"I wish," she continued – "I wish you'd stay in the house. I – I'm really a bit timid: unnerved, I presume. It's been, you know, rather a harrowing experience. Anything might happen in a place like this…"

"Oh, certainly," he agreed, something constrained. "I'd feel more content, myself, to know I was within call if anything should alarm you."

They returned to the kitchen.

In silence, while Whitaker fidgeted about the room, awkward and unhappy, the girl removed a glass lamp from the shelf above the sink, assured herself that it was filled, and lighted it. Then, over her shoulder:

"I hope you don't mean to stay up all night."

"I – well, I'm really not sleepy."

"Oh, but you are," she contradicted calmly.

"Honestly; I slept so long down there on the beach – "

"Please don't try to deceive me. I know that slumbers like those – of exhaustion – don't rest one as they should. Besides, you show how tired you are in every gesture, in the way you carry yourself, in your very eyes."

"You're mistaken," he contended, looking away for fear lest his eyes were indeed betraying him. "Besides, I mean merely to sit up here, to see that everything is all right."

"How should it be otherwise?" She laughed the thought away, yet not unkindly. "This island is as empty as a last-year's bird's-nest. What could happen to harm, or even alarm us – or me?"

"You never can tell – "

"Nonsense! I'm not in the least frightened. And furthermore I shan't sleep a wink – shan't even try to sleep unless you promise me not to be silly. There's a comfortable room right at the foot of the stairs. If you sleep there, I shall feel more than secure. Will you promise?"

He gave in at discretion: "Yes; I promise."

"As soon as you feel the least need of sleep, you'll go to bed?"

"I promise."

"Very well, then."

The insistent note faded from her tones. She moved toward the table, put the lamp down, and hesitated in one of her strange, unpresaged moods of diffidence, looking down at the finger-tips with which she traced a meaningless pattern on the oil-cloth.

"You are kind," she said abruptly, her head bowed, her face hidden from him.

"Kind!" he echoed, dumfounded.

"You are kind and sweet and generous to me," she insisted in a level voice. "You have shown me your heart – the heart of a gentleman – without reserve; but of me you have asked nothing."

"I don't understand – "

"I mean, you haven't once referred to what happened last night. You've been content to let me preserve my confidence, to remain secretive and mysterious in your sight… That is how I seem to you – isn't it?"

"Secretive and mysterious? But I have no right to your confidence; your affairs are yours, inviolable, unless you choose to discuss them."

"You would think that way – of course!" Suddenly she showed him her face illumined with its frank, shadowy smile, her sweet eyes, kind and as fearless as the eyes of a child. "Other men would not, I know. And you have every right to know."

"I – !"

"You; and I shall tell you… But not now; there's too much to tell, to explain and make understandable; and I'm too terribly tired. To-morrow, perhaps – or when we escape from this weird place, when I've had time to think things out – "

"At your pleasure," he assented gently. "Only – don't let anything worry you."

Impulsively she caught both his hands in a clasp at once soft and strong, wholly straightforward and friendly.

"Do you know," she said in a laughing voice, her head thrown back, soft shadows darkening her mystical eyes, the lamplight caressing her hair until it was as if her head were framed in a halo of pure gold, bright against the sombre background of that mean, bare room – "Do you know, dear man, that you are quite, quite blind?"

"I think," he said with his twisted smile, "it would be well for me if I were physically blind at this instant!"

She shook her head in light reproof.

"Blind, quite blind!" she repeated. "And yet – I'm glad it's so with you. I wouldn't have you otherwise for worlds."

She withdrew her hand, took up the lamp, moved a little away from him, and paused, holding his eyes.

"For Love, too, is blind," she said softly, with a quaint little nod of affirmation. "Good night."

He started forward, eyes aflame; took a single pace after her; paused as if against an unseen barrier. His hands dropped by his sides; his chin to his chest; the light died out of his face and left it gray and deeply lined.

In the hallway the lamp's glow receded, hesitated, began to ascend, throwing upon the unpapered walls a distorted silhouette of the rude balustrade; then disappeared, leaving the hall cold with empty darkness.

An inexplicable fit of trembling seized Whitaker. Dropping into a chair, he pillowed his head on his folded arms. Presently the seizure passed, but he remained moveless. With the drift of minutes, insensibly his taut muscles relaxed. Odd visions painted the dark tapestries of his closed eyes: a fragment of swinging seas shining in moonlight; white swords of light slashing the dark night round their unseen eyrie; the throat of a woman swelling firm and strong as a tower of ivory, tense from the collar of her cheap gown to the point of her tilted chin; a shrieking, swirling rabble of gulls seen against the fading sky, over the edge of a cliff…

He slept.

Through the open doorway behind him and through the windows on either hand drifted the sonorous song of the surf, a muted burden for the stealthy disturbances of the night in being.

XVII
DISCOVERY

In time the discomfort of his posture wore through the wrappings of slumber. He stirred drowsily, shifted, and discovered a cramp in his legs, the pain of which more effectually aroused him. He rose, yawned, stretched, grimaced with the ache in his stiffened limbs, and went to the kitchen door.

There was no way to tell how long he had slept. The night held black – the moon not yet up. The bonfire had burned down to a great glowing heap of embers. The wind was faint, a mere whisper in the void. There was a famous show of stars, clear, bright, cold and distant.

Closing and locking the door, he found another lamp, lighted it, and took it with him to the corner bedchamber, where he lay down without undressing. He had, indeed, nothing to change to.

A heavy lethargy weighed upon his faculties. No longer desperately sleepy, he was yet far from rested. His body continued to demand repose, but his mind was ill at ease.

He napped uneasily throughout the night, sleeping and waking by fits and starts, his brain insatiably occupied with an interminable succession of wretched dreams. The mad, distorted face of Drummond, bleached and degraded by his slavery to morphine, haunted Whitaker's consciousness like some frightful and hideous Chinese mask. He saw it in a dozen guises, each more pitiful and terrible than the last. It pursued him through eons of endless night, forever at his shoulder, blind and weeping. Thrice he started from his bed, wide awake and glaring, positive that Drummond had been in the room but the moment gone… And each time that he lay back and sleep stole in numbing waves through his brain, he passed into subconsciousness with the picture before his eyes of a seething cloud of gulls seen against the sky, over the edge of a cliff.

He was up and out in the cool of dawn, before sunrise, delaying to listen for some minutes at the foot of the stairway. But he heard no sound in that still house, and there was no longer the night to affright the woman with hinted threats of nameless horrors lurking beneath its impenetrable cloak. He felt no longer bound to stand sentinel on the threshold of her apprehensions. He went out.

The day would be clear: he drew promise of this from the gray bowl of the sky, cloudless, touched with spreading scarlet only on its eastern rim. There was no wind; from the cooling ashes of yesternight's beacon-fire a slim stalk of smoke grew straight and tall before it wavered and broke. The voice of the sea had fallen to a muffled throbbing.

In the white magic of air like crystal translucent and motionless, the world seemed more close-knitted and sane. What yesterday's veiling of haze had concealed was now bold and near. In the north the lighthouse stood like a horn on the brow of the headland, the lamp continuing to flash even though its light was darkened, its beams out-stripped by the radiant forerunners of the sun. Beyond it, over a breadth of water populated by an ocean-going tug with three barges in tow and a becalmed lumber schooner, a low-lying point of land (perhaps an island) thrust out into the west. On the nearer land human life was quickening: here and there pale streamers of smoke swung up from hidden chimneys on its wooded rises.

Whitaker eyed them with longing. But they were distant from attainment by at the least three miles of tideway through which strong waters raced – as he could plainly see from his elevation, in the pale, streaked and wrinkled surface of the channel.

He wagged a doubtful head, and scowled: no sign in any quarter of a boat heading for the island, no telling when they'd be taken off the cursed place!

In his mutinous irritation, the screaming of the gulls, over in the west, seemed to add the final touch of annoyance, a superfluous addition to the sum of his trials. Why need they have selected that island for their insane parliament? Why must his nerves be racked forever by their incessant bickering? He had dreamed of them all night; must he endure a day made similarly distressing?

What was the matter with the addle-pated things, anyway?

There was nothing to hinder him from investigating for himself. The girl would probably sleep another hour or two.

He went forthwith, dulling the keen edge of his exasperation with a rapid tramp of half a mile or so over the uneven uplands.

The screaming was well-nigh deafening by the time he stood upon the verge of the bluff; beneath him gulls clouded the air like bees swarming. And yet he experienced no difficulty in locating the cause of their excitement.

Below, a slow tide crawled, slavering, up over the boulder-strewn sands. In a wave-scooped depression between two of the larger boulders, the receding waters had left a little, limpid pool. In the pool lay the body of a man, face downward, limbs frightfully sprawling. Gulls fought for place upon his back.

The discovery brought with it no shock of surprise to the man on the bluff: horror alone. He seemed to have known all along that such would be the cause. Yet he had never consciously acknowledged the thought. It had lain sluggish in the deeps beneath surfaces agitated by emotions more poignant and immediate. Still, it had been there – that understanding. That, and that only, had so poisoned his rest…

But he shrank shuddering from the thought of the work that lay to his hand – work that must be accomplished at once and completely; for she must know nothing of it. She had suffered enough, as it was.

Hastening back to the farmstead, he secured a spade from the barn and made his way quickly down to the beach by way of the road through the cluster of deserted fishermen's huts.

Fifteen minutes' walk brought him to the pool. Ten minutes' hard work with the spade sufficed to excavate a shallow trench in the sands above high-water mark. He required as much time again to nerve himself to the point of driving off the gulls and moving the body. There were likewise crabs to be dealt with…

When it was accomplished, and he had lifted the last heavy stone into place above the grave, he dragged himself back along the beach and round a shoulder of the bluff to a spot warmed by the rays of the rising sun. There, stripping off his rags, he waded out into the sea and cleansed himself as best he might, scrubbing sand into his flesh until it was scored and angry; then crawled back, resumed his garments, and lay down for a time in the strength-giving light, feeling giddy and faint with the after-effects of the insuppressible nausea which had prolonged intolerably his loathsome task.

Very gradually the bluish shadows faded from about his mouth and eyes, and natural colour replaced his pallor. And presently he rose and went slowly up to the house, all his being in a state of violent rebellion against the terror and mystery of life.

What the gulls and the crabs and the shattering surf had left had been little, but enough for indisputable identification.

Whitaker had buried Drummond.

XVIII
BLIGHT

By the time he got back to the farm-house, the woman was up, dressed in the rent and stained but dry remnants of her own clothing (for all their defects, infinitely more becoming than the garments to which she had been obliged to resort the previous day) and busy preparing breakfast.

There was no question but that her rest had been sound and undisturbed. If her recuperative powers had won his envy before, now she was wholly marvellous in his eyes. Her radiant freshness dazzled, her elusive but absolute quality of charm bewitched – and her high spirits dismayed him. He entered her presence reluctantly, yielding alone to the spur of necessity. To keep out of her way was not only an impossibility, but would have served to rouse her suspicions; and she must not know: however difficult the task, he must dissemble, keep her in ignorance of his discovery. On that point he was resolved.

"Well, sir!" she called heartily over her shoulder. "And where, pray, have you been all this long time?"

"I went for a swim," he said evasively – "thought it might do me good."

"You're not feeling well?" She turned to look him over.

He avoided her eye. "I had a bad night – probably because I had too much sleep during the day. I got up feeling pretty rusty – the weight of my years. Cold water's ordinarily a specific for that sort of thing, but it didn't seem to work this time."

"Still got the hump, eh?"

"Still got the hump," he assented, glad thus to mask his unhappiness.

"Breakfast and a strong cup of tea or two will fix that," she announced with confidence. "It's too bad there's no coffee."

"Yes," he said – "sorry!"

"No signs of a response to our C. Q. D.?"

"None as yet. Of course, it's early."

He lounged out of the kitchen with a tin bowl, a towel and a bar of yellow soap, and splashed conscientiously at the pump in the dooryard, taking more time for the job than was really necessary.

From her place by the stove, she watched him through a window, her eyes like a sunlit sea dappled with shadows of clouds speeding before the wind.

He lingered outside until she called him to breakfast.

His stout attempts to match her cheerfulness during the meal fell dismally short of conviction. After two or three false starts he gave it up and took refuge in his plea of indisposition. She humoured him with a covert understanding that surmised more in a second than he could have compressed into a ten-minute confession.

The meal over, he rose and sidled awkwardly toward the door.

"You'll be busy for a while with the dishes and things, won't you?" he asked with an air meant to seem guileless.

"Oh, yes; for some time," she replied quickly.

"I – I think I'll take a stroll round the island. There might be something like a boat hidden away somewhere along the beach."

"You prefer to go alone?"

"If you don't mind."

"Not in the least. I've plenty to occupy my idle hands. If I can find needle and thread, for instance…" She indicated her clothing with a humorously rueful gesture.

"To be sure," he agreed, far too visibly relieved. Then his wits stumbled. "I want to think out some things," he added most superfluously.

"You won't go out of sight?" she pleaded through the window.

"It can't be done," he called back, strolling out of the dooryard with much show of idle indecision.

His real purpose was, in fact, definite. There was another body to be accounted for. It was quite possible that the sea might have given it up at some other point along the island coast. True: there was no second gathering of gulls to lend colour to this grisly theory; yet the danger was one to be provided against, since she was not to know.

Starting from its northwestern extreme, he made a complete circuit of the island, spending the greater part of the time along the edges of the western and southern bluffs, where he had not seldom to pause and scrutinize carefully the beach below, to make sure he had been deceived by some half-buried rock or curiously shaped boulder.

To his intense relief, he made no further discovery other than a scattering drift of wreckage from the motor-boats.

By the time he had finished, the morning was well advanced. He turned at length and trudged wearily up from the northern beach, through the community of desolation, back toward the farm-house.

Since breakfast he had seen nothing of the girl; none of the elaborately casual glances which he had from time to time cast inland had discovered any sign of her. But now she appeared in the doorway, and after a slight pause, as of indecision, moved down the path to meet him.

He was conscious that, at sight of her, his pulses quickened. Something swelled in his breast, something tightened the muscles of his throat. The way of her body in action, the way of the sun with her hair…!

Dismay shook him like an ague; he felt his heart divided against itself; he was so glad of her, and so afraid… He could not keep his eyes from her, nor could he make his desire be still; and yet … and yet…

Walking the faster of the two, she met him midway between the house and the beach.

"You've taken your time, Mr. Whitaker," said she.

"It was a bit of a walk," he contended, endeavouring to imitate her lightness of manner.

They paused beside one of the low stone walls that meandered in a meaningless fashion this way and that over the uplands. With a satisfied manner that suggested she had been seeking just that very spot, the girl sat down upon the lichened stones, then looked up to him with a smile and a slight movement of the head that plainly invited him to a place beside her.

He towered above her, darkly reluctant.

"Do sit down. You must be tired."

"I am."

Dubiously he seated himself at a little distance.

"And only your pains for your trouble?"

He nodded.

"I watched you, off and on, from the windows. You might have been looking for a pin, from your painstaking air, off there along the cliffs."

He nodded again, gloomily. Her comment seemed to admit of no more compromising method of reply.

"Then you've nothing to tell me?"

He pursed his lips, depreciatory, lifted his shoulders not quite happily, and swung one lanky leg across the other as he slouched, morosely eyeing the sheets of sapphire that made their prison walls.

"No. There's no good news yet."

"And you've no inclination to talk to me, either?"

"I've told you I don't feel – well – exactly light-hearted this morning."

There was a little silence. She watched him askance with her fugitive, shadowy, sympathetic and shrewd smile.

"Must I make talk, then?" she demanded at length.

"If we must, I suppose – you'll have to show the way. My mind's hardly equal to trail-breaking to-day."

"So I shall, then. Hugh…" She leaned toward him, dropping her hand over his own with an effect of infinite comprehension. "Hugh," she repeated, meeting his gaze squarely as he looked up, startled – "what's the good of keeping up the make-believe? You know!"

The breath clicked in his throat, and his glance wavered uneasily, then steadied again to hers. And through a long moment neither stirred, but sat so, eye to eye, searching each the other's mind and heart.

At length he confessed it with an uncertain, shamefaced nod.

"That's right," he said: "I do know – now."

She removed her hand and sat back without lessening the fixity of her regard.

"When did you find it out?"

"This morning. That is, it came to me all of a sudden – " His gaze fell; he stammered and felt his face burning.

"Hugh, that's not quite honest. I know you hadn't guessed, last night – I know it. How did you come to find it out this morning? Tell me!"

He persisted, as unconvincing as an unimaginative child trying to explain away a mischief:

"It was just a little while ago. I was thinking things over – "

"Hugh!"

He shrugged sulkily.

"Hugh, look at me!"

Unwillingly he met her eyes.

"How did you find out?"

He was an inexpert liar. Under the witchery of her eyes, his resource failed him absolutely. He started to repeat, stammered, fell still, and then in a breath capitulated.

"Before you were up – I meant to keep this from you – down there on the beach – I found Drummond."

"Drummond!"

It was a cry of terror. She started back from him, eyes wide, cheeks whitening.

"I'm sorry… But I presume you ought to know… His body … I buried it…"

She gave a little smothered cry, and seemed to shrink in upon herself, burying her face in her hands – an incongruous, huddled shape of grief, there upon the gray stone wall, set against all the radiant beauty of the exquisite, sun-gladdened world.

He was patient with her, though the slow-dragging minutes during which she neither moved nor made any sound brought him inexpressible distress, and he seemed to age visibly, his face, settling in iron lines, gray with suffering.

At length a moan – rather, a wail – came from the stricken figure beside him:

"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.