Chapter 15

Whitaker got up, found matches, and lighted a tin kerosene lamp in a bracket on the wall. The windows darkened and the walls took on a sombre yellow as the flame grew strong and steady.

"I'm quite finished." The girl scrubbed her arms and hands briskly with a dry towel and turned down her sleeves, facing him with her fine, frank, friendly smile. "If you're ready...."

"Whenever you are," he said with an oddly ceremonious bow.

To his surprise she drew back, her brows and lips contracting to level lines, her eyes informed with the light of wonder shot through with the flashings of a resentful temper.

"Why do you look at me so?" she demanded sharply. "What are you thinking...?" She checked, her frown relaxed, her smile flickered softly. "Am I such a fright--?"

"I beg your pardon," he said hastily. "I was merely thinking, wondering...."

She seemed about to speak, but said nothing. He did not round out his apology. A little distance apart, they stood staring at one another in that weird, unnatural light, wherein the glow from the lamp contended garishly with the ebbing flush of day. And again he was mute in bewildered inquiry before that puzzling phenomenon of inscrutable emotion which once before, since his awakening, had been disclosed to him in her mantling colour, in the quickening of her breath, and the agitation of her bosom, in the timid, dumb questioning of eyes grown strangely shy and frightened.

And then, in a twinkling, an impatient gesture exorcised the inexplicable mood that had possessed her, and she regained her normal, self-reliant poise as if by witchcraft.

"What a quaint creature you are, Hugh," she cried, her smile whimsical. "You've a way of looking at one that gives me the creeps. I see things--things that aren't so, and never were. If you don't stop it, I swear I shall think you're the devil! Stop it--do you hear me, sir? And come build our bonfire."

She swung lithely away and was out of the house before he could regain his wits and follow.

"I noticed a lot of old lumber around the barn," she announced, when he joined her in the dooryard--"old boxes and barrels and rubbish. And a wheelbarrow. So you won't have far to go for fuel. Now where do you purpose building the beacon?"

He cast round, peering through the thickening shades of dusk, and eventually settled upon a little knoll a moderate distance to leeward of the farm-house. Such a location would be safest, even though the wind was falling steadily with the flight of the hours; and the fire would be conspicuously placed for observation from any point in the north and east.

Off in the north, where Whitaker had marked down the empurpled headland during the afternoon, a white light lanced the gloom thrice with a sweeping blade, vanished, and was replaced by a glare of angry red, which in its turn winked out.

Whitaker watched it briefly with the finger-tips of his right hand resting lightly on the pulse in his left wrist. Then turning away, he announced:

"Three white flashes followed by a red at intervals of about ten seconds. Wonder what _that_ stands for!"

"What is it?" the girl asked. "A ship signalling?"

"No; a lighthouse--probably a first-order light--with its characteristic flash, not duplicated anywhere along this section of the Atlantic coast. If I knew anything of such matters, it would be easy enough to tell from that just about where we are. _If_ that information would help us."

"But, if we can see their light, they'll see ours,--won't they?--and send to find out what's the matter."

"Perhaps. At least--let's hope so. They're pretty sure to see it, but as to their attaching sufficient importance to it to investigate--that's a question. They may not know that the people who live here are away. They may think the natives here are merely celebrating their silver wedding, or Roosevelt's refusal of a third term, or the accession of Edward the Seventh--or anything."

"Please don't be silly--and discouraging. Do get to work and build the fire."

He obeyed with humility and expedition.

As she had said, there was no lack of fodder for the flames. By dint of several wheelbarrow trips between the knoll and the farmyard, he had presently constructed a pyre of impressive proportions; and by that time it was quite dark--so dark, indeed, that he had been forced to hunt up a yard lantern, carrying the which the girl had accompanied him on his two final trips.

"Here," he said clumsily, when all was ready, offering her matches. "You light it, please--for luck."

Their fingers touched as she took the matches. Something thumped in his breast, and a door opened in the chambers of his understanding, letting in light.

Kneeling at the base of the pyre, she struck a match and applied it to a quantity of tinder-dry excelsior. The stuff caught instantly, puffing into a brilliant patch of blaze; she rose and stood back, _en silhouette_, delicately poised at attention, waiting to see that her work was well done. He could not take his gaze from her.

So what he had trifled and toyed with, fought with and prayed against, doubted and questioned, laughed at and cried down, was sober, painful fact. Truth, heart-rending to behold in her stark, shining beauty, had been revealed to him in that moment of brushing finger-tips, and he had looked in her face and known his unworthiness; and he trembled and was afraid and ashamed....

Spreading swiftly near the ground, the flames mounted as quickly, with snappings and cracklings, excavating in the darkness an arena of reddish radiance.

The girl retreated to his side, returning the matches.

A tongue of flame shot up from the peak of the pyre, and a column of smoke surpassed it, swinging off to leeward in great, red-bosomed volutes and whorls picked out with flying regiments of sparks.

"You'd think they couldn't help understanding that it's a signal of distress."

"You would think so. I hope so. God knows I hope so!"

There was a passion in his tones to make her lift wondering eyes to his.

"Why do you say that--that way? We should be thankful to be safe--alive. And we're certain to get away before long."

"I know--yes, I know."

"But you spoke so strangely!"

"I'm sorry. I'd been thinking clearly; for the first time, I believe, since I woke up."

"About what? Us? Or merely me?"

"You. I was considering you alone. It isn't right that you should be in this fix. I'd give my right hand to remedy it!"

"But I'm not distressed. It isn't altogether pleasant, but it can't be helped and might easily have been worse."

"And still I can't help feeling, somehow, the wretched injustice of it to you. I want to protest--to do something to mend matters."

"But since you can't"--she laughed in light mockery, innocent of malice--"since we're doing our best, let's be philosophical and sit down over there and watch to see if there's any answer to our signal."

"There won't be."

"You _are_ a difficult body. Never mind. Come along!" she insisted with pretty imperiousness.

They seated themselves with their backs to the fire and at a respectful distance from it, where they could watch the jetting blades of light that ringed the far-off headland. Whitaker reclined on an elbow, relapsing into moody contemplation. The girl drew up her knees, clasped her arms about them, and stared thoughtfully into the night.

Behind them the fire flamed and roared, volcanic. All round it in a radius of many yards the earth glowed red, while, to one side, the grim, homely façade of the farm-house edged blushing out of the ambient night, all its staring windows bloodshot and sinister.

The girl stirred uneasily, turning her head to look at Whitaker.

"You know," she said with a confused attempt to laugh: "this is really no canny, this place. Or else I'm balmy. I'm seeing things--shapes that stir against the blackness, off there beyond the light, moving, halting, staring, hating us for butchering their age-old peace and quiet. Maybe I'll forget to see them, if you'll talk to me a little."

"I can't talk to you," he said, ungracious in his distress.

"You can't? It's the first time it's been noticeable, then. What's responsible for this all-of-a-sudden change of heart?"

"That's what's responsible." The words spoke themselves almost against his will.

"What--change of heart?"

"Yes," he said sullenly.

"You're very obscure. Am I to understand that you've taken a sudden dislike to me, so that you can't treat me with decent civility?"

"You know that isn't so."

"Surely"--she caught her breath sharply, paused for an instant, then went on--"surely you don't mean the converse!"

"I've always understood women knew what men meant before the men did, themselves." His voice broke a little. "Oh, can't you see how it is with me? Can't you see?" he cried. "God forgive me! I never meant to inflict this on you, at such a time! I don't know why I have...."

"You mean," she stammered in a voice of amaze--"you mean--love?"

"Can you doubt it?"

"No ... not after what's happened, I presume. You wouldn't have followed--you wouldn't have fought so to save me from drowning--I _suppose_--if you hadn't--cared.... But I didn't know."

She sighed, a sigh plaintive and perturbed, then resumed: "A woman never knows, really. She may suspect; in fact, she almost always does; she is obliged to be so continually on guard that suspicion is ingrained in her nature; but...."

"Then you're not--offended?" he asked, sitting up.

"Why should I be?" The firelight momentarily outlined the smiling, half wistful countenance she turned to him.

"But"--he exploded with righteous wrath, self-centred--"only a scoundrel would force his attentions upon a woman, in such circumstances! You can't get away from me--I may be utterly hateful to you--"

"Oh, you're not." She laughed quietly. "You're not; nor am I distressed--because of the circumstances that distress you, at least. What woman would be who received as great and honourable a compliment--from you, Hugh? Only"--again the whimsical little laugh that merged into a smothered sigh--"I wish I knew!"

"Wish you knew what?"

"What's going on inside that extraordinary head of yours: what's in the mind behind the eyes that I so often find staring at me so curiously."

He bowed that head between hands that compressed cruelly his temples. "I wish _I_ knew!" he groaned in protest. "It's a mystery to me, the spell you've laid upon my thoughts. Ever since we met you've haunted me with a weird suggestion of some elusive relationship, some entanglement--intimacy--gone, perished, forgotten.... But since you called me to supper, a while ago, by name--I don't know why--your voice, as you used it then, has run through my head and through, teasing my memory like a strain of music from some half-remembered song. It half-maddens me; I feel so strongly that everything would be so straight and plain and clear between us, if I could only fasten upon that fugitive, indefinable something that's always fluttering just beyond my grasp!"

"You mean all that--honestly?" she demanded in an oddly startled voice.

"Most honestly." He looked up in excitement. "You don't mean _you_'ve felt anything of the sort?"

"No, I"--her voice broke as if with weariness--"I don't mean that, precisely. I mean.... Probably I don't know what I do mean. I'm really very tired, too tired to go on, just now--to sit here with you, badgering our poor wits with esoteric subtleties. I think--do you mind?--I'd better go in."

She rose quickly, without waiting for his hand. Whitaker straightened out his long body with more deliberation, standing finally at full height, his grave and moody countenance strongly relieved in the ruddy glow, while her face was all in shadow.

"One moment," he begged humbly--"before we go in. I ... I've something else to say to you, if I may."

She waited, seriously attentive.

"I haven't played fair, I'm afraid," he said, lowering his head to escape her steadfast gaze. "I've just told you that I love you, but...."

"Well?" she demanded in an odd, ringing voice. "Isn't it true?"

"True?" He laughed unnaturally. "It's so true I--wish I had died before I told you!"

"Why?"

"Because ... because you didn't resent my telling you...."

It seemed impossible for him to speak connectedly or at any length, impossible to overcome his distaste for the hateful confession he must make. And she was intolerably patient with him; he resented her quiet, contained patience; while he feared, yet he was relieved when she at length insisted: "Well?"

"Since you didn't resent that confession, I am led to believe you don't--exactly--dislike me. That makes it just so much the harder to forfeit your regard."

"But must you?"

"Yes."

"Please explain," she urged, a trace wearily.

"I who love you with all my heart and mind and soul--I am not free to love you."

"You aren't free--!"

"I.... No."

After several moments, during which he fought vainly with his inability to go on, she resumed her examination with a manner aloof and yet determined:

"You've told me so much, I think you can hardly refuse to tell more."

"I," he stammered--"I am already married."

She gave a little, stifled cry--whether of pain or horror or of indignation he could not tell.

"I'm sorry--I--" he began.

"Don't you think you might have thought of this before?"

"I ... you don't understand--"

"Are you in the habit of declaring yourself first and confessing later?... Don't answer, if you don't want to. I've no real right to know. I asked out of simple curiosity."

"If you'd only listen to me!" he broke out suddenly. "The thing's so strange, so far off--dreamlike--that I forget it easily."

"So it would seem," she put in cruelly.

"Please hear me!"

"Surely you must see I am listening, Mr. Whitaker."

"It was several years ago--nearly seven. I was on the point of death--had been told to expect death within a few months.... In a moment of sentimental sympathy--I wasn't at all myself--I married a girl I'd never seen before, to help her out of a desperate scrape she'd got into--meaning simply to give her the protection of my name. She was in bad trouble.... We never lived together, never even saw one another after that hour. She had every reason to think me dead--as I should have been, by rights. But now she knows that I'm alive--is about to sue for a divorce.... Now you know just what sort of a contemptible hound I am, and why it was so hard to tell you."

After a long pause, during which neither stirred, she told him, in a faint voice: "Thank you."

She moved toward the house.

"I throw myself upon your mercy--"

"Do you?" she said coolly, pausing.

"If you will forgive me--"

"Oh, I forgive you, Mr. Whitaker. My heart is really not quite so fragile as all this implies."

"I didn't mean that--you know I didn't. I'm only trying to assure you that I won't bother you--with this trouble of mine--again. I don't want you to be afraid of me."

"I am not."

The words were terse and brusque enough; the accompanying swift gesture, in which her hand rested momentarily on his arm as if in confidence approaching affection, he found oddly contradictory.

"You don't see--anything?" she said with an abrupt change of manner, swinging to the north.

He shaded his eyes, peering intently through the night, closely sweeping its encompassing obscurity from northwest to southeast.

"Nothing," he said, dropping his hand. "If there were a boat heading this way, we couldn't help seeing her lights."

"Then there's no use waiting?"

"I'm afraid not. They'd hardly come to-night, anyway; more likely by daylight, if they should happen to grow suspicious of our beacon."

"Then I think I'll go to bed. I'm very, very tired, in spite of my sleep on the sands. That didn't rest me, really."

"Of course."

"And you--?"

"Oh, I'm all right."

"But what are you going to do?"

"Why--keep the fire going, I presume."

"Is it necessary, do you think? Or even worth while?"

He made a doubtful gesture.

"I wish," she continued--"I wish you'd stay in the house. I--I'm really a bit timid: unnerved, I presume. It's been, you know, rather a harrowing experience. Anything might happen in a place like this...."

"Oh, certainly," he agreed, something constrained. "I'd feel more content, myself, to know I was within call if anything should alarm you."

They returned to the kitchen.

In silence, while Whitaker fidgeted about the room, awkward and unhappy, the girl removed a glass lamp from the shelf above the sink, assured herself that it was filled, and lighted it. Then, over her shoulder:

"I hope you don't mean to stay up all night."

"I--well, I'm really not sleepy."

"Oh, but you are," she contradicted calmly.

"Honestly; I slept so long down there on the beach--"

"Please don't try to deceive me. I know that slumbers like those--of exhaustion--don't rest one as they should. Besides, you show how tired you are in every gesture, in the way you carry yourself, in your very eyes."

"You're mistaken," he contended, looking away for fear lest his eyes were indeed betraying him. "Besides, I mean merely to sit up here, to see that everything is all right."

"How should it be otherwise?" She laughed the thought away, yet not unkindly. "This island is as empty as a last-year's bird's-nest. What could happen to harm, or even alarm us--or me?"

"You never can tell--"

"Nonsense! I'm not in the least frightened. And furthermore I shan't sleep a wink--shan't even try to sleep unless you promise me not to be silly. There's a comfortable room right at the foot of the stairs. If you sleep there, I shall feel more than secure. Will you promise?"

He gave in at discretion: "Yes; I promise."

"As soon as you feel the least need of sleep, you'll go to bed?"

"I promise."

"Very well, then."

The insistent note faded from her tones. She moved toward the table, put the lamp down, and hesitated in one of her strange, unpresaged moods of diffidence, looking down at the finger-tips with which she traced a meaningless pattern on the oil-cloth.

"You are kind," she said abruptly, her head bowed, her face hidden from him.

"Kind!" he echoed, dumfounded.

"You are kind and sweet and generous to me," she insisted in a level voice. "You have shown me your heart--the heart of a gentleman--without reserve; but of me you have asked nothing."

"I don't understand--"

"I mean, you haven't once referred to what happened last night. You've been content to let me preserve my confidence, to remain secretive and mysterious in your sight.... That is how I seem to you--isn't it?"

"Secretive and mysterious? But I have no right to your confidence; your affairs are yours, inviolable, unless you choose to discuss them."

"You would think that way--of course!" Suddenly she showed him her face illumined with its frank, shadowy smile, her sweet eyes, kind and as fearless as the eyes of a child. "Other men would not, I know. And you have every right to know."

"I--!"

"You; and I shall tell you.... But not now; there's too much to tell, to explain and make understandable; and I'm too terribly tired. To-morrow, perhaps--or when we escape from this weird place, when I've had time to think things out--"

"At your pleasure," he assented gently. "Only--don't let anything worry you."

Impulsively she caught both his hands in a clasp at once soft and strong, wholly straightforward and friendly.

"Do you know," she said in a laughing voice, her head thrown back, soft shadows darkening her mystical eyes, the lamplight caressing her hair until it was as if her head were framed in a halo of pure gold, bright against the sombre background of that mean, bare room--"Do you know, dear man, that you are quite, quite blind?"

"I think," he said with his twisted smile, "it would be well for me if I were physically blind at this instant!"

She shook her head in light reproof.

"Blind, quite blind!" she repeated. "And yet--I'm glad it's so with you. I wouldn't have you otherwise for worlds."

She withdrew her hand, took up the lamp, moved a little away from him, and paused, holding his eyes.

"For Love, too, is blind," she said softly, with a quaint little nod of affirmation. "Good night."

He started forward, eyes aflame; took a single pace after her; paused as if against an unseen barrier. His hands dropped by his sides; his chin to his chest; the light died out of his face and left it gray and deeply lined.

In the hallway the lamp's glow receded, hesitated, began to ascend, throwing upon the unpapered walls a distorted silhouette of the rude balustrade; then disappeared, leaving the hall cold with empty darkness.

An inexplicable fit of trembling seized Whitaker. Dropping into a chair, he pillowed his head on his folded arms. Presently the seizure passed, but he remained moveless. With the drift of minutes, insensibly his taut muscles relaxed. Odd visions painted the dark tapestries of his closed eyes: a fragment of swinging seas shining in moonlight; white swords of light slashing the dark night round their unseen eyrie; the throat of a woman swelling firm and strong as a tower of ivory, tense from the collar of her cheap gown to the point of her tilted chin; a shrieking, swirling rabble of gulls seen against the fading sky, over the edge of a cliff....

He slept.

Through the open doorway behind him and through the windows on either hand drifted the sonorous song of the surf, a muted burden for the stealthy disturbances of the night in being.

XVII

DISCOVERY

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.