by Ives, Averil
"I'll have to get something more sensible than this when I go shopping!" She looked quickly at Kathleen and away. Kathleen's leaping pulses slowed a little. "He talked very pleasantly of several things . . . The changes that will take place at the quinta when he marries, and his sister leaves. He is buying a villa for his sister farther along the coast." Again the odd, quick look at Kathleen. "The boys won't go to school yet, however."
Kathleen felt as if something within her grew limp and quiet.
"He—he actually talked to you about marriage? His own marriage!"
"Oh, nothing precisely specific." Peggy looked down at the white toe of her sandal, and drew patterns in the dust with the cork sole. "I think he's really contemplating marriage, but at the moment he's planning alterations to the house. He wants a part of the grounds re-laid out, and he's got ideas about a new wing being built on to the house itself. That's probably where he's going to hang Shane's pictures." She grinned rather feebly. "It's probably going to be an English wing."
"Do you think Carmelita Albrantes will want an English wing?" Kathleen asked quietly, and Peggy quite noticeably avoided her sister-in-law's eyes.
"I couldn't say. But then I don't know very much
about Carmelita. And we none of us know for certain
that it's Carmelita the Conde's going to marry!" Kathleen turned away.
"I don't think there's very much doubt about it," she said.
The children were growing restless, and she was glad of the excuse to move on. She seized their hands, and tried to smile naturally at Peggy.
"Well, it's been nice running into you like this. Tell Shane I'm pleased about the pictures. I expect the next time I visit you you'll have the dining-room curtains hanging up and looking very splendid! I'll probably think I've come to the wrong house!"
Peggy tried to look as if she was thrilled at the thought of her home being thus transformed, but there was no doubt that she was anxious about Kathleen. The girl's smile was fixed and strained, and it was quite easy to understand what had happened to her. She had started off by quite violently disliking the Conde, and now she was . . . In love with him? Almost any girl could fall in love with the Conde, Peggy thought. Any susceptible girl most certainly would. Kathleen, however, wasn't susceptible, but she had reached an age when it would be a disaster for her if she fell in love with the wrong man!
"I make it a rule never to listen to gossip," Peggy said quickly, as if that might offer a grain of comfort. "Carmelita has never struck me as the ideal wife for Miguel de Chaves! In a few years she will not merely be quite plain, but she'll be dull, also! I should like to see the Conde married to someone rather more —more suited to himself!"
"Perhaps he considers Carmelita is very well suited to himself," Kathleen returned, and then added quickly that they must hurry, because the children's tea would be overdue, and it was the maid's evening off.
Peggy watched her hasten away through the blazing afternoon sunshine with her charges, and then turned and started on the remainder of her own walk home. She was not quite certain what that accidental meeting had achieved.
Kathleen handed over the children to Maria when she got indoors, and then went off to her own room to wash her hands and slip into a clean, crisp dress. But everything she did was purely mechanical, and she kept remembering the way Peggy had looked at her ... a vaguely uneasy look at first, and then a definitely sympathetic look.
Peggy knew very well that the Conde was planning to marry Carmelita, but she more than suspected that her sister-in-law had done the one thing she ought never to have done. The one thing no sensible employee ever did, and that was fall in love with her employer.
Peggy was probably wishing very hard that she had never brought her into contact with such a danger, but the damage was done now, and only Kathleen herself knew how irreparable it was. But at least she could look to her defences and make certain no one else guessed how completely she had succumbed to the fascination of the man who paid her her salary.
And the fact that it was such a good salary made the whole thing seem rather worse. It underlined the difference between them, even if there had been no Carmelita. He was rich, and she was grateful for the careless generosity that made the post she now held a valuable one. When she had to give it up she would be poorer in more ways than one. She would be financially less secure, and she would probably never see him again.
But it was the last thought that shook her. One could always get another job, but in the whole wide world there could be only one Miguel de Chaves.
Which proved how completely she had changed in her ideas about him since that first bleak interview in the library.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ANOTHER couple of weeks passed away, and Kathleen saw rather less of the Conde than she had done up till now. He was seldom in to lunch, and when he was Carmelita occupied the guest of honour's place at the table. That is to say she sat on his right hand and chattered to him as if Kathleen was not in the room with them, and sometimes it was a little embarrassing because she had a habit of slipping a hand inside his arm, and appealing to him in a very feminine way. And he rewarded her doe-like glances with a marked attentiveness that was even more embarrassing to the English girl, who had no one to prepare her peach for her or select a few of the choicest grapes from the great silver basket of fruit and place them on her fruit-plate.
It was true that she always refused dessert — not because she wasn't tempted by it, but because she was so anxious to leave them alone together. And she frequently scalded herself by drinking her coffee while it was too hot with the same purpose in mind.
For she was sure Carmelita heaved a sigh of relief when she was on the other side of the dining-room door.
She was also reasonably certain that Carmelita, in her pretty, plaintive way, had asked more than once why it was necessary for a governess to have her meals with her employer. But she didn't dare to try and convince herself that the Conde appeared surprised by such a question. He probably merely said that she was English, her people lived in the district, and it didn't seem quite right to confine her altogether to the nurseries.
Very occasionally Dona Inez lunched with them, and once Carmelita came early, driving herself in a small cream-coloured car, and spent the whole of the
morning with the twins' mother. When Kathleen had occasion to knock upon the sitting-room door in order to consult Dona Inez about a matter in connection with the children, she was invited to enter and found the two occupants of the room bending enthusiastically above a bale of heavy white satin damask on a side table, and fingering it appreciatively. Near them on a chesterfield couch was a pile of exclusive fashion magazines, one of which appeared to be a bridal number.
Inez looked rather vaguely at Kathleen as she put forward her request for permission to make a dental appointment for Jerry, and then nodded casually.
"Of course, if you think it's necessary." Then she lifted an end of the wonderful material and held it up against herself. "It's exquisite," she said, dreamily. "That faint golden thread that runs through it gives it an extra richness. I would like a wedding-gown of this material myself."
"Then you must get married again," Carmelita said gently, and smiled at her.
Inez made a slight shrugging movement with here shoulders, and dropped the satin.
"Perhaps I will one day," she answered. "When I am quite sure that I am behaving wisely!" She frowned, and Kathleen was sure she was thinking of Fernando, and that she was very certain her affair with him was anything but wise. "But, in any case, white is for very young and innocent brides, and I will never be that again."
She turned to Kathleen, as if suddenly recollecting that she, too, was young and might one day be a bride, and invited her to come and make a closer inspection of the shimmering beauty that was lying draped over the table.
"Do come and have a good look at this, Miss O'Farrell Isn't it quite gorgeous? And won't Senhorita Albrantes make a perfectly enchanting bride?"
For one moment Kathleen felt as if a rude hand actually caught at her heart and squeezed all the
life out of it, and her limbs refused to obey her as she tried to move forward to the table. She was dimly aware of Carmelita turning rather a delicate pink, and Inez with over-bright, faintly mocking eyes fixed on her own face, as if she perfectly understood how she was feeling — although this was so unlikely that afterwards Kathleen recognised that it was her agonised imagination that was playing her tricks. But her imagination had not conjured up that bridal silk, or put words into Inêz's mouth that she would have given anything not to hear.
"Senhorita Albrantes is getting married soon, and we are trying to select designs for her wedding-gown. My own dressmaker in Lisbon is going to hurry the thing through, and I can assure you it will be the most wonderful wedding-gown in all the world when it is finished!" She looked rather condescendingly at Carmelita. "You will owe me a debt of gratitude when you see how much skill has gone into the construction of this all-important robe! Senhora Araujo has few rivals, and even in Paris you would not do any better!"
"I am quite sure I would not," Carmelita agreed flutteringly, and flushed much more deeply, and considerably less attractively. "I am deeply grateful to you for putting me in touch with her, Inez."
Inez shrugged again dismissingly.
"Naturally, in the circumstances, I could not do anything else! We all want you to appear at your best, and very soon now you will be a close relative of mine." She smiled as if something about the other girl touched her suddenly. "It will be nice having you in the family, Carmelita!"
Kathleen withdrew from the room, carrying with her Inez's permission to have two of Jerry's upper teeth stopped, and if couldn't be avoided a lower one pulled. But as she walked blindly back to the nurseries she wasn't thinking about teeth and the importance of getting Jeronimo to a dentist as quickly as possible, but the final conclusive proof she had received that
morning that for once gossip hadn't lied, and the Conde de Chaves' future bride was a girl he had known all his life.
Carmelita Albrantes was the reason why he had been able to state so decidedly that he was in love — irrecoverably in love!
That afternoon several people came to tea, and Carmelita was joined by her aunt, and the Conde drove them home after they had stayed for an informal cocktail-party on the terrace.
Kathleen received an instruction from Dona Inez to bring the children down to the sala for tea, and Carmelita attempted to insinuate herself into their good graces, but although on their best behaviour neither Jerry nor Joe were attracted by her overtures. They clung determinedly to Kathleen's hands, and although she used every endeavour to persuade them to leave her side neither cream cakes nor crystallised fruits would woo them away from her. The Conde glanced at her a little oddly once or twice, she thought, and she wondered whether he was vexed because Carmelita's efforts went unrewarded.
She managed to attach the children to their mother for a while, and went back to her own room in order to give them no excuse for being awkward. But after a bare quarter-of-an-hour a maid requested her to collect her charges, and Dona Inez was obviously thankful to be rid of them when she entered the room.
Carmelita observed in an unusually clear voice that the children seemed to be very fond of their governess, and the Conde held open the door for them when they set off to return to the Nursery.
"You will join us on the terrace when these small people have been handed over to Maria?" he said to Kathleen, his unfathomable dark grey eyes seeking and holding hers.
But Kathleen was so surprised by the pointedness of the invitation that she flushed and refused at once.
"Thank you, senhor, but Maria has had a slight accident to her hand, and tonight I am putting them to bed and giving them their supper."
"I see," he said quietly, and as he lowered his glance and bent his sleek dark head — the merest suggestion of his slight, perfunctory little bow — she was glad that the excuse was not an invention, for Maria had actually sustained an injury to her hand, and for a day or two she would have to be relieved of some of her duties.
But two nights later there was a birthday dinner for Dona Inez, and Kathleen made the excuse that Jerry was still being afflicted by toothache to absent herself from it. And the following afternoon the local elite turned up in force to attend a garden-party in the lovely grounds, and Kathleen accepted the offer of one of the younger maids to take charge of Jerry and Joe while she slipped out to spend a couple of hours with Peggy and Shane.
She didn't dare to ask for a car so she once more walked, and the explanation she offered to her relatives was the sudden violent need she had felt to see someone of her own kind. Peggy looked dubious, particularly as the quinta garden-parties were far-famed. Apparently she and Shane had received an invitation which they had had to decline because Shane was working hard on a special commission and couldn't spare the time, and if the Conde found out that they had entertained Kathleen it might look a little ungracious. Doubly ungracious since Kathleen obviously preferred to seek her diversions away from the house.
Shane drove her back, but she insisted on him putting her down outside the gate of the quinta — in fact, well away from the ornamental gateway — and stole in by a side entrance as if she had a guilty conscience. But she need not have bothered to screen her movements, for apparently no one observed her or was interested in looking out for her, and that night when she entered the great dining-room it was to find that she
was to have her meal in solitary state, for the Conde and his sister and Carmelita and several of their friends had gone dining and dancing at a popular night-haunt in Amara.
Kathleen felt like someone who had been finally abandoned, and for the first time since she had fingered the material of Carmelita's wedding-gown she stopped pretending to herself that this was a phase she would get over. Alone, and lapped about by misery in the silent dining-room, she knew that she would never recover from the loss of a man who could never have been hers.
Which was a paradox she didn't recognise, so great was her misery.
She saw nothing of the Conde during the whole of the next day, or the day after that, and then Dona Inez let drop the information that he was leaving for Lisbon in another week. From Lisbon he was proceeding to Paris, partly in connection with business and partly in order to be able to act as escort to Senhorita Albrantes and her aunt, who were visiting the French capital to indulge in an orgy of highly important shopping.
Kathleen felt so stunned by this news that she decided to keep out of the Conde's way altogether — or, at any rate, as much as it was possible — for the next few days, until the lovely quinta no longer had its master beneath its roof. If the torment of knowing that she had to live without the sight of him, and the knowledge that he was nowhere near to her, had to be faced up to within a matter of a week, then the sooner she did so the better! The torment wouldn't be any the less, but at least it would be immediate, and not something deferred.
So when she and the children were walking in the grounds she was careful to keep out of range of the library windows, and the first note of the luncheon gong saw her in the dining-room so that she could leave before the Conde had sometimes barely taken
,
his seat. Her excuse was that Maria's hand was not quite well yet, and she didn't like to leave the children with her for any length of time; and at night the same excuse was most useful, particularly as Joe had lately taken to having nightmares and it was as well for someone like herself to be on hand.
Dona Inez smiled in her cool, detached way, and remarked that Kathleen was unusually conscientious, but she would be the last to quarrel with conscientiousness. But Miguel looked down his beautifully straight nose and tightened his lips occasionally, as if he didn't altogether approve of such an excess of zeal.
The night before he left for Lisbon he insisted on Kathleen drinking a little wine, although she normally emphatically refused, and offered
as explanation of his insistence the fact that she was looking rather pale.
"You mustn't take your duties too seriously, Miss O'Farrel," he said. "You are employed here as a governess, not a slave!"
Inez looked at him with amusement in her eyes.
"Our little Miss O'Farrel likes doing the job she is employed to do thoroughly," she said. "You should be thankful that it is so, and that we can place so much reliance in her. You can go away from here tomorrow knowing that the house will not be wrecked in your absence!"
"That, at least, is something," he said.
"You and Carmelita can have quiet minds," Inez remarked a little drily. "And in return I promise you that during your absence I will not permit our little Irish girl to listen too frequently to the blandishments of Fernando Queiroz! Although of course I can't prevent her seeing him if she wants to!"
She looked at Kathleen with deliberately indulgent eyes, and Kathleen — realising that if Fernando came to the quinta it would be to see Inez, and not her —felt suddenly strongly revolted by the other woman's pretence, and rose to leave the table.
"If you will excuse me, I would like to go upstairs now," she said.
But the Conde rose also.
"Certainly you may go upstairs and look at the children if you wish," he agreed. "But once you have done so I would like you to return downstairs and join me in the library. There are one or two things I would like to say to you before I leave here tomorrow!"
Kathleen felt her knees tremble suddenly, not merely with nervousness, but with the sudden delight of knowing that she was to see a little more of him before he left. The delight made her feel weak, incapable of immediate response or action of any sort, but she realised that he was waiting to hold open the door for her, and she moved towards it at last with the sensation that she was walking temporarily on air.