Chapter VIII: Part 8

"Ah, the pity of it! the pity of it!... What have I done that this should come to me!"

He ventured to touch her hand in gentle sympathy.

"Mary," he said, and hesitated with a little wonder, remembering that this was the first time he had ever called her by that name--"Mary, did you care for him so much?"

She sat, mute, her face averted and hidden.

"I'd give everything if I could have mended matters. I was fond of Drummond--poor soul! If he'd only been frank with me from the start, all this could have been avoided. As soon as I knew--that night when I recognized you on the stage--I went at once to you to say I would clear out--not stand in the way of your happiness. I would have said as much to him, but he gave me no chance."

"Don't blame him," she said softly. "He wasn't responsible."

"I know."

"How long have you known?" She swung suddenly to face him.

"For some time--definitely, for two or three days. He tried twice to murder me. The first time he must have thought he'd done it.... Then he tried again, the night before you were carried off. Ember suspected, watched for him, and caught him. He took him away, meaning to put him in a sanitarium. I don't understand how he got away--from Ember. It worries me--on Ember's account. I hope nothing has happened to him."

"Oh, I hope not!"

"You knew--I mean about the cause--the morphine?"

"I never guessed until that night. Then, as soon as I got over the first awful shock, I realized he was a madman. He talked incoherently--raved--shouted--threatened me with horrible things. I can't speak of them. Later, he quieted down a little, but that was after he had come down into the cabin to--to drug himself.... It was very terrible--that tiny, pitching cabin, with the swinging, smoking lamp, and the madman sitting there, muttering to himself over the glass in which the morphine was dissolving.... It happened three times before the wreck; I thought I should go out of my own mind."

She shuddered, her face tragic and pitiful.

"Poor girl!" he murmured inadequately.

"And that--that was why you were searching the beach so closely!"

"Yes--for the other fellow. I--didn't find him."

A moment later she said thoughtfully: "It was the man you saw watching me on the beach, I think."

"I assumed as much. Drummond had a lot of money, I fancy--enough to hire a desperate man to do almost anything.... The wages of sin--"

"Don't!" she begged. "Don't make me think of that!"

"Forgive me," he said.

For a little she sat, head bowed, brooding.

"Hugh!" she cried, looking up to search his face narrowly--"Hugh, you've not been pretending--?"

"Pretending?" he repeated, thick-witted.

"Hugh, I could never forgive you if you'd been pretending. It would be too cruel.... Ah, but you haven't been! Tell me you haven't!"

"I don't understand.... Pretending what?"

"Pretending you didn't know who I was--pretending to fall in love with me just because you were sorry for me, to make me think it was _me_ you loved and not the woman you felt bound to take care of, because you'd--you had--"

"Mary, listen to me," he interrupted. "I swear I didn't know you. Perhaps you don't understand how wonderfully you've changed. It's hard for me to believe you can be one with the timid and distracted little girl I married that rainy night. You're nothing like.... Only, that night on the stage, as _Joan Thursday_, you _were_ that girl again. Max told me it was make-up; I wouldn't believe him; to me you hadn't changed at all; you hadn't aged a day.... But that morning when I saw you first on the Great South Beach--I never dreamed of associating you with my wife. Do you realize I had never seen you in full light--never knew the colour of your hair?... Dear, I didn't know, believe me. It was you who bewitched me--not the wife for whose sake I fought against what I thought infatuation for you. I loved--I love you only, you as you are--not the poor little girl of the Commercial House."

"Is it true?" she questioned sadly, incredulous.

"It is true, Mary. I love you."

"I have loved you always," she said softly between barely parted lips--"always, Hugh. Even when I thought you dead.... I did believe that you were drowned out there, Hugh! You know that, don't you?"

"I have never for an instant questioned it."

"It wouldn't be like you to, my dear; it wouldn't be you, my Hugh.... But even then I loved the memory of you.... You don't know what you have meant in my life, Hugh. Always, always you have stood for all that was fine and strong and good and generous--my gentlest man, my knight _sans peur et sans reproche_.... No other man I ever knew--no, let me say it!--ever measured up to the standard you had set for me to worship. But, Hugh--you'll understand, won't you?--about the others--?"

"Please," he begged--"please don't harrow yourself so, Mary!"

"No; I must tell you.... The world seemed so empty and so lonely, Hugh: my Galahad gone, never to return to me.... I tried to lose myself in my work, but it wasn't enough. And those others came, beseeching me, and--and I liked them. There was none like you, but they were all good men of their kind, and I liked them. They made love to me and--I was starving for affection, Hugh. I was made to love and to be loved. Each time I thought to myself: 'Surely this time it is true; now at last am I come into my kingdom. It can't fulfil my dreams, for I have known the bravest man, but'--"

Her voice broke and fell. Her eyes grew dull and vacant; her vision passed through and beyond him, as if he had not been there; the bitter desolation of all the widowed generations clouded her golden face. Her lips barely moved, almost inaudibly enunciating the words that were shaken from her as if by some occult force, ruthless and inexorable:

"Each time, Hugh, it was the same. One by one they were taken from me, strangely, terribly.... Poor Tom Custer, first; he was a dear boy, but I didn't love him and couldn't marry him. I had to tell him so. He killed himself.... Then Billy Hamilton; I became engaged to him; but he was taken mysteriously from a crowded ship in mid-ocean.... A man named Mitchell Thurston loved me. I liked him; perhaps I might have consented to marry him. He was assassinated--shot down like a mad dog in broad daylight--no one ever knew by whom, or why. He hadn't an enemy in the world we knew of.... And now Drummond...!"

"Mary, Mary!" he pleaded. "Don't--don't--those things were all accidents--"

She paid him no heed. She didn't seem to hear. He tried to take her hand, with a man's dull, witless notion of the way to comfort a distraught woman; but she snatched it from his touch.

"And now"--her voice pealed out like a great bell tolling over the magnificent solitude of the forsaken island--"and now I have it to live through once again: the wonder and terror and beauty of love, the agony and passion of having you torn from me!... Hugh!... I don't believe I can endure it again. I can't _bear_ this exquisite torture. I'm afraid I shall go mad!... Unless ... unless"--her voice shuddered--"I have the strength, the strength to--"

"Good God!" he cried in desperation. "You must not go on like this! Mary! Listen to me!"

This time he succeeded in imprisoning her hand. "Mary," he said gently, drawing closer to her, "listen to me; understand what I say. I love you; I am your husband; nothing can possibly come between us. All these other things can be explained. Don't let yourself think for another instant--"

Her eyes, fixed upon the two hands in which he clasped her own, had grown wide and staring with dread. Momentarily she seemed stunned. Then she wrenched it from him, at the same time jumping up and away.

"No!" she cried, fending him from her with shaking arms. "No! Don't touch me! Don't come near me, Hugh! It's ... it's death! My touch is death! I know it now--I had begun to suspect, now I _know_! I am accursed--doomed to go through life like pestilence, leaving sorrow and death in my wake.... Hugh!" She controlled herself a trifle: "Hugh, I love you more than life; I love you more than love itself. But you must not come near me. Love me if you must, but, O my dear one! keep away from me; avoid me, forget me if you can, but at all cost shun me as you would the plague! I will not give myself to you to be your death!"

Before he could utter a syllable in reply, she turned and fled from him, wildly, blindly stumbling, like a hunted thing back up the ascent to the farm-house. He followed, vainly calling on her to stop and listen to him. But she outdistanced him, and by the time he had entered the house was in her room, behind a locked door.

XIX

CAPITULATION

Grimly Whitaker sat himself down in the kitchen and prepared to wait the reappearance of his wife--prepared to wait as long as life was in him, so that he were there to welcome her when, her paroxysm over, she would come to him to be comforted, soothed and reasoned out of her distorted conception of her destiny.

Not that he had the heart to blame or to pity her for that terrified vision of life. Her history was her excuse. Nor was his altogether a blameless figure in that history. At least it was not so in his sight. Though unwittingly, he had blundered cruelly in all his relations with the life of that sad little child of the Commercial House.

Like sunlight penetrating storm wrack, all the dark disarray of his revery was shot through and through by the golden splendour of the knowledge that she loved him....

As for this black, deadly shadow that had darkened her life--already he could see her emerging from it, radiant and wonderful. But it was not to be disregarded or as yet ignored, its baleful record considered closed and relegated to the pages of the past. Its movement had been too rhythmic altogether to lack a reason. His very present task was to read its riddle and exorcise it altogether.

For hours he pondered it there in the sunlit kitchen of the silent house--waiting, wondering, deep in thought. Time stole away without his knowledge. Not until late in the afternoon did the shifted position of the sun catch his attention and arouse him in alarm. Not a sound from above...!

He rose, ascended the stairs, tapped gently on the locked door.

"Mary," he called, with his heart in his mouth--"Mary!"

Her answer was instant, in accents sweet, calm and clear:

"I am all right. I'm resting, dear, and thinking. Don't fret about me. When I feel able, I will come down to you."

"As you will," he assented, unspeakably relieved; and returned to the kitchen.

The diversion of thought reminded him of their helpless and forlorn condition. He went out and swept the horizon with an eager and hopeful gaze that soon drooped in disappointment. The day had worn on in unbroken calm: not a sail stirred within the immense radius of the waters. Ships he saw in plenty--a number of them moving under power east and west beyond the headland with its crowning lighthouse; others--a few--left shining wakes upon the burnished expanse beyond the farthest land visible in the north. Unquestionably main-travelled roads of the sea, these, so clear to the sight, so heartbreakingly unattainable....

And then his conscience turned upon him, reminding him of the promise (completely driven out of his mind by his grim adventure before dawn, together with the emotional crisis of mid-morning) to display some sort of a day-signal of distress.

For something like half an hour he was busy with the task of nailing a turkey-red table-cloth to a pole, and the pole in turn (with the assistance of a ladder) to the peak of the gabled barn. But when this was accomplished, and he stood aside and contemplated the drooping, shapeless flag, realizing that without a wind it was quite meaningless, the thought came to him that the very elements seemed leagued together in a conspiracy to keep them prisoners, and he began to nurse a superstitious notion that, if anything were ever to be done toward winning their freedom, it would be only through his own endeavour, unassisted.

Thereafter for a considerable time he loitered up and down the dooryard, with all his interest focussed upon the tidal strait, measuring its greatest and its narrowest breadth with his eye, making shrewd guesses at the strength and the occasions of the tides.

If the calm held on and the sky remained unobscured by cloud, by eleven there would be clear moonlight and, if he guessed aright, the beginning of a period of slack water.

Sunset interrupted his calculations--sunset and his wife. Sounds of some one moving quietly round the kitchen, a soft clash of dishes, the rattling of the grate, drew him back to the door.

She showed him a face of calm restraint and implacable resolve, if scored and flushed with weeping. And her habit matched it: she had overcome her passion; her eyes were glorious with peace.

"Hugh"--her voice had found a new, sweet level of gentleness and strength--"I was wondering where you were."

"Can I do anything?"

"No, thank you. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am."

"For what, in Heaven's name?"

She smiled.... "For neglecting you so long. I really didn't think of it until the sunlight began to redden. I've let you go without your lunch."

"It didn't matter--"

"I don't agree. Man must be fed--and so must woman. I'm famished!"

"Well," he admitted with a short laugh--"so am I."

She paused, regarding him with her whimsical, indulgent smile. "You strange creature!" she said softly. "Are you angry with me--impatient--for this too facile descent from heroics to the commonplace? But, Hugh"--she touched his arm with a gentle and persuasive hand--"it _must_ be commonplace. We're just mortals, after all, you know, no matter how imperishable our egos make us feel: and the air of the heights is too fine and rare for mortals to breathe long at a time. Life is, after all, an everyday affair. We've just got to blunder through it from day to day--mostly on the low levels. Be patient with me, dear."

But, alarmed by his expression, her words stumbled and ran out. She stepped back a pace, a little flushed and tremulous.

"Hugh! No, Hugh, no!"

"Don't be afraid of me," he said, turning away. "I don't mean to bother. Only--at times--"

"I know, dear; but it must _not_ be." She had recovered; there was cool decision in her accents. She began to move briskly round the kitchen, setting the table, preparing the meal.

He made no attempt to reason with her, but sat quietly waiting. His role was patience, tolerance, strength restrained in waiting....

"Shall you make a fire again to-night?" she asked, when they had concluded the meal.

"In three places," he said. "We'll not stay another day for want of letting people know we're here."

She looked down, shyly. Coquetry with her was instinctive, irrepressible. Her vague, provoking smile edged her lips:

"You--you want to be rid of me again, so soon, Hugh?"

He bent over the table with a set face, silent until his undeviating gaze caught and held her eyes.

"Mary," he said slowly, "I want _you_. I mean to have you. Only by getting away from this place will that be possible. You must come to me of your own will."

She made the faintest negative motion of her head, her eyes fixed to his in fascination.

"You will," he insisted, in the same level tone. "If you love me, as you say, you must.... No--that's nonsense I won't listen to! Renunciation is a magnificent and noble thing, but it must have a sane excuse.... You said a while ago, this was a commonplace world, life an everyday affair. It is. The only thing that lifts it out of the deadly, intolerable rut is this wonderful thing man has invented and named Love. Without it we are as Nature made us--brute things crawling and squabbling in blind squalor. But love lifts us a little above that: love _is_ supernatural, the only thing in all creation that rises superior to nature. There's no such thing as a life accursed; no such thing as a life that blights; there are no malign and vicious forces operating outside the realm of natural forces: love alone is supreme, subject to no known laws. I mean to prove it to you; I mean to show you how little responsible you have been in any way for the misfortunes that have overtaken men who loved you; I shall show you that I am far more blameworthy than you.... And when I have done that, you will come to me."

"I am afraid," she whispered breathlessly--"I am afraid I shall."

He rose. "Till then, my dearest girl, don't, please don't ever shrink from me again. I may not be able to dissemble my love, but until your fears are done away with, your mind at rest, no act of mine, within my control, shall ever cause you even so much as an instant's annoyance or distress."

His tone changed. "I'll go now and build my fires. When you are ready--?"

"I shan't be long," she said.

But for long after he had left her, she lingered moveless by a window, her gaze following him as he moved to and fro: her face now wistful, now torn by distress, now bright with longing. Strong passions contended within her--love and fear, joy and regret; at times crushing apprehensions of evil darkened her musings, until she could have cried out with the torment of her fears; and again intimations possessed her of exquisite beauty, warming and ennobling her heart, all but persuading her.

At length, sighing, she lighted the lamp and went about her tasks, with a bended head, wondering and frightened, fearfully questioning her own inscrutable heart. Was it for this only that she had fought herself all through that day: that she should attain an outward semblance of calm so complete as to deceive even herself, so frail as to be rent away and banished completely by the mere tones of his mastering voice? Was she to know no rest? Was it to be her fate to live out her days in yearning, eating her heart alone, feeding with sighs the passing winds? Or was she too weary to hold by her vows? Was she to yield and, winning happiness, in that same instant encompass its destruction?...

When it was quite dark, Whitaker brought a lantern to the door and called her, and they went forth together.

As he had promised, he had built up three towering pyres, widely apart. When all three were in full roaring flame, their illumination was hot and glowing over all the upland. It seemed impossible that the world should not now become cognizant of their distress.

At some distance to the north of the greatest fire--that nearest the farm-house--they sat as on the previous night, looking out over the black and unresponsive waters, communing together in undertones.

In that hour they learned much of one another: much that had seemed strange and questionable assumed, in the understanding of each, the complexion of the normal and right. Whitaker spoke at length and in much detail of his Wilful Missing years without seeking to excuse the wrong-minded reasoning which had won him his own consent to live under the mask of death. He told of the motives that had prompted his return, of all that had happened since in which she had had no part--with a single reservation. One thing he kept back: the time for that was not yet.

A listener in his turn, he heard the history of the little girl of the Commercial House breaking her heart against the hardness of life in what at first seemed utterly futile endeavour to live by her own efforts, asking nothing more of the man who had given her his name. To make herself worthy of that name, so that, living or dead, he might have no cause to be ashamed of her or to regret the burden he had assumed: this was the explanation of her fierce striving, her undaunted renewal of the struggle in the face of each successive defeat, her renunciation of the competence his forethought had provided for her. So also--since she would take nothing from her husband--pride withheld her from asking anything of her family or her friends. She cut herself off utterly from them all, fought her fight alone.

He learned of the lean years of drifting from one theatrical organization to another, forced to leave them one by one by conditions impossible and intolerable, until Ember found her playing ingenue parts in a mean provincial stock company; of the coming of Max, his interest in her, the indefatigable pains he had expended coaching her to bring out the latent ability his own genius divined; of the initial performance of "Joan Thursday" before a meagre and indifferent audience, her instant triumph and subsequent conquest of the country in half a dozen widely dissimilar roles; finally of her decision to leave the stage when she married, for reasons comprehensible, demanding neither exposition nor defence.

"It doesn't matter any longer," she commented, concluding: "I loved and I hated it. It was deadly and it was glorious. But it no longer matters. It is finished: Sara Law is no more."

"You mean never to go back to the stage?"

"Never."

"And yet--" he mused craftily.

"Never!" She fell blindly into his trap. "I promised myself long ago that if ever I became a wife--"

"But you are no wife," he countered.

"Hugh!"

"You are Mrs. Whitaker--yes; but--"

"Dear, you are cruel to me!"

"I think it's you who would be cruel to yourself, dear heart."

She found no ready answer; was quiet for a space; then stirred, shivering. Behind them the fires were dying; by contrast a touch of chill seemed to pervade in the motionless air.

"I think," she announced, "we'd better go in."

She rose without assistance, moved away toward the house, paused and returned.

"Hugh," she said gently, with a quaver in her voice that wounded his conceit in himself; for he was sure it spelled laughter at his expense and well-merited--"Hugh, you big sulky boy! get up this instant and come back to the house with me. You know I'm timid. Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"

"I suppose so," he grumbled, rising. "I presume it's childish to want the moon--and sulk when you find you can't have it."

"Or a star?"

He made no reply; but his very silence was eloquent. She attempted a shrug of indifference to his disapproval, but didn't convince even herself; and when he paused before entering the house for one final look into the north, she waited on the steps above him.

"Nothing, Hugh?" she asked in a softened voice.

"Nothing," he affirmed dully.

"It's strange," she sighed.

"Lights enough off beyond the lighthouse yonder," he complained: "red lights and green, bound east and west. But you'd think this place was invisible, from the way we're ignored. However...."

They entered the kitchen.

"Well--however?" she prompted, studying his lowering face by lamplight.

"Something'll have to be done; if they won't help us, we'll have to help ourselves."

"Hugh!" There was alarm in her tone. He looked up quickly. "Hugh, what are you thinking of?"

"Oh--nothing. But I've got to think of something."

She came nearer, intuitively alarmed and pleading. "Hugh, you wouldn't leave me here alone?"

"What nonsense!"

"Promise me you won't."

"Don't be afraid," he said evasively. "I'll be here--as always--when you wake up."

She drew a deep breath, stepped back without removing her gaze from his face, then with a gesture of helplessness took up her lamp.

"Good night, Hugh."

"Good night," he replied, casting about for his own lamp.

But when he turned back, she was still hesitating in the doorway. He lifted inquiring brows.

"Hugh...."

"Yes?"

"I trust you. Be faithful, dear."

"Thank you," he returned, not without flavour of bitterness. "I'll try to be. Good night."

She disappeared; the light of her lamp faded, flickering in the draught of the hall, stencilled the wall with its evanescent caricature of the balustrade, and was no longer visible.

"Hugh!" her voice rang from the upper floor.

He started violently out of deep abstraction, and replied inquiringly.

"You won't forget to lock the door?"

He swore violently beneath his breath; controlled his temper and responded pleasantly: "Certainly not."

Then he shut the outside door with a convincing bang.

"If this be marriage...!" He smiled his twisted smile, laughed a little quietly, and became again his normal, good-natured self, if a little unusually preoccupied.

Leaving the kitchen light turned low, he went to his own room and, as on the previous night, threw himself upon the bed without undressing; but this time with no thought of sleep. Indeed, he had no expectation of closing his eyes in slumber before the next night, at the earliest; he had no intention other than to attempt to swim to the nearest land. In the illusion of night, his judgment worked upon by his emotions, that plan which had during the afternoon suggested itself, been thoroughly considered, rejected as too desperately dangerous, and then reconsidered in the guise of their only possible chance of escape at any reasonably early date, began to assume a deceptive semblance of feasibility.

He did not try to depreciate its perils: the tides that swept through that funnel-shaped channel were unquestionably heavy: heavier than even so strong a swimmer as he should be called upon to engage; the chances of being swept out to sea were appallingly heavy. The slightest error in judgment, the least miscalculation of the turn of the tide, and he was as good as lost.

On the other hand, with a little good luck, by leaving the house shortly after moonrise, he should be able to catch the tide just as it was nearing high water. Allowing it to swing him northwest until it fulled, he ought to be a third of the way across by the time it slackened, and two-thirds of the distance before it turned seawards again. And the distance was only three miles or so.

And the situation on the island had grown unendurable. He doubted his strength to stand the torment and the provocation of another day.

Allow an hour and a half for the swim--say, two; another hour in which to find a boat; and another to row or sail back: four hours. He should be back upon the island long before dawn, even if delayed. Surely no harm could come to her in that time; surely he ought to be able to reckon on her sleeping through his absence--worn down by the stress of the day's emotions as she must certainly be. True, he had given her to understand he would not leave her; but she need not know until his return; and then his success would have earned him forgiveness.

An hour dragged out its weary length, and the half of another while he reasoned with himself, drugging his conscience and his judgment alike with trust in his lucky star. In all that time he heard no sound from the room above him; and for his part he lay quite unstirring, his whole body relaxed, resting against the trial of strength to come.

Insensibly the windows of his room, that looked eastward, filled with the pale spectral promise of the waning moon. He rose, with infinite precaution against making any noise, and looked out. The night was no less placid than the day had been. The ruins of his three beacons shone like red winking eyes in the black face of night. Beyond them the sky was like a dome of crystal, silvery green. And as he looked, an edge of silver shone on the distant rim of the waters; and then the moon, misshapen, wizened and darkling, heaved sluggishly up from the deeps.

Slowly, on tiptoes, Whitaker stole toward the door, out into the hall; at the foot of the stairs he paused, listening with every nerve tense and straining; he fancied he could just barely detect the slow, regular respiration of the sleeping woman. And he could see that the upper hallway was faintly aglow. She had left her lamp burning, the door open. Last night, though the lamp had burned till dawn, that door had been closed....

He gathered himself together again, took a single step on toward the kitchen; and then, piercing suddenly the absolute stillness within the house, a board squealed like an animal beneath his tread.

In an instant he heard the thud and patter of her footsteps above, her loud, quickened breathing as she leaned over the balustrade, looking down, and her cry of dismay: "Hugh! Hugh!"

He halted, saying in an even voice: "Yes; it is I." She had already seen him; there was no use trying to get away without her knowledge now; besides, he was no sneak-thief to fly from a cry. He burned with resentment, impatience and indignation, but he waited stolidly enough while the woman flew down the stairs to his side.

"Hugh," she demanded, white-faced and trembling, "what is the matter? Where are you going?"

He moved his shoulders uneasily, forcing a short laugh. "I daresay you've guessed it. Undoubtedly you have. Else why--" He didn't finish save by a gesture of resignation.

"You mean you were going--going to try to swim to the mainland?"

"I meant to try it," he confessed.

"But, Hugh--your promise?"

"I'm sorry, Mary; I didn't want to promise. But you see ... this state of things cannot go on. Something has got to be done. It's the only way I know of. I--I can't trust myself--"

"You'd leave me here while you went to seek death--!"

"Oh, it isn't as dangerous as all that. If you'd only been asleep, as I thought you were, I'd've been back before you knew anything about it."

"I should have known!" she declared passionately. "I _was_ asleep, but I knew the instant you stirred. Tell me; how long did you stand listening here, to learn if I was awake or not?"

"Several minutes."

"I knew it, though I was asleep, and didn't waken till the board squeaked. I knew you would try it--knew it from the time when you quibbled and evaded and wouldn't give me a straight promise. Oh, Hugh, my Hugh, if you had gone and left me...!"

Her voice shook and broke. She swayed imperceptibly toward him, then away, resting a shoulder against the wall and quivering as though she would have fallen but for that support. He found himself unable to endure the reproach of those dark and luminous eyes set in the mask of pallor that was her face in the half-light of the hallway. He looked away, humbled, miserable, pained.

"It's too bad," he mumbled. "I'm sorry you had to know anything about it. But ... it can't be helped, Mary. You've got to brace up. I won't be gone four hours at the longest."

"Four hours!" She stood away from the wall, trembling in every limb. "Hugh, you--you don't mean--you're not going--_now_?"

He nodded a wretched, makeshift affirmation.

"It must be done," he muttered. "Please--"

"But it must not be done! Hugh!" Her voice ascended "I--I can't let you. I won't let you! You ... It'll be your death--you'll drown. I shall have let you go to your death--"

"Oh, now, really--" he protested.

"But, Hugh, I _know_ it! I feel it here." A hand strayed to rest, fluttering, above her heart. "If I should let you go ... Oh, my dear one, don't, don't go!"

"Mary," he began hoarsely, "I tell you--"

"You're only going, Hugh, because ... because I love you so I ... I am afraid to let you love me. That's true, isn't it? Hugh--it's true?"

"I can't stay ..." he muttered with a hang-dog air.

She sought support of the wall again, her body shaken by dry sobbing that it tore his heart to hear. "You--you're really going--?"

He mumbled an almost inaudible avowal of his intention.

"Hugh, you're killing me! If you leave me--"

He gave a gesture of despair and capitulation.

"I've done my best, Mary. I meant to do the right thing. I--"

"Hugh, you mean you won't go?" Joy from a surcharged heart rang vibrant in every syllable uttered in that marvellous voice.

But now he dared meet her eyes. "Yes," he said, "I won't go"--nodding, with an apologetic shadow of his twisted smile. "I can't if ... if it distresses you."

"Oh, my dear, my dear!"

Whitaker started, staggered with amaze, and the burden of his wife in his arms. Her own arms clipped him close. Her fragrant tear-gemmed face brushed his. He knew at last the warmth of her sweet mouth, the dear madness of that first caress.

The breathless seconds spun their golden web of minutes. They did not move. Round them the silence sang like the choiring seraphim....

Then through the magical hush of that time when the world stood still, the thin, clear vibrations of a distant hail:

"_Aho-oy!_"

In his embrace his wife stiffened and lifted her head to listen like a startled fawn. As one their hearts checked, paused, then hammered wildly. With a common impulse they started apart.

"You heard--?"

"Listen!" He held up a hand.

This time it rang out more near and most unmistakable:

"Ahoy! The house, ahoy!"

With the frenzied leap of a madman, Whitaker gained the kitchen door, shook it, controlled himself long enough to draw the bolt, and flung out into the dim silvery witchery of the night. He stood staring, while the girl stole to his side and caught his arm. He passed it round her, lifted the other hand, dumbly pointed toward the northern beach. For the moment he could not trust himself to speak.

In the sweep of the anchorage a small white yacht hovered ghostlike, broadside to the island, her glowing ports and green starboard lamp painting the polished ebony of the still waters with the images of many burning candles.

On the beach itself a small boat was drawn up. A figure in white waited near it. Issuing from the deserted fishing settlement, rising over the brow of the uplands, moved two other figures in white and one in darker clothing, the latter leading the way at a rapid pace.

With one accord Whitaker and his wife moved down to meet them. As they drew together, the leader of the landing party checked his pace and called:

"Hello there! Who are you? What's the meaning of your fires--?"

Mechanically Whitaker's lips uttered the beginning of the response: "Shipwrecked--signalling for help--"

"Whitaker!" the voice of the other interrupted with a jubilant shout. "Thank God we've found you!"

It was Ember.

XX

TEMPERAMENTAL

Seldom, perhaps, has an habitation been so unceremoniously vacated as was the solitary farm-house on that isolated island. Whitaker delayed only long enough to place a bill, borrowed from Ember, on the kitchen table, in payment for what provisions they had consumed, and to extinguish the lamps and shut the door.

Ten minutes later he occupied a chair beneath an awning on the after deck of the yacht, and, with an empty glass waiting to be refilled between his fingers and a blessed cigar fuming in the grip of his teeth, stared back to where their rock of refuge rested, brooding over its desolation, losing bulk and conformation and swiftly blending into a small dark blur upon the face of the waters.

"Ember," he demanded querulously, "what the devil is that place?"

"You didn't know?" Ember asked, amused.

"Not the smell of a suspicion. This is the first pleasure, in a manner of speaking, cruise I've taken up along this coast. I'm a bit weak on its hydrography."

"Well, if that's the case, I don't mind admitting that it is No Man's Land."

"I'm strong for its sponsors in baptism. They were equipped with a strong sense of the everlasting fitness of things. And the other--?"

"Martha's Vineyard. That's Gay Head--the headland with the lighthouse. Off to the north of it, the Elizabeth Islands. Beyond them, Buzzards Bay. This neat little vessel is now standing about west-no'th-west to pick up Point Judith light--if you'll stand for the nautical patois. After that, barring a mutiny on the part of the passengers, she'll swing on to Long Island Sound. If we're lucky, we'll be at anchor off East Twenty-fourth Street by nine o'clock to-morrow morning. Any kick coming?"

"Not from me. You might better consult--my wife," said Whitaker with an embarrassed laugh.

"Thanks, no: if it's all the same to you. Besides, I've turned her over to the stewardess, and I daresay she won't care to be interrupted. She's had a pretty tough time of it: I judge from your rather disreputable appearance. Really, you're cutting a most romantical, shocking figger."

"Glad of that," Whitaker remarked serenely. "Give me another drink.... I like to be consistent--wouldn't care to emerge from a personally conducted tour of all hell looking like a George Cohan chorus-boy.... Lord! how good tobacco does taste after you've gone without it a few days!... Look here: I've told you how things were with us, in brief; but I'm hanged if you've disgorged a single word of explanation as to how you came to let Drummond slip through your fingers, to say nothing of how you managed to find us."

"He didn't slip through my fingers," Ember retorted. "He launched a young earthquake at my devoted head and disappeared before the dust settled. More explicitly: I had got him to the edge of the woods, that night, when something hit me from behind and my light went out in a blaze of red fire. I came to some time later with a tasty little gag in my mouth and the latest thing in handcuffs on my wrists, behind my back--the same handcuffs that I'd decorated Drummond with--and several fathoms of rope wound round my legs. I lay there--it was a sort of open work barn--until nearly midnight the following night. Then the owner happened along, looking for something he'd missed--another ass, I believe--and let me loose. By the time I'd pulled myself together, from what you tell me, you were piling up on the rocks back there."

"Just before dawn, yesterday."

"Precisely. Finding you'd vacated the bungalow, I interviewed Sum Fat and Elise, and pieced together a working hypothesis. It was easy enough to surmise Drummond had some pal or other working with him: _I_ was slung-shotted from behind, while Drummond was walking ahead. And two men had worked in the kidnapping of Mrs. Whitaker. So I went sleuthing; traced you through the canal to Peconic; found eye-witnesses of your race as far as Sag Harbor. There I lost you--and there I borrowed this outfit from a friend, an old-time client of mine. Meanwhile I'd had a general alarm sent out to the police authorities all along the coast--clear to Boston. No one had seen anything of you anywhere. It was heavy odds-on, that you'd gone to the bottom in that blow, all of you; but I couldn't give up. We kept cruising, looking up unlikely places. And, at that, we were on the point of throwing up the sponge when I picked up a schooner that reported signal fires on No Man's Land.... I think that clears everything up."

"Yes," said Whitaker, sleepily. "And now, without ingratitude, may I ask you to lead me to a bath and my bunk. I have just about fifteen minutes of semi-consciousness to go on."

Nor was this exaggeration; it was hard upon midnight, and he had been awake since before dawn of a day whose course had been marked by a succession of increasingly exhaustive emotional crises, following a night of interrupted and abbreviated rest; add to this the inevitable reaction from high nervous tension. His reserve vitality seemed barely sufficient to enable him to keep his eyes open through the rite of the hot salt-water bath. After that he gave himself blindly into Ember's guidance, and with a mumbled, vague good night, tumbled into the berth assigned him. And so strong was his need of sleep that it was not until ten o'clock the following morning, when the yacht lay at her mooring in the East River, that Ember succeeded in rousing him by main strength and good-will.

This having been accomplished, he was left to dress and digest the fact that his wife had gone ashore an hour ago, after refusing to listen to a suggestion that Whitaker be disturbed. The note Ember handed him purported to explain what at first blush seemed a singularly ungrateful and ungracious freak. It was brief, but in Whitaker's sight eminently adequate and compensating.

"DEAREST BOY: I won't let them wake you, but I must run away. It's
early and I _must_ do some shopping before people are about. My
house here is closed; Mrs. Secretan is in Maine with the only keys
aside from those at Great West Bay; and I'm a _positive fright_ in
a coat and skirt borrowed from the stewardess. I don't want even
you to see me until I'm decently dressed. I shall put up at the
Waldorf; come there to-night, and we will dine together. Every
fibre of my being loves you.

"MARY."

Obviously not a note to be cavilled at. Whitaker took a serene and shining face to breakfast in the saloon, under the eyes of Ember.

Veins of optimism and of gratulation like threads of gold ran through the texture of their talk. There seemed to exist a tacit understanding that, with the death of Drummond, the cloud that had shadowed the career of Sara Law had lifted, while her renunciation of her public career had left her with a future of glorified serenity and assured happiness. By common consent, with an almost superstitious awe, they begged the question of the shadowed and inexplicable past--left the dead past to bury itself, bestowing all their fatuous concern with the to-day of rejoicing and the to-morrow of splendid promise.

Toward noon they parted ashore, each taking a taxicab to his lodgings. The understanding was that they were to dine together--all three, Whitaker promising for his wife--upon the morrow.

At six that evening, returning to his rooms to dress, Whitaker found another note awaiting him, in a handwriting that his heart recognized with a sensation of wretched apprehension.

He dared not trust himself to read it in the public hall. It was agony to wait through the maddeningly deliberate upward flight of the elevator. When he at length attained to the privacy of his own apartment, he was sweating like a panic-stricken horse. He could hardly control his fingers to open the envelope. He comprehended its contents with difficulty, half blinded by a swimming mist of foreboding.

"MY DEAR: I find my strength unequal to the strain of seeing you
to-night. Indeed, I am so worn out and nerve-racked that I have had
to consult my physician. He orders me immediately to a sanatorium,
to rest for a week or two. Don't worry about me. I shan't fail to
let you know as soon as I feel strong enough to see you. Forgive
me. I love you dearly.

"MARY."

The paper slipped from Whitaker's trembling hand and fluttered unheeded to the floor. He sprang to the telephone and presently had the Waldorf on the wire; it was true, he learned: Mrs. Whitaker had registered at the hotel in the morning, and had left at four in the afternoon. He was refused information as to whether she had left a forwarding address for her mail.

He wrote her immediately, and perhaps not altogether wisely, under stress of distraction, sending the letter by special delivery in care of the hotel. It was returned him in due course of time, embellished with a pencilled memorandum to the effect that Mrs. Whitaker had left no address.

He communicated at once with Ember, promptly enlisting his willing services. But after several days of earnest investigation the detective confessed himself baffled.

"If you ask me," he commented at the conclusion of his report, "the answer is: she means to be let alone until she's quite ready to see you again. I don't pin any medals on myself for this demonstration of extraordinary penetration; I merely point out the obvious for your own good. Contain yourself, my dear man--and stop gnawing your knuckles like the heavy man in a Third Avenue melodrama. It won't do any good; your wife promised to communicate with you as soon as her health was restored. And not only is she a woman who keeps her promise, but it is quite comprehensible that she should have been shaken up by her extraordinary experience to an extent we can hardly appreciate who haven't the highly sensitive organization of a woman to contend with. Give her time."

"I don't believe it!" Whitaker raged. "She--she loved me there on the island. She couldn't change so quickly, bring herself to treat me so cruelly, unless some infernal influence had been brought to bear upon her."

"It's possible, but I--"

"Oh, I don't mean that foolishness about her love being a man's death-warrant. That may have something to do with it, but--but, damn it!--I conquered that once. She promised ... was in my arms ... I'd won her.... She loved me; there wasn't any make-believe about it. If there were any foundation for that poppycock, I'd be a dead man now--instead of a man damnably ill-used!... No: somebody has got hold of her, worked on her sympathies, maligned me...."

"Do you object to telling me whom you have in mind?"

"The man you suspect as well as I--the one man to whom her allegiance means everything: the man you named to me the night we met for the first time, as the one who'd profit the most by keeping her from leaving the stage!"

"Well, if it's Max, you'll know in time. It won't profit him to hide the light of his star under a bushel; he can only make money by displaying it."

"I'll know before long. As soon as he gets back in town--"

"So you've been after him?"

"Why not? But he's out on the Pacific coast; or so they tell me at the theatre."

"And expected back--when?"

"Soon."

"Do you know when he left?"

"About the middle of July--they say in his office."

"Then that lets him out."

"But it's a lie."

"Well--?"

"I've just remembered: Max was at the Fiske place, urging her to return, the night before you caught Drummond at the bungalow. I saw them, walking up and down in front of the cottage, arguing earnestly: I could tell by her bearing she was refusing whatever he proposed. But I didn't know her then, and naturally I never connected Max with the fellow I saw, disguised in a motoring coat and cap. Neither of 'em had any place in my thoughts that night."

Ember uttered a thoughtful "Oh?" adding: "Did you find out at all definitely when Max is expected back?"

"Two or three weeks now, they say. He's got his winter productions to get under way. As a matter of fact, it looks to me as if he must be neglecting 'em strangely; it's my impression that the late summer is a producing manager's busiest time."

"Max runs himself by his own original code, I'm afraid. The chances are he's trying to raise money out on the Coast. No money, no productions--in other words."

"I shouldn't wonder."

"But there may be something in what you say--suspect, that is. If I agree to keep an eye on him, will you promise to give me a free hand?"

"Meaning--?"

"Keep out of Max's way: don't risk a wrangle with him."

"Why the devil should I be afraid of Max?"

"I know of no reason--as yet. But I prefer to work unhampered by the indiscretions of my principals."

"Oh--go ahead--to blazes--as far as you like."

"Thanks," Ember dryly wound up the conference; "but these passing flirtations with your present-day temper leave me with no hankering for greater warmth...."

Days ran stolidly on into weeks, and these into a month. Nothing happened. Max did not return; the whispered rumour played wild-fire in theatrical circles that the eccentric manager had encountered financial difficulties insuperable. The billboards flanking the entrance to the Theatre Max continued to display posters announcing the reopening early in September with a musical comedy by Tynan Dodd; but the comedy was not even in rehearsal by September fifteenth.

Ember went darkly about his various businesses, taciturn--even a trace more than ever reserved in his communication with Whitaker--preoccupied, but constant in his endeavour to enhearten the desponding husband. He refused to hazard any surmises whatever until the return of Max or the reappearance of Mary Whitaker.

She made no sign. Now and then Whitaker would lose patience and write to her: desperate letters, fond and endearing, passionate and insistent, wistful and pleading, strung upon a single theme. Despatched under the address of her town house, they vanished from his ken as mysteriously and completely as she herself had vanished. He received not a line of acknowledgment.

Day by day he made up his mind finally and definitely to give it up, to make an end of waiting, to accept the harsh cruelty of her treatment of him as an absolute definition of her wishes--to sever his renewed life in New York and return once and for all to the Antipodes. And day by day he paltered, doubted, put off going to the steamship office to engage passage. The memory of that last day on the lonely island would not down. Surely she dared not deny the self she had then revealed to him! Surely she must be desperately ill and unable to write, rather than ignoring him so heartlessly and intentionally. Surely the morrow would bring word of her!

Sometimes, fretted to a frenzy, he sought out Ember and made wild and unreasonable demands upon him. These failing of any effect other than the resigned retort, "I am a detective, not a miracle-monger," he would fly into desperate, gnawing, black rages that made Ember fear for his sanity and self-control and caused him to be haunted by that gentleman for hours--once or twice for days--until he resumed his normal poise of a sober and civilized man. He was, however, not often aware of this sedulous espionage.

September waned and October dawned in grateful coolness: an exquisite month of crisp nights and enlivening days, of mellowing sunlight and early gloamings tenderly coloured. Country houses were closed and theatres reopened. Fifth Avenue after four in the afternoon became thronged with an ever thickening army--horse, foot and motor-car. Several main-travelled thoroughfares were promptly torn to pieces and set up on end by municipal authorities with a keen eye for the discomfort of the public. A fresh electric sign blazed on Broadway every evening, and from Thirty-fourth Street to Columbus Circle the first nights crackled, detonated, sputtered and fizzled like a string of cheap Chinese firecrackers. One after another the most exorbitant restaurants advanced their prices and decreased their portions to the prompt and extraordinary multiplication of their clientele: restaurant French for a species of citizen whose birth-rate is said to be steadfast to the ratio of sixty to the hour. Wall Street wailed loudly of its poverty and hurled bitter anathemas at the President, the business interest of the country continued to suffer excruciating agonies, and the proprietors of leading hotels continued to add odd thousands of acres to their game preserves.

Then suddenly the town blossomed overnight with huge eight-sheet posters on every available hoarding, blazoning the news:

JULES MAX
begs to announce the return of
SARA LAW
in a new Comedy entitled FAITH
by JULES MAX
Theatre MAX--Friday October 15th

But Whitaker had the information before he saw the broad-sides in the streets. The morning paper propped up on his breakfast table contained the illuminating note under the caption, "News of Plays and Players":

"Jules Max has sprung another and perhaps his greatest surprise on
the theatre-going public of this city. In the face of the rumor
that he was in dire financial straits and would make no productions
whatever this year, the astute manager has been out of town for two
months secretly rehearsing the new comedy entitled 'Faith' of which
he is the author and in which Sara Law will return finally to the
stage.

"Additional interest attaches to this announcement in view of the
fact that Miss Law has authorized the publication of her intention
never again to retire from the stage. Miss Law is said to have
expressed herself as follows: 'It is my dearest wish to die in
harness. I have come to realize that a great artiste has no duty
greater than her duty to her art. I dedicate my life and artistry
to the American Public.'