by Averil Ives
He sent her another flashing, white-toothed smile, and then moved under the lintel.
“Mr. Whitelaw—Harry!” she called, as he started to move towards his garden gate.
He paused instantly, and looked back questioningly.
“When is the next steamer due here, Harry?” she asked with her heart pounding heavily.
Harry seemed to look down at her almost gravely. “Tomorrow morning,” he told her. And then he added: “Perhaps Mr. Halloran will be on it!”
“Yes,” she echoed, sitting on a chair with her hands folded limply in her lap, “perhaps he will!”
When he had left her alone she sat staring unseeingly at his photographs, while his electric fan whirred, and a false coolness stirred the ends of hair on her brow. Then, at last, she rose, and sighed a little, and moved towards the door. Harry had suggested to her that she might like to help herself to a drink before she left, but she didn’t do so. She went straight down the path to the gate, and walked briskly towards the plantation.
The light was certainly brazen, and most strange. There was no longer any sun making any attempt to shine at all. The entire sky was overcast, and the sea looked black and menacing. She could hardly believe it when she recalled the brilliance of the blue Caribbean day after day, and the way it reflected the stars at night. Just now it had an oily swell, as if somewhere far off there was a disturbance to which it was not accustomed, and which was causing it to frown and behave mutinously.
Felicity stood looking at the sea just before she entered the somewhat forbidding darkness of the plantation. She was fascinated by the sight of ominous waves that were breaking the oily surface of the strange, heaving mass of most unfriendly-looking ocean. Even as she watched, one of the waves leapt up and crashed upon the beach with a noise like muffled thunder. Another behaved in a similar manner, and another ... Then the noise of real thunder seemed to have drowned completely the roar of the surf on the barrier reef.
Aghast, Felicity watched a palm tree that had for long overhung one of the most sheltered parts of the beach, torn up by its roots, and cast into a heaving, boiling ocean. In almost the same instant the wind started drumming in the very depths of the plantation. It was like the violent humming of telegraph wires come suddenly to life. Felicity felt the hair first prickle on her scalp, and then stream back from her face as a thousand angry fingers seemed to catch at it and seek to wrench it off her head. Only the terrified plunge she made into the plants prevented her thin, cotton dress from being ripped right off her body.
Gasping, and stumbling amongst the trees, for the first time she thought of the darkness of the plantation as a welcome shelter that offered her not merely sanctuary, but temporarily preserved her sanity. She could not forget the palm tree being torn up by the roots, and hurled into the boiling mountainous seas. She shuddered as she thought of the beach, usually so placid, now littered with arms of trees and great sprays of brilliant blossom, which were being driven before a shrieking, frenzied wind that had arisen in a moment, out of the most leaden calm she had ever known in her life.
She had no idea how long she wandered blindly amongst those serried ranks of trees, listening to the terrified shrieks of birds as they swooped past her head, and hearing crashing noises all about her. Once she escaped being pinned beneath a fallen giant by nothing less than a miracle. Then, at last, she came to a part of the plantation which must have been its deepest heart, where it was like wandering into the lonely nave of a cathedral. The noises gradually faded away, and the roar of the sea became just a murmur. No wind seemed able to get at her, or touch her.
She sank down on to ground that was still warm and sweet-smelling at the foot of what must have been the giant king of the plantation. Although still gasping for breath, and bruised by the flail-like branches that had lashed at her and torn her flesh, she was able to feel with certainty that if only she remained where she was, she would be all right.
It was a conviction that came to her out of the riot and the tumult. Hours later, when the storm was at its peak around her, she felt, and knew, that she was safe.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE hurricane lasted all night. It reached pitches of ferocity that were lost on Felicity, as she crouched at the foot of her magnificent specimen of a tree, in the heart of the plantation James Ferguson Menzies had interposed as a shield between his first house on Menzies Island and the sea.
With the dawn the hurricane died down, and absolute silence replaced the inferno of sound. Felicity wondered at first why no vague crashing noises reached her any longer. The hush inside her retreat—her sanctuary, as she looked upon it—seemed like something solid that pressed on her. Even the birds were still. She wondered whether it was because they were exhausted, or whether most of them had been destroyed during the night. It seemed impossible to her that anything that had not shared her shelter could have escaped and still have the power to show itself, alive and fearlessly, in the full broad light of day.
Not that it was quite daylight when she emerged from the deep gloom of the trees, and stood on a strip of shelving beach that led down to gently encroaching wavelets. They were so unlike the waves of the night before that she gazed at them in wonder. The beach was pale yellow in the orange flush of dawn. The sea was pearly grey—pearly grey with a molten gold effect on the back of each gently curling wave. The sky overhead was a soft, tranquil blue, and one or two stars that hadn’t dared to show their faces during the night hung in it, like lamps waiting to be put out by an extinguisher. At Felicity’s feet it looked as if a giant had flung down a huge basketful of scarlet blossoms, torn and mangled, but recognizable as having once had velvet petals. There were some waxen blooms, too, all mixed up with seawreck, and a spray of something violently purple that was actually opening up before the warmth of the sun’s first rays. Felicity stooped and picked it up. The heady scent of it seemed to steal up into her brain.
Such scent, such a sunrise, such a marvellous freshness and sweetness in the air, such a placidly gleaming sea, bemused a little. In fact, she didn’t feel at all like Felicity Harding—or Felicity Halloran. She stood there pushing the heavy dark curls back from her brow, and wondered whether one had to live through an experience such as she had just endured in order to become a different person.
She felt like someone who had been purged of fear, for one thing, and she felt many, many years older—and wiser! Her face was pale, and had an ethereal look about it. The heavy eyes were almost unseeing. They had been looking inwards all night, seeing pictures that had nothing to do with the hurricane, or the island. Now it was not easy to focus them again on the island sights and loveliness.
And it was lovely ... She could appreciate that Menzies Island ...
She thought of Paul as she had done during the night, and wondered whether the steamer would venture to tie up to the jetty today. If not, it would probably come in sight tomorrow, just about this time. Perhaps he would be on it...
She thought wearily that she did so hope he would come home. She wanted to tell him that it didn’t matter—nothing mattered so long as she could go on being his wife, and sharing his life. However important, or unimportant, she was to him, she wanted to share his life. Wherever he elected to lead that life she wanted to be with him—in the background, if that was what he would prefer. One could be a lot of help in the background, sometimes, and she felt so much wiser ... She was so much wiser since last night. Paul must have had some particular reason for asking her to marry him. Whatever he wanted her to be she would be. Or she would try to be...
“Oh, Paul, Paul!” she whispered, as she stood there. Suddenly tears of utter weariness were running down her cheeks, and in spite of all the resolutions she had formed during the night she felt weak with longing for him, and utterly forlorn and alone because he wasn’t there. If only she knew where he was...
Suddenly it struck her that she must go back to the house—that Florence and Moses must be half out of their minds with anxiety about her
, and that she had no right to keep them in suspense. The miracle was that she was unhurt—almost unscathed—and they had a right to be reassured. Poor Florence, with a husband who had injured his ankle, and a mistress who had apparently been swallowed up by the hurricane ... Her black eyes would be rolling in her anxiety, and not even Moses’s ankle would keep her from wondering what she was going to say to her master when he did eventually return, in explanation of the disappearance of the lady of the house! His lady!...
Felicity couldn’t help smiling very faintly as she thought of Florence and her agitation, but as she turned to move back into the plantation the weariness that dragged at her steps and her cramped limbs, seemed to rush up all over her. She wondered suddenly whether she was going to fall; whether she could even make her way back to the house.
She leaned against a tree trunk for a minute or so, resting her pale forehead against the cool bark. While she did so she thought she heard someone call her name. She remained absolutely still, and then lifted her forehead. She felt dull, and rather stupid, but someone had called her name—in a sort of frantic relief—and she knew the voice.
She looked round slowly, unbelievingly, certain she would be disappointed—knowing that she would be disappointed.
But it was Paul who was coming towards her with lightning strides along the pale golden beach. It was Paul, unless, of course, she was a little light-headed! She had carried the picture of his sleek dark head, his well-held shoulders, and slightly pantherish movements about with her so often that she couldn’t possibly be mistaken now. But when he came within a few yards of her she could see that, surprisingly, his hair wasn’t at all sleek—it was ruffled and lack-lustre, as if the hurricane of the night before had got to work on it, as it had got to work on her own hair. When he was nearer still she was shocked because his eyes were no longer blue. They were black—black with concern! His face was white and haggard—as white as her own, but far more haggard than she had ever imagined any face could look.
“Felicity! ... Oh, Felicity!”
He almost lurched up against her, and caught her in his arms. She could feel his hands frantically searching her slight body to make certain she was intact, and that no terrible injuries had been inflicted on her. Then those same hands pressed her face into his shoulder and kept it hidden there.
“You are all right? ... My darling, you are all right!”
“Of course.” She spoke quite gently, freeing her face so that she could look up into his eyes and reassure him with the light in her own eyes. “I’m perfectly all right but I don’t understand how you—how you come to be here! Did the steamer tie up after all?”
He didn’t seem able to answer her, and she could feel how he trembled as he held her as if he could never possibly be induced to let her go again for an instant.
At last, burying his face in her hair, he seemed to groan out the words: “I flew in yesterday afternoon, just after you left the house! There’s a strip of land behind the house that can be used as a landing-ground, and we risked it. I chartered a ’plane, and—Oh, does it matter? Does anything matter except that I’ve found you, after a whole agonized night-time of searching? Felicity, I’ve been half out of my mind with anxiety about you, and if I hadn’t found you just now, I—”
He swallowed. “Oh, darling, thank heavens I’ve got you safe!” He clasped her with so much strength that her bruised body should have shrunk, but it didn’t. She didn’t even wince.
Instead she asked wonderingly, looking up at him: “But would it have mattered—as much as all that!—if—if—?”
“Don't!” he said.
“But would it?” she insisted. She touched his face as if she still couldn’t believe that it was him—really him! “Paul, would it have mattered?”
He took her own face between his hands, and looked down at her in a way that caused her breath to remain suspended in her throat. Utter wonder looked at him out of her great brown eyes.
“Felicity, I love you more than anything else in the world,” he told her, “and you ask me whether it would have mattered!”
“Oh, Paul!” she said, and suddenly her eyes smiled at him. It was a smile as radiant as the sunrise. “Oh, Paul!” she whispered, and then, despairingly, they were clinging to on anther, and his lips were on hers.
Later—Felicity had no real knowledge how much later it was, except that the sun seemed to be considerably higher in the heavens, and the beach was warm amber instead of pale gold—he drew her down on to the comfortably warm sand, and looked at her as if he had been starved of the sight of her, and now he was going to enjoy his fill.
“Darling,” he said softly, stroking her hair, and noticing the purple shadows beneath her eyes—the way her mouth drooped wistfully even now that she was happy—“you really aren’t hurt at all, are you? Not physically hurt, I mean? I know you’ve had an appalling night, and I really ought to carry you back to the house, and put you straight to bed. I’m going to do that, anyway, very soon—put you to bed for about forty-eight hours—but first I want us to be alone for a short while, and get everything absolutely straight between us. Felicity, we’ve got to get things straight.”
She put her tired head down on his shoulder, and looked up at him with bemused eyes.
“So long as you love me, everything is straight,” she told him simply. “And I’m not going to bed for forty-eight hours—not even twenty-four. It’s four weeks since you went away, and I want to be with you.”
“You will be with me, my dearest—now, and all the rest of our fives!” He kissed those purple smudges beneath the soft eyes, because they distressed him acutely. “Felicity, I went away—and stayed away—for two reasons. First, I had to see someone in Paris, who had been writing me appealing letters. It was the sister of Nina Carlotti, who had lighted on rather evil times, and was terribly hard up in a kind of Paris garret. She’s about a couple of years older than Nina would be now, if she was alive, and very like her. I wanted to confront myself with someone who looked like Nina—painfully like—and make absolutely certain that I’d got her out of my system!”
“Oh!” Felicity’s eyes dilated as if she had been wounded, suddenly, afresh.
He took her hand and carried it up to his cheek, and held it there.
“Don’t worry, dear heart ... She was out of my system two years ago. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a few minutes. But I wanted to make certainty doubly certain, and as soon as I saw Tina—never, really, to be confused with Nina, I must admit—I knew that I was absolutely free. I paid some money into a banking account for her, saw her installed in a reasonably decent little hotel, and then went on to Rome!”
He paused, and Felicity’s eyes hung on his face.
“In Rome I wanted to be certain of something, too. I wanted to find out whether I could pick up the threads of my past life, for your sake—not my own. I know now that this island is all I want, but it isn’t what I want in future—it’s what you, my darling little wife, need, and must have! I mean to make you happy, beloved, and somehow or other I must make up to you for not telling you something you should have been told before—long before. Our wedding night would not have been quite such a farce if I’d told you, I think!”
“And what—what was that?” she asked, in a whisper.
“That I loved you, I suppose from the moment I saw you—in that blue dress of yours, with your sweet eyes and hair, and your lovely, heart-warming smile. Oh, my darling!” He drew her to him, and she felt his lips moving rapturously in her hair. “I wanted you from that moment—I knew I had to have you. But Nina had done something to me years ago, and she haunted me, somehow. I didn’t keep her photograph beside my bed because I wanted to look at it, but because—there was just the possibility that I’d misjudged her. You see, on the night of my accident—incidentally, we were to have been married within a very short time after that—I called at her flat, which was also in Rome, and found another man there with her. The situation was highly compromising, and I
’d have been a fool if I’d believed the excuses she made. That’s why I once said to you that it isn’t always a wise thing to attempt to surprise a person—as I was surprising Nina that night, for she didn’t expect me. In fact she thought I was out of Rome! Do you remember me saying that to you?”
“Yes I do,” she answered, recalling that they were amongst almost the first words he ever uttered to her.
“Well, after leaving Nina’s flat—I left them together—I drove my car so recklessly that I inevitably crashed, and you know the result. Nina was not killed in the crash with me—she was killed chasing after me. It was a horrible affair, and I’ve always known that if I accused her unfairly I also caused her death. But Tina has freed me of that burden ... She knew that Nina was behaving as you, my darling—or any woman in love with the man she had promised to marry—could never have behaved, and she told me the whole story quite brutally. She didn’t spare Nina...” He looked away. “Or me!”
Felicity’s arms stole round his neck. “Then why couldn’t you tell me you loved me?”
“Because I had to be absolutely certain—” looking deep into her eyes—“that there was no slightest shadow of Nina standing between us.”
“And she never will be a shadow between us?”
“Never, my darling!”
Felicity sighed, a little sigh of pure happiness.
“And what did you want to find out in Rome?”
“I’ve told you—whether I could bear to take up the threads again. I wanted to see people—all sorts of people I knew well in the past, and who are keen for me to return to the world of music. But, somehow, I don’t know ... I even found a flat for us if you want me to go back! It rests with you, Felicity. What you want me to do I will do. I know it isn’t fair to condemn you to this island life, and in any case I’m going to take you away for a while ... We’re going to have that honeymoon, my sweetest and dearest, and I’m going to make up to you for the farce of a marriage I put you through! We might even find a church to be married in—as I know you would have liked to be married...” But she shook her head.