_By_ George Warburton Lewis
The outcome was all the more regrettable because Henry Fayne had staked
so much on the success of his great venture. He had renounced innumerable
bachelor friendships for Leanor, only to discover within a year of the
celebrated social event, which had been their wedding, that he was linked
for life to a captivating adventuress.
It was a hard blow. Only by desperate efforts, long sustained, had he
been able to take himself in hand and force out of his thoughts the ugly
images that obsessed him.
[Illustration]
Leanor’s perfidy was a thing of which even his best friends never could
have convinced him; yet now he knew it to be true—aye, knew it because
she herself had boasted of it!
Fayne had striven hard to shut so hideous a specter out of his vision,
partly because of a haunting fear that the thing which the discovery had
set throbbing in his brain would get the better of him, that he would
hurt somebody, or himself.
He had been an unusually well-balanced man, but it was only after many a
stern struggle with the pulsating thing that hammered in his head that he
surrendered the corpse of his outraged love to the divorce court and the
gossip-mongers, and went sadly back to his bachelor haunts in the hope
of forgetting. But he was appalled to find that he no longer fitted in.
The friends of the free and easy days of his celibacy were sincere enough
in their pity for him, though in no way disposed to put themselves out
seeking reclamation. In short, they might as well have said in chorus:
“You couldn’t have expected us to forewarn you; you’d have quit us cold.
You had to discover it for yourself, and the operation of finding out has
simply rendered you impossible as one of the old crowd. Sorry, old man,
but, after all, it’s better that you should know.”
So Henry Fayne brooded, lost his nerve, and then, all of a
sudden—disappeared.
The old circle knew his set and cynical face no more. There were rumors
of mental breakdown and suicide, and there was one report (little
credited, however) that the unfortunate fellow had drifted down into the
wilds of South America and become an eccentric and a recluse.
Leanor tired, in time, of the murderous velocity of her social chariot,
dumped the winged vehicle on the trash-heap and went abroad, accompanied
by a less rich and more ambitious retinue of high livers.
Like vari-colored butterflies, five years winged overhead, years by
no means lacking in color and variety for Leanor. Exacting as were
her tastes, she could scarcely have desired a more changeful, a more
exquisitely exhilarating life.
Only once in a blue moon did she think of Henry. Thoughts of him, like
all other memories of her meteoric past, had been crowded into oblivion
by the inrush of the more intimate and actual.
Henry had been very good to her, she had to admit, but he had been none
the less impossible. The outcome had been inevitable from the beginning.
He was fifteen years her senior. She knew that she could never have
held her volatile self down to a life of self-sacrifice and suffering
with Henry. The idea was no less absurd than the mating of an esthetic
humming-bird with some sedate old owl.
When she consented to marry Henry she had entertained no such
preposterous thought as exacting of him a compliance with the
ridiculously restricted code of ethics he subsequently set for her.
Indeed, she would have grown old and ugly with nothing accomplished,
unseeking and unsought. Too, there would have been lamentably fewer
notches on her ivory fan than the half-decade last past had yielded.
As the wretched venture had turned out, however, she was still under
thirty and was, to employ the homely simile of her latest masculine
objective, “as pretty as a peach.”
* * * * *
At the Pacific entrance of the Grand Canal, where the town of Bandora
drowses like a sprawling lizard on the sun-baked clay, word went round
that the millionaire adventuress was yachting down the west coast,
homeward bound.
Everybody who read the public prints knew about Leanor, so at least one
element at Bandora awaited her arrival with curious interest. And the
curious were to be gratified, for since pretty Leanor habitually did the
unexpected, she only proved her consistency when, upon her arrival, she
capriciously decided to tarry a fortnight, with the two-fold object of
having a look at the great waterway and exploring historic Batoga Island,
only a couple of hours distant.
Should the mighty monument to engineering skill prove uninteresting,
there remained the secret caves of Batoga, among them _La Guaca de San
Pedro_, by allegation the identical haunted, bat-inhabited cavern in
which buccaneering old Henry Morgan had once stored all of his ill-gotten
gains and maybe imprisoned the unfortunate nuns captured at Porto Bello!
And then, too, there was the celebrated Devil’s Channel, which, according
to widely circulated and much-believed stories, sucked small craft down
into its omnivorous maw like some insatiable demon lying in wait.
Leanor devoted but little time to the prodigious engineering feat. After
all, it was man-made, and what was man if not a purveyor to feminine
caprices? Mere men were cheap. The adventuress knew, because she had
bought and sold many of them. She had bartered the very souls of some.
She had bought them all with make-believe affection and disposed of them
at a hundred per cent discount. She treated them much as one treats
cast-off garments, experiencing only minor difficulties in disengaging
herself from some of the more persistent.
A genuine Sybarite, Leanor’s appetite for entities masculine had at last
cloyed, and she now turned impatiently to inscrutable old Nature to make
up the deficiency.
She went to Batoga, a verdant, mighty mountain, greenly shaggy, as yet
unshorn by advancing civilization. It might have been a little separate
world, set down by nature in a sleeping sea of sapphire. Here, indeed,
was something different.
She was wild with delight as soon as her dainty feet touched the
shell-paved beach. Really, this wonderland was too splendidly perfect to
share with her unpoetic company of paid buffoons! She sent the whole lot
of them bagging back to Bandora, decided to employ a guide, a boatman, or
a native maid, contingent upon her special needs, right on the ground.
It was due to this whim of Leanor’s that I myself wandered into the cast,
came to know Leanor and likewise the story I am telling you here. I had
just come through a notably obstinate case of dengue in the sanitarium.
My thin knees, in fact, were still somewhat wobbly, and I was urging
them back to normal by means of a leisurely stroll across the rolling
pasture-land. On a grassy, wind-swept hillside I came all unexpectedly
upon Leanor.
Evidently she had thought to refresh her jaded wits by a revel in wild
flowers. She was seated on a shelf of rock that rimmed the hill-crown,
culling unworthy floral specimens. A single upward glance, and then her
eyes dropped back to her flowers in a world-bored manner which I somehow
felt a quick impulse to resent. At least I could annoy her. That was any
fool’s privilege.
“Gathering flowers?” I interrogated, just as though that fact were not as
obvious as the blue sky itself.
For answer, my front-line fortifications were instantly swept by an
ocular onslaught well calculated to obliterate. I smiled back engagingly
at the source of the tempest.
“Some hill, this,” I suggested, emitting a windy sigh after the exertion
of its ascent.
And then I saw that my second drive had broken through her first-line
trench on a front of about a quarter of an inch. Disdain died slowly out
of her face—a face still unaccountably fresh and girlish—and something
like pity at my apparent lack of sophistication took its place.
“You really think it a high hill?” she asked, faintly smiling and gazing
at me steadily as though she doubted my sanity.
I noted that her hazel eyes seemed to swim in seas of a wonderfully
sparkling liquid.
“Well,” I qualified, affecting funereal gravity, “it’s higher than _some_
hills.”
Her amused smile expanded perceptibly.
“Really, now, have you ever seen very many hills?”
“N-no,” I reluctantly confessed, “not so _very_ many.”
“What induced you to measure this one?”
“Well, I was shadowing somebody,” I said quietly. At last she had given
me an opening.
“Whom, pray?” she demanded, her smile brightening expectantly.
“_You_—if you don’t mind,” I announced.
“_Me!_” She laughed deliriously for a moment.
“It’s hardly a laughing matter,” I said, with forced seriousness when she
was still. “I’ve been working on this case for years.”
She sobered with a suddenness that suggested ugly thoughts, perchance
remembering something of her kaleidoscopic past. The hazel eyes saddened
a little. It was evident that she was rummaging among happenings which it
gave her small pleasure to review. I waited. Maybe I was not quite the
yokel she had thought me.
“Do you mean you’re a detective?” she presently asked.
“I mean just that, madam,” I said evenly.
“By whom are you employed?” she questioned tentatively.
“By Henry Fayne,” I casually replied.
“That is the lie of an impostor,” quickly asserted the woman; “Henry
Fayne is dead.”
She rose from the stone shelf and prepared to desert me. Anyhow, I had
won my point. I had succeeded in annoying her.
But I concluded I could hardly let the matter so end, even as affecting a
woman like Leanor. Nobody can afford to be openly rude.
“Wait,” I said; “let’s be good sportsmen. You tilted at me and I
retaliated. Honors are even. Why not forget it?”
She was greatly relieved; and besides, forgetfulness, of all things, was
what she sought. After a moment, deep wells of laughter again glistened
in her splendid eyes. These and the smiling young mouth somehow seemed to
give the lie to the fiasco she had made of life. What a pity, I thought,
that she had chosen to fritter away her life in this fatuous, futile
fashion.
I had thought that I should feel only contempt for such a woman as
Leanor, but as we walked down the hill she told me something that
penetrated a hitherto unknown weak spot in my armor. So I all but pitied
the woman I had prepared to despise.
As if to take strength from them, she kept her eyes on the wild flowers
she had gathered, as she pronounced the well-nigh unbelievable words I
now set down.
The craze for the blinding white lights, and the delusion of equally
white wines, were surfeited. The gilt and tinsel of the truly tawdry had
palled. The mask of allurement had fallen from the forbidding face of
the artificial and empty. Life itself had become for Leanor a vacant and
meaningless thing. She had seen too much of it in too brief a space.
She concluded with a seeming contradiction, a veiled regret that her
frenzied explorations had exhausted all too soon the world’s meager store
of things worth while, and there was a bitterness in her voice which
contrasted unpleasantly with her youth and beauty as she said plainly,
though with little visible emotion, that she had reached a point where
life itself often repelled and nauseated her.
We had reached the sanitarium by this time, an interruption not unwelcome
in the circumstances, and I left the strange woman alone with her tardy
regrets and sought my own quarters, sympathetic and depressed, yet
thanking my lucky stars for the happy dispensation that had made me an
adventurer instead of an “adventuress.”
That evening, Leanor and I planned a trip to Devil’s Channel, and
I strolled down to the beach in search of such a shallow-draught
_cayuco_ as could maneuver its way over the reefs that barred larger
craft. _Boteros_ of divers nationalities abounded, and among the many
my questioning gaze finally met that of a vagabondish-looking fellow
countryman in a frayed sailor garb. In odd contrast to his raiment, and
swinging from his belt in a sheath which his short coat for an instant
did not quite conceal, I caught a single glimpse of a heavy hunting knife
with an ornamented stag-horn handle.
His name was Sisson, he told me, but he spoke Spanish like a native. His
uncarded beard was a thing long forgotten of razors. He was unmistakably
another of those easily identified tramps of the tropics who, in an
unguarded moment, unaccountably lose their grip on themselves and
thenceforward go sliding unresistingly down to a not unwelcome oblivion.
Sisson did not importune me, as did all the other boatmen; he did not
even offer me his services; and it was because of this evidence of
some lingering vestige of pride, coupled with the fact that he had an
eminently suitable _cayuco_, that I decided to employ him.
* * * * *
At the narrow gateway of Devil’s Channel the water is so shallow, and
there so frequently occur tiny submerged sand-bars, that only the
minutest of sea craft can skim over the gleaming rifts and gain entrance.
This was confirmed for the nth time when I felt the specially made keel
of our tiny _cayuco_ scrape the shiny sand in warning that we were at
last entering the canyon-like waterway.
Leanor and I were both playing our splendid oarsman with well-nigh every
imaginable question about the gloomy, spooky-looking channel before us.
“Aren’t we nearing _the place_ yet?” Leanor presently asked.
“Farther in,” drawled Sisson, the bearded giant of a boatman, glancing
carelessly at the ascending cliffs on either side.
Twisting my body round in the wee native _cayuco_, I noted that the
perpendicular walls of the shadowy strait that lay before us seemed
drawing together with every pull of Sisson’s great arms. Leanor’s pretty
face was radiant with expectation. Though bored of the world, there was
at least one more thrill for her ahead.
Five minutes slipped by. Sisson rowed on steadily.
“There she is!” the boatman said suddenly, for the first time evincing
something like a normal human interest in life. One of his huge, hairy
hands was indicating an alkali spot on the face of the right-hand wall a
stone’s throw ahead. “Just opposite that white spot is where _it always
happens_.”
He released his oars and let them trail in the still water. It looked
peculiarly lifeless. Our small shell gradually slowed.
“Seems to be all smooth sailing here today, though,” I ventured.
“Overrated, for the benefit of tourists,” opined Sisson. “The water’s
eaten out a little tunnel under the west wall, but there’s no real danger
if you know the chart.”
“How many did you say were drowned when that launch went down?” again
asked Leanor. Her great dark eyes were sparkling again now with a keen
new interest in life—or was it the nearness to potential death?
“Eleven,” drawled Sisson. “The engineer jumped for it and made a
landing on that bench of slate over there, and right there”—he smiled
reminiscently—“he sat for seventy-two hours, with ‘water, water
everywhere, nor any drop’—”
“And is it true that none of the life-preservers they were putting on
when the launch sank was ever found?” Leanor also wanted to know.
“True enough,” said Sisson, “but that’s not unnatural. Drowning men lay
hold of whatever they can and never, _never_ turn loose. Why, I’ve seen
the clawlike fingers of skeletons locked around sticks that wouldn’t bear
up a cockroach!”
“Did you say it was a relatively calm day?” I questioned the boatman idly.
“Sure. Calm as it is right now,” he answered.
I observed casually that the oarsman was gazing fixedly at Leanor. Even
on him, perhaps, beauty was not entirely lost. Doubtless, too, he had
heard the gossip her arrival had set going along the wharves at Batoga.
Meanwhile Leanor had made a discovery.
“Why, we’re still making headway!” she broke out suddenly. “I—I thought
we had stopped.”
Sisson glanced down at the water, and his tanned brow broke up in
vertical wrinkles of consternation. The look in his deepset eyes, though,
did not, oddly enough, seem to match the perplexity written on his
corrugated brow.
Our craft was sliding rapidly forward as though propelled by the oars.
The phenomenon was due to a current; that much was certain, for we were
moving with a flotsam of dead leaves and seaweed.
Again I screwed my body half round in the cramped bow and shot a glance
ahead. God! we were shooting toward the dread spot on the alkali cliff as
though drawn to it by an unseen magnet. I could see, too, that our speed
was rapidly increasing.
Sisson snatched up the trailing oars and put his giant’s strength against
the invisible something that seemed dragging us by the keel, but all
he did was to plough two futile furrows in the strange whirlpool. Our
_cayuco_ glided on.
The _blasé_ adventuress was never more beautiful. For the time, at least,
life, warm and pulsating, had come back and clasped her in a joyous
embrace. Her lips were parted in a smile of seemingly inexpressible
delight. There was not the remotest suggestion of surprise or fear in her
girlish face.
She put her helm over only when I shouted to her in wide-eyed alarm, but
the keen, finlike keel of our specially built _cayuco_ obviously did not
respond. Oblique in the channel, we slithered over, ever nearer to the
west wall, the unseen agent of destruction towing us with awful certainty
toward the vortex. Still the surface of the water, moving with us,
looked as motionless as a mill-pond! It was uncanny, nothing less.
I peered into the bluishly transparent depths, fascinated with wonder,
and then, of a sudden, I saw that which alone might prove our salvation.
Apparently we were in a writhing, powerful current, racing atop the
seemingly placid undersea or sub-surface waters of the channel. I
could make out many small objects spinning merrily about as they flew,
submerging, toward the whirlpool.
We carried six life-belts. Two of these I snatched from their fastenings,
slipped one about Leanor, and with the other but partly adjusted—for
there remained no time—myself plunged out of our—as it were—bewitched
craft in the direction of the west wall.
To my surprise I swam easily. When I made a deep stroke, however, I could
feel strange suctorial forces tugging at my finger-tips. But for the
moment I was safe.
I glanced about to see if Leanor had followed my lead. She was not in the
water. I turned on my back and saw, to my utter amazement, that neither
she nor Sisson had left the _cayuco_.
This was unaccountable indeed. And it was now clear that it was too late
for them to jump, for the light boat had already begun to spin round in a
circle at a point exactly opposite the alkali spot! Faster and faster it
flew, the diameter of the ring in which it raced swiftly narrowing.
As I swam, my shoulder collided with some obstruction. It was the west
wall. I clambered up a couple of feet and sat dripping on a slime-covered
shelf of slate, the identical slab on which the engineer of the sunken
launch had thirsted.
I was powerless to help my companions. I could only sit and stare in near
unbelief. Why—_Why_ had they not abandoned the tiny craft with me? I saw
now that neither had even so much as got hold of a life-belt. Why—?
_My God!_ What was this I beheld? Sisson had advanced to the stern of the
flying cockleshell where Leanor still sat motionless, unexcited, smiling.
The charmed look of expectancy was still in her perfect face.
Sisson’s voice, suddenly risen high, chilled me to the marrow. It might
have been the voice of some martyr on the scaffold. He did not reveal
his identity to Leanor. It was not necessary. Something—I dare not say
what—enabled her in that awful moment of tragedy to know _her divorced
husband_.
* * * * *
The exquisite torture of recollection had shriveled Henry Fayne’s
mentality and left him a semi-maniac, yet here, after all the cynical,
embittering years was the physical, the carnate Henry Fayne, the
long-discarded plaything of feminine caprice. His suffering was fearfully
recorded in the seamed and bearded mask of his altered features.
The smile did not leave Leanor’s face. The madman’s voice rose in a
shrill, terrible cry. He babbled and sputtered in consuming rage, but
I caught the current of his wild harangue. He had waited all the years
for this opportunity; he had followed her from Bandora, had laid all his
plans with infinite nicety to avenge the wreck which Leanor had made of
his life.
But the woman laughed defiantly, tensely; laughed derisively, full in the
bearded face.
“You have waited too long, Henry,” she said, evenly yet with a note of
triumph in her tone; “I’ve worn threadbare every allurement of life.
Today I came here seeking my last adventure—a sensation at once new and
ultimate—_death_!”
It was here that the miracle supervened.
Chagrin, fierce and awful, distorted the hairy vagabond’s face, and,
balancing himself precariously in the crazily whirling dugout, he
raised a great clenched fist. I once had seen a laughing man struck
by lightning. As the rending voltage shot through him the muscles of
his face had relaxed slowly, queerly, as if from incredulity, just as
the furious, drawn face of Henry Fayne relaxed now. The menacing fist
unclinched and fell limply at his side.
Of all the examples of thwarted vengeance I had ever seen on the stage,
or off, this episode from real life was the most dramatic.
The boat had circled swiftly in to the center of the vortex and now spun
crazily for a moment as though on a fixed pivot, like a weather-vane.
Then it capriciously resumed its first tactics, only it now raced
inversely in a rapidly widening circle, running well down in the water,
as though from some powerful submarine attraction.
That the spurious boatman was a victim of some hopeless form of insanity
I was certain when I saw him drop to his knees and extend both his great
hands in evident entreaty to the woman who had stripped him of his
honor and, driven him, a driveling idio-maniac, into exile. Leanor sat
impassive, but the madman continued to supplicate.
Never did my credulity undergo so mighty a strain as when, after a
moment, the woman reached out and locked her slim hands in his. It was a
strange picture, believe me! From my uncertain perch on the slimy ledge
of slate, I stared, thrilling deep in my being at this futile truce on
the brink of eternity.
Its revolutions greatly widened and its speed diminished, the tiny boat
suddenly swerved from its circular course, bobbed upward as though a
great weight had been detached from its keel and then drifted like some
spent thing of life toward the west wall, where I crouched dumbfounded,
my breath hissing in my nostrils, my lungs heaving.
Only now am I coming to the crux of this story of which the foregoing
forms a necessary prelude.
Back at Batoga that same night, in an obscure corner of the wide cool
porch of the palm-environed sanitarium, Henry Fayne and Leanor, after
a long heart-to-heart talk alone, agreed to forgive and forget. Later
in the evening Fayne went down to the contiguous village to assemble
his meager belongings. They would be interesting souvenirs with which
to decorate the walls of the rehabilitated home. I found Leanor sitting
where he had left her on the porch, smiling enigmatically.
“Can I act, or not?” she asked me rather abruptly as I came up.
“Act?” I groped; “what do you mean?”
She sat there, smiling mysteriously in the white moonlight, until I
at length prevailed upon her to pour into my incredulous ears how it
had flashed upon her, in the crucial moment at the whirlpool, that she
must convince Fayne that to destroy one who seeks death would give no
satisfaction to a seeker after vengeance. She had made him see that the
most effective way of wreaking his revenge would be to prevent her taking
her own life and force her to live with him again as in the old days.
What, indeed, could be greater punishment than that?
So once again the wily adventuress had tricked poor Henry Fayne. It had
been a close thing, but her lightning wits had saved her to look forward
enchantedly to the prospect of other adventures. Though she had, in
fact, tired of life, she had weakened before death; yet the fortitude
of skillful artifice underlying that physical fear bespoke such a
resourcefulness as I had never before seen in any woman.
She had spoken more truth than she knew when she said that Henry Fayne
was dead, for, mentally, he no longer existed.
But Leanor had one more card to play. When she had outlined her campaign,
I sat aghast at the frank inhumanity of her plans for the morrow. She
had already made arrangements with the native officials of the nearby
village. She was to appear in court and testify, and I was to be summoned
to give evidence before the committing judge. Henry Fayne was to be
ruthlessly chucked into the Acorn Insane Asylum!
After Leanor had retired to her apartment I lingered a while in the
fragrant night to smoke a cigar and meditate, for I was badly upset by
her pitiless resolve. As I sat reviewing the strange events of the day,
the dark figure of a man, half bent and retreating rapidly among the
dappled shadows of the palms, startled me unpleasantly.
At my first glimpse of the skulker, some sixth sense told me that he had
been eavesdropping Leanor and me from under the elevated porch on which I
sat. As soon as the flitting shadow had melted into the gloom I slipped
off the porch and investigated.
My half-formed suspicion was confirmed. The eavesdropper’s footprints
were quite distinct. He had crouched directly under the chairs which the
adventuress and I had occupied.
I did not retire until an hour later. An indescribable feeling of dread
had, though for no adequate reason, begun to weigh upon my spirits and to
nag my nerves.
The first faint glimmer of dawn was in the east when something touched
me softly on the shoulder. I remembered that I had left my porch window
open, and sprang up in a sudden flurry of alarm, but my nerves slackened
quickly when the intruder, a black Jamaican, showed me his watchman’s
badge.
The old negro was afraid something had happened. He had heard stealthy
footfalls upstairs, and somebody’s bedroom door was wide open. On looking
into the room he had seen—!
But at this point in his story he choked, overcome. He was an excitable
and superstitious old black at best, but now he was fairly beside himself
with a terror for which he had no explanation. The occupant of the room,
I surmised, had gone out on the porch, properly enough, to smoke an
early morning cigar. But the old watchman would not be reassured until I
consented to accompany him up to the second floor.
I noted, as we advanced along the corridor, that a door stood ajar. I
tapped tentatively. No answer. I repeated the summons, louder. Still no
answer. I walked in.
The moonlight that flooded the porch outside filtered in, subdued,
through the lace-curtained windows. It revealed a bed. In the center
of the bed was the figure of a woman—all in snow white save a single
dark-hued covering of some sort which sprawled across the full bosom.
A nameless something made me fumble rather hurriedly for the electric
switch. The bright light showed what I had dreaded, almost expected. The
dark-colored garment was not a garment at all. It was blood.
It dyed the white bosom repellently and, still welling from its fountain,
was fast forming a ragged little pool on the bedcovering. Fair over the
victim’s heart, the ornamented stag-horn handle of a heavy hunting-knife,
none of the blade visible, stood up like a sinister monument, somehow
increasingly familiar to my gaze; and after an instant’s reflection I
could have sworn—so plainly did my eyes visualize the motive for this
horror—that I beheld a single word scrawled in crimson along the mottled
staghorn handle:
“_VENGEANCE!_”