The Stars of San Cecilio (21 page)

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he answered. ‘Let’s get back to the top of the cliff. And remember there’s nothing to be afraid of, because I’m with you and I won’t let you fall. Just

give me your hand------ ’

She gave it to him, and he looked down deep into her eyes.

‘You came down alone, but you’re going back with me! It’s as simple as that, querida! Do you understand?’

With her free hand she thrust back an end of her fair hair that the wind had whipped into her eyes, and then he could see that the grey eyes were glistening like the restless surface of the sea. They were clear, transparent, utterly trusting eyes.

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I understand.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ONCE SAFELY back on the top of the cliff he refused to allow her to look down, but led her to a wooden bench near the front door of the cottage, and when she sank down on it sat down beside her.

‘And what would have happened, I wonder,’ he asked, in a voice such as she had never heard from him before, ‘if I hadn’t been here?’

Lisa looked up into eyes that seemed to be haunted by his concern, and although she was still pale from her experience, he was several degrees paler. It was a pallor resulting from inner dread, from a horrifying conviction that if he hadn’t been on the spot to prevent it she might have made some unwary move, or lost her nerve altogether down there on those needle-pointed rocks. And at the picture the thought conjured up his voice shook uncontrollably.

‘Lisa, why did you do this thing to me?’ he demanded hoarsely.

‘Why?’ As she looked at him she knew without a shadow of doubt that she had done something to him over the past few years that had transformed him so far as she was concerned, but remembering why she had had to do that thing - and her own so very recent sufferings! — she pretended that she didn’t understand. ‘I don’t know what you mean. What have I done to you?’

He looked at her almost sadly, the lustrous eyes filled with reproach.

‘You left Madrid without even a word to me. Without even a word for Gia! If it hadn’t been for Miss Tracey I wouldn’t have known where to find you, or where to look for you. ’

‘Was there any reason why you had to find me?’ The chill in her voice widened his eyes still further, and she rushed on: ‘I simply do not understand why you are here, Dr. Fernandez!

— why you came all this way in pursuit of me, apparently! And, in any case, Miss Tracey had no real right to let you know where I am. She promised ------- ‘

‘She promised,’ he took the words out of her mouth, gently, ‘not to volunteer where you were to be found, but not to refuse information if it was asked for. And naturally she knew it would be asked for, as you must have done. Lisa! ’ He reached forth a hand and covered both of hers, which were clinging to one another almost desperately in her lap. ‘Oh, querida, I still want to know why you thought I had to be made to suffer tortures of anxiety about you, particularly when Miss Tracey told me how upset you were! She is upset, too, because she has grown fond of

you, and Gia is very fond of you. While I-------------------‘

‘You?’ she said, lifting her eyes from the brown, slim hand that was giving back life and warmth to her fingers, and searching his face almost hopefully for an instant. Then her lower lip trembled, and she had to bite it hard to steady it, and she managed: ‘You, Dr. Fernandez, have been embarrassed by me, and I thought you would be very grateful if I removed the embarrassment. I removed it as far away as I could. I came here. ... ’

‘Yes, but that is what I do not understand! And why do you talk of embarrassment?’ Suddenly she snatched away her hands, and covered her eyes with them.

‘Please!’ she begged, in a muffled voice. ‘When I’m with you I always seem to behave in a way I shouldn’t! There was the night when my foot caught in the jetty, and then you had to treat a graze on my arm, and I — I was stupid! Then at the Espinhaco’s party I twisted my ankle, and I took you away from the party! . . . ’

The tears were trickling down her cheeks, and she tried to conceal them from him with her fingers, but he took the fingers back into his own warm clasp and removed them firmly and looked at her.

‘Even if all this is right, why do you catalogue these things?’ he asked. ‘And there is one thing you have forgotten. On the night of the Espinhaco’s party you allowed me to kiss you! ’

‘Y-yes!’

Her eyes swimming in tears, she looked at him pleadingly. Whether she was pleading for another kiss, or apologizing for her weakness on the night of the Espinhaco party, they were neither of them ever afterwards quite certain, but he did know that he couldn’t bear the sight of the pathetically quivering lower lip any longer, and she knew that if his arms hadn’t closed round her she would have hurled herself into them.

He held her with a mixture of fierceness and tenderness.

‘My darling,’ he said softly, into her hair. ‘My sweet and most precious darling! Oh, Lisa, I love you so much, and you must have known - you must have known! Right from the beginning I knew you were a challenge to me, but I’ve grown into a routine way of life that didn’t want anything to do with challenges, and I refused to accept it. But for weeks now I’ve known that I could never let you go out of my life! . . .’

‘But you’re going to marry Dona Beatriz,’ she stammered feebly into his neck.

‘Am I?’ He sounded interested. ‘That is news to me, my dear one! How did you hear it and when?’

Lisa burrowed deeper into his neck. If it wasn’t true it seemed pointless to involve Dona Beatriz at this stage. But on the other hand---But he was insistent now that he began to get an inkling of why she had run away.

‘Where did you hear it, and when?’ he persisted. ‘You’ve got to tell me. Because if I am already pledged to another woman, how can I ask you to marry me?’

‘M-marry you?’

He looked deep into her eyes, tilting up her chin.

‘ I want you for my wife more than anything in this world,’ he told her almost solemnly, ‘and if you hadn’t run away when you did I was coming to tell you so that very same night! I bought a mass of scarlet roses to send to you that morning after the dance, but somehow I hadn’t the courage. . . . Not until I was absolutely sure that

you loved me, too. Oh, Lisa, my darling------ ’

‘Scarlet roses!’ she gasped, sitting upright in his arms. Suddenly she knew that she had seen those scarlet roses and one of them had been emphasizing the whiteness of Dona Beatriz’s hand on that morning when she called at Juilo’s flat! And now she wondered, had Dona Beatriz known for whom those roses had been originally intended? Suddenly she sank back against him. ‘Scarlet roses! ’ she whispered.

He held her strongly.

‘You must tell me all there is to be told,’ he insisted with a note of sternness in his voice, ‘ You came to my flat on that last morning in Madrid, didn’t you?’

‘How do you know?’

‘Never mind how I know. But you saw Beatriz, didn’t

you?’

‘I — she was there, yes. ’

‘And what did she say to you?’

‘She ------- ‘ Helplessly she hid her face again.

‘Oh, never mind, now! So long as you are not going to marry her! ’

‘I do mind, and I am not going to marry her! Lisa,’ forcing her face into the open again, ‘ you have suffered badly, and I have suffered badly, and I must know the reason. What did Beatriz say to you, apart from inventing a story about marrying me?’

‘ And there never has been any truth in it? You never did intend to marry her, I mean? Although she practically ran your house and your daughter?’

‘ No, never — and I can explain these other accusations later, But for the moment we shall stick to the point, and what did Beatrice say?’

‘ She — she said that I was running after you, and that I embarrassed you! That you had confessed to her how much I embarrassed you, and that you had appealed to her to take Gia away, so that you could get rid of me! Oh, Julio,’ she told him, her whole face quivering as well as her voice, ‘it was horrible! ’

‘It was very horrible!’ he agreed. He rested his face against her hair, and she felt as if his arms were straining her to him protectively. ‘ But although it was almost criminal, why did you believe her? Have I ever given you reason to believe that I would discuss you with another woman? Am I the type of man, do you think, who would do that? Especially when you must have known that for me you had a charm that was more powerful than anything that had entered my life! ’

‘But I didn’t know!’ she told him. ‘Julio, I didn’t know! I thought you were kind. ... I thought perhaps you liked me sometimes, but I

didn’t think you were the sort of man who-----------------‘

‘Would look for the one perfect rose in the garden?’

She lifted her head and gazed into his eyes. His were black and lustrous, and they seemed to possess her. Hers started to glow.

‘Am I — I that to you?’ she asked.

‘You are! And what am I to you?’

Suddenly courage came to her, shyness vanished, and she lifted her arms and wound them round his neck. Her eyes weren’t merely transparent now, they were abject, adoring.

‘ You are the only man I could ever love in the whole of my lifetime! In a dozen lifetimes! You are the reason why I wished I had the courage to throw myself into the sea when I was part-way down the cliff just now, and why I couldn’t even start to make any plans for the future. I hadn’t any future without you, and without Gia. I love you both, but I love you more than life! ’

‘Querida! ’ The word was jerked out of him as if it was part of a long-suppressed inner turmoil, and then once again his lips came down upon hers, and she savored the bliss of surrendering to a man who would possess her always, and completely. There would never be any half measures between them — only utter belonging, and desire that was like a flame. Her whole body trembled with it, and his arms tightened to give her the final shred of conviction she needed that this was something far more vital than the dreams she had indulged in, and her mouth was like a scarlet flower when at last he lifted his head. He looked down at it broodingly. ‘Why does a man love one woman, and one only?’ he wanted to know. ‘Why is she so important to him that without her he never really comes alive?’

She put up a hand and touched his face.

‘But — but it is possible to love more than once, isn’t it?’

‘Not as I love you! ’ His olive skin darkened, and for the first time it was really borne in on her that he was no Englishman, but a Spaniard who could become fiercely jealous if the cause was provided — perhaps if it was not provided!

‘Lisa, if you think that it is possible to love more than once------ ’

‘I don’t — I don’t!’ she assured him immediately, her fingers slipping up into the thickness of his hair and delighting in the vital feeling of it as it sprang back crisply against the back of her hand. ‘But you — Julio,’ she faltered, although now that she had got so far she had to go on, ‘you were very much in love with Gia’s mother, weren’t you?’

He put her away from him rather suddenly, and sat and looked at her.

‘Who told you that?’

She was about to say, ‘Dona Beatriz’ when he made it unnecessary for her to do so.

‘My good friend Dona Beatriz de Camponelli has been putting in rather a lot of work on my behalf — or, rather, against me, I should say!’ with a dryness that made her feel secretly glad she was not Dona Beatriz de Camponelli. ‘Lisa, I’ll have to tell you the whole story about her, and about my wife, because otherwise there will always be doubts between us, and without complete faith there will never be complete accord. ’ He drew her back into his arms, and stroked her face gently. ‘ Darling, if Beatriz has made you unhappy I can only say that I am so much more than sorry. You see, you and I were meant to love one another from the beginning, and I think she must have guessed it. She has always been my good friend

— or so I have always believed her to be! — and it would be foolish of me to pretend that I didn’t know she wanted to marry me, but as I have already told you I never had the smallest intention of marrying her. She is not the type of woman I would ever wish to spend my life with, but I was beginning to wonder just when you made your impact on my life — how I was going to convince her of that. You see, my darling, perhaps I have been a little weak, but she was good to Gia, and I thought she was a good friend, and a busy professional man doesn’t have much time to cope with problems in his private life. Also Beatriz was a connection of my wife’s, and that gave her some sort of a hold over us. And another excellent reason why she took such a proprietorial interest in my affairs was because She knew how unhappy I had been, and what a failure my marriage was -- ’

‘A failure?’ Lisa interrupted him.

‘Yes; a failure!’ He looked a little grim. ‘You have talked to me more than once of arranged marriages, my dearest, and I told you that they were often a success, but that is not always so. My marriage was an arranged marriage — our families had been lifelong friends, and I don’t suppose we would either of us have stood a chance if we’d tried to break away from What had been planned you might say in our cradles. And it was a bitter failure! My wife didn’t really want marriage — she would have preferred a career, if she could have had one, and she didn’t want children. When she knew that Gia was coming she did everything that might endanger her own life, as well as make it impossible for her to have the child, and within a week of the birth she took out her car and drove for so many miles that she exhausted herself and crashed into another vehicle, and when Gia was born she did die! ’ He looked away. ‘Not many Spanish women are like her, but then she was partly English. ’

‘I am wholly English, ’ Lisa reminded him in a whisper.

‘Yes, but you are also my Lisa, my woman, and my love! ’ He looked down at her with a yearning tenderness that caused the color to fluctuate in her cheeks, and she made an impulsive movement towards him and clutched at him.

‘Oh, Julio, if you really want to marry me I swear I’ll think only of you, and make you happy! That is all I want to do!’

‘I believe you, sweetheart.’ He carried her small hands up to his lips, and kissed the fingers of each one separately. ‘ And you will also make Gia happy? Gia needs you, you know! ’