Island in the Dawn (6 page)

Looking about her again Felicity thought: “This could be enough
...
This could be more than enough!”

When they came within sight
o
f the plantation that protected the house from the shore and caught their first glimpse for many hours of the white, dignified house itself, her whole being was arrested by the thought: “Here in this spot one could have everything!”

But she was too tired and muddled in her head to know precisely what she meant by those words, and why they should rise up like letters of fire before her eyes just then.

They had stopped for a cup of tea
—
not
the
best cup of tea she had tasted in her life
—
in Harry’s office, and it had revived her temporarily, but by the time they got back she knew that they were already late for dinner. Late if she was to find time to bath and change before joining the others, and she was so hot and sticky that she knew she simply had to have a bath.

She wasted no time over getting rid of her stickiness, although the warm, scented water tempted her to just sit and let it draw the weariness out of her limbs.

Florence laid out a dress for her, and she hurriedly climbed into it, although the maid protested at such haste when she was looking so jaded.

Felicity admitted that her head ached rather badly.

“I expect I’ve had a little too much sun today,” she said, s
miling
at Florence’s concern. “But once I get downstairs I’ll have nothing to do but just sit back and listen to the others talking”
—
at any rate, she hoped that was what would happen
—
“and it will pass off in no time.”

“Why not let me get you a nice pot of tea and some aspirins?” Florence suggested. “The master won’t mind! He’
ll
quite understand if you send down a message that you’re tired, and he’ll probably insist on sending you some dinner up here to your room.”

“I wouldn’t dream of putting either him, or you, to so much trouble,” Felicity answered.

Florence stood with her black arms akimbo and eyed her doubtfully.

“I tell you the master wouldn’t mind,” she repeated as if she had a special reason for being quite certain of it.

No, but Cassandra would mind
—
and I should hear about it afterwards! Felicity said to herself silently. She could actually hear Cassandra saying in that high
-
pitched drawl of hers: ‘But, my dear Felicity, did you stop to think that we are not actually guests here, and even I would hesitate before turning myself into an invalid for the evening, and expecting people to run up and down stairs to me! After all, you didn’t
have
to stay out all day, did you?’

What Cassandra actually did say, when Felicity made her appearance in the big room where the silk-shaded lamps glowed softly, and the tall standard one behind Cassandra’s chair drew attention to the flame-red evening gown she wore, was: “Good gracious, Felicity, we thought you and Harry had decided to elope!” She laughed, a tinkling, amused laugh. “Did it take all day to learn all about, growing fruit? Or were there other things you discussed apart from productivity? Don’t tell me you had a burst tire on the way home, because I simply won’t believe it!”

Harry hadn’t joined them yet and the temporary master of the place was standing there in a white dinner
-
jacket that he had lately taken to wearing in the evenings, and looking a little inscrutable. Felicity had put on a white dress
—
a plain white nylon that floated gracefully from the waist
—
and scarlet satin sandals were the only touch of color about her. Her dark curls seemed to cling a little moistly to her pale brow, and her big brown eyes looked distinctly lack-lustre.

Paul Halloran moved forward until he stood at her side, and the inscrutable look vanished from his face.

“You are quite all right, aren’t you, Miss Harding?” he asked. “No
thin
g went wrong?”

“No, nothing went wrong.” She tried to smile at him as he put her into a chair and then called Michael to bring her a drink. He took the glass of sherry from his manservant and put it into her hand, and he noticed that her hand seemed to be shaking a little. He frowned.

“But everything is not quite as it should be? Perhaps you did have a burst tire?”

“No, the jeep went beautifully. I never knew what a useful vehicle a jeep is until today
...
”

“The jeep?” His frown drew his clearly marked brows so close together that they formed one straight black line above the bridge of his nose. “But what in the world possessed Harry to take you out for a whole day in the jeep? My car is in the garage and I gave him particular instructions that if either of you two ladies wanted to be shown the island he was to make use of it.” He looked round as Harry himself made his appearance. “Harry, can you explain this?”

Harry looked a little uncomfortable.

“Yes, certainly. Miss Wood suggested that you might be wanting the car yourself later on in the day
—
she said she was going to try and persuade you to show her something of the island, and that it would do you good to get away from the house for a bit
—
and that in any case Miss Harding wouldn’t mind the jeep! She seemed to
think
that Miss Harding would prefer it, because she would hate to think that you were without a means of transport if you needed it!”

“I see,” Paul Halloran said, so quietly that it was just as if a stone had been dropped into a silent pool, and in the ensuing short silence ripples might start to spread.

Cassandra cut in on a note of almost unnatural brightness: “As it happens, we might very easily have needed the car, for the steamer arrived a couple of days early
—
apparently almost unheard of
—
and brought news of Uncle James! He’s coming back to have a look at his island, and he’s bringing with him one of my old maiden aunts, who has be
e
n suffering from some sort of a chesty illness down in Devonshire where she lives. So you see, Felicity,” with a kind of two-edged sweetness, “if you really feel like going home, as you suggested, there is really nothing to stop you, for with Uncle James and Aunt Millicent both here I shall be very adequately chaperoned,” turning to her host with an arch smile.

He actually seemed to look a little astounded.

“Did Miss Harding suggest returning home?”

Cassandra rose with a graceful movement, and spread her hands and shoulders a little.

“Poor Felicity didn’t really wish this to be known,” she said, without looking at the girl she employed, “but she suffers from bad headaches
—
a sort of migraine
—
and unfortunately these latitudes don’t improve it!” She lifted her eyes and gazed hard at Felicity, as if challenging her to deny what she had just offered to the others as a piece of information. Felicity was fascinated by the queer
glint
in the hard green-blue eyes. She knew that just then she hadn’t the power to deny anything that Cassandra said, as the latter went on smoothly: “I know I ought not to have allowed you to go on a tour of the island today, my dear, but you were so keen to go with Harry, and I didn’t want to be a spoil-sport. But now that I look at you I feel quite conscience-stricken, for you’re obviously all in. Is the headache absolutely devastating?” moving sympathetically nearer.

Felicity felt as if she was suffering from a constriction in the throat. Her headache was bad
—
very bad!
—
but she could have got through the evening somehow without betraying the fact, and it was the first bad headache she had had for weeks, due entirely to exposure to too much sun. But Cassandra was t
r
ying to make her out a kind of invalid.

“I
—
” she choked, and found that words simply
would not come.

Cassandra shook her red head at her.

“Go back up to your room, my dear, and slip into bed. We’ll all excuse you, and Mr. Halloran will forgive you making the rest of us late for dinner!” Her eyes were still cold, but her mouth smiled. “I dare say Florence will bring you something.” She turned sweetly to her host. “You won’t mind issuing instructions to Florence to take something light upstairs to Felicity, will you, Mr. Halloran?”

“Of course not.” But he was looking curiously at Felicity, and there was also a good deal of concern in his eyes. “I had no idea this part of the world wasn’t suiting Miss Harding. She has looked very fit until tonight.”

“Camouflage, my dear man,” Cassandra assured him. “Felicity has always been very good at putting up a fa
c
ade,” gently ruffing Felicity’s curls, “but
I
know what she suffers! And I’m not so selfish that I’m going to insist on keeping her here if it doesn’t suit her!”

Still with the bewildered conviction that she was being hyp
n
otized by a snake
—
or something very like it
—
Felicity rose, a little awkwardly, and apologized to her host. Somehow the words formed in her brain and left her lips.

“You will forgive, won’t you? I’m so sorry to be a nuisance
...”

“Of course.” His hand rested lightly on her slim, bare arm, and his voice was gentle
—
the gentlest voice, she thought, she had ever heard in her life. “And you’re not a nuisance! You’re nothing of the kind
...
So please don’t apologize!”

She looked into his eyes and the vivid blue depths, so completely
unlik
e the blue of her employer’s eyes, seemed to reach out and wash over her so that she awoke from her strange torpor, and all in a moment words bubbled in her throat, and she very nearly gave them utterance. She would have spoken, she would have said, regardless of the other two standing by: ‘But I don’t suffer from headaches, and it’s all an invention on the part of Cassandra because she wants to get rid of me,’ but Cassandra pushed her gently fr
o
m behind, and said: “Come on, my dear! I’ll come up with you and hand you over to Florence
...
And if you’d prefer it I’ll help you into bed myself! You really are all in, and I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if you haven’t got a bit of a temperature. But if you have it’ll probably be down by morning
—
don’t worry!”

And she urged Felicity determinedly towards the door.

Paul Halloran didn’t say anything further. He didn’t offer to produce a thermometer, or say that if she wasn’t any better in the morning they would have to get a doctor. He just stood there, his blue eyes watching them both depart, and Harry Whitelaw looking a little bewildered, stood watching too.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THAT night, for the first time, Felicity heard
the
piano
being played in the silence of the house. The notes were being struck very softly, and very skilfully, and she had no doubts at all to whose fingers they were that were straying a little restlessly over the keys.

The house had settled down to silence some time ago. At an early hour Felicity had heard doors closing, and then the footsteps of Cassandra moving in her room. Cassandra hadn’t come anywhere nearer to her than the bathroom that separated their two rooms, but Felicity had had a very clear picture of her as she went through the usual routine tasks, such as brushing her teeth, creaming her face, etc. Cassandra never missed creaming her face, and she gave her hair a vigorous brushing however tired she was. It was certainly quite extraordinarily beautiful hair and she was very proud of it. She refused to have it cut whatever the trends of fashion, and when it wasn’t floating about her shapely shoulders it was worn coiled about her head.

As Felicity lay there in the darkness of her room
—
it was very dark tonight, because there was no moon
—
listening to Cassandra’s movements, she could visualize her employer in her brilliant dressing gown with the sheen like that on a peacock’s feathers. Cassandra had many filmy
negligees,
but she was particularly fond of her Chinese housecoat. It made her look exotic, and she knew it

Felicity couldn't sleep, although she had obediently swallowed a couple of aspirins when she went to bed. Her head was better, and she felt as if she had been lying there for hours, largely because sleep simply refused to come anywhere near her eyes.

Before the party of three downstairs dispersed she had been lying listening to the few identifiable noises that disturbed the otherwise absolute hush of the night: the
rustling
of palm leaves outside her open window; the forlorn crying of some night-bird as it flew over the island; the ceaseless murmur of the surf. She had grown used to the endless voice of the surf
—
there was a reef that went straight out to sea a little to the left of the beach below the house, and the surf piled up against it
—
and normally she found it soothing. But tonight nothing seemed capable Sf lulling her into a state when her mental alertness grew a little less alert, and she could close her eyes and forget the cold determination in Cassandra’s face when she hurried her up to bed.

Cassandra hadn’t remained with her. She had handed her over to Florence, and then returned downstairs and rejoined the others.

And now she was in her room, gazing at her own reflection in the mirror, while the house sank into a sort of oasis of quiet.

Or it was doing so until the piano playing started.

Felicity immediately grew ten times more wakeful, and at the same moment her senses stirred with pleasure as the quiet melodies stole upwards from the ground floor. Instead of concentrating on Cassandra’s movements she concentrated on the flowing movements of the slender hands she had often admired in secret. They were the right hands to lead an orchestra, the right hands to wield a baton. Felicity could see them
—
or one of them
—
holding the baton aloft, while the other made weaving movements
that were just as compelling.

Even nowadays there was something quiet and compelling about Paul Halloran’s slight, graceful figure, and
if
one was near enough to look into his eyes then there was magnetism as well. Felicity had come up against that magnetism earlier that evening, when she had received the distinct impression that he was endeavoring to overcome the hypnotic effect of Cassandra’s cold strangely-colored gaze, and provide her with support if she needed it.

If she needed it
...
She didn’t know what it
w
as, or why it was, but from the very beginning his eyes had done something to her. She had been so relieved when she had learned that they were not sightless that she had actually been surprised herself about the extent of her relief. In the days that had followed her arrival on the island she had had the even queerer feeling that, in spite of the fact that she had spent more time alone with Harry Whitelaw than she had with her host, they were very close to one another. Extraordinarily close!

It was just as if they shared something
...
Was it a bond of sympathy? But they had discovered nothing absolutely nothing, and neither appeared to be very anxious to learn much more about the other. Yet even very much so far that they could be sympathetic about
t
heir conversations were not revealing
—
in fact, they were merely polite and pleasant! They gave away
—
Cassandra sensed that there was something that
—
well, was it something that drew them one to the other? It was something that would have surprised them if they had had any idea what it was, although Felicity would not have denied that she knew the very instant that Paul Halloran entered a room where she was, even if she didn’t actually see him come in. Sometimes, too, his slight, groping movements that were largely the result of many weeks of having to feel his way about, made her feel as if a pain had entered her side. She wanted to rush to him and help him, although he no longer needed help, and sometimes when she saw him
looking at her a little quizzically she realized that her acute feeling of anxiety for him had been given away
by her eyes.

But
even if he regarded her quizzically, it was with gentleness too, just as his touch on her arm had been gentle tonight
...
She caught her breath suddenly as
she seemed
to feel that
touch
again,
and
as she lay there in the darkness she wished most ardently that she really
could do
so.

She grew hot, as if a blush started spreading all over her body, and something inside her started to quiver like a bird that was trying out its wings against the bars of a cage with which it was not familiar. The darkness was made liquid and magical with the piano-playing and she raised herself on her pillows to listen, in order not to miss a note.

If the music went on all night she would listen
—
she would go on listening
...
And then she bit her lip so hard that a tiny drop of blood spurted, for Cassandra had made quite clear to her what her intentions were. She was going to send her home!
...
She was go
ing
to use the pretext that the place didn’t suit Felicity, and that as her aunt and uncle were arriving there was no need for her to stay!

In the face of such an edict what was there Felicity could do? For even if she denied that the climate was upsetting her, Cassandra still had the right to dispense with her services and send her away!

And
—
Felicity grew cold as the realization sank home, and she knew that that was what Cassandra intended to do
—
there was nothing anyone else could do to prevent her being sent away from Menzies Island on the next steamer.

The next steamer
...
But she had known all along that they would have to go soon
—
she had anticipated, and even urged, their
both going
—
and now for some reason she was almost distraught by the thought of having to leave. She sat up in bed and told herself not to be ridiculous, and that if that was the effect Menzies Island had already had on her the sooner she left it the better. She was still trying to make herself believe this when the piano
-
playing stopped and Cassandra entered her room.

It was just as if Cassandra had been waiting for the moment when complete silence came down on the house to turn the knob of Felicity’s door, and walk in. She didn’t knock. She didn’t even say she was sorry when she entered for disturbing the other girl at this hour
—
perhaps because she had a pretty shrewd idea that Felicity had not yet been asleep.

She walked to
the
side of the bed and switched on the bedside light, and when she saw that Felicity was sitting up in bed her lips curled.

“I fe
l
t fairly certain you were not asleep,” she said, as she draped herself gracefully on the side of the bed. “For one
thin
g, accomplished musician though he may be, our host’s playing is a little inconsiderate at this hour, and it would be difficult to get to sleep while he kept it up.” She produced a cigarette-case and matching lighter from the pocket of her housecoat. “Mind if
I
smoke?” she enquired curtly.

“No, of course not.” But Felicity felt forced to defend her host. “Piano playing is usually soothing,” she remarked.

Cassandra eyed her over the flame of the lighter, and her strange eyes gleamed.

“It depends rather on who’s playing the piano, don’t you
think
?” she observed. “And just how interested you are in everything else they do
—
in fact, everything about them!”

Felicity said nothing. She was wearing a pale pink nylon nightdress that she had made herself. The tiny tucks and the
film
of lace in some way emphasized the pastel-tinted delicacy of her whole personality. She had the pleasing perfection of an English hedge-rose against the satin head board of her bed, and although her dark curls were tumbled they were most attractive in their disarray. Cassandra suggested exquisite things, like alabaster and jade, but Felicity had warmth and humanity, and a loveliness there was no disputing.

Cassandra’s eyes narrowed.

“I meant it, you know,” she said, rather abruptly. “My announcement that could go home. I wasn’t just saying something idly, and I didn’t invent your migraine for nothing. I have made up my mind that you must go home, and if it can be before the next steamer arrives the better. Uncle James and Aunt Millicent will probably arrive in some sort of a chartered craft
—
Uncle James knowing all about these waters, and probably in touch with all sorts of people who wouldn’t keep him waiting over there in Kingston. And whatever means they make use of to get here you can take advantage of to get back to the mainland. Is that clear?”

“It is clear,” Felicity said, after a moment when a genuine spurt of anger took possession of her and made her shake, “that for some reason which I don’t in the least understand you are anxious to get rid of me. But don’t you think our long association merits that I should be
told
why you want to get rid of me, and why you should turn me into an invalid to suit some whim of your own?”

“Oh, don’t be silly!” Cassandra sounded impatient “Of course I shall miss you, and you're a great help to me in many ways
...
And when I get back to England of course there’ll always be a job for you again. In fact, I’ll pay y
our wages until I do rejoin you
or you rejoin me. But in the meantime
—
just for the present, I don’t want you around.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, darling, don’t be simple!” Cassandra tried to appear as if she really thought her very simple.
“I’ve
found something here that I want, and it’s pure luck that Uncle James is arriving to give me the necessary time in which to get it! For I won’t fail, I promise you! But you
—
you could make it just a little bit more difficult for me to get it, and I don’t intend that there shall be any difficulty whatsoever! I mean to have a clear field, and that’s why I want you out of the way!” Felicity stared at her in the soft pink rays of her bedside lamp.

“Are you suggesting?” she began, when Cassandra interrupted her even more impatiently.

“I’m not suggesting anything, but I refuse to compete with a girl who hasn’t a quarter of my looks for a man we’ve both fallen in love with. Yes!
...
Whether you realize it or not, you
are
in love—or well on the road to it—with Paul Halloran, and although I happen to know that you haven’t a chance I refuse to have you around when I want him to myself! I
mean
to have him to myself, and if you think Uncle James and Aunt Millicent will get in the way, then I can assure you that it won’t matter in the slightest, because it will be a different sort of getting in the way! But you—well, my dear old school friend Felicity, you’re going!”

“Of course I’ll go if that’s the way you fee
l.
”

“You won’t have any option.”

Cassandra stood up.

“You’d better get your things packed tomorrow, and be ready. I’ve already explained
why
you’re going, and nobody will think it at all strange
—
not even Paul Halloran! When I’m married I’ll let you know, and we can get
together again. But until then—
”