She broke off with a sob, and the loud lapping of the water under the floor was like the beat of a rebellious heart.
“There, you know the truth!” she said.
He answered after a pause: “People do die.”
“Do they?” She laughed. “Yes—in happy marriages!”
They were silent again, and Isabel turned, feeling her way toward the door. As she did so, the profound stillness was broken by the sound of a man’s voice trolling out unsteadily the refrain of a music-hall song.
The two in the boathouse darted toward each other with a simultaneous movement, clutching hands as they met.
“He’s coming!” Isabel said.
Wrayford disengaged his hands.
“He may only be out for a turn before he goes to bed. Wait a minute. I’ll see.” He felt his way to the bench, scrambled up on it, and stretching his body forward managed to bring his eyes in line with the opening above the door.
“It’s as black as pitch. I can’t see anything.”
The refrain rang out nearer.
“Wait! I saw something twinkle. There it is again. It’s his cigar. It’s coming this way—down the path.”
There was a long rattle of thunder through the stillness.
“It’s the storm!” Isabel whispered. “He’s coming to see about the launch.”
Wrayford dropped noiselessly from the bench and she caught him by the arm.
“Isn’t there time to get up the path and slip under the shrubbery?”
“No, he’s in the path now. He’ll be here in two minutes. He’ll find us.”
He felt her hand tighten on his arm.
“You must go in the skiff, then. It’s the only way.”
“And let him find you? And hear my oars? Listen—there’s something I must say.”
She flung her arms about him and pressed her face to his.
“Isabel, just now I didn’t tell you everything. He’s ruined his mother—taken everything of hers too. And he’s got to tell her; it can’t be kept from her.”
She uttered an incredulous exclamation and drew back.
“Is this the truth? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“He forbade me. You were not to know.”
Close above them, in the shrubbery, Stilling warbled:
“Nita, Juanita, Ask thy soul if we must part!”
Wrayford held her by both arms. “Understand this—if he comes in, he’ll find us. And if there’s a row you’ll lose your boy.”
She seemed not to hear him. “You—you—you—he’ll kill you!” she exclaimed.
Wrayford laughed impatiently and released her, and she stood shrinking against the wall, her hands pressed to her breast. Wrayford straightened himself and she felt that he was listening intently. Then he dropped to his knees and laid his hands against the boards of the sliding floor. It yielded at once, as if with a kind of evil alacrity; and at their feet they saw, under the motionless solid night, another darker night that moved and shimmered. Wrayford threw himself back against the opposite wall, behind the door.
A key rattled in the lock, and after a moment’s fumbling the door swung open. Wrayford and Isabel saw a man’s black bulk against the obscurity. It moved a step, lurched forward, and vanished out of sight. From the depths beneath them there came a splash and a long cry.
“Go! go!” Wrayford cried out, feeling blindly for Isabel in the blackness.
“Oh—” she cried, wrenching herself away from him.
He stood still a moment, as if dazed; then she saw him suddenly plunge from her side, and heard another splash far down, and a tumult in the beaten water.
In the darkness she cowered close to the opening, pressing her face over the edge, and crying out the name of each of the two men in turn. Suddenly she began to see: the obscurity was less opaque, as if a faint moon-pallor diluted it. Isabel vaguely discerned the two shapes struggling in the black pit below her; once she saw the gleam of a face. She glanced up desperately for some means of rescue, and caught sight of the oars ranged on brackets against the wall. She snatched down the nearest, bent over the opening, and pushed the oar down into the blackness, crying out her husband’s name.
The clouds had swallowed the moon again, and she could see nothing below her; but she still heard the tumult in the beaten water.
“Cobham! Cobham!” she screamed.
As if in answer, she felt a mighty clutch on the oar, a clutch that strained her arms to the breaking-point as she tried to brace her knees against the runners of the sliding floor.
“Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!” a voice gasped out from below; and she held on, with racked muscles, with bleeding palms, with eyes straining from their sockets, and a heart that tugged at her as the weight was tugging at the oar.
Suddenly the weight relaxed, and the oar slipped up through her lacerated hands. She felt a wet body scrambling over the edge of the opening, and Stilling’s voice, raucous and strange, groaned out, close to her: “God! I thought I was done for.”
He staggered to his knees, coughing and sputtering, and the water dripped on her from his streaming clothes.
She flung herself down, again, straining over the pit. Not a sound came up from it.
“Austin! Austin! Quick! Another oar!” she shrieked.
Stilling gave a cry. “My God! Was it Austin? What in hell—Another oar? No, no; untie the skiff, I tell you. But it’s no use. Nothing’s any use. I felt him lose hold as I came up.”
*****
After that she was conscious of nothing till, hours later, as it appeared to her, she became dimly aware of her husband’s voice, high, hysterical and important, haranguing a group of scared lantern-struck faces that had sprung up mysteriously about them in the night.
“Poor Austin! Poor Wrayford… terrible loss to me… mysterious dispensation. Yes, I do feel gratitude—miraculous escape—but I wish old Austin could have known that I was saved!”
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