The Pursuit Part 47

He stood staring down at them through a moment of leering self-satisfaction, and then slowly, reluctantly, turned away. He took Miller's arm and drew him insistently down the path. His evil laughter came back to them shrill upon the evening breeze.

Inside their prison the two turned and confronted each other. Then Aylmer spoke.

"He has defied G.o.d, and the judgment of G.o.d has fallen on him. He is insane--that is evident! Insane with malice, with his surrender to the devil and all his works."

Her lips were parched. She whispered.

"And to-morrow?" she questioned, thickly. "To-morrow--we shall have to surrender, too. To him?"

He clenched his fists.

"No!" he said. "No! Not while Fate has given us to-night--to-night!"

CHAPTER XXIII

PADRE SIGISMONDI

The presage of the afternoon sky was amply fulfilled by midnight. The western gale howled through the window bars and the sound of the sea's thunder rolled up from the beach. For the Mediterranean it was a gale beyond the normal, one that had borrowed strength from its Atlantic kin.

It lashed the green islands of the archipelago with unaccustomed violence. The vine poles fell in ranks before its blast; the lava dust whirled up in spirals; the pebbles clattered along the face of the shingle. And yet there was something strange, noticeable, almost ominous, about the tempest. It had none of the northern breath of ice.

It was a hot wind; in spring or summer, and had it risen in the south, one would have called it sirocco and kept in the shadow throughout its blowing. But this wind blew from the north and the month was December.

The islanders mused over the phenomenon debatingly.

Inside the prison the storm m.u.f.fled sounds which, however, no listener was abroad to detect. A common table fork his only implement, Aylmer was levering the ma.s.sive corner-stones inch by inch from their seating. The lower one had already been removed, but the upper one, as expected, had not fallen from its place. He panted as he put forth his strength upon it. The ebb and flow of his pulses swelled in the half-healed scar on his temple. Blood was flowing from a few superficial cuts upon his fingers. He ground his teeth and tugged at the stone savagely, worrying it as a terrier might worry a defiant rat. And then, with an unexpected jerk, it fell out upon him bodily. He dropped backwards, the stone's weight upon his leg.

He gave a half-m.u.f.fled cry, not of pain, but of satisfaction. The rest was easy; the road was open.

Then, as he panted in the relief of accomplished effort, Fate rebuked his satisfaction with a sudden threat. A step sounded coming up the gravel.

His temperamental coolness and presence of mind never stood a test better. He stood up, raised each stone in quick succession, and placed them swiftly, carefully, and silently beneath the coverlet of his companion's bed. She flung herself down beside them. He drew his own pallet into the corner from which the stones had been removed and lay, his face to the wall, the huddle of the bed clothes hiding the opening.

A moment later a light shone through the window. The light of a lamp illuminated a wrinkled Italian face.

The watcher blinked at them suspiciously, grunted, and then with a half-articulate expression of satisfaction, turned away. The light bobbed slowly off into the distance, flaring and guttering before the force of the wind. Inside the prison a sigh went up--a chorussed echo of relief.

"Landon is taking no chances," said Aylmer, in a whisper. "We are to be visited, at intervals. That is evident."

He heard something like the sound of a sob in the darkness.

"It means defeat--this?" asked Claire. "Fate is setting her face against us. We are not even to have our chance!"

"No!" he said grimly. "Fate is not against us. I feel it, I have believed it all along. And if she is, then it is our duty to defy her.

After all, we can use the chief source of danger to defeat suspicion; that is easy."

He rose cautiously and plucked the remaining stones from the hole. He placed them in his own bed; he arranged matters carefully. And then he made a motion towards the new-made opening.

"Will you lead?" he said quietly. "Will you be the first to confront--Fate?"

She gave a little gasp.

"I?" she said, and hesitated, fear in her eyes.

"You, if you will," he answered simply. "Make your way out and hide yourself in the nearest convenient shadow. Then, if he returns before I can join you, await me. If not--" He shrugged his shoulders. "I shall be at your heels."

She still paused, and her fingers clenched and unclenched.

"I did not expect--to be--separated," she breathed. "My strength--I did not realize it at first--is coming all from you."

His hand went out into the darkness and touched her.

"From now on, it will be used in your service," he said quietly. "For you and you alone." She felt the hand quiver. "Whether you ask it or not, whether I am to be all to you in the future, or nothing. It will be there--for your asking."

And then, because the need of that strength came upon her with a force which she could not control, she gripped the protecting hand between her fingers and--Fate alone knows why--raised it to her lips. The next instant she had slipped past him in the darkness and was drawing herself through the opening. She rose to her knees, to her feet. She stood out upon the wind-swept earth, free. Free of the material prison behind her.

Had she not laid upon herself new bonds? It was a thought too new, too indefinite, too strangely sweet. The tumult of her feelings was in accord with the tumult of the night.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _She gripped the protecting hand between her fingers_]

She stood, expectant, her ears alert for sounds. There was no grating of pebbles upon the path. But from the hole at her feet the faint rip of clothing torn against the angle of the stone. The next instant Aylmer had emerged, but did not rise. His hands, returning to the opening, still worked at something within. And then she gave a little gasp. A light shone at her feet. It made a tiny, yellow splash in the darkness and fell--on Aylmer's face.

Terror paralyzed her; she stood as if turned to stone; her hands clenched into her clothing upon her breast. And Aylmer lay as motionless, the golden gleam falling directly into his eyes, which did not even blink.

A sound broke the stillness--a sound which came from the far side of their prison--and the light disappeared. She heard footsteps which retreated; she recognized again the grunt which told of another inspection made to the inspector's content. But what had saved them--what?

Aylmer rose and stood beside her. His hand gently gripped her elbow and drew her out into the roar and beat of the tempest. He headed inland; the path which the sentinel had taken was the one which led towards the sh.o.r.e.

A minute later she breathed her question. And he laughed lightly in the darkness. The sound, incongruous as it seemed to her sense of ever-menacing fear, thrilled her strangely. If he could laugh, was not Fate laughing with him? Was there not a smile on the face of Hope?

"I was only just through the hole when he came, when he flashed his lantern at what he supposed was my body, rec.u.mbent on the bed. I was holding up the bed clothes _from outside_; I had not had time to shove the stones back into place."

She shuddered at the nearness of the hazard. Supposing the man had come at the very moment of escape--supposing?

"But the light?" she protested. "The light shone upon your face!"

He laughed again.

"The bed clothes had a hole in them!" he said. "I held them up into the form of human shoulders, and through a rent his lantern beat directly on my face! He could not, of course, see me, but I got a good view of him.

It was Luigi himself, this time. Has Fate been whispering to him, do you think? Has she made him suspicious?"

She stumbled and caught at him to steady herself. He looked down in sudden, quick compunction.

"It has been too much for you!" he said anxiously. "You are feeling faint?"

"No!" she said quietly. "I am trying to think of it as a nightmare from which I shall wake directly, but it is real! Whenever that comes home to me it--it is a pain. Well, it will not be a long ordeal now, will it? We meet Fate at the landing stage, and she will give her decision. Can we unmoor the _Santa Margarita_ from inside the breakwater, or can we not?

She will know."

He nodded.