with satisfaction when the _Sylph_ was heading back to Port Charlotte.
Muloa, lying astern, we were no longer watching. Leavitt, at the
water's edge, had waved us a last good-by and had then abruptly
turned back into the forest, very likely to go clambering like a
demented goat up the flanks of his beloved volcano and to resume
poking about in its steaming fissures--an occupation of which he
never tired.
"The evidence is conclusive, don't you think?--the grave,
Farquharson's personal effects, those pages of the poor devil's diary."
I nodded assent. In my capacity as owner of the _Sylph_ I had merely
undertaken to furnish Major Stanleigh with passage to Muloa and back,
but the events of the last three days had made me a party to the
many conferences, and I was now on terms of something like intimacy
with the rather stiff and pompous English gentleman. How far I was
from sharing his real confidence I was to discover later when Eleanor
Stanleigh gave me hers.
"My wife and niece will be much relieved to hear all this--a family
matter, you understand, Mr. Barnaby," he had said to me when we
landed. "I should like to present you to them before we leave Port
Charlotte for home."
But, as it turned out, it was Eleanor Stanleigh who presented herself,
coming upon me quite unexpectedly that night after our return while
I sat smoking in the shadowy garden of the Marine Hotel. I had dined
with the major, after he had explained that the ladies were worn out
by the heat and general developments of the day and had begged to be
excused. And I was frankly glad not to have to endure another
discussion of the deceased Farquharson, of which I was heartily
tired after hearing little else for the last three days. I could not
help wondering how the verbose and pompous major had paraphrased and
condensed that inchoate mass of biography and reminiscence into an
orderly account for his wife and niece. He had doubtless devoted the
whole afternoon to it. Sitting under the cool green of the
lemon-trees, beneath a sky powdered with stars, I reflected that I,
at least, was done with Farquharson forever. But I was not, for just
then Eleanor Stanleigh appeared before me.
I was startled to hear her addressing me by name, and then calmly
begging me to resume my seat on the bench under the arbor. She sat
down also, her flame-coloured hair and bare shoulders gleaming in
the darkness. She was the soul of directness and candour, and after
a thoughtful, searching look into my face she came to the point at
once. She wanted to hear about Farquharson--from me.
"Of course, my uncle has given me a very full account of what he
learned from Mr. Leavitt, and yet many things puzzle me--this
Mr. Leavitt most of all."
"A queer chap," I epitomized him. "Frankly, I don't quite make him
out, Miss Stanleigh--marooning himself on that infernal island and
seemingly content to spend his days there."
"Is he so old?" she caught me up quickly.
"No, he isn't," I reflected. "Of course, it's difficult to judge
ages out here. The climate, you know. Leavitt's well under forty, I
should say. But that's a most unhealthy spot he has chosen to live in."
"Why does he stay there?"
I explained about the volcano. "You can have no idea what an
obsession it is with him. There isn't a square foot of its steaming,
treacherous surface that he hasn't been over, mapping new fissures,
poking into old lava-beds, delving into the crater itself on
favourable days--"
"Isn't it dangerous?"
"In a way, yes. The volcano itself is harmless enough. It smokes
unpleasantly now and then, splutters and rumbles as if about to
obliterate all creation, but for all its bluster it only manages to
spill a trickle or two of fresh lava down its sides--just tamely
subsides after deluging Leavitt with a shower of cinders and ashes.
But Leavitt won't leave it alone. He goes poking into the very crater,
half strangling himself in its poisonous fumes, scorching the shoes
off his feet, and once, I believe, he lost most of his hair and
eyebrows--a narrow squeak. He throws his head back and laughs at any
word of caution. To my notion, it's foolhardy to push a scientific
curiosity to that extreme."
"Is it, then, just scientific curiosity?" mused Miss Stanleigh.
Something in her tone made me stop short. Her eyes had lifted to
mine--almost appealingly, I fancied. Her innocence, her candour, her
warm beauty, which was like a pale phosphorescence in the starlit
darkness--all had their potent effect upon me in that moment. I felt
impelled to a sudden burst of confidence.
"At times I wonder. I've caught a look in his eyes, when he's been
down on his hands and knees, staring into some infernal vent-hole--a
look that is--well, uncanny, as if he were peering into the bowels
of the earth for something quite outside the conceptions of science.
You might think that volcano had worked some spell over him, turned
his mind. He prattles to it or storms at it as if it were a living
creature. Queer, yes; and he's impressive, too, with a sort of
magnetic personality that attracts and repels you violently at the
same time. He's like a cake of ice dipped in alcohol and set aflame.
I can't describe him. When he talks--"
"Does he talk about himself?"
I had to confess that he had told us practically not a word. He had
discussed everything under heaven in his brilliant, erratic way,
with a fleer of cynicism toward it all, but he had left himself out
completely. He had given us Farquharson with relish, and in infinite
detail, from the time the poor fellow first turned up in Muloa, put
ashore by a native craft. Talking about Farquharson was second only
to his delight in talking about volcanoes. And the result for me had
been innumerable vivid but confused impressions of the young
Englishman who had by chance invaded Leavitt's solitude and had
lingered there, held by some attraction, until he sickened and died.
It was like a jumbled mosaic put together again by inexpert hands.
"Did you get the impression that the two men had very much in common?"
"Quite the contrary," I answered. "But Major Stanleigh should know--"
"My uncle never met Mr. Farquharson."
I was fairly taken aback at that, and a silence fell between us. It
was impossible to divine the drift of her questions. It was as if
some profound mistrust weighed upon her and she was not so much
seeking to interrogate me as she was groping blindly for some chance
word of mine that might illuminate her doubts.
I looked at the girl in silent wonder, yes, and in admiration of her
bronze and ivory beauty in the full flower of her glorious
youth--and I thought of Joyce. I felt that it was like her to have
fallen in love simply but passionately at the mere lifting of the
finger of Fate. It was only another demonstration of the
unfathomable mystery, or miracle, which love is. Joyce was lucky,
indeed favoured of the gods, to have touched the spring in this
girl's heart which no other man could reach, and by the rarest of
chances--her coming out to this remote corner of the world. Lucky
Joyce! I knew him slightly--a straightforward young fellow, very
simple and whole-souled, enthusiastically absorbed in developing his
rubber lands in Malduna.
Miss Stanleigh remained lost in thought while her fingers toyed with
the pendant of the chain that she wore. In the darkness I caught the
glitter of a small gold cross.
"My. Barnaby," she finally broke the silence, and paused. "I have
decided to tell you something. This Mr. Farquharson was my husband."
Again a silence fell, heavy and prolonged, in which I sat as if
drugged by the night air that hung soft and perfumed about us. It
seemed incredible that in that fleeting instant she had spoken at all.
"I was young--and very foolish, I suppose."
With that confession, spoken with simple dignity, she broke off again.
Clearly, some knowledge of the past she deemed it necessary to
impart to me. If she halted over her words, it was rather to dismiss
what was irrelevant to the matter in hand, in which she sought my
counsel.
"I did not see him for four years--did not wish to.... And he
vanished completely.... Four years!--just a welcome blank!"
Her shoulders lifted and a little shiver went over her.
"But even a blank like that can become unendurable. To be always
dragging at a chain, and not knowing where it leads to...." Her
hand slipped from the gold cross on her breast and fell to the other
in her lap, which it clutched tightly. "Four years.... I tried to
make myself believe that he was gone forever--was dead. It was
wicked of me."
My murmur of polite dissent led her to repeat her words.
"Yes, and even worse than that. During the past month I have
actually prayed that he might be dead.... I shall be punished for it."
I ventured no rejoinder to these words of self-condemnation. Joyce,
I reflected, mundanely, had clearly swept her off her feet in the
ardour of their first meeting and instant love.
"It must be a great relief to you," I murmured at length, "to have
it all definitely settled at last."
"If I could only feel that it was!"
I turned in amazement, to see her leaning a little forward, her
hands still tightly clasped in her lap, and her eyes fixed upon the
distant horizon where the red spark of Lakalatcha's stertorous
breathing flamed and died away. Her breast rose and fell, as if
timed to the throbbing of that distant flare. "I want you to take me
to that island--to-morrow."
"Why, surely, Miss Stanleigh," I burst forth, "there can't be any
reasonable doubt. Leavitt's mind may be a little flighty--he may
have embroidered his story with a few gratuitous details; but
Farquharson's books and things--the material evidence of his having
lived there--"
"And having died there?"
"Surely Leavitt wouldn't have fabricated that! If you had talked
with him--"
"I should not care to talk with Mr. Leavitt," Miss Stanleigh cut me
short. "I want only to go and see--if he _is_ Mr. Leavitt."
"If he _is_ Mr. Leavitt!" For a moment I was mystified, and then in
a sudden flash I understood. "But that's pre-posterous--impossible!"
I tried to conceive of Leavitt in so monstrous a rôle, tried to
imagine the missing Farquharson still in the flesh and beguiling
Major Stanleigh and myself with so outlandish a story, devising all
that ingenious detail to trick us into a belief in his own death. It
would indeed have argued a warped mind, guided by some unfathomable
purpose.
"I devoutly hope you are right," Miss Stanleigh was saying, with
deliberation. "But it is not preposterous, and it is not
impossible--if you had known Mr. Farquharson as I have."
It was a discreet confession. She wished me to understand--without
the necessity of words. My surmise was that she had met and married
Farquharson, whoever he was, under the spell of some momentary
infatuation, and that he had proved himself to be an unspeakable
brute whom she had speedily abandoned.
"I am determined to go to Muloa, Mr. Barnaby," she announced, with
decision. "I want you to make the arrangements, and with as much
secrecy as possible. I shall ask my aunt to go with me."
I assured Miss Stanleigh that the _Sylph_ was at her service.
Mrs. Stanleigh was a large bland woman, inclined to stoutness and to
making confidences, with an intense dislike of the tropics and
physical discomforts of any sort. How her niece prevailed upon her
to make that surreptitious trip to Muloa, which we set out upon two
days later, I have never been able to imagine. The accommodations
aboard the schooner were cramped, to say the least, and the good
lady had a perfect horror of volcanoes. The fact that Lakalatcha had
behind it a record of a century or more of good conduct did not
weigh with her in the least. She was convinced that it would blow
its head off the moment the _Sylph_ got within range. She was fidgety,
talkative, and continually concerned over the state of her complexion,
inspecting it in the mirror of her bag at frequent intervals and
using a powder-puff liberally to mitigate the pernicious effects of
the tropic sun. But once having been induced to make the voyage, I
must admit she stuck manfully by her decision, ensconcing herself on
deck with books and cushions and numerous other necessities to her
comfort, and making the best of the sleeping quarters below. As the
captain of the _Sylph_, she wanted me to understand that she had
intrusted her soul to my charge, declaring that she would not draw
an easy breath until we were safe again in Port Charlotte.
"This dreadful business of Eleanor's," was the way she referred to
our mission, and she got round quite naturally to telling me of
Farquharson while acquainting me with her fears about volcanoes.
Some years before, Pompeii and Herculaneum had had a most unsettling
effect upon her nerves. Vesuvius was slightly in eruption at the time.
She confessed to never having had an easy moment while in Naples. And
it was in Naples that her niece and Farquharson had met. It had been,
as I surmised, a swift, romantic courtship, in which Farquharson,
quite irreproachable in antecedents and manners, had played the part
of an impetuous lover. Italian skies had done the rest. There was an
immediate marriage, in spite of Mrs. Stanleigh's protests, and the
young couple were off on a honeymoon trip by themselves. But when
Mrs. Stanleigh rejoined her husband at Nice, and together they
returned to their home in Sussex, a surprise was in store for them.
Eleanor was already there--alone, crushed, and with lips absolutely
sealed. She had divested herself of everything that linked her to
Farquharson; she refused to adopt her married name.
"I shall bless every saint in heaven when we have quite done with
this dreadful business of Eleanor's," Mrs. Stanleigh confided to me
from her deck-chair. "This trip that she insists on making herself
seems quite uncalled for. But you needn't think, Captain Barnaby,
that I'm going to set foot on that dreadful island--not even for the
satisfaction of seeing Mr. Farquharson's grave--and I'm shameless
enough to say that it _would_ be a satisfaction. If you could
imagine the tenth part of what I have had to put up with, all these
months we've been traveling about trying to locate the wretch! No,
indeed--I shall stay right here on this boat and entrust Eleanor to
your care while ashore. And I should not think it ought to take long,
now should it?"
I confessed aloud that I did not see how it could. If by any chance
the girl's secret conjecture about Leavitt's identity was right, it
would be verified in the mere act of coming face to face with him,
and in that event it would be just as well to spare the unsuspecting
aunt the shock of that discovery.
We reached Muloa just before nightfall, letting go the anchor in
placid water under the lee of the shore while the _Sylph_ swung to
and the sails fluttered and fell. A vast hush lay over the world.
From the shore the dark green of the forest confronted us with no
sound or sign of life. Above, and at this close distance blotting
out half the sky over our heads, towered the huge cone of Lakalatcha
with scarred and blackened flanks. It was in one of its querulous
moods. The feathery white plume of steam, woven by the wind into soft,
fantastic shapes, no longer capped the crater; its place had been
usurped by thick, dark fumes of smoke swirling sullenly about. In
the fading light I marked the red, malignant glow of a fissure newly
broken out in the side of the ragged cone, from which came a thin,
white trickle of lava.
There was no sign of Leavitt, although the _Sylph_ must have been
visible to him for several hours, obviously making for the island. I
fancied that he must have been unusually absorbed in the vagaries of
his beloved volcano. Otherwise he would have wondered what was
bringing us back again and his tall figure in shabby white drill
would have greeted us from the shore. Instead, there confronted us
only the belt of dark, matted green girdling the huge bulk of
Lakalatcha which soared skyward, sinister, mysterious, eternal.
In the brief twilight the shore vanished into dim obscurity.
Miss Stanleigh, who for the last hour had been standing by the rail,
silently watching the island, at last spoke to me over her shoulder:
"Is it far inland--the place? Will it be difficult to find in the
dark?"
Her question staggered me, for she was clearly bent on seeking out
Leavitt at once. A strange calmness overlay her. She paid no heed to
Lakalatcha's gigantic, smoke-belching cone, but, with fingers
gripping the rail, scanned the forbidding and inscrutable forest,
behind which lay the answer to her torturing doubt.
I acceded to her wish without protest. Leavitt's bungalow lay a
quarter of a mile distant. There would be no difficulty in following
the path. I would have a boat put over at once, I announced in a
casual way which belied my real feelings, for I was beginning to
share some of her own secret tension at this night invasion of
Leavitt's haunts.
This feeling deepened within me as we drew near the shore. Leavitt's
failure to appear seemed sinister and enigmatic. I began to evolve a
fantastic image of him as I recalled his queer ways and his uncanny
tricks of speech. It was as if we were seeking out the presiding
deity of the island, who had assumed the guise of a Caliban holding
unearthly sway over its unnatural processes.
With Williams, the boatswain, carrying a lantern, we pushed into the
brush, following the choked trail that led to Leavitt's abode. But
the bungalow, when we had reached the clearing and could discern the
outlines of the building against the masses of the forest, was dark
and deserted. As we mounted the veranda, the loose boards creaked
hollowly under our tread; the doorway, from which depended a
tattered curtain of coarse burlap, gaped black and empty.
The lantern, lifted high in the boatswain's hand, cleft at a stroke
the darkness within. On the writing-table, cluttered with papers and
bits of volcanic rock, stood a bottle and half-empty glass. Things
lay about in lugubrious disorder, as if the place had been hurriedly
ransacked by a thief. Some of the geological specimens had tumbled
from the table to the floor, and stray sheets of Leavitt's
manuscripts lay under his chair. Leavitt's books, ranged on shelving
against the wall, alone seemed undisturbed. Upon the top of the
shelving stood two enormous stuffed birds, moldering and decrepit,
regarding the sudden illumination with unblinking, bead-like eyes.
Between them a small dancing faun in greenish bronze tripped a
Bacchic measure with head thrown back in a transport of derisive
laughter.
For a long moment the three of us faced the silent, disordered room,
in which the little bronze faun alone seemed alive, convulsed with
diabolical mirth at our entrance. Somehow it recalled to me
Leavitt's own cynical laugh. Suddenly Miss Stanleigh made toward the
photographs above the bookshelves.
"This is he," she said, taking up one of the faded prints.
"Yes--Leavitt," I answered.
"_Leavitt_?" Her fingers tightened upon the photograph. Then,
abruptly, it fell to the floor. "Yes, yes--of course." Her eyes
closed very slowly, as if an extreme weakness had seized her.
In the shock of that moment I reached out to support her, but she
checked my hand. Her gray eyes opened again. A shudder visibly went
over her, as if the night air had suddenly become chill. From the
shelf the two stuffed birds regarded us dolefully, while the dancing
faun, with head thrown back in an attitude of immortal art, laughed
derisively.
"Where is he? I must speak to him," said Miss Stanleigh.
"One might think he were deliberately hiding," I muttered, for I was
at a loss to account for Leavitt's absence.
"Then find him," the girl commanded. I cut short my speculations to
direct Williams to search the hut in the rear of the bungalow, where,
behind bamboo palings, Leavitt's Malay servant maintained an aloof
and mysterious existence. I sat down beside Miss Stanleigh on the
veranda steps to find my hands sooty from the touch of the boards. A
fine volcanic ash was evidently drifting in the air, and now to my
ear, attuned to the profound stillness, the wind bore a faint
humming sound.
"Do you hear that?" I whispered. It was like the far-off murmur of a
gigantic caldron, softly a-boil--a dull vibration that seemed to
reach us through the ground as well as through the air.
The girl listened a moment, and then started up. "I hear
voices--somewhere,"
"Voices?" I strained my ears for sounds other than the insistent
ferment of the great cone above our heads. "Perhaps Leavitt----"
"Why do you still call him Leavitt?"
"Then you're quite certain----" I began, but an involuntary
exclamation from her cut me short.
The light of Williams's lantern, emerging from behind the bamboo
palings, disclosed the burly form of the boatswain with a shrinking
Malay in tow. He was jabbering in his native tongue, with much
gesticulation of his thin arms, and going into contortions at every
dozen paces in a sort of pantomime to emphasize his words. Williams
urged him along unceremoniously to the steps of the veranda.
"Perhaps you can get the straight of this, Mr. Barnaby," said the
boatswain. "He swears that the flame-devil in the volcano has
swallowed his master alive."
The poor fellow seemed indeed in a state of complete funk. With his
thin legs quaking under him, he poured forth in Malay a crazed,
distorted tale. According to Wadakimba, Leavitt--or Farquharson, to
give him his real name--had awakened the high displeasure of the
flame-devil within the mountain. Had we not observed that the cone
was smoking furiously? And the dust and heavy taint of sulphur in
the air? Surely we could feel the very tremor of the ground under
our feet. All that day the enraged monster had been spouting mud and
lava down upon the white _tuan_ who had remained in the bungalow,
drinking heavily and bawling out maledictions upon his enemy. At
length, in spite of Wadakimba's efforts to dissuade him, he had set
out to climb to the crater, vowing to show the flame-devil who was
master. He had compelled the terrified Wadakimba to go with him a
part of the way. The white _tuan_--was he really a god, as he
declared himself to be?--had gone alone up the tortuous, fissured
slopes, at times lost to sight in yellowish clouds of gas and steam,
while his screams and threats of vengeance came back to Wadakimba's
ears. Overhead, Lakalatcha continued to rumble and quiver and clear
his throat with great showers of mud and stones.
Farquharson must have indeed parted with his reason to have attempted
that grotesque sally. Listening to Wadakimba's tale, I pictured the
crazed man, scorched to tatters, heedless of bruises and burns,
scrambling up that difficult and perilous ascent, and hurling his
ridiculous blasphemy into the flares of smoke and steam that issued
from that vast caldron lit by subterranean fires. At its simmering
the whole island trembled. A mere whiff of the monster's breath and
he would have been snuffed out, annihilated in an instant. According
to Wadakimba, the end had indeed come in that fashion. It was as if
the mountain had suddenly given a deep sigh. The blast had carried
away solid rock. A sheet of flame had licked the spot where
Farquharson had been hurled headlong, and he was not.
Wadakimba, viewing all this from afar, had scuttled off to his hut.
Later he had ventured back to the scene of the tragedy. He had
picked up Farquharson's scorched helmet, which had been blown off to
some distance, and he also exhibited a pair of binoculars washed
down by the tide of lava, scarred and twisted by the heat, from
which the lenses had melted away.
I translated for Miss Stanleigh briefly, while she stood turning
over in her hands the twisted and blackened binoculars, which were
still warm. She heard me through without question or comment, and
when I proposed that we get back to the _Sylph_ at once, mindful of
her aunt's distressed nerves, she assented with a nod. She seemed to
have lost the power of speech. In a daze she followed as I led the
way back through the forest.
* * * * *