Perhaps that fire, too, accounted for a kind of avid, hungry look in her mouth and eyes. She said however, smoothly, with a smile: “Hello, Roy—Nonie. I thought I might find you here, Jim.”
She wore a gray linen dress, miraculously sleek and neat, and high-heeled, lizard-skin pumps. She was too thin so the veins showed on her hands as she came nearer and the throb of a pulse beat hard under the paper-white skin along her temple. Roy said something about a chair, a drink, the heat, and, smiling, she interrupted: “Thank you, Roy. You must know why I came. I hope you’ve persuaded Jim not to do anything on an impulse.”
Roy looked hot and uncomfortable. Jim said: “I’ve got to get back to New York, if that’s what you mean, Hermione.”
There was no change in Hermione’s white, thin face; only the pulse along her temple seemed to throb harder. She said, still smiling, shaking her head gently: “Youth is so impatient. Please think a little, Jim. What will you do if the job doesn’t work out?”
“It will,” Jim said shortly.
Her eyebrows were as neat and shining as her hair; they lifted a little. “You were not satisfied with it before you came to Middle Road. That’s why you came here.”
“I came to Middle Road because …” began Jim angrily and then checked himself. “You know why I came!”
Her eyes were like gray jewels. “Were you going to say because I asked you to come? I did, of course. I thought you’d be happy here. I’m sorry—sorrier than I can possibly say, to discover that you are bored and discontented. I realize that it must seem dull to you. A sugar plantation is only a sugar plantation. Middle Road is like every other; I’m sorry you have tired of it but …”
Jim, very white, burst out: “I’m not tired of Middle Road. I love Middle Road …” and again stopped as if he didn’t dare let himself say more—or as if he would not give her the satisfaction of showing how words cut.
She saw it, though. Her fixed smile did not change but her eyes seemed brighter and rather pleased. “Then why leave, Jim? You have nothing to worry you here. I don’t begrudge you money, not in the least. You are my nephew—I’m delighted to give you all I can. The plantation is there and you can be of help to me. I’m sure you can be of help,” said Hermione in the soothing, indulgent voice she would have used in order to coax a child. “Just as soon as you get accustomed to the plantation there’ll be all sorts of things you can help us with.”
Jim picked up his bag and looked at Roy. “I’d better be getting along.”
Hermione’s smile did not change or flicker, yet it seemed suddenly an adamant and ruthless line, not a smile at all. “But what about money? Oh, I see. Roy gave it to you!” She did not so much as glance at Roy, but Roy got out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. Hermione said, suddenly coaxing: “Now, Jim dear, I am making no complaints. I don’t object to supporting you. You can help me with—oh, with errands, all sorts of things. You play a very good bridge game. But really you mustn’t behave like a child in a tantrum. What will Roy think of you? What will Nonie think of you?”
Roy said suddenly: “Lay off, Hermione …”
And Jim said, with those agate hard eyes blazing from his white face very distinctly, very deliberately: “If I don’t leave, Hermione, I’ll kill you.”
Hermione laughed. Roy said quickly: “You’d better go, Jim. Nonie, my dear, are you sure you’ll be all right? I can manage to take him, you know, if …”
“I’ll be all right, Roy. I know the boat ….” How quickly again she spoke; how certainly as if she had planned it! And, again, once the words were spoken, she could not retract. She, and Jim with his bag and coat, and Roy were hurrying across the veranda, down the steps.
Jim did not look back at Hermione and she stood still and unruffled with the red smile on her face as if it had been painted there.
Roy put his hand on Jim’s arm. “We’ll have to hurry.”
They went quickly down the path, without speaking. Yet the three of them were sharply aware of that slender, elegant figure above them on the veranda—of the greedy fire and frustration behind the smiling, once-beautiful face.
Roy led the way along the graveled path with its hedges of yellow and green croton plants; at the end of the path a narrow flight of steps went down to the pier, and the motor boat, a small utility cruiser, was lying alongside, rocking gently in the wash of the waves.
“There’s plenty of gas,” said Roy. “In with you. I’ll cast off.”
Jim dropped his bag and coat into the boat and turned to Roy, pulling at his hand. “Thank you, Roy. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I’m sorry things have turned out this way.”
“Well, well! Hermy’s the way she is; can’t be helped. You’ll have to hurry to make the mail boat. Good luck …”
The two men shook hands briefly. Jim got down into the boat and put up his hands toward Nonie, but Roy, holding her strongly, helped her down into the boat, cast a quick and weatherwise glance over the placid water and sky, nodded reassuringly, and smiled down at her.
“Okay?” he said, and she settled into the seat and said: “Okay.”
Jim started the engine with a loud roar of the exhaust which brought Hermione to the veranda railing to watch.
Roy cast off and tossed the line into the boat behind them, and waved. The rhythm of the motor steadied, Jim turned the wheel slowly and they were headed away from Beadon Island. The sea was blue and gold, glittering with light; the sky clear blue above and clear pink toward the west.
Nonie glanced back and already the island seemed smaller. The cove below the house was a cup of blue, the house seemed higher than it actually was; the pinkish, coral rock walls and breakwater, the mangrove thickets, the slope of green lawn above, all stood out with extraordinary clarity like objects in a painted scene.
Roy was going up toward the house. Hermione’s slim figure was moving rather quickly but still arrogantly across the veranda to meet him. One of the windows of the house was open; a window at the end, above the veranda, probably in Aurelia’s room with its great Victorian chests and marble-topped tables. And the huge wardrobe where, now, a white dress, a wedding dress hung, in waiting.
Wednesday—how many hours away? And Jim would not be there; and she was thankful for that. Why had she volunteered to go with him to Elbow Beach? Why had she insisted? Why hadn’t she, instead, stayed with Roy at Beadon Gates? Her home; so soon, her home!
She looked back at the house and wondered briefly if Aurelia was sitting in the gloom beyond the window watching them, and looked along toward the west, past the drifting smoke that hovered over the mill, past massed green rocks and sand to the point where the tiny village of Beadon Rock, a clutch of white roofs and trees and a spire or two seemed to grow out of the coral rock and the wind-beaten palms.
One of those spires marked the church, small and white, its oaken altar rail worn and satiny from age.
Spray flashed higher in wide glittering arcs on either side as the boat turned in a long curve; Nonie brushed the fine cool moisture from her face and tied her hair more tightly. They came parallel with the village and the pier, and the single street running along behind a flat, long row of warehouses. “Well,” said Jim, abruptly, “that’s good-bye to Beadon Island.”
She looked at him quickly; the deadly white look of anger had left his face but he was still shaken with it; his voice sounded tired and rough; his mouth was tight.
“Sometime you’ll come back.”
He shook his head. “No. Not for a long time. Probably never.”
“But you are Hermione’s only relative. If anything happened to her …”
Eventually he’d have to come back to manage Middle Road—he’d live on the island, a neighbor and friend of Royal Beadon’s.
He was shaking his head again. “No. By that time it’ll be too late for me to make the plantation my job and my life. The time for me to become a planter is now. No—this is the end of Middle Road for me.”
“But that was why she asked you to come! It isn’t fair to treat you like this.”
“Oh, well. That’s in the past. I ought not to have let her get under my skin like that. Of course it’s true, everything she said. I haven’t any money. I haven’t a cent. And everything is hers as long as she lives.”
“But it’s your right. … ”
“No. Actually and legally, it isn’t. And she did far more for me than she’d have to do; there were no strings on the property, the way it was left. She wasn’t obliged to do a thing. But she sent me to school, paid for everything up to the time I went into the Navy. When I came out I got a job. I’m an engineer; it was in a contractor’s office. It’s what I’m going back to and damned glad of the chance. Give me a cigarette, will you, Nonie? There are some in the pocket of my coat.”
She got up on her knees on the slippery leather cushion, steadying herself with one hand on Jim’s shoulder. The boat lurched a little as it headed into a wave and she swayed. Jim caught her. “Steady …”
“Thanks.” She clutched quickly at the back of the seat, aware—too strongly aware again of his nearness, of the strength of the arm that caught and steadied her, of the brown hard cheek so near her own. Holding to the seat she fumbled into the pocket of his top coat. There was something heavy and sagging, too heavy to be a package of cigarettes. Her fingers touched metal and she cried: “Why, Jim, there’s a gun!”
“It’s mine. Try the other pocket.”
She pulled the coat around, swaying again with the boat; everybody on the island probably had a gun. The touch of the metal had been startling merely because it was there, because it was cold and unexpected. She found the cigarettes and slid back into the seat again. She lighted a cigarette and he took it without looking at her, his fingers steady and brown.
“Thanks. It’s funny what a woman like Hermione can do to people. She—well, that’s beside the point. Dick can’t help himself now but I can; I’m no worse off than I was a year ago. In fact I’m damned lucky. I’ll have my profession and a job.”
And you’ll never come back to Beadon Island, thought Nonie, with a contradictory feeling of desolation. A moment ago she had dreaded his return; now she thought: you’ll never come back to Middle Road plantation. You’ll forget the island, and you’ll forget everyone here. You’ll forget me—except that I’ll be your friend’s wife.
She must not let such thoughts enter her mind; she must not let them take shape in the silence between them! She must talk, say anything, but talk!
Spray flashed in the sun and the motor thudded through the waves, and Nonie thought, in spite of herself, as if she were two people and one of them had spoken warningly: You must remember this always. You must remember the cool sting of spray on your cheek, the way your hair whips, the sound of the motor. Jim’s hands on the wheel and his face against the glittering bright waves, brown and hard, and frowning a little; the way he puts the cigarette in his mouth and his lips close around it; the way he is looking straight ahead. You must remember all of it—all of it.
She said rather desperately, snatching at something which would build up words as a barrier against thoughts: “I’m new to the island; things that everybody knows I don’t know. I know that Hermione is your father’s sister and that she has the use of a trust fund and Middle Road. But that’s all.”
Jim replied promptly, almost eagerly, indeed, and with a loquaciousness that was not like him. Did he, too, welcome words? She listened, and tried to hear only Jim’s words and nothing spoken in her mind or in her heart. “It’s simple,” Jim said. “One of those things that ought never happen in a family and so often do. I suppose because any family is built on mutual trust. You always feel that when it comes right down to cases you can trust any member of your family to see to any other member of your family. That’s what my grandfather thought. He made two marriages, you see. Hermione was the child of the first marriage; my father was of the second. He died when I was a child. Hermione was the logical person to see to my mother and me. My mother was a delicate, feminine little thing ….She died during the war; I was in the South Pacific. I didn’t know it until three weeks afterward.”
She was listening now, wanting to hear, wanting to know. What had his life been—what had he thought and felt?
How little time there was!
So much to ask, so much to know and they would never meet again, like that.
He said suddenly terse: “Well, my grandfather’s money was put into a trust. Middle Road is part of it. Hermione can use the income as she pleases. My grandfather had absolute faith in her. Why shouldn’t he? And she did see to my mother and me.”
Suddenly Nonie was visited by a small mental picture of a sturdy, brown little boy with tumbled dark hair and scratched knees running in and about the low white house, with its long veranda and the double curved flight of steps leading up to it where, now, Hermione lived, and had, of course, lived then.
“Have you always lived at Middle Road?”
“No,” Jim said shortly, dispelling the picture. “Oh, it’s home to me. But my mother and Hermione …” His mouth closed tightly again. But silence between them was dangerous; silence seemed almost to speak its own and reckless tongue. She said with a kind of breathlessness, snatching at something safe: “Poor Dick Fenby!”
The cold still anger in Jim’s face deepened. “He can’t get away now. In a queer way he’s half in love with her, or was, once. Hermione wouldn’t have him. Yet she keeps him there, working for her, under her thumb. She’s a born bully. She’d never fall in love with anybody; she couldn’t. Dick can’t get away. But I can. We ought to sight Elbow. I wonder what time it is.”
She was wearing the tiny, extravagant watch that her gayly extravagant father had given her the first time she went away to school; she looked at the small circle. “Quarter to four,” she told him. And as the engine surged ahead with a sudden rush she caught her hair back away from her face and searched for Elbow Beach. It was far from dusk; for two or three more hours the sky, the sea, the whole dancing atmosphere between, would be bright and dazzling with lights. The only hint of coming evening—and of coming, tropical night—was a light rosy veil over the western sky. The sun was barely low enough to draw a glittering rapid shadow of the boat beside it through the water. A sail boat, Nonie thought irrelevantly, would have been more fitting to the glancing, dancing, gay and golden Caribbean. And then there was Elbow Beach.