A long, gray roller swept upon and over her, brimming her cockpit with foaming water. As it passed he saw the half-drowned men release the coamings, to which they had clung on involuntary impulse to escape being swept away, scramble upon the cabin roof, and with one accord abandon themselves to the will of the next wave to follow. As it broke over the boat and passed, he caught an instantaneous glimpse of their heads and arms bobbing and beating frantically as they whirled off through the yeasty welter.
But he saw this without pity or compassion. If he had been able to have his will with them, he would have sunk both ten fathoms deep without an instant's respite. His throat was choked with curses that welled up from a heart wrenched and raging at this discovery of cowardice unparalleled.
They had done what they could for themselves without even hesitating to release the woman imprisoned in the cabin.
TheTrouble, meantime, was closing in upon the scene of tragedy with little less than locomotive speed. Yet, however suddenly disaster had overtaken the other vessel, Whitaker saw what he saw and had time to take measures to avoid collision, if what he did was accomplished wholly without conscious thought or premeditation. He had applied the reversing gear to the motor before he knew it. Then, while the engine choked, coughing angrily, and reversed with a heavy and resentful pounding in the cylinder-heads, he began to strip off his coat. He was within ten yards of the wreck when a wave overtook theTroubleand sent a sheet of water sprawling over her stern to fill the cockpit ankle-deep. The next instant he swung the wheel over; the boat, moving forward despite the resistance of the propeller, drove heavily against the wreck, broadside to its stern. As this happened Whitaker leaped from one to the other, went to his knees in the cockpit of the wreck, and rose just in time to grasp the coaming and hold on against the onslaught of a hurtling comber.
It came down, an avalanche, crashing and bellowing, burying him deep in green. Thunderings benumbed him, and he began to strangle before it passed....
He found himself filling his lungs with free air and fighting his way toward the cabin doors through water waist-deep. Then he had won to them, had found and was tearing frantically at the solid brass bolt that held them shut. In another breath he had torn them open, wide, discovering the woman, her head and shoulders showing above the flood as she stood upon a transom, near the doorway, grasping a stanchion for support. Her eyes met his, black and blank with terror. He snatched through sheer instinct at a circular life-preserver that floated out toward him, and simultaneously managed to crook an arm round her neck.
Again the sea buried them beneath tons of raging dark water. Green lightnings flashed before his eyes, and in his ears there was a crashing like the crack of doom. His head was splitting, his heart on the point of breaking. The wave passed on, roaring. He could breathe. Now if ever....
As if stupefied beyond sensibility, the woman was passive to his handling. If she had struggled, if she had caught at and clung to him, or even if she had tried to help herself, he would in all likelihood have failed to cheat destruction. But she did none of these things, and he managed somehow to drag her from the cabin to the cockpit and to jam the life ring over her head and under one arm before the next wave bore down upon them.
As the wall of living green water drew near, he twisted one hand into the life-line of the cork ring and lifted the woman to the seat of the cockpit.
They were borne down, brutally buffeted, smothered and swept away. They came to the surface in the hollow of a deep, gray swale, fully fifty feet from the wreck. Whitaker retained his grasp of the life-preserver line. The woman floated easily in the support. He fancied a gleam of livelier consciousness in her staring eyes, and noticed with a curiously keen feeling of satisfaction that she was not only keeping her mouth closed, but had done so, apparently, while under water.
Relieved from danger of further submersion, at all events for the time being, he took occasion to rally his wits and look about him as well as he was able. It was easy, now, to understand how the kidnappers had come to their disaster; at this distance he could see plainly, despite the scudding haze, the profile of a high bluff of wave-channelled and bitten earth rising from a boulder-strewn beach, upon which the surf broke with a roar deafening and affrighting. Even a hardy swimmer might be pardoned for looking askance at such a landing. And Whitaker had a woman to think of and care for. Difficult to imagine how he was to drag her, and himself, through that vicious, pounding surf, without being beaten to jelly against the boulders....
As the next billow swung them high on its racing crest, he, gaining a broader field of vision, caught an instantaneous impression of a stark shoulder of the land bulking out through the mists several hundred yards to the left; suggesting that the shore curved inward at that spot. The thought came to him that if he could but weather that point, he might possibly find on the other side a better landing-place, out of the more forcible, direct drive of surf. It would be next to an impossibility to make it by swimming, with but one arm free, and further handicapped by the dead weight of the woman. And yet that way lay his only hope.
In that same survey he saw theTrouble, riding so low, with only bow and coamings awash, that he knew she must be waterlogged, rolling beam-on in to the beach. Of the two men from the other boat he saw nothing whatever. And when again he had a similar chance to look, the hapless power-boat was being battered to pieces between the boulders. Even such would be their fate unless....
He put forth every ounce of strength and summoned to his aid all his water wisdom and skill. But he fought against terrible odds, and there was no hope in him as he fought.
Then suddenly, to his utter amazement, the lift of a wave discovered to him a different contour of the shore; not that the shore had changed, but his position with regard to it had shifted materially and in precisely the way that he had wished for and struggled to bring about. Instead of being carried in to the rock-strewn beach, they were in the grip of a backwash which was bearing them not only out of immediate danger, but at the same time alongshore toward the point under whose lee he hoped to find less turbulent conditions.
It was quite half the battle—more than half; he had now merely to see that the set of this backward flow did not drag them too far from shore. Renewed faith in his star, a sense of possible salvation, lent strength to his flagging efforts. Slowly, methodically, he worked with his charge toward the landward limits of the current, cunningly biding the time to abandon it. And very soon that time came; they were abreast the point; he could see something of a broad, shelving beach, backed by lesser bluffs, to leeward of it. He worked free of the set with a mighty expenditure of force, nervous and physical, and then for a time, rested, limiting his exertion strictly to the degree requisite to keep him afloat, while the waves rocked him landwards with the woman. He found leisure even to give her a glance to see whether she still lived, was conscious or comatose.
He found her not only fully aware of her position, but actually swimming a little—striking out with more freedom than might have been expected, considering how her arms and shoulders were hampered by the life-ring. A suspicion crossed his mind that most probably she had been doing as much for a considerable time, that to her as much as to himself their escape from the offshore drift had been due. Certainly he could not doubt that her energies had been subjected to a drain no less severe than he had suffered. Her face was bloodless to the lips, pale with the pallor of snow; deep bluish shadows ringed eyes that had darkened strangely, so that they seemed black rather than violet; her features were so drawn and pinched that he almost wondered how he could have thought her beautiful beyond all living women. And her wondrous hair, broken from its fastenings, undulated about her like a tangled web of sodden sunbeams.
Three times he essayed to speak before he could wring articulate sounds from his cracked lips and burning throat.
"You ... all right?"
She replied with as much difficulty:
"Yes ... you may ... let go...."
To relax the swollen fingers that grasped the life-line was pure torture.
He attempted no further communication. None, indeed, was needed. It was plain that she understood their situation.
Some minutes passed before he became aware that they were closing in quickly to the shelving beach—so swiftly, indeed, that there was reason to believe the onward urge of the waves measurably reënforced by a shoreward set of current. But if they had managed to escape the greater fury on the weather side of the point, they had still a strong and angry surf to reckon with. Only a little way ahead, breakers were flaunting their white manes, while the thunder of their breaking was as the thundering of ten thousand hoofs.
Whitaker looked fearfully again at the woman. But she was unquestionably competent to care for herself. Proof of this he had in the fact that she had contrived to slip the life-preserver up over her head and discard it altogether. Thus disencumbered, she had more freedom for the impending struggle.
He glanced over his shoulder. They were on the line of breakers. Behind them a heavy comber was surging in, crested with snow, its concave belly resembling a vast sheet of emerald. In another moment it would be upon them. It was the moment a seasoned swimmer would seize.
His eye sought the girl's. In hers he read understanding and assent. Of one mind, they struck out with all their strength. The comber overtook them, clasped them to its bosom, tossed them high upon its great glassy shoulder. They fought madly to retain that place, and to such purpose that they rode it over a dozen yards before it crashed upon the beach, annihilating itself in a furious welter of creaming waters. Whitaker felt land beneath his feet....
The rest was like the crisis of a nightmare drawn out to the limit of human endurance. Conscious thought ceased: terror and panic and the blind instinct of self-preservation—these alone remained. The undertow tore at Whitaker's legs as with a hundred murderous hands. He fought his way forward a few paces—or yard or two—only to be overwhelmed, ground down into the gravel. He rose through some superhuman effort and lunged on, like a blind, hunted thing.... He came out of it eventually to find himself well up on the beach, out of the reach of the waves. But the very earth seemed to billow about him, and he could hardly keep his feet. A numbing faintness with a painful retching at once assailed him. He was but vaguely aware of the woman reeling not far from him, but saved....
Later he found that something of the worst effects had worn away. His scattered wits were reëstablishing intercommunication. The earth was once more passably firm beneath him. He was leaning against the careened hulk of a dismantled cat-boat with a gaping rent in its side. At a little distance the woman was sitting in the sands, bosom and shoulders heaving convulsively, damp, matted hair veiling her like a curtain of sunlit seaweed.
He moved with painful effort toward her. She turned up to him her pitiful, writhen face, white as parchment.
"Are you—hurt?" he managed to ask. "I mean—injured?"
She moved her head from side to side, as if she could not speak for panting.
"I'm—glad," he said dully. "You stay—here.... I'll go get help."
He raised his eyes, peering inland.
Back of the beach the land rose in long, sweeping hillocks, treeless but green. His curiously befogged vision made out a number of shapes that resembled dwellings.
"Go ... get ... help ..." he repeated thickly.
He started off with a brave, staggering rush that carried him a dozen feet inland. Then his knees turned to water, and the blackness of night shut down upon his senses.
Sleep is a potent medicine for the mind; but sometimes the potion is compounded with somewhat too heavy a proportion of dreams and nonsense; when it's apt to play curious tricks with returning consciousness. When Whitaker awoke he was on the sands of Narragansett, and the afternoon was cloudy-warm and bright, so that his eyes were grateful for the shade of a white parasol that a girl he knew was holding over him; and his age was eighteen and his cares they were none; and the girl was saying in a lazy, laughing voice: "I love my love with a P because he's Perfectly Pulchritudinous and Possesses the Power of Pleasing, and because he Prattles Prettily and his socks are Peculiarly Purple—"
"And," the man who'd regained his youth put in, "his name is Peter and he's Positively a Pest...."
But the voice in which he said this was quite out of the picture—less a voice than a croak out of a throat kiln-dry and burning. So he grew suspicious of his senses; and when the parasol was transformed into the shape of a woman wearing a clumsy jacket of soiled covert-cloth over a non-descript garment of weirdly printed calico—then he was sure that something was wrong with him.
Besides, the woman who wasn't a parasol suddenly turned and bent over him an anxious face, exclaiming in accents of consternation: "O dear! If he's delirious—!"
His voice, when he strove to answer, rustled and rattled rather than enunciated, surprising him so that he barely managed to say: "What nonsense! I'm just thirsty!" Then the circuit of returning consciousness closed and his lost youth slipped forever from his grasp.
"I thought you would be," said the woman, calmly; "so I brought water. Here...."
She offered a tin vessel to his lips, as he lay supine, spilling a quantity of its contents on his face and neck and a very little into his mouth, if enough to make him choke and splutter. He sat up suddenly, seized the vessel—a two-quart milk-pail—and buried his face in it, gradually tilting it, while its cool, delicious sweetness irrigated his arid tissues, until every blessed drop was drained. Then, and not till then, he lowered the pail and with sane vision began to renew acquaintance with the world.
He was sitting a trifle out of the shallow imprint of his body in the sands, in the lee of the beached cat-boat he now recalled as one might the features of an incubus. The woman he had rescued sat quite near him. The gale was still booming overhead, but now with less force (or so he fancied); and the surf still crashed in thunders on the beach a hundred feet or more away; but the haze was lighter, and the blue of the sky was visible, if tarnished.
Looking straight ahead from where he sat, the sands curved off in a wide crescent, ending in a long, sandy spit. Beyond this lay a broad expanse of maddened water, blue and white, backed by the empurpled loom of a lofty headland, dim in the smoky distance.
On his right lay the green landscape, reminiscent even as the boat was reminiscent in whose shadow he found himself: both fragments of the fugitive impressions gathered in that nightmare time of landing. There was a low, ragged earth-bank rising from the sands to a clutter of ramshackle, unpainted, hideous wooden buildings—some hardly more than sheds; back of these and stretching away on either hand, a spreading vista of treeless uplands, gently undulant and richly carpeted with grass and under-growth in a melting scheme of tender browns and greens and yellows, with here and there a trace of dusky red. Midway between the beach and where the hazy uplands lifted their blurred profile against the faded sky, set some distance apart from the community of dilapidated structures, stood a commonplace farm-house, in good repair, strongly constructed and neatly painted; with a brood of out buildings. Low stone fences lined the uplands with wandering streaks of gray. Here and there, in scattered groups and singly, sheep foraged. But they were lonely evidences of life. No human being was visible in any quarter.
With puzzled eyes Whitaker sought counsel and enlightenment of the woman, and found in her appearance quite as much to confound anticipation and deepen perplexity. She was hardly to be identified with the delightfully normal, essentially well-groomed creature he remembered. What she had worn when setting forth to call on him, accompanied by her maid, the night before, he could not say; but it certainly could have had nothing in common with her present dress—the worn, stained, misshapen jacket covering her shoulders, beneath it the calico wrapper scant and crude beyond belief, upon her feet the rusty wrecks that once had been shoes.
As for himself, a casual examination proved that the rags and tatters adorning him were at least to be recognized as the remains of his own clothing. His coat was lost, of course, and his collar he had torn away, together with a portion of his shirt, while in the water after the disaster; but his once white flannel trousers were precious souvenirs, even if one leg was ripped open to the knee, and even though the cloth as a whole had contracted to an alarming extent—uncomfortable as well; while his tennis shoes remained tolerably intact, and the canvas brace had shrunk upon his ankle until it gripped it like a vise.
But all these details he absorbed rather than studied, in the first few moments subsequent to his awakening. His chiefest and most direct interest centred upon the woman; and he showed it clearly in the downright, straightforward sincerity of his solicitous scrutiny. And, for all the handicap of her outlandish dress, she bore inspection wonderfully well.
Marvellously recuperative, as many women are, she had regained all her ardent loveliness; or, if any trace remained of the wear and tear of her fearful experience, he was in no condition to know it, much less to carp. There was warm color in the cheeks that he had last seen livid, there was the wonted play of light and shadow in her fascinating eyes; there were gracious rounded curves where had been sunken surfaces, hollowed out by fatigue and strain; and there remained the ineluctable allurement of her tremendous vitality....
"You are not hurt?" he demanded. "You are—all right?"
"Quite," she told him with a smile significant of her appreciation of his generous feeling. "I wasn't hurt, and I've recovered from my shock and fright—only I'm still a little tired. But you?"
"Oh, I ... never better. That is, I'm rested; and there was nothing else for me to get over."
"But your ankle—?"
"I've forgotten it ever bothered me.... Haven't you slept at all?"
"Oh, surely—a great deal. But I've been awake for some time—a few hours."
"A few hours!" His stare widened with wonder. "How long have I—?"
"All day—like a log."
"But I—! What time is it?"
"I haven't a watch, but late afternoon, I should think—going by the sun. It's nearly down."
"Good heavens!" he muttered, dashed. "Ihaveslept!"
"You earned your right to.... You needed it far more than I." Her eyes shone, warm with kindness.
She swayed almost imperceptibly toward him. Her voice was low pitched and a trifle broken with emotion:
"You saved my life—"
"I—? Oh, that was only what any other man—"
"None other did!"
"Please don't speak of it—I mean, consider it that way," he stammered. "What I want to know is, where are we?"
Her reply was more distant. "On an island, somewhere. It's uninhabited, I think."
He could only echo in bewilderment: "An island...! Uninhabited...!" Dismay assailed him. He got up, after a little struggle overcoming the resistance of stiff and sore limbs, and stood with a hand on the coaming of the dismantled cat-boat, raking the island with an incredulous stare.
"But those houses—?"
"There's no one in any of them, that I could find." She stirred from her place and offered him a hand. "Please help me up."
He turned eagerly, with a feeling of chagrin that she had needed to ask him. For an instant he had both her hands, warm and womanly, in his grasp, while she rose by his aid, and for an instant longer—possibly by way of reward. Then she disengaged them with gentle firmness.
She stood beside him so tall and fair, so serenely invested with the flawless dignity of her womanhood that he no longer thought of the incongruity of her grotesque garb.
"You've been up there?" he asked, far too keenly interested to scorn the self-evident.
She gave a comprehensive gesture, embracing the visible prospect. "All over.... When I woke, I thought surely ... I went to see, found nothing living except the sheep and some chickens and turkeys in the farmyard. Those nearer buildings—nothing there except desolation, ruin, and the smell of last year's fish. I think fishermen camp out here at times. And the farm-house—apparently it's ordinarily inhabited. Evidently the people have gone away for a visit somewhere. It gives the impression of being a home the year round. There isn't any boat—"
"No boat!"
"Not a sign of one, that I can find—except this wreck." She indicated the cat-boat.
"But we can't do anything with this," he expostulated.
The deep, wide break in its side placed it beyond consideration, even if it should prove possible to remedy its many other lacks.
"No. The people who live here must have a boat—I saw a mooring-buoy out there"—with a gesture toward the water. "Of course. How else could they get away?"
"The question is, how we are to get away," he grumbled, morose.
"You'll find the way," she told him with quiet confidence.
"I! I'll find the way? How?"
"I don't know—only you must. There must be some way of signalling the mainland, some means of communication. Surely people wouldn't live here, cut off from all the World.... Perhaps we'll find something in the farm-house to tell us what to do. I didn't have much time to look round. I wanted clothing, mostly—and found these awful things hanging behind the kitchen door. And then I wanted something to eat, and I found that—some bread, not too stale, and plenty of eggs in the hen-house.... And you—you must be famished!"
The reminder had an effect singularly distressing. Till then he had been much too thunderstruck by comprehension of their anomalous plight to think of himself. Now suddenly he was stabbed through and through with pangs of desperate hunger. He turned a little faint, was seized with a slight sensation of giddiness, at the thought of food, so that he was glad of the cat-boat for support.
"Oh, you are!" Compassion thrilled her tone. "I'm so sorry. Forgive me for not thinking of it at once. Come—if you can walk." She caught his hand as if to help him onward. "It's not far, and I can fix you something quickly. Do come."
"Oh, surely," he assented, recovering. "I am half starving—and then some. Only I didn't know it until you mentioned the fact."
The girl relinquished his hand, but they were almost shoulder to shoulder as they plodded through the dry, yielding sand toward firmer ground.
"We can build a fire and have something hot," she said; "there's plenty of fuel."
"But—what did you do?"
"I—oh, I took my eggsau naturel—barring some salt and pepper. I was in too much of a hurry to bother with a stove—"
"Why in a hurry?"
She made no answer for an instant. He turned to look at her, wondering. To his unutterable astonishment she not only failed to meet his glance, but tried to seem unconscious of it.
The admirable ease and gracious self-possession which he had learned to associate with her personality as inalienable traits were altogether gone, just then—obliterated by a singular, exotic attitude of constraint and diffidence, of self-consciousness. She seemed almost to shrink from his regard, and held her face a little averted from him, the full lips tense, lashes low and trembling upon her cheeks.
"I was ... afraid to leave you," she said in a faltering voice, under the spell of this extraordinary mood. "I was afraid something might happen to you, if I were long away."
"But whatcouldhappen to me, here—on this uninhabited island?"
"I don't know.... It was silly of me, of course." With an evident exertion of will power she threw off this perplexing mood of shyness, and became more like herself, as he knew her. "Really, I presume, it was mostly that I was afraid for myself—frightened of the loneliness, fearful lest it be made more lonely for me by some accident—"
"Of course," he assented, puzzled beyond expression, cudgelling his wits for some solution of a riddle sealed to his masculine obtuseness.
What could have happened to influence her so strangely? Could he have said or done—anything—?
The problem held him in abstraction throughout the greater part of their walk to the farm-house, though he heard and with ostensible intelligence responded to her running accompaniment of comment and suggestion....
They threaded the cluster of buildings that, their usefulness outlived, still encumbered the bluff bordering upon the beach. The most careless and superficial glance bore out the impression conveyed by the girl's description of the spot. Doorless doorways and windows with shattered sashes disclosed glimpses of interiors fallen into a state of ruin defying renovation. What remained intact of walls and roofs were mere shells half filled with an agglomeration of worthlessness—mounds of crumbled, mouldering plaster, shards, rust-eaten tins, broken bottles, shreds of what had once been garments: the whole perhaps threatened by the overhanging skeleton of a crazy staircase.... An evil, disturbing spot, exhaling an atmosphere more melancholy and disheartening than that of a rain-sodden November woodland: a haunted place, where the hand of Time had wrought devastation with the wanton efficacy of a destructive child: a good place to pass through quickly and ever thereafter to avoid.
In relief against it the uplands seemed the brighter, stretching away in the soft golden light of the descending sun. The wind sang over them a boisterous song of strength and the sweep of open spaces. The air was damp and soft and sweet with the scent of heather. Straggling sheep suspended for a moment their meditative cropping and lifted their heads to watch the strangers with timorous, stupid eyes. A flock of young turkeys fled in discordant agitation from their path.
Halfway up to the farm-house a memory shot through Whitaker's mind as startling as lightning streaking athwart a peaceful evening sky. He stopped with an exclamation that brought the girl beside him to a standstill with questioning eyes.
"But the others—!" he stammered.
"The others?" she repeated blankly.
"They—the men who brought you here—?"
Her lips tightened. She moved her head in slow negation.
"I have seen nothing of either of them."
Horror and pity filled him, conjuring up a vision of wild, raving waters, mad with blood-lust, and in their jaws, arms and heads helplessly whirling and tossing.
"Poor devils!" he muttered.
She said nothing. When he looked for sympathy in her face, he found it set and inscrutable.
He delayed another moment, thinking that soon she must speak, offer him some sort of explanation. But she remained uncommunicative. And he could not bring himself to seem anxious to pry into her affairs.
He took a tentative step onward. She responded instantly to the suggestion, but in silence.
The farm-house stood on high ground, commanding an uninterrupted sweep of the horizon. As they drew near it, Whitaker paused and turned, narrowing his eyes as he attempted to read the riddle of the enigmatic, amber-tinted distances.
To north and east the island fell away in irregular terraces to wide, crescent beaches whose horns, joining in the northeast, formed the sandy spit. To west and south the moorlands billowed up to the brink of a precipitous bluff. In the west, Whitaker noted absently, a great congregation of gulls were milling amid a cacophony of screams, just beyond the declivity. Far over the northern water the dark promontory was blending into violet shadows which, in turn, blended imperceptibly with the more sombre shade of the sea. Beyond it nothing was discernable. Southeast from it the coast, backed by dusky highlands, ran on for several miles to another, but less impressive, headland; its line, at an angle to that of the deserted island, forming a funnel-like tideway for the intervening waters fully six miles at its broadest in the north, narrowing in the east to something over three miles.
There was not a sail visible in all the blue cup of the sea.
"I don't know," said Whitaker slowly, as much to himself as to his companion. "It's odd ... it passes me...."
"Can't you tell where we are?" she inquired anxiously.
"Not definitely. I know, of course, we must be somewhere off the south coast of New England: somewhere between Cape Cod and Block Island. But I've never sailed up this way—never east of Orient Point; my boating has been altogether confined to Long Island Sound.... And my geographical memory is as hazy as the day. Thereareislands off the south coast of Massachusetts—a number of them: Nantucket, you know, and Martha's Vineyard. This might be either—only it isn't, because they're summer resorts. That"—he swept his hand toward the land in the northeast—"might be either, and probably is one of 'em. At the same time, it may be the mainland. I don't know."
"Then ... then what are we to do?"
"I should say, possess our souls in patience, since we have no boat. At least, until we can signal some passing vessel. There aren't any in sight just now, but there must be some—many—in decent weather."
"How—signal?"
He looked round, shaking a dubious head. "Of course there's nothing like a flagpole here—but me, and I'm not quite long enough. Perhaps I can find something to serve as well. We might nail a plank to the corner of the roof and a table-cloth to that, I suppose."
"And build fires, by night?"
He nodded. "Best suggestion yet. I'll do that very thing to-night—after I've had a bite to eat."
She started impatiently away. "Oh, come, come! What am I thinking of, to let you stand there, starving by inches?"
They entered the house by the back door, finding themselves in the kitchen—that mean and commonplace assembly-room of narrow and pinched lives. The immaculate cleanliness of decent, close poverty lay over it all like a blight. And despite the warmth of the air outside, within it was chill—bleak with an aura of discontent bred of the incessant struggle against crushing odds which went on within those walls from year's end to year's end....
Whitaker busied himself immediately with the stove. There was a full wood-box near by; and within a very few minutes he had a brisk fire going. The woman had disappeared in the direction of the barn. She returned in good time with half a dozen eggs. Foraging in the pantry and cupboards, she brought to light a quantity of supplies: a side of bacon, flour, potatoes, sugar, tea, small stores of edibles in tins.
"I'm hungry again, myself," she declared, attacking the problem of simple cookery with a will and a confident air that promised much.
The aroma of frying bacon, the steam of brewing tea, were all but intolerable to an empty stomach. Whitaker left the kitchen hurriedly and, in an endeavour to control himself, made a round of the other rooms. There were two others on the ground floor: a "parlour," a bedroom; in the upper story, four small bedchambers; above them an attic, gloomy and echoing. Nowhere did he discover anything to moderate the impression made by the kitchen: it was all impeccably neat, desperately bare.
Depressed, he turned toward the head of the stairs. Below a door whined on its hinges, and the woman called him, her voice ringing through the hallway with an effect of richness, deep-toned and bell-true, that somehow made him think of sunlight flinging an arm of gold athwart the dusk of a darkened room. He felt his being thrill responsive to it, as fine glass sings its answer to the note truly pitched. More than all this, he was staggered by something in the quality of that full-throated cry, something that smote his memory until it was quick and vibrant, like a harp swept by an old familiar hand.
"Hugh?" she called; and again: "Hugh! Where are you?"
He paused, grasping the balustrade, and with some difficulty managed to articulate:
"Here ... coming...."
"Hurry. Everything's ready."
Waiting an instant to steady his nerves, he descended and reëntered the kitchen.
The meal was waiting—on the table. The woman, too, faced him as he entered, waiting in the chair nearest the stove. But, once within the room, he paused so long beside the door, his hand upon the knob, and stared so strangely at her, that she moved uneasily, grew restless and disturbed. A gleam of apprehension flickered in her eyes.
"Why, what's the matter?" she asked with forced lightness. "Why don't you come in and sit down?"
He said abruptly: "You called me Hugh!"
She inclined her head, smiling mischievously. "I admit it. Do you mind?"
"Mind? No!" He shut the door, advanced and dropped into his chair, still searching her face with his troubled gaze. "Only," he said—"you startled me. I didn't think—expect—hope—"
"On so short an acquaintance?" she suggested archly. "Perhaps you're right. I didn't think.... And yet—I do think—with the man who risked his life for me—I'm a little justified in forgetting even that we've never met through the medium of a conventional introduction."
"It isn't that, but...." He hesitated, trying to formulate phrases to explain the singular sensation that had assailed him when she called him: a sensation the precise nature of which he himself did not as yet understand.
She interrupted brusquely: "Don't let's waste time talking. I can't wait another instant."
Silently submissive, he took up his knife and fork and fell to.
Through the meal, neither spoke; and if there were any serious thinking in process, Whitaker was not only ignorant of it, but innocent of participation therein. With the first taste of food, he passed into a state of abject surrender to sheer brutish hunger. It was not easily that he restrained himself, schooled his desires to decent expression. The smell, the taste, the sight of food: he fairly quivered like a ravenous animal under the influence of their sensual promise. He was sensible of a dull, carking shame, and yet was shameless.
The girl was the first to finish. She had eaten little in comparison; chiefly, perhaps, because she required less than he. Putting aside her knife and fork, she rested her elbows easily on the table, cradled her chin between her half-closed hands. Her eyes grew dark with speculation, and oddly lambent. He ate on, unconscious of her attitude. When he had finished, it was as if a swarm of locusts had passed that way. Of the more than plentiful meal she had prepared, there remained but a beggarly array of empty dishes to testify to his appreciation.
He leaned back a little in his chair, surprised her intent gaze, laughed sheepishly, and laughing, sighed with repletion.
A smile of sympathetic understanding darkened the corners of her lips.
"Milord is satisfied?"
"Milord," he said with an apologetic laugh, "is on the point of passing into a state of torpor. He begins to understand the inclination of the boa-constrictor—or whatever beast it is that feeds once every six months—to torp a little, gently, after its semi-annual gorge."
"Then there's nothing else...?"
"For a pipe and tobacco I would give you half my kingdom!"
"Oh, I'msosorry!"
"Don't be. It won't harm me to do without nicotine for a day or two." But his sigh belied the statement. "Anyway, I'll forget all about it presently. I'll be too busy."
"How?"
"It's coming on night. You haven't forgotten our signal fires?"
"Oh, no—and we must not forget!"
"Then I've got my work cut out for me, to forage for fuel. I must get right at it."
The girl rose quickly. "Do you mind waiting a little? I mustn't neglect my dishes, and—if you don't mind—I'd rather not be left alone any longer than necessary. You know...."
She ended with a nervous laugh, depreciatory.
"Why, surely. And I'll help with the dish-cloth."
"You'll do nothing of the sort. I'd rather do it all myself. Please." She waved him back to his chair with a commanding gesture. "I mean it—really."
"Well," he consented, doubtful, "if you insist...."
She worked rapidly above the steaming dish-pan, heedless of the effects upon her hands and bared arms: busy and intent upon her business, the fair head bowed, the cheeks faintly flushed.
Whitaker lounged, profoundly intrigued, watching her with sober and studious eyes, asking himself questions he found for the present unanswerable. What did she mean to him? Was what he had been at first disposed to consider a mere, light-hearted, fugitive infatuation, developing into something else, something stronger and more enduring? And what did it mean, this impression that had come to him so suddenly, within the hour, and that persisted with so much force in the face of its manifest impossibility, that he had known her, or some one strangely like her, at some forgotten time—as in some previous existence?
It was her voice that had made him think that, her voice of marvellous allure, crystal-pure, as flexible as tempered steel, strong, tender, rich, compassionate, compelling.... Where had he heard it before, and when?
And who was she, this Miss Fiske? This self-reliant and self-sufficient woman who chose to spend her summer in seclusion, with none but servants for companions; who had comprehension of machinery and ran her motor-boat alone; who went for lonely swims in the surf at dawn; who treated men as her peers—neither more nor less; who was spied upon, shadowed, attacked, kidnapped by men of unparalleled desperation and daring; who had retained her self-possession under stress of circumstance that would have driven strong men into pseudo-hysteria; who now found herself in a position to the last degree ambiguous and anomalous, cooped up, for God only knew how long, upon a lonely hand's-breadth of land in company with a man of whom she knew little more than nothing; and who accepted it all without protest, with a serene and flawless courage, uncomplaining, displaying an implicit and unquestioning faith in her companion: what manner of woman was this?
At least one to marvel over and admire without reserve; to rejoice in and, if it could not be otherwise, to desire in silence and in pride that it should be given to one so unworthy the privileges of desiring and of service and mute adoration....
"It's almost dark," her pleasant accents broke in upon his revery. "Would you mind lighting the lamp? My hands are all wet and sticky."
"Assuredly."
Whitaker got up, found matches, and lighted a tin kerosene lamp in a bracket on the wall. The windows darkened and the walls took on a sombre yellow as the flame grew strong and steady.
"I'm quite finished." The girl scrubbed her arms and hands briskly with a dry towel and turned down her sleeves, facing him with her fine, frank, friendly smile. "If you're ready...."
"Whenever you are," he said with an oddly ceremonious bow.
To his surprise she drew back, her brows and lips contracting to level lines, her eyes informed with the light of wonder shot through with the flashings of a resentful temper.
"Why do you look at me so?" she demanded sharply. "What are you thinking...?" She checked, her frown relaxed, her smile flickered softly. "Am I such a fright—?"
"I beg your pardon," he said hastily. "I was merely thinking, wondering...."
She seemed about to speak, but said nothing. He did not round out his apology. A little distance apart, they stood staring at one another in that weird, unnatural light, wherein the glow from the lamp contended garishly with the ebbing flush of day. And again he was mute in bewildered inquiry before that puzzling phenomenon of inscrutable emotion which once before, since his awakening, had been disclosed to him in her mantling colour, in the quickening of her breath, and the agitation of her bosom, in the timid, dumb questioning of eyes grown strangely shy and frightened.
And then, in a twinkling, an impatient gesture exorcised the inexplicable mood that had possessed her, and she regained her normal, self-reliant poise as if by witchcraft.
"What a quaint creature you are, Hugh," she cried, her smile whimsical. "You've a way of looking at one that gives me the creeps. I see things—things that aren't so, and never were. If you don't stop it, I swear I shall think you're the devil! Stop it—do you hear me, sir? And come build our bonfire."
She swung lithely away and was out of the house before he could regain his wits and follow.
"I noticed a lot of old lumber around the barn," she announced, when he joined her in the dooryard—"old boxes and barrels and rubbish. And a wheelbarrow. So you won't have far to go for fuel. Now where do you purpose building the beacon?"
He cast round, peering through the thickening shades of dusk, and eventually settled upon a little knoll a moderate distance to leeward of the farm-house. Such a location would be safest, even though the wind was falling steadily with the flight of the hours; and the fire would be conspicuously placed for observation from any point in the north and east.
Off in the north, where Whitaker had marked down the empurpled headland during the afternoon, a white light lanced the gloom thrice with a sweeping blade, vanished, and was replaced by a glare of angry red, which in its turn winked out.
Whitaker watched it briefly with the finger-tips of his right hand resting lightly on the pulse in his left wrist. Then turning away, he announced:
"Three white flashes followed by a red at intervals of about ten seconds. Wonder whatthatstands for!"
"What is it?" the girl asked. "A ship signalling?"
"No; a lighthouse—probably a first-order light—with its characteristic flash, not duplicated anywhere along this section of the Atlantic coast. If I knew anything of such matters, it would be easy enough to tell from that just about where we are.Ifthat information would help us."
"But, if we can see their light, they'll see ours,—won't they?—and send to find out what's the matter."
"Perhaps. At least—let's hope so. They're pretty sure to see it, but as to their attaching sufficient importance to it to investigate—that's a question. They may not know that the people who live here are away. They may think the natives here are merely celebrating their silver wedding, or Roosevelt's refusal of a third term, or the accession of Edward the Seventh—or anything."
"Please don't be silly—and discouraging. Do get to work and build the fire."
He obeyed with humility and expedition.
As she had said, there was no lack of fodder for the flames. By dint of several wheelbarrow trips between the knoll and the farmyard, he had presently constructed a pyre of impressive proportions; and by that time it was quite dark—so dark, indeed, that he had been forced to hunt up a yard lantern, carrying the which the girl had accompanied him on his two final trips.
"Here," he said clumsily, when all was ready, offering her matches. "You light it, please—for luck."
Their fingers touched as she took the matches. Something thumped in his breast, and a door opened in the chambers of his understanding, letting in light.
Kneeling at the base of the pyre, she struck a match and applied it to a quantity of tinder-dry excelsior. The stuff caught instantly, puffing into a brilliant patch of blaze; she rose and stood back,en silhouette, delicately poised at attention, waiting to see that her work was well done. He could not take his gaze from her.
So what he had trifled and toyed with, fought with and prayed against, doubted and questioned, laughed at and cried down, was sober, painful fact. Truth, heart-rending to behold in her stark, shining beauty, had been revealed to him in that moment of brushing finger-tips, and he had looked in her face and known his unworthiness; and he trembled and was afraid and ashamed....
Spreading swiftly near the ground, the flames mounted as quickly, with snappings and cracklings, excavating in the darkness an arena of reddish radiance.
The girl retreated to his side, returning the matches.
A tongue of flame shot up from the peak of the pyre, and a column of smoke surpassed it, swinging off to leeward in great, red-bosomed volutes and whorls picked out with flying regiments of sparks.
"You'd think they couldn't help understanding that it's a signal of distress."
"You would think so. I hope so. God knows I hope so!"
There was a passion in his tones to make her lift wondering eyes to his.
"Why do you say that—that way? We should be thankful to be safe—alive. And we're certain to get away before long."
"I know—yes, I know."
"But you spoke so strangely!"
"I'm sorry. I'd been thinking clearly; for the first time, I believe, since I woke up."
"About what? Us? Or merely me?"
"You. I was considering you alone. It isn't right that you should be in this fix. I'd give my right hand to remedy it!"
"But I'm not distressed. It isn't altogether pleasant, but it can't be helped and might easily have been worse."
"And still I can't help feeling, somehow, the wretched injustice of it to you. I want to protest—to do something to mend matters."
"But since you can't"—she laughed in light mockery, innocent of malice—"since we're doing our best, let's be philosophical and sit down over there and watch to see if there's any answer to our signal."
"There won't be."
"Youarea difficult body. Never mind. Come along!" she insisted with pretty imperiousness.
They seated themselves with their backs to the fire and at a respectful distance from it, where they could watch the jetting blades of light that ringed the far-off headland. Whitaker reclined on an elbow, relapsing into moody contemplation. The girl drew up her knees, clasped her arms about them, and stared thoughtfully into the night.
Behind them the fire flamed and roared, volcanic. All round it in a radius of many yards the earth glowed red, while, to one side, the grim, homely façade of the farm-house edged blushing out of the ambient night, all its staring windows bloodshot and sinister.
The girl stirred uneasily, turning her head to look at Whitaker.
"You know," she said with a confused attempt to laugh: "this is really no canny, this place. Or else I'm balmy. I'm seeing things—shapes that stir against the blackness, off there beyond the light, moving, halting, staring, hating us for butchering their age-old peace and quiet. Maybe I'll forget to see them, if you'll talk to me a little."
"I can't talk to you," he said, ungracious in his distress.
"You can't? It's the first time it's been noticeable, then. What's responsible for this all-of-a-sudden change of heart?"
"That's what's responsible." The words spoke themselves almost against his will.
"What—change of heart?"
"Yes," he said sullenly.
"You're very obscure. Am I to understand that you've taken a sudden dislike to me, so that you can't treat me with decent civility?"
"You know that isn't so."
"Surely"—she caught her breath sharply, paused for an instant, then went on—"surely you don't mean the converse!"
"I've always understood women knew what men meant before the men did, themselves." His voice broke a little. "Oh, can't you see how it is with me? Can't you see?" he cried. "God forgive me! I never meant to inflict this on you, at such a time! I don't know why I have...."
"You mean," she stammered in a voice of amaze—"you mean—love?"
"Can you doubt it?"
"No ... not after what's happened, I presume. You wouldn't have followed—you wouldn't have fought so to save me from drowning—Isuppose—if you hadn't—cared.... But I didn't know."
She sighed, a sigh plaintive and perturbed, then resumed: "A woman never knows, really. She may suspect; in fact, she almost always does; she is obliged to be so continually on guard that suspicion is ingrained in her nature; but...."
"Then you're not—offended?" he asked, sitting up.
"Why should I be?" The firelight momentarily outlined the smiling, half wistful countenance she turned to him.
"But"—he exploded with righteous wrath, self-centred—"only a scoundrel would force his attentions upon a woman, in such circumstances! You can't get away from me—I may be utterly hateful to you—"
"Oh, you're not." She laughed quietly. "You're not; nor am I distressed—because of the circumstances that distress you, at least. What woman would be who received as great and honourable a compliment—from you, Hugh? Only"—again the whimsical little laugh that merged into a smothered sigh—"I wish I knew!"
"Wish you knew what?"
"What's going on inside that extraordinary head of yours: what's in the mind behind the eyes that I so often find staring at me so curiously."
He bowed that head between hands that compressed cruelly his temples. "I wishIknew!" he groaned in protest. "It's a mystery to me, the spell you've laid upon my thoughts. Ever since we met you've haunted me with a weird suggestion of some elusive relationship, some entanglement—intimacy—gone, perished, forgotten.... But since you called me to supper, a while ago, by name—I don't know why—your voice, as you used it then, has run through my head and through, teasing my memory like a strain of music from some half-remembered song. It half-maddens me; I feel so strongly that everything would be so straight and plain and clear between us, if I could only fasten upon that fugitive, indefinable something that's always fluttering just beyond my grasp!"
"You mean all that—honestly?" she demanded in an oddly startled voice.
"Most honestly." He looked up in excitement. "You don't meanyou've felt anything of the sort?"
"No, I"—her voice broke as if with weariness—"I don't mean that, precisely. I mean.... Probably I don't know what I do mean. I'm really very tired, too tired to go on, just now—to sit here with you, badgering our poor wits with esoteric subtleties. I think—do you mind?—I'd better go in."
She rose quickly, without waiting for his hand. Whitaker straightened out his long body with more deliberation, standing finally at full height, his grave and moody countenance strongly relieved in the ruddy glow, while her face was all in shadow.
"One moment," he begged humbly—"before we go in. I ... I've something else to say to you, if I may."
She waited, seriously attentive.
"I haven't played fair, I'm afraid," he said, lowering his head to escape her steadfast gaze. "I've just told you that I love you, but...."
"Well?" she demanded in an odd, ringing voice. "Isn't it true?"
"True?" He laughed unnaturally. "It's so true I—wish I had died before I told you!"
"Why?"
"Because ... because you didn't resent my telling you...."
It seemed impossible for him to speak connectedly or at any length, impossible to overcome his distaste for the hateful confession he must make. And she was intolerably patient with him; he resented her quiet, contained patience; while he feared, yet he was relieved when she at length insisted: "Well?"
"Since you didn't resent that confession, I am led to believe you don't—exactly—dislike me. That makes it just so much the harder to forfeit your regard."
"But must you?"
"Yes."
"Please explain," she urged, a trace wearily.
"I who love you with all my heart and mind and soul—I am not free to love you."
"You aren't free—!"
"I.... No."
After several moments, during which he fought vainly with his inability to go on, she resumed her examination with a manner aloof and yet determined:
"You've told me so much, I think you can hardly refuse to tell more."
"I," he stammered—"I am already married."
She gave a little, stifled cry—whether of pain or horror or of indignation he could not tell.
"I'm sorry—I—" he began.
"Don't you think you might have thought of this before?"
"I ... you don't understand—"
"Are you in the habit of declaring yourself first and confessing later?... Don't answer, if you don't want to. I've no real right to know. I asked out of simple curiosity."
"If you'd only listen to me!" he broke out suddenly. "The thing's so strange, so far off—dreamlike—that I forget it easily."
"So it would seem," she put in cruelly.
"Please hear me!"
"Surely you must see I am listening, Mr. Whitaker."
"It was several years ago—nearly seven. I was on the point of death—had been told to expect death within a few months.... In a moment of sentimental sympathy—I wasn't at all myself—I married a girl I'd never seen before, to help her out of a desperate scrape she'd got into—meaning simply to give her the protection of my name. She was in bad trouble.... We never lived together, never even saw one another after that hour. She had every reason to think me dead—as I should have been, by rights. But now she knows that I'm alive—is about to sue for a divorce.... Now you know just what sort of a contemptible hound I am, and why it was so hard to tell you."
After a long pause, during which neither stirred, she told him, in a faint voice: "Thank you."
She moved toward the house.
"I throw myself upon your mercy—"
"Do you?" she said coolly, pausing.
"If you will forgive me—"
"Oh, I forgive you, Mr. Whitaker. My heart is really not quite so fragile as all this implies."
"I didn't mean that—you know I didn't. I'm only trying to assure you that I won't bother you—with this trouble of mine—again. I don't want you to be afraid of me."
"I am not."
The words were terse and brusque enough; the accompanying swift gesture, in which her hand rested momentarily on his arm as if in confidence approaching affection, he found oddly contradictory.
"You don't see—anything?" she said with an abrupt change of manner, swinging to the north.
He shaded his eyes, peering intently through the night, closely sweeping its encompassing obscurity from northwest to southeast.
"Nothing," he said, dropping his hand. "If there were a boat heading this way, we couldn't help seeing her lights."
"Then there's no use waiting?"
"I'm afraid not. They'd hardly come to-night, anyway; more likely by daylight, if they should happen to grow suspicious of our beacon."
"Then I think I'll go to bed. I'm very, very tired, in spite of my sleep on the sands. That didn't rest me, really."
"Of course."
"And you—?"
"Oh, I'm all right."
"But what are you going to do?"
"Why—keep the fire going, I presume."
"Is it necessary, do you think? Or even worth while?"
He made a doubtful gesture.
"I wish," she continued—"I wish you'd stay in the house. I—I'm really a bit timid: unnerved, I presume. It's been, you know, rather a harrowing experience. Anything might happen in a place like this...."
"Oh, certainly," he agreed, something constrained. "I'd feel more content, myself, to know I was within call if anything should alarm you."
They returned to the kitchen.
In silence, while Whitaker fidgeted about the room, awkward and unhappy, the girl removed a glass lamp from the shelf above the sink, assured herself that it was filled, and lighted it. Then, over her shoulder:
"I hope you don't mean to stay up all night."
"I—well, I'm really not sleepy."
"Oh, but you are," she contradicted calmly.
"Honestly; I slept so long down there on the beach—"
"Please don't try to deceive me. I know that slumbers like those—of exhaustion—don't rest one as they should. Besides, you show how tired you are in every gesture, in the way you carry yourself, in your very eyes."
"You're mistaken," he contended, looking away for fear lest his eyes were indeed betraying him. "Besides, I mean merely to sit up here, to see that everything is all right."
"How should it be otherwise?" She laughed the thought away, yet not unkindly. "This island is as empty as a last-year's bird's-nest. What could happen to harm, or even alarm us—or me?"
"You never can tell—"
"Nonsense! I'm not in the least frightened. And furthermore I shan't sleep a wink—shan't even try to sleep unless you promise me not to be silly. There's a comfortable room right at the foot of the stairs. If you sleep there, I shall feel more than secure. Will you promise?"
He gave in at discretion: "Yes; I promise."
"As soon as you feel the least need of sleep, you'll go to bed?"
"I promise."
"Very well, then."
The insistent note faded from her tones. She moved toward the table, put the lamp down, and hesitated in one of her strange, unpresaged moods of diffidence, looking down at the finger-tips with which she traced a meaningless pattern on the oil-cloth.
"You are kind," she said abruptly, her head bowed, her face hidden from him.
"Kind!" he echoed, dumfounded.
"You are kind and sweet and generous to me," she insisted in a level voice. "You have shown me your heart—the heart of a gentleman—without reserve; but of me you have asked nothing."
"I don't understand—"
"I mean, you haven't once referred to what happened last night. You've been content to let me preserve my confidence, to remain secretive and mysterious in your sight.... That is how I seem to you—isn't it?"
"Secretive and mysterious? But I have no right to your confidence; your affairs are yours, inviolable, unless you choose to discuss them."
"You would think that way—of course!" Suddenly she showed him her face illumined with its frank, shadowy smile, her sweet eyes, kind and as fearless as the eyes of a child. "Other men would not, I know. And you have every right to know."
"I—!"
"You; and I shall tell you.... But not now; there's too much to tell, to explain and make understandable; and I'm too terribly tired. To-morrow, perhaps—or when we escape from this weird place, when I've had time to think things out—"
"At your pleasure," he assented gently. "Only—don't let anything worry you."
Impulsively she caught both his hands in a clasp at once soft and strong, wholly straightforward and friendly.
"Do you know," she said in a laughing voice, her head thrown back, soft shadows darkening her mystical eyes, the lamplight caressing her hair until it was as if her head were framed in a halo of pure gold, bright against the sombre background of that mean, bare room—"Do you know, dear man, that you are quite, quite blind?"
"I think," he said with his twisted smile, "it would be well for me if I were physically blind at this instant!"
She shook her head in light reproof.
"Blind, quite blind!" she repeated. "And yet—I'm glad it's so with you. I wouldn't have you otherwise for worlds."
She withdrew her hand, took up the lamp, moved a little away from him, and paused, holding his eyes.
"For Love, too, is blind," she said softly, with a quaint little nod of affirmation. "Good night."
He started forward, eyes aflame; took a single pace after her; paused as if against an unseen barrier. His hands dropped by his sides; his chin to his chest; the light died out of his face and left it gray and deeply lined.
In the hallway the lamp's glow receded, hesitated, began to ascend, throwing upon the unpapered walls a distorted silhouette of the rude balustrade; then disappeared, leaving the hall cold with empty darkness.
An inexplicable fit of trembling seized Whitaker. Dropping into a chair, he pillowed his head on his folded arms. Presently the seizure passed, but he remained moveless. With the drift of minutes, insensibly his taut muscles relaxed. Odd visions painted the dark tapestries of his closed eyes: a fragment of swinging seas shining in moonlight; white swords of light slashing the dark night round their unseen eyrie; the throat of a woman swelling firm and strong as a tower of ivory, tense from the collar of her cheap gown to the point of her tilted chin; a shrieking, swirling rabble of gulls seen against the fading sky, over the edge of a cliff....
He slept.
Through the open doorway behind him and through the windows on either hand drifted the sonorous song of the surf, a muted burden for the stealthy disturbances of the night in being.