THE STORM
You have been informed that Dr. Gray promised us three days' security
in the bungalow, and I will now tell you how it came about that we
quitted the house next morning, and set out anew upon the strangest
errand of them all.
There's an old saying among seamen that the higher the storm the deeper
the sleep, and this, may-be, is true, if you speak of a ship and of an
English crew upon her. It takes something more than a capful of wind to
blow sleep from a sailor's eyes; and though you were to tell him that
the Judgment was for to-morrow, I do believe he would take his four
hours off all the same. But at Ken's Island things went differently;
and two, at least, of our party knew little sleep that night. Again and
again I turned on my bed to see Dr. Gray busy before his furnace and to
hear Peter Bligh snoring as though he'd crack the window-glass.
Nevertheless, sleep came to me slowly, and when I slept I dreamed of
the island and all the strange things which had happened there since
first we set foot upon it. Many sounds and shapes were present in my
dream, and the sweet figure of Ruth Bellenden with them all. I saw her
brave and patient in the gardens of the bungalow; the words which she
had spoken, "For God's sake come back to me!" troubled my ears like the
music of the sea. Sometimes, as dreams will, the picture was but a
vague shadow, and would send me hither and thither, now to the high
seas and an English port, again to the island and the bay wherein I
first landed. I remember, more than all, a dream which carried me to
the water's edge, with my hand in hers, and showed me a great storm and
inky clouds looming above the reef and the lightning playing vividly,
and a tide rising so swiftly that it threatened to engulf us and flood
the very land on which we stood. And then I awoke, and the dawn-light
was in the room and Dr. Gray himself stood watching by the window.
"Yes," he said, as though answering some remark of mine, "we shall have
a storm--and soon."
"You do not say so!" cried I; "why, that's my dream! I must have heard
the thunder in my sleep."
He drew the curtain back to show me the angry sky, which gave promise
of thunder and of a hurricane to follow; the air of the room seemed
heavy as that of a prison-house. In the gardens outside a shimmer of
yellow light reminded me of a London fog as once I breathed it by
Temple Bar. No longer could you distinguish the trees or the bushes or
even the mass of the woods beyond the gate. From time to time the loom
of the cloud would lift, and a beam of sunlight strike through it,
revealing a golden path and a bewitching vision of grass and roses all
drooping in the heat. Then the ray was lost again, and the yellow
vapour steamed up anew.
"A storm undoubtedly," said the doctor, at last, "and a bad one, too.
We should learn something from this, captain. Why, yes, it looks
easy--after the storm the wind."
"And the wind will clear Ken's Island of fog," cried I. "Ah, of course,
it will. We shall breathe just now and go about like sane men. I am
younger for hearing it, doctor."
He said, "Yes, it was good news," and then put some sticks into the
grate and began to make a fire. The others still slept heavily. Little
Dolly Venn muttered in his sleep a name I thought I had heard before,
and, truth to tell, it was something like "Rosamunda." The doctor
himself was as busy as a housemaid.
"Yes," he continued, presently, "we should be pretty well through with
the sleep-time, and after that, waking. Does anything occur to you?"
I sat up in the chair and looked at him closely. His own manner of
speech was catching.
"Why, yes," said I, "something does occur. For one thing, we may have
company."
He lit a match and watched the wood blazing up the chimney. A bit of
fire is always a cheerful thing, and it did me good to see it that
morning.
"Czerny has more than a hundred men," said he, after some reflection.
"We are four and one, which makes five; five exactly."
Now, this was the first time he had confessed to anything which might
let a man know where his sympathies lay. Friend or enemy, yesterday
taught me nothing about him. I learnt afterwards that he had once known
Kenrick Bellenden in Philadelphia. I think he was glad to have four
comrades with him on Ken's Island.
"If you mean thereby, doctor, that you'd join us," was my reply, "you
couldn't tell me better news. You know why I came here and you know why
I stay. It may mean much to Mme. Czerny to have such a friend as you.
What can be done by five men on this cursed shore shall be done, I
swear; but I am glad that you are with us--very glad."
I really meant it, and spoke from my heart: but he was not a
demonstrative man, and he rarely answered one directly as one might
have wished. On this occasion, I remember, he went about his work for a
little while before he spoke again; and it was not until the coffee was
boiling on the hob that he came across to me and, seating himself on
the arm of my chair, asked, abruptly:
"Do you know what fool's errand brought me to this place?"
"I have imagined it," said I. "You wanted to know the truth about the
sleep-time."
He laughed that queer little laugh which expressed so much when you
heard it.
"No," said he, "I do not care a dime either way! I just came along to
advertise myself. Ken's Island and its secrets are my newspaper. When I
go back to New York people will say, 'That's the specialist, Duncan
Gray, who wrote about narcotics and their uses.' They'll come and see
me because the newspapers tell them to. We advertise or die, nowadays,
captain, and the man who gets a foothold up above must take some risks.
I took them when I shipped with Edmond Czerny."
It was an honest story, and I liked the man the better for it. No word
of mine intervened before he went on with it.
"Luck put me in the way of the thing," he continued, the mood being on
him now and my silence helping him; "I met Czerny's skipper in 'Frisco,
and he was a talker. There's nothing more dangerous than a loose
tongue. The man said that his master was the second human being to set
foot on Ken's Archipelago. I knew that it was not true. A hundred years
ago Jacob Hoyt, a Dutchman, was marooned on this place and lived to
tell the story of it. The record lies in the library at Washington;
I've read it."
He said this with a low chuckle, like a man in possession of a secret
which might be of great value to him. I did not see the point of it at
the time, but I saw it later, as you shall hear.
"Yes," he rattled on, "Edmond Czerny holds a full hand, but I may yet
draw fours. He's a clever man, too, and a deep one. We'll see who's
the deeper, and we will begin soon, Captain Begg--very soon. The
sleep-time's through, I guess, and this means waking."
Now, this was spoken of the storm without, and a heavy clap of thunder,
breaking at that moment, pointed his words as nothing else could have
done. I had many questions yet to ask him, such as how it was that he
persuaded Czerny to take him aboard (though a man who knew so much
would have been a dangerous customer to leave behind), but the rolling
sounds awoke the others, and Peter Bligh, jumping up half asleep, asked
if any one knocked.
"I thought it was the devil with the hot water--and bedad it is!" cries
he. "Is the house struck, or am I dreaming it, doctor? It's a fearsome
sound, truly."
Peter meant it as a bit of his humour, I do believe; but little he knew
how near the truth his guess was. The storm, which had threatened us
since dawn, now burst with a splendour I have never seen surpassed. A
very sheet of raging fire opened up the livid sky. The crashing thunder
shook the timbers of the house until you might have thought that the
very roof was coming in. In the gardens themselves, leaping into your
view and passing out of it again as a picture shuttered by light, great
trees were split and broken, the woods fired, the gravel driven up in a
shower of pelting hail. I have seen storms in my life a-many, but never
one so loud and so angry as the storm of that ebbing sleep-time. There
were moments when a whirlwind of terrible sounds seemed to envelop us,
and the very heavens might have been rolling asunder. We said that the
bungalow could not stand, and we were right.
Now, this was a bad prophecy; but the fulfilment came more swiftly and
more surely than any of us had looked for. Indeed, Dolly Venn was
scarce upon his feet, and the sleep hardly out of Seth Barker's eyes,
when the room in which we stood was all filled by a scathing flame of
crimson light, and, a whirlwind of fire sweeping about us, it seemed to
wither and burn everything in its path and to scorch our very limbs as
it passed them by. To this there succeeded an overpowering stench of
sulphur, and ripping sounds as of wood bursting in splinters, and beams
falling, and the crackling of timber burning. Not a man among us, I
make sure, but knew full well the meaning of those signals or what they
called him to do. The bungalow was struck; life lay in the fog without,
in the death-fog we had twice escaped.
"She's burning--she's burning, by----!" cried Seth Barker, running
wildly for the door; and to his voice was added that of Duncan Gray,
who roared:
"My lead, my lead--stand back, for your lives!"
He threw a muffler round his neck and ran out from the stricken
bungalow. The whole westward wing of the house was now alight. Great
clouds of crimson flame wrestled with the looming fog above us; they
illumined all the garden about as with the light of ten thousand fiery
lamps. Suffocating smoke, burning breezes, floating sparks, leaping
tongues of flame drove us on. Cries you heard, one naming the heights
for a haven, another clamouring for the beach, one answering with an
oath, another, it may be, with a prayer; but no man keeping his wits or
shaping a true course. What would have happened but for the holding fog
and the sulphurous air we breathed, I make no pretence to say; but
Nature stopped us at last, and, panting and exhausted, we came to a
halt in the woods, and asked each other in the name of reason what we
should do next.
"The sea!" cries Peter Bligh, forgetting his courage (a rare thing for
him to do); "show me the sea or I'm a dead man!"
To whom Seth Barker answers:
"If there's breath, it's on the hills; we'll surely die here."
And little Dolly, he said:
"I cannot run another step, sir; I'm beat--dead beat!"
For my part I had no word for them; it remained for Doctor Gray to lead
again.
"I will show you the road," cried he, "if you will take it."
"And why not?" I asked him. "Why not, doctor?"
"Because," he answered, very slowly, "it's the road to Edmond Czerny's
house."