The DESTROYING ANGEL

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 836, 3 December 1929, Page 5

The DESTROYING ANGEL

BY

LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

(Copyright by Public Ledger.)

CHAPTER XXXlll.—(Continued) Starting from its north-western extreme, he made a complete circuit of the island, spending the greater part of the time along the edges of the western and southern bluffs, where he halted not seldom to pause and scrutinise carefully the beach below, to make sure he had been deceived by some half-buried rock or curiously shaped boulder. To his intense relief, he made no further discovery other than a scattering drift of wreckage from the motor-boats. By the time he had finished, the morning was well advanced. He turned at length and trudged wearily up from the northern beach, through the community of desolation, back coward the farmhouse. Since breakfast he had seen nothing of the girl; none of the elaborately casual glances which he had from time to time cast inland had discovered any sign of her. But now she a. peared in the doorway, and after a slight pause, as of indecision, moved down the path to meet him. He was conscious that, at sight of her, his pulses quickened. Something swelled in his breast, something tightened the muscles of his throat. The way of her body in action, the way of the sun with her hair . . . Dismay shook him like au ague; he felt his heart divided against itself; he was so glad of her, and so afraid . . . He could not keep his eyes from her, nor could he make his desire be still; and yet . . . and yet . . . Walking the faster of the t*o, she met him midway between the house and the beach. “You’ve taken your time, Mr. Whitaker,” said she. “It was a bit of a walk,” he contended, endeavouring to imitate her lightness of maimer. They paused beside one of the low stone walls that meandered in a meaningless fashion this way and that over the uplands. With a satisfied manner that suggested she had been seeking just that very spot, the girl sat down upon the lichened stones, then looked up to him with a smile and a slight movement of the head that plainly invited him to ar place beside her. He towered above her, darkly reluctant. “Do sit down. You must be tired. “I am.” Dubiously he seated himself at a little distance. “And only your pains for your trouble?” He nodded. “I watched you, off and on, from the windows. You might have been looking for a pin, from your Painstaking air. off ft're along the cliffs He nodded again, gloomily. Her comment seemed to admit of no more compromising method of reply. “Then vou’ve nothing to tell me . He pursed his lips, deprecatory, lifted his shoulders not quite happily, and swung one lanky leg across the other as he slouched, morosely eying the sheets of sapphire that made their Pr - S Xo. There's no good news yet.

“And you’ve no inclination to talk to me, either?” “I’ve told you I don't feel —well— exactly light-hearted this morning.” There was a little silence. She watched him askance with her fugitive, shadowy, sympathetic and shrewd smile. “Must I make talk, then?” she demanded at length. “if we must! I suppose—you’ll have to show the way. My mind’s hardly equal to trail-breaking today,” “So I shall. then. Hugh . . .” She leaned toward him, dropping her hand over his own with an eifect of infinite comprehension. “Hugh,” she repeated, meeting his gaze squarely as he looked up, startled—“what’s the good of keeping up the make-believe? You know!” The breath clicked in his throat, and his glance wavered uneasily, then steadied again to hers. And through a long moment neither stirred, but sat so, eye to eye, searching each other’s mind and heart. At length he confessed it with an uncertain, shamefaced nod. “That’s right,” he said: “I do know —now. She removed the hand and sat back without lessening the fixity of her regard. “When did you find it out?” “This morning. That is, it came to me all of a sudden —” His gaze fell: he stammered and felt his face burning. “Hugh, that’s not quite honest. 1 know you hadn’t guessed, last night— I know it. How did you come to find it out this morning? Tell me!” He persisted, as unconvincing as an unimaginative child trying to explain away a mischief: “It was just a little while ago. I was thinking things over—" “Hugh!” He shrugged sulkily. “Hugh, look at me!” Unwillingly he met her eyes. “How did you find out . He was an inexpert liar. Under the witchery of her eyes, his resources failed him absolutely. He started to repeat, stammered, fell still, and then ill a breath capitulated. “Before you were up—l meant to keep this from you—down there on the beach —I found Drummond.”

CHAPTER XXXIV. “Drummond! ” It was a cry of terror. The girl stai'ted back from Whitaker, eyes wide, cheeks whitening. “I'm sorry. . . . But I presume you ought to know. . . . His body. . . . I buried it. . . ” She gave a little smothered cry, and seemed to shrink in upon herself, burying her face in her hands — an incongruous, huddled shape of grief, there upon the gray stone wall, set against all the radiant beauty of the exquisite, sun-gladdened world. He was patient with her, though the slow-dragging minutes during which she neither moved nor made any sound brought him inexpressible distress, and he seemed to age visibly, his face, settling in iron lines, gray with suffering. At length a moan—rather, a wail—came from the stricken figure beside him.

“Ah, the pity of it! the pity of it! . . . What have I done that this should come to be!” He ventured to touch her hand in gentle sympathy. “Mary,” he said, and hesitated with a little wonder, remembering that this was the first time he had ever called her by that name—“ Mary, did you care for him so much?” She sat, mute, her face averted and hidden. “I’d give everything if I could have mended matters. I was fond of Drummond —poor soul! If he’d only been frank with me from the start all this could have been avoided. As soon as I knew —that night when I recognised you on the stage—l went at once to you to say I would clear out —uot stand in the way of your hairpiness. I would have said as much to him, but he gave me no chance.” “Don’t blame him,” she said softly. “He wasn’t responsible.” “I know.” “How long have you known?” She swung suddenly to face him. “For some time —definitely, for two or three days. He tried twice to murder me. The first time he must have thought he'd done it. . . . Then he tried again, the night before you were carried off. Ember suspected, watched for him, and caught him. He took him away, meaning to put him in a sanatorium. 1 don’t understand how he got away—from Ember. It worries me—on Ember’s account, i hope nothing has happened to him.” “Oh, I hope not!” “You knew—l mean about the cause—the drugs?” “I never guessed until that night. Then, as soon as I got over the first awful shock, I realised he was a madman. He talked incoherently—raved —shouted —threatened me with horrible things. I can’t speak of them. Later he quietened down a little, but that was after he had come down into the cabin to —to drug himself. . . . it was very terrible —that tiny pitching cabin, with the swinging smoking lamp, and the madman sitting there, muttering to himself over the glass. “It happened three times before the wreck. I thought i should go out of my own mind.” She shuddered, her face tragic and pitiful. “Poor girl!” he murmured inadequately. “And that —that was why you were searching the beach so closely?” “Yes—for the other fellow. I did not find him.” A moment later she said thoughtfully, “It was the man you saw watching me on the beach, I think.” “I assumed as much. Drummond had a lot of money, I fancy—enough to hire a desperate man to do almost anything. . . The wages of sin—” “Don't!” she begged. “Don’t make mo think of that!” “Forgive me!” he said. For a little she sat, head bowed, brooding. “Hugh.” she cried, looking up to search his face iferrowly; “Hugh, you’ve not been pretending—” “Pretending?” he repeated, thickwitted. “Hugh, I could never forgive you if you’d been pretending. It would be too cruel. . . . Ah, bift you haven’t been! Tell me you haven’t!” “I don’t understand. . . . Pretending what?” “Pretending you didn't know who I was —pretending to fall in love with me just because you were sorry' for me, to make me think it was me you loved, and not the wpman you felt

There is no excuse for flies—fragrant stainless Flytox kills them instantly Harmless to humans. £

bound to take care of, because you’d —you had —” “Mary, listen to me,” he interrupted. “I swear I didn’t know you. Perhaps you don’t understand how wonderfully you’ve changed. It’s hard for nte to believe you can be one with the timid and distracted little girl I married that rainy night. You’re nothing like. . . .” “Only, that night on the stage, as Joan Thursday, you were that girl again. Max told me it was make-up; I wouldn’t believe him; to me you hadn’t changed at all; you hadn’t aged a day. . . . But that morning when I saw you first on the Great South Beach —I never dreamed of associating you with my wife. Do you realise I had never seen you in full light—never knew the colour of your hair ” “Dear, I didn’t know, believe me. It was you who bewitched me—not the wife for whose sake I fought against what I thought infatuation for you, I loved —I love you only, you as you are —not the poor little girl of the Commercial House.” “Is it true?” she questioned sadly, incredulous. “It is true, Mary, I love you.” “I have loved you always,” she said softly between barely parted lips—“always, Hugh. Even when I thought you dead ... I did believe that you were drowned out there, Hugh! You know that, don’t you?” “I have never for an instant questioned it.” “It wouldn’t be like you to. my dear; it wouldn’t be you, my Hugh . . . But even then I loved the memory of j t ou . . . You don’t know what you have meant in my life, Hugh. Always, always you have stood for all that was fine and strong and good and generous —my gentlest man, my knights sans peur et sans reproche ... No other man I ever knew —no, let me say it! ever measured up to the standard you had set for me to worship.” “But. Hugh—you’ll understand, won’t you?—about the others —?”

“Please,” he begged—“please don’t harrow yourself so, Mary!” “No; I must tell you. . . . The world seemed so empty and so lonely, Hugh; my Galahad gone, never to return to me. ... I tried to lose myself in my work, but it wasn’t enough. And those others came, beseeching me, and —and I liked them. There was none like you, but they were all good men of their kind, and I liked them. They made love to me and—l was starving for affection, Hugh. I was made to love and to be loved. Each time I thought to myself; ‘Surely this time it is true; now at last am I come into my kingdom. It can’t fulfill my dreams, for I have known the bravest man, but’—”

Her voice broke and fell. Her eyes grew dull and vacant; her vision passed through and beyond him, as if he had not been there; the bitter desolation of all the widowed generations clouded her golden face. Her lips barely moved, almost inaudibly enunciating the words that were shaken from hep as if by some occult force, ruthless and inexorable; “Each time, Hugh, it was the same. One by one they were taken from me, strangely, terribly. . . . Poor Tom Custer, first; he was a dear boy, but I didn’t love him and couldn’t marry him. I had to tell him so. He killed himself. . . . Then Billy I became engaged to him; but he was taken mysteriously from a crowded ship in midocean. ... A man named Mitchell Thurston loved me. I liked him: perhaps I might have consented to marry him. He was assassinated —shot down like a mad dog in broad daylight—no one ever known by whom, or why. He

hadn’t an enemy in the world we knew of. . . . And now Drummond . - .! “Mary,” he said, gently, “listen to me; understand what I say. I love you; I am your husband; nothing can possibly come between us. All these other things can be explained. Don’t let yourself think for another instant ” Her eyes, fixed upon the two hands in which he clasped her own, had grown wide and staring with dread. Momentarily she seemed stunned. Then she wrenched it from him, at the same time jumping up and away. “No!” she cried, fending him from her with shaking arms. “No! Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me, Hugh! It’s .. . it’s death! My touch is death! I know it now—l had begun to suspect, now I know! I am accursed—doomed to go through life like pestilence,, leaving sorrow- and death in my wake. . . .Hugh!” She controlled herself a trifle: “Hugh, I love you more than life; I love you more than love itself. But you must not come near me. Love me if you must, but, oh, my dear one! Keep away- from me; avoid me, forget me if you can, but at all costs shun me as you would the plague; I will not give myself to you to be your death!” Before he could utter a syllable in reply, she turned and fled from him. wildly, blindly stumbling. like a hunted thing back up the ascent to the farmhouse. He followed, vainly calling on her to stop and listen to him. But she outdistanced him, and by the time he had entered the house was in her room, behind a locked door.

Grimly Whitaker sat himself down in the kitchen and prepared to wait j the reappearance of his wife —pro- J pared to wait as long as life was in him, so that he would be there to wel-, come her when, her paroxysm over, 1 she would come to him to be com- , forted. soothed and reasoned out of ! her distorted conception of her des- j tiny. Not that he had the heart to blame j or to pity her for that terrified vision j of life. Her history was her excuse. Nor was his altogether a blameless figure in that history. At least it was not so in his sight. Though unwittingly,* he had blundered cruelly in all his relations with the life of that j sad little child of the Commercial ; House. Like sunlight penetrating storm wrack, all the dark disarray of his reverie was shot through and through by the golden splendour of the know- i ledge that she loved him. . . . As for this black. deadly shadow that had darkened her life —already I he could see her emerging from it, radiant and wonderful. But it was not to be disregarded or as yet ignored, its baleful record considered closed and relegated to the pages of the past. Its movement had been too rythmic altogether to lack a reason. His very present task was to read its riddle and exorcise it altogether. For hours he pondered it there in the sunlit kitchen of the silent house —waiting, wondering, deep in thought. Time stole away without his knowledge. Not until late in the afternoon did the shifted position of the sun

I catch his attention and arouse him |in alarm. Not a sound from above j He rose, ascended the stairs, tapped , gently on the locked door. | “Mary,” he called, with his heart in | his mouth —“Mary'!” j Her answer was instant, in accents j sweet, calm and clear: “I am all right. I’m resting, dear, ! and thinking. Don’t fret about me. When I feel able, I will come down to you.” “As you will." he assented unspeakably relieved; and returned to the kitchen. The diversion of thought reminded him of their helpless and forlorn condition. He went out and swept the horizon with an eager and hopeful gaze that soon drooped in disappointment. The day had worn on in unbroken calm; not a sail stirred within the immense radius of the waters. Ships he saw in plenty—a number of them moving under power east and I west beyond the headland with its j crowning lighthouse; others —a few —- left shining wakes upon the burnished expanse beyond the farthest land visible in the north. Unquestionably main-travelled roads of the sea, these, so clear to the sight, so heartbreakI 1 ingly unattainable. . . . And then his conscience turned upon him, reminding him of the promise (completely driven out of his mind by his grim adventure before dawn, together with the emotional crisis of mid-morning) to display ; some sort of a day’-signal of distress. (To be continued tomorrow)