The Thing from the Lake Part 22

The fog still dense outside was whitening with daybreak. A few hours while the sun ran its course once more for me, then night again, bringing completion of the menace. I recognized that this delay could not affect the end. Perhaps it would have been easier if all had finished for me tonight, easier if Vere and Phillida had not found me in time to bring me back.

How had they found out my condition? Wonder stirred under my lethargy.

Had I called or cried out? It did not seem that I could have done so.

Certainly I had not tried! I was not quite so poor an adventurer as that.

Phillida was back with a cup of steaming black coffee, tiptoeing in her anxiety and questioning Vere with her eyes. He took the cup, stooping to receive my glance of a.s.sent to the new medicine.

The brandy had stimulated, but sickened me. The coffee revived me so much that I was able to take the second cup without Vere's help. When I had walked up and down the room a few times, leaning on his arm, life had taken me back, if only for a little while.

The two nurses were so good in their care of me that our first words were of my grat.i.tude to them. Then my curiosity found voice.

"How did you happen to come in at this hour?" I asked. "How did you know I was--ill?"

"I cannot imagine what made Ethan wake up," said Phillida, with a puzzled look toward her husband. "He woke me by rushing out of the room and letting the door slam behind him. Of course I knew something must be wrong to make Drawls hurry like that. Usually he does such a tremendous lot in a day while looking positively lazy. So I came rushing after and found him in here, trying to waken you. I--I thought at first that you were not living, Cousin Roger. It was horrible! You were all white and cold----" she shivered.

Vere poured another cup of coffee. He said nothing on the subject, merely observing that the stimulant would hardly hurt me and some might be good for Phil. I asked her to bring cups for them both.

"I am not sure I really care about the coffee, but I'll make some more,"

she nodded, dimpling. "I love to drink from your wee porcelain cups with their gold holders. You do have pretty things, you bachelors from town."

When she was across the room, I asked quietly:

"What was it, Vere? What sent you to me?"

He answered in as subdued a tone, looking at the tinted shade of the lamp instead of at my face.

"The young lady woke me, Mr. Locke. She came to the bedside, whispering that you were dying--would be dead if I didn't get to help you in time.

She was gone before Phillida roused up so she doesn't know anything about it."

My heart, so nearly stopped forever and so lethargic still, leaped in a strong beat. Desire, then, had come back to save me. For all my doubt and seemingly broken faith, she had brought her slight power to help me in my hour of danger. For my sake she had broken through her mysterious seclusion to call Vere and send him to my rescue.

Neither he nor I being unsophisticated, I understood what Vere believed, and why he looked at the lamp rather than at me. But even that matter had to yield precedence to my first eagerness.

"You saw her?" I demanded. "You call her young. You saw her face, then?"

"I could forget it if I had," he said dryly. "As it happened, I didn't.

She was wrapped in a lot of floating thin stuff; gray, I guess? The room was pretty dark, and I was jumping out of sleep. I don't know why she seemed young unless it was the easy, light way she moved. By the time I got what she was saying and sat up, she was gone."

"Gone?"

"She went out the door like a puff of smoke. I just saw a gray figure in the doorway, where the hall lamp made it brighter than in the room. When I came into the hall there wasn't a sign of anybody about. Nor afterward, either!"

I considered briefly.

"I suppose I know what you are thinking, Vere. It is natural, but wrong.

The lady----"

"Mr. Locke," he checked me, "I'm not--thinking. I guess you're as good a judge as I am about what goes on in this house. After the way you've treated us from the first, I'd be pretty dull not to know you're as choice of Phillida as I am; and she is all that matters."

"Who is?" demanded Phillida, returning. "Me? I haven't the least idea what you are talking about, Drawls, but I think Cousin Roger matters a great deal more than I do, just now. Perhaps now he is able to tell us about this attack, and if he should have a doctor. I have noticed for weeks how thin and grave he has been growing to be. If only he _would_ drink b.u.t.termilk!"

I looked into the candid, affectionate face she turned to me. From her, I looked to her husband, whose New England steadiness had been tempered by a sailor's service in the war and broadened by the test of his experience in a city cabaret. A new thought cleaved through my perplexities like an arrow shot from a far-off place.

"How much do you both trust me?" I slowly asked. "I do not mean trust my character or my good intentions, but how much confidence have you in my sanity and commonsense? Would you believe a thing because I told it to you? Or would you say: 'This is outside usual experience. He is deceiving us, or mad'?"

They regarded one another, smiling with an exquisite intimacy of understanding.

"Don't you see yourself one little, little bit, Cousin?" she wondered at me.

"Anything you say, goes all the way with us," Vere corroborated.

"Wait," I bade. "Drink your coffee while I think."

"Please drink yours, Cousin Roger, all fresh and hot."

I emptied the cup she urged upon me, then leaned my forehead in my hands and tried to review the situation. They obeyed like well-bred children, settling down on a cushioned seat together and taking their coffee as prettily as a pair of parakeets. They seemed almost children to me, although there was little difference in years between Vere and myself.

But then, I stood on the brink where years stopped.

With the next night, my triumphant enemy could be put off no longer.

That I could not doubt. I cannot say that I was unafraid, yet fear weighed less upon me than a heavy sense of solemnity and realization of the few hours left during which I could affect the affairs of life. What remained to be done?

On one of my visits to New York, I had called on my lawyer and made my will. There were a few pensioners for whom provision should continue after my death. The aged music master under whom I developed such abilities as I had, who was crippled now by rheumatism and otherwise dependent on a hard-faced son-in-law; the three small daughters of a dead friend, an actor, whose care and education at a famous school of cla.s.sic dancing I had promised him to finance--a few such obligations had been provided for, and the rest was for Phillida.

But now, what of Desire Mich.e.l.l?

She had seemed so apart from common existence that I never had thought of her possible needs any more than of the needs of a bird that darted in and out of my windows. Until tonight, when I had seen her and she had proved herself all woman by her appeal to Ethan Vere. It was not a spirit or a seeress or "ye foule witch, Desire Mich.e.l.l" who had fled to him for help in rescuing me. It was simply a terrified girl. What was to become of this girl? Under what circ.u.mstances did she dwell? Had she a home, or did she need one? Could I care for this matter while I was here?

Day was so far advanced that a clamor of birds came in to us along with a freshening air. The strangely persistent fog had not lifted, but the lamps already looked wan and faded in the new light. I switched them out before speaking to the pair who watched me.

"I have a story to tell you both," I said. "The beginning of it Phillida has already heard. Perhaps----Have you told Vere about the woman who visited this room, the first night I spent in the house? Who cut her hair and left the braid in my hand to escape from me?"

"Yes," she nodded, wide-eyed.

"Will you go to my chiffonier, there in the alcove, and bring a package wrapped in white silk from the top drawer?"

She did as she was asked and laid the square of folded silk before me. I put back the covering, showing that sumptuous braid. The rich fragrance of the gold pomander wrapped with it filled the air like a vivifying elixir. Phillida gathered up the braid with a cry of envious rapture.

"Oh! The gorgeous thing! How do some lucky girls have hair like that? If it was unbound, my two hands could not hold it all. What a pity to have cut it! Look, Ethan, how it crinkles and glitters."

She held it out to him, extended across her palms. Vere refrained from touching the braid, surveying it where it lay. Being a mere bachelor, I had no idea of Phillida's emotions, until Vere's usual gravity broke in a mischievous, heart-warming smile into the brown eyes uplifted to him.

"Beautiful," he agreed politely.

No more. But as I saw the wistful envy pa.s.s quite away from my little cousin's plain face and leave her content, I advanced in respect for him.

In the beginning, it was even harder to speak than I had antic.i.p.ated.

When Phillida laid the braid back in its wrapping, I left it uncovered before me and looked at its rea.s.suring reality rather than at my listeners. How, I wondered, could anyone be expected to credit the story I had to tell? How should I find words to embody it?

Only at first! Whether there clung about me some atmosphere of that land between the worlds where I so recently had stood; or the room indeed kept, as I fancied, the melancholy chill of the unseen tide that had washed through it, I met no scepticism from the two who heard my tale of wild experience. They did not interrupt me. Phillida crept close to her husband, putting her hand in his, but she did not exclaim or question.