Nurse for the Doctor (8 page)

“Then I will certainly get up early,” she promised. She raised the large brown eyes that had always struck Michael as slightly doe-like, to his face. “Do you know England,
senor
?” she asked. “The way you said ‘even in England’ sounded as if you are familiar with it.”

He smiled.

“Of course I am familiar with it. Who is not familiar with England?—or would not be if they could! As a matter of fact, I spent the better part of my early life in England, being educated at one of your well-known schools, and visiting my English grandmother, who unhappily has been many years dead.”

“Your—English grandmother?” She looked at him in really keen surprise. “I had no idea that you are only partly Spanish.”

“No?” His smile was a little quizzical, as his eyes watched her. “Is that something, perhaps, you feel I should be thankful for?” The smile revealing beautiful, even teeth. “But I assure you I am even more proud of my Spanish ancestry, and therefore it must mean that I am truly at heart a Spaniard!” He selected from his case one of the thin, flat, greyish-looking cigarettes she had noticed he smoked a quantity of, and having lighted it continued to regard her as if she amused him just a little. “Did you not know that my mother was partly English? That is how she and Mrs. Duveen became acquainted. They moved in the same circles when my mother was young, and enjoyed the same form of education.”

“Oh, yes, I did know that—I mean, I knew that they went to school together, and saw a lot of one another in their young days.” But, try as she would, as she gazed at him, she could not think of him as a man with a solitary drop of prosaic English blood in his veins. To her, when she met his eyes, he suggested a thin veneer of polite, self-contained ice over all sorts of possibilities. She repeated to herself, “All sorts of possibilities!” and suddenly her cheeks were dyed scarlet because of the way he looked at her.

“Well,
senorita
,” he demanded, very softly, “what is it that you are thinking?”

A crisp voice from the far end of the room came to Josie’s rescue. The elderly white-haired lady in the black lace shawl swept together her cards and called out commandingly: “Summon my car for me, Carlos, and I will say good night to you all! These cards will not come out in the way I wish, and I will waste no more time on them.” She stood up, looking very tall and slightly arrogant, leaning on the head of a slender ebony cane, and the marquis instantly remembered his manners as a host.

“At once,
Tia
Amelie
!” he responded, and sprang to his feet to reach forth his hand to an old-fashioned bell-rope. But when he moved away from Josie’s chair he bent over her and apologized: “I must leave you, Miss Winter, to attend to the departure of my aunt—but if it is true that you had a headache, I hope it will be quite gone in the morning.” And she was left sipping the remainder of her drink and wondering whether by that he wished her to guess that Mrs. Duveen’s statement about her headache had not deceived him for one moment. She also felt a little glow of warmth around her heart because he had stayed to talk to her, and had apologized for leaving her.

As the old lady tap-tapped past Josie’s chair she paused for an instant and bent over her.

“My nephew did not think fit to present you to me, young woman,” she said in excellent English—the sort of English that lent itself easily to colloquialism—“but I, too, am familiar with England, and you must come and see me and we will talk about it. Do not forget.”

Josie stammered something about being delighted, but the old lady had passed on. Mrs. Duveen was looking at her employee with eyebrows raised, and Michael broke off his conversation with Maria to wink at her rather broadly. She wondered afterwards what he meant by that wink.

But before she summoned up the courage to make her excuses and return to her room she couldn’t help taking note of the fact that—so far as she was able to observe—the marquis studiously avoided having any conversation with Michael, he was meticulously polite to Mrs. Duveen, but seldom smiled when he talked to her, and when Sylvia Petersen claimed his attention he was all strangely winning charm, and eagerness to have that attention claimed. As if, Josie thought, Sylvia had a special right to it.

When she slipped into bed at last, delighting in the almost sensuous comfort of the half-tester, it was not upon Michael and Dona Maria that Josie found herself dwelling—not even upon the night before and Michael’s kiss—but upon her host and the lovely young woman who possessed so many diamonds, who kept all her smiles for the exalted Spaniard. Josie thought that this American girl, who regarded lesser people, even Michael Duveen, as apparently beneath her interest—and who had such a lot to commend her, when it came to an assessment of purely physical attributes, was yet not quite cut out to be a wife for Carlos de Palheiro.

She felt unshakable about that, and it was only when she was becoming drowsy, and the billowy comfort of the bed was about to drug her senses, that she started to wonder why.

CHAPTER VII

Although
it was so late when she fell asleep, Josie wakened early enough the next morning to remember the marquis’s recommendation and spring out of bed to take a peep at the world from her balcony.

Her breath caught with admiration as she leaned over the balcony rail. There, below her, was the garden, all diamond-bright with dew, mystical with gossamer, and sweet with the wet scents that had lain crouched amongst the flower-borders all night. Piercingly sweet was the perfume of roses, and one of the dark red climbing roses actually twined itself about her balcony. She reached out and plucked a crimson bud, and held it against her cheek. Her heart pounded with sudden, acute pleasure.

Oh, what a lovely, lovely world, she thought, looking upwards at the color in the sky—just as if the sun, in the effort of lifting itself into a clear space in the heavens, was palpitating with excitement, like a young woman planning to meet a lover. And in all the pleasurable anticipations the sky flamed, until it was a glowing mass of orange, and cerise, lemon and rose, and when finally the sun won free of all these hampering vestments a rush of liquid blue poured in from the east, and the brilliant canopy of a new day was spreading in all directions.

The sea, that had looked dark and sombre, came to life, the light glinting along its placid surface until each wave that broke on the golden shore was edged with a brilliance like diamonds. Far out the horizon was still shrouded in a haze that betokened considerable heat as the day advanced, but it was a placid haze, a pleasant, lavender-colored haze like the herb that had saturated the coast with perfume during the days of high summer.

Josie felt that all this was much too good to miss, and she rushed into her clothes and went down into the garden without waiting for early-morning tea or coffee to be brought to her.

The villa was very silent at that hour, and she stole out through a side door, without encountering anyone. The crispness of the paths crunched beneath her sandalled feet, and late butterflies brushed against her face and hair. She passed a fish-pond where the fish were disporting themselves happily, and walked in the shadow of the long pergolas where the vines shut out the sun. She crossed the lawn over which she had seen a motor-mower being driven the day before, and was rounding a corner of the dazzling white house that looked as if it might lead to stable quarters when a man on horseback swept beneath an arch, and drew up within a bare couple of feet of her.

Josie was startled at first, and then filled with admiration because the horse was such a beauty, like chestnut satin in the sunlight, with a white star between its ears, and snowy forefeet. She put back her head until she could see its rider easily, and he smiled at her and swept off his black Cordoban hat so that she could see his black curls glinting like patent leather, gently ruffled by the light breeze.

“
Buenos dias, senorita
,” he greeted her, his white teeth flashing in his brown face. “Like me you find the morning air is sweet?”

He swung himself down from his mount, and when he was standing beside her on the path she could almost have laughed unbelievingly at his willowy, film-star grace and suppleness. Such looks, such a smile, such a snowy cambric shirt and tight-fitting impeccably tailored riding-breeches, such a brilliant bandanna as the one that was knotted about his bronzed column of a throat, were almost too much. And taken together with the horse, lifting its proud, arched neck into the air, and allowing its long, undocked tail to flow like the unhampered tresses of a mermaid free to the morning breezes, was like coming face to face with as unlikely an apparition as she could have imagined in England.

“Your pardon,
senorita
,” he said, bowing meticulously from the waist, “but first it is important that I introduce myself. I am Luis de Manzanares, very much at your service.

“I think I saw you last night,” she told him, her voice sounding a little shy—while her brown eyes looked rather intriguingly shy—because she was unused to such confident young men as this.

“That is true,
senorita
, and I also saw you, and learned that you were the nurse in attendance on the rather un-invalidish looking invalid, who in addition is a doctor. It does not seem to me that a doctor should require anyone like you to look after him, but from his point of view it must make him very happy.” His eyes glinted down at her a little audaciously. “It would make
me
very happy!” Josie actually blushed.

“Dr. Duveen was the victim of a very unpleasant accident a month or so ago,” she explained.

“Is that so?” Don Luis murmured. “Then he is now reaping the rewards of his carelessness—of, if it was not his own carelessness, somebody else’s carelessness.” He stood patting the horse’s neck, and studying her with interest.

“But you still have not introduced yourself to me,
senorita
,” he reminded her a little reproachfully.

She told him hurriedly, while she, too, reached up to pat the horse’s neck:

“I am Josephine Winter.”

“Josephine?” He echoed the name thoughtfully, pronouncing the J as if it was an H, in the Spanish fashion. “I heard your patient refer to you as Josie last night, but he should of course address you as Nurse Winter, to be strictly correct.”

Josie couldn’t resist asking him with a smile: “And are you always strictly correct,
senor
?”

“In Spain we are always correct.” But the audaciousness in his eyes suggested that he side-tracked that correctness whenever it was possible. “And the name, as I have told you, is Luis,” he added.

“I mustn’t interfere with your morning ride, Don Luis,” she said, stepping back on to the grass verge.

“No, that is true,” he agreed, noticing that his mount was sweating a little. ‘This fellow must be rubbed down, and without delay. It is my daily task to exercise him while I am here.”

“For the Marquis de Palheiro?” she inquired, as if she knew already that the chestnut was the property of her host.

Don Luis nodded a little gravely.

“Ramirez is the pride of my cousin’s heart at the moment—although we have here quite a string of horses, and the welfare of each is of importance to him. He does not now of course ride very much himself.”

“I shouldn’t have thought it was possible for him to ride at all with only one arm.”

“You would be surprised, Senorita Josie, what my cousin the marquis achieves with only that one arm,” the young man told her, as if his personal admiration for those achievements was unbounded. “He even drives a car, which has been specially designed for him, of course. And on a desert island he would be quite capable of attending to all his own wants without even a Man Friday to watch over him.”

“Really?” Josie’s eyes widened, but she was not really surprised, for it had already struck her when watching the marquis that the absence of a sound left arm seemed to cause him remarkably little inconvenience. She had observed the method he adopted to light his own cigarettes, and on the two occasions when she had lunched with him his complete lack of awkwardness at the table had amazed her. But she had found it difficult to understand why he preferred an empty sleeve to an artificial limb, which would have helped at least to disguise his incapacity; and had decided that possibly he had something against artificial limbs, and that was the reason why he elected to do without one.

But to think of him driving a car—possibly at speed, since he was used to speed—was inclined to appall her a little.

Don Luis swung himself back into the saddle, and once more he swept off his hat to her.

“
Hasta la vista, senorita
,” he called, as he swung round to return through the arch. “And may that,” with his flashing smile, “be soon.”

As he rode away Josie wondered whether he also was staying at the villa, or whether—as seemed more likely—he had a place of residence of his own somewhere along the coast.

The Marquis de Palheiro came up silently behind her as she stood lost in admiration for a piece of graceful horsemanship.

“You ride, Miss Winter?” he asked, his eyes on the soft curls that had the warm tone of honey in the sunshine.

She turned quickly and looked up at him, a glow creeping up under her clear skin.

“No,
senor
—I’m afraid I don’t. But Don Luis looks magnificent in the saddle.” she added, with an impetuosity that was almost schoolgirlish.

The marquis smiled, but not in the way his cousin had smiled without any hint of reserve. The marquis’s smile had a good deal of reserve about it.

“No doubt you find him picturesque,” he said. “I’m sorry I did not present you to one another last night, but it struck me that you were not quite in the mood for that sort of thing.”

“As a matter of fact,” she admitted, with a shy, grateful peep at him, “I wasn’t.”

He turned, and they walked back together along the path. She tried to recall the sensation of faint awe of him that she had had the night before, when they had walked back together to the house. But this morning, in the full broad light of day, there was no awe—only a rather odd pleasure in his society.

“Luis would make you quite a pleasant escort if you should feel the need of one,” he surprised her suddenly by saying. “He would not presume, and a young woman like you will naturally wish to see as much as possible on a first visit to a foreign country. It is important that you
should
see as much as possible,” he added, as if he was quite convinced about this.

Josie looked sideways at him, and was aware of a queer tugging of disappointment at her heart.

“I think you must forget,
senor
, that I am not here on a holiday,” she reminded him. “I am here in a professional capacity, and I have no real right to a lot of spare time.”

“No?” He met her upturned eyes, which made him think of stone called cairngorm, and some mountains in Scotland that he had once climbed. “All the same, your patient is recovering rapidly, and it would be most unfair of him—
and
his mother,” he added, with a kind of cool deliberation—”if they prevented you from enjoying yourself while you are here.”

“I am lucky to be here at all,” she assured him. “But for Dr. Duveen’s accident I would probably never have seen Spain.”

He said nothing for several seconds, but his downward fixed gaze made her avert her own.

She rushed into speech.

“Don Luis was telling me that you still ride sometimes,
senor
, and that you drive a car. I think that is marvellous considering your handicap.”

“Do you?” But there was rather a dry note in his voice this time. “Oh, yes, I decided long ago that if the loss of an arm was going to prevent me doing at least some of the things I used to do, then it would have been better if I had lost more than an arm.

There was no mistaking his meaning, and she looked slightly shocked.

“Oh, no
senor
!”

He smiled rather queerly.

“Oh, yes,
senorita.
I’m sure Duveen would tell you that if he was going to retain that limp for the rest of his life he would feel less kindly disposed towards the surgeons who patched him up so admirably otherwise.”

But she shook her head.

“Life is sweet,” she said. “Life is
always
sweet!”

“To you, perhaps,” regarding her fair face gently. “You are young—to me you seem almost painfully young to have taken up such a serious occupation as nursing—and at the moment no doubt there are other reasons why you feel that it is good to be alive. But remember, so uncertain is the path we have to tread that at almost any time our whole being can undergo a change of attitude—our mental outlook can alter entirely, and I am not referring to possible accidents that might choose us as their victim.”

He spoke so sombrely that she wondered what he was referring to, and there was just a trace of anxiety in his eyes as he looked down at her.

“You have known Dr. Duveen for quite a long time, Nurse Winter? I mean, you knew him before ever he became your patient?”

“Only as a consultant to the nursing-home in London to which I myself am attached,” she answered.

“I see,” he said, and suddenly he looked away across the garden without, she felt sure, noticing any of the beauty of it. And as if his thoughts had harked backwards he asked suddenly: “You said that you do not ride, Nurse Winter. Does that mean you would be nervous on a horse?”

“You mean—?”

“I mean,” smiling at her rather abruptly in a very delightful way, “that in Spain our girls ride pillion sometimes, and if you would not be nervous that might be a pleasant experience for you.
Would
you be nervous?” insistently.

“No, I don’t think so.” But she looked up at him as if she was perplexed. “I don’t think I would be nervous at all, but whose pillion would I ride on?”

“Mine—if you would not be afraid.”

She knew that her eyes grew large with surprise, and for a few seconds surprise was so strong in her that it was the only emotion she was capable of experiencing. And then she answered with absolute truthfulness: “I wouldn’t be in the least afraid.”

And she knew she wouldn’t. He was the sort of man with whom one couldn’t possibly be afraid, not even if he asked one to accompany him on a trip to the moon—which was highly unlikely, but proof of the strange strength of his personality, at least as it was exercised over her.

The little tug of disappointment she had experienced a few minutes before might never have been as an extraordinary sensation of gratification took possession of her.

“Then that is a half promise you have made to me,” he said, pausing to give emphasis to his words. “One morning you shall find out whether or not you can enjoy a really novel experience.”

As they passed beneath a balcony on their way round to the back of the house, and the big patio where everyone foregathered at some time or other during the day, Josie caught a glimpse of a slender figure in a wide-skirted housecoat of dusky peach color, with a cap of hair like molten gold, reclining luxuriously in the sunshine and sipping early morning coffee, and she knew that they were being carefully watched by the American, Sylvia Petersen. But although the marquis must have known whose balcony it was beneath which they were passing—and although he had probably caught a glimpse of the enchanting figure already—he did not betray by so much as a movement of his head his knowledge of that near presence. Josie told herself that that was because he was a Spaniard, and to a Spaniard of his rank brought up in a tradition that had altered little throughout many centuries, the very idea of even attempting to spy upon a young woman who imagined she was enjoying seclusion would be abhorrent. He was too rigidly correct to have caused her any embarrassment, no matter how overpowering the desire to recognize her nearness might have been.

But, just before they parted company in the patio, Josie could not resist posing a sudden question of her own. “Does Miss Petersen ride,
senor
?” she asked.