Chapter 14

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. "I _have_ slept!"

"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 eggs _au 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 what _could_ happen 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. There _are_ islands 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.

XVI

THE BEACON

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'm _so_ sorry!"

"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."