Island in the Dawn Read online

  ISLAND IN THE DAWN

  Averil Ives

  Set in the beautiful Caribbean, Menzies Island seemed to have all one could wish for. But Felicity soon learned that lovely surroundings alone do not produce happiness ... Cassandra Wood made it quite clear that she intended Paul Halloran to be her property, and Felicity found that to live in close proximity to a man who would never return the love she felt for him was heart-breaking. Desperation drove her into a rash move that normally she would never have contemplated.

  For a while the outlook was black; then came a wonderful, almost unbelievable revelation.

  CHAPTER ONE

  CASSANDRA had been very full of confidence at the hotel in Kingston; but now that they were the only couple of passengers set ashore on an island that was like an upturned green saucer on the broad bosom of the sparkling Caribbean, a great deal of that confidence. Felicity could tell, was beginning to ebb.

  It was true that it was very warm; the whole island swam in a haze of heat. Palms that were in actual fact as still as if there was no air at all, seemed to be wavering continually in a shimmering mist, and the ground rose in occasional billow as if it were compounded of the same element as the sea they had just left.

  From a green thicket of jungle behind them bright birds darted and described amazing circles right in front of their eyes, and Cassandra stood staring upwards a little unbelievingly at some gorgeous trumpet-shaped scarlet blossoms that drooped above them. At the same time a tassel of heavenly blue flowers actually tapped her shoulder.

  “I remember all this growth,” she said. “The whole island is a mass of color that hurts your eyes until you get used to it!” And then, with a mixture of peevishness and impatience, while perspiration pricked upon her forehead: “Oh, why didn’t I keep my dark glasses handy, instead of tucking them away at the bottom of a suitcase? This kind of think could bring on a migraine, if one suffered from such a thing.”

  “Well, you don’t,” Felicity returned, with more composure. “And I dare say we’ll stand up to it for a short while. The forest looks cool.”

  “But it's an inferno here on the jetty! And there’s no one to meet us!"

  “Did you expect anyone to meet us?” Even as she posed the question, which she knew could only be answered in the negative, Felicity handed over her own dark glasses, and then started to check the baggage that was being dumped upon the tiny jetty. The grinning seaman, who was handling Cassandra’s expensive suitcases and her shagreen beauty-box and matching jewel-case as if they were of no greater value than a few empty tea-chests, suddenly sketched them a salute and grinned so widely that his teeth seemed to occupy the whole of his face. Then he leaped back into the boat they had just left and started up the motor. The cheerful flutter of his black hand as the boat shot away from the side of the jetty, told the two girls that they were finally abandoned.

  “It wasn’t like this when I came here before,” Cassandra exclaimed, all but stamping her foot in vexation. “Uncle James was here to meet me as soon as I stepped ashore, and his servant took charge of the luggage immediately. Why isn’t someone doing something about the luggage today?”

  “Because no one is expecting us,” Felicity reminded her, reasonably. “Do you forget that you thought it a good idea not to let your Uncle James know we were coming?—to give him a surprise! Well, if you want to give someone a surprise, you can’t expect them to be waiting at the quayside, can you?”

  “This isn’t a quayside, it’s a stupid little improvisation of a jetty!” Cassandra returned, yielding to the temptation to grind the high white heel of one of her slender sandals into a crack in the sun-baked stone on which she was standing. She thrust back the wide brim of her hat, so that the genuine Titian hair could be seen flaming and curling round her creamy face, and her kingfisher blue eyes snapped. “Anyway, Uncle James isn’t the only man on this island! There are one or two other houses!”

  “But I thought you said his was the only house of any size—the only white man’s house,” Felicity found it necessary to point out, and Cassandra bit her lip.

  “So it is—so he is! He’s the uncrowned king of the island.”

  “And he doesn’t expect us. You can’t blame him for not being here.”

  “I don’t blame him, but I wish now I’d let him know we were coming, and—Oh, what are we going to do about this wretched luggage?” Cassandra sat down on a suit-case, and looked helpless and thwarted. “I want a long, cool drink, and a bath—die washing facilities on that horrid little steamer were impossible! And I want someone to unpack my things for me and get me out something fresh to put on.” She looked down with distaste at the expensive white silk suit she was wearing, which was scarcely marred by even a wrinkle. “Felicity you seem to be standing up to this better than I am. Now look, there’s a track which leads to the house if you make your way through those trees. It’s what they call a plantation, and it lies between the house and the sea. Uncle James likes to feel that his domain is entirely private, and the place is simply ringed by trees, with glimpses of the sea from the attic windows only. If you keep straight on you can’t possibly lose your way, so do be a pet and put me out of my misery as soon as possible!”

  She smiled with her lovely scarlet mouth, but her eyes remained peevish and filled with the certainty that Felicity would do exactly as requested. For although they were old school friends, and there was a thin blood tie between them as well, they also stood nowadays in the relationship of employer and employee to one another. And Cassandra was a very wealthy employer, who was not accustomed to doing anything at all for herself.

  “Try and be as quick as you can, that’s all I ask,” she concluded, as she extracted a platinum cigarette-case from her handbag, and lighted one of her specially blended cigarettes. “And tell Uncle James I’m in danger of becoming a grease spot if he doesn’t hurry!”

  Felicity hesitated for a moment. She wondered how she was going to explain this unexpected visitation to a man she had never met—there was no blood tie between James Ferguson Menzies and herself—and thought that it might be a little awkward if he wasn’t in the mood for visitors. Then she nodded in her bright, encouraging way at Cassandra, and stepped off the jetty into the dense green gloom of the trees.

  It was like nothing she had ever known before, a rather delicious green gloom after the brazen heat of the jetty. She was a little surprised that Cassandra had elected to remain where she was instead of seeking this revivifying shade; but then Cassandra was at all times an unpredictable person, and her whims were seldom easily accounted for. It was just possible that, having decided very abruptly to thrust herself and her companion open her uncle without any warning whatsoever, she was somewhat doubtful in her own mind as to the warmth of the welcome they would receive, and preferred that Felicity should take the shock of this sudden surprise.

  Felicity, born to fend for herself, without even a tarnished silver spoon in her mouth, went straight to her objective, and as a reward for her boldness and compliance the sweet coolness of the plantation lapped about her.

  She had no idea what the trees were that surrounded her in serried ranks, but their plumy tops were absolutely motionless against the deep blue of the sky. Vines trailed from them and formed loops above her head; flowers touched her gently and caused her blood to bound a little because their perfume was like nothing she had ever known before. It was a scent that could get up into one’s head, she thought, if one inhaled deeply enough of it, and it was a queer promise in itself of unusual things in store.

  That morning, very early, when she had seen the island for the first time, through the lilac haze of dawn, her blood had quickened in the same way. The sea and the sky had been all rose and gold and turquoise; the island had been
just a vague blur, with some feathery trees lifting their arms to the sunrise. It hadn’t seemed a green saucer of land on the Caribbean—one of numerous other little green saucers that were floating jauntily all about them—but a mystic symbol of something she had been secretly dreaming about for years. Peace, beauty, remoteness, romance ... romance that swelled and grew with the sunrise and the flood of color in the sky. And as the color faded, the lilac haze vanished and the island stood forth against a background of tranquil blue. Every palm tip was touched with the gold of a new day, and she felt a rush of breathless excitement around her heart.

  It was a feeling that was quite the opposite of tranquillity—and Menzies Island struck Felicity as being the most tranquil place in the whole wide world. Even Cassandra, as she stood beside her on deck in the dawn, recalled that on her one and only visit to the island five years before, she had been impressed by the curious peace of the place.

  “Nothing ever happens there,” she said. “Every day is the same! A couple of months would probably reduce me to a state of utter boredom! I think after a time one would be almost repulsed by the deadly sameness, the monotony—and yet the beauty is like a narcotic. It sort of eats into you, and causes you to forget that there is another life—another world where people rush about and strive to make money, and have a thoroughly good time. On Uncle James’s island life just slips past, and unless you’re very strong-minded you become a lotus-eater almost at once. Uncle James is a lotus-eater—he never wishes to leave. He’s got lots and lots of money, most of it passed on to him by his father, but a great deal earned by writing plays—successful plays which he never bothers to see put on in London, although they run for ages. I don’t know when he visited London last. That’s what his island has done to Uncle James?”

  “And it is his island?”

  “Oh, yes. His father bought it—or acquired it—years ago. I don’t know enough about the transaction to be absolutely certain, but it’s now family property, and may even come into my own possession one of these days.” She smiled a little oddly, sideways, at Felicity. “That’s one reason why I like to look up Uncle James occasionally—to make certain that he doesn’t overlook the fact that he has a niece. An island could be a refuge if one ever needed a refuge, and in addition it’s very productive—citrus fruit, and so on. But there isn’t even an air-strip to connect with the mainland.”

  “I rather thing the feeling of remoteness must appeal to your Uncle James,” Felicity remarked, as if she had been tinning the matter over in her mind. “He obviously wouldn’t live where he does all the time if he was fond of company, would he?—the kind of company that drops in!” And then, a little more doubtfully: “Isn’t it just possible he might object to our sudden arrival? Look upon it as an intrusion?”

  Cassandra shook her head, with the complacence of a sleek, red-headed cat.

  “Even as a child I had an appeal for Uncle James, and since I’ve arrived at an age of discretion, as one might call it, I haven’t honestly noticed that any man, related to me or not, has ever been inclined to look upon my sudden appearance as an intrusion. And as you’re a part of my entourage—for want of a better word—there’s no reason why your arrival should be frowned upon, either.”

  Felicity realized that there was a great deal of truth in this statement, for after working for Cassandra for six months she had discovered how irresistible she was to the male sex. She didn’t have to do a single thing to attract them, and they succumbed like flies. Just at the moment she was running away from an affair that had got a little out of hand—begun to bore her because her usual method of putting an end to a pleasant interlude had failed for once, and a temporary removal of herself and her charms from the scene had struck her as wise. The young man in question had been so attractive, and so honest, that Felicity’s impressionable heart had bled for him, and she had felt more than a little appalled because Cassandra, apparently, was not really the possessor of a heart at all.

  She liked admiration and adulation in large doses—but only so long as they didn’t irk her, or conflict with new plans! Felicity wondered whether she would always be like that, and wholeheartedly admiring her loveliness, could only hope not. For Cassandra was surely made to love, and be loved, intensely.

  Felicity was the younger of the two girls who had first made one another’s acquaintance at a south coast boarding school. They were drawn together by loneliness, as neither of them possessed any parents. But at twenty-five Cassandra was a woman of the world and at twenty-four-and-a-half Felicity had had no experiences to speak of. There had been the usual boy friend who had escorted her to the odd dance, and taken her out to dinner and to the theatre occasionally. There had also been one or two kisses in the moonlight, after the show was over, on the doorstep of her lodgings. But emotionally Felicity was untouched and unawakened.

  Possibly Cassandra was unawakened, too, but she was quite different from Felicity. She was like an arid plant that was just not capable of response. Felicity, just as surely as she leaned on the rail of the steamer that was taking her to the island, knew that one day—One Day!...

  Her breath caught as she stared at the approaching island, feeling that in a certain sense this was the end of a journey she had had to make ... Even if she had never become companion to Cassandra she would have had to come here! ... Which was absurd, of course!

  Now as she trod lightly, in her white sandals, the dim path that led through the plantation providing a screen for James Ferguson Menzies’s chosen retreat, the silence, the seductive coolness and the rich green gloom, made her even more full of excited anticipation. This was not the kind of pathway she had ever trodden before, and there was an aura of unreality about it that was thrilling. Anything could happen in such a place, and such a spot... And something did happen!

  She emerged from the gloom of the trees and saw a white gracious house surrounded by velvety green lawns appearing abruptly, like a mirage, before her eyes. Hardly had she taken in the sight, when a short, dapper little man in a white jacket and striped trousers that would have done very nicely for a bank-clerk, appeared on the steps facing her, and then came towards her.

  “Holy St. Patrick!” said a rich, Irish voice, in a brogue so unmistakable that it was almost laughable—and then the dapper little man stopped. He put his head on one side and studied her with incredulity: her slight figure in the pastel blue linen that had lost a little of its original crispness because of the heat; her head of soft, dark brown hair shot through with bronzish lights; her eyes that were dark brown, too, and also seemed to hold little lights. She was not the most attractive young woman he had seen in his life, but she was so frankly feminine, so delicately pastel-tinted—the whole of her, not just her dress—that he gaped. He said earnestly: “If I hadn’t forsworn the ‘drop’ that was body and soul to me a couple of years ago I’d have said it was the troubles come upon me again! I’d have said I was seeing things!...”

  His consternation made Felicity smile in spite of the fact that they were standing in the middle of a blinding patch of sunlight on one of the deliciously green lawns. She was aware of rose scents floating near to her, of masses of brilliant blooms rising up all around her as a frame for the lawns and the gracious white house.

  “Excuse me,” she said, in her voice which matched her looks; “but is Mr. James Ferguson Menzies anywhere about... ?”

  The Irishman looked faintly relieved.

  “Mr. Menzies? You can’t have dropped in just to see Mr. Menzies! ... And, in any case, you’ve come to the wrong place!”

  The little man explained, his brogue making his speech difficult to follow.

  “Mr. Menzies doesn’t live here any more! ... Not for a whole year, God Bless Ould Ireland! ‘Tis me, and Himself, who live here now! And Himself won’t be receiving pretty young ladies like yourself, Miss, at this hour of the morning—even if he could see them!”

  “I—don’t know what you mean?” Felicity faltered, the heat making her head swim a little,
while the news she had just received bewildered her. “Why is Mr. Menzies not here, and—who is ‘Himself’...?”

  For answer a slender figure of a man appeared on the veranda that ran along the whole front of the house, and a huge Alsatian dog that was with him came bounding across the shaven turf to Felicity’s side.

  “Come back, Bruno!” called a voice with a quiet whiplash of command in it, and the dog obeyed. Without even pausing to investigate the newcomer it returned to its master’s side, and that master put out a hand and kept it on the animal’s head. “Who is it, Michael?” The quiet voice wanted to know, and although he appeared to be staring at Felicity the latter knew that he did not see her—not merely because he wore dark glasses, but because the eyes behind the glasses were not functioning as they should.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FELICITY was conscious of a distinct sensation of shock as she stood there with the golden sunshine ail about her, the intoxicating scent of roses floating in the air. All this brilliance and loveliness, and a pair of eyes that didn’t function! It was in some way horrifying!

  She moved forward across the lawn, and ascended the steps of the veranda. Stammeringly she explained why and how she came to be there, exactly who she was, and exactly who Cassandra was. She explained about their luggage on the jetty, and about Cassandra feeling the heat so much that she had had to remain where she was. But even as she added that little bit she realized that if Cassandra had been really overcome by the sudden onslaught of a climate to which they were unaccustomed, she would have sought the shade of the trees even if she hadn’t walked all the way to the house.

  But, no Cassandra wanted to be received on the jetty, and she was not prepared to move a step, even for her own comfort, until her arrival was acknowledged in a suitable manner. No arriving in a backstairs fashion for Cassandra!