Island in the Dawn

by Averil Ives

  She went back to her dressing table and looked at herself anxiously in the minor. She was wearing the only dress in her wardrobe that was really expensive—an evening gown that she had purchased for some special occasion, and which became her very well indeed. In fact, she could hardly have looked more utterly charming than she did tonight, with the pale mauve of the evening-gown doing something to her lightly tanned skin that seemed to give it a kind of glow. It was there on her cheeks, and on her lips, and her eyes had the tawny darkness of pansies in a cottage garden border. The sort of border to be found at home in England, not here on the flaming Caribbean.

  The dress was softly draped, and one shoulder was completely bare. It had the ripe smoothness of a pomegranate. The other had a brooch pinned to it, and in her ears there were matching ear-rings. She didn’t normally wear much jewellery, but these pieces were good, and had been bestowed on her by a wealthy godmother when she came of age. They were composed of small rubies surrounded by delicately glistening pearls. The rubies matched her lips, and the pearls gave her the feeling that for once she was really elegant.

  She heard the grandfather-clock begin to chime, and she crept to the door. Outside on the staircase she became panic-stricken lest Cassandra should appear and stop her, and in her highly agitated state she couldn’t think what explanation she would offer to her. It wasn’t that she was afraid of Cassandra, but she had become used to obeying her lightest behest.

  But Cassandra didn’t appear, and she went on down the stair. Outside the study door she felt her heart begin to beat wildly, but before it could affect her breathing and drive the color from her cheeks the door opened, and Paul Halloran stood there.

  He was wearing a white dinner jacket, and he looked black and white and elegant. Only his skin was the color of pale bronze, and his eyes, of course, were deeply, disturbingly blue.

  Felicity, when she looked into them, felt the color begin to recede from her cheeks.

  “You’re very punctual,” he said. He stood aside for her to enter the room, and she saw that it was small but luxurious. The windows stood wide to a side veranda, and a fan stirred up a pleasant current of air. The only light streamed from a reading lamp beside a deep, comfortable chair. Paul made her sit down, and then asked what she would like to drink.

  “Oh...” Her voice failed her, and he smiled a little.

  “I think you like sherry, don’t you?”

  He went to a tray of drinks that stood on a small, carved, ebony table, and Felicity watched him as he poured sherry into a glass. His hand was so shapely, and so firm. The whiteness of his cuff above his brown wrist fascinated her. She was so afraid that her feeling would be given away by her eyes that she wrenched them away as he approached her again and concentrated feverishly on a slender bronze statuette that stood on his writing table and served the useful purpose of a paper-weight.

  “How—how charming!” she commented. “It’s Italian, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I picked it up in Florence, when I was staying there once. I’d had rather a busy season in Milan, and Florence is a delightful place to relax in when you’ve been under a certain amount of strain. I don’t know whether you know it?—The little shops on the Ponte Vecchio, so like London Bridge in olden times? You can come upon all sorts of things if you search long enough...”

  “No, I—I don’t know it,” she had to admit. She added shyly, feeling very small and insignificant because she had travelled so little: “I don’t know very much about the world, I’m afraid! This is the first time I’ve been out of England!”

  “Really?” He stopped, and he smiled at her—just a little whimsically, she thought. “Well, in that case, you’ve a good deal to see yet, haven’t you?” He reached for the statuette and put it into her hand. “Do you admire Italian craftsmanship? At least you seem able to recognize it!”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I’ve a weakness for antiques, and I haunt antique shops when I’m at home in London,” Felicity confessed.

  The smile vanished from his face, and he stood looking down at her.

  “Really?” he said.

  “Yes, really.” She smiled in the way that brought the dimples into play at the corners of her mouth, but she kept her eyes on the paper-weight. “You—I suppose you regard Italy as your home, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Well, no, as a matter of fact, I don’t.” He started to pace up and down the room, and beneath her lowered lids she watched his graceful, almost cat-like strides. She could imagine him climbing the steps to the rostrum in a great concert hall—the moment when he lifted his hand, and an absolute hush descended. “My father was Irish, as Miss Wood was at pains to remind me on the morning when you arrived here!” She couldn’t tell whether it was humor that chased itself across his finely cut mouth, or whether it was something else that tightened and curved the lips a little. “And I was brought up in Ireland. I have a house there to which I may, or may not, return one day—I don’t know!” He shot her a quick, rather odd look. “It’s quite a charming house, overlooking a bay that is sometimes as blue as the seas here. But, of course, the weather isn’t the sort of weather we get here.”

  “And you like it here best?”

  “I like the sunshine, and the warmth. Possibly I’m not really very Irish, and my Italian blood craves sunshine.” He paused, and almost nervously he lighted a cigarette. “And that brings me to the reason why I asked you in here tonight! ... Why I said I wanted to talk to you!”

  He moved to the window, where the curtains were swaying gently in the softest current of air, and he suggested without looking at her: “Perhaps you’d like to come out here, Miss Harding? It is, as almost always, a perfect night, and I feel that what I want to say to you can be better said in the open! It’s nothing alarming,” turning to smile at her a little as she followed him into the darkness of the broad side veranda, “but it may take you a little by surprise, and ... Well, anyway, it’s cooler out here!” He drew forward a chair for her. “Please sit down, and if you feel you’re not warm enough—”

  “I’m quite warm, thank you,” she assured him. Her brown eyes gazed up at him a little uncertainly. There was no doubt about it, he was slightly agitated, and she couldn’t think why—except that it was unusual that the two should find themselves so completely alone at this hour. “As you said, the nights are always perfect here.”

  “Yes.” He threw away his cigarette, and then started to light another. “And it is quite true that the climate doesn’t upset you?”

  “Quite true.”

  “Then why do you suppose Miss Wood wanted to make us believe that it was otherwise?”

  Felicity felt that she had to be careful here. One point had to be stuck to, but she had known Cassandra for years, and she couldn’t come out with the bare truth.

  “It is possible,” she said at last, a little diffidently, “that I am no longer very important to her, and she thought it would spare my feelings if she invented a reason for my return home. And, after all, as an employer she has a perfect right to terminate employment when she feels like it.”

  “Although you appear to have known one another for quite a while?”

  “We were at school together, yes.”

  “Then you must have always rather liked one another?”

  “Yes.”

  He was looking at her keenly through the velvet gloom that lay between them.

  “Do you want to return home?”

  “I—”

  ‘Have you a job to return to?”

  “I expect I shall soon find one.”

  “I think you told me that you have no parents. With whom will you stay while you are looking for something to do?”

  Felicity’s eyes widened still more as he shot the questions at her. She simply couldn’t understand why he was doing so, and why he looked as if he was determined to sift to the bottom of her personal problem as he stood there only a few paces away, keeping his blue eyes fixed on her.

  “I shall probably take
a room somewhere.” Her fingers closed nervously about the ruby and pearl brooch attached to the draperies over her shoulder, and she tried to convince him: “I’m not in the least concerned about being sent home, Mr. Halloran. That is to say, I don’t find it upsetting that I’ve become a little redundant. And I think Miss Wood is of the opinion that it’s a bit of an infliction having us both thrust on you, and when her aunt and uncle arrive—”

  “They will not make the slightest difference, because after the first night or so they will not be staying here.” He moved towards her, until the yard or so between them had narrowed to barely a foot. “However, we won’t go into that now. That is something Miss Wood will learn about when her aunt and uncle arrive. In the meantime I want to ask you, Miss Harding—”

  “Yes?” she said, feeling as if a pulse actually leapt in her throat

  “Or may I say Felicity? I know that Miss Wood—Cassandra!—calls you Felicity!”

  “I don’t mind what you call me.” She tried to sound coolly amused. “Cassandra is nearly always known as Cassandra.”

  “But you are not the same type as Cassandra, are you? It is easy to be on Christian name terms with some people, but not so easy with others.”

  “And you class me amongst the ‘others’?”

  “I don’t class you with anyone!”

  She stood up because that nervous beating in her throat was making her feel a trifle breathless, and anyway she felt better when she was standing facing him. “What is it you want to ask me, Mr. Halloran?” Was he going to offer her a job, she wondered? Did he perhaps want a secretary?—Someone to type his letters?

  “I want to ask you to stay here and many me, Felicity,” was the answer that took her breath right away. “And the name is Paul,” he added quietly. Felicity stood holding on to the arm of her chair. It was a low rattan chair, and she had to bend backwards to grasp at the arm, and it gave her the attitude of shrinking away from him a little.

  “M-marry you?” she gasped.

  His face all at once was a picture of concern.

  “Have I startled you very badly?” he asked. As she straightened he put forth his hands and took both of hers, holding them so vitally and so strongly that little thrills coursed their way up and down her arms. “I didn’t want to startle you! In fact—and it may sound impertinent!—I had the queer feeling that I wouldn’t! That you wouldn’t be utterly unprepared!”

  She could say nothing, only look up at him with enormous dark eyes, and slightly parted lips.

  “I want to marry you so badly, Felicity!”

  “Why?” she managed, in a whisper.

  “I don’t quite know!” He was frowning a little as he gazed down at her. “From the moment we met I’ve felt that we were in tune—as some people are in tune! You’re so human, and comradely, and sweet, and—and, of course, you’re very lovely!”

  He said that as his eyes dwelt upon the slightly quivering parted lips—scarlet in the dim starlight—and then shifted to the creamy throat that disappeared into the mauve dress.

  “Cassandra is beautiful!” she heard herself remarking, for no reason that she could think of.

  He made an impatient movement, and dropped her hands.

  “I have seen so many women as beautiful as Cassandra—and many who were far more beautiful!—but I have never wanted to marry one of them! The Cassandras of this world do not interest me, and I would certainly not wish to share my life with them. But perhaps I should make something quite clear to you before we go any further.” He looked at her half apprehensively, and then decided to plunge. “There was one woman in my life, and to me she had a beauty that was quite unrepeatable! ... I planned to marry her, but the Fates willed otherwise, and she died!” His voice was so level and sombre that it actually chilled her. “I was in love with her, and I don’t think one ever falls in love in the same way twice ... That sort of thing is impossible! One gets over it and wounds heal ... But in the longest lifetime there are only a limited number of emotions that one can experience, and if you experience them all at the same time...”

  “Then there is nothing left for anyone else?” she heard herself say in the same cracked whisper as before, “I didn’t say that!” He caught her hands again, and he looked down at her intently. “You are so different to anyone I have ever known before ... If you’d been here when I first came to the island, when I was blind and thought I was going to remain blind for the rest of my life, I’m sure I could have borne it more easily! Your voice is so warm and full of sympathy ... If a man couldn’t see it would be something to have it always in his ears! A kind of recompense! And now that I can see I know that—that I couldn’t bear you to just say good-bye and go back to England. This island, this house, would never be the same again now that you’ve actually lived here for nearly three weeks.”

  “There are other places in the world,” she reminded him. “You don’t have to stay here, do you?”

  “Yes, I do.” His face twisted in a tormented fashion. “You don’t know what the island has done for me. And Ferguson’s house! ... I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to keep it. Buy it from him.”

  “Will he let you?”

  “Yes. The option to purchase was in the agreement when I took it over, and now I’m going to take up the option! I feel that it would be impossible to go back and attempt to take up my old life, and here on this island there is a sort of peace. You must have felt it when you arrived? ... Everyone does.”

  “Yes,” she admitted, “I felt it.”

  “Then you will stay here and marry me, and we will share the peace between us?”

  She tried to free her hands from his clasp, but he refused to let them go. She asked at last: “Can you tell me of any reason, apart from a desire to share the peace of this island with you, why I should marry you?—Why I should want to marry you?”

  His brilliant blue eyes looked down searchingly into her face.

  “I had thought—I had hoped!—you liked me a little.”

  A little? As she looked up and met that strange blue gaze that was like a blue searchlight finding its way into her heart, wounding it so that she actually felt as if a pain tore through it, she wanted to cry out that she loved him and that such a thing as liking him had never even happened to her. It had been love as soon as she looked at him—the sort of thing she had never believed in, and which she would never have believed would happen to herself! Love from the moment he removed his dark glasses and looked straight into her eyes...

  And perhaps even before that, from the moment she became aware of him at all, standing with his dog at his side, watching her ... Although she hadn’t known then that he had the power to watch anyone or anything!

  “Felicity,” he said, gently, gathering her hands into a closer clasp, and looking down at them as if the pale, slim fingers fascinated him because they were so small and delicate. By contrast with his strong dark ones they were like pale flowers. “Felicity, I can’t say I love you, but I want you—I want you so much to be my wife! I don't ask you to tell me that you love me, but please believe that there is something between us, and in time it will grow, strengthen...”

  She snatched away her hands and walked to the far end of the veranda, and he followed her. Although she kept her face rigidly averted he slid his arms about her and drew her so that instinctively her dark head rested against him, and she felt the lean, virile strength of his body.

  “Felicity,” he promised, “I won’t ask anything of you—not until you’re ready to give it!—if only you’ll say ‘Yes’! That you will marry me! Say it now—-don't ask for time to think it over! And I further promise you that we will be happy together!”

  “How do you know?”

  She put back her head and looked up at him, and in the strong, white light of the stars, which seemed to have grown very much stronger since they left the lights of his private sitting room behind them, his face looked strong, dark, and convincing. But it also looked—unless it was purely her imagina
tion, or a shadow cast by a wavering palm frond created the impression—a little sad.

  She thought: Oh, if only he could say he loved me!

  “How do you know?” she repeated.

  “I do know, that is all. And I know that you would not let me hold you like this even for a moment if you did not like me a little!”

  “Yes, I like you a little,” she whispered. “I like you—very much!”

  He smiled above her head a little whimsically, but she did not see the smile.

  “Then we will get this matter settled before we have to rejoin the others. You will marry me and live here with me on Menzies Island, and I will do my utmost to make you happy, and there will be no need for you to go back to England and look for jobs with strange people who will never appreciate you as much as you should be appreciated. You will remain here where I feel you have already found a form of happiness, and in time that happiness will increase. I will take care of you—I don’t feel that you have had enough care taken of you in your lifetime—and you will be secure. Doesn’t security mean something to you? Or are you one of these modern young women who desire freedom before everything else?”

  “No.”

  “Then the answer is ‘Yes’?”

  “You are bribing me,” she whispered.

  “I am not bribing you, because you are not the type to be bribed. But I want to make you part of my life—part of my future life! Say ‘Yes,’ Felicity!” he commanded, with a sudden odd impatience.

  And she heard herself weakly saying the word he wanted to hear just as the great gong in the hall summoned them to join the others at dinner.