In time the discomfort of his posture wore through the wrappings of slumber. He stirred drowsily, shifted, and discovered a cramp in his legs, the pain of which more effectually aroused him. He rose, yawned, stretched, grimaced with the ache in his stiffened limbs, and went to the kitchen door.
There was no way to tell how long he had slept. The night held black—the moon not yet up. The bonfire had burned down to a great glowing heap of embers. The wind was faint, a mere whisper in the void. There was a famous show of stars, clear, bright, cold and distant.
Closing and locking the door, he found another lamp, lighted it, and took it with him to the corner bedchamber, where he lay down without undressing. He had, indeed, nothing to change to.
A heavy lethargy weighed upon his faculties. No longer desperately sleepy, he was yet far from rested. His body continued to demand repose, but his mind was ill at ease.
He napped uneasily throughout the night, sleeping and waking by fits and starts, his brain insatiably occupied with an interminable succession of wretched dreams. The mad, distorted face of Drummond, bleached and degraded by his slavery to morphine, haunted Whitaker's consciousness like some frightful and hideous Chinese mask. He saw it in a dozen guises, each more pitiful and terrible than the last. It pursued him through eons of endless night, forever at his shoulder, blind and weeping. Thrice he started from his bed, wide awake and glaring, positive that Drummond had been in the room but the moment gone.... And each time that he lay back and sleep stole in numbing waves through his brain, he passed into subconsciousness with the picture before his eyes of a seething cloud of gulls seen against the sky, over the edge of a cliff.
He was up and out in the cool of dawn, before sunrise, delaying to listen for some minutes at the foot of the stairway. But he heard no sound in that still house, and there was no longer the night to affright the woman with hinted threats of nameless horrors lurking beneath its impenetrable cloak. He felt no longer bound to stand sentinel on the threshold of her apprehensions. He went out.
The day would be clear: he drew promise of this from the gray bowl of the sky, cloudless, touched with spreading scarlet only on its eastern rim. There was no wind; from the cooling ashes of yesternight's beacon-fire a slim stalk of smoke grew straight and tall before it wavered and broke. The voice of the sea had fallen to a muffled throbbing.
In the white magic of air like crystal translucent and motionless, the world seemed more close-knitted and sane. What yesterday's veiling of haze had concealed was now bold and near. In the north the lighthouse stood like a horn on the brow of the headland, the lamp continuing to flash even though its light was darkened, its beams out-stripped by the radiant forerunners of the sun. Beyond it, over a breadth of water populated by an ocean-going tug with three barges in tow and a becalmed lumber schooner, a low-lying point of land (perhaps an island) thrust out into the west. On the nearer land human life was quickening: here and there pale streamers of smoke swung up from hidden chimneys on its wooded rises.
Whitaker eyed them with longing. But they were distant from attainment by at the least three miles of tideway through which strong waters raced—as he could plainly see from his elevation, in the pale, streaked and wrinkled surface of the channel.
He wagged a doubtful head, and scowled: no sign in any quarter of a boat heading for the island, no telling when they'd be taken off the cursed place!
In his mutinous irritation, the screaming of the gulls, over in the west, seemed to add the final touch of annoyance, a superfluous addition to the sum of his trials. Why need they have selected that island for their insane parliament? Why must his nerves be racked forever by their incessant bickering? He had dreamed of them all night; must he endure a day made similarly distressing?
Whatwasthe matter with the addle-pated things, anyway?
There was nothing to hinder him from investigating for himself. The girl would probably sleep another hour or two.
He went forthwith, dulling the keen edge of his exasperation with a rapid tramp of half a mile or so over the uneven uplands.
The screaming was well-nigh deafening by the time he stood upon the verge of the bluff; beneath him gulls clouded the air like bees swarming. And yet he experienced no difficulty in locating the cause of their excitement.
Below, a slow tide crawled, slavering, up over the boulder-strewn sands. In a wave-scooped depression between two of the larger boulders, the receding waters had left a little, limpid pool. In the pool lay the body of a man, face downward, limbs frightfully sprawling. Gulls fought for place upon his back.
The discovery brought with it no shock of surprise to the man on the bluff: horror alone. He seemed to have known all along that such would be the cause. Yet he had never consciously acknowledged the thought. It had lain sluggish in the deeps beneath surfaces agitated by emotions more poignant and immediate. Still, it had been there—that understanding. That, and that only, had so poisoned his rest....
But he shrank shuddering from the thought of the work that lay to his hand—work that must be accomplished at once and completely; for she must know nothing of it. She had suffered enough, as it was.
Hastening back to the farmstead, he secured a spade from the barn and made his way quickly down to the beach by way of the road through the cluster of deserted fishermen's huts.
Fifteen minutes' walk brought him to the pool. Ten minutes' hard work with the spade sufficed to excavate a shallow trench in the sands above high-water mark. He required as much time again to nerve himself to the point of driving off the gulls and moving the body. There were likewise crabs to be dealt with....
When it was accomplished, and he had lifted the last heavy stone into place above the grave, he dragged himself back along the beach and round a shoulder of the bluff to a spot warmed by the rays of the rising sun. There, stripping off his rags, he waded out into the sea and cleansed himself as best he might, scrubbing sand into his flesh until it was scored and angry; then crawled back, resumed his garments, and lay down for a time in the strength-giving light, feeling giddy and faint with the after-effects of the insuppressible nausea which had prolonged intolerably his loathsome task.
Very gradually the bluish shadows faded from about his mouth and eyes, and natural colour replaced his pallor. And presently he rose and went slowly up to the house, all his being in a state of violent rebellion against the terror and mystery of life.
What the gulls and the crabs and the shattering surf had left had been little, but enough for indisputable identification.
Whitaker had buried Drummond.
By the time he got back to the farm-house, the woman was up, dressed in the rent and stained but dry remnants of her own clothing (for all their defects, infinitely more becoming than the garments to which she had been obliged to resort the previous day) and busy preparing breakfast.
There was no question but that her rest had been sound and undisturbed. If her recuperative powers had won his envy before, now she was wholly marvellous in his eyes. Her radiant freshness dazzled, her elusive but absolute quality of charm bewitched—and her high spirits dismayed him. He entered her presence reluctantly, yielding alone to the spur of necessity. To keep out of her way was not only an impossibility, but would have served to rouse her suspicions; and she must not know: however difficult the task, he must dissemble, keep her in ignorance of his discovery. On that point he was resolved.
"Well, sir!" she called heartily over her shoulder. "And where, pray, have you been all this long time?"
"I went for a swim," he said evasively—"thought it might do me good."
"You're not feeling well?" She turned to look him over.
He avoided her eye. "I had a bad night—probably because I had too much sleep during the day. I got up feeling pretty rusty—the weight of my years. Cold water's ordinarily a specific for that sort of thing, but it didn't seem to work this time."
"Still got the hump, eh?"
"Still got the hump," he assented, glad thus to mask his unhappiness.
"Breakfast and a strong cup of tea or two will fix that," she announced with confidence. "It's too bad there's no coffee."
"Yes," he said—"sorry!"
"No signs of a response to our C. Q. D.?"
"None as yet. Of course, it's early."
He lounged out of the kitchen with a tin bowl, a towel and a bar of yellow soap, and splashed conscientiously at the pump in the dooryard, taking more time for the job than was really necessary.
From her place by the stove, she watched him through a window, her eyes like a sunlit sea dappled with shadows of clouds speeding before the wind.
He lingered outside until she called him to breakfast.
His stout attempts to match her cheerfulness during the meal fell dismally short of conviction. After two or three false starts he gave it up and took refuge in his plea of indisposition. She humoured him with a covert understanding that surmised more in a second than he could have compressed into a ten-minute confession.
The meal over, he rose and sidled awkwardly toward the door.
"You'll be busy for a while with the dishes and things, won't you?" he asked with an air meant to seem guileless.
"Oh, yes; for some time," she replied quickly.
"I—I think I'll take a stroll round the island. There might be something like a boat hidden away somewhere along the beach."
"You prefer to go alone?"
"If you don't mind."
"Not in the least. I've plenty to occupy my idle hands. If I can find needle and thread, for instance...." She indicated her clothing with a humorously rueful gesture.
"To be sure," he agreed, far too visibly relieved. Then his wits stumbled. "I want to think out some things," he added most superfluously.
"You won't go out of sight?" she pleaded through the window.
"It can't be done," he called back, strolling out of the dooryard with much show of idle indecision.
His real purpose was, in fact, definite. There was another body to be accounted for. It was quite possible that the sea might have given it up at some other point along the island coast. True: there was no second gathering of gulls to lend colour to this grisly theory; yet the danger was one to be provided against, since she was not to know.
Starting from its northwestern extreme, he made a complete circuit of the island, spending the greater part of the time along the edges of the western and southern bluffs, where he had not seldom to pause and scrutinize carefully the beach below, to make sure he had been deceived by some half-buried rock or curiously shaped boulder.
To his intense relief, he made no further discovery other than a scattering drift of wreckage from the motor-boats.
By the time he had finished, the morning was well advanced. He turned at length and trudged wearily up from the northern beach, through the community of desolation, back toward the farm-house.
Since breakfast he had seen nothing of the girl; none of the elaborately casual glances which he had from time to time cast inland had discovered any sign of her. But now she appeared in the doorway, and after a slight pause, as of indecision, moved down the path to meet him.
He was conscious that, at sight of her, his pulses quickened. Something swelled in his breast, something tightened the muscles of his throat. The way of her body in action, the way of the sun with her hair...!
Dismay shook him like an ague; he felt his heart divided against itself; he was so glad of her, and so afraid.... He could not keep his eyes from her, nor could he make his desire be still; and yet ... and yet....
Walking the faster of the two, she met him midway between the house and the beach.
"You've taken your time, Mr. Whitaker," said she.
"It was a bit of a walk," he contended, endeavouring to imitate her lightness of manner.
They paused beside one of the low stone walls that meandered in a meaningless fashion this way and that over the uplands. With a satisfied manner that suggested she had been seeking just that very spot, the girl sat down upon the lichened stones, then looked up to him with a smile and a slight movement of the head that plainly invited him to a place beside her.
He towered above her, darkly reluctant.
"Do sit down. You must be tired."
"I am."
Dubiously he seated himself at a little distance.
"And only your pains for your trouble?"
He nodded.
"I watched you, off and on, from the windows. You might have been looking for a pin, from your painstaking air, off there along the cliffs."
He nodded again, gloomily. Her comment seemed to admit of no more compromising method of reply.
"Then you've nothing to tell me?"
He pursed his lips, depreciatory, lifted his shoulders not quite happily, and swung one lanky leg across the other as he slouched, morosely eyeing the sheets of sapphire that made their prison walls.
"No. There's no good news yet."
"And you've no inclination to talk to me, either?"
"I've told you I don't feel—well—exactly light-hearted this morning."
There was a little silence. She watched him askance with her fugitive, shadowy, sympathetic and shrewd smile.
"Must I make talk, then?" she demanded at length.
"If we must, I suppose—you'll have to show the way. My mind's hardly equal to trail-breaking to-day."
"So I shall, then. Hugh...." She leaned toward him, dropping her hand over his own with an effect of infinite comprehension. "Hugh," she repeated, meeting his gaze squarely as he looked up, startled—"what's the good of keeping up the make-believe? Youknow!"
The breath clicked in his throat, and his glance wavered uneasily, then steadied again to hers. And through a long moment neither stirred, but sat so, eye to eye, searching each the other's mind and heart.
At length he confessed it with an uncertain, shamefaced nod.
"That's right," he said: "I do know—now."
She removed her hand and sat back without lessening the fixity of her regard.
"When did you find it out?"
"This morning. That is, it came to me all of a sudden—" His gaze fell; he stammered and felt his face burning.
"Hugh, that's not quite honest. I know you hadn't guessed, last night—Iknowit. How did you come to find it out this morning? Tell me!"
He persisted, as unconvincing as an unimaginative child trying to explain away a mischief:
"It was just a little while ago. I was thinking things over—"
"Hugh!"
He shrugged sulkily.
"Hugh, look at me!"
Unwillingly he met her eyes.
"How did you find out?"
He was an inexpert liar. Under the witchery of her eyes, his resource failed him absolutely. He started to repeat, stammered, fell still, and then in a breath capitulated.
"Before you were up—I meant to keep this from you—down there on the beach—I found Drummond."
"Drummond!"
It was a cry of terror. She started back from him, eyes wide, cheeks whitening.
"I'm sorry.... But I presume you ought to know.... His body ... I buried it...."
She gave a little smothered cry, and seemed to shrink in upon herself, burying her face in her hands—an incongruous, huddled shape of grief, there upon the gray stone wall, set against all the radiant beauty of the exquisite, sun-gladdened world.
He was patient with her, though the slow-dragging minutes during which she neither moved nor made any sound brought him inexpressible distress, and he seemed to age visibly, his face, settling in iron lines, gray with suffering.
At length a moan—rather, a wail—came from the stricken figure beside him:
"Ah, the pity of it! the pity of it!... What have I done that this should come to me!"
He ventured to touch her hand in gentle sympathy.
"Mary," he said, and hesitated with a little wonder, remembering that this was the first time he had ever called her by that name—"Mary, did you care for him so much?"
She sat, mute, her face averted and hidden.
"I'd give everything if I could have mended matters. I was fond of Drummond—poor soul! If he'd only been frank with me from the start, all this could have been avoided. As soon as I knew—that night when I recognized you on the stage—I went at once to you to say I would clear out—not stand in the way of your happiness. I would have said as much to him, but he gave me no chance."
"Don't blame him," she said softly. "He wasn't responsible."
"I know."
"How long have you known?" She swung suddenly to face him.
"For some time—definitely, for two or three days. He tried twice to murder me. The first time he must have thought he'd done it.... Then he tried again, the night before you were carried off. Ember suspected, watched for him, and caught him. He took him away, meaning to put him in a sanitarium. I don't understand how he got away—from Ember. It worries me—on Ember's account. I hope nothing has happened to him."
"Oh, I hope not!"
"You knew—I mean about the cause—the morphine?"
"I never guessed until that night. Then, as soon as I got over the first awful shock, I realized he was a madman. He talked incoherently—raved—shouted—threatened me with horrible things. I can't speak of them. Later, he quieted down a little, but that was after he had come down into the cabin to—to drug himself.... It was very terrible—that tiny, pitching cabin, with the swinging, smoking lamp, and the madman sitting there, muttering to himself over the glass in which the morphine was dissolving.... It happened three times before the wreck; I thought I should go out of my own mind."
She shuddered, her face tragic and pitiful.
"Poor girl!" he murmured inadequately.
"And that—that was why you were searching the beach so closely!"
"Yes—for the other fellow. I—didn't find him."
A moment later she said thoughtfully: "It was the man you saw watching me on the beach, I think."
"I assumed as much. Drummond had a lot of money, I fancy—enough to hire a desperate man to do almost anything.... The wages of sin—"
"Don't!" she begged. "Don't make me think of that!"
"Forgive me," he said.
For a little she sat, head bowed, brooding.
"Hugh!" she cried, looking up to search his face narrowly—"Hugh, you've not been pretending—?"
"Pretending?" he repeated, thick-witted.
"Hugh, I could never forgive you if you'd been pretending. It would be too cruel.... Ah, but you haven't been! Tell me you haven't!"
"I don't understand.... Pretending what?"
"Pretending you didn't know who I was—pretending to fall in love with me just because you were sorry for me, to make me think it wasmeyou loved and not the woman you felt bound to take care of, because you'd—you had—"
"Mary, listen to me," he interrupted. "I swear I didn't know you. Perhaps you don't understand how wonderfully you've changed. It's hard for me to believe you can be one with the timid and distracted little girl I married that rainy night. You're nothing like.... Only, that night on the stage, asJoan Thursday, youwerethat girl again. Max told me it was make-up; I wouldn't believe him; to me you hadn't changed at all; you hadn't aged a day.... But that morning when I saw you first on the Great South Beach—I never dreamed of associating you with my wife. Do you realize I had never seen you in full light—never knew the colour of your hair?... Dear, I didn't know, believe me. It was you who bewitched me—not the wife for whose sake I fought against what I thought infatuation for you. I loved—I love you only, you as you are—not the poor little girl of the Commercial House."
"Is it true?" she questioned sadly, incredulous.
"It is true, Mary. I love you."
"I have loved you always," she said softly between barely parted lips—"always, Hugh. Even when I thought you dead.... I did believe that you were drowned out there, Hugh! You know that, don't you?"
"I have never for an instant questioned it."
"It wouldn't be like you to, my dear; it wouldn't be you, my Hugh.... But even then I loved the memory of you.... You don't know what you have meant in my life, Hugh. Always, always you have stood for all that was fine and strong and good and generous—my gentlest man, my knightsans peur et sans reproche.... No other man I ever knew—no, let me say it!—ever measured up to the standard you had set for me to worship. But, Hugh—you'll understand, won't you?—about the others—?"
"Please," he begged—"please don't harrow yourself so, Mary!"
"No; I must tell you.... The world seemed so empty and so lonely, Hugh: my Galahad gone, never to return to me.... I tried to lose myself in my work, but it wasn't enough. And those others came, beseeching me, and—and I liked them. There was none like you, but they were all good men of their kind, and I liked them. They made love to me and—I was starving for affection, Hugh. I was made to love and to be loved. Each time I thought to myself: 'Surely this time it is true; now at last am I come into my kingdom. It can't fulfil my dreams, for I have known the bravest man, but'—"
Her voice broke and fell. Her eyes grew dull and vacant; her vision passed through and beyond him, as if he had not been there; the bitter desolation of all the widowed generations clouded her golden face. Her lips barely moved, almost inaudibly enunciating the words that were shaken from her as if by some occult force, ruthless and inexorable:
"Each time, Hugh, it was the same. One by one they were taken from me, strangely, terribly.... Poor Tom Custer, first; he was a dear boy, but I didn't love him and couldn't marry him. I had to tell him so. He killed himself.... Then Billy Hamilton; I became engaged to him; but he was taken mysteriously from a crowded ship in mid-ocean.... A man named Mitchell Thurston loved me. I liked him; perhaps I might have consented to marry him. He was assassinated—shot down like a mad dog in broad daylight—no one ever knew by whom, or why. He hadn't an enemy in the world we knew of.... And now Drummond...!"
"Mary, Mary!" he pleaded. "Don't—don't—those things were all accidents—"
She paid him no heed. She didn't seem to hear. He tried to take her hand, with a man's dull, witless notion of the way to comfort a distraught woman; but she snatched it from his touch.
"And now"—her voice pealed out like a great bell tolling over the magnificent solitude of the forsaken island—"and now I have it to live through once again: the wonder and terror and beauty of love, the agony and passion of having you torn from me!... Hugh!... I don't believe I can endure it again. I can'tbearthis exquisite torture. I'm afraid I shall go mad!... Unless ... unless"—her voice shuddered—"I have the strength, the strength to—"
"Good God!" he cried in desperation. "You must not go on like this! Mary! Listen to me!"
This time he succeeded in imprisoning her hand. "Mary," he said gently, drawing closer to her, "listen to me; understand what I say. I love you; I am your husband; nothing can possibly come between us. All these other things can be explained. Don't let yourself think for another instant—"
Her eyes, fixed upon the two hands in which he clasped her own, had grown wide and staring with dread. Momentarily she seemed stunned. Then she wrenched it from him, at the same time jumping up and away.
"No!" she cried, fending him from her with shaking arms. "No! Don't touch me! Don't come near me, Hugh! It's ... it's death! My touch is death! I know it now—I had begun to suspect, now Iknow! I am accursed—doomed to go through life like pestilence, leaving sorrow and death in my wake.... Hugh!" She controlled herself a trifle: "Hugh, I love you more than life; I love you more than love itself. But you must not come near me. Love me if you must, but, O my dear one! keep away from me; avoid me, forget me if you can, but at all cost shun me as you would the plague! I will not give myself to you to be your death!"
Before he could utter a syllable in reply, she turned and fled from him, wildly, blindly stumbling, like a hunted thing back up the ascent to the farm-house. He followed, vainly calling on her to stop and listen to him. But she outdistanced him, and by the time he had entered the house was in her room, behind a locked door.
Grimly Whitaker sat himself down in the kitchen and prepared to wait the reappearance of his wife—prepared to wait as long as life was in him, so that he were there to welcome her when, her paroxysm over, she would come to him to be comforted, soothed and reasoned out of her distorted conception of her destiny.
Not that he had the heart to blame or to pity her for that terrified vision of life. Her history was her excuse. Nor was his altogether a blameless figure in that history. At least it was not so in his sight. Though unwittingly, he had blundered cruelly in all his relations with the life of that sad little child of the Commercial House.
Like sunlight penetrating storm wrack, all the dark disarray of his revery was shot through and through by the golden splendour of the knowledge that she loved him....
As for this black, deadly shadow that had darkened her life—already he could see her emerging from it, radiant and wonderful. But it was not to be disregarded or as yet ignored, its baleful record considered closed and relegated to the pages of the past. Its movement had been too rhythmic altogether to lack a reason. His very present task was to read its riddle and exorcise it altogether.
For hours he pondered it there in the sunlit kitchen of the silent house—waiting, wondering, deep in thought. Time stole away without his knowledge. Not until late in the afternoon did the shifted position of the sun catch his attention and arouse him in alarm. Not a sound from above...!
He rose, ascended the stairs, tapped gently on the locked door.
"Mary," he called, with his heart in his mouth—"Mary!"
Her answer was instant, in accents sweet, calm and clear:
"I am all right. I'm resting, dear, and thinking. Don't fret about me. When I feel able, I will come down to you."
"As you will," he assented, unspeakably relieved; and returned to the kitchen.
The diversion of thought reminded him of their helpless and forlorn condition. He went out and swept the horizon with an eager and hopeful gaze that soon drooped in disappointment. The day had worn on in unbroken calm: not a sail stirred within the immense radius of the waters. Ships he saw in plenty—a number of them moving under power east and west beyond the headland with its crowning lighthouse; others—a few—left shining wakes upon the burnished expanse beyond the farthest land visible in the north. Unquestionably main-travelled roads of the sea, these, so clear to the sight, so heartbreakingly unattainable....
And then his conscience turned upon him, reminding him of the promise (completely driven out of his mind by his grim adventure before dawn, together with the emotional crisis of mid-morning) to display some sort of a day-signal of distress.
For something like half an hour he was busy with the task of nailing a turkey-red table-cloth to a pole, and the pole in turn (with the assistance of a ladder) to the peak of the gabled barn. But when this was accomplished, and he stood aside and contemplated the drooping, shapeless flag, realizing that without a wind it was quite meaningless, the thought came to him that the very elements seemed leagued together in a conspiracy to keep them prisoners, and he began to nurse a superstitious notion that, if anything were ever to be done toward winning their freedom, it would be only through his own endeavour, unassisted.
Thereafter for a considerable time he loitered up and down the dooryard, with all his interest focussed upon the tidal strait, measuring its greatest and its narrowest breadth with his eye, making shrewd guesses at the strength and the occasions of the tides.
If the calm held on and the sky remained unobscured by cloud, by eleven there would be clear moonlight and, if he guessed aright, the beginning of a period of slack water.
Sunset interrupted his calculations—sunset and his wife. Sounds of some one moving quietly round the kitchen, a soft clash of dishes, the rattling of the grate, drew him back to the door.
She showed him a face of calm restraint and implacable resolve, if scored and flushed with weeping. And her habit matched it: she had overcome her passion; her eyes were glorious with peace.
"Hugh"—her voice had found a new, sweet level of gentleness and strength—"I was wondering where you were."
"Can I do anything?"
"No, thank you. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am."
"For what, in Heaven's name?"
She smiled.... "For neglecting you so long. I really didn't think of it until the sunlight began to redden. I've let you go without your lunch."
"It didn't matter—"
"I don't agree. Man must be fed—and so must woman. I'm famished!"
"Well," he admitted with a short laugh—"so am I."
She paused, regarding him with her whimsical, indulgent smile. "You strange creature!" she said softly. "Are you angry with me—impatient—for this too facile descent from heroics to the commonplace? But, Hugh"—she touched his arm with a gentle and persuasive hand—"itmustbe commonplace. We're just mortals, after all, you know, no matter how imperishable our egos make us feel: and the air of the heights is too fine and rare for mortals to breathe long at a time. Life is, after all, an everyday affair. We've just got to blunder through it from day to day—mostly on the low levels. Be patient with me, dear."
But, alarmed by his expression, her words stumbled and ran out. She stepped back a pace, a little flushed and tremulous.
"Hugh! No, Hugh, no!"
"Don't be afraid of me," he said, turning away. "I don't mean to bother. Only—at times—"
"I know, dear; but it mustnotbe." She had recovered; there was cool decision in her accents. She began to move briskly round the kitchen, setting the table, preparing the meal.
He made no attempt to reason with her, but sat quietly waiting. His rôle was patience, tolerance, strength restrained in waiting....
"Shall you make a fire again to-night?" she asked, when they had concluded the meal.
"In three places," he said. "We'll not stay another day for want of letting people know we're here."
She looked down, shyly. Coquetry with her was instinctive, irrepressible. Her vague, provoking smile edged her lips:
"You—you want to be rid of me again, so soon, Hugh?"
He bent over the table with a set face, silent until his undeviating gaze caught and held her eyes.
"Mary," he said slowly, "I wantyou. I mean to have you. Only by getting away from this place will that be possible. You must come to me of your own will."
She made the faintest negative motion of her head, her eyes fixed to his in fascination.
"You will," he insisted, in the same level tone. "If you love me, as you say, you must.... No—that's nonsense I won't listen to! Renunciation is a magnificent and noble thing, but it must have a sane excuse.... You said a while ago, this was a commonplace world, life an everyday affair. It is. The only thing that lifts it out of the deadly, intolerable rut is this wonderful thing man has invented and named Love. Without it we are as Nature made us—brute things crawling and squabbling in blind squalor. But love lifts us a little above that: loveissupernatural, the only thing in all creation that rises superior to nature. There's no such thing as a life accursed; no such thing as a life that blights; there are no malign and vicious forces operating outside the realm of natural forces: love alone is supreme, subject to no known laws. I mean to prove it to you; I mean to show you how little responsible you have been in any way for the misfortunes that have overtaken men who loved you; I shall show you that I am far more blameworthy than you.... And when I have done that, you will come to me."
"I am afraid," she whispered breathlessly—"I am afraid I shall."
He rose. "Till then, my dearest girl, don't, please don't ever shrink from me again. I may not be able to dissemble my love, but until your fears are done away with, your mind at rest, no act of mine, within my control, shall ever cause you even so much as an instant's annoyance or distress."
His tone changed. "I'll go now and build my fires. When you are ready—?"
"I shan't be long," she said.
But for long after he had left her, she lingered moveless by a window, her gaze following him as he moved to and fro: her face now wistful, now torn by distress, now bright with longing. Strong passions contended within her—love and fear, joy and regret; at times crushing apprehensions of evil darkened her musings, until she could have cried out with the torment of her fears; and again intimations possessed her of exquisite beauty, warming and ennobling her heart, all but persuading her.
At length, sighing, she lighted the lamp and went about her tasks, with a bended head, wondering and frightened, fearfully questioning her own inscrutable heart. Was it for this only that she had fought herself all through that day: that she should attain an outward semblance of calm so complete as to deceive even herself, so frail as to be rent away and banished completely by the mere tones of his mastering voice? Was she to know no rest? Was it to be her fate to live out her days in yearning, eating her heart alone, feeding with sighs the passing winds? Or was she too weary to hold by her vows? Was she to yield and, winning happiness, in that same instant encompass its destruction?...
When it was quite dark, Whitaker brought a lantern to the door and called her, and they went forth together.
As he had promised, he had built up three towering pyres, widely apart. When all three were in full roaring flame, their illumination was hot and glowing over all the upland. It seemed impossible that the world should not now become cognizant of their distress.
At some distance to the north of the greatest fire—that nearest the farm-house—they sat as on the previous night, looking out over the black and unresponsive waters, communing together in undertones.
In that hour they learned much of one another: much that had seemed strange and questionable assumed, in the understanding of each, the complexion of the normal and right. Whitaker spoke at length and in much detail of his Wilful Missing years without seeking to excuse the wrong-minded reasoning which had won him his own consent to live under the mask of death. He told of the motives that had prompted his return, of all that had happened since in which she had had no part—with a single reservation. One thing he kept back: the time for that was not yet.
A listener in his turn, he heard the history of the little girl of the Commercial House breaking her heart against the hardness of life in what at first seemed utterly futile endeavour to live by her own efforts, asking nothing more of the man who had given her his name. To make herself worthy of that name, so that, living or dead, he might have no cause to be ashamed of her or to regret the burden he had assumed: this was the explanation of her fierce striving, her undaunted renewal of the struggle in the face of each successive defeat, her renunciation of the competence his forethought had provided for her. So also—since she would take nothing from her husband—pride withheld her from asking anything of her family or her friends. She cut herself off utterly from them all, fought her fight alone.
He learned of the lean years of drifting from one theatrical organization to another, forced to leave them one by one by conditions impossible and intolerable, until Ember found her playing ingenue parts in a mean provincial stock company; of the coming of Max, his interest in her, the indefatigable pains he had expended coaching her to bring out the latent ability his own genius divined; of the initial performance of "Joan Thursday" before a meagre and indifferent audience, her instant triumph and subsequent conquest of the country in half a dozen widely dissimilar rôles; finally of her decision to leave the stage when she married, for reasons comprehensible, demanding neither exposition nor defence.
"It doesn't matter any longer," she commented, concluding: "I loved and I hated it. It was deadly and it was glorious. But it no longer matters. It is finished: Sara Law is no more."
"You mean never to go back to the stage?"
"Never."
"And yet—" he mused craftily.
"Never!" She fell blindly into his trap. "I promised myself long ago that if ever I became a wife—"
"But you are no wife," he countered.
"Hugh!"
"You are Mrs. Whitaker—yes; but—"
"Dear, you are cruel to me!"
"I think it's you who would be cruel to yourself, dear heart."
She found no ready answer; was quiet for a space; then stirred, shivering. Behind them the fires were dying; by contrast a touch of chill seemed to pervade in the motionless air.
"I think," she announced, "we'd better go in."
She rose without assistance, moved away toward the house, paused and returned.
"Hugh," she said gently, with a quaver in her voice that wounded his conceit in himself; for he was sure it spelled laughter at his expense and well-merited—"Hugh, you big sulky boy! get up this instant and come back to the house with me. You know I'm timid. Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"
"I suppose so," he grumbled, rising. "I presume it's childish to want the moon—and sulk when you find you can't have it."
"Or a star?"
He made no reply; but his very silence was eloquent. She attempted a shrug of indifference to his disapproval, but didn't convince even herself; and when he paused before entering the house for one final look into the north, she waited on the steps above him.
"Nothing, Hugh?" she asked in a softened voice.
"Nothing," he affirmed dully.
"It's strange," she sighed.
"Lights enough off beyond the lighthouse yonder," he complained: "red lights and green, bound east and west. But you'd think this place was invisible, from the way we're ignored. However...."
They entered the kitchen.
"Well—however?" she prompted, studying his lowering face by lamplight.
"Something'll have to be done; if they won't help us, we'll have to help ourselves."
"Hugh!" There was alarm in her tone. He looked up quickly. "Hugh, what are you thinking of?"
"Oh—nothing. But I've got to think of something."
She came nearer, intuitively alarmed and pleading. "Hugh, you wouldn't leave me here alone?"
"What nonsense!"
"Promise me you won't."
"Don't be afraid," he said evasively. "I'll be here—as always—when you wake up."
She drew a deep breath, stepped back without removing her gaze from his face, then with a gesture of helplessness took up her lamp.
"Good night, Hugh."
"Good night," he replied, casting about for his own lamp.
But when he turned back, she was still hesitating in the doorway. He lifted inquiring brows.
"Hugh...."
"Yes?"
"I trust you. Be faithful, dear."
"Thank you," he returned, not without flavour of bitterness. "I'll try to be. Good night."
She disappeared; the light of her lamp faded, flickering in the draught of the hall, stencilled the wall with its evanescent caricature of the balustrade, and was no longer visible.
"Hugh!" her voice rang from the upper floor.
He started violently out of deep abstraction, and replied inquiringly.
"You won't forget to lock the door?"
He swore violently beneath his breath; controlled his temper and responded pleasantly: "Certainly not."
Then he shut the outside door with a convincing bang.
"If this be marriage...!" He smiled his twisted smile, laughed a little quietly, and became again his normal, good-natured self, if a little unusually preoccupied.
Leaving the kitchen light turned low, he went to his own room and, as on the previous night, threw himself upon the bed without undressing; but this time with no thought of sleep. Indeed, he had no expectation of closing his eyes in slumber before the next night, at the earliest; he had no intention other than to attempt to swim to the nearest land. In the illusion of night, his judgment worked upon by his emotions, that plan which had during the afternoon suggested itself, been thoroughly considered, rejected as too desperately dangerous, and then reconsidered in the guise of their only possible chance of escape at any reasonably early date, began to assume a deceptive semblance of feasibility.
He did not try to depreciate its perils: the tides that swept through that funnel-shaped channel were unquestionably heavy: heavier than even so strong a swimmer as he should be called upon to engage; the chances of being swept out to sea were appallingly heavy. The slightest error in judgment, the least miscalculation of the turn of the tide, and he was as good as lost.
On the other hand, with a little good luck, by leaving the house shortly after moonrise, he should be able to catch the tide just as it was nearing high water. Allowing it to swing him northwest until it fulled, he ought to be a third of the way across by the time it slackened, and two-thirds of the distance before it turned seawards again. And the distance was only three miles or so.
And the situation on the island had grown unendurable. He doubted his strength to stand the torment and the provocation of another day.
Allow an hour and a half for the swim—say, two; another hour in which to find a boat; and another to row or sail back: four hours. He should be back upon the island long before dawn, even if delayed. Surely no harm could come to her in that time; surely he ought to be able to reckon on her sleeping through his absence—worn down by the stress of the day's emotions as she must certainly be. True, he had given her to understand he would not leave her; but she need not know until his return; and then his success would have earned him forgiveness.
An hour dragged out its weary length, and the half of another while he reasoned with himself, drugging his conscience and his judgment alike with trust in his lucky star. In all that time he heard no sound from the room above him; and for his part he lay quite unstirring, his whole body relaxed, resting against the trial of strength to come.
Insensibly the windows of his room, that looked eastward, filled with the pale spectral promise of the waning moon. He rose, with infinite precaution against making any noise, and looked out. The night was no less placid than the day had been. The ruins of his three beacons shone like red winking eyes in the black face of night. Beyond them the sky was like a dome of crystal, silvery green. And as he looked, an edge of silver shone on the distant rim of the waters; and then the moon, misshapen, wizened and darkling, heaved sluggishly up from the deeps.
Slowly, on tiptoes, Whitaker stole toward the door, out into the hall; at the foot of the stairs he paused, listening with every nerve tense and straining; he fancied he could just barely detect the slow, regular respiration of the sleeping woman. And he could see that the upper hallway was faintly aglow. She had left her lamp burning, the door open. Last night, though the lamp had burned till dawn, that door had been closed....
He gathered himself together again, took a single step on toward the kitchen; and then, piercing suddenly the absolute stillness within the house, a board squealed like an animal beneath his tread.
In an instant he heard the thud and patter of her footsteps above, her loud, quickened breathing as she leaned over the balustrade, looking down, and her cry of dismay: "Hugh! Hugh!"
He halted, saying in an even voice: "Yes; it is I." She had already seen him; there was no use trying to get away without her knowledge now; besides, he was no sneak-thief to fly from a cry. He burned with resentment, impatience and indignation, but he waited stolidly enough while the woman flew down the stairs to his side.
"Hugh," she demanded, white-faced and trembling, "what is the matter? Where are you going?"
He moved his shoulders uneasily, forcing a short laugh. "I daresay you've guessed it. Undoubtedly you have. Else why—" He didn't finish save by a gesture of resignation.
"You mean you were going—going to try to swim to the mainland?"
"I meant to try it," he confessed.
"But, Hugh—your promise?"
"I'm sorry, Mary; I didn't want to promise. But you see ... this state of things cannot go on. Something has got to be done. It's the only way I know of. I—I can't trust myself—"
"You'd leave me here while you went to seek death—!"
"Oh, it isn't as dangerous as all that. If you'd only been asleep, as I thought you were, I'd've been back before you knew anything about it."
"I should have known!" she declared passionately. "Iwasasleep, but I knew the instant you stirred. Tell me; how long did you stand listening here, to learn if I was awake or not?"
"Several minutes."
"I knew it, though I was asleep, and didn't waken till the board squeaked. I knew you would try it—knew it from the time when you quibbled and evaded and wouldn't give me a straight promise. Oh, Hugh, my Hugh, if you had gone and left me...!"
Her voice shook and broke. She swayed imperceptibly toward him, then away, resting a shoulder against the wall and quivering as though she would have fallen but for that support. He found himself unable to endure the reproach of those dark and luminous eyes set in the mask of pallor that was her face in the half-light of the hallway. He looked away, humbled, miserable, pained.
"It's too bad," he mumbled. "I'm sorry you had to know anything about it. But ... it can't be helped, Mary. You've got to brace up. I won't be gone four hours at the longest."
"Four hours!" She stood away from the wall, trembling in every limb. "Hugh, you—you don't mean—you're not going—now?"
He nodded a wretched, makeshift affirmation.
"It must be done," he muttered. "Please—"
"But it must not be done! Hugh!" Her voice ascended "I—I can't let you. I won't let you! You ... It'll be your death—you'll drown. I shall have let you go to your death—"
"Oh, now, really—" he protested.
"But, Hugh, Iknowit! I feel it here." A hand strayed to rest, fluttering, above her heart. "If I should let you go ... Oh, my dear one, don't, don't go!"
"Mary," he began hoarsely, "I tell you—"
"You're only going, Hugh, because ... because I love you so I ... I am afraid to let you love me. That's true, isn't it? Hugh—it's true?"
"I can't stay ..." he muttered with a hang-dog air.
She sought support of the wall again, her body shaken by dry sobbing that it tore his heart to hear. "You—you're really going—?"
He mumbled an almost inaudible avowal of his intention.
"Hugh, you're killing me! If you leave me—"
He gave a gesture of despair and capitulation.
"I've done my best, Mary. I meant to do the right thing. I—"
"Hugh, you mean you won't go?" Joy from a surcharged heart rang vibrant in every syllable uttered in that marvellous voice.
But now he dared meet her eyes. "Yes," he said, "I won't go"—nodding, with an apologetic shadow of his twisted smile. "I can't if ... if it distresses you."
"Oh, my dear, my dear!"
Whitaker started, staggered with amaze, and the burden of his wife in his arms. Her own arms clipped him close. Her fragrant tear-gemmed face brushed his. He knew at last the warmth of her sweet mouth, the dear madness of that first caress.
The breathless seconds spun their golden web of minutes. They did not move. Round them the silence sang like the choiring seraphim....
Then through the magical hush of that time when the world stood still, the thin, clear vibrations of a distant hail:
"Aho-oy!"
In his embrace his wife stiffened and lifted her head to listen like a startled fawn. As one their hearts checked, paused, then hammered wildly. With a common impulse they started apart.
"You heard—?"
"Listen!" He held up a hand.
This time it rang out more near and most unmistakable:
"Ahoy! The house, ahoy!"
With the frenzied leap of a madman, Whitaker gained the kitchen door, shook it, controlled himself long enough to draw the bolt, and flung out into the dim silvery witchery of the night. He stood staring, while the girl stole to his side and caught his arm. He passed it round her, lifted the other hand, dumbly pointed toward the northern beach. For the moment he could not trust himself to speak.
In the sweep of the anchorage a small white yacht hovered ghostlike, broadside to the island, her glowing ports and green starboard lamp painting the polished ebony of the still waters with the images of many burning candles.
On the beach itself a small boat was drawn up. A figure in white waited near it. Issuing from the deserted fishing settlement, rising over the brow of the uplands, moved two other figures in white and one in darker clothing, the latter leading the way at a rapid pace.
With one accord Whitaker and his wife moved down to meet them. As they drew together, the leader of the landing party checked his pace and called:
"Hello there! Who are you? What's the meaning of your fires—?"
Mechanically Whitaker's lips uttered the beginning of the response: "Shipwrecked—signalling for help—"
"Whitaker!" the voice of the other interrupted with a jubilant shout. "Thank God we've found you!"
It was Ember.
Seldom, perhaps, has an habitation been so unceremoniously vacated as was the solitary farm-house on that isolated island. Whitaker delayed only long enough to place a bill, borrowed from Ember, on the kitchen table, in payment for what provisions they had consumed, and to extinguish the lamps and shut the door.
Ten minutes later he occupied a chair beneath an awning on the after deck of the yacht, and, with an empty glass waiting to be refilled between his fingers and a blessed cigar fuming in the grip of his teeth, stared back to where their rock of refuge rested, brooding over its desolation, losing bulk and conformation and swiftly blending into a small dark blur upon the face of the waters.
"Ember," he demanded querulously, "what the devil is that place?"
"You didn't know?" Ember asked, amused.
"Not the smell of a suspicion. This is the first pleasure, in a manner of speaking, cruise I've taken up along this coast. I'm a bit weak on its hydrography."
"Well, if that's the case, I don't mind admitting that it is No Man's Land."
"I'm strong for its sponsors in baptism. They were equipped with a strong sense of the everlasting fitness of things. And the other—?"
"Martha's Vineyard. That's Gay Head—the headland with the lighthouse. Off to the north of it, the Elizabeth Islands. Beyond them, Buzzards Bay. This neat little vessel is now standing about west-no'th-west to pick up Point Judith light—if you'll stand for the nautical patois. After that, barring a mutiny on the part of the passengers, she'll swing on to Long Island Sound. If we're lucky, we'll be at anchor off East Twenty-fourth Street by nine o'clock to-morrow morning. Any kick coming?"
"Not from me. You might better consult—my wife," said Whitaker with an embarrassed laugh.
"Thanks, no: if it's all the same to you. Besides, I've turned her over to the stewardess, and I daresay she won't care to be interrupted. She's had a pretty tough time of it: I judge from your rather disreputable appearance. Really, you're cutting a most romantical, shocking figger."
"Glad of that," Whitaker remarked serenely. "Give me another drink.... I like to be consistent—wouldn't care to emerge from a personally conducted tour of all hell looking like a George Cohan chorus-boy.... Lord! how good tobacco does taste after you've gone without it a few days!... Look here: I've told you how things were with us, in brief; but I'm hanged if you've disgorged a single word of explanation as to how you came to let Drummond slip through your fingers, to say nothing of how you managed to find us."
"He didn't slip through my fingers," Ember retorted. "He launched a young earthquake at my devoted head and disappeared before the dust settled. More explicitly: I had got him to the edge of the woods, that night, when something hit me from behind and my light went out in a blaze of red fire. I came to some time later with a tasty little gag in my mouth and the latest thing in handcuffs on my wrists, behind my back—the same handcuffs that I'd decorated Drummond with—and several fathoms of rope wound round my legs. I lay there—it was a sort of open work barn—until nearly midnight the following night. Then the owner happened along, looking for something he'd missed—another ass, I believe—and let me loose. By the time I'd pulled myself together, from what you tell me, you were piling up on the rocks back there."
"Just before dawn, yesterday."
"Precisely. Finding you'd vacated the bungalow, I interviewed Sum Fat and Elise, and pieced together a working hypothesis. It was easy enough to surmise Drummond had some pal or other working with him:Iwas slung-shotted from behind, while Drummond was walking ahead. And two men had worked in the kidnapping of Mrs. Whitaker. So I went sleuthing; traced you through the canal to Peconic; found eye-witnesses of your race as far as Sag Harbor. There I lost you—and there I borrowed this outfit from a friend, an old-time client of mine. Meanwhile I'd had a general alarm sent out to the police authorities all along the coast—clear to Boston. No one had seen anything of you anywhere. It was heavy odds-on, that you'd gone to the bottom in that blow, all of you; but I couldn't give up. We kept cruising, looking up unlikely places. And, at that, we were on the point of throwing up the sponge when I picked up a schooner that reported signal fires on No Man's Land.... I think that clears everything up."
"Yes," said Whitaker, sleepily. "And now, without ingratitude, may I ask you to lead me to a bath and my bunk. I have just about fifteen minutes of semi-consciousness to go on."
Nor was this exaggeration; it was hard upon midnight, and he had been awake since before dawn of a day whose course had been marked by a succession of increasingly exhaustive emotional crises, following a night of interrupted and abbreviated rest; add to this the inevitable reaction from high nervous tension. His reserve vitality seemed barely sufficient to enable him to keep his eyes open through the rite of the hot salt-water bath. After that he gave himself blindly into Ember's guidance, and with a mumbled, vague good night, tumbled into the berth assigned him. And so strong was his need of sleep that it was not until ten o'clock the following morning, when the yacht lay at her mooring in the East River, that Ember succeeded in rousing him by main strength and good-will.
This having been accomplished, he was left to dress and digest the fact that his wife had gone ashore an hour ago, after refusing to listen to a suggestion that Whitaker be disturbed. The note Ember handed him purported to explain what at first blush seemed a singularly ungrateful and ungracious freak. It was brief, but in Whitaker's sight eminently adequate and compensating.