Part 11

He described his state as curiously lucid and far-seeing. The insane outbreak seemed to have freed his intelligence and temporarily suspended the torment of his nerves. The situation presented itself with a vision-like clarity and all the forces of his mind and will sprang into action, combining to achieve his safety. From the shadow of the vines he looked at the house, saw Bassett come to the living-room entrance, glance about and go back. The sound of the shot had evidently roused no forebodings and when no face appeared at window or door, he ran to the pine grove. There he was safe and slipped unobserved to the balcony. He waited here for a moment to get his breath and compose his manner. He was the actor, playing a difficult part with a high-keyed, heady confidence when he entered the room.

His wife--that had been the unforeseen retribution. He had not realized that suspicion would turn on her, and then saw that it might, saw that it did. His hell began when he grasped the danger she was in, listened to Rawson’s questions on the night of their arrival, sensed Williams’ line of thought when the scene was rehearsed on the shore. He had tried to turn them to Joe Tracy, snatching at anything to gain time, but he would have told, he was ready to tell. He kept reiterating the words, his burning eyes moving from one face to the other--he had broken her heart, ruined her life, but he was not so utterly lost as that.

It was her assurances that quieted him. She had known from the first he would tell as she had known from the first he had done it. He relaxed and sank back, his eyes closing, and the doctor motioned them to go. Flora followed them to the door and held them there a moment to repeat what she had said--as if, like him, wanting to rid her mind of all its secret agony. It wasn’t surmise; she had seen him. When she had turned from the water after her attempt to catch the body she had had a clear view of him stealing through the pine wood, moving noiselessly and watching the house.

“He never knew it,” she said. “That night when you, Mr. Williams, nearly caught me on the stairs, I was going to see him, say I knew what he’d done and that I’d help him and lie for him and stand by him. Oh, yes--I don’t care what I tell now. He was my husband, I’d loved him and he’d been cursed--cursed and destroyed.”

The men closed the door softly as upon the dead. What they had heard and left behind them had taken the zest from their accomplishment and in the glow of the hall lights their faces looked drawn and hollowed with fatigue. Rawson drew out his watch--half past two. The best thing they could do was to get a little sleep. The day would be on them in a few hours, there would be a lot of business to get through and he, for one, was dead beat. They wouldn’t take off their clothes, just turn in on the sofa and divan, and stepping gently, as befitted a place where so dark a doom had fallen, he and Williams passed into the library.

Sleep was far from Bassett. He would like to have seen Anne, but it would have been inhuman to rouse her, and he went toward the living-room where he could think in quiet. The screen still covered by the sheet and the projector facing it were untouched and gave the place the air of a scene set for a play. Silence brooded over the room, a silence so peaceful and profound that it seemed as if the hideous tumult of the last hour must be a nightmare illusion. He dropped into a chair, his breath expelled with a groaning note, then heard Anne’s voice from the gallery above:

“I’ve been waiting for you. May I come down?”

There she was, dressed, leaning against the railing.

“Come,” he beckoned, his heart expanding, his depression lightened, and as she disappeared he pulled up a chair for her. She came in, soft-footed across the rugs, with the whispering words:

“I couldn’t rest till I’d seen you and heard. He’s told?”

“Everything.” They sat, facing each other, close together. “It’s solved and ended--the Gull Island murder.”

“Is it all right for you to tell me?”

It was all right and he told her.

She listened absorbed, eyes intent on his, now and then nodding her head in confirmation of an agreement in her own mind. When he had finished, she sat looking down, apparently lost in musing contemplation of the story.

“So, as it turns out, Anne dearest, all that misery you and I went through was unnecessary.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “It wasn’t Joe, he wasn’t in it at all. But I don’t understand. I’ve been sitting in my room while you were with Stokes thinking about it and I can’t make it out. Hugh”--she leaned forward and rested her hand on his knee, dropping her voice though no one was there to hear--“this is what I can’t explain--_whom_ did I see in here last night?”

Bassett’s answer was prompt, delivered in the brisk tone of common sense:

“I can. It’s very simple. You didn’t see anybody.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody. I’ve been thinking about it, too. There’s only one explanation, and that’s it.”

She looked beyond him at the lamp, her eyebrows drawn in a puzzled frown:

“You think I imagined it?”

“I know you did. Just consider:--You were in a wrought-up condition, you expected to see him, came down for that purpose. The room was almost dark, quite dark under the gallery where you say he came from. After what you’d gone through--first a murder, then a suspicion that would have undermined the strongest nerves--you were in a state to see anything.”

She continued to stare at the light, her face set in troubled thought.

“I suppose that could be.”

“Why, Anne dear, it must have been, it could have happened to any one. And there’s another point--if it had been Joe, wouldn’t he have spoken to you, one question even to find out what was going on, what we were doing?”

“Yes, yes. I’ve thought of that. It didn’t occur to me at the time. But he would have said something.”

“Of course he would. You never saw anything more substantial than a shadow in the moonlight.”

“That must be it,” she murmured.

“I ought to have realized it but I was stampeded myself. We were all ready to go off like a pack of fire-crackers. God”--he took her hand and held its soft coldness against his forehead--“its a wonder we didn’t all break to pieces like Stokes.”

She was silent for a moment then said:

“Well, where _is_ Joe? What’s he doing?”

“Gone off on some business of his own. You were telling the truth when you told Rawson and Williams that Joe’s actions weren’t always calculable, weren’t you?” He saw her answering nod. “Well, he’s evidently chosen the occasion of his leaving the island to light out in some new direction. You can’t tell what may have been in his head--a joke on Jimmy Travers, on us, any sort of lark or tom-foolery. We’ll find it all out soon.”

He had his own opinion of Joe’s behavior which he was not going to tell her now. The boy, found out in his spying, knowing himself condemned by his associates and black-listed in his profession, might have departed for good, taken the opportunity to disappear from a part of the country where closed doors and averted faces would be his portion. It would be like him and Bassett fervently hoped that it might be the case.

“Come,” he said, rising and drawing her to her feet. “There’s no good bothering about that any more. Leave it to me and when we’ve got through the rest of this horrible business I’ll look around for him. And anyway, he’ll see it in the papers, and if he wants to show up, he’ll do it himself within the next few days. Now you must go to bed and let your poor tired brain rest.”

They walked to the door and there he caught her against his breast and looked into her face:

“It’s all over--that fighting and struggling alone, Anne. After this we’ll be together, as soon as we can get away from here and find a clergyman to marry us.”

They kissed and parted, Bassett going to his room--he could sleep now--and Anne faring slowly up the stairs to hers.

XVIII

ANY one watching Gull Island from the shore would have seen the yellow shape of one bright window set like a small golden square in the darkness. The bright window was Anne’s and over against it Anne sat on the side of the bed looking at the floor. She sat perfectly still, held in a staring concentration of thought, reviewing the happenings of the night. The inability to understand that she had expressed to Bassett had come back to her, there were things that she could not explain away. Like a child piecing together the disconnected bits of a puzzle, she contemplated separate facts, studied them, dropped each one in turn and went on to another.

While Bassett had talked to her she had accepted his theory. His belief in it had been so absolute and it was so plausible. Of course a person in her state might have imagined anything. And as she dwelt on the sentence to persuade herself, the vision of the dim shadowy room rose before her with the figure coming toward her from the darkness of the gallery, moving spiritlike as an hallucination might move. But as the memory grew in vividness the shape took form and solidity, the slim boy’s shape. She saw again its rapid advance, its sudden stoppage at her words, its lightning-quick turn and soundless flight. The snap of the closing door came to her mind as a last confirmation and she knew it was no delusion.

“I did,” she said in a whisper, and raised her eyes as if confronting a doubter with the truth. “I _know_ it--I _did_ see somebody.”

Somebody!

The word struck her ear with a startling effect, an effect of discovery, of impending disclosures. Her body shrank together as if in fear of them, her riveted glance grew fixed as a sleep-walker’s. She lost all sense of her surroundings, her entire being contracted to a point of inner activity. Before that intensified mental vision a series of pictures passed like the slides in a magic lantern:--Shine’s photograph, the worn, wide-eyed face of Sybil; Joe playing Sebastian, his costume, his movements, a replica of Viola’s; the living-room as they heard the shot, dusk falling outside; in the summer-house--with its shrouding vines--it would have been almost dark.

The pictures were disconnected like spots of light breaking through darkness. If the darkness could be dispelled and the spots of light joined, fused into continuity, she would reach something, something she was groping toward, fearfully groping toward. Suddenly a recollection flashed up, clairvoyantly distinct--Joe at the flat trying to make Bassett give him the part of Sebastian, imitating Sybil’s walk. That picture brought her to her feet, brought a smothered cry to her lips. The spots of light had joined, run together in a leaping illumination.

On the bureau lay the key of Joe’s trunk that she had brought from his room after their last interview. She snatched it up and ran to the door, out of it, along the gallery. In Joe’s room she turned on the light and unlocked his trunk. She went through it to the bottom looking for his Sebastian costume. It was gone, every appointment of it. She had not needed the proof, she knew that she would not find it, that it was Joe, dressed in that costume, Stokes had killed.

The rest of it--Sybil alive, hiding somewhere! She saw the gray dawn on the window--the night was over, the house would soon be stirring. She locked the trunk, turned off the light and stole out on the gallery. She did not go back to her room but kept on down the hall to the top-floor staircase. Half-way up she heard from the floor above a sound, so faint, so furtive, that it would only have been audible in the dead dawn hush. She made a rush upward sending her voice, low-keyed but passionately urgent, ahead of her:

“Sybil, Sybil, if it’s you, wait. It’s Anne. I’m coming to help you.”

The door of the bedroom opposite the stair-head was open. Against the pale light of the window, poised with one hand resting on the raised sash, was a boy’s figure--surely the figure she had seen in the living-room two nights before. It was so completely boyish, the cropped round head, the knickerbockers and belted jacket, that she could not yet be sure and went forward with slackened gait, peering and murmuring fearfully:

“Sybil, it _is_ you?”

The figure left the window, came nearer, silently, creepingly, with a hand raised for caution. She saw the face then, pinched and haggard, strangely altered with the curling frame of hair clipped close, but still Sybil’s.

It was so extraordinary--such a gulf of unknown happenings lay between them--that at first they said nothing. In the spectral light they were like two ghosts come together in some debatable land beyond earth’s confines--too astonished at their encounter to find speech, too removed from the recognized and familiar to drop back to its facile communications. They stared, eye to eye, breath coming brokenly through parted lips, drawing together as if each were a magnet compelling the other. Anne spoke first.

“Joe,” she said. “It’s Joe that’s dead.”

“Yes. Do they know?”

“They know nothing. They think it was you. It’s all over, Stokes has told. But, oh, what is it? I can’t understand--it’s like a fearful dream.”

The words died away and a sudden violent trembling shook her. With the joints of her knees like water she sank on the side of the bed, gripping the other with her shaking hands, pulling her down beside her.

“Tell me, tell me,” she implored. “Why is he dead? Why did he pretend he was you? What was he doing?”

They sat, clinging together, two small huddled figures in the gray light. Though the house below was as silent as the tomb they spoke in subdued voices, question, answer, surmise. Each knew a different aspect of the story, brought her own knowledge of Joe’s motives and actions. In that whispered exchange they pieced together the separate facts, combined them in coherent sequence and came to a final enlightenment.

Joe had met his death in his last effort as a police spy, his last effort to get the Parkinson reward. Leaving his room to come down and make ready for his departure, he had heard the voices of Stokes and Sybil in the living-room. Sybil remembered Stokes’ upward look and question about some one moving in the gallery--Joe creeping to concealment behind the arch. The nature of their conversation would have held him listening: here was his last opportunity to get the information he sought. He had heard the rendezvous in the summer-house. Its open situation offered no hiding-place outside, but knowing that it would be almost dark inside, he had conceived the idea of putting on his Sebastian costume and impersonating Sybil. He probably thought he risked no more than Stokes’ rage, and he also probably thought that he might escape before Stokes had discovered his identity.

His room was next to Sybil’s. He had heard her come up-stairs and from his window could command the Point. When Shine left it he had gone down, passed the balcony where Stokes was waiting, and hearing his following footsteps, moved with that close imitation of Sybil’s gait to the summer-house. There the dim light and the drooping curls of his wig enabled him to carry through the deception. Stokes’ wild speech, followed by the drawing of the pistol, had terrified him. Confronted by a man armed and half-mad, panic had seized him and he had made a rush from the place.

So Joe had died, a body clad in gala dress swirling out on currents that would never bring him back. Anne said nothing. She did not feel any special grief, or feeling of any kind. Too much had happened, she was benumbed. She had a vague sense that in some future time, when she had recovered from her dulled and battered state, she might be sorry, cry perhaps. Her eyes fell on her hand with Sybil’s clasped around it and the sight of the linked fingers roused her. They were like a symbol of the intertwined closeness of their lives, so much closer than hers and Joe’s had ever been. That brought her back to Sybil and Sybil’s inexplicable actions. She lifted her head and looked at the face beside her:

“But--but--why did you do all this? Hide, not say anything, let them think you were dead?”

“I wanted to get away.”

“Get away! What for--where?”

“To Jim Dallas. I know where he is.”

“You’ve known?”

“For a month. I’ve written him telling him I’d come if I could, if I _ever_ could. Oh, but it’s been hopeless. I was spied on, dogged, followed--” Her voice rose on a hoarse note, stopped, and after a scared listening hush, went on whisperingly: “I want to stay dead, never come to life here again. It’s my chance--the only chance I’ll ever have. You’ve found me now and I’ll tell you everything.” And she told Anne the story--the story that no one else has ever heard.

Since she had received his address the longing to join her lover had possessed her. She had written she would come, she knew he was waiting for her, but the watch kept upon her made any move impossible. Whatever her anguish, she could not risk betraying his whereabouts; if it had been only herself she would have dared anything. In this position, growing daily more unbearable, had suddenly come the means of escape. Tragedy, swift and terrible as a bolt from the blue, had been her opportunity, and she had desperately seized it.

From her window, after the interview with Stokes, she had seen Joe, in his Sebastian dress, pass below. She had known it was he because of the costume and was astonished, supposing him already gone. Stokes came into view following him and the disturbing idea seized her that he had mistaken the boy for herself. She had run to the door to go down and end the misapprehension, and then stopped--at close quarters Stokes would see who it was, and to let Joe--evil-tongued and hostile--discover their rendezvous, was the last thing she wanted. She went back to the window to watch the outcome and saw neither of them. This frightened her--the only place they could have disappeared to was the summer-house. Stokes might say too much before he discovered his mistake, and panic-stricken, she was about to rush out, when Joe ran from the doorway and the shot followed.

For a space--she had no idea how long--she was paralyzed, not believing her senses. She remembered moving back into the room and from there she saw Stokes issue from the summer-house and flee to the shelter of the pine wood, _that_ told her what she had seen was real, a murder had been committed under her eyes, and she went to the door to go down. Holding it open she paused on the threshold, heard the voices below, heard Stokes’ entering words and had made a forward step to run down and denounce him, when a sound from outside stopped her. Flora’s cry that Sybil was killed.

It was that wild screaming voice that gave her the idea, sent it through her brain like a zigzag of lightning. While the people below made their clamorous rush from the house, she stood in the doorway, motionless in contemplation of the possibilities that opened before her. The excitement that had shaken her a few minutes earlier died, her mind steadied and cleared, she felt herself uplifted by an invincible daring and courage. There was no danger of a recovery of the body for she had heard from Gabriel and Miss Pinkney that bodies carried out on the tide were never found.

Alone on the second floor with little fear of interruption she had gone about her preparations at once. She had taken nothing from her own room but money from her purse (leaving a small amount to avert suspicion) the candies from the box on the table, a few crackers she had brought up the night before from supper, and a pair of scissors. Then going to Joe’s room she had gathered the clothes he had discarded, lying ready to her hand on the bed--everything from the shoes to the cap--and stolen out and upward to the top floor. Here she had put on the clothes and cut off her hair--she showed Anne the ends of the yellow curls in her jacket pocket--hiding her own clothes in a box in the store-room.

As to when the police would be summoned and of what their procedure would consist, she knew nothing. Her hope was to escape by the causeway that night. From this Anne had saved her. In her terror of recognition she had kept silent knowing her voice would betray her.

The next day she had been a prey to a rising tide of alarm. From behind a curtain she had watched the search of the island and realized a hunt through the top floor must follow. Every sign of her presence was obliterated and she studied her surroundings for a hiding-place. The windows, opened half-way to air the rooms, suggested the possibility of a cache outside. Climbing up the wall and extending to the roof was the great wisteria vine, its outspread branches twisted into ropes and covered with a mantle of dense foliage. The main trunk passed close to the window of the room that faced the stair-head, the place where she sat waiting for ascending footsteps. When Anne had made her visit, she had heard the first creak of the stairs and crawled out under the raised window. With a foothold on the gutter she had slipped behind the curtain of the vine, her hands gripped round its limbs. Even from the garden below she thought it would have been impossible to detect her. Of Anne’s whispered pleadings she had heard nothing; she had supposed the intruder one of the men. When they came up she had had plenty of time to hide for she had heard their footsteps when they came along the hall.

“Sleep!” she said, in answer to Anne’s question. “I never thought of sleep. I was in this room all the time, waiting and listening. I didn’t even dare to lie on the bed for fear I couldn’t get it smooth again. The candies and crackers kept me from being hungry. But when your whole being is on such a strain you don’t think of those things, you forget your body.”

After the visit of Rawson and Williams she knew the danger of detection increased with every hour. Also the necessity for food could not be denied much longer. The one chance left her was to get away that night, make what she felt would be a last attempt to gain the freedom that meant life to her. The darkness was in her favor and she resolved to slip from the house and cross the bed of the channel below the causeway. She was a good swimmer and though the central stream was deep and swift she was ready to match her strength against it. If she failed--but she hadn’t thought of failure--the goal to be reached was all she saw.

At the foot of the stairs she had hesitated, undecided whether to go by the living-room or the kitchen. Finally she chose the way she knew best, where she was familiar with the disposition of the furniture. As the flashlight burst she had made a noiseless rush for the stairs, was in the upper passage when the women’s doors flew open and Rawson came running along the hall below. The darkness and noise had covered her flight, but in her eyrie on the top floor she had crouched at the head of the stairs sick with uncertainty and dread. The concerted shrieks of the women had come eerily to her--cries of her own name. She guessed then a picture had been taken, they had seen it, and she waited not knowing what was coming. She had stayed there a long time, listening with every sense alert, heard silence gathering over the house and then gone back to her place by the window:

“I hadn’t given up, I had the spirit to fight still. But it was so awful not knowing anything, what they were doing, if they’d found out I was alive. And what was I to do--stay here, get out on the island? I couldn’t tell, I was all in the dark, and I felt my nerve weaken for the first time. And then I heard your voice, Anne, ‘I’m coming to help you,’ it said.” She drew back and looked with solemn meaning into the other’s face. “You meant it? You will help me?”

“Sybil, you know it.”

“There’s only one way you can.”

“Any way.”

“Let me go.”

“Never tell--that you were here--that it wasn’t you?”