Part 10

It was a simple and practicable plan--a watch kept for the rest of the night on the stairs and certain points of exit. In the face of positive orders two people had come from the upper floor the night before, Miss Tracy on an errand that Rawson thought suspicious, Mrs. Stokes, in Williams’ opinion, to communicate with her husband. Even if both men were wrong some powerful incentive was making them take such risks and it was natural to suppose that incentive might be strengthened after twenty-four hours of strain and uncertainty. They might try it again, and to catch them at it, surprise them in the act--if they didn’t break down on the spot--a little grilling would do the job.

As for the boy--if he was still in the top story as Rawson thought, he’d certainly not stay there after they’d been searching the place for him. He’d know they were on his trail, that his only hope was getting away and the night was dark enough to tempt him. If he was outside he’d discover his escape was cut off and what would he want then--food? He’d see himself faced by starvation and the place he’d make for would be the kitchen.

Rawson looked at his assistant with an approving eye. The idea was good, excellent, and without waste of time they arranged the distribution of the watch.

Williams would take the front stairs, his particular prey was there and he had already located the position of the electric-light button. Rawson would station himself in the kitchen with its two doors one to the outside, one to the hall. As Williams had pointed out it was the place to which Joe, escape blocked, would inevitably turn. The living-room they would assign to Shine, less important than either of the other ambushes, but commanding the entrance to the side wing and the path to the causeway and dock. Any one descending the back stairs to make an exit from the house would either turn to the kitchen or go through the living-room, and whichever way they took, would run into a trap. The men were satisfied, each one was detailed to the spot where he might expect to apprehend the object of his suspicion. The living-room, central and exposed, might safely be left to Shine.

They found Shine in the butler’s room sleeping soundly on the outside of the bed. He was acquainted with the plan, and stumbling and heavy-eyed followed them. In the hall Rawson left them, taking his way to his hiding-place, the other two faring on to the scene of Shine’s duties. Here he received his instructions, special emphasis being laid on the door that led to the kitchen wing and the back stairs. Shine looked from the door to Williams with a perplexed frown. He did not like to admit--no more than he had liked to display the healthy vigor of his appetite--that he was so sleepy it was doubtful whether he could keep awake. In this embarrassing position, when he desired to acquit himself creditably and feared the weakness of his flesh, he too had an idea. He did not know if it would be acceptable and broached it with a cautious preamble.

They just wanted to know who the person was, didn’t they? He wouldn’t have to catch them, which would be nearly impossible in the dark and was unnecessary as no one could get off the island. To see them, be able to identify them, get on to who was stealing round the house, was the point. If that was enough he’d a way of doing it, the surest and most efficacious way it could be done, no scrambling round the furniture, no uncertainty--he’d set his small camera for a flashlight photograph. The materials were all at hand, he’d gathered them together for a flashlight picture of the company. All he had to do was to get them ready and if any one entered by the door he was to watch, he’d have their number before they knew it.

Williams was interested--it was a neat trick and tickled his fancy. As he was ignorant of the process, Shine explained it, getting his properties from the cabinet as he spoke. The flashlight powder in a saucer on the table, then a double wire extending from it to a point above the door--the pair of antlers would answer. There the wire would be cut, one-half hanging down from the antlers, the other twisted round the door handle, its end standing out. When the door was opened the two severed ends would come in contact and make the circuit which would set off the powder. He did not tell Williams that the taking of the picture could be achieved whether he was asleep or awake, but that the camera would make its record whatever his state was an immense relief to his mind.

Williams left and he quickly completed his preparations. The antlers served his purpose well, the depending cord was in exactly the right position and before he made his final adjustment of the two wires he unloosed the latch of the door that it might open easily and noiselessly at the first push of a stealthy hand. Then, his camera in place, he turned off the lights. The room was suddenly plunged into Egyptian blackness; he had to feel for the chair he had pulled up and grasping the tripod, nearly upset it. Swearing under his breath he found the arms of the chair and let himself down upon it carefully, to avoid creaking. The silence of the house closed round him, a silence that was like oblivion. The darkness showed no break as his glance traveled over it. A solid impenetrable wall, it was hard to look at, the eye required something to rest upon. After he had stared into it for what seemed a measureless stretch of time, he felt he must shut his eyes for a moment of respite. He did so, his head drooped, nodded, sunk, and he lay a big crumpled figure held in the embrace of the chair.

A bang--in that silence as loud as a cannon shot--a rending burst of light, waked him. He leaped to his feet his senses scattered, not knowing where he was or what had happened. Then from every side of the house noise broke, groans, screams, slamming of doors, thudding footfalls. It was terrifying in the darkness, like a company of ghosts wailing and running about in some black inferno. Williams’ voice shouted the first intelligible words:

“You got them--good work! Where the hell are the lights?”

That shook Shine into consciousness, and he called to the gallery whence a patter of bare feet and shrill female cries rose:

“It’s all right. Don’t be scared. It’s only a flashlight.”

Male voices followed, harsh and loud as the men came rushing in:

Rawson’s from the left with the crash of the door flung back against the wall.

“What are you doing in here? What was that?”

Bassett’s from the entrance, his body colliding with furniture as he ran blindly forward. Somewhere in the darkness behind, Stokes’ high and choked, breaking into curses. And over all Miss Pinkney’s riding the tumult like the war cry of the Valkyries:

“Why don’t some of you fools turn on the electricity? The button’s on the right side of the door.”

Bassett’s hand found it and the room was flooded with light.

The women in straight white nightgowns stood on the gallery huddled together. The dreadful darkness lifted, they leaned over the railing, their faces pallid between hanging locks of hair, dropping a shower of questions on the men below. One of them was hysterical and gave forth a sobbing wail, and Williams shouted with angry authority:

“Keep quiet up there. Nothing’s the matter. Didn’t you hear it was a flashlight?”

Some one strangled a scream--Williams thought it was Flora but could not be sure. Then they made a simultaneous retreat to the bedrooms for negligées and slippers, while the men, gathered round Shine, listened to his explanation. No, he’d seen nothing and heard nothing, but he’d got the picture all right, whoever it was, he had them. Now he’d go and develop it--he could do that in a few minutes--and there was the projector in the corner he could use, throw it on to something where they’d all see. A sheet over that screen by the desk would do. And when it’s on there, large as life, there won’t be any use lying, there’ll be nothing for it but to come across.

They urged him out, they’d attend to everything: hurry up with the picture. Williams was unable to hide his elation. His idea, augmented by Shine’s, was a bull’s-eye hit, and his voice showed an exultant excitement as he called to Miss Pinkney to bring a sheet. Rawson’s satisfaction was less apparent, but his eye was alight with anticipation. If it was the boy, he had run back up-stairs, for no exit had been attempted through the kitchen. With the whole house astir he’d be afraid to come down and they had him safe as a rat in a trap. Impatient at the wait for Shine’s reappearance he left the room, saying he was going to the boat-house for a word with Patrick.

Bassett saw him go and made no move--he could not leave Anne now. The detonation and fire-work illumination that had made him leap for the path had roused Patrick. As he ran, not knowing what had taken place in the house, he had heard the man’s grunt of returning consciousness and a hoarse expletive thrown into the night. Rawson would find him awake and his dereliction never be known. But this mattered nothing to Bassett. An inner anguish held him; his eyes and Anne’s had met as she stood on the gallery and for the despair in hers he had no consolation. He saw Miss Pinkney and Williams pulling out the screen and draping it with a sheet, he saw Stokes walking stiffly to a chair, his hands curved over its back, his face a curious shining white--he saw and his mind registered nothing. If it was Joe, if it was Joe--what would become of her, what could he do?

The noise of the women’s footsteps on the stairs came in a descending rush. They burst in, their voices going before them, a scattering of gasped explosive utterances.

Flora went to Stokes and caught at his arm. “What is it, what is it?” she kept repeating, jerking at his arm, till he started away from her pushing her off.

Williams heard and answered with veiled gusto. Some one had been walking about the house at night against orders. It had been important to find out who was doing it and so Mr. Shine had set his camera and caught them, him or her--Williams’ voice was heavy on the last pronoun--in a flashlight picture. Mr. Shine was developing it now and as soon as he was ready they’d see it thrown on the sheet.

“It wasn’t me,” came Mrs. Cornell’s voice in loud relief.

“Nor me, nor me.” Flora’s followed.

“Can’t you damned women keep still,” Stokes ground out between his teeth.

Rawson reentered. He had heard them as he came up the path and stopped on the threshold looking at Anne, waiting to see if she would speak. But she said nothing, standing by Bassett, her hand braced against a table, her glance on the floor. She knew Rawson was watching her and willed her form to an upright immobility, her face to a stony blankness. If she could hold herself this way, not move or speak, she could bear the tension. A touch, a word, and she felt that her body might break to pieces and her voice ascend in long-drawn screams to the skies.

The screen under its white covering was set in the place Shine had indicated, the projector put some distance back, facing it. To some of them these preparations had the hideous significance of those preceding an execution and all of them felt the deadly oppression of the approaching climax. The room was very still as if an enchantment lay on it. At intervals Mrs. Cornell drew her breath with a low moaning sound, Stokes’ hands clenched and unclenched on the chair-back and Williams looked at his watch. He began a guttural mutter of impatience and stopped as the door opened and Shine came in.

He came quickly, bringing an air of excitement to the already highly charged atmosphere. There was a bewildered agitation in his face, and his words were broken and uncertain as he answered Williams’ questions:

“Oh, yes, I got it--something--I can’t quite make out--got me sort of flustered hurrying so. You’ll have to stand away there, folks.” He made a waving gesture and they drew back, pushing against one another till they stood massed in the rear of the room. He turned to the projector, adjusting it, then held the negative out toward Williams. “We’ll probably lose this, Mr. Williams. Doing it so quickly I couldn’t fix it. It’ll likely melt with the heat in here, won’t last more than a few minutes. You don’t want to keep it, do you?”

“Go ahead. It’s only the picture--that’s all that concerns us.”

“All right--it’s your say-so. You’ll get it in a minute now and by gum, I want to see--” he stopped, his breath caught, his hands busy over the machine. “Now then, we’re ready. Some one please put out the lights.”

Miss Pinkney pressed the button and the room dropped into darkness. Through it the projector cast a golden shaft that rested on the screen in a bright circle. The reflection painted their faces with a spectral glow. Every face, eyes staring, lips dropped agape or pressed together in a taut line, watched the bright disk of gold.

“Now,” came Shine’s voice whisperingly.

A picture leaped into being on the screen. A door-frame backed by solid indistinguishable black, the edge of a door, and beyond it, the outlines melting into the darkness, the suggestion of a head and shoulders only the face showing clear, looking at them with wide questioning eyes--Sybil Saunders’ face.

The silence held for a moment, then broke in an explosive volume of sound. The women’s shrieks rose simultaneously--“Sybil! Sybil!” The name ran about the room, beat on the high ceiling and was buffeted from wall to wall.

“The dead woman!” Williams shook Shine’s arm in his incredulous amazement.

“It is--it’s her. I saw it when I developed it and I don’t know--something’s gone wrong.”

A raucous cry rose above the chorus of female voices. Stokes had dropped his hold on the chair, his starting eyes fixed on the picture. From his lips, curled back like an angry dog’s, came a strangling rush of words:

“She’s dead. She’s dead for I killed her. I shot her--she’s dead. She can’t come back, she never can come back. I shot her as she ran--I killed her--I saw her fall--she’s dead--dead!”

The words died in a groan. He pitched forward and lay a writhing moaning shape with hands that clawed and dug into the carpet. The men rushed at him, clustered about him, the women watching in dumb horror while the picture behind them slowly faded from the screen.

XVII

WHEN they carried Stokes to his room they thought him dying, so ghastly was his appearance, so deathlike his collapse. Bassett telephoned to Hayworth for a doctor and before the man came, Flora, singularly cold and collected now the fight was over, told them her husband was a morphia addict and showed them the case in his bag with the empty vial. In the two days’ detention on the island his supply had been exhausted, the greatest strain of the many that had ended in his frantic confession.

When the doctor had made his examination and heard the facts he looked grave--the man was in desperate case, a complete breakdown of the whole organism and an overstrained heart. He thought there was little or no hope, but there might be a return to consciousness. If there was he promised to call the officers who were keen to get a fuller statement. Meantime he wanted the room cleared of everybody but Mrs. Stokes, and the men left, returning to the living-room to find Shine and get an explanation of the picture.

In the excitement of the Stokes sensation they had forgotten all about the picture and now, walking down the hall, they swung back to it. Bassett and Williams were baffled and confounded by it; it was one of the most startling of the whole chain of startling circumstances. Rawson was neither baffled nor confounded having already arrived at a solution: Shine had played a trick, done it on purpose to see if it might not accomplish just what it had accomplished. He was loud in his praise of the photographer, it was a clever ruse that had brought things to a climax when they might have gone on bungling for days. Rawson was willing to admit his mistakes--he’d been sure of the boy and now it appeared that Bassett and Miss Tracy were right. Joe Tracy had evidently lit out secretly on some business of his own.

He dismissed the company with a curt command and as they made their hurried exits, jocularly congratulated Shine as the man who had pulled off a successful hoax. But the photographer showed no responsive pride, on the contrary he looked rather shamefaced and denied the charge. He’d meant to take a picture, no funny business or fooling about it--but--he rubbed his hand over his tousled hair and grinned sheepishly. He was sleepy, that’s what had been the matter, just plain doped with sleep so he didn’t know what he was doing.

“Well, how do you account for the picture?” said Rawson. “Are you one of these people who can take spirit photographs?”

Shine wasn’t that--there was only one way of accounting for it. He hadn’t opened the shutter and the picture was one of those he had taken of Miss Saunders the day of his arrival.

“Of course,” he said, staring perplexedly at the carpet. “I’d swear I opened the shutter and I’d swear I closed it after I got my wits back. But there you are--you can’t take a picture of a dead woman and I had a lot of her on that film. That’s how it came about, being waked up sudden by Mr. Williams and trying to pretend I was on the job, and being naturally rattled by all that’s transpired here. Oh, you can understand it!”

“You’d taken her like that--coming through a doorway?”

He’d taken two or three like that--he couldn’t be sure how many. But he did remember posing her at both the front and rear entrances of the living-room, trying to get effects of a dark background with her figure dimly suggested and the light on her face. It was evidently one of those pictures, must have been the last he’d done, but he couldn’t trust his memory on any small points. He’d been more shocked than he had any idea of but he knew it now.

He described his amazement at having seen it in the negative. He said he couldn’t believe his eyes and hadn’t mentioned it as he thought he was “seeing things” what with the murder and all the excitement. And he couldn’t study it or compare it with those on the rest of the film because it was gone. After they’d taken Stokes away and he’d got the women quieted down he’d turned to the sheet--and there it was, blank as it is now and the negative melted. As for the explosion of the powder, that was easy to explain, and he told of his precautions in unlatching the door. Any light air could have swung it open and as he was sinking to sleep, he had felt a breeze blowing in from the entrance. Rawson verified this; a wind had arisen that had kept him on the _qui vive_ in the kitchen, moving the curtains and making the doors creak.

So that was that! Nobody’s brains, nobody’s deductive powers, or perspicacity or psychological insight had brought them to the goal. The bungling of a sleepy man had done the trick.

They were talking it over when the sound of Flora’s voice stopped them. She was standing in the doorway very white and very calm. Stokes was asking for them. Yes, she nodded in answer to Rawson’s look, he was quite himself. The doctor had wanted him to wait till he was stronger but he had insisted:

“He says he must speak now while his mind is clear. He seems to know it won’t last and he can’t rest till he’s told everything.”

They found him bolstered up in bed, a haggard spectacle, his eyes, sunk in darkened hollows, seemed to hold all the life left in his body. They hung on the entering men, then swerved to his wife and he made a motion for her to sit beside him. When she had taken her place and he had groped for her hand, his eyelids dropped and he lay for a moment as if gathering strength.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” he whispered. “Glad it’s over. If I’m going on now it can’t be to anything worse than this last thirty-six hours.”

The desire to free his mind possessed him. Rest, he said, rest was all he wanted and it was not for him till he had unloaded the intolerable burden he had carried since Sybil Saunders’ death. In his own words the recital was broken by digressions, memories of his torturing passion, assurances of good intentions that failed of execution, remorse for the wrong he had done his wife. Robbed of the theatrical quality that was of the man’s essence, it was the stark revelation of a soul’s tragedy.

He had never intended to kill her--that was the one point of exculpation he insisted on. His love had made him mad, carried him beyond the inhibiting forces of honor, feeling, reason. That it was hopeless seemed to increase its obsessing power, and she had never for one moment led him to think it was anything but hopeless. Unwaveringly, from the first, her attitude had been dislike, aversion, a horror of his state of mind and himself.

His knowledge of the coming separation had been the igniting motive that caused the inner explosion. After their stay on the island she would go her way, keep her whereabouts hidden from him, and he might never see her again. The thought became unbearable, and led him to a resolution of wild desperation--he would get her alone, once more confess his passion, and if she met it with the old scorn and abhorrence, kill himself before her eyes. He had seen the revolver in the drawer of the desk and on the day of the performance, taken it. To prevail upon her to grant him the interview was the problem, and the evil inspiration came to him to tell her he had news of Dallas, her lover. It was a lie, he knew nothing of the man, but truth, decency, self-respect no longer existed for him.

He described the interview in the living-room, her roused interest and demand for the information. The intrusion of his wife worked with his plan and he had insisted on a rendezvous where they would be free from interruption. They started for the summer-house on the Point, saw Shine there, and made the arrangement to meet in the place at seven. Then she had gone up-stairs to her room and he to the balcony to wait for her.

When he saw her pass the balcony he had risen and followed her. She had moved rapidly, not waiting for him, and he had not tried to catch up with her as he knew she did not want any one to see them together. When he entered the summer-house she was sitting on the bench close to the table on which her elbows rested. His hysterical state, accelerated during the long wait, had reached a climax of distraction and he burst into a stream of words--he had lied to her, he knew nothing, but he had to see her, he had lured her there for a last interview, a final clearing up, and he drew out the pistol. The sight of it, his mad babble of disconnected sentences, evidently terrified her. She leaped to her feet and made a rush like a frightened animal for the opening. Before he could speak or catch her she had brushed past him and fled from the place.

Then something had gone wrong in his head--he couldn’t explain--a breaking of some pressure, a stoppage of all mental processes. In the vacuum one fact stayed--that she had got away from him and he never would see her again. A blind fury seized him and he shot at her as she ran. She was at the summit of the cliff, staggered, threw up her arms and went over. When he saw her body lurch and topple forward the darkness lifted from his brain. He came back to himself as if from a period of unconsciousness and realized what he had done.