Kastle Krags Part 14

"The English don't think so--but they're full of weird ideas. Have that big c.o.o.n bring us some lemonade then--iced tea--anything. This is the kind of night that sets men crazy."

Men who have spent July in India, when the humidity is on the land, could appreciate such heat, but it pa.s.sed ordinary understanding. It hara.s.sed the brain and fevered the blood, and warned us all of lawless demons that lived just under our skins. A man wouldn't be responsible, to-night. The devil inside of him, recognizing a familiar temperature, escaped his bonds and stood ready to take any advantage of openings.

It was a curious thing that there was no perceptible wind over the lagoon. Perhaps the reason was that we invariably a.s.sociate wind with coolness, rather than any sort of a hushed movement of the air--and the impulse that brushed up on the veranda to us was as warm as a child's breath on the face. There was simply no whisper of sound on sh.o.r.e or sea or forest. The curlews were stilled, the wild creatures were likely lying motionless, trying to escape the heat, the little rustlings and murmurings of stirring vegetation was gone from the gardens. But that first silence, remarkable enough, seemed to deepen as we waited.

There is a point, in temperature, that seems the utter limit of cold.

Mushers along certain trails in the North had known that point--when there seems simply no heat left in the bitter, crackling, biting air.

The temperature, at such times, registers forty--fifty--sixty below. Yet the scientist, in his laboratory, with his liquid hydrogen vaporizing in a vacuum, can show that this temperature is not the beginning of the fearful scale of cold. To-night it was the same way with the silence.

There simply seemed no sound left. But as we waited the silence grew and swelled until the brain ceased to believe the senses and the image of reality was gone. It gave you the impression of being fast asleep and in a dream that might easily turn to death.

The mind kept dwelling on death. It was a great deal more plausible than life. The image of life was gone from that bleak manor house by the sea--the sea was dead, the air, all the elements by which men view their lives. The forest, lost in its silence, its most whispered voices stilled, was a dead forest, incomprehensible as living.

I went upstairs soon after. I thought it might be cooler there.

Sometimes, if you go a few feet off the ground, you find it x.x.xX cooler--quite in opposition to the fact that hot air rises. There was no appreciable difference, however; but here, at least, I could take off my outer clothes. Then I got into a dressing-gown and slippers and waited, with a breathlessness and impatience not quite healthy and normal, for the late night sea breeze to spring up.

Seemingly it had been delayed. The hour was past eleven, the sweltering heat still remained. There was no way under Heaven to pa.s.s the time. One couldn't read, for the reason that the mental effort of following the lines of type was incomprehensibly fatiguing. I had neither the energy nor the interest to work upon the cryptogram--that baffling column of four-lettered words. Yet the brain was inordinately active. Ungoverned thought swept through it in ordered trains, in sudden, lunging waves, and in swirling eddies. Yet the thoughts were not clean-cut, wholly true--they overlapped with the bizarre and elfin impulses of the fancy, and the fine edge of discrimination between reality and dreams was some way dulled. It wasn't easy to hold the brain in perfect bondage.

To that fact alone I try to ascribe the curious flood of thoughts that swept me in those midnight hours. Except for the heat, perhaps in a measure for the silence, I wouldn't have known them at all. I got to thinking about last night's crime, and I couldn't get it out of mind.

The conceptions I had formed of it, the theories and decisions, seemed less and less convincing as I sat overlooking those shadowed, silent grounds. So much depends on the point of view. Ordinarily, our will gives us strength to believe wholly what we want to believe and nothing else. But the powers of the will were unstable to-night, the whole seat of being was shaken, and my fine theories in regard to Pescini seemed to lack the stuff of truth. I suppose every man present provided some satisfactory theory to fit the facts, for no other reason than that we didn't want to change our conception of Things as They Are. Such a course was essential to our own self-comfort and security. But my Pescini theory seemed far-fetched. In that silence and that heat, anything could be true at Kastle Krags!

From this point my mind led logically to the most disquieting and fearful thing of all. What was to prevent last night's crime from recurring?

It isn't hard to see the basis for such a thought. Some way, in these last, stifling, almost maddening hours, it had become difficult to rely implicitly on our rational interpretation of things. Certain things are credible to the every-day man in the every-day mood--things such as aeronautics and wireless, that to a savage mind would seem a thousand times more incredible than mere witchcraft and magic--and certain things simply can not and will not be believed. Society itself, our laws, our customs, our basic att.i.tude towards life depends on a fine balance of what is credible and what is not, an imperious disbelief in any manifestation out of the common run of things. It is altogether good for society when this can be so. Men can not rise up from savagery until it is so. As long as black magic and witchcraft haunt the souls of men, there is nothing to trust, nothing to hold to or build towards, nothing permanent or infallible on which to rely, and hope can not escape from fear, and there is no promise that to-day's work will stand till to-morrow. Men are far happier when they may master their own beliefs.

There is nothing so destructive to happiness, so favorable to the dominion of Fear, as an indiscriminate credulity. Those African explorers who have seen the curse of fear in the Congo tribes need not be told this fact.

But to-night this fine scorn of the supernatural and the bizarre was some way gone from my being. It wasn't so easy to reject them now. Those hide-and-seek, half-glimpsed, eerie phantasies that are hidden deep in every man's subconscious mind were in the ascendancy to-night. They had been implanted in the germ-plasm a thousand thousand generations gone, they were a dim and mystic heritage from the childhood days of the race, the fear and the dreads and horrors of those dark forests of countless thousands of years ago, and they still lie like a shadow over the fear-cursed minds of some of the more savage peoples. Civilization has mostly got away from them, it has strengthened itself steadily against them, building with the high aim of wholly escaping from them, yet no man in this childlike world is wholly unknown to them. The blind, ghastly fear of the darkness, of the unknown, of the whispering voice or the rustling of garments of one who returns from beyond the void is an experience few human beings can deny.

The cold logic with which I looked on life was in some way shaken and uncertain. The fanciful side of myself crept in and influenced all my thought-processes. It was no longer possible to accept, with implicit faith, that last night's crime was merely the expression of ordinary, familiar moods and human pa.s.sions, that it would all work out according to the accepted scheme of things. Indeed the crime seemed no longer _human_ at all. Rather it seemed just some deadly outgrowth of these weird sands beside the mysterious lagoon.

The crime had seemed a thing of human origin before, to be judged by human standards, but now it had become a.s.sociated, in my mind, with inanimate sand and water. It was as if we had beheld the sinister expression of some inherent quality in the place itself rather than the men who had gathered there. It was hard to believe, now, that Florey had been a mere actor in some human drama that in the end had led to murder.

He had been little and gray and obscure, seemingly apart from human drama as the mountains are apart from the sea, and it was easier to believe that he had been merely the unsuspecting victim of some outer peril that none of us knew. Slain, with a ragged, downward cut through the breast--and his body dragged into the lagoon!

What was to prevent the same thing from happening again? Before the week was done other of the occupants of that house might find themselves walking in the gardens at night, down by the craggy sh.o.r.e of the lagoon! Nealman, others of the servants, any one of the guests--Edith herself--wouldn't circ.u.mstance, sooner or later, take them into the shadow of that curse? Who could tell but that the whole thing might be reenacted before this dreadful, sweltering night was done!

The occupants of the house wouldn't be able to sleep to-night. Some of them would go walking in the gardens, rambling further down the beguiling garden paths that would take them at last to that craggy margin of the inlet. Some of them might want a cool glimpse of the lagoon itself. Would we hear that sharp, agonized, fearful scream again streaming through the windows, gripping the heart and freezing the blood in the veins? Any hour--any moment--such a thing might occur.

But at that point I managed a barren and mirthless laugh. I was letting childlike fancies carry me away--and I had simply tried to laugh them to scorn. Surely I need not yield to such a mood as this, to let the sweltering heat and the silence change me into a superst.i.tious savage.

The thing to do was to move away from the window and direct my thought in other channels. Yet I knew, as I argued with myself, that I was curiously breathless and inwardly shaken. But these were nothing in comparison with the fact that I was some way _expectant_, too, with a dreadful expectancy beyond the power of naming.

Then my laugh was cut short. And I don't know what half-strangled utterance, what gagging expression of horror or regret or fulfilled dread took its place on my lips as a distinct scream for help, agonized and fearful, came suddenly, ripped through the darkness from the direction of the lagoon.

CHAPTER XV

The most outstanding thing about that sound was its amazing loudness. It was hard to believe that a human voice could develop such penetration and volume. It had an explosive quality, bursting upon the eardrums with no warning whatsoever, and the man who had cried out had evidently given the full power of his lungs. It was probably true that the moist, hot atmosphere, hanging almost without motion, was a perfect medium for transmitting sound. Besides, my windows were open, facing the lagoon.

I heard the sound die away. The silence dropped down again to find me standing wholly motionless before the window, one hand resting on the sill, seemingly with all power of action gone. It was a shattering blow to spirit and hope that there was no further sound from that deathly still lagoon. Further calls would indicate that the outcome of the affair was still in doubt, that there was still use to hope and struggle. But there was a sense of dreadful finality in that unbroken silence. The drama that had raged on that craggy sh.o.r.e was already closed and done.

The sound had not been only a cry for help. It had been charged full of the knowledge of impending death.

Motion came back to my body; and I sprang to the door. The interlude of inactivity couldn't have been more than a second in duration. That still, upper corridor was coming to life. Some one flashed on a light at the end of the hall, and the door of the room just opposite mine flew open. Van Hope, also in dressing-gown and slippers, stood on the threshold.

He saw me, and pushed through into the hall. His face had an almost incredible pallor in the soft light. In a moment his strong hand had seized my arm.

"Good G.o.d, I didn't dream that, did I?" he cried. "I was dozing--you heard it, didn't you----"

"Of course I heard----"

"Some one screamed for help! I heard the word plain. Good Lord, it's last night's work done over----"

What he said thereafter I didn't hear. I was running down the hall toward the stairway, and at the head of the stairs I almost collided with Major Dell, just emerging from his room. He had evidently gone to bed, and he had just had time to jerk on his trousers over his pajamas and slip on a pair of romeos. The light was brighter here, and I got a clear picture of his face.

It is a curious thing what details imprint themselves ineffaceably on the memory in a moment of crisis. Perhaps--as in the world of beasts--all the senses are incalculably sharpened, the thought processes are clean-cut and infallible, and images have a clarity unequalled at any other time. I got the idea that Dell had been terribly moved by that scream in the darkness. His emotion had seemingly been so violent that it gave the impression of no emotion. His face looked blank as a sheet of white paper.

I rushed by him, and I heard him and Van Hope descending the stairs just behind me. The hall was still lighted, but long shadows lay across the broad veranda. Fargo, his book still in his hand, stood just outside the door.

"What was it, Killdare?" he asked me. "I couldn't tell from where it was----"

"The lagoon!" I answered. In the instant Van Hope and Dell caught up with me, and the four of us raced down the driveway.

Instinctively we went first to the place on the sh.o.r.e where Florey had been slain the night before. The action was a clear indication of what was in our minds--that this matter was in some way darkly related to the crime of the night before. But the sand was bare, and the gra.s.s unshadowed in the moonlight.

For a moment we stood, aghast and shaken, gazing out over the lagoon. It was still as gla.s.s. The tide was running out, and not a wave stirred in all its darkened expanse. We saw the image of the moon far out, scarcely wavering, and the long, bright trail that it made across the water to our eyes. The night was still stifling hot, and the lagoon conveyed an image of coolness.

"Don't stand here!" Fargo cried. "We've got to make a search. Some poor devil is likely lying somewhere in these gardens----"

The house was lighted now, and in an uproar, and some of the other guests were racing down the driveway to us. In this regard it might have been last night's tragedy reenacted. There was, however, one significant change.

The iron self-control, the coolness, the perfect discipline of mind and muscle that had marked the finding of the dead body on the sh.o.r.e the preceding night was no longer entirely manifest. These northern men, cold as flint ordinarily, were no longer wholly self-mastered. One glance at their faces, loose and pale in the moonlight, and the first sound of their voices told this fact only too plainly. It was not, however, that they were completely broken. Their training and their manhood was too good for that.

We didn't stop to answer their queries. We began to search through the gardens, examining every shadow, peering into every covert. We tried to direct each other according to our several ideas as to the source of the sound. We all agreed, however, that the sound had seemed to come from the immediate vicinity of the natural rock wall that formed the lagoon.

The next few moments were not very coherent. We called back and forth, encountered one another in the shadows, knew moments of apprehension when the brush walls cut us off from our fellows, but we found nothing that might have explained that desperate cry of a few moments before. At last some one called out commandingly from the sh.o.r.es of the lagoon.

"Come here, every one," he said. The voice rose above our confused utterances, and all of us, recognizing a leader, hurried to him. Pescini was standing beside the craggy sh.o.r.e, a strange and imposing figure in the wealth of moonlight, at the edge of that tranquil water.

Pescini, after all, was showing himself one of the most self-mastered men among us. Any one could read the fact in his voice. How white his skin looked in the moonlight, how raven-black his mustache and beard! He was still in the garb he had worn at dinner, immaculate and unruffled.

"We're not getting anywhere," he said. "Is every one here?"

"Here!" It was Joe Nopp's voice, and he immediately joined us. We waited an instant, seeing if any further searchers were yet to come in. But the thickets were as hushed as the lagoon itself.

"Let's take another tack," Pescini said. "There's nothing in these gardens. If there is we'll find it in an organized search. Remember--our search got us nowhere last night. Let's count up, and see if we're all all right."

We waited for him to continue. All of us breathed deeply and hard.