John Woolfolk peered through the night toward the land.
"Put me ashore beyond the point," he told Halvard; "at a half-sunk
wharf on the sea."
The sailor secured the tender, and, dropping into it, held the small
boat steady while Woolfolk followed. With a vigorous push they fell
away from the _Gar_. Halvard's oars struck the water smartly and
forced the tender forward into the beating wind. They made a choppy
passage to the rim of the bay, where, turning, they followed the thin,
pale glimmer of the broken water on the land's edge. Halvard pulled
with short, telling strokes, his oarblades stirring into momentary
being livid blurs of phosphorescence.
John Woolfolk guided the boat about the point where he had first seen
Millie swimming. He recalled how strange her unexpected appearance had
seemed. It had, however, been no stranger than the actuality which had
driven her into the bay in the effort to cleanse the stain of Iscah
Nicholas' touch. Woolfolk's face hardened; he was suddenly conscious
of the cold weight in his pocket. He realized that he would kill
Nicholas at the first opportunity and without the slightest
hesitation.
The tender passed about the point, and he could hear more clearly the
sullen clamor of the waves on the seaward bars. The patches of green
sky had grown larger, the clouds swept by with the apparent menace of
solid, flying objects. The land lay in a low, formless mass on the
left. It appeared secretive, a masked place of evil. Its influence
reached out and subtly touched John Woolfolk's heart with the
premonition of base treacheries. The tormented trees had the sound of
Iscah Nicholas sobbing. He must take Millie away immediately; banish
its last memory from her mind, its influence from her soul. It was the
latter he always feared, which formed his greatest hazard--to tear
from her the tendrils of the invidious past.
The vague outline of the ruined wharf swam forward, and the tender
slid into the comparative quiet of its partial protection.
"Make fast," Woolfolk directed. "I shall be out of the boat for a
while." He hesitated; then: "Miss Stope will be here; and if, after an
hour, you hear nothing from me, take her out to the ketch for the
night. Insist on her going. If you hear nothing from me still, make
the first town and report."
He mounted by a cross pinning to the insecure surface above; and,
picking his way to solid earth, waited. He struck a match and,
covering the light with his palm, saw that it was ten minutes before
eight. Millie, he had thought, would reach the wharf before the hour
he had indicated. She would not at any cost be late.
The night was impenetrable. Halvard was as absolutely lost as if he
had dropped, with all the world save the bare, wet spot where Woolfolk
stood, into a nether region from which floated up great, shuddering
gasps of agony. He followed this idea more minutely, picturing the
details of such a terrestrial calamity; then he put it from him with
an oath. Black thoughts crept insidiously into his mind like rats in a
cellar. He had ordinarily a rigidly disciplined brain, an incisive
logic, and he was disturbed by the distorted visions that came to him
unbidden. He wished, in a momentary panic, instantly suppressed, that
he were safely away with Millie in the ketch.
He was becoming hysterical, he told himself with compressed lips--no
better than Lichfield Stope. The latter rose greyly in his memory, and
fled across the sea, a phantom body pulsing with a veined fire like
that stirred from the nocturnal bay. He again consulted his watch, and
said aloud, incredulously: "Five minutes past eight." The inchoate
crawling of his thoughts changed to an acute, tangible doubt, a
mounting dread.
He rehearsed the details of his plan, tried it at every turning. It
had seemed to him at the moment of its birth the best--no, the
only--thing to do, and it was still without obvious fault. Some
trivial happening, an unforeseen need of her father's, had delayed
Millie for a minute or two. But the minutes increased and she did not
appear. All his conflicting emotions merged into a cold passion of
anger. He would kill Nicholas without a word's preliminary. The time
drew out, Millie did not materialize, and his anger sank to the
realization of appalling possibilities.
He decided that he would wait no longer. In the act of moving forward
he thought he heard, rising thinly against the fluctuating wind, a
sudden cry. He stopped automatically, listening with every nerve, but
there was no repetition of the uncertain sound. As Woolfolk swiftly
considered it he was possessed by the feeling that he had not heard
the cry with his actual ear but with a deeper, more unaccountable
sense. He went forward in a blind rush, feeling with extended hands
for the opening in the tangle, groping a stumbling way through the
close dark of the matted trees. He fell over an exposed root,
blundered into a chill, wet trunk, and finally emerged at the side of
the desolate mansion. Here his way led through saw grass, waist high,
and the blades cut at him like lithe, vindictive knives. No light
showed from the face of the house toward him, and he came abruptly
against the bay window of the dismantled billiard room.
A sudden caution arrested him--the sound of his approach might
precipitate a catastrophe, and he soundlessly felt his passage about
the house to the portico. The steps creaked beneath his careful tread,
but the noise was lost in the wind. At first he could see no light;
the hall door, he discovered, was closed; then he was aware of a faint
glimmer seeping through a drawn window shade on the right. From
without he could distinguish nothing. He listened, but not a sound
rose. The stillness was more ominous than cries.
John Woolfolk took the pistol from his pocket and, automatically
releasing the safety, moved to the door, opening it with his left
hand. The hall was unlighted; he could feel the pressure of the
darkness above. The dank silence flowed over him like chill water
rising above his heart. He turned, and a dim thread of light, showing
through the chink of a partly closed doorway, led him swiftly forward.
He paused a moment before entering, shrinking from what might be
revealed beyond, and then flung the door sharply open.
His pistol was directed at a low-trimmed lamp in a chamber empty of
all life. He saw a row of large black portfolios on low supports, a
sewing bag spilled its contents from a chair, a table bore a tin
tobacco jar and the empty skin of a plantain. Then his gaze rested
upon the floor, on a thin, inanimate body in crumpled alpaca trousers
and dark jacket, with a peaked, congested face upturned toward the
pale light. It was Lichfield Stope--dead.
Woolfolk bent over him, searching for a mark of violence, for the
cause of the other's death. At first he found nothing; then, as he
moved the body--its lightness came to him as a shock--he saw that one
fragile arm had been twisted and broken; the hand hung like a withered
autumn leaf from its circular cuff fastened with the mosaic button.
That was all.
He straightened up sharply, with his pistol levelled at the door. But
there had been no noise other than that of the wind plucking at the
old tin roof, rattling the shrunken frames of the windows. Lichfield
Stope had fallen back with his countenance lying on a doubled arm, as
if he were attempting to hide from his extinguished gaze the horror of
his end. The lamp was of the common glass variety, without shade; and,
in a sudden eddy of air, it flickered, threatened to go out, and a
thin ribbon of smoke swept up against the chimney and vanished.
On the wall was a wide stipple print of the early nineteenth
century--the smooth sward of a village glebe surrounded by the low
stone walls of ancient dwellings, with a timbered inn behind broad
oaks and a swinging sign. It was--in the print--serenely evening, and
long shadows slipped out through an ambient glow. Woolfolk, with
pistol elevated, became suddenly conscious of the withdrawn scene, and
for a moment its utter peace held him spellbound. It was another
world, for the security, the unattainable repose of which, he longed
with a passionate bitterness.
The wind shifted its direction and beat upon the front of the house; a
different set of windows rattled, and the blast swept compact and cold
up through the blank hall. John Woolfolk cursed his inertia of mind,
and once more addressed the profound, tragic mystery that surrounded
him.
He thought: Nicholas has gone--with Millie. Or perhaps he has left
her--in some dark, upper space. A maddening sense of impotence settled
upon him. If the man had taken Millie out into the night he had no
chance of following, finding them. Impenetrable screens of bushes lay
on every hand, with, behind them, mile after mile of shrouded pine
woods.
His plan had gone terribly amiss, with possibilities which he could
not bring himself to face. All that had happened before in his
life, and that had seemed so insupportable at the time, faded to
insignificance. Shuddering waves of horror swept over him. He raised
his hand unsteadily, drew it across his brow, and it came away
dripping wet. He was oppressed by the feeling familiar in evil
dreams--of gazing with leaden limbs at deliberate, unspeakable acts.
He shook off the numbness of dread. He must act--at once! How? A
thousand men could not find Iscah Nicholas in the confused darkness
without. To raise the scattered and meager neighborhood would consume
an entire day.
The wind agitated a rocking chair in the hall, an erratic creaking
responded, and Woolfolk started forward, and stopped as he heard and
then identified the noise. This, he told himself, would not do; the
hysteria was creeping over him again. He shook his shoulders, wiped
his palm and took a fresh grip on the pistol.
Then from above came the heavy, unmistakable fall of a foot. It was
not repeated; the silence spread once more, broken only from without.
But there was no possibility of mistake, there had been no subtlety in
the sound--a slow foot had moved, a heavy body had shifted.
At this actuality a new determination seized him; he was conscious of
a feeling that almost resembled joy, an immeasurable relief at the
prospect of action and retaliation. He took up the lamp, held it
elevated while he advanced to the door with a ready pistol. There,
however, he stopped, realizing the mark he would present moving,
conveniently illuminated, up the stair. The floor above was totally
unknown to him; at any turning he might be surprised, overcome,
rendered useless. He had a supreme purpose to perform. He had already,
perhaps fatally, erred, and there must be no further misstep.
John Woolfolk realized that he must go upstairs in the dark, or with,
at most, in extreme necessity, a fleeting and guarded matchlight.
This, too, since he would be entirely without knowledge of his
surroundings, would be inconvenient, perhaps impossible. He must try.
He put the lamp back upon the table, moving it farther out of the eddy
from the door, where it would stay lighted against a possible pressing
need. Then he moved from the wan radiance into the night of the hall.