She Buildeth Her House Part 18

The conductor called that he would be back directly, as his car slid down.... In the untellable disorganization of mind, Paula knew for the moment only this: she must reach the outer darkness instantly or expire.

In that swift drop to the main floor, and in the brief interval required to stop the car and slide the door, she endured all the agony of tightened fingers upon her throat. There was an ease in racing limbs, as she sped across the tiles to the entrance, as a frightened child rushes from a dark room. She would die if the great door resisted--pictured it all before her hand touched the k.n.o.b. She would turn, scream, and fall from suffocation. Her scream would call about her the horror that she feared.

The big door answered, as it seemed, with a sort of leisurely dignity to her spasm of strength--and out under the rain-blurred lamps, she ran, ready to faint if any one called, and continually horrified lest something pluck at her skirts--thus to Central Park West. An Eighth Avenue car was approaching, half a square above. To stand and wait, in the fear lest Bellingham reach the corner in time for the car, a.s.sailed the last of her vitality. It was not until she had boarded it, and was beyond reach of a pedestrian on Cathedral Way, that she breathed as one who has touched sh.o.r.e after the Rapids. Still, every south-bound cab renewed her panic. She could have made time to South Ferry by changing to the Elevated, but fear of encountering the Destroyer prevented this.

Fully three-quarters of an hour was used in reaching the waiting-room, where she was fortunate in catching a Staten Island boat without delay.

Every figure that crossed the bridge after her, until the big ferry put off, Paula scrutinized; then sank nearly fainting into a seat.

Bellingham's plot was clear to her mind, as well as certain elements of his craft to obviate every possibility of failure. He had doubtless seen her enter the house, and timed his control to dethrone her volition as she reached her rooms. Since the elevator-man would not have taken him up, without word from her, Bellingham had hastened in and started up the stairs when the car was called from the main floor. His shock at finding her in the second-hall was extraordinary, since he was doubtless struggling with the entire force of his concentration, to hold her in the higher apartment and to prepare her mind for his own reception. It was that moment that the elevator-man had saved her; yet, she could not forget how the voice of Quentin Charter had broken the magician's power a moment before; and it occurred to her now how wonderfully throughout her whole Bellingham experience, something of the Westerner's spirit had sustained her in the crises--Quentin Charter's book that first night in Prismatic Hall; Quentin Charter's letter to which she had clung during the dreadful interview in the Park....

As for Quentin Charter rus.h.i.+ng immediately to the woman of lawless attractions, because he had not received the hoped-for note at the _Granville_--in this appeared a wantonness almost beyond belief. Wearily she tried to put the man and his base action entirely out of mind. And Selma Cross, whose animation had been so noticeable when informed of Charter's coming, had fallen beneath the reach of Paula's emotions....

She could pity--with what a torrential outpouring--could she pity "that finest, lowest head!"

She stepped out on deck. The April night was inky-black. All day there had been a misty rain from which the chill of winter was gone. The dampness was sweet to breathe and fresh upon her face. The smell of ocean brought up from the subconscious, a thought already in tangible formation there. The round clock in the cabin forward had indicated nine-forty-five. It seemed more like another day, than only an hour and a half ago, that she had caught the Eighth Avenue car at Cathedral Way.

The ferry was nearing the Staten slip. In a half-hour more, she would reach Reifferscheid's house. Her heart warmed with grat.i.tude for a friend to whom she could say as little or as much as she pleased, yet find him, heart and home, at her service. One must be terrified and know the need of a refuge in the night to test such values. A few hours before, she had rejected the thought of going, because a slight formality had not been attended to. Hard pressed now, she was seeking him in the midst of the night.... At the mention of the big man's name, the conductor on the Silver Lake car took her in charge, helped her off at the right road, and pointed out the Reifferscheid light. Thus she felt her friend's kindness long before she heard the big elms whispering over his cottage. The front-window was frankly uncurtained, and the editor sat within, soft-s.h.i.+rted and eminently comfortable beside a green-shaded reading-lamp. She even saw him drop his book at her step upon the walk. A moment later, she blinked at him laughingly, as he stood in the light of the wide open doorway.

"Properly 'Driven From Home,' I suppose I should be tear-stained and in shawl and ap.r.o.n," she began.

He laughed delightedly, and exclaimed: "How could Father be so obdurate--alas, a-a-las! Lemme see, this is a fisherman's hut on the moors, or a gardener's lodge on the sh.o.r.e. Anyway, it's good to have you here.... Annie!"

He took her hat and raincoat, wriggling meanwhile into a coat of his own, arranged a big chair before the grate, then removed her rubbers.

Not a question did he ask, and Sister Annie's greeting presently, from her chair, was quite the same--as if the visit and the hour were exactly in order.

"You'll stay a day or two, won't you?" he asked. "Honestly, I don't like the way they treat you up there beyond the Park.... It will be fine to-morrow. This soft rain will make Mother Earth turn over and take an eye-opener----"

"The truth is, I want to stay until there's a s.h.i.+p for the Antilles,"

she told him, "and I don't know when the first one goes."

"I hope it's a week at least," he said briskly. "The morning papers are here with all the sailings. A sea-voyage will do you a world of good, and Europe doesn't compare with a trip to the Caribbean."

"Just you two--and one other--are to know," Paula added nervously.

Reifferscheid had gathered up a bundle of papers, and was turning pages swiftly. "There isn't a reason in the world why everybody should know,"

he remarked lightly, "only you'd better be Lottie or Daisy Whats-her-name, as the cabin lists of all outgoing s.h.i.+ps are available to any one who looks."

"Tim will be delighted to make everything easy for you," Sister Annie put in.

Thus mountains dissolved. The soulful accord and the instant sympathy which sprang to meet her every word, and the valor behind it all, so solid as to need no explanation--were more than Paula could bear....

Reifferscheid looked up from his papers, finding that she did not speak, started with embarra.s.sment, and darted to the buffet. A moment later he had given her a gla.s.s of wine and vanished from the room with an armful of newspapers. The door had no sooner closed upon him than Paula discovered the outstretched arms of Sister Annie. In the several moments which followed her heart was healed and soothed through a half-forgotten luxury....

"The twin-screw liner, _Fruitlands_,--do you really want the first?"

Reifferscheid interrupted himself, when he was permitted to enter later.

"Yes."

"Well, it sails in forty-eight hours, or a little less--Savannah, Santiago de Cuba, San Juan de Porto Rico--and down to the little Antilles--Tuesday night at ten o'clock at the foot of Manhattan."

"That will do very well," Paula said, "and I'd like to go straight to the s.h.i.+p from here--if you'll----"

"Berth--transportation--trunks--and sub-let your flat, if you like,"

Reifferscheid said as gleefully as a boy invited for a week's hunt.

"Why, Miss Linster, I am the original arrangement committee."

"You have always been wonderful to me," Paula could not help saying, though it shattered his ease. "This one other who must know is Madame Nestor. She'll take care of my flat and pack things for me--if you'll get a message to her in the morning when you go over. I don't expect to be gone so long that it will be advisable to sub-let."

"Which is emphatically glad tidings," Reifferscheid remarked hastily.

"You'll want all your summer clothes," said Sister Annie. "Tim will see to your trunks."

"Sometime, I'll make it all plain," Paula tried to say steadily. "It's just been life to me--this coming here--and knowing that I could come here----"

"Miss Linster," Reifferscheid broke in, "I don't want to have to disappear again. The little things you need done, I'd do for any one in the office. Please bear in mind that Sister Annie and I would be hurt--if you didn't let us do them. Why, we belong--in a case like this.

Incidentally, you are doing a bully thing--to take a sail down past that toy-archipelago. They say you can hear the parakeets screeching out from the palm-trees on the sh.o.r.e, and each island has a different smell of spice. It will be great for you--rig you out with a new set of wings.

You must take Hearn along. I've got his volume here on the West Indies.

He'll tell you the color of the water your s.h.i.+p churns. Each day farther south it's a different blue----"

So he jockeyed her into laughing, and she slept long and dreamlessly that night, as she had done once before in the same room.... The second night following, Reifferscheid put her aboard the _Fruitlands_.

"It's good you thought of taking your cabin under a borrowed name, Miss--er--Wyndam--Miss Laura Wyndam," he said in a low voice, for the pa.s.sengers were moving about. "I'll write you all about it. You have famous friends. Selma Cross, who is playing at the _Herriot_, wanted to know where you were. I thought for a minute she was going to throw me down and take it away from me. Quentin Charter, by the way, is in town and asked about you. Seemed depressed when I told him you were out of town, and hadn't sent your address to me yet. I told him and Miss Cross that mail for you sent to _The States_ would get to you eventually. Both said they would write--so you'll hear from them on the s.h.i.+p that follows this." He glanced at her queerly for a second, and added, "Good-by, and a blessed voyage to you, Tired Lady. Write us how the isles bewitch you, and I'll send you a package of books every s.h.i.+p or two----"

"Good-by--my first of friends!"

Two hours afterward Paula took a last turn on deck. The spray swept in gusts over the _Fruitlands's_ dipping prow. The bare masts, tipped with lights, swung with a giant sweep from port to starboard and back to port again, fingering the black heavens for the blown-out stars. She was lonely, but not altogether miserable, out there on the tossing floor of the Atlantic....

SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER

PAULA SAILS INTO THE SOUTH, SEEKING THE HOLY MAN OF SAINT PIERRE, WHERE _LA MONTAGNE PELeE_ GIVES WARNING

Wonderfully strengthened, she was, by the voyage. Sorrow had destroyed large fields of verdure, and turned barren the future, but its devouring was finished. Quentin Charter was adjusted in her mind to a duality with which Paula Linster could have no concern. Only to one mistress could he be faithful; indeed, it was only in the presence of this mistress that he became the tower of visions to another; in the midst of the work he wors.h.i.+pped, Quentin Charter had heard the Skylark sing. Paula did not want to see him again, nor Selma Cross. To avoid these two, as well as the place where the Destroyer had learned so well to penetrate, she had managed not to return to her apartment during the two days before sailing.... There would never be another master-romance--never again so rich a giving, nor so pure an ideal. Before this tragic reality, the inner glory of her womanhood became meaningless. It was this that made the future a crossing of sterile tundras,--yet she would keep her friends, and love her work, and try to hold her faith....

Bellingham did not call her at sea, but he had frightened her too profoundly to be far from mind. The face she had seen in the hall-way was drawn and disordered by the dreadful tortures of nether-planes; and awful in the eyes, was that feline vacancy of soul. Once in a dream, she saw him--a pale reptile-monster upreared from a salty sea, voiceless in that oceanic isolation, a shameful secret of the depths. The ghastly bulk had risen with a mute protest to the sky against dissolution and creeping decay--and sounded again....

To her, Bellingham was living death, the triumph of desire which rends itself, the very essence of tragedy. She gladly would have died to make her race see the awfulness of _just flesh_--as she saw it now.... His power seemed ended; she felt with the Reifferscheids and Madame Nestor, that her secret was hermetic, and there was a goodly sense of security in the intervening sea....

And now there was a new island each day; each morning a fresh garden arose from the Caribbean--sun-wooed, rain-softened isles with colorful little ports.... There was one tropic city--she could not recall the name--which from the offing had looked like the flower-strewn gateway to an amphitheatre of mountains.

The _Fruitlands_ had lain for a day in the hot, sharky harbor of Santiago; had run into a real cloudburst off the Silver Reefs of Santo Domingo, and breathed on the radiant next morning before the stately and ancient city of San Juan de Porto Rico--s.h.i.+ning white as a dream-castle of old Spain, and adrift in an azure world of sky and sea. She spent a day and an evening in this isle of ripe fruits and riper amours; and took away materials for a memory composite of interminable siestas, restless radiant nights, towering cliffs, incomparable courtesy, and soft-voiced maidens with wondrous Spanish eyes that laugh and turn away.

Then for two days they had steamed down past the saintly archipelago--St. Thomas, St. Martin, St. Kitts; then Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Dominica, and a legion of littler isles--truncated peaks jutting forth from fragrant, tinted water. There were afternoons when she did not care to lift her voice or move about. Fruit-juices and the simplest salads, a flexible cane chair under the awnings, a book to rest the eyes from the gorgeous sea and enchanted sh.o.r.es, somnolence rather than sleep--these are enough for the approach to perfection in the Caribbean, with the Lesser Antilles on the lee.... Then at last in late afternoon, the great hulking shape of Pelee loomed watery green against the sky; in the swift-speeding twilight, the volcano seemed to swell and blacken until it was like the shadow of a continent, and the lights of Saint Pierre p.r.i.c.ked off the edge of the land.

At last late at night, queerly restless, she sat alone on deck in the windless roadstead and regarded the illumined terraces of Saint Pierre.

They had told her that the breath from Martinique was like the heavy moist sweetness of a horticultural garden, but the island must have been sick with fever this night, for a mile at sea the land-breeze was dry, devitalized, irritating the throat and nostrils.

There was no moon, and the stars were so faint in the north that the ma.s.s of Pelee was scarcely shaped against the sky. The higher lights of the city had a reddish uncertain glow, as if a thin film of fog hung between them and the eye; but to the south the night cleared into pure purple and unsullied tropic stars. The harbor was weirdly hot.

Before her was the city which held the quest of her voyaging--Father Fontanel, the holy man of Saint Pierre.... _Only a stranger can realize what a pure s.h.i.+ning garment his actual flesh has become. To me there was healing in the very approach of the man...._ This was the enduring fragment from the Charter letters; and in that dreadful Sunday night when she began her flight from Bellingham, already deep within her mind Father Fontanel was the goal.... Paula set out for sh.o.r.e early the next morning. The second-officer of the _Fruitlands_ sat beside her in the launch. She spoke of the intense sultriness.