by Averil Ives
She could see the white shape of the house, beautifully dignified in the moonlight—transmuted by it into something almost too exquisite to be a house. There was the long veranda, glowing a little where the rays of light from the rooms behind it reached it, and the upstairs bedrooms with their individual balconies and shutters fastened back against the white walls. A magnificently straight palm tree reared itself against her own bedroom window, and one or two of the green palm fronds bent forward to tap against the panes of glass. She heard them rustling like the endless movement of taffeta underskirts even on a night when there was so little air that the heavy flower perfume that drenched the island was like a torrid weight, just as she heard the murmur of the surf even when the seas beyond the barrier reef were like a mirror reflecting the stars.
There was a light in her room, and she knew that Florence was in there putting away her things. Florence had expressed the utmost delight when the news had been broken to her that Felicity was to become her mistress, and since hearing the news she couldn’t do enough for the future Mrs. Halloran. Unfortunately, from her point of view, Felicity was naturally tidy and had always had to look after herself and be responsible for her own things, so that there wasn’t very much for eager black fingers to seize upon and hang up in capacious wardrobes, or fold away tenderly in lavender-scented drawers.
“Lordy, but you should see the mess that Miss Wood leaves for me to clear up!” Florence had exclaimed more than once, when she had spent a full half-hour tidying the bathroom after Cassandra had taken a shower. “Face powder all over her dressing table, and stockings in every corner! And another pile of stockings left out for me to mend!”
“You shouldn’t mend Miss Wood’s stockings, Florence,” Felicity had protested more than once. “That’s my job.”
But Florence would take no heed.
“You won’t let me mend your stockings, so I’ll have to mend Miss Wood’s,” she said, with a shrug of her plump shoulders inside one of her immaculate cotton dresses. “Missy mends both lots, she’d be at it all the time!”
But after tomorrow there would be no Miss Wood’s stockings to mend, and the bathroom would require less attention. Felicity felt her fingers grow a little cold as she wondered whether it would be very quiet when everyone had gone. She tried to imagine the room next to her silent; no restless movements occasioned by Cassandra swinging back the shutters, or whisking open the door of a wardrobe; no little nervous cough that was partly due to over-smoking on the part of Cassandra. Her room would be empty, the shutters fastened to keep it cool, the satin bed spread on the low French bed gleaming palely in the gloom.
And Miss Menzies, and Uncle James Ferguson Menzies, and Mervyn Manners, would have gone, too, and their rooms would be empty; and when the big brass gong in the hall sent out its summons to dinner there would be only herself and Paul to obey it! Paul, who by that time would be her husband!...
She would be in her own room, dressing, and the summons would boom along the corridors, and up the flowing stairs, and along still more corridors ... Until it reached her in her room!
Or would that still be her room...
Her fingers grew colder than ever, and she dug them into the fallen tree trunk. Cassandra was right; hers would be the strangest wedding ever. There seemed to have been absolutely no plans made, save that the retired missionary was coming over in the morning to perform the ceremony, and then presumably he would go away again! He might be given something to drink, just as the others would be given something to drink, and there might be healths drunk ... Miss Menzies would be terribly upset if there were no healths drunk! She would be very sad if those few bottles of champagne were not brought up from the cellar!
But so far as Felicity knew, the staff had received no instructions to alter rooms ... And as for Cassandra’s absurd talk about the bridal chamber—well, that of course, was nothing more than silly chatter!
Then she remembered the photograph, and bit her lip so hard that it pained her sharply for a second or so. She was dabbing at her lower lip with her wisp of lace handkerchief that she had been crushing into a tight, hard, moist ball in her other hand, when she heard the footsteps on the path, and started.
A man’s voice said reproachfully: “You shouldn’t be sitting here alone in the dark on the eve of your wedding. It isn’t as if there’s any sort of stag-party going on for the bridegroom and his friends, and it isn’t as if the bridegroom is even playing bridge. I don’t know where he is—he’s vanished. And you’re the forlorn maiden all alone in a wood!”
“I’m not forlorn.” Felicity tried to speak lightly, but she had been startled for a moment when she heard those footsteps. It was very isolated here in the plantation, and the sense of loneliness and unprotectedness was something that had seemed to press on her. “I’m just here to get cool.”
“Really?” He glanced at her sideways in the gloom, and she thought that he smiled oddly. “Mind if I share this tree trunk with you?”
“Of course not.”
Mervyn Manners seated himself.
“I wonder what brought this chap down like this?” patting the smooth bark, and looking upwards into the dim tops of the trees. “One of those sudden hurricanes that blow up here, I suppose! I believe they’re absolute demons when they get started, and even magnificent giants like this are not proof against being wrenched out of the earth! Can’t say I should care to experience one of them myself!”
Felicity’s eyes grew a little wider, and she looked surprised.
“I didn’t know they had hurricanes here, but I suppose I should have known, considering the latitude we’re in. But there isn’t very much evidence apart from this tree of any very recent disaster, is there?”
“None that I’ve come upon so far.” He offered her his cigarette-case, and when she refused lighted himself a cigarette. “But don’t let my remark cause you any alarm—I suppose it was a little tactless considering you’re going to live here—and don’t let it put you off the thought of doing so.”
Once again he glanced at her sideways, and although she couldn’t see his face she knew that for once his audacious blue eyes were not twinkling with the amusement that normally dwelt in them.
“How could it put me off,” she asked, “when I am—when I am going to live here?”
He shrugged his shoulders slightly. As he was wearing a white sharkskin dinner jacket it was easy to see the movement.
“It’s not too late to change your mind, you know!” Felicity sat very still and silent beside him. She felt as if she had been watching a conjurer producing rabbits out of a hat—and the final rabbit hadn’t surprised her in the least.
“Why do you say that?” she managed, really curiously, at last.
“Because I thought you ought to be reminded of it!”
“Cassandra has been—talking to you?”
“Cassandra?” He shrugged again. “Would I listen to Cassandra, whatever she said? I’ve come all this way to her uncle’s island because, like you, I’m determined to do something I’ll almost certainly regret, but I seldom pay very much attention to Cassandra’s views on people and things. She feels that you’ve let her down badly—in fact, she’s really disappointed in you—and you’ve snaffled her man from under her nose, and for that alone I ought to feel grateful to you. But I don’t feel grateful, because that chap Halloran would see through a dozen Cassandras, and whatever wiles she used on him she would never have got him in the end. I think she knows that herself now, but that doesn’t make her feel any kinder towards you. I simply can’t understand why you’re rushing into marriage, and I wish you wouldn’t do it, Felicity!”
“Why not?”
“Because ... Oh, I don’t know!...”
“You think Paul can see through a dozen of me, too?”
“I think you’re both a little inscrutable, although I would once have said you were the most transparently honest and unpretentious young woman I know. I would have said that when you married it would be
for love, and a home, and children, and all that sort of thing, and that the chap who got you would be jolly lucky. But Halloran isn’t behaving like a man who is aware of his good fortune—please forgive me for saying this, won’t you?—and I’ve never seen you look less as I imagined you would look when you got everything satisfactorily tied up, and your future husband nicely ear-marked and in line for the altar. And the very fact that there isn’t going to be any altar is another thing! ... This hole and corner marriage isn’t good enough for you, Felicity!”
“Thank you, Mervyn,” she answered gratefully. “But it’s all I want.”
“Rubbish!” he exclaimed. The whole thing is being indecently rushed—not that I hold that against Halloran if he’s in love with you—but if he’s in love with you why doesn’t he make a few concessions where you’re concerned, and take you away from this island for a bit? A short honeymoon—a visit to Kingston to get married! There are hotels you could stay in. He’s got plenty of money ... There’s nothing to prevent the two of you going off for a long honeymoon. After all, he’s been stuck here in this island for two years...”
“He’s only just recovered his sight,” she pointed out.
“True, but having recovered it he’s got nothing to gloom about, and any normal man would be happy to get away for a bit with a new wife! You’re pretty, Felicity—so pretty that if I wasn’t in love with Cassandra I’d fall in love with you myself—and you deserve to be shown off, bought pretty things—expensive things. You’ve never had much fun, have you?”
“You mean I’ve never been able to buy expensive things for myself?”
“Yes—and Cassandra tells me you’re being married in one of her old dresses!”
“She shouldn’t have told you that!”
“All the same, she did. And, Felicity...”
“Yes?”
“There’s something—something...”
The gloom of the trees wrapped them about, the pale fingers of moonlight touched their hair, and one of them—a very cold finger of moonlight—touched Felicity’s heart.
“It’s about—the photograph, isn’t it?” she asked, quite gently. “You feel that I ought to know about it?”
“But you already do know about it! Don’t tell me Cassandra—?”
“She told me; but perhaps she, too, thought I ought to know! I don’t think she was merely trying to hurt me,” not altogether truthfully, for she knew that Cassandra had been glad to hurt her. “And, after all, a photograph is—only a photograph, isn’t it?”
Mervyn shook his head as if he was genuinely puzzled.
“I saw it—I saw it myself! But it wasn’t there this morning when he called me, into his room to show me a book we had been discussing a few nights ago. But the very fact that he called me into his room again did strike me as odd—I think he meant me to see that the photograph was no longer there!”
Felicity sighed suddenly, but it was so soft a sigh that he hardly heard it
“I wouldn’t worry, Mervyn,” she said. “Things are not always what they seem, you know—and, anyway, I’m being married tomorrow. You, presumably, will marry Cassandra as soon as you can persuade her to name a day?”
He nodded—and then he, too, sighed.
“What fools we are—asking for trouble by the bucketful! But at least I know what to expect—I’m wondering whether you do. And if you don’t Felicity—then be sensible, while you still have the chance, and change your mind.”
“You’re sweet, Mervyn,” she said, “but I won’t change my mind!”
He laid his hand over hers and gave it a squeeze, “Not a hope?”
“Not a—hope!”
And then a shadow fell across the tree trunk, and she discovered that Paul was standing looking down at them. His eyes were cold as the slits in a mask.
“This is not a sensible place in which to sit at this hour of the night,” he said. “Felicity, if you don’t want to risk getting a chill, come inside!”
But he completely ignored Mervyn.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TWENTY-FOUR hours later they had all gone and the house, as Felicity had known it would be, was as silent as a pool hidden away in the depths of a shadowy wood.
She herself had just lived through an evening that had shaken her as nothing in her life had ever shaken her before. Now she stood fumbling with the clasp of her necklace and trying to remove it in front of her dressing table mirror. Her bed was turned down—the familiar bed she had occupied for three weeks—and Florence had put out a nightdress that was the most cobwebby confection she could find amongst Felicity’s things. It had actually been a present from Cassandra when Cassandra had been feeling particularly generous, and looked like the pale lining of a shell as it lay on the white sheet.
Beneath Felicity’s feet her soft grey carpet felt like a bed of moss. It was the sort of carpet that helped to deaden all sound in this white house filled with costly treasures. Her curtains of rose-colored moiré silk swayed gently in the night air, and all around her a circle of rosy light spread until it reached the shadows that lay just inside the white-painted door. The door itself was locked, and it was her own fingers that had turned the key—whether as a sort of gesture or not she didn’t know.
If anyone tried it they would find it didn’t yield. But she was quite certain no one would try it.
Downstairs her husband of a few hours was smoking a cigarette on the veranda. He hadn’t said whether it would be a last cigarette, but she strongly suspected he would smoke a good many more before he went to bed himself. He had looked grim when he recommended her to call it a day, being aware of her, apparently, out of the corner of his eye, although he had been staring into the darkness while he spoke.
“You must feel that it’s been a little exhausting—to say the least!—and I expect you’d like to go to bed! There’s no reason why you should get up early tomorrow, either. You could have what your Miss Wood would call a ‘comfortable lie in’,” with a cold curl to his lips, “and Florence will bring you breakfast, and even lunch, on a tray, if you’d like her to do so!”
“I don’t normally breakfast in bed,” Felicity protested, as if the words were wrung out of her. “And I certainly wouldn’t want lunch in my room, unless I was ill.”
“I was thinking you might like a little quiet for a change.”
“It hasn’t been as noisy as all that!” She stared at her hands, at the strange, unfamiliar ring that glittered in the light that streamed from the room behind them. Even now she didn’t know how, or by what means, he had obtained that ring, but it was obviously new, and miraculously it fitted her. It was of pale, smooth gold, and it felt like a badge on her finger. “And everyone was most kind. Miss Menzies is—is very kind! I shall miss her!”
“And Mr. Manners?”
“Mr. Manners is a fellow countryman I like. I’m hoping Cassandra will like him enough to marry him one day.”
“You have just become a married woman yourself, and I should get used to the idea of that before marrying anyone else off,” Paul remarked, so curtly, and as if he was speaking through slightly clenched teeth, that she stared at him with a kind of pain in her eyes as he strode to the veranda rail.
That bad been his attitude ever since the night before, when he had come upon her and Mervyn Manners in the plantation. Whether he had seen Manners laying his hand over hers she couldn’t tell, but even if he had there had been absolutely nothing in it, and she was inclined to believe that ids attitude had nothing to do with Mervyn at all. Possibly all at once the realization that he was doing something extremely unwise had poured over him just as it had poured over her, and he was unable to fight against that sudden cold shock of awareness. No doubt he felt appalled, concerned because of his dead love and what he was doing to her memory. He was banishing it out of his life—or he was banishing the right to keep her photograph in a prominent position beside his bed, and putting someone else into the place that would have been hers. He was making a more or less unk
nown girl his wife, and that was an affront, surely, to the memory of a woman he had loved?
Felicity felt a little sick when she thought of Mervyn trying to make her understand the implications of the photograph—as if Cassandra hadn't already made them clear enough!—and a hot flurry of resentment rose up in her every time she tried to feel gratitude for an outsider’s concern. There was nothing quite so true as the saying that what the eye didn’t see the heart didn’t grieve over. And if she hadn’t heard anything at all about the photograph...
She knew enough—Paul himself had told her that he hadn’t any love to offer her—so she might have been spared the photograph...
She would never know how she had got through that day. Miss Menzies insisting on behaving as if she was about to attend a white wedding ... She took Florence aside the night before, whispered into her ear about the bride’s right to have breakfast in bed—how many other people thought she wanted to have breakfast in bed?—and offered to help with her dressing. As if a pink linen suit needed very much adjusting, or a round white hat that was just a round of white straw with a fuchsia-pink velvet ribbon its only adornment! Buts nevertheless, Felicity had wanted to hug Miss Menzies before she had left her room, for the elderly maiden lady had coaxed a spray of white gardenias out of the head gardener—they were special gardenias that he cherished, and usually only a chit from the master of the place resulted in any of them being included in the flowers for the house—and carried them up to Felicity herself.