by Susan Barrie
Signor Valdoli had his work cut out soothing Rosalie, and preventing her mother also going in for hysterics—or remembering that she had a weak heart!—and Raoul had eyes and ears only for Madelon, who was clinging to his arm. Madame Villennes—perhaps the least concerned of all the women—kept snapping Tim Strangeways head off every time he tried to reassure her about the progress of the fire, and the certainty that they would be, taken off in the boats before any actual danger threatened, and Neil was determined to look after Steve.
The host—with the safety of all of them resting on his shoulders—could attach himself to no one individually, and he kept going the rounds and attempting to hearten them all, in between also ascertaining that the various members of the crew were up on deck, and there was no danger of anyone being left behind.
Gabrielle called to him appealingly whenever he moved near to her:
“Léon! Oh, Léon, this is ghastly! I’ve left all my things in my cabin, and this horrible man won’t let me go back and get them!” She beat at the brown, sailor-like arm that was keeping her in check. “He didn’t even give me a chance to dress!” This time she scratched the arm viciously with her pearl-colored nails, and he swore at her in French.
“You son of a pig!” she cried. “I’ll inform your employer! I’ll see that you are sacked!” Then, in shrill appeal, as the Comte once again drew near: “Léon, I must get some of my things! Order one of your men below to fetch me something I can wear, and at least I must have my beauty-box...” And then, as she suddenly remembered it: “My jewel-case! Léon! I must have my jewel-case!”
But when she was somewhat inconsiderately bundled into the launch that also contained Rosalie Trent and her mother, as well as Signor Valdoli and Madame Villennes, she was still without the one possession she prized above everything else, and she was still without the wonderful gold-mounted case that contained all her bottles and lotions and various forms of make-up.
Behind her in the second launch, Steve found herself sitting beside the French girl, Madelon, and beside Madelon, Raoul de Courvalles, already with the signs of a beard on his handsome dark face, had his arm along her shoulders, and one of her hands was tightly clasped in his free hand.
Neil Heritage sat just behind Steve, and the Comte de Courvalles slipped into the only vacant space beside him just before the launch was thrust off.
By that time the Odette was blazing like an inferno in her after-part, and tongues of flame leapt high in the sky. The noise of the fire was terrifying to the little collection of people who were now rendered homeless, with nothing but the broad bosom of the Indian Ocean to float on, and the brightening sky on all sides of them.
But as the last flower-like star dipped and waxed and then finally waned, and the eager chugging of the motor in the smart white launch filled all the atmosphere about them, and the Odette was finally abandoned, it was at the face of the Comte Steve found herself looking, and not back at the ill-fated Odette.
He was doing just that. Looking back across the shimmering surface of the water, in the exquisite coolness of early dawn, with a sea of tender, tranquil blue sky spreading above them like a canopy, and his dark, grave, distant face was utterly inscrutable. Steve found herself reaching out a hand and touching him. Without realizing what she was doing she rested a hand upon his sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “The Odette was such a beautiful yacht. But one day you’ll have another!”
He looked down at her hand, resting like a slim golden flower on the sleeve of his white tropical jacket; and then he picked it up and held it thoughtfully, and finally carried it up to his lips.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said quietly, and they looked into one another’s eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HOURS later they were still in the launch, and there was no sign of either of the other boats. It was fiercely hot, and although the men had rigged up a kind of awning to give Steve and Madelon certain amount of protection from the glare, the rest of them had no protection whatsoever.
The last they saw of the Odette she was still burning like a piece of tinder. The rising sun put out the light of the fire so far as they were concerned, and by that time they were a considerable distance away from the yacht. After another hour or so the engine of the launch spluttered and died on them and the two seamen who were with them had to take to the oars. Neil Heritage also seized a pair of oars, and although they didn’t make such good progress as before they still shot ahead, and it was only the fact that the sea was quite empty that created a hollow feeling of alarm inside Steve.
Heritage explained that they were slightly off the track of passing ships, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t sight one at any moment. And at any moment they might sight one of those green saucers of land that dotted the Indian Ocean.
But it was late evening before anything in the nature of land rewarded their anxious and constant look-out. And by that time Steve was exhausted with the heat, the excitement of the night before and the monotony of watching men ceaselessly rowing, and knowing she could do nothing to help them. She fell asleep several times during the course of that long day, and each time when she awakened someone had done his very utmost to make her comfortable.
Once, when she awakened, her head was pillowed on the Comte’s shoulder, and his arm was about her and holding her strongly. At her first movement he spoke soothingly to her and touched her cheek with a gentle finger, and because the brilliant glare from off the water was in her eyes, and she couldn’t see any of the others, she looked straight up into the eyes of the man who employed her ... or had done until a few hours before!
“My poor little one,” he said gently, tenderly, and it seemed to her there was no memory, of the painful scene in which she had been involved on their last night on the Odette in those strangely caressing and concerned eyes.
Madelon also slumbered for hours in the cramped space allotted to her, and Raoul bent over her with the same solicitude the Comte reserved for Steve. Only Neil Heritage looked a little wry, and out of the picture, as he sat determinedly working his oars.
They had the means of making coffee in the launch, and a certain amount of dry foodstuff, so, as the hours passed, they were not hungry, but there was tremendous relief in their hearts when the green atoll of land appeared above the rim of the ocean as the sun was slowly westering.
In the tranquil golden light it looked no more than a few waving palm tops and a placid strip of beach, but once they got nearer to it they could see that it was quite a sizeable island, with some dense patches of forest inland. A high hill rose to a conical peak in the centre, and the sides of it were clothed with some brilliantly colorful growth.
As the boat was run ashore, and the women were helped to land, some brilliantly plumaged birds flew out from the nearest outcrop of underbrush. The circled, screaming, in the air, and then flew back into cover, while from the tall tops of the trees came the noisy chattering of monkeys, Madelon, who was perhaps slightly fresher than Steve, was intrigued by the sight of a monkey running up a tree, and Raoul said he would catch one for her as a souvenir before they left the island.
They all knew he was joking, but it was a good time to joke when the stillness of evening was closing like a mantle over this utterly unknown small area of land on which they stood. There was exquisite scents that floated on the becalmed atmosphere around them as if they were unseen ambrosial clouds compounded of the very essence of the island, and the lazy slap and surge of the lagoon was like strange music in the otherwise all prevailing silence. But that very silence, which could be felt, was sinister, and in their weary condition the beauty of the first stars caught up in the fantastic fronds of palm leaves was a beauty that passed them by.
Madelon spoke for all of them when she said:
“Well, I’m glad we’ve got somewhere at last, but I’m too dead tired to care where it is! Even if the place is infested with cannibals I couldn’t care less!”
Steve smiled, but she
knew those were precisely her own sentiments. Unlike Madelon she was not consumed by a secret anxiety for a close relative—for Madelon’s grandmother was in one of the other two launches—but she had conceived for Madelon herself a great admiration as the gruelling day wore itself out. Gabrielle, in the same boat with them, would have been something in the nature of the last straw, but Madelon had remained cheerful throughout, and even now, in spite of the exhaustion that made her gamine face look pale and peaked, she was quick to lend a hand when it came to unloading stores from the boat.
“I don’t know whether you’re all in agreement,” the Comte remarked, when the last case had been carried into the shelter of the first line of trees, and some blankets flung down as ground-sheets, “but unless you’re all desperately hungry I suggest we have some coffee and go bed. Or rather, try to sleep!”
Everyone agreed immediately, and the small spirit stove that had heated the coffee in the launch was got into action, the plastic mugs were handed round, and everyone stretched themselves out luxuriously on the still warm sand, heedless of whether or not they were in close proximity to a male or a female.
Only Neil Heritage gazed at the sky rather intently, and wandered off on a small expedition of his own. When he came back he suggested that they left the protection of the line of trees and slept out in the open, under the stars. As he explained, when disgruntled rejections of the idea greeted him at once, they were in the right area for sudden storms, and with tremendous tree-trunks towering up on all sides of them they could be in danger if a tree happened to be struck by lightning, or was brought down by a gale of wind.
At that moment, so still was it that the very idea of a gale of wind seemed a freakish notion. But Heritage was an experienced seaman, and the Comte decided they would be wise to take his advice, and move into the open, and the move was made without any further loss of time.
When she lay down for the second time Steve was so drugged with weariness that she was certain she would be asleep in no time at all. But, although she had been provided with a pillow—the Comte had insisted on rolling up his jacket for her to rest her head on—and it was sheer bliss to be able to stretch out her limbs after the cramped position she had had to maintain in the boat, after the first few minutes or so, when nobody uttered a sound, and only the fitful beam of a cigarette-end stabbed the velvety blackness that was now all around them, she had the feeling that her eyelids grew lighter instead of heavier, and she simply couldn’t resist the temptation to let them fly wide and peer into the darkness.
Perhaps it was the very quality of that smothering, all-enveloping darkness that struck a chord of awe in her heart ... even fear. The stars, that had been so bright immediately after the sun set, were now practically invisible, and although the moon was due to rise there was no sign of it doing so. And the atmosphere was almost stiflingly close, as if an animal’s warm breath was being breathed out over them.
Steve felt her heart begin to pound slowly and heavily. The lazy slap and surge of the lagoon was more like thunder when one lay with one’s ear to the ground, and the hideous call of a night-bird—or was it an unknown animal?—chilled the blood on its way through her veins. She became rigid with nerves.
She moved restlessly, praying that she wouldn’t disturb the others—although one of the two seamen was already beginning to snore heavily—and then a hand came out and groped for one of her cold, moist ones, and in relief she grasped at the firm fingers. She was lying beside the Comte, with Neil Heritage on her other side; but she knew it was the Comte’s hand she grasped, and she knew it was his voice that spoke to her softly, with that slight, fascinating French accent of his, from a distance of only a few inches away.
“What is it, little one?” he whispered. “Do you find it hard to sleep?”
She answered by clutching his fingers so tight that he slid his free arm under her, and drew her close. She could feel the strong, steady beating of his heart as her head went down on his shoulder, and his breath stirred her hair. There was the warm scent of cigarette smoke on his breath, and his lips were actually resting against her forehead. His arms clasped her securely.
“Is that better?” he whispered, for her ear alone, and she made a little movement with her head like an eager nod. He drew her closer still, and in a matter of seconds, blissfully encompassed by a sense of impregnable security, she was asleep.
But not for long. She was awakened by screaming wind and the furious lashing to and fro of palm branches. The water in the lagoon had gone quite mad and was like a seething cauldron—although no one could actually see it boiling over in the intense blackness—and from the forest inland came the blood-curdling voices of animals in a state of direst panic.
Steve tried to sit up, after gasping out a terrified inquiry as to what had happened, but the arms that had held her while she slept refused to permit her to do anything so rash.
“Lie still,” Léon de Courvalles ordered, shouting violently—although she didn’t realize it—above the din and tumult, to make himself heard. “Keep as still as you can, bury your head in my chest.” His hand forced her head into his chest, and although it was stifling hot, and she had the terrifying sensation that she would soon cease to breathe, she managed to do as he ordered, and while the world went mad around them—and she hadn’t the least idea what was happening to the others—she clung to him, and practically forced her head through his hard brown chest, and felt his arms bruising every one of her ribs. And then came the rain, descending as she had never known rain descend before, as if it was following an almost vertical line. It drummed on the leaves and bounced on the beach like the impact of cannon-balls, and as she felt it soak her through and through it also seemed to scourge her body as if it was a whole series of whips or flails. The Comte did his utmost to keep the worst violence of it away from her, but his most frenzied efforts were puny while the storm was at its worst; and while the thunder rolled and the lightning flashed—presenting her with an excellent opportunity to see the whole of the beach, as if it was floodlit, if she had dared to lift her head—Steve was more or less certain that this was the final catastrophe, and that they could none of them possibly survive it.
But, as is the way with tropical steams, it had come and gone while she was still not quite certain whether she was dead or alive. There was the numbness of despair in the way she clung to the Comte, but at the same time, the occasional flashes of knowledge that it was his arms that were holding her were a heaven in themselves. When she looked back on that night in after days it was with the conviction that the few moments when she was in heaven more than made up for the many moments when she was in a state of sheer mental terror and acute physical discomfort. And as soon as the rain had stopped, the wind died, and the sun was coming up out of the sea.
Steve found that her sopping dressing-gown was giving off a cloud of steam as the immediate warmth drew the moisture out of it, and the Comte was in the same condition as herself, steaming from every pore, as it were. When she looked round dazedly at the others she found that they were all in a similar condition, and all very grateful to Neil Heritage that he had had the forethought to suggest sleeping in the open, and not on the fringe of the forest, where fallen giants were lying like matchsticks, and accounted for the vague crashing noises Steve had heard during the height of the gale.
She made an effort to get to her feet, but her limbs were bruised from the assault of the elements, and she was glad to be assisted on to her feet by the man who had stayed so close to her all through those hours of darkness. When she looked into his eyes, and realized how violently dishevelled she was, with her still wet dressing-gown plastered to her, she flushed brilliantly, and, although she didn’t realize it, looked so attractive that the Comte smiled at her with open tenderness, although by this time there were lookers-on.
“I suggest that, if you want to get quite dry, and recover the use of your limbs, you go for a run along the beach,” he said. “Or at any rate, a walk. And I’ll come
with you!”
Heritage watched them go, and Raoul and Madelon also watched them go. But Raoul and Madelon merely smiled into one another’s eyes, as if they understood perfectly the reason why two people had a desire to be alone—or as far from human eyes as they could get just then—and only the Englishman sighed inwardly as he admitted to himself that a dream was ended.
Steve had no need of him. It was not he she had turned to during the hours of darkness. Not he who had held her while the storm was at its worst.
And the only thing he could think of that was any comfort just then—and even that comfort didn’t really extend to himself—was that Gabrielle was not with them. Wherever she was at that moment she couldn’t spoil things for Steve, or do anything vicious to harm her.
Steve was temporarily safe from Gabrielle!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BUT, although she might be safe from Gabrielle, Steve could not escape from the sense of confusion that had her in its grip as she sped away along the beach ahead of the man who followed her
At first she moved so awkwardly that she expected at any moment to trip up, and measure her length on the sand. But as her stiffened muscles ceased to be so stiff, and elasticity came back to her movements, she ran like the wind, and the Comte ran after her.
He caught her up when, through sheer breathlessness, she was forced to stop and lean against a tree-trunk; and although as she looked at him she knew that his long strides could have overtaken her before, she was grateful that he had given her that little respite, and although she was panting and breathless she was once more partially herself. But only partially. She would never again belong entirely to herself!
