the island, spending the greater part of the time along the edges of the
western and southern bluffs, where he had not seldom to pause and
scrutinize carefully the beach below, to make sure he had been deceived
by some half-buried rock or curiously shaped boulder.
To his intense relief, he made no further discovery other than a
scattering drift of wreckage from the motor-boats.
By the time he had finished, the morning was well advanced. He turned at
length and trudged wearily up from the northern beach, through the
community of desolation, back toward the farm-house.
Since breakfast he had seen nothing of the girl; none of the elaborately
casual glances which he had from time to time cast inland had discovered
any sign of her. But now she appeared in the doorway, and after a slight
pause, as of indecision, moved down the path to meet him.
He was conscious that, at sight of her, his pulses quickened. Something
swelled in his breast, something tightened the muscles of his throat.
The way of her body in action, the way of the sun with her hair...!
Dismay shook him like an ague; he felt his heart divided against itself;
he was so glad of her, and so afraid.... He could not keep his eyes from
her, nor could he make his desire be still; and yet ... and yet....
Walking the faster of the two, she met him midway between the house and
the beach.
"You've taken your time, Mr. Whitaker," said she.
"It was a bit of a walk," he contended, endeavouring to imitate her
lightness of manner.
They paused beside one of the low stone walls that meandered in a
meaningless fashion this way and that over the uplands. With a satisfied
manner that suggested she had been seeking just that very spot, the girl
sat down upon the lichened stones, then looked up to him with a smile
and a slight movement of the head that plainly invited him to a place
beside her.
He towered above her, darkly reluctant.
"Do sit down. You must be tired."
"I am."
Dubiously he seated himself at a little distance.
"And only your pains for your trouble?"
He nodded.
"I watched you, off and on, from the windows. You might have been
looking for a pin, from your painstaking air, off there along the
cliffs."
He nodded again, gloomily. Her comment seemed to admit of no more
compromising method of reply.
"Then you've nothing to tell me?"
He pursed his lips, depreciatory, lifted his shoulders not quite
happily, and swung one lanky leg across the other as he slouched,
morosely eyeing the sheets of sapphire that made their prison walls.
"No. There's no good news yet."
"And you've no inclination to talk to me, either?"
"I've told you I don't feel--well--exactly light-hearted this morning."
There was a little silence. She watched him askance with her fugitive,
shadowy, sympathetic and shrewd smile.
"Must I make talk, then?" she demanded at length.
"If we must, I suppose--you'll have to show the way. My mind's hardly
equal to trail-breaking to-day."
"So I shall, then. Hugh...." She leaned toward him, dropping her hand
over his own with an effect of infinite comprehension. "Hugh," she
repeated, meeting his gaze squarely as he looked up, startled--"what's
the good of keeping up the make-believe? You _know_!"
The breath clicked in his throat, and his glance wavered uneasily, then
steadied again to hers. And through a long moment neither stirred, but
sat so, eye to eye, searching each the other's mind and heart.
At length he confessed it with an uncertain, shamefaced nod.
"That's right," he said: "I do know--now."
She removed her hand and sat back without lessening the fixity of her
regard.
"When did you find it out?"
"This morning. That is, it came to me all of a sudden--" His gaze fell;
he stammered and felt his face burning.
"Hugh, that's not quite honest. I know you hadn't guessed, last night--I
_know_ it. How did you come to find it out this morning? Tell me!"
He persisted, as unconvincing as an unimaginative child trying to
explain away a mischief:
"It was just a little while ago. I was thinking things over--"
"Hugh!"
He shrugged sulkily.
"Hugh, look at me!"
Unwillingly he met her eyes.
"How did you find out?"
He was an inexpert liar. Under the witchery of her eyes, his resource
failed him absolutely. He started to repeat, stammered, fell still, and
then in a breath capitulated.
"Before you were up--I meant to keep this from you--down there on the
beach--I found Drummond."
"Drummond!"
It was a cry of terror. She started back from him, eyes wide, cheeks
whitening.
"I'm sorry.... But I presume you ought to know.... His body ... I buried
it...."
She gave a little smothered cry, and seemed to shrink in upon herself,
burying her face in her hands--an incongruous, huddled shape of grief,
there upon the gray stone wall, set against all the radiant beauty of
the exquisite, sun-gladdened world.
He was patient with her, though the slow-dragging minutes during which
she neither moved nor made any sound brought him inexpressible distress,
and he seemed to age visibly, his face, settling in iron lines, gray
with suffering.
At length a moan--rather, a wail--came from the stricken figure beside
him:
"Ah, the pity of it! the pity of it!... What have I done that this
should come to me!"
He ventured to touch her hand in gentle sympathy.
"Mary," he said, and hesitated with a little wonder, remembering that
this was the first time he had ever called her by that name--"Mary, did
you care for him so much?"
She sat, mute, her face averted and hidden.
"I'd give everything if I could have mended matters. I was fond of
Drummond--poor soul! If he'd only been frank with me from the start, all
this could have been avoided. As soon as I knew--that night when I
recognized you on the stage--I went at once to you to say I would clear
out--not stand in the way of your happiness. I would have said as much
to him, but he gave me no chance."
"Don't blame him," she said softly. "He wasn't responsible."
"I know."
"How long have you known?" She swung suddenly to face him.
"For some time--definitely, for two or three days. He tried twice to
murder me. The first time he must have thought he'd done it.... Then he
tried again, the night before you were carried off. Ember suspected,
watched for him, and caught him. He took him away, meaning to put him in
a sanitarium. I don't understand how he got away--from Ember. It worries
me--on Ember's account. I hope nothing has happened to him."
"Oh, I hope not!"
"You knew--I mean about the cause--the morphine?"
"I never guessed until that night. Then, as soon as I got over
the first awful shock, I realized he was a madman. He talked
incoherently--raved--shouted--threatened me with horrible things. I
can't speak of them. Later, he quieted down a little, but that was after
he had come down into the cabin to--to drug himself.... It was very
terrible--that tiny, pitching cabin, with the swinging, smoking lamp,
and the madman sitting there, muttering to himself over the glass in
which the morphine was dissolving.... It happened three times before the
wreck; I thought I should go out of my own mind."
She shuddered, her face tragic and pitiful.
"Poor girl!" he murmured inadequately.
"And that--that was why you were searching the beach so closely!"
"Yes--for the other fellow. I--didn't find him."
A moment later she said thoughtfully: "It was the man you saw watching
me on the beach, I think."
"I assumed as much. Drummond had a lot of money, I fancy--enough to hire
a desperate man to do almost anything.... The wages of sin--"
"Don't!" she begged. "Don't make me think of that!"
"Forgive me," he said.
For a little she sat, head bowed, brooding.
"Hugh!" she cried, looking up to search his face narrowly--"Hugh, you've
not been pretending--?"
"Pretending?" he repeated, thick-witted.
"Hugh, I could never forgive you if you'd been pretending. It would be
too cruel.... Ah, but you haven't been! Tell me you haven't!"
"I don't understand.... Pretending what?"
"Pretending you didn't know who I was--pretending to fall in love with
me just because you were sorry for me, to make me think it was _me_ you
loved and not the woman you felt bound to take care of, because
you'd--you had--"
"Mary, listen to me," he interrupted. "I swear I didn't know you.
Perhaps you don't understand how wonderfully you've changed. It's hard
for me to believe you can be one with the timid and distracted little
girl I married that rainy night. You're nothing like.... Only, that
night on the stage, as _Joan Thursday_, you _were_ that girl again. Max
told me it was make-up; I wouldn't believe him; to me you hadn't changed
at all; you hadn't aged a day.... But that morning when I saw you first
on the Great South Beach--I never dreamed of associating you with my
wife. Do you realize I had never seen you in full light--never knew the
colour of your hair?... Dear, I didn't know, believe me. It was you who
bewitched me--not the wife for whose sake I fought against what I
thought infatuation for you. I loved--I love you only, you as you
are--not the poor little girl of the Commercial House."
"Is it true?" she questioned sadly, incredulous.
"It is true, Mary. I love you."
"I have loved you always," she said softly between barely parted
lips--"always, Hugh. Even when I thought you dead.... I did believe that
you were drowned out there, Hugh! You know that, don't you?"
"I have never for an instant questioned it."
"It wouldn't be like you to, my dear; it wouldn't be you, my Hugh....
But even then I loved the memory of you.... You don't know what you have
meant in my life, Hugh. Always, always you have stood for all that was
fine and strong and good and generous--my gentlest man, my knight _sans
peur et sans reproche_.... No other man I ever knew--no, let me say
it!--ever measured up to the standard you had set for me to worship.
But, Hugh--you'll understand, won't you?--about the others--?"
"Please," he begged--"please don't harrow yourself so, Mary!"
"No; I must tell you.... The world seemed so empty and so lonely, Hugh:
my Galahad gone, never to return to me.... I tried to lose myself in my
work, but it wasn't enough. And those others came, beseeching me,
and--and I liked them. There was none like you, but they were all good
men of their kind, and I liked them. They made love to me and--I was
starving for affection, Hugh. I was made to love and to be loved. Each
time I thought to myself: 'Surely this time it is true; now at last am I
come into my kingdom. It can't fulfil my dreams, for I have known the
bravest man, but'--"
Her voice broke and fell. Her eyes grew dull and vacant; her vision
passed through and beyond him, as if he had not been there; the bitter
desolation of all the widowed generations clouded her golden face. Her
lips barely moved, almost inaudibly enunciating the words that were
shaken from her as if by some occult force, ruthless and inexorable:
"Each time, Hugh, it was the same. One by one they were taken from me,
strangely, terribly.... Poor Tom Custer, first; he was a dear boy, but I
didn't love him and couldn't marry him. I had to tell him so. He killed
himself.... Then Billy Hamilton; I became engaged to him; but he was
taken mysteriously from a crowded ship in mid-ocean.... A man named
Mitchell Thurston loved me. I liked him; perhaps I might have consented
to marry him. He was assassinated--shot down like a mad dog in broad
daylight--no one ever knew by whom, or why. He hadn't an enemy in the
world we knew of.... And now Drummond...!"
"Mary, Mary!" he pleaded. "Don't--don't--those things were all
accidents--"
She paid him no heed. She didn't seem to hear. He tried to take her
hand, with a man's dull, witless notion of the way to comfort a
distraught woman; but she snatched it from his touch.
"And now"--her voice pealed out like a great bell tolling over the
magnificent solitude of the forsaken island--"and now I have it to live
through once again: the wonder and terror and beauty of love, the agony
and passion of having you torn from me!... Hugh!... I don't believe I
can endure it again. I can't _bear_ this exquisite torture. I'm afraid I
shall go mad!... Unless ... unless"--her voice shuddered--"I have the
strength, the strength to--"
"Good God!" he cried in desperation. "You must not go on like this!
Mary! Listen to me!"
This time he succeeded in imprisoning her hand. "Mary," he said gently,
drawing closer to her, "listen to me; understand what I say. I love you;
I am your husband; nothing can possibly come between us. All these other
things can be explained. Don't let yourself think for another instant--"
Her eyes, fixed upon the two hands in which he clasped her own, had
grown wide and staring with dread. Momentarily she seemed stunned. Then
she wrenched it from him, at the same time jumping up and away.
"No!" she cried, fending him from her with shaking arms. "No! Don't
touch me! Don't come near me, Hugh! It's ... it's death! My touch is
death! I know it now--I had begun to suspect, now I _know_! I am
accursed--doomed to go through life like pestilence, leaving sorrow and
death in my wake.... Hugh!" She controlled herself a trifle: "Hugh, I
love you more than life; I love you more than love itself. But you must
not come near me. Love me if you must, but, O my dear one! keep away
from me; avoid me, forget me if you can, but at all cost shun me as you
would the plague! I will not give myself to you to be your death!"
Before he could utter a syllable in reply, she turned and fled from him,
wildly, blindly stumbling, like a hunted thing back up the ascent to the
farm-house. He followed, vainly calling on her to stop and listen to
him. But she outdistanced him, and by the time he had entered the house
was in her room, behind a locked door.
XIX
CAPITULATION
Grimly Whitaker sat himself down in the kitchen and prepared to wait the
reappearance of his wife--prepared to wait as long as life was in him,
so that he were there to welcome her when, her paroxysm over, she would
come to him to be comforted, soothed and reasoned out of her distorted
conception of her destiny.
Not that he had the heart to blame or to pity her for that terrified
vision of life. Her history was her excuse. Nor was his altogether a
blameless figure in that history. At least it was not so in his sight.
Though unwittingly, he had blundered cruelly in all his relations with
the life of that sad little child of the Commercial House.
Like sunlight penetrating storm wrack, all the dark disarray of his
revery was shot through and through by the golden splendour of the
knowledge that she loved him....
As for this black, deadly shadow that had darkened her life--already he
could see her emerging from it, radiant and wonderful. But it was not to
be disregarded or as yet ignored, its baleful record considered closed
and relegated to the pages of the past. Its movement had been too
rhythmic altogether to lack a reason. His very present task was to read
its riddle and exorcise it altogether.
For hours he pondered it there in the sunlit kitchen of the silent
house--waiting, wondering, deep in thought. Time stole away without his
knowledge. Not until late in the afternoon did the shifted position of
the sun catch his attention and arouse him in alarm. Not a sound from
above...!
He rose, ascended the stairs, tapped gently on the locked door.
"Mary," he called, with his heart in his mouth--"Mary!"
Her answer was instant, in accents sweet, calm and clear:
"I am all right. I'm resting, dear, and thinking. Don't fret about me.
When I feel able, I will come down to you."
"As you will," he assented, unspeakably relieved; and returned to the
kitchen.
The diversion of thought reminded him of their helpless and forlorn
condition. He went out and swept the horizon with an eager and hopeful
gaze that soon drooped in disappointment. The day had worn on in
unbroken calm: not a sail stirred within the immense radius of the
waters. Ships he saw in plenty--a number of them moving under power east
and west beyond the headland with its crowning lighthouse; others--a
few--left shining wakes upon the burnished expanse beyond the farthest
land visible in the north. Unquestionably main-travelled roads of the
sea, these, so clear to the sight, so heartbreakingly unattainable....
And then his conscience turned upon him, reminding him of the promise
(completely driven out of his mind by his grim adventure before dawn,
together with the emotional crisis of mid-morning) to display some sort
of a day-signal of distress.
For something like half an hour he was busy with the task of nailing a
turkey-red table-cloth to a pole, and the pole in turn (with the
assistance of a ladder) to the peak of the gabled barn. But when this
was accomplished, and he stood aside and contemplated the drooping,
shapeless flag, realizing that without a wind it was quite meaningless,
the thought came to him that the very elements seemed leagued together
in a conspiracy to keep them prisoners, and he began to nurse a
superstitious notion that, if anything were ever to be done toward
winning their freedom, it would be only through his own endeavour,
unassisted.
Thereafter for a considerable time he loitered up and down the dooryard,
with all his interest focussed upon the tidal strait, measuring its
greatest and its narrowest breadth with his eye, making shrewd guesses
at the strength and the occasions of the tides.
If the calm held on and the sky remained unobscured by cloud, by eleven
there would be clear moonlight and, if he guessed aright, the beginning
of a period of slack water.
Sunset interrupted his calculations--sunset and his wife. Sounds of some
one moving quietly round the kitchen, a soft clash of dishes, the
rattling of the grate, drew him back to the door.
She showed him a face of calm restraint and implacable resolve, if
scored and flushed with weeping. And her habit matched it: she had
overcome her passion; her eyes were glorious with peace.
"Hugh"--her voice had found a new, sweet level of gentleness and
strength--"I was wondering where you were."
"Can I do anything?"
"No, thank you. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am."
"For what, in Heaven's name?"
She smiled.... "For neglecting you so long. I really didn't think of it
until the sunlight began to redden. I've let you go without your lunch."
"It didn't matter--"
"I don't agree. Man must be fed--and so must woman. I'm famished!"
"Well," he admitted with a short laugh--"so am I."
She paused, regarding him with her whimsical, indulgent smile. "You
strange creature!" she said softly. "Are you angry with
me--impatient--for this too facile descent from heroics to the
commonplace? But, Hugh"--she touched his arm with a gentle and
persuasive hand--"it _must_ be commonplace. We're just mortals, after
all, you know, no matter how imperishable our egos make us feel: and the
air of the heights is too fine and rare for mortals to breathe long at a
time. Life is, after all, an everyday affair. We've just got to blunder
through it from day to day--mostly on the low levels. Be patient with
me, dear."
But, alarmed by his expression, her words stumbled and ran out. She
stepped back a pace, a little flushed and tremulous.
"Hugh! No, Hugh, no!"
"Don't be afraid of me," he said, turning away. "I don't mean to bother.
Only--at times--"
"I know, dear; but it must _not_ be." She had recovered; there was cool
decision in her accents. She began to move briskly round the kitchen,
setting the table, preparing the meal.
He made no attempt to reason with her, but sat quietly waiting. His role
was patience, tolerance, strength restrained in waiting....
"Shall you make a fire again to-night?" she asked, when they had
concluded the meal.
"In three places," he said. "We'll not stay another day for want of
letting people know we're here."
She looked down, shyly. Coquetry with her was instinctive,
irrepressible. Her vague, provoking smile edged her lips:
"You--you want to be rid of me again, so soon, Hugh?"
He bent over the table with a set face, silent until his undeviating
gaze caught and held her eyes.
"Mary," he said slowly, "I want _you_. I mean to have you. Only by
getting away from this place will that be possible. You must come to me
of your own will."
She made the faintest negative motion of her head, her eyes fixed to his
in fascination.
"You will," he insisted, in the same level tone. "If you love me, as you
say, you must.... No--that's nonsense I won't listen to! Renunciation is
a magnificent and noble thing, but it must have a sane excuse.... You
said a while ago, this was a commonplace world, life an everyday affair.
It is. The only thing that lifts it out of the deadly, intolerable rut
is this wonderful thing man has invented and named Love. Without it we
are as Nature made us--brute things crawling and squabbling in blind
squalor. But love lifts us a little above that: love _is_ supernatural,
the only thing in all creation that rises superior to nature. There's no
such thing as a life accursed; no such thing as a life that blights;
there are no malign and vicious forces operating outside the realm of
natural forces: love alone is supreme, subject to no known laws. I mean
to prove it to you; I mean to show you how little responsible you have
been in any way for the misfortunes that have overtaken men who loved
you; I shall show you that I am far more blameworthy than you.... And
when I have done that, you will come to me."
"I am afraid," she whispered breathlessly--"I am afraid I shall."
He rose. "Till then, my dearest girl, don't, please don't ever shrink
from me again. I may not be able to dissemble my love, but until your
fears are done away with, your mind at rest, no act of mine, within my
control, shall ever cause you even so much as an instant's annoyance or
distress."
His tone changed. "I'll go now and build my fires. When you are
ready--?"
"I shan't be long," she said.
But for long after he had left her, she lingered moveless by a window,
her gaze following him as he moved to and fro: her face now wistful, now
torn by distress, now bright with longing. Strong passions contended
within her--love and fear, joy and regret; at times crushing
apprehensions of evil darkened her musings, until she could have cried
out with the torment of her fears; and again intimations possessed her
of exquisite beauty, warming and ennobling her heart, all but persuading
her.
At length, sighing, she lighted the lamp and went about her tasks, with
a bended head, wondering and frightened, fearfully questioning her own
inscrutable heart. Was it for this only that she had fought herself all
through that day: that she should attain an outward semblance of calm so
complete as to deceive even herself, so frail as to be rent away and
banished completely by the mere tones of his mastering voice? Was she to
know no rest? Was it to be her fate to live out her days in yearning,
eating her heart alone, feeding with sighs the passing winds? Or was she
too weary to hold by her vows? Was she to yield and, winning happiness,
in that same instant encompass its destruction?...
When it was quite dark, Whitaker brought a lantern to the door and
called her, and they went forth together.
As he had promised, he had built up three towering pyres, widely apart.
When all three were in full roaring flame, their illumination was hot
and glowing over all the upland. It seemed impossible that the world
should not now become cognizant of their distress.
At some distance to the north of the greatest fire--that nearest the
farm-house--they sat as on the previous night, looking out over the
black and unresponsive waters, communing together in undertones.
In that hour they learned much of one another: much that had seemed
strange and questionable assumed, in the understanding of each, the
complexion of the normal and right. Whitaker spoke at length and in much
detail of his Wilful Missing years without seeking to excuse the
wrong-minded reasoning which had won him his own consent to live under
the mask of death. He told of the motives that had prompted his return,
of all that had happened since in which she had had no part--with a
single reservation. One thing he kept back: the time for that was not
yet.