Part 3

A door to the right opened into the entrance hall. Here he and his wife occupied a ground-floor room. It was on the garden front of the house opposite the stairway that led to the second story. He listened at the panel before he entered, then softly turned the knob, and, inside, as softly closed the door. Shut in and alone his languid pose fell from him like a cloak. An avid eagerness sharpened his features and directed his hands, pulling open his valise and taking from it a small leather case. Moving back from the window he pushed up his sleeve, took the hypodermic from the case and pressed in the needle. When he had restored the bag to its place, he threw himself on the bed and lay with closed eyes feeling the ineffable comfort, grateful as an influx of life, vitalize and soothe his tortured being.

Mrs. Cornell and Shine rose up and followed him. Mrs. Cornell had her packing to get through and wanted Miss Pinkney’s help. Shine was going to see if the pantry would do for a dark room, intending to take some flashlight photographs of the company that evening. He had found in a cabinet all the flashlight requisites and thought it would be an interesting memento of their visit--each of them to have a picture.

“They’ve got everything here,” he said as he pointed to the corner where he had made his find. “Not alone all the supplies, but two first-class cameras and a projector. I suppose some of the family took it up for a fad.”

Mrs. Cornell opined it was to occupy the young men. There were several Driscoll boys and if you didn’t give them something to do they’d get into mischief. Though, if you asked her, she didn’t see any chances for mischief in _this_ jumping-off place, unless the high tide washed in a few mermaids.

Then they passed on through the left doorway, into the side wing of the house. Here Shine, who was domiciled in the butler’s bedroom, disappeared into the adjoining pantry and Mrs. Cornell trod resolutely on into the kitchen, being one of the few members of the company who was not afraid of the housekeeper.

Miss Pinkney, who was sitting upright in a stiff-backed chair, rose respectfully. She was a lean slab-sided woman of fifty, with tight-drawn hair and a long horse face. She had disapproved bitterly of the intrusion of the actors upon the sacred precincts of Gull Island and though she had been rigidly polite hoped that her disapproval had got across. Anyway, she had had the satisfaction of putting cotton sheets on their beds and serving their meals on the kitchen china. If they did any damage to the house or premises she was ready to assert her authority, and she had been on the watch. But they had been careful and orderly and treated her with the proper deference, and in her heart the revolutionary thought had arisen that they were equally considerate and more amusing than the usual run of Gull Island guests. Also they gave her a subject of conversation that would last out the winter.

Mrs. Cornell broached her request and Miss Pinkney agreed. She was even very pleasant about it, showing a brisk friendly alacrity--with the helper gone there’d only be a cold supper and she could dish that up in two shakes. Together they left the kitchen and on the stairs Mrs. Cornell hooked her plump arm inside Miss Pinkney’s bony one and said when Mr. Shine took the flashlights that night he must take one of them as the “feeder” and the other as the “fed.”

IV

BASSETT had gone into the house too. As he crossed the living-room he noticed its deserted quietude, in contrast to the noise and bustle that had possessed it an hour ago.

It was a rich friendly room, comfortably homelike in spite of its size, for it crossed the center of the house, its rear door opening on the garden as the one opposite did on the path. It was spacious in height as well as width, its walls rising two stories. Midway up a gallery ran, on three sides of which the bedrooms opened. The fourth side, on the seaward front, was flanked by a line of windows, great squares of unsullied glass that looked over the garden and the amphitheater to the uplands and the open ocean. There were tables here, raking wicker chairs, and low settees with brilliant cushions, books lying about and smokers’ materials. In the room below the character of a hunting lodge had been suggested by mounted deer heads, Indian blankets, baskets of cunning weave and animal skins on the floor. But it was an idealized hunting lodge, with seats in which the body sank luxuriously, and softly shaded lights. Round the deep-mouthed chimney the scent of wood fires lingered, the fires of birch logs that leaped there when Gull Island lay under storm and mist. The architect had not diminished the effect of size and unencumbered space by stairs. The second story was reached by two flights, one in the entrance hall, one in the kitchen wing.

Bassett opened the door into the hall where again all was quiet, none of the jarring accents that occasionally rose from the Stokes’ room. He walked across the gleaming parquette to the library which he had used for his office. There were no signs of the hunting lodge here--a scholarly retreat, book-lined, with leather armchairs and lights arranged for readers’ eyes, a place for delightful hours if one had time to drowse and poke about on the shelves. Two long French windows framed a view of the channel and Hayworth dreaming among its elms. He went to one of the windows and looked out. The girls were still sitting there, and, as he looked at them, an expression of infinite tenderness lay like a light on his face. It was the light Shine had noticed, allowed to break through clearly now that no one was there to see.

He sat down at the desk; there were letters for him to answer, addenda of the performance to check up. He moved the papers, looked at them, pushed them away, and, resting his forehead on his hands, relinquished himself to a deep pervading happiness. Yesterday Anne had promised to marry him.

His mind, held all day to his work, now flew to her--memories of her face with the down-bent lids as he had asked her, and the look in her eyes as they met his. Brave beautiful eyes with her soul in them. It had been no light acceptance for her, it meant the surrendering of her whole being, her life given over to him. He heard her voice again, and his face sank into his hands, his heart trembling in the passion of its dedication to her service. Anne, whom he had coveted and yearned for and thought so far beyond his reach--his! He would be worthy of her, and he would take such care of her, gird her round with his two arms, a buckler against every ill that life might bring. She’d had such a hard time of it, struggling up by herself with Joe hung round her neck like a millstone.

At the memory of Joe he came to earth with a jarring impact. He dropped his hands and stared at the papers, his brows bent in harassed thought. Joe had broken the charm, obstructed the way to the paradise of dreams like the angel with the flaming sword--though angel was not exactly the word. Bassett had heard something that morning from Sybil which must be looked into--something he could hardly believe. But Joe being what he was you never could tell. It had been a mistake to bring him, with Sybil a bunch of nerves and Stokes shunted unexpectedly into their midst. And now he felt responsible, he’d have it out with Joe before he left. One more disagreeable scene before they separated to-morrow, and Bassett, like Mrs. Cornell, felt he’d thank Providence when they were all on the train in the morning. Meantime he’d go over his papers while he waited for the boy who had gone to his room to dress. The door was open and he could hear him as he came down the stairs.

Anne was approaching the house, a slender crimson figure, her hair in the sunset light shining like black lacquer. She was smiling to herself--everything was so beautiful, not only Gull Island and this hour of tranquil glory, but the mere fact of existing. Then she saw Flora Stokes sitting on the balcony and realized that in this golden world there were people to whom life was a dark and troublous affair. She wanted to comfort Flora, let some of the happiness in her own heart spill over into that burdened one. But she knew no way of doing it, could only smile at the haggard face the woman lifted from her book.

“Oh, Mrs. Stokes, reading,” she cried as she ran up the steps. “How can you read on such an evening as this?”

Flora Stokes said she had been walking about till she was tired, and then glanced at the distant rock:

“You’ve left Sybil out there.”

There was no comfort or consolation that could penetrate Mrs. Stokes’ obsession. Anne could only reassure:

“She’s coming in soon. She just wanted to see the end of the sunset.”

She passed into the hall, sorry--oh, so sorry! But the library door was open and she halted, poised birdlike for one glance. The man at the desk had his back to her and she said nothing, yet he turned, gave a smothered sound and jumped up. She shut her eyes as she felt his arms go about her and his kisses on her hair, her senses blurred in a strange ineffably sweet confusion of timidity and delight.

“Oh, Anne,” she heard his voice between the kisses. “I was waiting for you.”

“Some one will see us,” she whispered. “Take care.”

She could feel the beating of his heart through his coat. Her hands went up to his shoulders feeling along the rough tweed and with her lids down-drooped she lifted her face.

“Darling,” he breathed, when the kiss was over, “I thought you were never coming.”

“I had to stay with Sybil. She didn’t want to be alone.”

“But _you_ wanted to be here?”

“Just _here_,” she laid a finger on his breast and broke into smothered, breathless laughter.

He laughed too and they drew apart, their hands sliding together and interlocking. It was all so new, so bewilderingly entrancing, that they did not know how to express it, the man staring wonder-struck, the girl, with her quivering laughter that was close to tears, looking this way and that, not knowing where to look.

“I ought to go,” she whispered. “They’ll be coming,” but made no move.

“Wait till they do.” Then with a sudden practical facing of realities, “When will we be married?”

“Oh, not for ages! I’m not used to being engaged yet!”

“I am--I never was before but I must have had a talent for it, I’ve taken to it so well.”

“Oh, Hugh!” Her laughter came more naturally, his with it. They were like a pair of children, delighting in a little secret. “Won’t they be surprised when they hear? Nobody has a suspicion of it.”

She looked so enchanting with her eyebrows arched in mischievous query that he made a movement to clasp her again, and then came the creak of an opening door from the floor above.

“Hist!” she held up a warning hand and slid away, her face, glancing back for a last look, beautiful in its radiant joy.

Bassett moved to the stair-foot. Once again he had to come down to earth with a bump. He passed his hand over his face as if to wipe off an expression incompatible with disagreeable interviews. This must be Joe.

It _was_ Joe, dressed for travel in knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket, a golf cap on the back of his head. He carried an overcoat across his arm, in his hands a suit-case and a fishing-rod done up in a canvas case. At the sight of Bassett he halted, and the elder man noticed a change in his expression, a quick focusing to attention.

“Oh,” he said. “Want to see me, Bassett?”

“Yes, I want to speak to you before you go.”

Joe descended. Stopping a step above Bassett, he set down his baggage and leaned on the banister, politely waiting.

Bassett spoke with lowered voice:

“I heard something this morning that I can hardly believe--an accusation against you. That you’ve been using your position here to act as one of the police spies who’ve been keeping tab on Sybil.”

The boy looked at him with impenetrable eyes and answered in the same lowered key:

“Who told you that?”

“She did. She accuses you of having come here with that intention, got the job knowing that no outsiders were to be allowed on the island.”

Bassett was certain he had paled under his tan, but his face retained a masklike passivity.

“Sounds as if she might be losing her mind.”

“You deny it?”

The boy gave a scornful shrug:

“Of course I deny it. I shouldn’t think it would be necessary to ask that. She’s had a down on me for some time--everybody’s seen it, snapping and snarling at me for nothing--and I suppose she wants to get an excuse for it.”

“She says she came upon you examining a letter of hers, holding it up to the light. And three days ago she found you in her room looking over the papers in her desk.”

“Ah!” he made a gesture of angry contempt. “It would make a person sick--examining her letters! I was looking through the mail bag to see if there was anything for me. If I took up one of hers by mistake does that prove I was examining it?”

“How about the other thing?”

“Being in her room? Yes, I was there. I went in to get a stamp. I had an important letter to go when Gabriel took over the mail and it was time for him. All the rest of you were out. Her room was next to mine and I went in. I never thought anything about it, no more than I would have thought about going into Anne’s or yours or anybody else’s. She’s nutty, I tell you. You can’t trust her word. And if she says I’m hired to spy on her she’s a damned----”

He stopped. Basset’s eye was steady on him in a cold command he knew. There was the same cold quality in the director’s voice:

“If the position Sybil’s in has made her suspicious, that’s all right. I’d like to believe it was the case. But if any of us--supposedly her friends--had inserted themselves in here to carry on police surveillance, using _me_ to get them in--well, I’d not think _that_ all right.”

Joe leaned over the banister. His control was shaken, his voice hoarsely urgent:

“You got to be fair, Bassett, and because you’re sorry for her is no reason to set her word over mine. It’s _not_ true. Don’t you believe me?”

Bassett did not answer for a moment. He wanted to believe and he doubted; he thought of Joe’s desire to come, of the reward:

“I guess you know, Joe, you can trust me to be fair, but I’m not going to commit myself till I know. It won’t be hard to do that. I can find out when I get back to New York. And take this from me--if what Sybil says is true I’m done with you. No more help from me, no more work in any company I manage. And I fancy the whole theatrical profession will feel the same way.” He drew back from the stair-foot. The disagreeable interview was over. “There’s no good talking any more about it. Accusations and denials don’t get us anywhere. We’ll let it rest till I’ve made my inquiries. I’ll say good-by now and hope you’ll have a good time in the woods.”

He turned and walked up the hall to his room on the garden front next the Stokes’. Joe gathered his luggage and went the opposite way, down the hall and into the big central apartment. He stepped with gingerly softness as if he were creeping away from something he feared might follow him. At the entrance door he set down his luggage and as he bent over it a whispered stream of curses flowed from his lips. He cursed Bassett and his luck, but Sybil with a savage variety of epithet and choice of misfortune, for she had undone him. Straightening up he looked blankly about--his inner turmoil was such he hardly knew where he was--and he retraced his steps, seeking the seclusion of his room, went up the stairs in noiseless vaulting strides like a frightened spider climbing to its web.

V

ANNE had taken off her costume and slipped into a negligée to do her packing comfortably, and then decided she had better bid good-by to Joe first. Bidding good-by was not an obligation between them, but she had to get the key of his trunk--it was going back to New York with hers--and her heart in its new warmth yearned to him, her only relation. She wanted to tell him her great secret, see an answering joy leap into his face, for he thought more of Bassett than anybody, and he’d be so surprised to hear that Anne, her charms held at a low valuation, had won such a prize.

Her room was the first on the left side of the gallery, Joe’s next to Sybil’s on the land front of the house. She passed the long line of closed doors, voices coming from behind Mrs. Cornell’s, and reaching Joe’s, knocked. A “Come in,” uninvitingly loud and harsh, answered her and she entered. Joe was sitting in a low armchair, bent forward, his hands holding a cane with which he was tapping on the floor. The bright square of the window was behind him, framing rosy sky and the green shore-line. He looked up to see who it was; then, without greeting or comment, drooped his head and went on lightly striking the cane on the carpet as if he were hammering in a nail and it required all his attention. Anne felt dashed, his manner might have been the same to an intruding stranger. She asked about the key, and he nodded to the bureau where it lay. The trunk was packed and locked? To that he gave an assenting grunt, then raised his head and looked at her--what have you come here for, the look said.

It was not a reception to encourage confidences and she stood uncomfortably regarding him, trying to find something to say that would dispel his somber ill humor.

“You’re all ready? Where’s your luggage?”

“Down by the door. Is there anything else you want to know?”

“_I_ don’t want to know, I was thinking of you. You’re always late, and it’s different here with only one way to get ashore and Gabriel never willing to wait.”

He made no answer, continuing his play with the cane. She knew that something was wrong and sat down on the arm of a chair, uneasy, wondering what it was:

“I’m glad you’ve managed this holiday. And it’s so jolly having Jimmy Travers, he’s such a sport. You’ll meet him to-night at Bangor. At the Algonquin Inn--wasn’t that the name of it?”

“Um.”

“I want to be sure because if any important mail should come for you I could send it there to meet you on your way back. Algonquin Inn--I’ll remember that. Then off to-morrow morning--it’ll be lovely in the woods now.”

“Any place would be lovely after this beastly hole.”

“Beastly hole! I thought you liked it!”

“Did you? Take another guess.”

“You expected to like it. You wanted to come.”

He made no answer, but slanting his body sidewise with an air of ostentatious endurance, took out his watch and looked at it. She ignored the hint--you couldn’t be sensitive with Joe--and leaning toward him asked:

“What’s the matter, Joe?”

“Matter--with what?”

“You! Has anything happened?”

“Oh, no, nothing’s happened.” His words were mincingly soft. “What _could_ happen with such a charming lot of people and Miss Saunders playing the star rôle in the performance and out.”

It was Sybil then--he’d been working himself into a bad temper over her treatment of him. Anne had thought it odd he had not mentioned it before:

“You’re angry with Sybil, and I don’t think she has been very nice to you. I’ve noticed it, especially the last three days and this afternoon when we were sitting out there on the rock I tried to make her tell me why.”

He raised his head; the profile sharply defined against the window showed a working muscle in the cheek: “And did she tell you?”

“No, she didn’t seem to want to talk about it. She changed the subject.”

“How considerate!”

“There’s no sense getting annoyed about it because I don’t think she has any reason. You have to make excuses for her. She’s gone through this awful experience and her nerves are all wracked to pieces. You have to be patient and take her as a sort of afflicted person--”

He dashed the cane down and jumped to his feet in a volcanic explosion of rage:

“I don’t take her that way. I take her for what she is, a damned lying hypocrite.”

“Joe!” She was amazed, not so much at the words, as at the suddenness of the outburst and the contorted passion of his face.

“She thinks she can treat me any way she wants and get away with it. Well, she’ll find her mistake, she’s taken the wrong turning this time. She takes me for a yellow dog she can kick whenever she feels like it. But I got teeth, I can bite. Patient--be patient--God, I’d like to wring her neck, the damned----.”

He used an epithet that brought Anne to her feet, breathing battle: “Don’t dare to say that of my friend, Joe Tracy.”

He stood in front of her, hump-shouldered, with outthrust jaw, brows drawn low over eyes gleaming like a cat’s. She had never seen him look like that; he seemed a stranger, a horrible stranger, and she drew away, aghast at the revelation of a being so sinisterly unfamiliar. Her look brought him back to self-control. He jerked his head up, ran a hand over his hair, and turned away to the window. Standing there he said:

“Well, I take that back. I didn’t mean to say it. But she’s made me mad; I think she’d make anybody.”

The tone, surly still, had a placating quality; it was as near an apology as Joe could ever come. She felt immeasurably relieved for he had frightened her. To see the family cat, whose vagaries of temperament she knew by heart, suddenly transformed into a tiger, had given her a shock. She accepted his amends without comment, but she could not resist a sisterly admonition:

“If you’d only stop getting mad over small things you’d find life so much easier.”

He laughed:

“Good advice from little sister! It doesn’t cost anything and it’s the correct _ingenue_ pose.”

He turned from the window smiling, Joe at his most amiable. If he had met her this way she would have poured out her secret. But her high mood had fallen and besides he wanted her to go--he said he had a letter to write yet. Lounging toward her he put his hands on her shoulders, gave her a light kiss on the cheek and pushed her toward the door.

On her way back along the gallery she recalled his face in that moment of rage with troubled question. She wondered if there was more disturbing him than she knew--it was an extraordinary exhibition of anger for such a cause. Also she had not felt sure that his change of mood was genuine, his laugh had rung false, and when he had laid his hands on her shoulders she had felt their coldness through the thin stuff of her negligée. She heaved a sigh of relief at the thought that he was going. In his present mood there was no knowing what clashes there might be, and it was the last evening, and there would be a full moon, and she and Bassett would walk like lovers under its magic light.

When her door had closed, the gallery and living-room became as quiet as though the house were unoccupied. Sybil, approaching it, heard no sound of voices, a fact that reassured her, for the long day had tired her and she had no mind for talk. She was coming in by the balcony when she saw Flora Stokes sitting there reading and deflected her course toward the path that skirted the building’s front. If Flora noticed her she made no sign, her eyes glued to her book, and Sybil, stepping softly, for she dreaded the woman’s resentful glances, passed along to the entrance of the living-room. The place was deserted and she stopped on the threshold for a last look at the sky’s fading splendors.

Across the depths of the room the door into the hall opened, but so gently that she did not hear it. Stokes made this noiseless entrance in the hope that she might be there, and now, seeing his hope fulfilled, closed the door as carefully, standing against it watching her.