“You don’t have to tell me.” The girl’s dark, long-lashed eyes suddenly blazed. “You heard what Don said about Ivor paying for this dress—for all the trousseau. You think that’s awful—a bridegroom paying for the bride’s clothes.”
Kay’s fingers still clutched the little green leather book. “My dear, I…”
“You’re just like the rest of them. You think I’m marrying him for his money.” There was a swift, almost hysterical defiance in the girl’s voice. “Terry thinks that. Terry used—used to love me, but he hates me now. He despises me because he thinks I’m marrying Ivor to be rich. But I don’t care what any of you think. Why should I?”
Kay was completely off her guard. She could only stare at that taut young figure in the gorgeous wedding gown.
“Ivor is rich. He is older than I. He has been married before. But why shouldn’t I love him? I’m glad he’s rich and can afford all those wonderful things for Daddy. It isn’t a sin to marry a rich man, is it? It isn’t…”
She stopped dead, swinging blindly away as the door opened again and Simon Morley strolled into the room. The girl wore a leaf-green bathrobe over her swimming suit and her amazing chestnut hair was damp and pushed carelessly back from her forehead.
“Just back from aquaplaning with Terry.” She ran a finger around the silver slave bracelet on her wrist. “I heard there was a dress rehearsal, so I came to peek.”
Behind their long lashes her chameleon blue eyes moved over Elaine with the faintest trace of mockery. “Darling, you look too picturesque for words.” Her smile, parting red, exotic lips, seemed to include Kay in its obscure irony. “This trip to the altar Ivor’s certainly ringing the gong, isn’t he?”
The room was caught up in a thick, hostile silence. Vaguely Kay was conscious of voices and a commotion downstairs in the hall and then of footsteps ascending the stairs. To keep herself from thinking, she followed their easy progress with exaggerated attention. The other girls seemed to be listening too. Both of them turned as the footsteps drew nearer and nearer.
Then, at the very pitch of that queerly built-up climax, a tall, lithe man in an immaculate white suit stepped into the room.
Kay felt sudden dizziness. Elaine took a short step forward, her wedding dress rustling like leaves in a spurt of breeze.
“Ivor!”
“Yes, darling. Ivor, by the grace of Pan-American Airways and a hired boat from Hamilton.”
“But—but I thought you were coming tomorrow.”
“So did I until I got onto the plane. A whim, darling. Importunate bridegrooms have a right to be whimsical.”
Very slowly Ivor Drake’s eyes, dark and slightly tilted at the corners, moved from Elaine to Simon Morley. Finally they rested on Kay. They showed not the slightest vestige of surprise or embarrassment.
A smile gave the vivid contrast of white teeth to the deep bronze of his skin.
“This,” he said, “is a stupendous welcome. Kay Winyard, Simon Morley, and Elaine Chiltern, all in a girlish group to greet me. The Three Graces—or would it be The Three Fates?”
He paused.
“The past, the present, and the future.”
Chapter Three
UNEXPECTEDLY in those first grueling seconds Kay’s entire attention was fixed on Simon Morley. The girl was staring at Ivor, her face lit up with sudden incandescent fury.
“You’ll have to get along with only two fates for a while,” she said. “I’m going home.”
After a moment of sharp silence, she flung out of the room.
Ivor’s slight shrug dismissed her. With that slow, extraordinarily supple grace of his, he moved to Elaine and put his hands on her arms. There was a queer tenderness in the dark, faunlike eyes.
“Darling, you’re lovelier than my memory of you.” He kissed her gently on the lips, his fingers moving across the soft taffeta of the wedding gown. “Beautiful and laudably impatient to be a bride.”
Elaine still seemed in a daze. “I was just trying on the dress for Kay. You—you seem to know each other.”
“Yes. We met once—years ago.”
Only then did Ivor Drake turn squarely to Kay. It was amazing how he had not changed a particle in three years. He must be almost forty now. Yet he could have passed for twenty-eight with his slim figure and the tanned, unlined face which showed maturity only in the sophistication of the mouth and in those dangerous mahogany eyes that never missed the tiniest movement in a room or the faintest change of mood.
Ivor Drake had discovered the fountain of youth. That was part of his fascination, part too of the repulsion that came with it. He had no right to be so young-looking and so handsome.
Thoughts were tumbling in Kay’s mind. Had he come back a day earlier because he’d heard she would be there? Had he guessed why she had come? Had he…?
His gaze had shifted to the little green leather book in her hand. Did he know what it was? With the slightest trace of derision in his voice, he said: “I’m delighted at the prospect of having you for an aunt, Miss Winyard.”
“And I’m delighted to be here for the wedding.” Kay felt no awkwardness now, only her own antagonism and more subtly the antagonism emanating from him. “I never forgave myself for only just missing your last one.”
Elaine’s eyes in her pale set face were bright and puzzled. “Kay’s going to be maid of honor, Ivor.”
“So you told me.” For an instant his eyes flickered. “Kay Winyard—maid of honor! What could be more apt?” He slid his arm around Elaine’s waist. “Come, darling, your honorable aunt will be wanting to dress for dinner. We must leave her in peace.”
At the door he paused, glancing at Kay over his shoulder. “That’s quite a sound principle for prospective aunts and nephews, don’t you think—leaving each other in peace?”
That was a definite challenge and Kay accepted it. Although her plans were still vague, she felt oddly sure of herself now. Slipping the little green diary into a drawer of her dressing table, she chose a white evening gown with jade-green sandals. She had picked a spray of feathery blue plumbago from a vase at the bedside and was just arranging it, Bermuda style, in her hair, when the gong boomed for dinner.
After cocktails, most of which were consumed by Ivor, dinner was served, as lunch had been, in the white-walled patio at the back of the house, with candles already lit in high hurricane glasses. In the fading daylight, long shadows played across the lawn, the air was heavy with the evening scent of jasmine, and the sky to the west glowed pink and gold in prologue to sunset.
The insidious glamour of a Bermuda summer evening had enveloped Hurricane House and, inevitably, Ivor Drake had become the pivotal point of the glamour as he sat at the head of his own table, lean and bronzed in his tropical dinner jacket, a stiff highball in his hand, completely at ease with the casual arrogance of a man who knows the power of his own charm.
The moment Kay sat down at the table, she sensed the extraordinary change which had come over the family with Ivor’s arrival. There was nothing tangible. In fact, the Chilterns, all of them, had assumed a sort of overexcited politeness to welcome the unexpected host. And yet beneath the smooth veneer, like the pulsing of a heartbreak, she could feel an undercurrent of tension.
It was in Ivor too—in the very excess of charm in this man who never overexerted himself without a purpose. As the beautifully prepared meal progressed, Kay was almost sure that he was conducting this charm ensemble for her benefit, as the next step in his challenge—just to show her how completely he had her family eating out of his hand.
And then gradually she began to realize that something was going wrong. Acutely conscious of Ivor and his every shift of mood, she detected the change first in him, in a certain insolent tilt to his smile, a caressing softness in his voice which spelled danger. And slowly she realized the cause, realized that for some unfathomable reason the Chilterns were no longer responding the way he wanted them to. Elaine, lovely and flowerlike in a white satin dress similar to Kay’s
, had slipped into apathetic silence. Terry too seemed remote, awkwardly out of the group. Even Maud, in spite of Ivor’s attempts to attract her interest, was withdrawn in some reverie of her own.
Kay felt increasingly keyed up. She knew Ivor so well, knew that lack of adulation, particularly from dependents, was poison to him and that, subjected to it, the paper-thin layer of charm could be ripped like a circus hoop. She watched the danger signals of his mounting exasperation, waited for the flare of almost feminine spite which was bound to come.
And it came with a suddenness that startled even her.
Staring down the table at Maud, Ivor said casually: “Do you know if the bed’s made up in the playhouse?”
“Terry’s been sleeping over there. But I can easily get Don to take clean sheets over after dinner if you want to be on the island.”
“It’s bad luck for the bridegroom to sleep under the same roof with the bride. I’d be more conventional in the playhouse.” Ivor’s gaze, dark and sardonic, shifted around the table to Terry. “That is, unless Terry doesn’t want to move out.”
Terry looked up. “Why should I care?”
“Well, it’s charmingly private on the island.” Ivor shrugged. “And it only takes six minutes to row over there from the Morley house.”
Terry’s eyes went steel hard and his mouth tightened into a pale, thin line.
“Just what are you implying?”
Kay saw the quick parting of Ivor’s lips. “Come, Terry, you’re a grown man now. Or aren’t you? Bermuda’s the place for romance. Simon’s a very attractive girl and I—er—understand she’ll go quite a long way for a slave bracelet.”
Slowly Terry rose, his long body looming over the table. In a low dry voice, he said: “You swine! You damn, lying swine!”
The table was electrified into silence. Maud stared, her face an astonished blank. Ineffectually Gilbert called: “Terry!”
It was amazing that the polite veneer could be cracked so suddenly and so completely. It was amazing too—the white, impassioned fury that was in Terry.
Ivor was watching him, his eyes lit up with a queer brightness, his fingers tightening around his highball glass. “It’s not exactly polite to call me a damn, lying swine in my own house, is it?” His nostrils were quivering faintly. “I may have been able to make things comfortable for your father and mother. I may be willing to finance the completion of your liberal education. But I’m still hoping to be able to marry Elaine without having to deed you my house too.”
As he delivered that final, crude taunt, his eyes slid for one instant to Kay and with sudden clairvoyance she saw the motive behind this wanton attack. Ivor had failed in trying to show her how he could charm the Chilterns; now he was letting her see just how successful he could be in humiliating them.
For one long moment Terry had stood completely still. Then, without warning, he lunged toward Ivor, his chair spilling back behind him.
Elaine jumped up and sprang between the two men, her face white as the white satin of her gown. She clutched Terry’s arm.
“Don’t, Terry! Don’t be a fool!”
“A fool!” The boy’s savage gaze shifted to his sister. “I suppose I’m meant to say: ‘Thank you, Mr. Drake.’ I suppose I’m meant to be like you and the rest of them, licking his boots, fawning on him like a bunch of lap dogs, just because he’s rich and you’re scared silly he won’t marry you and redeem the family fortunes.” He swung away, completely ignoring Ivor, glaring down the table at his father and mother. “You’re my parents. I’m supposed to look up to you and respect you. Respect you! I’d rather be dead than be the way you are.”
Elaine said hoarsely: “Terry, you must be crazy! You must…”
He turned back to her, shaking her hand roughly from his arm.
“You!” he said. “You cheap little money-grubbing floosie! Here’s what I think of you.”
Jerkily he lifted his hand and brought the flat of his palm stingingly down on his sister’s cheek.
While the others stared in deep, stunned silence, he gave a little sob and, half running, half stumbling, hurried to the yellow patio door, tugged it open, and disappeared through it.
Slowly, as in a daze, Elaine’s fingers moved to the reddening weal on her cheek. Her eyes; green and flat, stared blindly in front of her.
“I-Excuse me. I think I’ll go upstairs.”
She ran into the house. Maud started to follow and then stopped. Ivor, serene and entirely unruffled, had sat down again at the table and was balancing his highball glass on the edge. He said: “Maud, dear, you really should eat your crepes suzettes before they get cold. They are very good.”
His contemptuous composure was unendurable to Kay. Hardly conscious of the others, she moved away and hurried out through the patio door.
In spite of that incredible scene, she felt a strong flood of triumph. Terry had stood up to Ivor. He had had the courage to speak the truth about the whole setup. Ahead, in the rapidly thickening dusk, she could just make out her nephew’s figure moving across the lawn to the dock. She must go to him, tell him the whole truth, let him know how right he had been, let him know she was on his side, that now they were together.
When she reached the wooden wharf, she saw the cruiser lying off the diving raft, saw the speedboat moored to the dock with the aquaplane board, tossed in the stern, still attached to the gunwale by long, tangled ropes. Hanging on the dock rail, like pale limp ghosts, were the family swimming suits and towels, stretched to dry. Maud’s dark, shadowy; Elaine’s gleaming silver white with the small platinum-silver cap perched grotesquely on a post head at its side.
The rhythmic splash of oars drew her attention to Terry. He was in a punt rowing toward a sailboat which stood out as a white blur against the dark of the island beyond.
“Terry…!” she called.
There was no reply.
“Terry. It’s Kay. Come back.”
But the boy rowed doggedly on. It was obvious he wanted to be alone. Poor Terry! She understood so well. It was not only Ivor’s cruel gibes at Simon. Terry’s tempestuous flash of anger had shown her into the deepest recesses of his young heart, had shown her a glimpse of the hell of shame and disgust he was enduring at seeing his mother and father and his beloved sister acting out what to him was a cheap, dishonorable sham.
She felt helpless and alone, as if this family she had loved so much had become something alien and remote.
Terry had reached the sailboat now. Kay moved away from the dock, starting along the shallow cliffs which, massed with great century plants and sharp, white-plumed yuccas, dropped to the swimming beach below. The stars, dim a moment before, blazed as if some gigantic hand had suddenly polished them, and a faint glow over the velvet water hinted at the moon’s approach.
Without the slightest warning, a voice sounded behind her.
“Thank God, you’ve come.”
She spun round. A man, shadowy and unidentifiable in the dusk, stood straight in front of her. Before she could speak, his arms, bare to the elbow, had slipped around her waist and were pulling her toward him. His lips, warm and brutally insistent, found hers, pressing them in a long, passionate kiss.
Kay was too startled even to think, let alone to cry out or to struggle free from those strong, encircling arms.
The man’s mouth slid away from hers. His voice, hoarse and urgent, was whispering: “I’ve been through hell waiting, wondering if you’d come. I…”
She recognized him then, recognized the husky voice, the blunt, strong face of Ivor Drake’s boatman. And, as she did so, she felt his body go rigid, felt his arms release her. Now that the first flurry of emotion was gone, she realized the staggering truth.
Trying to keep her voice steady, she said: “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong girl, Mr. Baird.”
The boatman stood absolutely still, staring at her. “The white dress,” he blurted. “She has a white dress too. I…”
“You thought I was Elaine.” Kay’s mind
was swirling at the implications of this utterly undreamed-of thing. “You—you and Elaine!”
“I told you I was going to stop that wedding.” He gave a short laugh. “Maybe now you see why.”
“She was planning to meet you here. She… You’ve got to tell me. Is she in love with you?”
“In love with me!” In the starlight his eyes were very bright and wild. “She damn well better be if she knows what’s good for her.”
“But why—why is she marrying Ivor?”
“Do you think I know that? Do you think I can tell what goes on in that muddled head of hers? He’s rich, isn’t he? He’s glamorous. She’s young and a fool and frightened of being poor. She doesn’t know what it’s all about. That’s why I told her to meet me tonight— to get wise to herself.” The words came thickly, incoherently. “This afternoon I made her talk, made her try and face an issue for a change. I told her she was going to cut free from this filthy racket and go away with me. Oh, I haven’t a red cent. It’d mean arriving flat broke in New York until I could land a job. It’d mean bingo to my plans for studying law. It’d be hell to offer any girl—but it’s worth it; it’s a thousand times worth it to save her from marrying that…”
His voice suddenly stopped and he gripped her arm. Kay turned.
About twenty feet away up the path to the house, the red tip of a cigarette was glowing. Behind it, a tall, lean shadow in the starlight, stood the white-coated figure of Ivor Drake.
In a second he was with them, moving with that strange, supple grace. “I’m sleeping on the island tonight, Don. I want you to take sheets and things over and make up the bed. You can do that, can’t you?” He felt in his pocket and brought out a bunch of keys.
“While you’re about it, you can take my bags over and unpack. A little valeting would do you good.” His dark eyes, bright and steady in the light from his cigarette, shifted to Kay. “Incidentally, I hope you enjoyed your little conversation with Miss Winyard… because it will almost certainly be your last. You’re paid by me to work, not to—entertain my guests.”
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