# The Sinister Lake/Part 2

Chapters: VIII — IX — X — XI — XII
The Sinister Lake
By Geraldine Bonner
Author of “The Emigrant Trail,” “The Girl at Central,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY ROBERT A. GRAEF
The Conclusion of a Thrilling Two-Part Serial
THE PEOPLE IN THE STORY:
   Jaspar Blatch—an elderly multimillionaire who has been eccentric ever since a serious illness in his youth, shortly before his money was left him and just after a passionate love affair with a beautiful Southern girl, Alice Brunel, who jilted him because of his poverty.
   The Harmon Children—Mary, Frank, and Lottie, the children of Alice Brunel. Brought up in Europe, they come to New York after the death of their parents, and are sought out and made much of by Blatch, who invites them to Hinterland, his famous summer home in the wilds of Canada, and there announces that they are to be his heirs. Mary is really Blatch’s daughter, though neither he nor she knows it.
   Adamson—Blatch’s secretary, in love with Mary. Though he is apparently one of the few people in the world of whom Blatch is fond, he is dismissed suddenly and without warning and left behind when Blatch and his house party leave for Hinterland.
   Tom McGraw—an old Scotchman who befriended Blatch in his poverty, and since his rise to fortune has been his devoted servant.
   Melville Gaynes—a young doctor who has gained an influence over Frank Harmon and is making love to Lottie, with the idea of getting hold of Blatch’s money through them.
CHAPTER VIII.
SATURDAY broke in tranquil perfection, the sky a cloudless dome, the lake a shimmer of crystal.
They were not to leave till the early afternoon, but the preparations began soon after breakfast. It was to be pioneering, not a servant to help, but it was to be pioneering with so much done beforehand that, as Frank remarked, it looked as if their part of the work would be eating and sleeping. They stood about watching the boats being loaded—food in hampers and boxes, blankets, pillows, linen, rugs, and cushions. The wharf was piled with what the voyageurs called the “butin,” and, moving through it, these red-capped, black-bearded men of the woods looked like a gang of amiable pirates transporting their loot to the hidden cave.
Frank and the doctor helped, Frank’s French mingling with the Canadians’ patois, calling out their rich laughter. They professed not to understand it and rallied him with the mischievous zest of children. Laughter came at nothing on this glorious morning with every one’s spirits bubbling: Lottie, under the pine trees, a red tam-o’-shanter on her blond hair, took dancing steps over the needled carpet, the sun spots dancing with her. Blatch, on his way to the wharf, paused to watch her, and, forgetful of her shyness, she went on with her posturing, a bright, challenging eye on his.
“You're very light hearted, Lottie,” he said. “There’s evidently nothing on your conscience.”
She said there wasn’t; how could there be on such a fine morning, when they were starting on such an adventure?
“When I’m happy, I’m all happy,” she explained.
“An enviable faculty,” he answered. “Cultivate it; it will serve you well,” and he moved on, smiling.
The loaded boats started in the face of the sun, cleaving their way into the white dazzle of water. Each bore a train of two canoes, jostling and tilting, then, with a tightening of ropes, swinging into line and riding light as cockleshells on the frothing wake. “As they slid away, the voice of a voyageur rose in song—one of the old French chansons of his ancestry. Others took it up, and the blended harmony was carried across the sounding board of the lake to the blue distances and wooded shores.
It was three before the party started, taking their places in the larger launch, the Frenchmen, clustered at the end of the wharf, drinking it all in, immensely interested. Among them old Tom stood, holding his master’s wraps and looking sulky, the one unsmiling face in the group. Blatch, deciding that the launch was crowded, said he would go in the dory with Gabriel. He leaped in, almost as agile as the half-breed, Tom leaning down to hand him the wraps. He took them with a curt thanks, and the old servant stepped back.
“Isn’t Tom coming?” Lottie whispered to her sister. “I thought he always went wherever Mr. Blatch did.”
Mary gave her a surreptitious nudge. She had thought so, too, and the nudge was a warning for silence. Tom was evidently angry; you only had to look at him to see it. To Blatch’s good-by, he returned a morose mutter and moved up the wharf. When they started, he was already on his way to the house, and Mary watched him, an old, bowed figure. She wondered why Blatch, whose affection for the man she had heard of and noticed, had done what had apparently wounded him. The thought crossed her mind that she would never understand her host—and then it didn’t matter. It was too good a day, too glad a moment, to bother with any one’s intricacies of character.
The fort had been put in welcoming array for them. The doors were flung wide, showing an interior of bronzed obscurity crossed by sun rays. There were scarlet cushions on the steps and banks of wild flowers on the window ledges, bright behind the bars. The younger ones could hardly wait to see what it was like inside, Lottie and Frank scrambling out and racing for the steps. In the doorway, Lottie halted a poised moment in skimming flight, to fling back at Mary:
“Oh, come, hurry! It’s too wonderful! All fixed up and yet it’s like an ancient prison!” She had to go on then, darting out of sight, little squeals marking her progress.
Mary, who had lingered for Blatch, caught his eye. He nodded and waved her to the steps. He would join them presently; he had some last instructions to give the boatmen. She was nearly as curious as Lottie and, with Gaynes at her heels, ran up, both stopping in the doorway to stare about, eager as tourists.
It was, as Lottie had said, like a prison, stone-walled, stone-floored, the modern chairs and tables, the flowers and cushions, curiously incongruous in its uncompromising grimness. It reminded Mary of places she had seen in Europe—old fortresses, the ancient portions of medieval castles. The doors gave on a wide, oblong room lit by the light of the two windows that flanked the entrance. The other three sides showed no openings; the right wall was a solid expanse of masonry with a large, blackened fireplace in the middle, the left and the back were broken by a line of doors, small and close together, like the doors of cabins in a ship’s corridor. Lottie was opening them, peering in and delivering breathless bulletins:
“They’re little tiny rooms, without any windows—as neat as wax, with a bed and a table and a candle in an iron holder. Just like a monastery. I'll feel like a monk in mine to-night.”
She opened the last of the line and dove in, rapturous cries calling Mary. It was a kitchen, its narrow window barred like the others, tiers of shelves set out with china and glass. A blue-flame stove stood in the corner. On the table, unpacked, ready for their arranging hands, were the supplies for that night’s supper. A side door led into a storeroom, the hampers standing below shelves stocked with groceries, jams, wines—everything. The girls explored—opened drawers, peered into cupboards, exclaiming, admiring, marveling.
Lottie could not be torn away, but Mary, mindful of her host, returned to the main room just as the motor boats were leaving. Framed in the doorway, she saw them gliding slowly from the end of the wharf, the men’s heads dark against the lake’s brilliant blue. The chug of the engines ran light as a skimming echo across the water, and in the churned whiteness of their wakes, they headed for the spot where Hinterland lay. Blatch was coming up the steps.
“Well,” he said, “what do you think of it? I’ve had guests who found it too formidable—endured it politely till they got back to Hinterland. But I don’t think you’re that kind.”
Of course she wasn’t; she didn’t have to say so. And, pleased by her enthusiasm, he said he would play cicerone if she wanted. It was just what she did want, but the others must hear, too, and she called them. They came, gathering about Blatch in an attentive group.
He had changed the inside very little—had simply repaired it, wanting to preserve its original aspect. The central space had been the gathering place or hall, the cubicles off it rooms where the furs had been stored. He had kept them as they were, fitting them with sufficient furniture to insure his guests a comfortable lodgment. There were no windows in any of them; in fact, outside the narrow one in the kitchen, there were only two real windows in the place. He pointed to them, the old bars replaced by new ones imbedded in the stone.
“Now, if you'll look over the door, you'll see a gallery.”
They backed out into the middle of the floor, gazing upward. Lifted above the sunshine that slanted through the entrance, they saw a passageway edged by a balustrade. It extended across the space from wall to wall, its ends supported by wooden joists. Behind it a line of bright, thin slits cut the darkness at regular intervals, the light that fell through them lying in stripes across the shadows. Blatch went on with his explanations:
“Those narrow openings were the loopholes for shooting in case of attack. From up there the men could fire over the stockade. The gallery was useful in other ways; in bad weather the facteur took his exercise there, and when his coureurs des bois brought in rumors of Indian unrest, he could command the lake and the surrounding country with his glass. You can imagine him spying out over the frozen solitude, sometimes watching for the stealthy approach of Indians, sometimes for the relief party when food was low.”
“How did he get up there?” said Lottie. “I don’t see any stairs.”
Blatch’s glance touched her in amused commendation,
“Observant girl! He got up by stairs that had rotted away when I came into possession. I restored the gallery, but didn’t bother about them. There was the outside stone flight you probably noticed the other day. It’s the only way to get there now. But then one doesn’t want to go up often. I just had the gallery put back as a piece of the old stage setting.”
“He could keep his eye on the garrison from there, couldn’t he?” said Frank. ‘In the winter I suppose they were all strewed round here in front of the fire.”
“Sleeping on the stones. Lord, what a life!” murmured Gaynes.
They laughed at him, even Blatch joining in.
“Sleeping on the stones, Doctor Gaynes, was probably the softest part of their life. But to go back to the gallery—the entrance is in that far corner hard to see from here, and the door is curious. I moved it there from a small side exit here on the lower floor that was partly in ruins and that I had walled up. But the door was sufficiently interesting to preserve—very old, one of the original ones. The two in the main entrance are the same—quite worth your attention. Look!”
He went to the threshold and drew out from the wall one of the doors—very heavy, swinging slow from a freshly oiled hinge. He tapped it, and the ring of metal was flung back clangorously from the stone walls.
“Solid iron. Brought here at what cost and labor you may imagine—carried from England in the hull of a ship. Wooden doors were not practicable. The Indians, once inside the stockade, would have burned them.”
Frank was impressed, pushed the door, exclaiming at its weight:
“When these were shut, they must have felt safe! Ready-to stand a siege if they had food enough.”
Mary gave a shuddering movement.
“But how grisly! Battened in with nothing but the wilderness round you and a savage foe outside!”
They moved toward the threshold, Lottie lingering to knock on the door and listen to the echo. Her attention was attracted by the key, large and of antique form, protruding from the keyhole. She drew it out and held it up, exclaiming:
“Oh, look at the key! Isn’t it the dearest old thing? Like the one they have for the Bastille in plays about the French Revolution.”
Blatch, ahead, turned quickly.
“Careful, Lottie! That’s an important part of the property, hard to replace. I had to get a man up from Norcross to make it and the one for the upper door, too.”
Blatch turned quickly. “Careful, Lottie, that’s an important part of the property, hard to replace.”
“Back it goes this minute. I'll not take any chances.” She bent to insert it in the lock and then paused. “It was on the outside. Shall I put it there again or inside? Then we can turn it to-night and know we're safe against what Mary calls ‘the savage foe.’”
Blatch laughed.
“There’s no savage foe for us. Put it on the outside.”
She pushed it into its place. As she did so, Gaynes, who was standing near her, struck with his heel on the floor and said:
“I wonder if there’s anything underneath here. Dungeons for prisoners would be the correct thing.”
Blatch called back over his shoulder:
“I don’t think they bothered much about prisoners. Food was scarce, and the North tells no tales. There’s a sort of rough cellar underneath, used, I fancy, for the less valuable furs and extra supplies. But I’ve done nothing to it—left it as it was, choked up with stone and débris. It’s almost impossible to get into it.”
In the bright sunshine outside, they loitered and made plans for the time left them before supper. The young men were energetic; they would explore the promontory and set off by a path that led round the side of the fort. Lottie wanted to go her own way—“poke about just anywhere,” she said, and her red tam was soon a moving spot of color through the birch leaves. Mary decided to stay where she was; it was too lovely to leave, and she dropped on the top step, Blatch taking his seat on a lower one.
Blatch turned quickly. “Careful, Lottie, that’s an important part of the property, hard to replace.”
Before them the lake stretched, a dark sapphire line where it met the sky. The air was crystal fine, not a breath stirring, and charged with aromatic wood scents. It was so still that the landscape was like a picture executed on a vast canvas with paints which had the bright transparency of genius. They were silent, sunk in a dreamy contemplation of the scene. The girl felt no call to speak, knowing that the man on the step below shared her contentment in the beauty of the prospect and the penetrating peace of the hour.
Her thoughts slid away, at first carried on aimless currents, which gradually drew toward a central point of attention—New York. It rose upon her mental vision, hot and airless, the rifts of its streets glaring with sun and thick with a hurrying throng, Adamson among them. She pictured him searching for work, and then saw him beside her, brown and handsome, and she resented his absence. Nervously conscious of her words, but wanting to establish a real relation of trust and confidence with the man who had assumed the position of benefactor, she said suddenly:
“I wish Mr. Adamson were here.”
Blatch moved, turning his head so that his profile was offered to her gaze.
“Adamson—why?”
“Because I like him.”
“It’s a common weakness. Even I do, and I like few people.”
She could not say what she had intended after that. It was not that he had rebuffed her; it was as if he hadn’t noticed, probably had never thought of it.
“I’m sorry you sent him away when you did—that he didn’t have the summer at Hinterland.”
“A summer’s pleasure is a small thing to offset against a man’s future.” He turned to the lake again, his voice sharp with the note of finality she was learning to know. “I sent Adamson away for his own good.”
CHAPTER IX.
The evening was so long in these high latitudes that there was no need for lights till late. But Lottie could not wait for the tardy twilight; she said she must see how the fort looked illuminated, and anyway the cubicles with no windows were getting dark already. In each one she lit the candle, and from the dark of the wall the doorways sprang into a line of bright oblongs. They were like a series of pictures, all the same—a bed, a chair a table, the candle flame diffusing a yellow aura.
Then she lit up the kitchen and after that the dining table. This, with its double row of candles, broke into radiance, light airs swaying the flames, glass and china sparkling. Its brightness mingled with the thin blues of evening which seemed hostile, as if trying to quench with their cold clarity its warm and friendly luster. Lottie was vaguely aware of it. You couldn’t get the fort to look really cozy unless you closed the doors. She called it out to Mary, still on the steps with Blatch.
They came in, Mary pausing on the threshold to exclaim in admiration. Blatch said they would shut the doors presently; he would attend to it himself, as they were hard to close, but not till they were all there. Where were the boys? Gone for a walk, Lottie said, round by the back. She wasn’t going to wait for them, she was going to start in now, and she went to the kitchen, the pop of the blue-flame stove following her entrance.
Mary lingered with Blatch. She saw that the absence of the boys irritated him, and since the scene with Gabriel, she was fearful of any jar to his temper. He was restless, went to the door, looked about there, moved back to the dining table, his glance traveling absently over it. On a small table standing against the wall wineglasses had been set out. His roving eyes caught them, and he said, “We'll have a toast to-night. I told the men to bring champagne,” and stood staring at the glasses as if suddenly sunk in thought. Mary, watching him, noted how worn he looked, his face fallen into hollows. She was wondering if she dared suggest a rest,“when he turned on her, exclaiming with fierce vehemence:
“Where are they? Why don’t they come?”
“They'll be here in a minute. They’re far too hungry to be late for supper.” Her smile brought out no answering one, and she tried a diversion: “What are we to drink a toast to?”
“The future!”
The sound of feet on the steps caught his ear; his dark look vanished, and he wheeled to the doorway, crying, with restored good humor:
“Ah, truants! We’ve been waiting for you.”
Frank entered, flushed and apologetic.
“Awfully sorry, but we got lost. Went to the mainland and missed the trail. Been plowing through the woods for the last hour. And now for supper. I’m hungry enough to eat all the provisions.”
“But you have to help. The labor’s to be divided between the ladies and the gentlemen; it is so nominated in the bond. The girls have started, and you must get busy. I want the champagne brought out to-night for our first toast. It should be in the storeroom, packed in ice. There are the glasses ready and waiting.” He pointed to the stand. “Now go to work, play the butler—that’s your job.”
He gave Frank a slap on the shoulder, and his laugh broke, cackling. Gaynes, standing to one side, scrutinized him with a pondering intentness.
“And you must remember that you do nothing,” said Mary. “That’s to be your rôle.”
“Oh, nothing, nothing!” He laughed again louder. “I'll loiter about in lordly ease while my guests do the work. Shoo! Be off with you!”
He made a gesture of brushing them away, and they ran, jostling one another, crowding together through the kitchen doorway. Blatch sauntered to the main entrance, stood there for a space, then moved out into the evening shadows.
Mary superintended in the kitchen, Lottie carrying out the viands and putting them on the table. She dashed back and forth, unfinished sentences breathlessly resumed when she returned. There seemed quantities of food. The table was gradually covered with little dishes and big. Lottie caracoled round it, touching it to a daintier arrangement.
“Mr. Blatch has gone out,” she told Mary on a return trip. “I’m so glad. I can gloat over the table much better when he’s not there.”
The young men had disappeared in the storeroom to get the champagne. They could not find it at first, the place being packed with hampers and crocks and faintly lit by the light of one candle on a shelf. They were rummaging about in the search when Gaynes said in a low voice:
“Have you noticed that Blatch isn’t well?”
Frank came to a stand, startled. He had noticed nothing of the kind, had thought, on the contrary, that Blatch was in unusually high spirits.
“That’s what I mean—he’s all nerves, hopping about like a sparrow on a twig. Something’s wrong with him. Just lift down that candle so I can see into the corner there.”
The boy moved the light, but made no other effort to help. The doctor’s voice was peculiarly cold and business-like, the voice of the professional, a new note to Frank. Its quality disturbed him as much as the words.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Did you ever hear that he had a heart weakness?”
“No. Do you think he has?”
“I know it. I’ve thought so all along from various signs—indications a doctor would notice. Then that girl Bessie—the chambermaid who does my room—told me that, two years ago here, he had an attack which almost ended him. She said he wouldn’t allow it spoken of, but they—the household—were immensely relieved when he brought a doctor this summer. Do move that candle so I can see. There’s a box in here that I think may be it.”
It was, and he backed out, pulling it along the floor, Frank retreating before him, The boy said nothing; the words sank to his conscience, biting into it like an acid. Gaynes, kneeling by the box, went on:
“I warn you now he may go out at any moment, quick as that candle would if you blew on it. Those attacks recur, and at his age the next one may be the last.”
Frank stared down at the top of the doctor’s head. His face, illumined by the candle he held, looked grotesquely changed, shocked and troubled, all the gayety stricken out of it. A surge of condemning shame rose in him. It was horrible—to hear such a thing now, after last night. He hated Gaynes for saying it; if the man had spoken of the will, he would have struck him.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asked.
“Because I was only sure myself after Bessie told me, and that was yesterday morning.”
“Isn’t this kind of thing bad for him—all this fuss and bother? Oughtn’t he to be kept quiet?”
“Yes, it would be better, especially when you see the effect it’s having on him—the way he is to-night.”
He pulled a metal pail out of the box, the bottle’s neck protruding from a bed of ice.
“Then we'll break it up, put an end to it, go back to Hinterland.”
The doctor drew himself up, his hands resting on the sides of the pail, upon which he kept his eyes.
“How can you do that now, at this hour, with everything ready?”
“I didn’t mean to-night, but to-morrow in the morning. We can fake up a reason. Somebody can be ill.”
“Yes, that’s feasible, and it’s the best thing to do. We could arrange it with your sister. She or Lottie—or any of us—can have a pain or a sore throat or something, and I'll come in as the doctor and say they’ve got to go back to the house.”
“That’s right. You fix it up with Mary after supper. Go for a stroll. I’ll keep Blatch here. Thank Heaven you told me! He’s worn himself out trying to give us a good time, and it’s up to us now to do something for him. But be careful not to give anything away. Let’s be as jolly as we can this evening—make it go off well.”
Frank went into the kitchen to help the girls, and the doctor was left, still kneeling, his hands on the sides of the pail. For a few moments he rested motionless, his eyes fixed on the pointed flame of the candle, his breath coming quickly. Then he rose, stole to the door, and looked into the larger room. No one was there.
He carried the pail to the side table where the glasses stood. Here he set it on the floor, very carefully, that here might be no ring of its metal on the stone. Righting himself, he looked about, listening, hearing the voices from the kitchen, the soft night whisperings through the open window. He felt his heart beating in his throat and the palms of his hands moist, and while his inner vision was focused: on one predominating fact, his outer senses were aware of the faintest sounds, the most insignificant objects.
Very delicately, as one who touches a thing of infinite worth, he took a glass and moved it to the corner of the table. He paused and listened, his eyes sliding from the kitchen door to the entrance; in the hush that held the place, he could hear his heart beating. Assured, he slipped one hand. into his pocket and drew it out upcurled round a small bottle. With the hand dropped by his side, he waited—the portentous, shuddering moment of decision—heard the girls’ voices as if coming from a vast distance, fine, but amazingly distinct, saw the wild flowers on the window sill, the freaked and spotted design of their petals. His glance traveled back to the glass; the dropped hand lifted. It trembled, and its trembling shook the liquid from the bottle’s mouth, made. it fall in a spattering trickle into the glass.
“After it was done, he was dizzy and had to hold to the table edge, struggling with the labored thickness of his breathing. He kept his eyes on the glass, saw nothing else and saw that as something enormous, looming. at him through darkness, the one fact in his consciousness. It took some minutes for him to come back to where it attained its true proportions, receded through diminishing stages, grew smaller and smaller, and finally took its place on the corner of the table. It was as if he were emerging from another element, and he looked about the room, seeing it as something new, a room he had been familiar with and that now had a strange aspect.
When he felt master of himself, he began to move the glasses to the dining table, one at each place. He tried to compel his hands to steadiness, his steps to a brisk lightness, Alert for interruptions, he fell into attitudes, his head cocked, his eyes studying the table. Growing reassured, he attempted to whistle an air, found he had not sufficient breath, and hummed it. This he could do and he moved back and forth to a crooned accompaniment. He was almost calm when he put the last glass by Blatch’s plate, seeing that the film of watery liquid was invisible against the crystal bowl.
He had just finished when his ear caught a step on the path outside, and Blatch appeared in the doorway. If the young man’s lips smiled stiffly, his voice was clear and steady:
“Everything’s ready. I have the champagne here, waiting to open. it when you give the sign.”
Blatch nodded his approval, then moved to the center of the room, calling:
“Come, young people. The evening’s getting on, and the host is waiting.”
Answering cries came from the kitchen; a moment, just a moment, and all would be ready. He went to the door, a clamor of voices greeting him, expostulating. It was not his job; he mustn’t come in. But he did, and was pushed out, threatened with punishment, and retreated, vociferating his commands to hurry. They tried to obey, emerging with last dishes, scurrying back and forth, colliding with one another, with Blatch, their laughter bursting out and his rising above it, explosive and shrill. An exhilaration which had been growing as the dusk deepened and the candlelight glowed stronger had reached its climax. The walls of the room, now framing a gleaming space, held within their inclosure a febrile excitement. It seemed to surge against them, to mill and churn inside their restraining barrier like a fierce nerve pressure in the containing envelope of a human body.
At last they were ready, the finishing touches given, a general move made toward the table. Blatch halted them with an upraised hand.
“Wait—there’s one thing more. Lottie wanted the doors shut. A good idea, as the night air is chilly. And I myself want to take a look at you—to see the effect from above.” He pointed to the gallery. “There’s never before been so charming a party in the fort, and I want to take a bird’s-eye view of it—an old crank’s whim that I know you'll grant.”
He moved to the entrance and drew one of the doors from the wall, Frank running to the other. The two great leaves of iron swung slowly outward, Blatch slipping between them. His face, looking in peeringly, showed for a moment; then they clanged together on the threshold, filling the air with sonorous reverberations.
“There!” cried Lottie. “We’re shut in at last. Let’s see how it looks,” and she pirouetted about on her toes.
A grating sound, short and harsh, broke through the metallic ringing that the doors, shaking from the impact, still gave out. Only Mary and Frank heard it, the doctor drawing a bottle from the ice and Lottie, in the center of the floor, watching the gallery for Blatch’s appearance. Mary threw a startled glance at her brother.
“Is he locking us in?” she said.
The boy, with a laugh, strolled back toward Lottie.
“Maybe—it sounds like it. He’s full of jokes and nonsense to-day.”
She followed him, and they stood in a group, gazing up. The doctor did not join them. He was waiting by the dining table, the bottle he held resting on its edge, his figure motionless, his eyes fixed, as if fallen into reverie.
A shaft of evening light fell palely across the shadowed end of the gallery.
The silence grew oppressive. Frank broke it: “Well, do we look as charming as you thought we would?”
“There he comes,” said Lottie. Her voice was low, holding a sort of hushed expectation. The clang of the closing door followed it, the shadows gathered again, and Blatch came forward and stood by the railing.
With his hands pressed on it, his shoulders raised, he looked down, the yellow radiance from below. gilding his brow and chin, accentuating the darkness of his eye sockets. For a moment, he said nothing, and the silence grew oppressive. Frank broke it:
“Well, do we look as charming as you thought we would?”
“Even more so—the three children of Alice Brunel and Alexander Harmon.”
His voice fell low, the words dropping in slow deliberation as if rising from lower wells of thought, bubbles from a hidden current. Gaynes looked up quickly, suddenly roused to attention. Without knowing why she did it, Mary leaned forward and caught Lottie’s arm, drawing the girl to her. The voice came again, its musing note gone, clear and incisive:
His small shape seemed to expand, hovering over them, baleful and terrible.“Last night you thought my plans for your future had reached their culmination. But you were mistaken. There is a plan yet to be accomplished—the final one, the consummation. It is the reason for my interest in you, the reason why I brought you to Hinterland and here to-night to the fort.”
He leaned over the railing, his hands outstretched, his shadow sliding like a dark portent up the wall behind. His small shape seemed to expand, hovering over them, baleful and terrible.
“You are the children of a rotten breed, a breed that must be wiped out. No such blood as yours should perpetuate itself, contaminating purer strains, sending its poison on to future generations. That is my plan, my final plan—extermination. I am your executioner. Under this building there is a bundle of high per cent dynamite, placed there by myself. No other human being knows it; no one can come to your aid. At sunrise to-morrow, a clock attachment will send the exploding spark into the cap, and then, ah, then, I will have one righteous deed to my credit! 1 will have rid the world of a menace to its honor and beauty and joy.”
CHAPTER X.
Adamson had moved from Fifth Avenue to humble quarters in a house downtown. His room looked out on a yard backing up against another yard and flanked by still more yards crossed by clotheslines and divided by fences along which gloomily pensive cats picked a precarious way.
The change affected him little, for he was one in whose life material detail played a small part. Besides, he had matter of moment on his mind. The “job,” which was to lift the embargo on his silence, was yet unfound, and he chafed at an idleness that wore on his primed energies and passionate hopes. He wanted to get it without the aid Blatch had proffered, for his pride was in arms. He still smarted at the memory of his curt dismissal, and when he thought of what the summer would have been had he gone to Hinterland, the smart burned to an angry resentment.
He wrote to Mary, a letter that he felt was stiff and formal, but his leashed heart held his hand. Then, one morning, he found her answer on the hall table, and felt the day’s sunshine flood his soul. It was not like his, but simple and frank, full of descriptions of the good times at Hinterland, of regrets that he wasn’t there.
He wanted to answer it at once, but was fearful of seeming too precipitate; worried through a week, decided that common politeness demanded an acknowledgment, and wrote one. After that, he made calculations as to how soon he might expect a reply, and while he waited, a hot wave rolled in from the West and settled over the city.
At midday, the streets were glaring clefts, holding the heat between incandescent walls. The passers-by fared slowly, keeping to the rim of shade along the house fronts. In the parks, where the leaves hung motionless from motionless branches, people sprawled on the benches, limp and devitalized. They watched with dull eyes the spectacle of the traffic roaring by with its terrible energy, beaten upon, scorched, and seared by the sun’s remorseless fury. Adamson went on his quest, but it was a bad time; the men he wanted to see were out of town. He came home with a lagging step, his clothes sticking to his damp body, his face beaded. He was angrily conscious of fatigue and the first creeping approach of depression. Then, one evening, there was a letter again on the hall table, end he forgot that such things as discomfort or discouragement existed in the world.
After he had read it, he dropped into a chair by the window and stared at the opposite wall. It was like the first one, a record of joyous days, but for one short paragraph—an allusion to Blatch. She expressed a fear that he was doing too much and tiring himself out. She had noticed that he was irritable, had been sharp with the guides, and the day before had flown out in violent anger against Gabriel for slipping and tilting the canoe. She was uneasy—thought he was exhausting himself in his efforts to amuse them and wondered if it would not be wise for them to shorten their visit. What did Mr. Adamson think?
As the young man pondered, the darkness fell, dense and stifling; the small room was like an oven. There was nothing especially disturbing in what she had said. He had seen Blatch give way to bursts of temper. But Gabriel was a favorite. To be angry with Gabriel for a trivial mishap——
He got up with a smothered exclamation and lit the light. His thoughts were running away with him, filling him with preposterous alarms. He took up a book and forced himself to read. In the night, he waked from sleep, coming suddenly to consciousness like an animal. He could see the lights in windows across the yards where people had risen from a tormented repose. The memory of Mary’s letter sprang at him like a live thing, coiled and waiting. It had a sinister power then, and he turned and threw out his arm, feeling the hot, moist air from the window.
“It’s the heat,” he muttered, digging his head into the pillow. “I’m worried about the d—d work, and it’s got on my nerves.”
In the morning, it was different; his dark unrest had gone, vanished with the friendly light. As he dressed, he wondered at himself, looked at his hand to see if it shook. Some quirk of the nerves, as he’d thought; he’d probably walked about too much in the sun. He had always said he was impervious to temperature, but he wasn’t as hard as he had been; softened by too much luxury was his trouble. There was no fear of that any more; he would have plenty of time now to train back to the form of his college days.
He did not answer her letter at once; the question required consideration. It was evident that she was relying on his advice, and he was insufficiently informed to give it. He finally decided to write to Tom and find out just how things were. If the old man thought Blatch was overdoing it, there would be plenty of time to tell her to invent an excuse and come home.
He was some days reaching the decision, and on Thursday afternoon came back to his rooms, intending to write to Tom that evening after dinner. A thunderstorm was threatening, hanging over the city like a bulging dark pall, pressing out the air as it swung lower and lower. It was the breaking of the hot wave, a moment of still breathlessness; objects were strangely distinct under an eerie gray light.
Adamson stood in his window, seeing faces in other windows, women hastily pulling clothes off the lines, the first large drops on the flags, the passage of a tremulous breeze, and across the sky a rolling mutter of thunder.
He watched the storm come—the onslaught of the rain, straight white lances that broke on the flags in spray, darkness suddenly soaked with livid light, and the tremendous crackling crash of the thunder. He could see the yards vividly revealed, then gone, coming and going, a picture flashed and hidden. It was like the rhythmic beat of some mighty throb of life, the pulsings of a heart in despair and joy—blackness, illumination, blackness, a titanic stutter of rage, and the falling of torrential tears.
He stood by the window till it was over, twilight shining on wet pavements, the air cooled and full of the sound of dripping water.
The spectacle had engrossed him to the forgetfulness of a more practical matter—his dinner, It was past the time; he was hungry, and the best things on the menu were gone if you were late. He snatched up his hat and went vaulting down the stairs. The hall was almost dark, one bead of gas trembling from the chandelier. By its feeble flicker, he saw the white square of a letter on the table and was going by—no letter had any interest for him except one from Hinterland which was not yet due—when he swerved back and picked it up. If not from Mary, it was from Hinterland, addressed in the writing of old Tom. Turning the gas higher, he stood under its light, opened the envelope, and read as follows:
Dear Mr. Adamson: I take the liberty of writing to you, being worried and not rightly sure of what I ought to do, hoping that you might give me some advice. It’s this: I don’t think Mr. Blatch is well. He's uncommon ugly in the temper and unreasonable—not the way he always is, but fierce-like—and he doesn’t sleep. There’s nights that his light’s lit till morning. It's the Harmon children, as I told you, but it’s worse since he’s been up here. Not that he’s cross to them. He’s always as sweet as honey—acts like he couldn’t do enough for them. But they ain’t good for him, Mr. Adamson. They do him harm. I don’t like to say it, and I wouldn’t to any one but you, but they ought to be got away from him. He'd get right again if he was free of the sight and the thought of them.
I can’t rest easy up here, so far from any one, and I'd be obliged if you'd. drop me a word, or ask Mr. Denby to, telling me what you think I'd better do. If, between you, you could make up some plan to get the Harmon children away, I'd be satisfied to go along as usual, for with them gone, I could get him quieted down and straightened out.
I hope you won't think I’m presuming in writing this, but I’m old, Mr. Adamson, and with these young people here, I don’t like the responsibility. If his mind were to really go astray, you couldn't tell what might happen, and it’s his mind I’m afraid of. Respectfully yours,
Thomas McGraw.
Adamson mechanically folded the letter and looked up. He looked at his own face in the mirror above the table, his living eyes meeting the reflected ones in a fixed stare. He stood thus for some moments, his intelligence suspended, his being surrendered to an overmastering dread. He emerged from it to a consciousness of his face, a pale blot floating on the mirror’s surface, the paralysis of his apprehension breaking, thought power resumed. The first fact he recognized was that he must act on his own initiative, not bother with Denby, difficult to locate and useless when found; the second was that he must get the Harmons out of Hinterland as soon as it could be done.
This stood forth as the one immediate necessity, to be put through before anything else was considered. He saw the space between New York and Hinterland, and his mind knew only one thought—he must bridge it and go to Mary. That brought him to the level of concrete things, and he looked at his watch. Twenty minutes past seven, and the train for Toronto started at eight. He could make it.
A scrambling rush in his own room followed, clothes thrown into a suit case, then a race along the street. for a taxi. He did make it, and in the Pullman, his activities temporarily ended, he felt the insidious, stealthy return of his dread. He fought it off like a monster and concentrated on a study of time-tables. He had always made the trip in the leisurely manner prescribed by Blatch, with breaks in the journey, recuperative stop-overs. By the electric light in his berth, he worked out a quicker passage, dependent on a close connection in the morning with an early northbound train to Norcross. Also, he could speed up the canoe trip, usually occupying a whole day. At St. Hilaire, he would get Gaston Lafarge, the best guide in the region, and with one passenger and no baggage, they could cover the distance in half the time. All going well, he ought to reach Hinterland Saturday morning.
His train was late, but he made the connection, hurtling through the crowded depot and leaping on a rear platform. In the car, he slumped down in a seat, panting in deep relief, experiencing a first relaxation of the strain. He relinquished himself to it, sprawled in easeful limpness, his mind quiet as a rundown mechanism. He had not slept the night before, and he dropped into a doze, woke to a normal clearness, and began to think about his arrival at Hinterland.
It was the first time he had given any attention to that end of the adventure. Refreshed by rest, his nerves steadied, the hobgoblin terrors of the night before had diminished, and he began to see the situation with the cold lucidity of common sense. Tom had asked only for his advice, not for his presence, and here he was en route, to be there to-morrow morning. He stirred uneasily in his seat and tried to think how he would account for his appearance, how he would satisfy Blatch’s politely ironical surprise. He had been discharged, sent about his business, and without word of warning, he was suddenly going to burst into their midst, bent on the singular errand of taking away Blatch’s guests.
He saw himself meeting his former employer, making explanations, and could think of none that would be plausible and convincing. Only a matter of life or death would call a man, undesired and uninvited, to such a place at such a distance. Towns and villages flashed by, rich fields gradually giving way to stretches of woodland, and the more he thought, the more impossible his position became. He experienced the sickly discomfiture of one who, rushing on a quest in headlong excitement, finds his quest a chimera and hears his mortification greeted by mocking laughter.
His exasperation boiled into futile accusations of himself. He had been a fool, had gone off at half-cock. What he should have done was to write to Mary and tell her to come home. She was ready, waiting for such instructions, and would have left at once. That was the rational procedure; it would have roused no suspicion in Blatch and have straightened out the situation. He mused on it in gloomy disgust, suddenly saw it as still practicable, and drew himself up, his perturbed face clearing. He would write to Mary to-night from Norcross, tell her to address her answer to the King Edward Hotel in Toronto, and go back there to-morow morning and wait for her.
His heart was light when, that evening at Norcross, he dropped the letter in the box, and in his hotel room he slept the sleep of exhaustion. In the morning he walked leisurely to the station to take the return train to Toronto. There were few people on the platform, only a party of men, arrayed in strange habiliments and surrounded by a group of guides. Adamson knew the type well, city “sports,” moving with pomp and circumstance upon the woods for a rejuvenating taste of outdoor life.
He was turning toward the ticket-office window when one of the guides saw him and ran forward in welcome. It was Gaston Lafarge, who, taking it for granted the young man was on his way to Hinterland, deplored the fact that his services were already engaged. The “sports,” a party of rich men from Detroit, had gathered in all the available guides from the neighborhood and even as far as St. Hilaire. Lafarge was afraid Mr. Adamson might not find any one at St. Hilaire to take him to Hinterland.
The information had a curious effect on Adamson—it rewakened his desire to go there. It rose in sudden insistence and, startled, he looked at the man, not speaking, his glance darkly disturbed. Lafarge regretted the possibility of delay, not only for Mr. Adamson’s sake, but because they might need him at Hinterland. A few days before, Jean Baptiste had come down from there for express packages, and had said that Monsieur Blatch was queer, very queer.
There was a movement among the “sports.” One of them called Lafarge, who, turning to go, looked back and, touching his forehead with a forefinger, said:
“Always been a little téte monté, le vieux. Not right up there, and now worse. Jean Baptiste said so.”
“Where have I the best chance at St. Hilaire to get a man?” Adamson called back.
“Maybe at Bonnets’—he has a boy—and the Indian hangars on the river.”
The way train, crawling along the northern branch that terminated at St. Hilaire, deposited Adamson there at noon. He spent two hours looking for a guide—at Bonnets’ and in the Indian shacks along the river—offering any price, but could find no one. Rumors of Blatch’s “queerness” reached him. Jean Baptiste had evidently been garrulous. He finally decided to buy a canoe and paddle himself and, at the one store which dealt in such wares and did a thriving business with Hinterland, was succored by the patron, who offered him the services of an Indian boy employed there. It was mid-afternoon before they started.
Adamson’s memories of the long water trip were of leisurely, delightful floating into the wilderness, a string of canoes slipping along the shining river, talk and laughter, lunch on the bank, portages where the guests followed the stream and the guides shouldered the boats. This time it was a fierce progress made at top speed with strained muscles, a race against haunting fears. Looking ahead, he had no mind to note the current’s clear brownness, the trees glassily mirrored, the upward soar and languid flight of a heron. Each point was a goal to be gained, tufted birches hanging over a rocky cape a mark upon which to keep his eyes, measure the diminishing interval, reach, and pass. The river, glazed by sunlight, stretched before him, a track along which he sped like a runner flying to a call for help.
The two paddles rose and dipped in unison, the double arc of drops scattering with a dry patter along the stream’s surface. The canoe, a reflected duplicate meeting its keel, cut the water in a clean rift, the blades of the paddles sending up crystal bubbles, driving it forward in a rippling swoop. Adamson in the bow, the Indian in the stern, spoke not a word. Silent as dead men, they moved through the stillness, like a pictured craft sliding against a pictured background.
Adamson in the bow, the Indian in the stern, spoke not a word. Silent as dead men, they moved through the stillness, like a pictured craft sliding against a pictured background.
The afternoon declined to evening; clouds turning rosy floated on the water’s breast; birds soared jubilant against a glowing sky. The river narrowed to an agitated current, broken by rocks and laced with silvery eddies. The Indian shipped his oar, drew a pole from the bottom, and stood erect. The canoe, caught in a churning tumult of water, charged forward, the pole’s iron tip knocking among the rocks, swinging to right and left, steadying the nutshell craft, letting it go in a careening downward flight, the lips of waves breaking along its edge. Then came a portage through trees, over ferns and sedgy grasses; and beyond that a lake, a polished expanse, holding the colors of the sunset. The boat slid across it like a small, dark arrow driven into a world of gold.
There were other lakes, gleaming between fretted rims, the stream again, slants of fading light, banks that were condensing into darkness, a deeper pungency of wood scents, a dimming of the sunset’s splendid ceremonial, veils of gray, and night coming. Then a new light, a whiteness as of the North’s snows reflected in the heavens, and the great ribbons of the aurora began to play across the sky. They rose and ran to the zenith, subsided and shot up, wove in and out, the rays of an unseen, colorless sun, the streaming hair of some giant goddess, dancing in a pale ecstasy. Adamson had often watched them, awed by their cold mystery. Now they seemed an expression of his mood, troubled by an unrest like his own, hurrying him on, signaling a wild distress.
He drove his paddle deeper, and in the leaping radiance the canoe slipped along a glistening path banked by black walls. It seemed endless; would they never get there? As the thought formed in his mind, the voice of the Indian rose from behind him:
“Come to lake now.”
The river widened in a white glimmer, the boat stole with a whispering ripple round a point, and the lake lay before them. Adamson shipped his paddle, struck a match, and looked at his watch. It was ten minutes past eleven; it would be midnight before they reached the house.
For the first time, he was conscious of fatigue and, with the paddle across the bow, rested on it and let his glance travel to the place where Hinterland stood. They were still too far to see the lights, and, crouched in drooping weariness, he looked out over the lake where the aurora played as upon a surface of ice. It was all solid darkness and wavering light, blackness under shifting gleams, held in a brooding silence, the world, unconquered and unchallenged, absorbed in its own contemplation.
The canoe shot from the wooded inlet into the wider waters, and Adamson let his eyes sweep the shore, traversing its outline which lay like an ebony frame to a bright and shining mirror. Suddenly they stopped, and he emitted a smothered sound. At the limit of sight, pricking through the darkness in a yellow spark, was a tiny golden point.
“The fort!” he muttered, and as if the spark had kindled a warming fire in him, his foreboding lifted, the coil of fear round his heart melted. “They’re camping over the week-end. He wouldn’t do that unless he was well and in good spirits. It’s all right, thank God! It’s all right!”
He seized the paddle with a hand vitalized by a new strength; he did not notice the stiffness of his arm or the ache of his wearied body. As the canoe cut its oblique course to the opposite shore, he whistled softly to himself. When the lights of Hinterland shone through the trees, the explanatory scene with Blatch was already hovering, like a persistent, unlayable ghost, in the back of his mind.
CHAPTER XI.
At the moment when Adamson saw the fort’s light, the party assembled there were as dumb and motionless as if sculptured in stone. Their bodies had succumbed to a dreadful exhaustion, their minds ceased to act, and the place was so still that the delicate sounds from outside—the lap of the water, the crackling of underbrush under the pad of an animal foot—came distinct through the windows.
Night had filled the room with shadows, thickening to a brownish penumbra under the roof, hovering in the corners. As wafts of air swayed the lights, the shadows moved, stole forward, and slid back, fearful and uncertain. Along the wall, the line of lit doorways still shone, bright little pictures hanging on the gloom, their relation with reality gone. On the dining table, the candles were burning low, gutterings of wax running down to the cloth, long wicks curling over and sending up skeins of smoke. Under their illumination, the table, untouched, still waiting, was a lustrous center, giving out gleams and sparklings as the fitful airs stirred the flames.
Mary sat near it; Lottie crouched on the ground beside her with hidden face. Their figures were a block of darkness, the wavering glow gilding the folds of their garments, their hands and hair. Through the windows, the light of the aurora fell on the floor in two pale and quivering patches, and on one of these the elder girl’s eyes were fixed. The huddled shape against the threshold was Frank, prone after furious onslaughts on the doors. Against the far window, Gaynes’ silhouette showed, his hands gripping the bars, the reflections from the water playing on his face.
In the gallery Blatch sat against the balustrade, looking down, his elbow on the railing, one hand curved over his eyes. He had an air of absorbed interest, his hand shutting out the glare of the table that he might concentrate his vision on the picture below.
This lull had come after hours of turmoil and clamor. Into the encircling silence, fearful sounds had broken, shattering the woods’ night dreams, running across the water in the wail of the lost. The fort had rung to cries, cursings, objurgations. There had been moments when, clustered together at the windows, the prisoners had called to the unanswering solitude, hoarse animal shouts from the men, the girls’ voices rising higher in tenuous screams. Blatch had listened, and when they broke and came again into his line of vision, had leaned forward, following their moving figures, which ran hither and thither, clung together, separated, lifting beseeching hands and contorted faces to him.
At intervals he ceased his observation and paced back and forth along the gallery. His step was a measured, majestic strut, his glance fixed in solemn exaltation. Like one withdrawn, dedicated to a sacred purpose, he paid no heed to their ravings, implacable in the rapt resolution of his madness. Now and then, attracted by a shriller cry or a more passionate appeal, he paused to give a momentary attention. His hand on the railing, he seemed to be less listening than studying the speaker’s face, as if its transformation roused a somber curiosity.
His march along the gallery had not begun till their first outburst of panic had spent itself. During that, he had awarded them a close and piercing scrutiny. As an entomologist might study some rare insects, he had followed their frantic rushings back and forth. They had been like rats penned in a trap, making disorganized dashes this way and that, into the cubicles, out again, then into the kitchen, huddled there, the men wrenching at the window bars. It was hopeless, and they emerged, a line of fleeing shapes that coalesced into grouped darkness, broke into separate particles, circling the room in distracted scurryings, their shadows leaping on the walls. Once he heard the doors resounding to a concerted assault, the ring of the metal answering the impact of blows. As their cries swelled above the clangor, he made a movement of impatience and, drawing back from the railing, looked at his watch.
He had only once addressed them—when they had gathered on the hearth-stone. There had been a low-toned consultation, and the doctor had crawled into the fireplace, feeling upward for the chimney mouth. Then Blatch had spoken, quietly and courteously as to a stranger needing directions in an unfamiliar locality; in the general restoration, the chimney had been rebuilt, and the flue was too narrow to permit the passage of a human body.
It had been their last effort. After that hope and energy had died. Spasmodic outbreaks came at intervals; Frank had hurled himself against the doors only to sink prostrate, Lottie’s agonized sobbing had beaten on a growing stillness. She had forgotten her lover; he was a stranger from whom she turned to the sister who stood, in this sudden collapse of the world, as the one being to cling to for courage and look to for help.
Foreboding had risen in Mary with the grating of the key in the lock. When Blatch had first spoken from the gallery, there had come a sickening rush of it, and after that she had been a shell holding terror. It had possessed her, paralyzed her brain, driven her with the others in the insensate stampede of panic. She realized nothing but the inclosing walls and death in a frightful form hastening to claim them. In a blurred distraction of anguish, she had cried to him, besought, reviled, commanded, and had seen him pass and repass through the gallery shadows, unmoved in his tranced alienation.
Then, in the succeeding silence, the inner tumult began to subside, her suspended faculties to function. She had been like a swimmer, submerged in strangling depths; who slowly rises to where he can breathe again and knows his mastery restored over the obsessing urge of instinct. She had to fight to get back to this mastery, steady her thought to a central point, hold it there, seeing nothing outside its radius. Sitting with Lottie’s arms about her, she felt strength come from their pressure, laid her hands on the girl’s, and drew from the contact a fortifying current. As sight pierces a lifting fog and deciphers salient objects, her mental vision caught at and then saw two facts—the possibility that Blatch, mad though he was, might suffer a change of heart, and her own power to weaken his purpose.
She stirred and loosened Lottie’s hands. It was the first movement she had made for over an hour, and Blatch, alert, drew his curved palm lower that he might better see her. She rose and walked to the middle of the room, there came to a stand, and looked up. Blatch’s glance had followed her, from the shade of his hand his shifting eyeballs gleaming as they moved.
The frenzied desperation of her earlier appeals was gone; she spoke with the persuasive address of an advocate before a judge. Her plea was their helplessness, their guiltlessness of any evil design, their trust in him as friend and benefactor. The doctor loosed his hold on the window bars and listened; Frank propped himself against the door and turned a white face toward her. When she paused, Blatch, his attitude unchanged, said:
“Well done, Mary Harmon! A moving and plausible argument!”
His face showed no softening of its sinister preoccupation. She forced down a surge of disintegrating dread and lost something of her fiercely won composure, When she again spoke, her voice held the vibration of a leashed and guarded vehemence fighting for expression. The grievance he had against their parents—evidently bitter, or he would not have visited it upon their innocent heads—was unknown to them. Let them learn what it was, and let them work out the debt. They would dedicate their lives to righting the wrongs he had suffered. They were young; they were willing to make any sacrifice, to pay any price he asked—any price except the one which made reparation impossible.
This time he made no answer, and silence closed on her words, a complete suspension of sound, as if the night held its breath to listen. It was broken by Frank, crawling across the floor and, on his knees beside her, adding his plea to hers. Blatch’s glance rested on him for a moment, absent, absorbed, then went back to the girl.
“Have you any more to say?” he asked. “
She raised her face, strained it up toward him uplifted on the stem of her neck; her hands went to her heart, clenched and pressing there. Yes, she had one more thing to say—a compromise; let her stay and the younger ones go. Be merciful to them; take her to make that atonement which he felt his injuries demanded. They would pledge themselves to silence; they would offer it in return for their lives. They could be trusted; this night’s experience would mark them forever. Give them their liberty, and she would say no more; would bow her head in submission and agree to the fate he had ordained.
Blatch pushed back his chair and rose, looking down, frowning and morose, at her. She stood pressing upward, her energies, spiritual, physical, reaching out at him like tangible forces that were dragging him to agreement.
“If I spared any Harmon,” he said, “it would be you. Where does it come from, the courage and the heart? To what ancestral fineness do you throw back, which here to-night, with death waiting, comes to the surface?”
She saw relenting in the words and stretched out her hands.
“Do what I ask! Let them go!”
He shook his head.
“No. The strain returns, subsides, but reappears, wells from the dead to the living, goes on through the ages carrying pollution.” He raised his voice and struck on the railing with his hand. “No, my purpose is fixed! All go—all end! If God fails to care for His creatures, man must.”
He turned from the balustrade and resumed his pacing, and Mary went back to her chair. She sat down, Lottie’s head against her knee, motionless as she had been before, her eyes again on the patch of dancing light. The immobility of a vital concentration held her, an assembling and focusing of her forces in aid of a hope that persisted. She had detected a wavering of irresolution in Blatch, a moment when he had hesitated and considered. She had pierced through his insane imperviousness and touched a place where something of the living spirit survived. She would call upon it again, compel it by the dominance of her own, break down his resistance by a strength that was yet unspent. She took no tally of her powers, knew only the determination to conquer.
She did not see the doctor’s figure drift from the window to Frank’s side, the two shadows blend, then move across the floor to the kitchen. In its lit interior, they stood murmuring, and presently emerged carrying a table. It was done so quietly that she was not aware of any change in their positions till a whispering voice told her to move.
“What for?” she whispered back.
Frank’s face, drawn and sunken, bent close to hers.
“We're going to try and get to the gallery—put this table on the big one and then a chair. Gaynes thinks we can reach the crossbeam at the corner and climb up.”
“Get at him?”
“Yes—get the key of that upper door. He has it. He said so this afternoon, and I heard him unlock the door when he went in.”
“He'll see you. He keeps watching, watching, all the time.”
“We're going to fool him. I go first, size it up, and say it can’t be done. Then Gaynes says he’ll take the risk and goes. If he makes it, Blatch’ll try to push him off, but if Gaynes once gets a foothold, he’ll stick. Blatch is no match for him.”
She measured the distance from the floor to the crossbeam that supported the end of the gallery.
“Can you do it?”
“We don’t know, but we'll try. It’s a chance, and any chance is better than waiting.”
The doctor was lifting the candlesticks from the table and putting them on the floor. He was shaking so that his movements were uncertain, the stone emitting resonant sounds as the bases of the candlesticks tapped against it. Then he looked, baffled, at the laden table and from it questioning to Frank. The boy gave a sweeping gesture and a whispered command:
“Pull it off. We can’t go slow, and we can’t hide it from him.”
Gaynes seized the edges of the cloth, gathered them together, and with a backward wrench tore it off. The glass and china crashed to the floor, the sound buffeted from wall to wall. He and Frank trampled through the débris, lifted the table, and carried it to the corner below the crossbeam. Mary looked up, and saw Blatch leaning over from the gallery, craning his neck to see what they were doing.
Upon the dining table the smaller one from the kitchen was placed, and on top of that the chair. From its seat the crossbeam was within reach. They saw it, and felt their hearts swell with a stifling excitement, and feared to raise their eyes to the watching face above. No one spoke, and Frank climbed the rude ladder, stood swaying, and then, with a despairing gesture, slid downward to the floor, crying the prearranged words:
“It can’t be done! It’s too far!”
Blatch said nothing and made no attempt to draw back. They were conscious of his figure against the railing, its immobility suggesting confidence in his own security. The doctor moved forward, scanned the edifice, and said:
“Maybe it can’t, but I’ll try it. Better to die now from a fractured skull than wait here like a rat in a trap.”
He began to climb up, very slowly, with an assumption of difficulty in maintaining his balance. His hand was on the chair, and still Blatch made no move, leaning forward to watch with the interested detachment of an unconcerned spectator. Their hope grew into something terrible, an upward pressure like a geyser bursting to freedom; the throb of their hearts was like the strained panting of exhausted engines. The doctor, his eyes on the crossbeam, climbed to the chair and drew himself erect. Blatch took a step backward and spoke:
“What you’re attempting, Doctor Gaynes, is hazardous and not worth the risk. If it is my death you want, you may have it without more trouble. Having accomplished my design, there is no need for me to live, and I have no desire to do so.” He thrust his hand into his pocket and drew out a key which he held up. “Here is the key of the gallery door, which I locked as I came in.” He made another step backward and flung it through a loop-hole opening behind him. “I am content—in fact happy—to die with you, to make an end of all, the past and the present.”
Lottie’s shriek rose in a fine-drawn, dolorous note, cutting a deathlike silence. It was followed by the clattering fall of the doctor, sliding, limp as a piece of cloth, down the table edges to the floor. He lay there a moment, as if stunned, then picked himself up and moved with long, gliding steps to the door of one of the cubicles. Holding to the door frame, he steadied himself, drew his body upright, took a deep breath, and entered the little room. By the light of the candle, he took from his pocket the vial from which he had shaken the liquid into Blatch’s glass. He put it to his lips, swallowed, blew out the light, and dropped on the bed. With a groping hand, he tried to pull the blanket over his body, but the hand lost its direction, swayed, jerked, and fell.
That vision of the key flying through the loophole had demolished Mary’s high-built house of hope. From its pinnacle, she had fallen in a darkling rush, plunged downward amid its stark desolation. Her courage, so gallantly maintained, her steeled resolution, had broken, crumbled, and with their crumbling, she had given up, knew herself beaten, her efforts in vain. The reaction was complete, a collapse that suspended the activities of brain and nerves, that left her benumbed, as if some deadening fluid had entered her veins and permeated her being. Her body lay fiberless in the chair, her head supported by its back, the light of the candles falling on her upturned face. The ravages that years of suffering might have caused were graven on it. It was suddenly old; the shriveling of the tissues, the haggard hollows that time would bring, had marked it in a few hours.
It lay like a dead face on the growing darkness, clear, then obscured, as the candle flames shot up and flickered to extinction. The thickening shadows drew out from the walls, encroaching on the lights, moving nearer, an encompassing substance upon which the face floated like a drowned woman’s on a dim pool.
Blatch saw it thus—detached, an illumined object amid gathering shades—and his eyes, blankly resting on it, widened and fixed in a sudden horrified intentness. What he looked at was familiar, not as Mary Harmon’s face, but as his own. The sunken orbits, the lined forehead, the mouth, lip folded thin on lip—it was a mask that had looked back at him from mirrors, withering with the years, changing to the grim and blighted devastation he saw in the face of the girl below. He gave a sound, a little clucking pulse from the throat, and his jaw dropped, hanging to let out the strangled breath.
The silence was as deep as it had been, but now there was no hope in the Harmon children to make them heed and hear. He climbed the railing, dropped to the gallery’s edge, and swung down, his feet feeling for the chair. They touched it, steadied on it, and, loosing his hold, he descended noiseless to the floor. His movements were light and agile as a cat’s. The girl had not heard him, and sat rigid, her eyes closed. Beside her, he put his hand on her shoulder and shook her. The opening of her eyes was like the wakening of a sleeper, the lids rising slowly over a gaze filmed and vacant. In the great surprise she was awaiting, no smaller ones could have place. Staring at him, her look was without question or intelligence, resting blankly on his face.
When he spoke, her expression remained unchanged. His madness, which had brought them to this pass, might show in any fantastic form; what he did or said had no value, was part of the hour’s goblin unreality. His words came to her as from a far distance, a thread of voice carrying a question that gave a last wild grotesqueness to the phantasmagoria of the night:
“When were you born?”
She made no answer, and the gripping hand shook her shoulder again. Its violence roused her, and through clearing mists she saw his face, close to hers, avid, savagely demanding. She spoke then; she knew she must, or the face, with its dreadful urgency, would stay there unsatisfied and persisting:
“In Florence, on the second of February, twenty-four years ago.”
His head jerked backward as if from a blow; the hand on her shoulder clutched spasmodically, then loosened, and, shrunk together, he drew away, step behind step, glaring with haunted eyes.
He drew away, step behind step, glaring with haunted eyes. “Mary!” he whispered. “Mary!”
“Mary!” he whispered. “Mary!” and, wheeling suddenly, he flung out his arms, caught at the table, and fell.
She went to him and knelt; one glance told her that he was dead. When she rose to her feet, she stood looking at the window, through which the first light of the dawn shone gray.
CHAPTER XII.
Adamson, with the Indian boy at his heels, stood in the darkness of the porch hammering on the door. He knocked vigorously, for he anticipated difficulty in waking the servants, who occupied a long anterior wing. But as he started on his second assault, he heard steps approaching from inside, and the pale square of a near-by window grew brighter. Some one was coming with a light. As he heard the bolts sliding back, the thought crossed his mind that the person answering his summons must have been awake.
The door swung open, and the figure of Tom, in a wrapper, a lamp in one hand, was revealed on the threshold. He peered into the darkness; then, seeing who it was, exclaimed in a wondering amaze that held gladness:
“Good Lord, Mr. Adamson, is it yourself?”
With his unencumbered hand, he seized the young man’s arm and drew him into the hall, staring, overjoyed at the sight of him.
“It’s I all right, Tom. They’re not here. I saw a light in the fort as I came across.”
“They’re camping out till Monday. Thank God you’ve come! Was it my letter?”
Adamson drew farther from the door, lowering his voice.
“Yes, it made me uneasy. I was afraid something might happen. I’ve come to take them away. How is he?”
The old man shook his head.
“Not right. When I wrote to you, I was at my wit’s end. He’s been better since then, the last few days—quieter, more like himself. But they must go from here. He’s got to be kept from the sight of them. I’ve been glad to see you often, Mr. Adamson, but never as glad as I am now.”
The young man’s face showed a rising disquietude.
“How about this—out in the fort? Is it all right to let them be there? We can get the launch and go now.”
“Oh, there’s no need of that.” Tom’s tone deprecated any necessity for such a radical step. “He isn’t so bad that we'd need to act to-night—not yet, and maybe never will be. He was very cheery at the thought of going. It’ll do him good, I’m hoping. And they’re all safe. It’s for himself I’m fearful—of him ending his life in darkness. I didn’t think to put such a scare into you when I wrote, but, as I told you, I’m getting old, and up here alone, with no one to turn to, I couldn’t seem to shoulder it. I didn’t dare run any risks, Mr. Adamson. It’s too much responsibility.”
The young man nodded, understanding and relieved.
“You did just right, Tom, and we'll arrange it between us. To-morrow morning I’ll go over there and bring them back. We'll fake up a story that’ll sound reasonable; we can do it now. I want something to eat—I’m famished—and there’s a guide out there on the porch who ought to have food and a bed. He’s worked like a Trojan. Just make him comfortable somewhere and then come back here to me.”
He walked down the hall to the dining room and lit the light, Tom disappearing with the Indian. The place was intensely quiet, and Adamson, the poignant alarm that had goaded him allayed, dropped into Blatch’s chair in a sprawl of fatigue. It suddenly pervaded him, loosing his muscles, which seemed to run fluid in his body, carrying a dull, continuous ache. With his elbows on the table, his hands supporting his head, he stared at the hanging lamp, in the reaction from the long tension, sunk in apathy.
Presently Tom came back with food. As he set it out, he told of the reasons for his fears. It was a record of small happenings, only to be noticed by one long familiar with Blatch’s eccentricities. He maintained his contention that, removed from the persons who had stirred the old memories, Blatch would be restored to his normal poise. He spoke of the new will, Adamson greeting the news with a confirming nod. Both had expected it, and as an indication of Blatch’s continued affection for the Harmon children, it still further quieted the young man’s apprehensions.
Falling on the food, he motioned Tom to a chair opposite, and under the glow of the hanging lamp, they set to work constructing the fable which would explain his presence and enable the Harmons to leave without exciting Blatch’s suspicions. On one point Adamson was decided—he would go to the fort to-morrow morning and see that all was well. They could return with him then or stay out the week-end if they wanted, but on Monday, when the visit was over, he would take them back to New York.
To find a story taxed the inventive powers of the conspirators; plots were built up only to be discarded as unconvincing, and one was finally evolved through a combination of Adamson’s imagination and Tom’s memories. The old man recollected that Mrs. Hamilton, the aunt of the Brunel girls, had had a son resident somewhere in the South. Whether he still lived was of no importance in a fiction created to meet so dire an emergency. He had heard of his relatives, had come to New York to find them, and had communicated with Denby, who in turn had handed the matter over to Adamson. Mr. Hamilton had spent much time in the search, was about to leave for Europe, and was extremely anxious to meet his cousins and plan for their welfare before his departure. He had been so urgent that Adamson had undertaken the task of going to Hinterland to fetch them.
They conned it over, fitting it together, developing its details. Adamson was to arrive as the bearer of important tidings, take the Harmons aside, tell them the truth, and then, aware of the deception, they would acquaint Blatch with the news and the necessity of an immediate return to New York. With the busy concentration of insects ignorant of forces gathering for their destruction, the two men elaborated the scheme, and rested secure in its ultimate success.
The night was far spent when they separated, Tom to his quarters at the entrance of the servants’ wing, Adamson to a guest room opening on the same hall. He was dog-tired, he told Tom, but asked to be waked early. It took over an hour to reach the fort, and he would like to get there by nine, so please have his breakfast at half past seven.
The time for rest was so short and his fatigue so overwhelming that he threw himself on the bed as he was. His head had hardly sunk into the pillow before he was asleep.
His repose at first was a blank unconsciousness, a suspension of life as deep as death. Then it became troubled, not by the visionary mirage of dreams, but by a dim, pervasive distress. He stirred and threw out an arm, muttering, for his spirit was touched by pain, was aware of it moving upon him, advancing from illimitable distances, pressing toward him as its goal. It grew more poignant, condensed from nebulous diffusion to a gathering acuteness. A sensation was straining toward expression, an inchoate despair forcing its way to recognition. It contracted to a central glow, taking form like a thought become articulate in words.
It was Blatch’s face, the figure shadowy below it, hanging upon darkness, isolated, like a face in a mirror which holds no other reflection. It grew slowly distinct, emerging in white transparency as if illumined by a finer aërial radiance, Then the sleeper knew it for what it was—the ultimate incarnation, the shapeless pain made manifest.
No sound came from the lips, but no words were needed to express its impassioned urgency. Broken through from a higher level, beyond the limits of the material, its cry for help was silent; in silence it conveyed its intolerable dread, in silence sent forth its summons. It floated before the sleeper, enveloping him in its terror, projecting its piercing plea, its soundless call for his aid. Its anguish had found transmission through a finer mode of communication, and its message came, light-clear and light-swift, from immeasurable depths of being to the soul released and receptive.
Adamson woke.
He came quickly to consciousness, the black oblivion of his sleep falling from him with the opening of his eyes. He slid from the bed, seeing the room as a tiny, contracted square to which he had returned from gulfs of space. He did not ask himself if he had dreamed, he neither questioned nor sought to explain; the power of the vision extended across the barriers of sleep, obsessed and compelled him.
The dawn was gray on the window-pane, the lake outside sending forth its first silvery gleam. He pulled on his shoes and coat, his face, in the wan light, set in a fixed rigidity. Out in the hall, he ran to Tom’s door, knocked, and, knocking, called in a voice that broke muffled on the house’s slumbering stillness:
“Quick, quick—get up! I want you!”
Without waiting for an answer, he opened the door. The old man, still in his wrapper, was struggling to rise from the chair in which he had been sleeping.
“What—what?” he stammered, bewildered and with strayed senses. Then the sight of Adamson’s face waked him, and he got to his feet, paling and gasping out, “What’s the matter?”
“Something’s wrong at the fort. I don’t know what, but I know it! Come—don’t wait—as you are! I'll go on and get the boat. Come quick—hurry!”
He was gone, and Tom, his brain too full of a dazed terror to question, followed him. Careening in a staggering run down the dim passage, the old man heard the clatter of bolts and the opening hall door crash back against the wall. From the porch steps he saw Adamson’s figure in flight to the wharf, black against the dull steel of the water. The launches lay side by side in their slips; the dark shape raced along the boarding and leaped into the smaller one.
Tom, on the path, quavered between dragged out breaths:
“What’s wrong? How do you know—how could you hear?”
Adamson was on the wharf again, crouched to unfasten the painter from its ring.
“I can’t tell you now, but I know! Hurry—come on!” He pulled the rope through the ring, waited till the old man was in, then jumped to the bow and ran catlike down the boat’s length to its stern.
Tom dropped on the circular seat, staring at him in a dumb amaze as he started the engine. Its spitting beat ran out over the lake’s still surface, a thrilling vibration carried along the level floor. The launch backed from the slip, quivering in a churning turmoil of water like a live thing loosed to a joyous liberty. The eddies seethed away from its pressure, and the prow drove forward in a crisp, bubbling rush. A few stars were dying in the west; along the rim of the east the sky was lightened by a faint pallor.
Its reflection lay white on Adamson’s face. Without looking at his companion, he suddenly spoke as if answering a question:
“I can’t tell you what’s happened, for I don’t know. But Blatch is dead—I’m certain of that. It came to me—back there in my room I can’t explain,— but they’re—they’re—— Something’s the matter, and we’ve got to get to them.”
The old man made no answer. In this strange hour the explanation lost all quality of the irrational or the fantastic. It came as the climax of a long-sustained fear, was like an echo augmented to dreadful volume. Possessed by a great horror, he cowered, wetting his dry lips, pulling his gown closer with shaking hands. He saw the eastern horizon deepen to a pearly glow, the water’s smoothness break into ripples flushed on each tiny crest. The glassy surface cut by the boat’s bow curled back in two long ridges, shining with the same pink gleam. They seemed to be cleaving their way into an unreal world, a place of rapt radiance and eternal silence.
Adamson, at the wheel, kept his eyes on the distance ahead. Once or twice he glanced at the growing light in the east, an opponent with whom he ran his race. Beyond the lake’s expanse, he strained his gaze for the opposite shore, saw it thicken from a dark pencil line, expand, and widen, its solid straightness break to a fretted outline.
“Just God!” the old man groaned, in sudden intolerable suspense.
The trees took shape across the glistening water, a flat-topped bulk arose among them. The men leaned forward like dogs straining at the leash, trying to hear above the boat’s panting breath, trying to see beyond the limits of sight. The black dots of the windows grew into squares, the canoes nosing against the wharf from colored dashes to recognizable forms. It was 1ike a picture—not a movement, all held in a deep, untroubled peace. And then from it, breaking out of that silence, a cry, a thin, high projection of sound, piercing its way to them, winged like an arrow for their hearts: “Come! Come! Come!”
Inside the fort, as the dawn deepened, three people sat, cowered close, waiting. Against Mary, upright in her chair, Frank and Lottie rested. They had drawn near to her, crouching against her, as the one refuge. She had covered them with a rug, pulled it over their heads to shut out sight and sound, and through it she could feel their bodies, limp and flaccid in a faintness that increased as the moments passed. She felt no such blessed dimming of her own senses, had never been more acutely alive. Rigid in the chair, her eyes on the window, she sat as motionless as a carven figure, fearful of a movement, a deeper breath, that might shatter her steadfastness. It was her final obligation to them, all she could do for them in this last, slow advance to extinction.
An infinitesimal pulse of sound quivered, shaking through the silence like light shaking across the ripples of water. She stiffened and moved her glance from the window, looked at the covered heads beside her, at Blatch’s body by the table. She had heard nothing; her senses had created it, and to shut it out, and with it the dread of her own disorganization, she bent her head, clasping her hands over her ears. But this was unbearable. She drew her hands slowly down, her eyes fearful, afraid to listen, unable to resist.
This time it was clearer, a quick, throbbing beat, like the heart of a runner strained in a race. It grew, a heart pressed to its final effort, but never faltering, each beat crowding on the last, carrying on the advance, sharp, regular, more distinct, the stillness deepening as if to let it come to her, to subdue any slightest intruding whisper that might interfere.
The others, with hidden heads, did not hear. She smothered the shriek on her lips, for she still thought it might be a mocking echo of her own dead hopes. She rose, noiseless, delicately careful, letting them rest against the chair, and sped, shadow soft, to the window. The east was aglow, wisps of scarlet cloud brushed on its splendor. The dew crusted the steps and verdure with a sparkling hoar. The water’s shallow edge was a golden transparency against the rocks. Beyond, the long, flushed level of the lake waited the supreme moment when it should flash its answer to the sun’s call.
Across the world, hushed in the expectancy of the great ceremonial, breath-held for the ecstatic union of sun and earth, a dark spot moved. It had no part in the rapt moment; the sound of its panting haste ruptured the quietude, its rushing speed broke the tranced spell. It drove through the lake’s mirror like a wedge, severing it into a sparkling breakage, furrowing a crack through its flawlessness. A curl of gilded foam parted under its bow; behind it two glassy folds of water slanted, leaving it the moving apex of a triangle.
She caught at the bars, raised herself, and let her voice rush out to meet it.
Tom hid his face in his hands and muttered disjointed words, memories of old prayers. When he lifted it, he could see her behind the bars, her hands curled round them, the red dawn light on her. Adamson pushed him to the wheel.
“The end of the wharf! Stay here—don’t move! I’ll get them! God knows what it is!”
The old man clutched at the wheel, waked to action. Adamson ran forward and, as the launch bore down on the pier, poised for a spring. A clamor of voices came from the windows—Lottie’s, Frank’s, shrieking, hoarse shouts, words, phrases, a medley of appalling portent.
He sprang and ran, the boat behind him grinding against the wharf’s edge and coming to a stop. As he vaulted up the steps, the clangor of the doors, beaten on from within, filled the air. She was still at the window and through the ringing reverberation he could hear her voice.
“Quick, quick! Open the doors! Let us out! It’s death!”
The key, glittering with dew, stood in the lock. He turned it, and the doors flew back, swung by a dragging force. Frank and Lottie burst upon him—a vision of wild white faces with open mouths—and darted for the steps. As they fled, they gave forth a trail of broken phrases, ejaculations, words that fell like sparks, illuminating his ignorance. Their clattering rush down the wharf was in his ears as he caught Mary, reeling on the threshold. Her hands hooked on his shoulders, her white lips shaped a sentence.
“The boat, the boat!” he shouted. “Get into the boat!” and, gathering her against him, he ran with her for the steps. The others were in when he reached the end of the wharf and he dropped her upon them—a huddle of crouched bodies with lifted, livid faces.
“Go out—out!” he cried at Tom, and the old man started the engine.
The launch had swung away from the end of the pier before they realized that he wasn’t with them. They shrieked together, stretching out imploring hands, and he shouted back:
“I’m coming. The canoe—— It’s all right,” and, turning, ran back.
The launch sped outward to the open water. As the space between it and the shore widened, they watched the fort’s black doorway, saw him emerge, vault down the steps, and leap into a canoe.
“Stop, stop!” came their voices. “He’s coming!” But Tom, his glance strained backward, had seen him, and the boat’s speed eased gradually.
The canoe shot over the water, each dig of the paddle sending it forward like a race horse struck by the whip. It drew near, ran alongside, and Mary leaned forward to grasp its edge. The two boats lay still on the shining water.
The west was a wide blaze; the edge of the sun shone in a golden curve above the horizon.
They saw the fort, like some monstrous vision in a dream, heave, rock, and split, straight rays of flame shooting above its cloven roof.
A roar, muffled and deep seated as if the earth were protesting in anguish, shook the air. They saw the fort, like some monstrous vision in a dream, heave, rock, and split, straight rays of flame shooting above its cloven roof. Black objects hurtled through the red beams; smoke burst, swelling in clouds; a white welter of water seethed up the bank, swept the steps, slid back, oozing in foamy upheaval through the wreckage of walls. A haze of smoke and dust hung, blotting out the place; thinned, broke in rifts, and lifted, showing a ruin of stone amid trees torn and blackened.
Without speech, they looked at one another, blanched and ravaged in the day’s glad brightness. Lottie began to cry, a feeble whimper, her face unhidden, crumpled in pitiful contortions and beaded with a trickle of tears. Mary threw an arm about her and, pushing against her, made room for Adamson. She indicated the place with her free hand, and he stepped from the canoe and sat beside her. Pressed against her shoulder, he took her hand and, holding it close in his, said:
“Go on, Tom. Back to Hinterland.”
THE END.