by Susan Barrie
CHAPTER XI
Angela waited in the room until his footsteps had died away in the corridor outside it, and then she tore open the door and rushed upstairs to her own room. Her cheeks were burning with a mixture of humiliation and pent-up emotion. The last thing she wanted to do was run into her grandmother just then, and so she secured
her door by locking it, and she also took the precaution of locking the door which communicated with the bathroom, and beyond it Dona Miranda’s room.
It was still early in the day, and Dona Miranda had gone for a walk in the gardens. Angela at last became convinced of this when she heard no sound on the other side of the bathroom door.
What was she to do? She lay on her bed and thought of all sorts of desperate and retaliatory measures that she might take, including enlisting her grandmother’s support because Felipe was so obviously enamoured of Mrs. Ruddock, and if only Dona Miranda could be sure of it she might call a halt to the wedding herself. Angela thought she could convince her if only she talked long and earnestly enough to her—and also if she drew her grandmother’s attention to the scratches on her neck.
But instead of doing that she finally rose and bathed her face with cool water, powdered her nose and touched her mouth with lipstick and her eyes with a little mascara, covered up the marks on her neck with a fine chiffon scarf, and went downstairs when the luncheon gong sounded to join the rest of them at lunch. The rest of them, that is, with the exception of Mrs. Ruddock. For once Dona Miranda joined them, and she expressed genuine concern over the near disaster that had overtaken Felipe’s most charming English guest early that morning. For some reason Angela’s part in the rescue—or, at any rate, not a very active part—was not made clear to her.
No one would have guessed, looking at Felipe while the long-drawn-out meal lasted, that he and his fiancee had been discussing separation only a bare hour or so earlier. He looked as if every emotion of which he was capable was completely under control, with the exception of the concern he felt for Mrs. Ruddock’s well-being, and even that could have been nothing more than the natural concern of a host judging by the almost complete absence of expression in his eyes.
That afternoon, while the rest of them took their customary siestas in their rooms, and in the coolest corners of the garden and the shore, Felipe departed in his car to execute some business he had mentioned casually at lunch. Angela once more lay on her bed and wrestled with her problem without getting appreciably nearer to solving it, and her grandmother in the room next door, knowing nothing whatsoever about her problem—so far as Angela was aware—dozed placidly in her comfortable long rattan chair beside a window that had its shutters securely fastened over it, and the whole house, standing as it did beside the shimmering sea, was as silent as a pool.
The afternoon hours dragged away, and at five o’clock one of the maids brought Angela a tray of afternoon tea. In the room next door her grandmother also sipped tea with lemon, and found it very refreshing.
There was the problem of the evening. Angela did not feel she could go downstairs and take part in conversation with the others—their numbers probably reinforced by Carmelita, whom the maid who brought the tea had informed Angela was very much recovered, in fact almost completely recovered, and preoccupied with selecting a dress for the evening.
No, Angela thought, making up her mind firmly and unshakably for the first time in her life, she would not go downstairs and join the others, and if possible she would not be drawn into conversation with her grandmother, who tried once or twice to gain admittance from the room next door.
‘Please go away, Abuela,’ she pleaded through the door. ‘I have a headache.’
‘I have some excellent Cologne that should help you, child,’ her grandmother called softly through the door.
But Angela declined to open the door. Whether or not she convinced her grandmother that her headache was too painful to enable her to talk to anyone for any length of time she did not know, for Dona Miranda went away, and from the silence inside her room she went downstairs to dinner that night, which Angela had in her room on a tray.
No one else enquired after her. There was no message on the tray ... not even a command from Felipe. And she was left to make the most of her self-imposed seclusion knowing, or at any rate believing, that no one really cared—not even her devoted grandmother—and to all intents and purposes the rest of her future life lay in ruins about her.
But this was an attitude of mind which lasted until she had drained the last of the coffee in her coffee-pot, and then abruptly—as if someone had swept cobwebs away that had been clouding her mind and her thinking powers—she arrived at a decision. By the time Dona Miranda came upstairs, tap-tapping along the corridor with her stick, her granddaughter was waiting for her.
‘Grandmother!’ She burst into her room through the dividing bathroom with an immensely purposeful look on her face—such a look Dona Miranda had certainly never seen there before. The old lady was looking rather pale and tired, as if some unusual exertion had taxed her considerably, and as she stood leaning on her stick and regarding her granddaughter there was an extremely patient expression on her face, as if she was keeping her natural impatience in check, and was prepared to be reasonable.
‘Well, child?’ she demanded. ‘I trust you enjoyed your dinner in the seclusion of your room? At your age I was not permitted to take a meal in my room ... not unless I was ill.’
‘When you were my age, Abuela, things were different,’ Angela told her. ‘They were very different! Young people had to obey their parents, and they were not allowed to think things out for themselves ... not in Spain, anyway. But even in Spain to-day things are not the same. The young do have minds of their own, and if a course of action is objectionable to them they have a right to protest. I have decided that there is one thing I cannot do, and therefore I’ve got to tell you so, and it doesn’t matter what you say, Abuela, I won’t change my mind.... ’
‘Well?’ Dona Miranda demanded, as if her patience was rapidly evaporating, ‘what is it? Don’t make speeches, child. Just get to the point! ’
‘I can’t marry Don Felipe!’
‘I thought it was that. And if it is nothing more than that I agree with you that your wishes in this matter have never been properly taken into account. It was my wish that you should marry Don Felipe, and I still believe he is the right man for you, but after much dwelling upon the matter in the last few days I have, like you, arrived at a conclusion. No one must force you to marry Felipe, and if you honestly are very strongly against marrying him you must give him back your ring!’
Angela literally gaped at her.
‘But, Grandmother.... ’
The old lady looked as if this was almost, but not quite, the last straw.
‘It seems you are difficult to please,’ she remarked a trifle acidly. ‘But I will tell you this.... If you hadn’t come to me with the truth as you have now done I was going to insist that you opened that door between us and listened to what I have to propose. I don’t want any histrionics or any well-thought-out diatribes. It is perfectly simple, you being absolutely clear in your mind about the amount of esteem in which you hold Felipe. You must go away at once, and leave me to make your peace with Felipe! To become involved with him in argument would be fatal—although I understand you have been a little forthright to him earlier in the day. That is not the way, however, to handle Felipe! You can take a horse to the water, but you can’t make him drink!’
Angela was twirling her engagement ring on her finger.
‘Do you mean to tell me, Grandmamma, that you have discussed me with Felipe...?’ she asked as if she was faintly perturbed by the very idea.
‘I wouldn’t say we discussed you,’ her grandmother returned, limping to a chair and sitting down on it. ‘But I did have something to say about Mrs. Ruddock’s continued presence in this house, and as my
granddaughter I felt that—well, you had certain rights!’
�
��And Felipe?’ Angela enquired still more thinly.
‘He didn’t exactly agree with me, but I suspect that the charms of this alliance that has been arranged between you are beginning to pall a little. When the marriage was contracted you were reasonably amenable, but recently it has been obvious to anyone with eyes to see that you were growing rebellious. A marriage in which the wife rebels from the outset would hardly commend itself to a man of wide interests who likes peace and harmony in his background. A wife to come home to.... A wife to welcome him is one thing, but a wife who would behave like a fishwife every time she lost her temper or considered herself ill-used is quite another!’
Angela’s pale face coloured indignantly.
‘I did not behave like a fishwife, Abuela, and I never have behaved like a fishwife,’ she protested. ‘If Don Felipe prefers to rescue another woman from the sea and leave me to drown—’
‘Which you did not do,’ her grandmother pointed out to her.
‘No, but I might have done.’
‘However, you are safe and sound, and with all your swimming trophies and your undoubted prowess in the sea I consider that Felipe would have been very stupid indeed if he had considered for one moment that you could drown in a perfectly calm sea just because of a slight tussle in the water with a silly Englishwoman who has no prowess at all. Don’t you realise, child, that anything might have happened to her in her wild, hysterical state if he hadn’t been very firm with her, and given her all his attention?’
‘I still say he might at least have looked around to make sure I was all right,’ Angela muttered sulkily.
Dona Miranda surveyed her with an absolutely blank face, and the same air of increasing weariness.
‘But, apart from this deplorable neglect on his part, you are not in the least in love with Felipe, is that it?’ she asked.
‘I—er—’
‘Areyou?’ the older woman shot at her.
‘No,’ Angela answered, and wondered whether she had ever told such a deliberate lie in her life, and to her only living relative, too. Something of the confusion and the bitterness in her heart showed in her face; the natural recoil on her part from committing herself to a blatant untruth; and if there was one thing Dona Miranda had it was a pair of sharp eyes.
However, she persisted with her probing.
‘You have no softness for him whatsoever? If he married this—this Englishwoman it would not upset you?’
Angela hesitated, went very pale, and then answered with a blatant ‘No.’
‘Then, in that case, the way is clear.’ She pressed a bell for the maid, and while they were waiting for the girl to answer it explained the plan she had formed. ‘You will leave here to-night. I have already arranged with Felipe’s chauffeur to drive you back to Granada, and all you need take with you is one single suitcase of your clothes. The rest will be packed tomorrow and will accompany me when I return. Naturally, there are many things to be worked out with Felipe, but I don’t think there will be any acrimony on his part, and I certainly shall be as diplomatic as I know how. When I return to Granada we will discuss your future, and perhaps it might be a good idea if you are sent away for a while—’
‘In disgrace?’ Angela blurted out, as if this was in the nature of a final straw.
‘No, not precisely in disgrace.’ But the words her grandmother left unsaid spoke volumes. ‘However, we cannot expect that a broken engagement will escape being commented on by all our acquaintances, and there will be many unpleasant duties I shall have to perform before the thing can be decently overlooked and, we hope, forgotten. You have a wedding dress awaiting you
in Granada, and presents are arriving there every day....
That ring you are wearing will have to be returned! ’
Automatically Angela removed it from her finger.
‘And Felipe?’ she enquired, in a strange, husky voice. ‘You must have discussed something of this with him already if he is willing to allow his chauffeur to drive me back to Granada. You say I am to leave to-night. Is he downstairs, and am I likely to see something of him before I leave?’
‘Fortunately, there is no danger of anything of that sort,’ Dona Miranda replied, with the first note of complacence she had allowed to enter her voice. ‘You couldn’t possibly wish to see him before you leave, and I happen to know that he has taken his guests for a drive along the coast, using one of his other cars. They are unlikely to return until it is very late, so you can make your escape without running into any sort of
unpleasantness before you do so.’
Angela bit her lip, and her little teeth pressed so hard into her lower lip that it bled.
‘ It sounds to me as if all this has been arranged with the connivance of Don Felipe,’ she remarked, not entirely surprised because of the complete absence of sympathy in her grandmother’s face, but bewildered nevertheless because of this sudden opening of the doorway to freedom. And as for Felipe.... Well, it might well be that he would gain something from this financially, but she never would have believed— especially after their quarrel that morning—that he would let her go quite so easily.
If nothing worse, it was humiliating ... it was the most humiliating thing that could ever possibly happen to her, which probably indicated that she was by no means balanced in her reasoning.
Her grandmother looked at her with sudden, real impatience.
‘What do you wish, child?’ she enquired of her acidly. ‘To eat your cake and then complain that there was neither cream or jam on it?’
‘It isn’t a matter of cream or jam.’ Angela continued to bite her lip, to tear at it agitatedly. ‘But—’ And then she turned away to her wardrobe. ‘Do you think Felipe will marry Mrs. Ruddock, Abuela?’ she enquired hurriedly and breathlessly as the maid’s footsteps sounded in the corridor.
Dona Miranda answered as if the question actively offended her, and was the final proof of the general bad taste and decadence of modern young people like her granddaughter.
‘How should I know, child?’ she returned with even greater acidity. ‘Do you think that I sat downstairs after dinner discussing with Felipe his relationship with a woman of whom I most certainly do not approve, and actually asked him whether he proposed to marry her? Do you imagine I have no pride, and no sense of the fitness of things? I may be afflicted with a granddaughter who has neither, but at least I have sufficient for both of us!’
Angela went on her way to the wardrobe, but just before the maid entered the room she had one final question to ask.
‘So you did discuss all this with Felipe after dinner?’
‘We had a short talk in his study. His guests were waiting for him and it necessarily had to be brief.’
‘Well!...’ Angela thought and snatched open the door of the wardrobe and began dragging out her clothes willy-nilly.
CHAPTER XII
The maid went ahead of her with her suitcase when she crossed the hall. The house was uncannily silent, and there was only a very dim light left burning in the hall, with its polished furniture and handsome Martinez portraits lining the walls. Angela glanced up at one or two of them before she reached the door and the short flight of steps which led down to the drive.
What was it Felipe had said?—Not once, but twice! ‘The first thing I will do when we are married is have your portrait painted, and you shall hang in my gallery in Madrid!’
She felt an appalling—almost a shattering— sensation of loss, not because her portrait would never hang in his gallery in Madrid, but because she herself had only too plainly been put right outside his thoughts already, and while a lonely journey to Granada awaited her he was driving his friends along the coast!
Her eyes became so blinded by the rush of self-pitying moisture that filled them that she scarcely saw the steps once she had set her foot on them, and it was the maid who prevented her from falling as she returned to the house after handing over her case to the chauffeur, who had already deposited it in the boot of the car.
‘Be careful, senorita!’ the maid cautioned, and as she uttered the caution the chauffeur turned from closing the boot and took a half step towards the front door as if he, too, was anxious to prevent an accident.
It was extraordinarily dark outside on the drive, and Angela realised it was because the powerful lights above the entrance door, and on each side of the entrance gate, had not been switched on.
But the car lights were streaming like sword blades down the drive, and the car itself was headed for the main gates.
The maid said a polite farewell to the departing guest, whom she had understood was proposing to marry the master in a matter of a few weeks or less, and Angela found herself placed in the back of the car, with a light rug over her knees because a cool wind was blowing in from the sea and lowering the temperature dramatically.
They cleared the main gates and started to hum along the main coast road, but Angela was hardly aware of anything about her, and the only thing she sensed was the alarming extent of her own black depression. It was of her own free will that she was returning to Granada freed of the shackles of an engagement about which she had protested constantly in the past, and she knew that only a few weeks ago—less than a few weeks! —she would have been conscious of an overwhelming sensation of relief because at last her grandmother had seen sense and made it possible for her granddaughter to live a life of her own selection.
But unfortunately for Angela there had been a visit to a remote inn and a night in a garden full of the sounds of singing birds that had made it as clear as a searchlight to her that she didn’t want to live a life of her own selection. And even before that her ideas had been changing, the personality of Don Felipe Martinez had been exercising a kind of fatal charm. And now that she knew just how fatal that charm was she had severed all links with him, and only that morning she had hurled at him all sorts of accusations that she now bitterly regretted.