Satan Sanderson Part 18

Over the sanatorium on the ridge sleep had descended. On its broad grounds there was no light of moon or stars, and its chamber windows were dark, save where here and there the soft glow of a night-lamp sifted through a shutter. The evening had closed gloomily, breeding storm. The air was sultry and windless, and now and then sheet-lightning threw into blunt relief the dark bodies of the trees. Inside the building all slumbered, soundly or fitfully as health or illness decreed, carrying the humors of the stirring day into the wider realm of sleep.

Jessica had closed her eyes, thinking of a time when secrecy would all be ended, disguise done, when she would wear again the ring she had taken off in bitterness, when indeed and in name she would be a wife before the world. She had picked a great bowl of wild star-jasmin and set it by her bedside and the room was sweet with the delicate scent.

The odor carried her irresistibly back to the far-away mansion that had since seemed a haunted dwelling, to the days of her blindness and of Hugh's courtship. Before she extinguished the light she searched in a drawer and found her wedding-ring--the one she had worn for less than an hour. It was folded away in a box which she had not opened since the dreadful day when she had broken in pieces her model of the Prodigal Son. When she crept into bed, the ring was on her finger. She had fallen asleep with her cheek resting on it.

She awoke with a start, with a vague, inexplicable uneasiness, an instinct that the night had voiced an unusual sound. She sat up in bed, staring into the dark depths of the room. Her instant thought had been of David Stires, but the tiny bell on the wall whose wire led to his bedroom was not vibrating. She listened a moment, but there was only a deep silence.

Slipping out of bed, she crossed the room and parted the curtain from before the tall French window. The room was on the ground floor and the window gave directly on the lawn. The wind seemed dead, and the world outside--the broad, cleared expanse of trees and shrubs, and the descending forest that closed it round--was wrapped in a dense blackness. While she gazed there came a sudden yellow flare of lightning and far-distant mutter of thunder spoke behind the hills.

Still with the unreasoning uneasiness holding her, she groped to the door, drew the bolt and looked out into the wide, softly carpeted hall, lighted dimly by a lamp set just at the turn of the staircase. All at once a shiver ran through her. There, a dozen steps away, the light full upon him, stood the man who filled her thoughts.

He stood perfectly still, without movement or gesture, gazing at her.

She could see his face distinctly, silhouetted on the pearl-gray wall.

It wore an expression of strained concern and of deep helplessness. The instant agitation and surprise blotted the puzzle of his presence there.

She forgot that it was the dead of night, that she was in her nightgown.

It flashed across her mind that some near and desperate trouble had befallen him. All the protective and maternal in her love welled up. She went quickly toward him.

He did not move or stir, and then she realized that though his eyes seemed to look at her, it was with a pa.s.sive tranced fixity. They saw nothing. He was asleep.

It was the mind which was conscious, the action of the brain was at rest. The body, through the operation of some irreducible law of the subjective self, was moving in an automatic somnambulism. The intermittent memory that had begun to emerge in sleep, that had given him on waking the eerie impression of a dual ident.i.ty, had led him, involuntarily and unerringly, to her.

She halted, a deep compa.s.sion and a painful wonderment holding her, feeling with a thrill the power she possessed over him. Then, like a cold wave, surged over her a numbing sense of his position. How had he entered? Had he broken locks like a burglar? The situation was anomalous. What should she do? Waked abruptly, the result might be disastrous. Discovered, his presence there when all slumbered, suspected as he had been, would be ruinous. She must get him away, out of the house, and quickly.

A breath of cool air swept past her, putting out the lamp--an outer door was open. At the same instant she heard steps beyond the curve of the hall, Doctor Brent's voice peremptory and inquiring. Her nerves chilled; he blocked the sole avenue of retreat. No, there was one other, and only one--a single way to shield him. Quiet and resourceful now, though her cheeks were hot, she took the hand of the unconscious man, drew him silent and unresisting into the friendly shadow of her room, closed the door noiselessly and bolted it.

For a moment she stood motionless, her heart beating violently. Had he been seen? Or had the open door created an alarm? Releasing his hand gently, she found her way softly to a stand, lighted a tiny night-taper, and threw a shawl about her. Through its ground-gla.s.s the light cast a wan glimmer which showed the shadowy outlines of the room, its white rumpled bed, its scattered belongings eloquent of a woman's ownership, and the pallid countenance of the sleeping man. He had stopped still; a troubled frown was on his face, and his head was bent as if listening.

A sudden confusion tingled through her veins, a sense of maidenly shame that she could be there beside him _en deshabille_, opposing the sweet reminder of their real relationship--was he not in fact her husband?--that lay ever beneath her thought to justify and explain. He must wake before he left that room. What would he think? She flushed scarlet in the semi-darkness; she could not tell him--that! Not there and then! The blood forsook her heart as footsteps sounded outside the door. They paused, pa.s.sed on, returned and died away.

Suddenly, in the tense silence of the room, the mantel-clock struck three, a deep chime, like the vibration of a far-off church bell. The tone was not loud--indeed the low roll of the thunder had been well-nigh as loud--but there was in the intrusive metallic cadence a peculiar suggestion to the dormant mind. As the sound of the church bell in the town had done so often, it penetrated the crust of sleep; it touched the inner ear of the conscious intelligence that stirred so painfully, throbbing keenly to sights and sounds and odors that to the wakeful mind left only a cloudy impression eddying to some unfamiliar center. Harry started, a shudder ran through his frame, he swayed dizzily, his hand went to his forehead.

In the instant of shocked awakening, Jessica was at his side in an agony of apprehension, her arm thrown about him, her hand pressed across his lips, her own lips at his ear in an agonized warning:

"Hush, do not speak! It is I, Jessica. Make no noise."

She felt her wrist caught in a grasp that made her wince. His whole body was trembling violently. "Jessica!" he said in a painfully articulated whisper. "You? Where am I?"

"This is my room," she breathed. "You have been walking in your sleep.

Make no sound. We shall be heard."

A low exclamation broke from his lips. He looked bewilderedly about him, his eyes returning to her face with a horrified realization. "I ... came here ... to your room?" The voice was scarcely audible.

"It was I who brought you here. You were in the hall--you would have been found. The house is roused."

He turned abruptly to the door, but she caught his arm. "What are you going to do? You will be seen!"

"So much the better; it will be at my proper measure--as a prowler, a housebreaker, a disturber of honest sleep!"

"No, no!" she protested in a panic. "You shall not; I will not have you taken for what you are not! I know--but they would not know! No one must see you leave this room! Do you not think of me?"

He caught his breath hard. "Think of you!" he repeated huskily. "Is there ever an hour when I do not think of you? Is there a day when I would not die to serve you? Yet in my very sleep--"

He paused, gazing at her where she stood in the half-light, a misty, uncertain figure. She was curiously happy. The delicious and pangless sense of guilt, however--the guilt of the hidden, not the blameworthy thing--that was tingling through her was for him a shrinking and acute self-reproach.

"Here!" he said under his breath. "To have brought myself here, of all places, for you of all women to risk yourself for me! I only know that I was wandering for years and years in a shadowy desert, searching for something that would not be found--and then, suddenly I was here and you were speaking to me! You should have left me to be dragged away where I could trouble no one again."

She was silent. "Forgive me," he said, "if you can. I--I can never forgive myself. How can I best go?"

For answer she moved to the window, slender and wraith-like. He followed silently. A million vague new impressions were clutching at him; the fragrance in the room was like a hypnotic incense veiling shadowy forms.

Lines started from the blank:

And I swear, as I thought of her thus, in that hour, And how, after all, old things were best, That I smelt the smell of that jasmin-flower Which she used to wear in her breast!

As she parted the curtain, a second of bright lightning revealed the landscape, the dark hedges and cl.u.s.tered trees. It blackened, and she drew him back with a hushed word, pointing where a lantern was flashing through the shrubbery.

"It is a watchman," she said. "He will be gone presently."

Looking at her, where she stood in the dim light, half turned away, one hand against her cheek, there welled through him a wave of that hopeless longing which her kiss had awakened in that epoch moment of the Reverend Henry Sanderson. The clinging white gown, with the filmy lace at its throat, the taper's faint glow glimmering to a numbus in her loosened hair, the sweet intangible suggestions of the room--all these called to him potently, through the lines that raced in his brain.

But O, the smell of that jasmin-flower!

And O that music! and O the way That voice rang out from the donjon tower--

"G.o.d help me!" he whispered, the pent pa.s.sion of his dreams rushing to utterance. "Why did I ever see your face? I was reckless and careless then. I had d.a.m.ned the decent side of me that now is quivering alive! I have tried to blot your face from my memory. But it is useless. I shall always see it."

A rumble of nearer thunder sounded and a tentative dash of rain struck the pane. She was shaken to her depths. She stood in a whirlwind of emotion. She seemed to feel his arms clasping her, his lips on hers, his adjuring words in her ears. The odor of the flowers wreathed them both.

The beating of her heart seemed to fill all the silent room.

On the lawn just outside the window, low voices were heard through the increasing rain. They pa.s.sed, and after a moment he softly unlatched the window.

"Good-by," he said.

She stretched out her hand. He touched it, then drew the window wide. As he stepped noiselessly down on to the springy turf, the lightning flashed again--a pale-green glow that seemed almost before her face. She drew back, and the same instant, through the thunder, the electric bell on the wall rang sharply. She threw on her dressing-gown, thrust her feet into slippers, and hastened from the room.

The same flash that had startled Jessica lighted brightly the physician and the watchman, who stood at the corner of the building, having finished their tour of inspection. It was the latter who had found the open door and who had aroused the doctor, insisting that he had seen a man in the hall. The other had pooh-poohed this, but now by the lightning both saw the figure emerge from the French window and disappear in the darkness.

They ran back, the physician ahead. The window was not locked, and they stepped through it into an empty room.

"To be sure!" said the doctor disgustedly. "He was here all the time--heard us searching the halls, and took the first unlocked door he found. Miss Holme, no doubt, is sitting up with Mr. Stires. Not a word of this," he added as they walked along the hall. "Unless she misses something, there is no need of frightening her."

He barred the outer door behind the watchman and went on. As he reached David Stires' room, the door opened and Jessica came out. She spoke to him in a low, anxious voice. "I was coming for you," she said. "I am afraid he is not so well. I can not rouse him. Will you come in and see what you can do?"

The doctor entered, and a glance at his patient alarmed him. Until dawn he sat with Jessica watching. When the early sunlight was flooding the room, however, David Stires opened his eyes and looked upon her quite naturally.

"Where is Harry Sanderson?" he asked. "I thought he was here."