White Rose of Love Page 9

  The hour for aperitifs drew near, and by that time they were high in the mountains. The inn they found this time was much more impressive, modern and catering for a luxury trade amongst tourists. There was a terrace raised high in space where drinks could be sipped as the sun slipped lower and lower, and far away in the distance the blue sea lay and sparkled under a darkening evening sky. There was also an excellent dining-room and a room where an orchestra played and couples danced dreamily to tuneful modern numbers that floated out into the suffocating warmth of the night and became lost amidst scented shrubs and beneath a riot of early incredible stars.

  Steve found a ladies room and washed and attended to her face and hair, and rejoined Dom Manoel at a table on the terrace. Neither of them had any appetite for dinner, but they sipped a local wine and listened to the orchestra, and presently Manoel asked the girl if she would like to dance.

  She was a little surprised, having had no idea whether in his formal scheme of things he approved of dancing—apart from watching native folk dancers, and listening to their sad songs and fados. But, even more to her surprise, she discovered that he danced beautifully, and no doubt he had had in mind the opportunity that would be his to hold her close, for no sooner did his arms close round her than the realization was borne in on her that they had been hungering to do that very thing all day.

  The two of them danced blissfully together, forgetting everything but the sheer joy of the music and their closeness to one another, returning to their table between numbers, and then taking the floor again the instant the music restarted. Other people regarded them curiously from time to time . . . the handsome, dark, distinguished man with an air of affluence, who was quite obviously Portuguese, and the girl with the bright brown hair and the flawless skin who, just as obviously, was not. They appeared to be inhabiting a world where only their two

  selves existed, and there was no room for anyone else.

  Still without bothering about dinner they wandered out into the garden, drifted away along the paths. Steve had ceased wondering about Tim and worrying in case he was anxious about her, and whenever she glanced upwards at Manoel’s face she could tell by the slight rigidness of his jaw line, and the brooding darkness of his eyes, that he was consciously forgetting Madelena, and if she got back to the quinta before he did, and wondered what had become of him, he was in no condition of mind to allow the thought to disturb him.

  He had other thoughts to dwell on, and other concerns, that at that moment were close to his side.

  In a shadowy corner of the garden Steve stumbled, and instantly she was in his arms. It was as it should have been the night she stumbled in the garden of the quinta, only on that night the feeling aroused by the abrupt proximity of their two bodies could not have been as great as it was tonight. All day they had been craving for this moment, and now it was as if a match had set a light to some very dry kindling, and it went up in a burst of flame ail in a moment.

  Desperately they clung to one another, their mouths and arms fiercely locked together. Steve had never known such burning kisses, such utter desperation in a pair of masculine arms that held her as if never under any circumstances could he let her go again. As for her own complete yielding, she knew it was wrong, but there was nothing she could do about it. . . . Manoel was the only man in the world whose arms had a right to hold her, because she loved him with every sensitive nerve in her body, and in that remote place—far from Madelena, far from reminders of the desolation in store for her, Steve, in a few weeks time—it was as natural and right to be in his arms as it was to breathe.

  He whispered to her adoringly between kisses:

  “You are the loveliest thing in the world! ... Stephanie, Stephanie, why did you not come into my life before? Why did you wait so long? Oh, if only I had known of your existence! ...” He kissed her eyelids, his lips trembling. “My darling, I can’t bear to let you go! ... If we are to live apart, there is no life for us! There can never be any life for us apart!”

  She closed her eyes, the dark garden rocking round her.

  “Sweetheart,” straining her to him until she felt that her bones must crack, “at least we are together here! To-night is all the happiness we may know in our lives.... Why do we have to cut it short and return to outer darkness and utter loneliness? There are other inns in the mountains, more remote than this.... We can become lost, no one will know where we are....”

  His voice was wild, beseeching; his dark cheek was pressing despairingly against her own.

  “What do you say, my own, my darling. . . ?”

  “Manoel, we’ll have to go back!” She tried to free herself from his hold, realizing that it was up to her now to retain some grasp of reality. Manoel was like someone prepared to burn his boats—watch his whole future (and hers!) go up in flames—for the doubtful joy of turning this night into one memorable night for them both.

  All his training, his rigid sense of correctness, had been cast overboard, and his bleak unhappiness aroused in her such depths of love and longing that the urge to do something about that unhappiness at least shook her like an aspen bending to a storm. And then she knew that that way would not mean happiness for either of them—not even for one night when they could forget everything else.

  Resolutely she twisted herself out of his hold, and spoke sharply.

  “Manoel, we must go back! ...”

  And it was at that moment that voices sounded somewhere near to them, and two people came hurriedly round some bushes and practically blundered into them.

  There was no moon, but it was a night full of stars, and Steve saw at once that it was a man and a woman—both dark, both Portuguese, both dressed for an evening of light dissipation. The woman was laughing and scintillating with brilliance as she moved; the man—young, curly-haired, confidently handsome—she recognized as quickly as he recognized her.

  “Miss Wayne!” he exclaimed.

  “Senhor D’Castelos,” she said, rather feebly, but Dom Manoel said nothing at all.

  Carlos D’Castelos bowed. His companion looked a little curious, but not nearly as curious as Carlos did when he glanced at de Romeiro.

  “Good-evening,” the Dom said, without warmth, enthusiasm, or even in a voice that sounded polite.

  “I fear we intrude,” Carlos said, as if he was thoroughly perplexed, gazed with his bright brown eyes at Steve, and then at his recent host—almost certainly took note of the fact that neither of them were in evening-dress, although it was now nearly ten o’clock, and then bowed again with the utmost formality.

  “Good-night, Miss Wayne . . . Good-night, Manoel,” the young man enunciated clearly.

  As soon as they were alone Steve clutched at her companion’s arm.

  “He thought it was odd. The two of us here together,” she observed a trifle huskily.

  Manoel did not answer. Instead, all at once, he seemed to become his normal, correct and formal self—a self with which most people were familiar. He drew himself up to his full height, looked curiously down at Steve, and spoke a little stiffly.

  “Yes, we will go now,” he said, as if he was answering her earlier plea. “I’m afraid it is a little late.” And then, just before he started to move purposefully ahead of her: “I offer you my profound apologies, Stephanie. I think I must have been a little mad!”

  She had the feeling that the Manoel she knew and loved had departed—perhaps taken his final departure out of her life! —and the man she was left with was Dom Manoel de Romeiro, in many respects a complete stranger to her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ALL the way home he scarcely spoke to her, and Stephanie felt curiously exhausted after her strangely emotional day. It was a relief to her to have to say nothing—to think nothing, since there was very little point in thinking ahead. While the cream car sped through the night and touched ninety miles an hour on the straighter stretches of the road she sat with her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes fascinated by the road as it unwound ahead of them in
the powerful gleam of the headlights, and forced her mind into the state of blankness that was the only state of mind that was bearable to her just then.

  Beside her, Manoel seemed completely absorbed in his driving, and if he was aware of her closeness on the seat beside him he hardly ever betrayed the fact that he was. Only once did he ask her whether she was cold, and advised her to tuck a rug round her knees. On another occasion he mentioned the draught from the open window beside her, but she refused to have it shut.

  Just before he set her down at the cottage she forced herself to put a question to him. It was a question she would rather it had not been necessary to put.

  “Is Senhor D’Castelos likely to—to talk about seeing us together tonight?”

  “I don’t know.” It might have been a matter of supreme indifference to him, if the cool tone of his voice was anything to go by. “It all depends on how greatly he was impressed by seeing us together.”

  “I’m sorry for your sake that he did.”

  “Please don’t let it worry you.”

  For one moment, before she climbed out of the car, she wondered—even hoped, for that same moment, rather wildly—that he would say something that would put the memory of the long, empty miles they had travelled together right out of her mind, and leave her with something sweeter, and more consoling, to take to bed with her.

  But he didn’t do so. He helped her out of the car, took note of the fact that the antique lantern above the cottage door was glowing brightly, like a star, to guide her footsteps up the short path to the door, and then held out his hand to her with an abruptness that actually shook her a little.

  “Good-night,” he said. And then he added, a little peculiarly: “And thank you!”

  Steve knew that he watched until she was inside the house, and then his long car slipped away in the direction of the quinta.

  If Tim was up, he didn’t make the mistake of appearing just then. But she suspected that he was up, because there was a light shining under his door. Steve crept past it with the fixed motions of a sleepwalker, and she entered her room with the same blank, bewildered stare on her face, and no colour at all in it.

  In the morning Tim asked, casually enough, at breakfast, if she had enjoyed herself the day before.

  Steve regarded him almost furtively.

  “You—you know that I went out with Dom Manoel? We—we went for rather a long drive.”

  “Yes, I knew,” Tim answered, as he helped himself rather lavishly to marmalade. “It must have been,” he commented, with equal casualness, “quite a considerable drive.”

  Almost immediately after breakfast another note was brought round from the quinta for Steve. She would have liked to have crept away up to her room and read the contents, but Tim was watching her, and she knew he expected to hear something of what those contents were. Under ordinary circumstances he wouldn’t have dreamed of prying into her affairs, but this was different . . . Steve knew it was very different!

  With trembling fingers she slit open the envelope. Dom Manoel’s severe masculine handwriting stared up at her, and at first it blurred before her eyes so that she could hardly read it. Then it steadied, and she managed to make out the gist of Manoel de Romeiro’s communication.

  It began:

  My dear Stephanie,

  After what happened last night I have no alternative but to ask you to marry me. If you agree, I will approach Senhorita Almeida at once and ask her to release me from our betrothal. With the marriage date so near this is bound to be a shock to her, but I am sure she will not hesitate to set me free if I tell her that 1 wish to marry you. Relations between her family and mine will become strained, naturally, but this will be remedied in time.

  Please get in touch with me as soon as you have read this letter.

  It was signed, Manoel de Romeiro.

  Steve felt as if something had butted her unexpectedly in the stomach as she stood staring at the letter. Tim asked her sharply:

  “What is it?”

  Steve held the letter out to him. Two little spots of scarlet were beginning to burn in her cheeks, but otherwise she was pale as ashes, and her eyes had a blind look.

  “It’s ... it’s a proposal!” she said.

  Tim read the letter, and then he studied his sister as if he had never really seen her before.

  “What happened yesterday?” he asked, at last.

  “Nothing. We went for a drive.”

  “And Manoel made love to you?”

  She nodded.

  “It must have been pretty high-powered love if it’s resulted in—this,” and he held the letter away from him, as if he disliked it.

  Steve realized what he meant by ‘high-powered love,’ and her face flamed afresh.

  “Oh, no, no!” she cried. “It wasn’t”—she bit her lip— “anything like that! It was just—”

  “Love making? The kind my little sister would indulge in with a man she meant to marry?”

  She nodded again, her lips trembling.

  Tim looked her in the eyes, and then glanced almost disdainfully at the letter.

  “Do you intend to marry him?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Does this proposal strike you as the proposal of a man of honour, or the proposal of a man who wants to marry

  you?”

  Steve buried her face in her hands.

  “Shall I tear it up?” Tim asked.

  She nodded, her face still hidden.

  Tim tore the expensive sheet of notepaper into fragments, and then burned them in the empty fireplace. He admitted:

  “I don’t know whether my strongest urge is to punch Dom Manoel on the jaw on your behalf or Madelena’s. As she’ll end up by marrying him it ought to be on hers!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  STEVE answered Dom Manoel’s letter with a brief note that acknowledged its receipt and declined his offer to marry her. She said she hoped he would be very happy with Madelena, and that the relations between the Almeida and de Romeiro families would always be excellent.

  She also sent a note to Senhorita Almeida and said she was ready to continue with the modelling sessions if Madelena wished them to continue, but that she would prefer it if her sitter came to the cottage instead of requiring her to go to the Quinta Rosa. Madelena replied by driving herself to the cottage in her little blue car, and from that moment the model of her shapely head began to take real and flattering shape.

  A few days after she had sent her reply to Dom Manoel’s letter Steve and her brother were invited to dine with one of the local families. They spent a typically Portuguese evening in a formal atmosphere, and Dom Manoel and his fiancee were not amongst the guests. A couple of days later they lunched with another of the leading families, and then there was a kind of cocktail party they attended at which Madelena and Dom Manoel were both present, followed by Madelena’s birthday party.

  At the cocktail party Steve wore a navy-blue silk dress with white accessories. She looked strikingly English with her strangely radiant complexion and her brown hair with the golden lights in it, and her reticence and the way she held herself aloof from even the most voluble of the English-speaking guests emphasized the fact that she was English. Only a very charming elderly man who spoke the most effortless and correct English she had ever listened to seemed to make any impression on her, and to him she talked on all sorts of subjects . . . making the discovery later that he was Dom Manoel’s uncle, Senhor Jose de Romeiro.

  Dom Manoel and his fiancee were a little late in arriving, but as the cocktail party went on for hours this didn’t matter very much. Madelena caused a little stir when she appeared amongst the rest of the guests, radiant in petunia pink that suited her perfectly. She waved to Steve, in the uninhibited fashion that was a result of her democratic education, and later she and Tim seemed to get together in a corner and find a lot to talk about. Steve—discussing artistic trends with Senhor de Romeiro—wondered whether art was the subject that held them enthralled
, also.

  Dom Manoel found the opportunity to talk to Steve when she wandered out on to the terrace, and he followed her. It was a golden evening, glowing still with the fierce heat of the day, and below them, as always, the sea crooned away restlessly on the beach that at this hour was golden as a wedding-ring. The gardens of the house where they were both guests were a blaze of colour, and the perfume of thousands of flowers floated in the atmosphere.

  The setting could not have been more romantic. . . . But Steve, when she heard that quiet footstep behind her, and knew even without turning round whose footstep it was, became immediately so tense that for her the beauty was blotted out, and romance was something she had forsworn.

  “I thought —I hoped! —I might find you here,” Manoel remarked, his voice as quiet as his footfall, as she refused to turn round.

  She bit her lip so hard that a tiny drop of blood spurted and stained her teeth.

  “Do you mean that you thought you would find me here on the terrace, or you thought you would find me a guest here?” she enquired.

  “I hoped I would find you a guest! I saw you talking to my uncle just now! . . . I’m sure he enjoyed your conversation. He looked as if he was doing so, anyway.”

  “Your uncle has a lot to talk about, I found him extremely interesting.”

  “He is the oldest living member of the de Romero family. Naturally we all look up to him.”

  She spun round. Her blue eyes blazed like cold blue fires— by some strange paradox—in her small, pale face. And the colour had started to desert it the moment she knew he was amongst the guests.

  “And if you had been unwise enough to mean what you wrote in that letter you sent me he—as well as all the other members of your family! —would undoubtedly have suffered as a result of the bad feeling you were so afraid of creating between the de Romeiro and the Almeida families?” she stated rather than asked.