station in life, doomed to concentrate on vegetables as his main means of sustenance, and to hawk them from door to door, he would still be completely unlike Pedro. Humane, and emotionally stable — emotionally economical! — with a wisdom at the back of those night-dark eyes that was like the wisdom of the ages, because he obviously saw so much, and thought so much more than one might suspect him of at a first meeting.
As in a flash she recalled her own first meeting with him — not the first time she saw him, but the first time she actually came face to face with him on the little jetty in San Cecilio, with the moon shedding its light over the sea. He had been charming and kind. Later she had discovered that he could be hard and cold. Just now she wasn’t at all certain what was going on behind the emotionless mask of his face, but once more he was being kind.
All at once a sensation of desolation swept over her. He was kind to her because she had been foolhardy, and a big black mongrel dog had knocked her down, and her arm had been grazed. He had already examined the graze very carefully, and now he asked her to excuse him for a moment while he withdrew to some corner of the house where he kept the materials for cleansing it, and ensuring that it became nothing worse than a graze.
When he returned she was wallowing in the trough of her desolation, and the brandy he had persuaded her to drink had in some way acted as a depressant, which she knew it shouldn’t have done. Unless it was that she had been secretly very much depressed beforehand — in fact, for several days
— and the brandy was the key that opened the door to all her carefully controlled emotions. Whatever it was, however, she was in no mood just then to analyze her feelings, and she only knew that they seemed to be getting the better of her, particularly when he knelt beside her, and his sleek dark head came very close to the tip of her chin. And the sudden smarting of the graze when he treated it with something out of a bottle brought a rush of tears to her eyes, and she gave a little gasp, and one of them splashed down on to the back of his hand.
He looked up as if he was startled.
‘That hurt you!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m sorry, but it is important that this sort of thing should
‘Only this morning is rather different, because you have had a shock, and also you were very much concerned because the well-being of that extraordinary-looking creature Senora Cortina calls a puppy was most unexpectedly threatened! ’ he said, and his voice was infinitely gentle. ‘‘I know! I understand! ’
She looked up at him helplessly, and the tears were still swimming in her eyes, so that they looked like grey-blue violets drenched with dew; and despite every effort on her part her traitorous lower lip would not be steady.
If only he did understand, she thought! If only he understood just what his nearness did to her, and how completely barren her whole future stretched before her because of it! And then panic seized her lest she should give herself away, and he should be horrified, and dismiss her — send her back to England....
‘Please do forgive me,’ she begged, in a terror-stricken little rush. ‘It was the iodine, I think. ... I wasn’t prepared for it.’
But his whole expression had undergone a complete change, and the lustrous dark eyes were suddenly full of concern. He rose from his kneeling position and took a chair beside her, leaning forward and possessing himself of both her hands, and holding them strongly.
‘Querida,’ he said — and she was certain the endearment escaped him by accident — ‘ something rather more than that is wrong, I think? You are not hurt anywhere else, are you? That
brute of a dog didn’t----------‘
‘No, no,’ she assured him, sounding calm as his agitation mounted.
‘Then your fall was rather worse than I was able to observe? I was a little late on the scene, otherwise there would have been no fall of any kind! You are badly shaken — bruised?’
She smiled determinedly through her tears, and then successfully willed them away.
‘I am perfectly all right, ’ she assured him.
He looked down at her hands, and the sight of them lying in his virile brown palms seemed to fascinate him. They were so slender and white and well cared for, and not for the first time they struck him as very fragile hands, and inadequate for one who had to earn her own living.
‘Nevertheless I think you ought to go upstairs to your room and lie down. Perhaps I ought to give you a sedative. . . .’
She gently removed her hands.
‘Nonsense, Doctor. I shall be completely myself once I’ve had an opportunity to change my dress’
— looking down at the rent in the pink linen caused by a branch that had clutched at her during her fall — ‘ and washed and tidied myself. ’ She was conscious that there was dust on her cheek, and her hair would persist in falling forward so that it was more like a golden cloak framing her face.
Slowly the doctor’s eyes lifted from her hands to her face, and although there was no longer any sign of weakness, and she was completely in control of all her emotions, the troubled look in his eyes persisted. Also he seemed to find her face, unrevealing though it now was, as temporarily fascinating as her hands.
‘Que — Miss Waring,’ he said, so swiftly that there might never have been any hesitation over his choice of a manner of addressing her, ‘will you tell me whether you are really happy here! ’
She looked at him in surprise.
‘Happy? But of course I’m happy.’
‘And you do not regret that you ever came to Spain?’
Her eyes widened, and her pulses quickened because she was suddenly once more afraid. He had guessed.... He was guessing!
‘I love Spain! ’
His eyes were still troubled, and his voice was troubled, too.
‘We once talked of roses, you and I — and the one perfect one to be found one day in a garden. For you, that is. . . . ’ His eyes held hers for a moment, and then he looked away. He stood up, and moved
away to the window. ‘Your young friend, Peter Hamilton-Tracey, telephoned me this morning and asked for permission to take you out to lunch with a relative of his. Some elderly aunt who has arrived to stay in San Cecilio, and whom he wishes you to meet. Presumably he also wishes her to meet you. . . . ’
He turned and looked at her fixedly.
‘Yes,’ she answered, as casually as she could, ‘I was expecting the invitation. ’
‘And you were also expecting to meet the aunt?’
‘Yes, I—I was told about her.’
His eyes held a look she simply could not understand. ‘When young men introduce young women friends to their relatives they are usually rather serious about them.’ He started to pace up and down the library. ‘At least, in Spain it would indicate rather more than seriousness! I have no very clear idea how you conduct these things in your country, but I feel in a sense responsible for you, and my advice to you is, do not let loneliness drive you into a situation that you might find it difficult to extricate yourself from. That is,’ with a queer smile just touching the corners of his lips, ‘if you still feel the same way about roses! ’
‘I ------- ‘ Lisa was beginning, when the door opened and
Dona Beatriz stood looking with distinct curiosity at both of them.
‘I heard that you were here,’ she said, ‘and that Miss Waring had been foolish enough to interfere with a mongrel dog! ’ Her voice suggested that, having done such a thing, Miss Waring had received her deserts. ‘Senora Cortina is in a state of despair in the kitchen, because her vegetable supply is low, and the vegetable man has gone on his way without leaving her any onions or leeks for the soup. So next time, Miss Waring,’ with a cold smile, ‘that you think to save her puppy’s life for her, remember also that she has an employer whom she is paid to serve, and that the proper preparation of his meals is of the utmost importance! ’