The Thing from the Lake Part 30

Desire exclaimed something. What, I do not know. Her voice was lost in the triumphant conviction that I was right. She was free, and the freedom was my gift to her. I was not vanquished, but victor. The life I paid was not a penalty, but a price.

Her face was uplifted to mine as she clung to me; then my weight glided through her arms and I fell back in my chair.

I was alone amid blackness and desolation that poured past me like the wind above the world.

For the last time, I opened my eyes on the gray sh.o.r.e at the foot of the Barrier. I, pygmy indeed, stood again before the colossal wall whose palisades reared up beyond vision and stretched away beyond vision on either side.

I was alone here. No whisper of taunt or menace, no presence of horror troubled me. Opposite me, the Breach that split the cliff showed as a shadowed canon, empty except of dread. Far out behind me the sea that was like no sea of earth gathered itself beneath its eternal mists as a tidal wave draws and gathers. With folded arms I stood there, waiting for the returning surge of mighty waters to overwhelm me in their flood.

I waited in awe and solemn expectancy, beyond fear or hope.

But now I became aware of a new doubleness of experience. Here on the Frontier, I was between the worlds, yet I also saw the room in the house left behind. I saw myself as an unconscious body reclined in a chair beside the hearth. Desire Mich.e.l.l knelt on the floor beside me, her hands grasping my arms, her gaze fixed on my face, her hair spilling its shining lengths across my knees. Phillida was huddled in a chair, crying hysterically. Vere apparently had been trying to force some stimulant upon the man who was myself, yet was not myself, for while I watched he reluctantly rose from bending above the figure and set a gla.s.s upon the table. I echoed his sigh. Life was good.

The sea behind me began to rush in from immeasurable distances. The roar of the waters' thunderous approach blended with the heat and flash of storm all about the house into which I looked.

"He dies," Desire spoke, her voice level and calm. "Has it not been so with all who loved the daughters of my race these two centuries past?

Yet never did one of those die as he dies--not for pa.s.sion, but for protection of the woman--not as a madman or one ignorant, but facing that which was not meant for man to face, his eyes beating back the intolerable Eyes. Oh, glory and grief of mine to have seen this!"

Phillida cowered lower in her chair, burying her face in the cushions.

But Vere abruptly stood erect, his fine dark face lifted and set. Just so some ancestors of his might have risen in a bleak New England meeting-house when moved powerfully to wrestle with evil in prayer. But it is doubtful if any Maine deacon ever addressed his Deity as Vere appealed to his.

"Almighty, we're in places we don't understand," he spoke simply as to a friend within the room, his earnest, drawling speech entirely natural.

"But You know them as You do us. If things have got to go this way, why, we'll make out the best we can. But if they don't, and we're just blundering into trouble, please save Roger Locke and this poor girl.

Because we know You can. Amen."

Now at this strange and beautiful prayer--or so it seemed to me--a ray of blinding light cleaved up from where Vere stood, like a shot arrow speeding straight through house and night into inconceivable s.p.a.ce. Then the room vanished from my sight as the great wave burst out of the mist upon me.

I went down in a smother of ghastly snarling floods cold as s.p.a.ce is cold. Something fled past me up the strand, shrieking inhuman pa.s.sion; the Eyes of my enemy glared briefly across my vision.

One last view I glimpsed of that dread Barrier, amid the tumult and welter of my pa.s.sing. The breach was closed! Unbroken, majestic, the enormous Wall stood up inviolate.

CHAPTER XXI

"Fancy, like the finger of a clock, Runs the great circuit, and is still at home."

--COWPER.

The uproar of rushing waters was still in my ears. But I was in my chair before the hearth in the living room of the farmhouse, and the noise was the din of a tempest outside.

Opposite me, Phillida and Desire were clinging together, watching me with such looks of gladness and anxiety that I felt myself abashed before them. Bagheera, the cat, sat on the table beside the lamp, yellow eyes blinking at each flash and rattle of lightning and thunder, while he sleeked his recently wetted fur. Wondering where that wet had come from, I discovered presently that the fire was out, and the hearth drenched with soot-stained water. I looked toward the windows, from which the curtains had been drawn aside. Rain poured glistening down the panes, but the clean storm was empty of horror.

"Drink some of this, Mr. Locke," urged Vere, whose arm was about me.

"Sit quiet, and I guess you'll be all right in a few moments."

I took the advice. Strength was flowing into me, as inexplicably as it had flowed away from me a while past. How can I describe the certainty of life that possessed me? The a.s.surance was established, singularly enough, for all of us. None of my companions asked, and I myself never doubted whether the danger might return. The experience was complete, and closed. Moreover, already the Thing that had been our enemy, the horror that had been Its atmosphere, the mystery that haunted Desire--all were fading into the past. The phantoms were exorcised, and the house purified of fear.

But there was something different from ordinary storm in this tempest.

The tumult of rain and wind linked another, deeper roar with theirs. The house quivered with a steady trembling like a bridge over which a train is pa.s.sing. Pulling myself together I turned to Vere.

"What is happening outdoors?" I asked.

"The cloudburst was too much for the dam," he answered regretfully. "It went off with a noise like a big gun, a while back. I expect the lake is flooding the whole place and messing up everything from our cellar to the chickenhouse. Daylight is due pretty soon, now, and the storm is dying down. We'll be able to add up the damage, after a bit."

"The water came down the chimney and drowned Bagheera," Phillida bravely tried to summon nonchalance. "Isn't it lucky you and Desire could not get started in the car, after all? Fancy being out in that!"

Desire Mich.e.l.l steadied her soft lips and gave her quota to the shelter of commonplace speech we raised between ourselves and emotions too recently felt.

"It was like the tropical storms in Papua, where I lived until this year," she said. "Once, one blew down the mission house."

Vere's weather prediction proved quite right. In an hour the storm had exhausted itself, or pa.s.sed away to other places. Sunrise came with a veritable glory of crimson and gold, blazing through air washed limpidly pure by the rain. The east held a troop of small clouds red as flamingoes flying against a shining sky; last traces of our tempest.

We stood on the porch together to survey an unfamiliar scene in the rosy light. Water overlay lawns and paths, so the house stood in a wide, shallow lake whose ripples lapped around the white cement steps and the pillars of the porte-cochere. Phillida's Pekin ducks floated and fed on this new waterway as contentedly as upon their accustomed pastures.

Small objects sailed on the flood here and there; Bagheera's milk-pan from the rear veranda bobbed amidst a fleet of apples shaken down in the orchard, while some wooden garden tools nudged a silk canoe-cushion.

In contrast to all this aquatic prospect, where the real lake had been there now lay some acres of ugly, oozing marsh; its expanse dotted with the bodies of dead water-creatures and such of Vere's young trout as had not been swept away by the outpouring flood. The dam was a mere pile of debris through which trickled a stream bearing no resemblance to the sparkling waterfall of yesterday. Already the sun's rays were drawing a rank, unwholesome vapor from the long-submerged surface.

We contemplated the ruin for a while, without words.

"Poor Drawls!" Phillida sighed at length. "All your work just rubbed out!"

"Never mind, Vere," I exclaimed impulsively. "We will put it all back in the same shape as it was."

But even as I spoke, I felt an odd shock of uneasiness and recoil from my own proposition. I did not want the lake to be there again; or to hear the unaccountable sounds to which it gave birth and the varying fall of the cataract over the dam. Did the others share my repugnance? I seemed to divine that they did. Even the impetuous Phil did not break out in welcome of my offer. Desire, who had smoothed her sober gray dress in some feminine fashion and stood like Marguerite or Melisande with a great braid over either shoulder, moved as if to speak, then changed her intention. A faint distress troubled her expression.

As usual, Vere himself quietly lifted us out of unrest.

"I'm not sure that couldn't be bettered, Mr. Locke," he demurred. "That is if you liked, of course! That marsh could be cleaned up and drained into pretty rich land, I guess. And down there beyond the barn, on the other side where the creek naturally widens out into a kind of basin, I should think might be the spot for a smaller, cleaner lake."

"Doesn't it seem to you, Ethan," I said, "that we have progressed rather past the _Mr. Locke_ stage?"

A little later, when Desire and I were alone on the porch, we walked to the end nearest the vanished lake. Or rather, I led her to a swinging couch there, and sat down beside her.

"Point out the path down the hill by which you used to come," I asked of her.

She shook her head. There are no words to paint how she looked in the clear morning, except that she seemed its sister.

"It is only the end of a path that matters," she said. "Look instead at the marsh. Do you see nothing there stranger than a path through the woods even when trodden by a wilful woman?"

Following her lifted finger, I saw a series of long mounds out there in the muddy floor not far from the dam. Not high, two or three feet at most, the mounds formed an irregular square of considerable area.

"The old house!" I exclaimed.

"It was set on fire by the second Desire Mich.e.l.l one night deep in winter. Her father built this house of yours and put in the dam that covered the ruins with water. I think he hoped to wash away the horror upon the place."

"I know so little of your history."