CHAPTER XV.
Hope.
THE entrance of Lorna with a bowl of steaming broth, put an end to my cogitations for the time. She looked pale and wan, and there were traces of tears on her cheeks.
"My poor child," she said in a low, hurried voice, "you will try to drink this, for your own sake, for the sake of your father? You must keep up your strength!"
She glanced back half fearfully at the door, and added in a whisper:
"The little dog, he is quite safe. I have found him. He was hurt, but I have tended him and he will not die. I have hidden him away where they shall not discover and kill him.
"You are very good," I said gratefully. "I—I am sorry for the horrid things I said to you, but I know now that you meant to be as kind as you could. I—I suppose you will not tell me anything of his master? Is he a prisoner, too—or dead?"
"Ah, no—not that! You must not ask me!" There was a quick note of distress in her voice. "Come! This broth, it will be good for you, and you need it, pauvre petite."
I took the bowl from her hands and sipped the contents obediently. She was right. I must not weaken, I must be strong and ready for any emergency which might present itself. "Pauvre petite!" She had called me that yesterday, too. Indeed from the first day when she had boarded the yacht I noticed that little French phrases had crept into her speech and odd, dainty foreign gestures and mannerisms had manifested themselves naturally in her.
"You are French, aren't you?" I asked, glancing up swiftly at her. "And you are different in so many ways from the others. How is it that a girl like you could lend herself to such a cowardly, low scheme as this?"
She drew back, started, and gazed at me speechlessly.
"Your friend, Herman Goebel, has paid me a call" I was beginning, but she sprang forward, and laid her hand over my lips.
"Hush, for the love of God!" she breathed. "You would not live a moment longer if he heard!"
Then she withdrew her hand and added, in the merest whisper:
"How did you know?"
"I heard him lecture once, on socialism," I whispered back. "Did he think to disguise himself with that mop of white hair? The Man of the People he calls himself! The man who has instigated all the riots and labor wars, the man who sits back with folded hands while the poor foolish men he has incited to destruction fight against the forces of law and order! And that woman out there, who took me away; Connie Cole, the adventuress"
She halted me with a gesture and the trembling hands she placed upon my shoulders chilled me with their icy touch.
"Listen to me!" she said, and something in her voice made me shudder, in spite of myself. "What you are saying is madness, do you hear, madness! But you must put it from your thoughts, you must not repeat it, for if you breathe a word of this which they might hear, they will kill you as surely as I am speaking now, and I would be powerless to save you! You are but a child, you have no discretion, but you must believe what I tell you, and if you value your life, you must attend. Do not dare to speak of this again, or you will never see your father! I am traitorous to them to warn you, now, but I cannot denounce you, I cannot stand by and witness the murder of an innocent girl! I must not turn upon them, they have trusted me, but I can and will spare you all the suffering that is possible!"
A sudden thought came to me and I cried impulsively, "And do you think that they are true, that they would not sell you out, betray you without a qualm if they could benefit themselves? I know better!"
"What do you mean?" she stepped back and a sudden gleam came into her dark-rimmed eyes.
"Your friend, for one, who calls himself Raoul Pelissier. I don't know what he is to you, but I know that he is a traitor, he has lied to you, plotted against you"
"How do you know?" her voice came from her drawn lips in a toneless whisper, and her colorless, wan face had grown even paler. "What has he done? How has he lied?"
"Ask him where he went in the launch the day he took that man whose name I must not mention, to the mainland. He was more than two hours returning, if you remember, and he said the engine broke down, but as it happens, I know that it did not. When I taxed him with my knowledge, he implored me to say nothing of it to the rest of you, and told me a pretty tale about a lady on one of the islands to the southward. Do you know what I think? I believe that lady is an invention of Signor Marconi's! I think that he tried to get into wireless communication with my father, or the authorities, and sell you out, at his price!"
"Raoul!" she whispered, clenching her slender hands until the knuckles almost burst through the skin. "Raoul! If I thought that!"
"Ask him!" I repeated.
"Listen!" she cried, passionately. "It was for him that I have acted this part, that I have helped in this odious scheme! For him! If he has done what you say, if he has tried to betray us"
"Nicolette!" We had not heard his light footsteps outside the heavy barred door, but the voice of Monsieur Pelissier came to us, harsh with fury. "Are you in there? What are you doing? Come here immediately!"
With a gesture of warning silence she picked up the empty bowl and left the room. The doors were instantly locked behind her, and I heard their voices, low and indistinguishable, but intense with suppressed rage. All at once there was a crash, as if the bowl had fallen from her hands, then followed the cruel sickening thud of blows and she screamed twice, terribly. The rush of feet came to my ears, a quick order in Herman Goebel's stern, cutting tones, and then silence.
What had happened? Had she accused the Frenchman, and been beaten to death for her temerity? I felt faint with the horror of it all! That these people were desperate, and would not hesitate to kill me if their plans were defeated, I could no longer doubt. I would die before I would accede to their demands and beg Daddy to pay for my release, but oh, would he never find me? And Gilbert, what had they done to him? Why did he not come to save me?
At noon May Grady entered, banging my lunch tray down on the table, with a toss of her blondined head.
"There! Eat that, if you don't want to make more trouble for yourself!" she remarked with a sneer. "Little sneaking tattle-tale! Thought you'd get me into trouble, didn't you, because I spoke of Herman! You'll be sorry for that before I'm through with you! You're pretty sly, but you made a mistake that time. Little fool, you never saw the man before in your life!"
I ignored her, and she flounced out of the room with an ugly laugh. Had I not already been certain of his identity, her clumsy attempt to convince me that the man in the white wig was not Herman Goebel, would have been assurance enough of the truth. My heart sank at the thought that even if the girl called Lorna had not been killed outright by that brutal Pelissier when he struck her down, they would no longer trust her to come to me. If that Grady woman were to be my jailer henceforth it would be doubly hard to endure my confinement, and I shrank from encountering her taunts and malicious triumph. I felt that her hatred of me was deeper than anything merely personal, it was the antagonism of caste. She was envious and bitterly resentful of a girl more fortunate by the accident of birth than she, and too vicious and small minded to realize that I was not voluntarily responsible for the difference in our positions.
The afternoon wore away in unbroken silence, and with the twilight the lights were switched on, as they had been the previous day, but a long time elapsed before anyone came to my door.
At last Miss Grady appeared bearing my dinner, and as she placed it upon the table, she glanced at the other tray.
"Decided to quit sulking and eat your lunch, didn't you?" she observed. "It's about time you came to your senses, and listened to reason."
"I ate because I wished to," I returned, coldly. "I don't care to have anything whatever to say to you." And I turned away from her.
"Still got your fine-lady airs, haven't you?" she sneered. "You'll sing a different tune before we're through with you!"
"I wish you would leave me," I said wearily. "I am not in the least afraid of you or your threats."
"Oh, aren't you!" she mimicked me. "You'll do what you're told, nevertheless. You won't get out of here in a hurry if you don't."
"I'm not so sure about that," I remarked tentatively, with a swift, side-long glance at her supercilious face.
"I suppose you think your young man will save you!" she flung at me tauntingly, while I held my breath. "Well, he won't! He tried it once, but he's where he won't be able to get into any more mischief for awhile. You needn't count on the police taking a hand, either. They've shown what they can do the past week. You'll stay here, whether you like it or not, my fine young lady, until your father ponies up that little old million dollars ransom!"
"And if he does, you don't think that you will be able to get away with it, do you?" I scoffed, although my heart beat suffocatingly. It had been almost too easy to elicit the truth from her. Gilbert was not dead! They had captured and hidden him away somewhere, but he was at least alive, and would come to my rescue when he could elude them. And he would succeed in that, I knew he would! I had only to wait!
"Get away with it?" she repeated, with a short laugh. "All the police in the world won't be able to follow us! Raoul and I will leave this country and no one will ever know" she caught herself up, with a little gasp of dismay at what she had disclosed, but I made a pretense of not having heard, or noted the significance of her last words.
She picked up the empty tray and moved to the door, pausing to say with a toss of her head:
"Anyway, if you hadn't pried into things which weren't meant for you to know, you wouldn't be cooped up here now! You brought it all on yourself, and I hope you are enjoying it!"
The door slammed after her departing figure, and the dinner which she had brought me remained untouched, while I paced the floor in a fever of restless thought. The girl called Lorna loved Monsieur Pelissier, beyond any doubt. The admission she had made to me that morning had been wrung from her very heart. I had more than once surprised a look of jealousy on her face, when she encountered the pseudo Bijou and the Frenchman in a confidential tête-à-tête. If she suspected that the other girl had really supplanted her in his fickle affections, if she could know what I had just heard, might she not be moved to help me, in a spirit of revenge against them?
But even if I succeeded in regaining my liberty, with her aid—and unless she contrived to come to me, I could not communicate with her—I should be little better off than before.
Without Gilbert, of course, I could not hope to escape from the island. I knew nothing of the management of a motorboat, and there was no other means of reaching the mainland. Ah, if Gilbert were only free! If he could come to me!
While I wandered ceaselessly about the tiny room, tortured by vain thoughts, I became aware that the wind was rising. The great branches of the trees outside were soughing and thrashing about with a moaning, whistling sound which was indescribably dreary and forboding. The brass rim and casement of one of the portholes had been taken out, evidently worn away in the past and through the aperture came sharp, sudden gusts which fanned my heated face. There was no moon and the little round patch of sky which I could discern was heavily overcast. The coming storm would only add to the horror of it all.
A nervous depression and fear of I knew not what laid hold upon me, and tightened about by heart, although I strove desperately to rid myself of it. These people would not dare harm me, I tried to assure myself over and over. In imprisoning me they had surely done their worst, and to show further violence to me would be to defeat their own ends. And yet, if Daddy proved obdurate and the police grew hot upon their trail, so that disaster stared them in the face, their project became doomed, and their only safety lay in flight, what, then, of me? They could not encumber themselves with a struggling captive; they would not leave me behind to tell what I already knew! What alternative fate remained for me?
I crouched upon my bunk, overwhelmed with terror at the vision conjured up by my overwrought mind. The wind had increased to a rushing, roaring fury, and the waves beat thunderously upon the shore. All at once, as if to add to the vague terror of my situation, the lights suddenly went out, and the room was plunged into pitch darkness. I would have fancied that the electricity in the air had affected the house wiring, only at that moment when the light was extinguished I had heard, faintly but distinctly, a metallic click. Someone had turned or cut off the switch.
I had no way of knowing how many hours had passed since dinner time, but I felt it must be still early. Who could have done this? What was their purpose in leaving me in darkness? I listened fearfully, but no sound broke the stillness of the house, nothing came to my ears but the sobbing, moaning breath of the wind, and the boom and swirl of the breakers.
But was that all? Was there not a soft, stealthy footfall outside my door, a light, sure hand slowly turning the key? My breath caught in my throat, and I flung my hands out into the darkness, as if to ward off this terrible, unknown danger which threatened me. Then the massive bolt slipped back carefully, almost noiselessly and the door opened, inch by inch, admitting a fan-shaped wisp of subdued light which broadened and reached into the far corners, accentuating the shadows which lurked ominously there.
I watched it breathlessly, fascinated, unable to move or cry out, spellbound by sheer terror of the unknown.
At length, in the dim, misty radiance of the doorway, a face appeared and I all but sobbed in my relief. It was Lorna.
"Hush!" she breathed. She was wrapped in a shapeless gown of some soft gray material, and even in the dim, half-light I could see that her face was ghastly, and disfigured by great bruises and discolorations. "Don't make a sound, Maida!"
She closed the door softly behind her, and felt her way in the darkness to my side. Then, as if faint she sank down beside me and her icy hand clasped mine convulsively.
"Listen to me! I am going to help you! You shall leave this place! Your lover shall take you away, and they may suffer the consequences. I care not!"
"You know?" I whispered back.
"If he tried that day to turn traitor, and enter into negotiations of his own with your father? No, and it matters little. I know that he is false to me, and after all I have done for him, all I have endured, he has tired, thrown me aside for that painted doll! I am his wife, Maida, his wife! You did not guess that, did you? I was an actress, studying at the Conservatoire in Paris, when I met him, and I loved him blindly, following him, obeying him, helping to further his schemes which grew more and more bold and disreputable. My training made me of use to him, I could play many a part, and act the spy, and I did! He promised me that this should be the last, that no harm should come to you, that you would be none the worse for this experience, and he argued that your father could well afford to lose the money involved in the transaction. He swore that when it was over we would return to France together, and live out our lives, simply, happily, and I believed him I But today, when he suspected my pity, my sympathy for you, he—beat me, and in his rage and contempt revealed himself and his intentions for the future! Later I heard a few words between him and that woman, and I learned the truth. I had suspected them before, more than once, but mon Dieu! not this!"
"I know!" I said softly. "They mean to go away together. The girl told me so herself, today."
A tremor of suppressed fury shook her slender form from head to foot, and she whispered vehemently.
"And they shall! But not together; to prison, for life! I will tell you. There is no time to lose. Tomorrow, he—the man you know—intends to force you to write that letter to your father, demanding the ransom. They are afraid to delay longer. You must go tonight, now! It is the only way. The young man, your lover, came to your window last night. He climbed a ladder and they were waiting within to spring upon him. He is locked up in the old lighthouse, on the point of rocks. I have talked with him, and he has a plan for helping you escape. I cannot get you out of this room. They are watching every moment and in an hour the man you know as Alaric will be stationed on guard just outside your door. They know that I have come. Thinking you asleep, they sent me here to give you this!"
She paused and I felt the cold touch of a hypodermic syringe beneath my fingers. I drew my hand away in swift horror.
"It was that they used upon the yacht," she went on. "The punch contained only a mild dose of veronal, so that your slumber would be too profound for you to waken at the prick of the needle. It was morphine which kept you insensible two nights and a day."
"They feared that the approaching storm might awaken you, and you would cry out in startled apprehension. A strange, high-powered boat has been hovering about close to the inland all day, causing them great uneasiness, and if your cries were heard, all concealment might be at an end. They knew that you trusted me more than any of the rest, and if the stab of the needle aroused you, I could calm your apprehension by saying that I had come to smooth your couch and see that you were comfortable for the night."
"How horrible of them!" I shuddered. "But that boat! Do you think it means that the authorities are on their trail at last?"
I spoke as if she had not been one of them, and in league with them herself.
"How can we tell?" she returned. "We cannot wait to find out. They would kill you, I think, before they would allow you to be taken."
"If you cannot get me out of the room, how can you help me?" I asked, despairingly.
"I can set free the young man in the lighthouse, and procure for him the key of the padlock which fastens the racing boat, and I will!"
"Lorna!" I stammered. "What can I say to you I How can I ever thank you for what you are doing! Come with us! Come away from these terrible people, and leave them to their fate, to escape or be captured as chance wills! My father will understand, he will do anything in the world to prove his gratitude! You can return to your own country, and forget it all, and live in the happiness which money and peace of mind can bring you!"
"No," she said softly. "I must stay with the rest, to the end. I will not suffer their plan to succeed, but I cannot enrich myself at their expense. Besides, petite amie, you forget the things which I have already done, for Raoul's sake. I have a—a record, which the police of more than one country will hold against me. You remember when after a long delay I reached the yacht on the day we sailed, torn and disheveled? There was no taxicab accident, as I said. I had been apprehended by the police at the last moment, but I managed to escape from them."
"Then you had not gone, after all, to meet Senator Ranger's son?" I asked.
"If he has a son I am not aware of it. That was another necessary fabrication, to account for my thoughtless words to Raoul, which you had overheard. I went to meet the man you called Goebel, for final instructions, but he did not appear. You see that even your father's influence could not save me from justice!"
"I don't believe you have done anything very terrible, before this, in spite of what you say!" I cried impulsively. "You are not really wicked, as they are, I know that you are not! How can I ever repay you for your kindness to me now?"
"By being happy, cherie!" Her voice trembled. "You will have love, everything to make you so, everything that has passed me by—I must go now, or they will suspect. In twenty minutes, a half-hour at most, be ready. Remember, whatever happens, whatever you may see or hear, do not be frightened, do not utter a sound! Trust me, and you shall soon be free!"
She clasped my hands tightly once more, then dropped them and moved away from me in the darkness and in another moment the door had noiselessly opened and closed.
I sat there in the tense silence, every nerve alive and tingling with eager, tremulous expectation. What would the next hour bring forth? Would she be able to keep her word, and carry out her daring plan? Would Gilbert save me?
I had no preparations to make. There was no cloak or head-covering at hand, but I was wearing a dark serge gown, and for comfort I had slipped my feet into rubber soled tennis shoes, which I found among the things she had brought me on the previous day. I could take nothing with me, and I wanted nothing; only to get away, away from this terrible place!
The storm was coming on apace, and the strain grew upon me with every moment that dragged by. What was happening outside my prison? It already seemed that hours must have passed since she left me! I had not the slightest idea how Gilbert meant to effect my escape, and strangely enough, no thought of it entered my mind. He would come, I knew, if she succeeded in freeing him, and somehow, someway he would rescue me. I felt it in my heart, without doubt or question, and the possible means he would take to accomplish his ends I might safely leave in his hands. My faith in him was absolute.
The wind was blowing a veritable gale, but it no longer depressed me with menacing foreboding. Rather, it held a buoyant note of rallying cheer and defiance, and I welcomed the thought of a sharp battle with the elements in the open after this interminable siege against the insidious treachery of mankind.
All at once, above the beat of the surf and moaning surge of the trees, I heard low voices outside my door, and a hand rattled the bolt. I sprang upon the bunk, pulling the covers up to my neck, and closing my eyes, just as the door opened, and footsteps sounded within the room. I held my breath while a light flashed before my eyelids, and I heard the Frenchman's low voice.
"It is well. She sleeps."
He spoke in a tone of complete satisfaction, but another voice, which I recognized as Herman Goebel's said warningly:
"Hush! Not so loud!"
"Have no fear!" Pelissier laughed softly, significantly. "A charge of dynamite would not waken her before morning. Nicolette knows how much to use in her needle. We can make our minds easy for to-night, while Craigen snores outside her door."
They withdrew and I heard the key turn, and the bolt shoot back into place. For a long time I lay motionless, scarcely daring to breathe. How nearly I had been discovered! If they had found out that Lorna had broken faith with them, and failed to carry out their instructions, her punishment would have been swift and terrible, and all chance of escape gone.
Moments passed which seemed like hours, and at length I began to despair. Lorna had not been able to elude them, and set Gilbert free! He would not come to me! My last hope must perish!
As I lay sunk in the uttermost depths of my despairing thoughts I became gradually aware of a curious grating, gnawing sound, as of a rat in the wainscoting. It had been going on for some time and with an inward qualm, I found myself wishing that they had left a light burning in the room. Suppose the awful little animal escaped from the wall, and ran across my face? Could I refrain from screaming and arousing the snoring sentinel outside my door? I listened. The sound seemed to come from quite high up in the wall, by the porthole—that porthole from which the rim was missing, which was merely a small, round aperture edged with hard, weather-beaten wood.
The sound grew louder and continued without a pause; a steady grating crunch. On a sudden impulse I rose and tip-toed over to the place from which it came, and at that moment the wind-driven clouds parted and for a brief instant the moon cast a clear, penetrating ray straight in upon me.
From the top of the open, circular hole a straight, clean cut like a crack, appeared through the thick wooden wall, extending horizontally toward the right, and through it protruded the tip of a keen saw!