The Destroying Angel

by Louis Joseph Vance

  XV

  DISCLOSURES

  Sleep is a potent medicine for the mind; but sometimes the potion iscompounded with somewhat too heavy a proportion of dreams and nonsense;when it's apt to play curious tricks with returning consciousness. WhenWhitaker awoke he was on the sands of Narragansett, and the afternoonwas cloudy-warm and bright, so that his eyes were grateful for the shadeof a white parasol that a girl he knew was holding over him; and his agewas eighteen and his cares they were none; and the girl was saying in alazy, laughing voice: "I love my love with a P because he's PerfectlyPulchritudinous and Possesses the Power of Pleasing, and because hePrattles Prettily and his socks are Peculiarly Purple--"

  "And," the man who'd regained his youth put in, "his name is Peter andhe's Positively a Pest...."

  But the voice in which he said this was quite out of the picture--less avoice than a croak out of a throat kiln-dry and burning. So he grewsuspicious of his senses; and when the parasol was transformed into theshape of a woman wearing a clumsy jacket of soiled covert-cloth over anon-descript garment of weirdly printed calico--then he was sure thatsomething was wrong with him.

  Besides, the woman who wasn't a parasol suddenly turned and bent overhim an anxious face, exclaiming in accents of consternation: "O dear! Ifhe's delirious--!"

  His voice, when he strove to answer, rustled and rattled rather thanenunciated, surprising him so that he barely managed to say: "Whatnonsense! I'm just thirsty!" Then the circuit of returning consciousnessclosed and his lost youth slipped forever from his grasp.

  "I thought you would be," said the woman, calmly; "so I brought water.Here...."

  She offered a tin vessel to his lips, as he lay supine, spilling aquantity of its contents on his face and neck and a very little into hismouth, if enough to make him choke and splutter. He sat up suddenly,seized the vessel--a two-quart milk-pail--and buried his face in it,gradually tilting it, while its cool, delicious sweetness irrigated hisarid tissues, until every blessed drop was drained. Then, and not tillthen, he lowered the pail and with sane vision began to renewacquaintance with the world.

  He was sitting a trifle out of the shallow imprint of his body in thesands, in the lee of the beached cat-boat he now recalled as one mightthe features of an incubus. The woman he had rescued sat quite near him.The gale was still booming overhead, but now with less force (or so hefancied); and the surf still crashed in thunders on the beach a hundredfeet or more away; but the haze was lighter, and the blue of the sky wasvisible, if tarnished.

  Looking straight ahead from where he sat, the sands curved off in a widecrescent, ending in a long, sandy spit. Beyond this lay a broad expanseof maddened water, blue and white, backed by the empurpled loom of alofty headland, dim in the smoky distance.

  On his right lay the green landscape, reminiscent even as the boat wasreminiscent in whose shadow he found himself: both fragments of thefugitive impressions gathered in that nightmare time of landing. Therewas a low, ragged earth-bank rising from the sands to a clutter oframshackle, unpainted, hideous wooden buildings--some hardly more thansheds; back of these and stretching away on either hand, a spreadingvista of treeless uplands, gently undulant and richly carpeted withgrass and under-growth in a melting scheme of tender browns and greensand yellows, with here and there a trace of dusky red. Midway betweenthe beach and where the hazy uplands lifted their blurred profileagainst the faded sky, set some distance apart from the community ofdilapidated structures, stood a commonplace farm-house, in good repair,strongly constructed and neatly painted; with a brood of out buildings.Low stone fences lined the uplands with wandering streaks of gray. Hereand there, in scattered groups and singly, sheep foraged. But they werelonely evidences of life. No human being was visible in any quarter.

  With puzzled eyes Whitaker sought counsel and enlightenment of thewoman, and found in her appearance quite as much to confoundanticipation and deepen perplexity. She was hardly to be identified withthe delightfully normal, essentially well-groomed creature heremembered. What she had worn when setting forth to call on him,accompanied by her maid, the night before, he could not say; but itcertainly could have had nothing in common with her present dress--theworn, stained, misshapen jacket covering her shoulders, beneath it thecalico wrapper scant and crude beyond belief, upon her feet the rustywrecks that once had been shoes.

  As for himself, a casual examination proved that the rags and tattersadorning him were at least to be recognized as the remains of his ownclothing. His coat was lost, of course, and his collar he had torn away,together with a portion of his shirt, while in the water after thedisaster; but his once white flannel trousers were precious souvenirs,even if one leg was ripped open to the knee, and even though the clothas a whole had contracted to an alarming extent--uncomfortable as well;while his tennis shoes remained tolerably intact, and the canvas bracehad shrunk upon his ankle until it gripped it like a vise.

  But all these details he absorbed rather than studied, in the first fewmoments subsequent to his awakening. His chiefest and most directinterest centred upon the woman; and he showed it clearly in thedownright, straightforward sincerity of his solicitous scrutiny. And,for all the handicap of her outlandish dress, she bore inspectionwonderfully well.

  Marvellously recuperative, as many women are, she had regained all herardent loveliness; or, if any trace remained of the wear and tear of herfearful experience, he was in no condition to know it, much less tocarp. There was warm color in the cheeks that he had last seen livid,there was the wonted play of light and shadow in her fascinating eyes;there were gracious rounded curves where had been sunken surfaces,hollowed out by fatigue and strain; and there remained the ineluctableallurement of her tremendous vitality....

  "You are not hurt?" he demanded. "You are--all right?"

  "Quite," she told him with a smile significant of her appreciation ofhis generous feeling. "I wasn't hurt, and I've recovered from my shockand fright--only I'm still a little tired. But you?"

  "Oh, I ... never better. That is, I'm rested; and there was nothing elsefor me to get over."

  "But your ankle--?"

  "I've forgotten it ever bothered me.... Haven't you slept at all?"

  "Oh, surely--a great deal. But I've been awake for some time--a fewhours."

  "A few hours!" His stare widened with wonder. "How long have I--?"

  "All day--like a log."

  "But I--! What time is it?"

  "I haven't a watch, but late afternoon, I should think--going by thesun. It's nearly down."

  "Good heavens!" he muttered, dashed. "I _have_ slept!"

  "You earned your right to.... You needed it far more than I." Her eyesshone, warm with kindness.

  She swayed almost imperceptibly toward him. Her voice was low pitchedand a trifle broken with emotion:

  "You saved my life--"

  "I--? Oh, that was only what any other man--"

  "None other did!"

  "Please don't speak of it--I mean, consider it that way," he stammered."What I want to know is, where are we?"

  Her reply was more distant. "On an island, somewhere. It's uninhabited,I think."

  He could only echo in bewilderment: "An island...! Uninhabited...!"Dismay assailed him. He got up, after a little struggle overcoming theresistance of stiff and sore limbs, and stood with a hand on the coamingof the dismantled cat-boat, raking the island with an incredulous stare.

  "But those houses--?"

  "There's no one in any of them, that I could find." She stirred from herplace and offered him a hand. "Please help me up."

  He turned eagerly, with a feeling of chagrin that she had needed to askhim. For an instant he had both her hands, warm and womanly, in hisgrasp, while she rose by his aid, and for an instant longer--possibly byway of reward. Then she disengaged them with gentle firmness.

  She stood beside him so tall and fair, so serenely invested with theflawless dignity of her womanhood that he no longer thought of theincongruity of her grotesque garb.

  "You've
been up there?" he asked, far too keenly interested to scorn theself-evident.

  She gave a comprehensive gesture, embracing the visible prospect. "Allover.... When I woke, I thought surely ... I went to see, found nothingliving except the sheep and some chickens and turkeys in the farmyard.Those nearer buildings--nothing there except desolation, ruin, and thesmell of last year's fish. I think fishermen camp out here at times. Andthe farm-house--apparently it's ordinarily inhabited. Evidently thepeople have gone away for a visit somewhere. It gives the impression ofbeing a home the year round. There isn't any boat--"

  "No boat!"

  "Not a sign of one, that I can find--except this wreck." She indicatedthe cat-boat.

  "But we can't do anything with this," he expostulated.

  The deep, wide break in its side placed it beyond consideration, even ifit should prove possible to remedy its many other lacks.

  "No. The people who live here must have a boat--I saw a mooring-buoy outthere"--with a gesture toward the water. "Of course. How else could theyget away?"

  "The question is, how we are to get away," he grumbled, morose.

  "You'll find the way," she told him with quiet confidence.

  "I! I'll find the way? How?"

  "I don't know--only you must. There must be some way of signalling themainland, some means of communication. Surely people wouldn't live here,cut off from all the World.... Perhaps we'll find something in thefarm-house to tell us what to do. I didn't have much time to look round.I wanted clothing, mostly--and found these awful things hanging behindthe kitchen door. And then I wanted something to eat, and I foundthat--some bread, not too stale, and plenty of eggs in the hen-house....And you--you must be famished!"

  The reminder had an effect singularly distressing. Till then he had beenmuch too thunderstruck by comprehension of their anomalous plight tothink of himself. Now suddenly he was stabbed through and through withpangs of desperate hunger. He turned a little faint, was seized with aslight sensation of giddiness, at the thought of food, so that he wasglad of the cat-boat for support.

  "Oh, you are!" Compassion thrilled her tone. "I'm so sorry. Forgive mefor not thinking of it at once. Come--if you can walk." She caught hishand as if to help him onward. "It's not far, and I can fix yousomething quickly. Do come."

  "Oh, surely," he assented, recovering. "I am half starving--and thensome. Only I didn't know it until you mentioned the fact."

  The girl relinquished his hand, but they were almost shoulder toshoulder as they plodded through the dry, yielding sand toward firmerground.

  "We can build a fire and have something hot," she said; "there's plentyof fuel."

  "But--what did you do?"

  "I--oh, I took my eggs _au naturel_--barring some salt and pepper. I wasin too much of a hurry to bother with a stove--"

  "Why in a hurry?"

  She made no answer for an instant. He turned to look at her, wondering.To his unutterable astonishment she not only failed to meet his glance,but tried to seem unconscious of it.

  The admirable ease and gracious self-possession which he had learned toassociate with her personality as inalienable traits were altogethergone, just then--obliterated by a singular, exotic attitude ofconstraint and diffidence, of self-consciousness. She seemed almost toshrink from his regard, and held her face a little averted from him, thefull lips tense, lashes low and trembling upon her cheeks.

  "I was ... afraid to leave you," she said in a faltering voice, underthe spell of this extraordinary mood. "I was afraid something mighthappen to you, if I were long away."

  "But what _could_ happen to me, here--on this uninhabited island?"

  "I don't know.... It was silly of me, of course." With an evidentexertion of will power she threw off this perplexing mood of shyness,and became more like herself, as he knew her. "Really, I presume, it wasmostly that I was afraid for myself--frightened of the loneliness,fearful lest it be made more lonely for me by some accident--"

  "Of course," he assented, puzzled beyond expression, cudgelling his witsfor some solution of a riddle sealed to his masculine obtuseness.

  What could have happened to influence her so strangely? Could he havesaid or done--anything--?

  The problem held him in abstraction throughout the greater part of theirwalk to the farm-house, though he heard and with ostensible intelligenceresponded to her running accompaniment of comment and suggestion....

  They threaded the cluster of buildings that, their usefulness outlived,still encumbered the bluff bordering upon the beach. The most carelessand superficial glance bore out the impression conveyed by the girl'sdescription of the spot. Doorless doorways and windows with shatteredsashes disclosed glimpses of interiors fallen into a state of ruindefying renovation. What remained intact of walls and roofs were mereshells half filled with an agglomeration of worthlessness--mounds ofcrumbled, mouldering plaster, shards, rust-eaten tins, broken bottles,shreds of what had once been garments: the whole perhaps threatened bythe overhanging skeleton of a crazy staircase.... An evil, disturbingspot, exhaling an atmosphere more melancholy and disheartening than thatof a rain-sodden November woodland: a haunted place, where the hand ofTime had wrought devastation with the wanton efficacy of a destructivechild: a good place to pass through quickly and ever thereafter toavoid.

  In relief against it the uplands seemed the brighter, stretching away inthe soft golden light of the descending sun. The wind sang over them aboisterous song of strength and the sweep of open spaces. The air wasdamp and soft and sweet with the scent of heather. Straggling sheepsuspended for a moment their meditative cropping and lifted their headsto watch the strangers with timorous, stupid eyes. A flock of youngturkeys fled in discordant agitation from their path.

  Halfway up to the farm-house a memory shot through Whitaker's mind asstartling as lightning streaking athwart a peaceful evening sky. Hestopped with an exclamation that brought the girl beside him to astandstill with questioning eyes.

  "But the others--!" he stammered.

  "The others?" she repeated blankly.

  "They--the men who brought you here--?"

  Her lips tightened. She moved her head in slow negation.

  "I have seen nothing of either of them."

  Horror and pity filled him, conjuring up a vision of wild, ravingwaters, mad with blood-lust, and in their jaws, arms and headshelplessly whirling and tossing.

  "Poor devils!" he muttered.

  She said nothing. When he looked for sympathy in her face, he found itset and inscrutable.

  He delayed another moment, thinking that soon she must speak, offer himsome sort of explanation. But she remained uncommunicative. And he couldnot bring himself to seem anxious to pry into her affairs.

  He took a tentative step onward. She responded instantly to thesuggestion, but in silence.

  The farm-house stood on high ground, commanding an uninterrupted sweepof the horizon. As they drew near it, Whitaker paused and turned,narrowing his eyes as he attempted to read the riddle of the enigmatic,amber-tinted distances.

  To north and east the island fell away in irregular terraces to wide,crescent beaches whose horns, joining in the northeast, formed the sandyspit. To west and south the moorlands billowed up to the brink of aprecipitous bluff. In the west, Whitaker noted absently, a greatcongregation of gulls were milling amid a cacophony of screams, justbeyond the declivity. Far over the northern water the dark promontorywas blending into violet shadows which, in turn, blended imperceptiblywith the more sombre shade of the sea. Beyond it nothing wasdiscernable. Southeast from it the coast, backed by dusky highlands, ranon for several miles to another, but less impressive, headland; itsline, at an angle to that of the deserted island, forming a funnel-liketideway for the intervening waters fully six miles at its broadest inthe north, narrowing in the east to something over three miles.

  There was not a sail visible in all the blue cup of the sea.

  "I don't know," said Whitaker slowly, as much to himself as to hiscompanion. "It's odd ... it
passes me...."

  "Can't you tell where we are?" she inquired anxiously.

  "Not definitely. I know, of course, we must be somewhere off the southcoast of New England: somewhere between Cape Cod and Block Island. ButI've never sailed up this way--never east of Orient Point; my boatinghas been altogether confined to Long Island Sound.... And mygeographical memory is as hazy as the day. There _are_ islands off thesouth coast of Massachusetts--a number of them: Nantucket, you know, andMartha's Vineyard. This might be either--only it isn't, because they'resummer resorts. That"--he swept his hand toward the land in thenortheast--"might be either, and probably is one of 'em. At the sametime, it may be the mainland. I don't know."

  "Then ... then what are we to do?"

  "I should say, possess our souls in patience, since we have no boat. Atleast, until we can signal some passing vessel. There aren't any insight just now, but there must be some--many--in decent weather."

  "How--signal?"

  He looked round, shaking a dubious head. "Of course there's nothing likea flagpole here--but me, and I'm not quite long enough. Perhaps I canfind something to serve as well. We might nail a plank to the corner ofthe roof and a table-cloth to that, I suppose."

  "And build fires, by night?"

  He nodded. "Best suggestion yet. I'll do that very thing to-night--afterI've had a bite to eat."

  She started impatiently away. "Oh, come, come! What am I thinking of, tolet you stand there, starving by inches?"

  They entered the house by the back door, finding themselves in thekitchen--that mean and commonplace assembly-room of narrow and pinchedlives. The immaculate cleanliness of decent, close poverty lay over itall like a blight. And despite the warmth of the air outside, within itwas chill--bleak with an aura of discontent bred of the incessantstruggle against crushing odds which went on within those walls fromyear's end to year's end....

  Whitaker busied himself immediately with the stove. There was a fullwood-box near by; and within a very few minutes he had a brisk firegoing. The woman had disappeared in the direction of the barn. Shereturned in good time with half a dozen eggs. Foraging in the pantry andcupboards, she brought to light a quantity of supplies: a side of bacon,flour, potatoes, sugar, tea, small stores of edibles in tins.

  "I'm hungry again, myself," she declared, attacking the problem ofsimple cookery with a will and a confident air that promised much.

  The aroma of frying bacon, the steam of brewing tea, were all butintolerable to an empty stomach. Whitaker left the kitchen hurriedlyand, in an endeavour to control himself, made a round of the otherrooms. There were two others on the ground floor: a "parlour," abedroom; in the upper story, four small bedchambers; above them anattic, gloomy and echoing. Nowhere did he discover anything to moderatethe impression made by the kitchen: it was all impeccably neat,desperately bare.

  Depressed, he turned toward the head of the stairs. Below a door whinedon its hinges, and the woman called him, her voice ringing through thehallway with an effect of richness, deep-toned and bell-true, thatsomehow made him think of sunlight flinging an arm of gold athwart thedusk of a darkened room. He felt his being thrill responsive to it, asfine glass sings its answer to the note truly pitched. More than allthis, he was staggered by something in the quality of that full-throatedcry, something that smote his memory until it was quick and vibrant,like a harp swept by an old familiar hand.

  "Hugh?" she called; and again: "Hugh! Where are you?"

  He paused, grasping the balustrade, and with some difficulty managed toarticulate:

  "Here ... coming...."

  "Hurry. Everything's ready."

  Waiting an instant to steady his nerves, he descended and reentered thekitchen.

  The meal was waiting--on the table. The woman, too, faced him as heentered, waiting in the chair nearest the stove. But, once within theroom, he paused so long beside the door, his hand upon the knob, andstared so strangely at her, that she moved uneasily, grew restless anddisturbed. A gleam of apprehension flickered in her eyes.

  "Why, what's the matter?" she asked with forced lightness. "Why don'tyou come in and sit down?"

  He said abruptly: "You called me Hugh!"

  She inclined her head, smiling mischievously. "I admit it. Do you mind?"

  "Mind? No!" He shut the door, advanced and dropped into his chair, stillsearching her face with his troubled gaze. "Only," he said--"youstartled me. I didn't think--expect--hope--"

  "On so short an acquaintance?" she suggested archly. "Perhaps you'reright. I didn't think.... And yet--I do think--with the man who riskedhis life for me--I'm a little justified in forgetting even that we'venever met through the medium of a conventional introduction."

  "It isn't that, but...." He hesitated, trying to formulate phrases toexplain the singular sensation that had assailed him when she calledhim: a sensation the precise nature of which he himself did not as yetunderstand.

  She interrupted brusquely: "Don't let's waste time talking. I can't waitanother instant."

  Silently submissive, he took up his knife and fork and fell to.