AN INTERLUDE, DURING WHICH WE READ IN RUTH BELLENDEN'S DIARY AGAIN *
* The editor has thought it well to give at this point the
above extract from Ruth Bellenden's diary, as permitting some
insight into the events which transpired on Ken's Island after
Jasper Begg's discovery and Edmond Czerny's return.
May 5TH.--My message to the sea has been heard. Jasper Begg is on Ken's
Island. All that this means to me, all that it may mean, I dare not
think. A great burden seems lifted from my shoulders. I have found a
friend and he is near me.
May 6th.--I have seen Jasper to-night, and he has gone away again. He
is not changed, I think. It is the same honest, English face, the same
cheery English voice. I have always said that Jasper is one of the
handsomest Englishmen I have ever seen. And just as on my own yacht, so
here on Ken's Island, the true English gentleman speaks to me. For
Jasper is that above all things, one of Nature's gentlemen, whom the
rough world will never disguise nor the sea life change. He would be
thirty-five years of age now, I remember, but he has not lost his
boyish face, and there is the same shy reticence which he never could
conquer. He has come here according to his promise. A ship lies in the
offing, and he would have me go to it. How little he knows of my true
condition in this dreadful place. How may a woman go when a hundred
watch her every hour?
May 7th.--Clair-de-Lune, the Frenchman, came to the bungalow very early
this morning to tell me of certain things which happened on the island
last night. It seems that Jasper is still here, and that the storm has
driven away his ship. I do not know whether to be sorry or glad. He
cannot help me--he cannot!--and yet a friend is here. I take new
courage at that. If a woman can aid a brave man to win her liberty, I
am that woman and Jasper is the man. Yesterday I was alone; but to-day
I am alone no longer, and a friend is at my side, and he has heard me.
His ship will come back, I say. It is an ecstasy to dream like this!
May 10th.--I have spent four anxious days--more anxious, I think, than
any in my life. The ship has not returned, and Jasper Begg is still a
fugitive in the hills. There are three of his companions with him, and
we send them food every day. What will be the end of it all? I am more
closely watched than ever since this was known. I fear the worst for my
friends, and yet I am powerless to help them.
May 10th (later).--My husband, who has now returned from San Francisco,
knows that Jasper is here and speaks of it. I fear these moods of
confidence and kindness. "Your friend has come," Edmond says; "but why
am I not to know of it? Why is he frightened of me? Why does he skulk
like a thief? Let him show himself at this house and state his
business; I shall not eat him!" Edmond, I believe, has moments when he
tries to persuade himself that he is a good man. They are dangerous
moments, if all a man's better instincts are dead and forgotten.
May 11th.--Clair-de-Lune, Edmond tells me, has been sent to the lower
reef. I do not ask him why. It was he who helped my friends in the
hills. Is it all real or did I dream it? Jasper Begg, the one man who
befriended me, left to die as so many have been left on this unpitying
shore! It cannot be--it cannot be! All that I had hoped and planned
must be forgotten now. And yet there were those who remembered Ruth
Bellenden and came here for love of her, as she will remember them, for
love's sake.
[Illustration: The drawing-room is a cave whose walls are of jewels.]
May 13th.--The alarm bell rang on the island last night and we left in
great haste for the shelter. The dreadful mists were already rising
fast when I went down through the woods to the beach. The people fled
wildly to the lower reef. It is not three months since the sleep-time,
and its renewal was unlooked for. To-night I do not think of my own
safety, but of those we are leaving on the heights. What is to become
of Jasper, my friend--who will help him? I think of Jasper before any
other now. Does he, I wonder, so think of me?
May 13th (later).--The House Under the Sea is built inside the reef
which ties about a mile away on the northern side of the island. There
can be nothing like it in the world. Hundreds of years ago, perhaps,
this lonely rock, rising out of the water, was the mouth of some great
volcano. To-day it is the door of our house, and when you enter it you
find that the rocks below have been hollowed out by Nature in a manner
so wonderful that a great house lies there with stone-cold rooms and
immense corridors and pits seeming to go to the heart of the world.
None but a man with my husband's romantic craving would have discovered
such a place, or built himself therein a house so wonderful. For
imagine a suite of rooms above which the tides surge--rooms lighted by
tunnels in the solid rock and covered over with strongest glasses which
the sea cannot break. Imagine countless electric lamps lighting this
labyrinth until it seems sometimes like a fairy palace. Say that your
drawing-room is a cave, whose walls are of jewels and whose floor is of
jasper. Night and day you hear the sea, the moaning winds, the breaking
billows. It is another world here, like to nothing that any man has
seen or ever will see. The people of a city could live in this place
and yet leave room for others. My own rooms are the first you come to;
lofty as a church, dim as one, yet furnished with all that a woman
could desire. Yes, indeed, all I can desire. In my dressing-room are
gowns from Dousé's and hats from Alphonsine's, jewels from the Rue de
la Paix, furs from Canada--all there to call back my life of two short
years ago, that laughing life of Paris and the cities when I was free,
and all the world my own, and only my girlhood to regret! Now I
remember it all as one bright day in years of gathering night.
Everything that I want, my husband says, shall be mine. I ask for
liberty, but that is denied to me. It is too late to speak of promises
or to believe. If I would condone it all; if I would but say to Edmond,
"Yes, your life shall be my life, your secrets shall be mine; go, get
riches, I will never ask you how." If I would say to him, "I will shut
out from my memory all that I have seen on this island; I will forget
the agony of those who have died here; I will never hear again the
cries of drowning people, will never see hands outstretched above the
waves, or the dead that come in on the dreadful tides; I will forget
all this, and say, 'I love you, I believe in you'"--ah, how soon would
liberty be won! But I am dumb; I cannot answer. I shall die on Ken's
Island, saying, "God help those who perish here!"
May 14th.--Three days have passed in the shelter, and Clair-de-Lune,
who comes to me every day, brings no good news of Jasper. "He is on
the heights," he says; "if food were there he might live through the
sleep-time." My husband knows that he is there, but does not speak of
it. Yesterday, about sunset, I went up to the gallery on the reef,
where the island is visible, and I saw the fog lying about it like a
pall. It is an agony to know that those dear to you are suffering,
perhaps dying, there! I cannot hide my eyes from others; they read my
story truly. "Your friends will be clever if they come to Ken's Island
again," my husband says. I do not answer him. I shall never answer him
again.
May 15th.--There was a terrible storm on the island last night, and we
all went up to the gallery to see the lightning play about the heights
and run in rivulets of fire through the dark clouds above the woods. A
weird spectacle, but one I shall never forget. The very sky seemed to
burn at times. We could distinguish the heart of the thicket clearly,
and poor people running madly to and fro there as though vainly seeking
a shelter from the fire. They tell me to-day that the bungalow is
burnt; I do not know whether to be sorry or glad. I am thinking of my
friends. I am thinking of Jasper, thinking of him always.
May 16th.--I learn that there was a stranger left behind in the
bungalow, a Doctor Gray, of San Francisco. He landed with Edmond last
week, and is here for scientific reasons. My husband says that he does
not like him; but allowed him, nevertheless, to come. He was in the
bungalow making experiments when the lightning struck the house and
destroyed it. It is feared that he must have perished in the fire. My
husband tells me this to-night and is pleased to say it. But what of
Jasper, my friend; what of him?
May 16th.--I was passing through the great hall of the house to-night,
going to my bed-room, when something happened which made my very heart
stand still. I thought that I heard a sound in the shadows, and
imagining it to be one of the servants, I asked, "Who is there?" No one
answered me; and, becoming frightened, I was about to run on, when a
hand touched my own, and, turning round quickly, I found myself face to
face with Jasper himself, and knew that he had come to save me!