House Of Storm (6 page)

He was leaning down now, his hands on her arms tight and hard, his gray eyes urgent and dark. Her throat was dry; she couldn’t speak. The mail boat gave two hoarse little grunts which were warning whistles. She nodded and Jim said, “I hate to go. … Nonie, Nonie …”

The mail boat was churning now in the water like a solid old lady gathering her skirts around her preparing to depart.

She found her voice and cried again, “Jim, hurry …” and he pulled her up then into his arms, close and hard, and kissed her and held her against him as if he would never let her go.

Then he released her. He jumped onto the jetty; he was pulling out his bags and coat; she was helping, tugging at a bag. He was above her, looking down into the boat and still there was reality only in the lap of the water, the faint motion of the boat. His dark hair was blown and awry and a lock on one of his bags snapped open. She must tell him. Then she met his eyes and he was saying good-bye and she couldn’t look away from him.

“Be careful, going back …”

“Yes, yes, Jim.”

“Remember …”

“You’ll miss the boat—hurry.”

“Good-bye—good-bye, darling.”

“Good-bye …”

The mail boat was sturdily getting under way; it was deliberate, leisurely and inexorable.

She watched him run along the few feet of jetty, then he disappeared around the stern. The gangway was going up but he shouted at the friendly, straw-hatted colored boys, who held it. Like a slow-motion picture, now, the whole scene seemed to stand still for an instant—the boat, the gangway, everything except Jim’s running figure. Then all at once he was on the boat. He thanked the boys. … He was coming to the railing.

One of the boys was coming along the jetty. He neared her, smiling.

“Captain say to cast off line. Ready, lady?”

“Yes. Yes, thank you.”

Jim was waving, watching. She waved; she nodded at the colored boy; she was still part of a painted picture.

She turned on the engine and automatically set her hands to the wheel. And already when she looked up, her boat had gone beyond the narrow finger of the jetty. Jim’s face was sober now, no longer smiling; the water between them was widening.

The mail boat was churning now, turning slowly, yet so swiftly. And then all at once, it was gone and she had started back to Beadon Island. The motor was running smoothly along; Elbow Beach, the jetty, the smiling, friendly colored boy, the mail boat were behind her.

It was only then, actually, that she was really aware of the pressure of Jim’s mouth upon her own, of the warmth and strength and urgency of his arms. It was as if she still felt them; as if they were still there. And mingled with that lingering sense of his presence was a sense of astonishment, that was love! The warmth of her pulses, the lift of her heart, the wings that had swept her up into his embrace, that was part of love.

In a rush, reality returned. Everything Jim had said, every expression on his face, the sense of his presence, beside her, was all of it now too sharply real; even the wheel seemed still warm from the pressure of his hands. With all those physical reminders of his presence, Jim himself had gone. Yet everything in her life had changed because he had been there. Because she had come to Beadon Island—with Roy—to marry Roy—and Jim was there.

She went back through the sea, toward Beadon Island. The sun was lower, the water now more sharply dappled with darker blues and brighter golds. She guided the motor boat mechanically, setting an even rate of speed toward Beadon Island. Toward Beadon Gates where, on Wednesday, there would be no gay wedding party. No marriage in the little white church which soon would come into view.

How had so much happened in such a short time?

How was she to tell Roy?

She must think of that; she must think. But the boat drove on, thudding through the waves and the glitter of sunlight over the trackless way it had come, which was yet so marked, so irrevocably patterned now in her heart.

Elbow Beach became a gray line behind her; the spires and roofs of Beadon Rock, the green massed trees came up like magic at her side. Before it seemed possible, the small pier below Beadon Gates was there, shining out of the water ahead, her inevitable destination.

Roy had seen her coming and was standing on the pier, waiting for her.

J
IM SAID TO THINK.
He had meant, of course, that she must think and consider, weight and test the validity of the thing that had swept them together; but with the sight of Roy’s tall figure, the movement with which he tossed a cigarette into the water, Nonie realized with a shock that she had no plan, no words, no way to tell Roy the thing she had to tell him. She had thought, but of Jim, not of the immediate and terribly difficult thing that nevertheless she had to do.

Roy came forward as she turned the motor boat neatly alongside the pier. She was not an expert boatman, she could never have sailed, but there had been a time in her father’s life when small yachts and motor boats were his hobby—as years before, long sleek and shining automobiles with foreign names on them (and almost equally sleek chauffeurs) had embellished his life and consequently her own. Roy said approvingly: “Nicely done,” and caught at the line she tossed upward and made it fast. And Dick Fenby came down the steps.

She felt a sense of relief; until Dick went away she could not talk to Roy. It was impossible to blurt out what she had to say in a quick sentence, or two.

Roy put down his hands to lift her out of the boat. Roy was always courteous, in a rather old-fashioned way, aware of the small gallantries and attentiveness of an older and perhaps a more courteous generation. It was one of his charms, one of the qualities that had drawn her to him. One of the many reasons for the quite sincere and honest affection which, in what seemed now abysmal ignorance she had taken for love. How different it was from the thing she felt with Jim. This is it, Jim had said. She turned off the engine and the silence of the island lapped around them.

Roy’s hands were kind and strong and firm—and the hands of a kind and gentle friend, no more. She stood on the pier and he smiled down at her.

“You made a good trip. I timed you. Jim get the mail boat all right?”

“Oh, yes. But barely; it was leaving when he got aboard.”

“Hello, Nonie,” Dick said, coming along toward them and at once she saw that he’d been drinking.

Dick Fenby (Major Dick Fenby, retired after the First World War) who was Hermione’s factor, was a slight, fair man with a fine-drawn, ineffectual but pleasant face which now was puffy and flushed; his usually candid, if rather bleak blue eyes were glassy.

How right Jim had been to leave! With a flash of shocking clarity Nonie saw the life which Hermione had attempted to enforce upon him; an idle life, with no aims and no purpose permitted him, living on what Hermione chose to give him, never quite being allowed to earn even that, at the mercy of Hermione’s whims, dependent upon her will and her bounty. He would not have yelled; there would have been battles, but Hermione, by reason of her legal position, would have had the upper hand. Hermione knew that; Jim knew it.

Dick said: “Jim got away?”

“He got the mail boat. He’ll be in New York late tonight.”

They turned back along the pier, toward the path, their feet making blurred soft thumps on the wooden flooring of the pier, Dick’s only a little uneven. He said: “He got away. That’s what’s important. He got away before it was too late.”

“I’m sorry,” Roy said. “Jim had the makings of a good planter.”

Dick gave a kind of sigh. “Yes, he had. I knew by the questions he’d ask, the way he went at things. Or tried to go at things. She always stopped him. The way she … I’d have been a good planter.”

“You are a good planter.”

“Sometimes—sometimes, when she lets me alone. When she doesn’t … I saw her doing it to Jim. Blocking him about everything—such little things, so—so subtly. It’s queer he saw it himself. I didn’t till it was too late.”

“Well,” Roy said temperately. “Jim had no experience. She couldn’t give him much responsibility yet.”

“She could have let him learn. She wouldn’t. You taught him anything he learned. She could have given him a real job, not a kind of super errand boy, living on her charity, humiliated at every turn. I saw it. And lately I saw Jim’s resentment growing and Hermione saw it, too, and went after him with all her claws out—smiling all the time.”

“Now, Dick …”

Dick said firmly: “She didn’t want him to learn to be a planter. She wanted to see to it that he didn’t learn. She wanted”—he took a breath—“she wanted to make sure that by the time Middle Road came to him he’d …” He stopped and fumbled for words and said: “She wanted him to be like me! Only more so because I do know how to see to the place. I tell you, Roy, that’s what she lives for. Power. Middle Road is like a little kingdom to her. She gets as much kick out of it as if it were a real kingdom, the size doesn’t matter. All that is relative, anyway. Power is what she feeds on. Power over people. That’s her—her vanity, her pride. You can’t be on equal terms with Hermione, ever. It’s always a battle; no matter what the relationship, it’s a battle till Hermione wins. Then when she gets you so she can put the screws on, when she has you right under her thumb, she despises you. She …”

“Okay, Dick. Okay.”

“I’m talking too much. It’s all true though. You know it. Everybody knows …” They had reached the steps and Dick looked up and said: “Hello, Lydia!” in a tone of surprise which all at once sounded like hostility. “What are you doing here?”

Nonie looked up quickly too. Lydia Bassett was sitting on the veranda waiting for them. Her red hair with its thick deep waves framed her lovely face with an almost flaunting arrogance of beauty; she was lying back in one of the long wicker chairs, her slim yet vibrant figure outlined in the long chiffon folds of a green dinner dress. Her eyes, brilliant and intelligent, seemed to have taken color from the dress and even at that distance had a kind of green fire. She was smiling, and obviously from her dress, had come to dinner.

“Lydia,” Roy said in a startled way.

“Hello,” she said, ignoring Dick after one swift and measuring glance. “I hope you don’t mind. I rang up Aurelia and invited myself to dinner. After all, with the wedding coming up so soon and the honeymoon you two won’t want guests for some time. I thought I’d better come now if I wanted to see you at all for—how long does a honeymoon last? Really a month?”

Her words, her voice, her smile were all pleasant and engaging. Surely, thought Nonie, she must imagine some mocking undertone. She said, “Hello, Lydia. I’m glad to see you.”

Roy said, but still in a startled way, “Delighted, Lydia. You know that, delighted!”

He came up the steps, between Nonie and Dick. He rang for Jebe, the little old colored man who was the butler, major domo and all but, under Aurelia, housekeeper of Beadon Gates, and ordered drinks for them all. No one could be a more gracious and delightful host than Roy, but Nonie knew and did not know how she knew it that Lydia’s presence was, somehow, not quite welcome.

It meant to her, of course, what Dick’s presence had meant. Nonie’s talk with Roy had still to be postponed. After dinner, after Dick and Lydia went away, after Aurelia had gone to bed, that would be the time. She and Roy would be alone and perhaps her very love for Jim, the new and deep feeling of kinship with the world and everyone in it would give her wisdom.

Lydia too had sensed that unspoken lack of welcome on Roy’s part. She said, this time with an unmistakable note of mockery in her voice: “But my drink is rum and soda, Roy, darling. Remember? I do hope you don’t really mind my coming. I do realize that you and your bride wish to be alone. I’ll leave early. I’m afraid, though, I’ll have to ask you to take me home. I got a lift in Dr. Riordan’s car. He was coming to see somebody at Middle Road and brought me here.”

“I tell you I’m delighted,” Roy said and turned to Jebe. “That’s right. Rum and soda for Miss Lydia. Rum old-fashioneds for me and Miss Nonie. How about you, Dick?”

Dick slid with a sigh into a deep chair. “Jebe knows. Rum and water for me.”

Rum, of course, was the island drink; made and bottled at Beadon Gates by Roy, with his label on the squat, fat bottles. Roy said to Lydia: “Who’s sick at Middle Road?”

“I don’t know,” Lydia said negligently. “One of the house boys, I think. Had some sort of accident. I didn’t ask. Well, I hear that Jim Shaw’s had a row with Hermy and left the island.”

Purple shadows were laying themselves gently across the sea; the setting sun cast a pink, clear glow in the sky. Nonie rose, aware of her smudged white slacks. “I’ll change now, if you don’t mind. I’ll be down in a moment. …”

“Darling,” Lydia said, “don’t put on the emerald tiara, will you? Or the diamond necklaces? We are simple souls here, you know, not used to splendors.”

“Don’t be absurd, Lydia,” Roy said suddenly and sharply. Nonie felt herself flushing. She repressed an automatic schoolgirl retort; the kind of retort she had learned, actually, during school days and because of all the unconsciously ostentatious ways her father’s money had spent itself. Roy crossed the veranda, rising quickly in spite of his big and powerful body, to open the door for her, to smile down at her briefly but warmly, as she entered the house. Her house, he’d said, she remembered again; her home. And she’d been so grateful, sure that marriage to Roy would be a happy marriage.

A sensible marriage, she’d written—so short a time ago—to Aunt Annie—a rational marriage.

But not a real marriage and she knew that now. Where was Jim by now? Nearing Cienfuegos; pacing the deck of the tiny mail boat; thinking and planning; wondering, as she was wondering, at the thing that had happened to them, but accepting it because it had to be accepted and could not be denied.

The hall was wide and rather shadowy, with its deep maroon wallpaper, old and embossed with faded gilt figures, with its thin old rugs and the chandelier at the stairway, its lusters tinkling gently in the air. She went upstairs slowly; the stairs she had thought to tread, happily and contentedly all her life. How little she had known when she came down those stairs! Yet she’d guessed, even then. She’d guessed when she saw Jim; she’d guessed when suddenly she knew in the very act of writing it, that the kind of happiness she was describing was not for her. Not the real thing. This is it, Jim had said, and she thought of it again, holding the words like a charm, like a banner, like a shield and a faith to sustain her.