Part 15

The man's voice reached her again, filled her mind with amazing resistance--so that the point of the occultist's will was broken. Suddenly, she remembered that she had once heard Stephen Cabot, protesting that he was quite well--at the end of the first New York performance of _The Thing_, and that his tones were inseparably identified with his misfortune. The voice she heard now thrilled her like an ancient, but instantly familiar, harmony. It was not Stephen Cabot's. She stood at the open door, when the vehemence of Selma Cross, who was now speaking, caused her to refrain from making her presence known. The unspeakable possibility, suddenly upreared in her mind, banished every formality. The full energies of her life formed in a prayer that she might be wrong, as Paula peered through the inner hall, and for the first time in the flesh glimpsed Quentin Charter.

She was standing before the elevator-shaft and had signaled for the car eternities ago. Selma Cross was moving up and down the room within, but her words though faintly audible, had no meaning to the woman without. Paula's mind seemed so filled with sayings from the actress that there was no room for the interpretation of a syllable further. One sentence of Charter's startled her with deadly pain.... She could wait no longer, and started to walk down. Half-way to the main-floor, the elevator sped upward to answer her bell.... She was very weak, and temptation was fiercely operative to return to her rooms, when she heard a slow, firm step ascending the flight below. She turned from the stairs on the second floor, just as the huge, lean shoulders of Bellingham appeared on the opposite side of the elevator-shaft.

The two faced without words. His countenance was livid, wasted, but his eyes were of fire. Paula lost herself in their power. She knew only that she must return with him. There was no place to go; indeed, to return with him now seemed normal, rational--until the brightly-lit car rushed down and stopped before them.

"Excuse me for keeping you waiting, Miss Linster," the elevator-man said, "but I had to carry a message to the rear."

In the instantaneous break of Bellingham's concentration, Paula recovered herself sufficiently to dart into the car.

"Down, if you please," she said hoarsely. "The gentleman is going up."

Bellingham, who had started to follow, was stopped by the sliding-door. The conductor called that he would be back directly, as his car slid down.... In the untellable disorganization of mind, Paula knew for the moment only this: she must reach the outer darkness instantly or expire. In that swift drop to the main floor, and in the brief interval required to stop the car and slide the door, she endured all the agony of tightened fingers upon her throat. There was an ease in racing limbs, as she sped across the tiles to the entrance, as a frightened child rushes from a dark room. She would die if the great door resisted--pictured it all before her hand touched the knob. She would turn, scream, and fall from suffocation. Her scream would call about her the horror that she feared.

The big door answered, as it seemed, with a sort of leisurely dignity to her spasm of strength--and out under the rain-blurred lamps, she ran, ready to faint if any one called, and continually horrified lest something pluck at her skirts--thus to Central Park West. An Eighth Avenue car was approaching, half a square above. To stand and wait, in the fear lest Bellingham reach the corner in time for the car, assailed the last of her vitality. It was not until she had boarded it, and was beyond reach of a pedestrian on Cathedral Way, that she breathed as one who has touched shore after the Rapids. Still, every south-bound cab renewed her panic. She could have made time to South Ferry by changing to the Elevated, but fear of encountering the Destroyer prevented this. Fully three-quarters of an hour was used in reaching the waiting-room, where she was fortunate in catching a Staten Island boat without delay. Every figure that crossed the bridge after her, until the big ferry put off, Paula scrutinized; then sank nearly fainting into a seat.

Bellingham's plot was clear to her mind, as well as certain elements of his craft to obviate every possibility of failure. He had doubtless seen her enter the house, and timed his control to dethrone her volition as she reached her rooms. Since the elevator-man would not have taken him up, without word from her, Bellingham had hastened in and started up the stairs when the car was called from the main floor. His shock at finding her in the second-hall was extraordinary, since he was doubtless struggling with the entire force of his concentration, to hold her in the higher apartment and to prepare her mind for his own reception. It was that moment that the elevator-man had saved her; yet, she could not forget how the voice of Quentin Charter had broken the magician's power a moment before; and it occurred to her now how wonderfully throughout her whole Bellingham experience, something of the Westerner's spirit had sustained her in the crises--Quentin Charter's book that first night in Prismatic Hall; Quentin Charter's letter to which she had clung during the dreadful interview in the Park....

As for Quentin Charter rushing immediately to the woman of lawless attractions, because he had not received the hoped-for note at the _Granville_--in this appeared a wantonness almost beyond belief. Wearily she tried to put the man and his base action entirely out of mind. And Selma Cross, whose animation had been so noticeable when informed of Charter's coming, had fallen beneath the reach of Paula's emotions.... She could pity--with what a torrential outpouring--could she pity "that finest, lowest head!"

She stepped out on deck. The April night was inky-black. All day there had been a misty rain from which the chill of winter was gone. The dampness was sweet to breathe and fresh upon her face. The smell of ocean brought up from the subconscious, a thought already in tangible formation there. The round clock in the cabin forward had indicated nine-forty-five. It seemed more like another day, than only an hour and a half ago, that she had caught the Eighth Avenue car at Cathedral Way. The ferry was nearing the Staten slip. In a half-hour more, she would reach Reifferscheid's house. Her heart warmed with gratitude for a friend to whom she could say as little or as much as she pleased, yet find him, heart and home, at her service. One must be terrified and know the need of a refuge in the night to test such values. A few hours before, she had rejected the thought of going, because a slight formality had not been attended to. Hard pressed now, she was seeking him in the midst of the night.... At the mention of the big man's name, the conductor on the Silver Lake car took her in charge, helped her off at the right road, and pointed out the Reifferscheid light. Thus she felt her friend's kindness long before she heard the big elms whispering over his cottage. The front-window was frankly uncurtained, and the editor sat within, soft-shirted and eminently comfortable beside a green-shaded reading-lamp. She even saw him drop his book at her step upon the walk. A moment later, she blinked at him laughingly, as he stood in the light of the wide open doorway.

"Properly 'Driven From Home,' I suppose I should be tear-stained and in shawl and apron," she began.

He laughed delightedly, and exclaimed: "How could Father be so obdurate--alas, a-a-las! Lemme see, this is a fisherman's hut on the moors, or a gardener's lodge on the shore. Anyway, it's good to have you here.... Annie!"

He took her hat and raincoat, wriggling meanwhile into a coat of his own, arranged a big chair before the grate, then removed her rubbers. Not a question did he ask, and Sister Annie's greeting presently, from her chair, was quite the same--as if the visit and the hour were exactly in order.

"You'll stay a day or two, won't you?" he asked. "Honestly, I don't like the way they treat you up there beyond the Park.... It will be fine to-morrow. This soft rain will make Mother Earth turn over and take an eye-opener----"

"The truth is, I want to stay until there's a ship for the Antilles," she told him, "and I don't know when the first one goes."

"I hope it's a week at least," he said briskly. "The morning papers are here with all the sailings. A sea-voyage will do you a world of good, and Europe doesn't compare with a trip to the Caribbean."

"Just you two--and one other--are to know," Paula added nervously.

Reifferscheid had gathered up a bundle of papers, and was turning pages swiftly. "There isn't a reason in the world why everybody should know," he remarked lightly, "only you'd better be Lottie or Daisy Whats-her-name, as the cabin lists of all outgoing ships are available to any one who looks."

"Tim will be delighted to make everything easy for you," Sister Annie put in.

Thus mountains dissolved. The soulful accord and the instant sympathy which sprang to meet her every word, and the valor behind it all, so solid as to need no explanation--were more than Paula could bear.... Reifferscheid looked up from his papers, finding that she did not speak, started with embarrassment, and darted to the buffet. A moment later he had given her a glass of wine and vanished from the room with an armful of newspapers. The door had no sooner closed upon him than Paula discovered the outstretched arms of Sister Annie. In the several moments which followed her heart was healed and soothed through a half-forgotten luxury....

"The twin-screw liner, _Fruitlands_,--do you really want the first?" Reifferscheid interrupted himself, when he was permitted to enter later.

"Yes."

"Well, it sails in forty-eight hours, or a little less--Savannah, Santiago de Cuba, San Juan de Porto Rico--and down to the little Antilles--Tuesday night at ten o'clock at the foot of Manhattan."

"That will do very well," Paula said, "and I'd like to go straight to the ship from here--if you'll----"

"Berth--transportation--trunks--and sub-let your flat, if you like," Reifferscheid said as gleefully as a boy invited for a week's hunt. "Why, Miss Linster, I am the original arrangement committee."

"You have always been wonderful to me," Paula could not help saying, though it shattered his ease. "This one other who must know is Madame Nestor. She'll take care of my flat and pack things for me--if you'll get a message to her in the morning when you go over. I don't expect to be gone so long that it will be advisable to sub-let."

"Which is emphatically glad tidings," Reifferscheid remarked hastily.

"You'll want all your summer clothes," said Sister Annie. "Tim will see to your trunks."

"Sometime, I'll make it all plain," Paula tried to say steadily. "It's just been life to me--this coming here--and knowing that I could come here----"

"Miss Linster," Reifferscheid broke in, "I don't want to have to disappear again. The little things you need done, I'd do for any one in the office. Please bear in mind that Sister Annie and I would be hurt--if you didn't let us do them. Why, we belong--in a case like this. Incidentally, you are doing a bully thing--to take a sail down past that toy-archipelago. They say you can hear the parakeets screeching out from the palm-trees on the shore, and each island has a different smell of spice. It will be great for you--rig you out with a new set of wings. You must take Hearn along. I've got his volume here on the West Indies. He'll tell you the color of the water your ship churns. Each day farther south it's a different blue----"

So he jockeyed her into laughing, and she slept long and dreamlessly that night, as she had done once before in the same room.... The second night following, Reifferscheid put her aboard the _Fruitlands_.

"It's good you thought of taking your cabin under a borrowed name, Miss--er--Wyndam--Miss Laura Wyndam," he said in a low voice, for the passengers were moving about. "I'll write you all about it. You have famous friends. Selma Cross, who is playing at the _Herriot_, wanted to know where you were. I thought for a minute she was going to throw me down and take it away from me. Quentin Charter, by the way, is in town and asked about you. Seemed depressed when I told him you were out of town, and hadn't sent your address to me yet. I told him and Miss Cross that mail for you sent to _The States_ would get to you eventually. Both said they would write--so you'll hear from them on the ship that follows this." He glanced at her queerly for a second, and added, "Good-by, and a blessed voyage to you, Tired Lady. Write us how the isles bewitch you, and I'll send you a package of books every ship or two----"

"Good-by--my first of friends!"

Two hours afterward Paula took a last turn on deck. The spray swept in gusts over the _Fruitlands's_ dipping prow. The bare masts, tipped with lights, swung with a giant sweep from port to starboard and back to port again, fingering the black heavens for the blown-out stars. She was lonely, but not altogether miserable, out there on the tossing floor of the Atlantic....

SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER

PAULA SAILS INTO THE SOUTH, SEEKING THE HOLY MAN OF SAINT PIERRE, WHERE _LA MONTAGNE PELEE_ GIVES WARNING

Wonderfully strengthened, she was, by the voyage. Sorrow had destroyed large fields of verdure, and turned barren the future, but its devouring was finished. Quentin Charter was adjusted in her mind to a duality with which Paula Linster could have no concern. Only to one mistress could he be faithful; indeed, it was only in the presence of this mistress that he became the tower of visions to another; in the midst of the work he worshipped, Quentin Charter had heard the Skylark sing. Paula did not want to see him again, nor Selma Cross. To avoid these two, as well as the place where the Destroyer had learned so well to penetrate, she had managed not to return to her apartment during the two days before sailing.... There would never be another master-romance--never again so rich a giving, nor so pure an ideal. Before this tragic reality, the inner glory of her womanhood became meaningless. It was this that made the future a crossing of sterile tundras,--yet she would keep her friends, and love her work, and try to hold her faith....

Bellingham did not call her at sea, but he had frightened her too profoundly to be far from mind. The face she had seen in the hall-way was drawn and disordered by the dreadful tortures of nether-planes; and awful in the eyes, was that feline vacancy of soul. Once in a dream, she saw him--a pale reptile-monster upreared from a salty sea, voiceless in that oceanic isolation, a shameful secret of the depths. The ghastly bulk had risen with a mute protest to the sky against dissolution and creeping decay--and sounded again....

To her, Bellingham was living death, the triumph of desire which rends itself, the very essence of tragedy. She gladly would have died to make her race see the awfulness of _just flesh_--as she saw it now.... His power seemed ended; she felt with the Reifferscheids and Madame Nestor, that her secret was hermetic, and there was a goodly sense of security in the intervening sea....

And now there was a new island each day; each morning a fresh garden arose from the Caribbean--sun-wooed, rain-softened isles with colorful little ports.... There was one tropic city--she could not recall the name--which from the offing had looked like the flower-strewn gateway to an amphitheatre of mountains.

The _Fruitlands_ had lain for a day in the hot, sharky harbor of Santiago; had run into a real cloudburst off the Silver Reefs of Santo Domingo, and breathed on the radiant next morning before the stately and ancient city of San Juan de Porto Rico--shining white as a dream-castle of old Spain, and adrift in an azure world of sky and sea. She spent a day and an evening in this isle of ripe fruits and riper amours; and took away materials for a memory composite of interminable siestas, restless radiant nights, towering cliffs, incomparable courtesy, and soft-voiced maidens with wondrous Spanish eyes that laugh and turn away.

Then for two days they had steamed down past the saintly archipelago--St. Thomas, St. Martin, St. Kitts; then Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Dominica, and a legion of littler isles--truncated peaks jutting forth from fragrant, tinted water. There were afternoons when she did not care to lift her voice or move about. Fruit-juices and the simplest salads, a flexible cane chair under the awnings, a book to rest the eyes from the gorgeous sea and enchanted shores, somnolence rather than sleep--these are enough for the approach to perfection in the Caribbean, with the Lesser Antilles on the lee.... Then at last in late afternoon, the great hulking shape of Pelee loomed watery green against the sky; in the swift-speeding twilight, the volcano seemed to swell and blacken until it was like the shadow of a continent, and the lights of Saint Pierre pricked off the edge of the land.

At last late at night, queerly restless, she sat alone on deck in the windless roadstead and regarded the illumined terraces of Saint Pierre. They had told her that the breath from Martinique was like the heavy moist sweetness of a horticultural garden, but the island must have been sick with fever this night, for a mile at sea the land-breeze was dry, devitalized, irritating the throat and nostrils.

There was no moon, and the stars were so faint in the north that the mass of Pelee was scarcely shaped against the sky. The higher lights of the city had a reddish uncertain glow, as if a thin film of fog hung between them and the eye; but to the south the night cleared into pure purple and unsullied tropic stars. The harbor was weirdly hot.

Before her was the city which held the quest of her voyaging--Father Fontanel, the holy man of Saint Pierre.... _Only a stranger can realize what a pure shining garment his actual flesh has become. To me there was healing in the very approach of the man...._ This was the enduring fragment from the Charter letters; and in that dreadful Sunday night when she began her flight from Bellingham, already deep within her mind Father Fontanel was the goal.... Paula set out for shore early the next morning. The second-officer of the _Fruitlands_ sat beside her in the launch. She spoke of the intense sultriness.

"Yes, Saint Pierre is glowing like a brazier," he said. "I was ashore last night for awhile. The people blame the mountain. Old Pelee has been acting up--showering the town with ash every little while lately. It's the taint of sulphur that spoils the air."

She turned apprehensively toward the volcano. _La Montague Pelee_, over the red-tiled roofs of Saint Pierre, looked huge like an Emperor of the Romans. Paled in the intense morning light, he wore a delicate ruching of white cloud about his crown. They stepped ashore on the Sugar Landing where Paula found a carriage to take her to the _Hotel des Palms_, a rare old plantation-house on the _Morne d'Orange_, recently converted for public use.

The ponies were ascending the rise in _Rue Victor Hugo_, at the southern end of the city, when Paula discovered the little Catholic church she had imaged for so many weeks, _Notre Dame des Lourdes_, niched away in the crowded streets with a Quebec-like quaintness, and all the holier from its close association with the lowly shops. From these walls had risen the spiritual house of Father Fontanel--her far bright beacon.... The _porteuses_, said to be the lithest, hardiest women of the occident, wore a pitiable look of fatigue, as they came down from the hill-trails, steadying the baskets upon their heads. The pressure of the heat, and the dispiriting atmosphere revealed their effects in the distended eyelids and colorless, twisted lips of the burden-bearers.

The ponies at length gained the eminence of the _Morne d'Orange_, and ahead she saw the broad, white plantation-house--_Hotel des Palms_. To the right was the dazzling, turquoise sea where the _Fruitlands_ lay large among the shipping, and near her a private sea-going yacht, nearly as long and angelically white. The broad verandas of the hotel were alluring with palms; the walls and portcullises were cooled with embroidering vines. Gardens flamed with poinsettias and roses, and a shaded grove of mango and India trees at the end of the lawn, was edged with moon flowerets and oleanders. Back of the plantation-house waved the sloping seas of cane; in front, the Caribbean. On the south rose the peaks of Carbet; on the north, the Monster.

Paula had hardly left the veranda of magnificent vistas two hours later, when the friendly captain of the _Fruitlands_ approached with an elderly American, of distinguished appearance, whom he presented--Mr. Peter Stock, of Pittsburg.

"Since you are to leave us here, Miss Wyndam," the captain added, "I thought you would be glad to know Mr. Stock, who makes an annual cruise around these Islands--and knows them better than any American I've encountered yet. Yonder is his yacht--that clipper-built beauty just a bit in from the liner."

"I've already been admiring the yacht," Paula said, "and wondering her name. There's something Venetian about her dazzling whiteness in the soft, deep blue."

"I get it exactly, Miss Wyndam--that 'mirage of marble' in the Italian sky.... My craft is the _Saragossa_." His eyelids were tightened against the light, and the voice was sharp and brisk. His face, tropically tanned, contrasted effectively with the close-cropped hair and mustache, lustrous-white as his ship.... Paula having found the captain's courtesy and good sense invariable during the voyage, gladly accepted his friend, who proved most interesting on the matter of Pelee.

"I've stayed here in Saint Pierre longer now than usual," he told her, pointing toward the mountain, "to study the old man yonder. Pelee, you know, is identified with Martinique, much the same as the memory of Josephine; yet the people of the city can't seem to take his present disorder seriously. This is cataclysmic country. Hell--I use the word to signify a geological stratum--is very close to the surface down here. All these lovely islands are merely ash-piles hurled up by the great subterranean fires. The point is, Lost Atlantis is apt to stir any time under the Caribbean--and rub out our very pretty panorama."

"You regard this as an entertainment worth waiting for?" Paula asked.

The vaguest sort of a smile passed over his eyes and touched his lips. "Pelee and I are very old friends. I spoke of the volcanic origin of these islands in the way of suggesting that any seismic activity in the archipelago--Pelee's present internal complaint, for instance,--should be taken significantly. Saint Pierre would have been white this morning--except for the heavy rain before dawn."

"You mean volcanic ash?"

"Exactly."

"That explains the white scum I saw in the gutters, driving through the city.... But it isn't altogether a novelty, is it, for the mountain to behave this way?"

"From time to time in the past ten days, Miss Wyndam, Pelee has had a session of grumbling."

"I mean as a usual thing----"

He turned to her abruptly and inquired, "Didn't you know that there hasn't been a sound from Pelee for twenty years before the month of April now ending?"

This gave intimacy to the disorder. Mr. Stock was called away just now, but after dinner that night he joined Paula again on the great veranda.

"Ever been in Pittsburg?" he asked.

"No."

"I've only to shut my eyes in this second-hand air--to think I'm back among the steel mills of the lower Monongahela."

"The moon looks like beaten egg," Paula said with a slight shiver. "They must be suffering down in the city. You're the expert on Pelee, Mr. Stock, please tell me more about him."