until their niece should be properly married to Joyce. At Eleanor's
wish, it was a very simple affair, and as Joyce's bride she was as
eager to be off to his rubber-plantation in Malduna as he was to set
her up there as mistress of his household. I had agreed to give them
passage on the _Sylph_, since the next sailing of the mail-boat would
have necessitated a further fortnight's delay.
Mrs. Stanleigh, with visions of seeing England again, and profoundly
grateful to a benevolent Providence that had not only brought
"this dreadful business of Eleanor's" to a happy termination, but
had averted Lakalatcha's baptism of fire from descending upon her
own head, thanked me profusely and a little tearfully. It was during
the general chorus of farewells at the last moment before the
_Sylph_ cast off. Her last appeal, cried after us from the wharf
where she stood frantically waving a wet handkerchief, was that I
should give Muloa a wide berth.
It brought a laugh from Joyce. He had discovered the good lady's
extreme perturbation in regard to Lakalatcha, and had promptly
declared for spending a day there with his bride. It was an
exceptional opportunity to witness the volcano in its active mood.
Each time that Joyce had essayed this teasing pleasantry, which
never failed to draw Mrs. Stanleigh's protests, I observed that his
wife remained silent. I assumed that she had decided to keep her own
counsel in regard to the trip she had made there.
"I'm trusting you not to take Eleanor near that dreadful island,
Mr. Barnaby," was the admonition shouted across the widening gap of
water.
It was a quite unnecessary appeal, for Joyce, who was presently
sitting with his wife in a sheltered quarter of the deck, had not
the slightest interest in the smoking cone which was as yet a mere
smudge upon the horizon. Eleanor, with one hand in Joyce's possession,
at times watched it with a seemingly vast apathy until some ardent
word from Joyce would draw her eyes back to his and she would lift
to him a smile that was like a caress. The look of weariness and
balked purpose that had once marked her expression had vanished. In
the week since she had married Joyce she seemed to have grown
younger and to be again standing on the very threshold of life with
girlish eagerness. She hung on Joyce's every word, communing with
him hour after hour, utterly content, indifferent to all the world
about her.
In the cabin that evening at dinner, when the two of them deigned to
take polite cognizance of my existence, I announced to Joyce that I
proposed to hug the island pretty close during the night. It would
save considerable time.
"Just as you like, Captain," Joyce replied, indifferently.
"We may get a shower of ashes by doing so, if the wind should shift."
I looked across the table at Mrs. Joyce.
"But we shall reach Malduna that much sooner?" she queried.
I nodded. "However, if you feel any uneasiness, I'll give the island
a wide berth." I didn't like the idea of dragging her--the bride of
a week--past that place with its unspeakable memories, if it should
really distress her.
Her eyes thanked me silently across the table. "It's very kind of you,
but"--she chose her words with significant deliberation--"I haven't
a fear in the world, Mr. Barnaby."
Evening had fallen when we came up on deck. Joyce bethought himself
of some cigars in his stateroom and went back. For the moment I was
alone with his wife by the rail, watching the stars beginning to
prick through the darkening sky. The _Sylph_ was running smoothly,
with the wind almost aft; the scud of water past her bows and the
occasional creak of a block aloft were the only sounds audible in the
silence that lay like a benediction upon the sea.
"You may think it unfeeling of me," she began, quite abruptly,
"but all this past trouble of mine, now that it is ended, I have
completely dismissed. Already it begins to seem like a horrid dream.
And as for that island"--her eyes looked off toward Muloa now
impending upon us and lighting up the heavens with its sullen flare--
"it seems incredible that I ever set foot upon it.
"Perhaps you understand," she went on, after a pause, "that I have
not told my husband. But I have not deceived him. He knows that I
was once married, and that the man is no longer living. He does not
wish to know more. Of course he is aware that Uncle Geoffrey came
out here to--to see a Mr. Leavitt, a matter which he has no idea
concerned me. He thanks the stars for whatever it was that did bring
us out here, for otherwise he would not have met me."
"It has turned out most happily," I murmured.
"It was almost disaster. After meeting Mr. Joyce--and I was weak
enough to let myself become engaged--to have discovered that I was
still chained to a living creature like that.... I should have
killed myself."
"But surely the courts--"
She shook her head with decision. "My church does not recognize that
sort of freedom."
We were drawing steadily nearer to Muloa. The mountain was breathing
slowly and heavily--a vast flare that lifted fanlike in the skies
and died away. Lightning played fitfully through the dense mass of
smoke and choking gases that hung like a pall over the great cone.
It was like the night sky that overhangs a city of gigantic
blast-furnaces, only infinitely multiplied. The sails of the _Sylph_
caught the ruddy tinge like a phantom craft gliding through the black
night, its canvas still dyed with the sunset glow. The faces of the
crew, turned to watch the spectacle, curiously fixed and inhuman,
were picked out of the gloom by the same fantastic light. It was as
if the schooner, with masts and riggings etched black against the
lurid sky, sailed on into the Day of Judgment.
* * * * *
It was after midnight. The _Sylph_ came about, with sails trembling,
and lost headway. Suddenly she vibrated from stem to stern, and with
a soft grating sound that was unmistakable came to rest. We were
aground in what should have been clear water, with the forest-clad
shore of Muloa lying close off to port.
The helmsman turned to me with a look of silly fright on his face,
as the wheel revolved useless in his hands. We had shelved with
scarcely a jar sufficient to disturb those sleeping below, but in a
twinkling Jackson, the mate, appeared on deck in his pajamas, and
after a swift glance toward the familiar shore turned to me with the
same dumfounded look that had frozen upon the face of the steersman.
"What do you make of this?" he exclaimed, as I called for the lead.
"Be quiet about it," I said to the hands that had started into
movement. "Look sharp now, and make no noise." Then I turned to the
mate, who was perplexedly rubbing one bare foot against the other
and measuring with his eye our distance from the shore. The _Sylph_
should have turned the point of the island without mishap, as she
had done scores of times.
"It's the volcano we have to thank for this," was my conjecture.
"Its recent activity has caused some displacement of the sea bottom."
Jackson's head went back in sudden comprehension. "It's a miracle
you didn't plow into it under full sail."
We had indeed come about in the very nick of time to avoid disaster.
As matters stood I was hopeful. "With any sort of luck we ought to
float clear with the tide."
The mate cocked a doubtful eye at Lakalatcha, uncomfortably close
above our heads, flaming at intervals and bathing the deck with an
angry glare of light. "If she should begin spitting up a little
livelier ..." he speculated with a shrug, and presently took
himself off to his bunk after an inspection below had shown that
none of the schooner's seams had started. There was nothing to do
but to wait for the tide to make and lift the vessel clear. It would
be a matter of three or four hours. I dismissed the helmsman; and the
watch forward, taking advantage of the respite from duty, were soon
recumbent in attitudes of heavy sleep.
The wind had died out and a heavy torpor lay upon the water. It was
as if the stars alone held to their slow courses above a world rigid
and inanimate. The _Sylph_ lay with a slight list, her spars looking
inexpressibly helpless against the sky, and, as the minutes dragged,
a fine volcanic ash, like some mortal pestilence exhaled by the
monster cone, settled down upon the deck, where, forward in the
shadow, the watch lay curled like dead men.
Alone, I paced back and forth--countless soft-footed miles, it seemed,
through interminable hours, until at length some obscure impulse
prompted me to pause before the open sky-light over the cabin and
thrust my head down. A lamp above the dining-table, left to burn
through the night, feebly illuminated the room. A faint snore issued
at regular intervals from the half-open door of the mate's stateroom.
The door of Joyce's stateroom opposite was also upon the hook for
the sake of air.
Suddenly a soft thump against the side of the schooner, followed by
a scrambling noise, made me turn round. The dripping, bedraggled
figure of a man in a sleeping-suit mounted the rope ladder that hung
over the side, and paused, grasping the rail. I had withdrawn my
gaze so suddenly from the glow of the light in the cabin that for
several moments the intruder from out of the sea was only a blurred
form with one leg hung over the rail, where he hung as if spent by
his exertions.
Just then the sooty vapours above the edged maw of the volcano were
rent by a flare of crimson, and in the fleeting instant of unnatural
daylight I beheld Farquharson, bare-footed, and dripping with
sea-water, confronting me with a sardonic, triumphant smile. The
light faded in a twinkling, but in the darkness he swung his other
leg over the rail and sat perched there, as if challenging the
testimony of my senses.
"Farquharson!" I breathed aloud, utterly dumfounded.
"Did you think I was a ghost?" I could hear him softly laughing to
himself in the interval that followed. "You should have witnessed
Wadakimba's fright at my coming back from the dead. Well, I'll admit
I almost was done for."
Again the volcano breathed in torment. It was like the sudden
opening of a gigantic blast-furnace, and in that instant I saw him
vividly--his thin, saturnine face, his damp black hair pushed
sleekly back, his lips twisted to a cruel smile, his eyes craftily
alert, as if to some ambushed danger continually at hand. He was
watching me with a sort of malicious relish in the shock he had
given me.
"It was not your intention to stop at Muloa," he observed, dryly,
for the plight of the schooner was obvious.
"We'll float clear with the tide," I muttered.
"But in the meantime"--there was something almost menacing in his
deliberate pause--"I have the pleasure of this little call upon you."
A head lifted from among the inert figures and sleepily regarded us
before it dropped back into the shadows. The stranded ship, the
recumbent men, the mountain flaming overhead--it was like a phantom
world into which had been suddenly thrust this ghastly and
incredible reality.
"Whatever possessed you to swim out here in the middle of the night?"
I demanded, in a harsh whisper.
He chose to ignore the question, while I waited in a chill of
suspense. It was inconceivable that he could be aware of the truth
of the situation and deliberately bent on forcing it to its
unspeakable, tragic issue.
"Of late, Captain Barnaby, we seem to have taken to visiting each
other rather frequently, don't you think?"
It was lightly tossed off, but not without its evil implication; and
I felt his eyes intently fixed upon me as he sat hunched up on the
rail in his sodden sleeping-suit, like some huge, ill-omened bird of
prey.
To get rid of him, to obliterate the horrible fact that he still
existed in the flesh, was the instinctive impulse of my staggered
brain. But the peril of discovery, the chance that those sleeping
below might waken and hear us, held me in a vise of indecision.
"If I could bring myself to reproach you, Captain," he went on,
ironically polite, "I might protest that your last visit to this
island savoured of a too-inquisitive intrusion. You'll pardon my
frankness. I had convinced you and Major Stanleigh that Farquharson
was dead. To the world at large that should have sufficed. That I
choose to remain alive is my own affair. Your sudden return to
Muloa--with a lady--would have upset everything, if Fate and that
inspired fool of a Malay had not happily intervened. But now, surely,
there can be no doubt that I am dead?"
I nodded assent in a dumb, helpless way.
"And I have a notion that even you, Captain Barnaby, will never
dispute that fact."
He threw back his head suddenly--for all the world like the dancing
faun--and laughed silently at the stars.
My tongue was dry in my mouth as I tried to make some rejoinder. He
baffled me completely, and meanwhile I was in a tingle of fear lest
the mate should come up on deck to see what progress the tide had
made, or lest the sound of our voices might waken the girl in
Joyce's stateroom.
"I can promise you that," I attempted to assure him in weak,
sepulchral tones. "And now, if you like, I'll put you ashore in the
small boat. You must be getting chilly in that wet sleeping-suit."
"As a matter of fact I am, and I was wondering if you would not
offer me something to drink."
"You shall have a bottle to take along," I promised, with alacrity,
but he demurred.
"There is no sociability in that. And you seem very lonesome
here--stuck for two more hours at least. Come, Captain, fetch your
bottle and we will share it together."
He got down from the rail, stretched his arms lazily above his head,
and dropped into one of the deck chairs that had been placed aft for
the convenience of my two passengers.
"And cigars, too, Captain," he suggested, with a politeness that was
almost impertinence. "We'll have a cozy hour or two out of this
tedious wait for the tide to lift you off."
I contemplated him helplessly. There was no alternative but to fall
in with whatever mad caprice might seize his brain. If I opposed him,
it would lead to high and querulous words; and the hideous fact of
his presence there--of his mere existence--I was bound to conceal at
all hazards.
"I must ask you to keep quiet," I said, stiffly.
"As a tomb," he agreed, and his eyes twinkled disagreeably in the
darkness. "You forget that I am supposed to be in one."
I went stealthily down into the cabin, where I secured a box of
cigars and the first couple of bottles that my hands laid hold of in
the locker. They proved to contain an old Tokay wine which I had
treasured for several years to no particular purpose. The ancient
bottles clinked heavily in my grasp as I mounted again to the deck.
"Now this is something like," he purred, watching like a cat my
every motion as I set the glasses forth and guardedly drew the cork.
He saluted me with a flourish and drank.
To an onlooker that pantomime in the darkness would have seemed
utterly grotesque. I tasted the fragrant, heavy wine and
waited--waited in an agony of suspense--my ears strained desperately
to catch the least sound from below. But a profound silence
enveloped the schooner, broken only by the occasional rhythmic snore
of the mate.
"You seem rather ill at ease," Farquharson observed from the depths
of the deck chair when he had his cigar comfortably aglow. "I trust
it isn't this little impromptu call of mine that's disturbing you.
After all, life has its unusual moments, and this, I think, is one
of them." He sniffed the bouquet of his wine and drank. "It is rare
moments like this--bizarre, incredible, what you like--that
compensate for the tedium of years."
His disengaged hand had fallen to the side of the chair, and I now
observed in dismay that a scarf belonging to Joyce's wife had been
left lying in the chair, and that his fingers were absently twisting
the silken fringe.
"I wonder that you stick it out, as you do, on this island," I
forced myself to observe, seeking safety in the commonplace, while
my eyes, as if fascinated, watched his fingers toying with the ends
of the scarf. I was forced to accept the innuendo beneath his
enigmatic utterances. His utter baseness and depravity, born perhaps
of a diseased mind, I could understand. I had led him to bait a trap
with the fiction of his own death, but he could not know that it had
been already sprung upon his unsuspecting victims.
He seemed to regard me with contemptuous pity. "Naturally, you wonder.
A mere skipper like yourself fails to understand--many things. What
can you know of life cooped up in this schooner? You touch only the
surface of things just as this confounded boat of yours skims only
the top of the water. Once in a lifetime you may come to real grips
with life--strike bottom, eh?--as your schooner has done now. Then
you're aground and quite helpless. What a pity!"
He lifted his glass and drank it off, then thrust it out to be
refilled. "Life as the world lives it--bah!" he dismissed it with
the scorn of one who counts himself divested of all illusions.
"Life would be an infernal bore if it were not for its paradoxes.
Now you, Captain Barnaby, would never dream that in becoming dead to
the world--in other people's belief--I have become intensely alive.
There are opened up infinite possibilities--"
He drank again and eyed me darkly, and then went on in his
crack-brained way. "What is life but a challenge to pretense, a
constant exercise in duplicity, with so few that come to master it
as an art? Every one goes about with something locked deep in his
heart. Take yourself, Captain Barnaby. You have your secrets--hidden
from me, from all the world--which, if they could be dragged out of
you--"
His deep-set eyes bored through the darkness upon me. Hunched up in
the deck chair, with his legs crossed under him, he was like an
animated Buddha venting a dark philosophy and seeking to undermine
my mental balance with his sophistry.
"I'm a plain man of the sea," I rejoined, bluntly. "I take life as
it comes."
He smiled derisively, drained his glass, and held it out again.
"But you have your secrets, rather clumsily guarded, to be sure--"
"What secrets?" I cried out, goaded almost beyond endurance.
He seemed to deprecate the vigour of my retort and lifted a
cautioning hand. "Do you want every one on board to hear this
conversation?" At that moment the smoke-wrapped cone of Lakalatcha
was cleft by a sheet of flame, and we confronted each other in a
sort of blood-red dawn.
"There is no reason why we should quarrel," he went on, after
darkness had enveloped us again. "But there are times which call
for plain speaking. Major Stanleigh is probably hardly aware of just
what he said to me under a little artful questioning. It seems that
a lady who--shall we say, whom we both have the honour of knowing?
--is in love. Love, mark you. It is always interesting to see that
flower bud twice from the same stalk. However, one naturally defers
to a lady, especially when one is very much in her way. _Place aux
dames_, eh? Exit poor Farquharson! You must admit that his was an
altruistic soul. Well, she has her freedom--if only to barter it for
a new bondage. Shall we drink to the happy future of that romance?"
He lifted to me his glass with ironical invitation, while I sat
aghast and speechless, my heart pounding against my ribs. This
intolerable colloquy could not last forever. I deliberated what I
should do if we were surprised. At the sound of a footfall or the
soft creak of a plank I felt that I might lose all control and leap
up and brain him with the heavy bottle in my grasp. I had an insane
desire to spring at his throat and throttle his infamous bravado,
tumble him overboard and annihilate the last vestige of his existence.
"Come, Captain," he urged, "you, too, have shared in smoothing the
path for these lovers. Shall we not drink to their happy union?"
A feeling of utter loathing went over me. I set my glass down.
"It would be a more serviceable compliment to the lady in question
if I strangled you on the spot," I muttered, boldly.
"But you are forgetting that I am already dead." He threw his head
back as if vastly amused, then lurched forward and held out his
glass a little unsteadily to be refilled.
He gave me a quick, evil look. "Besides, the noise might disturb
your passengers."
I could feel a cold perspiration suddenly breaking out upon my body.
Either the fellow had obtained an inkling of the truth in some
incredible way, or was blindly on the track of it, guided by some
diabolical scent. Under the spell of his eyes, I could not manage
the outright lie which stuck in my throat.
"What makes you think I have passengers?" I parried, weakly.
With intent or not, he was again fingering the fringe of the scarf
that hung over the arm of the chair.
"It is not your usual practice, but you have been carrying them
lately."
He drained his glass and sat staring into it, his head drooping a
little forward. The heavy wine was beginning to have its effect upon
him, but whether it would provoke him to some outright violence or
drag him down into a stupor, I could not predict. Suddenly the glass
slipped from his fingers and shivered to pieces on the deck. I
started violently at the sound, and in the silence that followed I
thought I heard a footfall in the cabin below.
He looked up at length from his absorbed contemplation of the bits
of broken glass. "We were talking about love, were we not?" he
demanded, heavily.
I did not answer. I was straining to catch a repetition of the sound
from below. Time was slipping rapidly away, and to sit on meant
inevitable discovery. The watch might waken or the mate appear to
surprise me in converse with my nocturnal visitor. It would be folly
to attempt to conceal his presence and I despaired of getting him
back to shore while his present mood held, although I remembered
that the small boat, which had been lowered after we went aground,
was still moored to the rail amidships.
Refilling my own glass, I offered it to him. He lurched forward to
take it, but the fumes of the wine suddenly drifted clear of his
brain. "You seem very much distressed," he observed, with ironic
concern. "One might think you were actually sheltering these
precious love-birds."
Perspiration broke out anew upon my face and neck. "I don't know what
you are talking about," I bluntly tried to fend off his implication.
I felt as if I were helplessly strapped down and that he was about
to probe me mercilessly with some sharp instrument. I strode to turn
the direction of his thoughts by saying, "I understand that the
Stanleighs are returning to England."
"The Stanleighs--quite so," he nodded agreement, and fixed me with a
maudlin stare. Something prompted me to fill his glass again. He
drank it off mechanically. Again I poured, and he obediently drank.
With an effort he tried to pick up the thread of our conversation:
"What did you say? Oh, the Stanleighs ... yes, yes, of course." He
slowly nodded his head and fell silent. "I was about to say ..." He
broke off again and seemed to ruminate profoundly.... "Love-birds--"
I caught the word feebly from his lips, spoken as if in a daze. The
glass hung dripping in his relaxed grasp.
It was a crucial moment in which his purpose seemed to waver and die
in his clouded brain. A great hope sprang up in my heart, which was
hammering furiously. If I could divert his fuddled thoughts and get
him back to shore while the wine lulled him to forgetfulness.
I leaned forward to take the glass which was all but slipping from
his hand, when Lakalatcha flamed with redoubled fury. It was as if
the mountain had suddenly bared its fiery heart to the heavens, and
a muffled detonation reached my ears.
Farquharson straightened up with a jerk and scanned the smoking peak,
from which a new trickle of white-hot lava had broken forth in a
threadlike waterfall. He watched its graceful play as if hypnotized,
and began babbling to himself in an incoherent prattle. All his
faculties seemed suddenly awake, but riveted solely upon the heavy
labouring of the mountain. He was chiding it in Malay as if it were
a fractious child. When I ventured to urge him back to shore he made
no protest, but followed me into the boat. As I pushed off and took
up the oars he had eyes for nothing but the flaming cone, as if its
leaping fires held for him an Apocalyptic vision.
I strained at the oars as if in a race, with all eternity at stake,
blindly urging the boat ahead through water that flashed crimson at
every stroke. The mountain now flamed like a beacon, and I rowed for
dear life over a sea of blood.