Part 18 (2/2)

”Yes.... But G.o.d knows what I may do to you.... There'll be somebody to--watch me--won't there?... I don't know what may happen to you or to myself.... I'm in a bad way, Miss Erith... I'm in a very bad way.”

”I know,” she murmured.

He said with an almost childish directness: ”Do men always live through such cures?... I don't see how I can live through it.”

She rose from the sofa and stood beside him, feeling still dizzy, still tremulous and lacking strength.

”Let us win through,” she said, not looking at him. ”I think you will suffer more than I shall. A little more.... Because I had rather feel pain than give it--rather suffer than look on suffering....

It will be very hard for us both, I fear.”

Her butler announced luncheon.

CHAPTER IV

WRECKAGE

The man had been desperately ill in soul and mind and body. And now in some curious manner the ocean seemed to be making him physically better but spiritually worse. Something, too, in the horizonwide waste of waters was having a sinister effect on his brain. The grey daylight of early May, bitter as December--the utter desolation, the mounting and raucous menace of the sea, were meddling with normal convalescence.

Dull animosity awoke in a battered mind not yet readjusted to the living world. What had these people done to him anyway? The sullen resentment which invaded him groped stealthily for a vent.

Was THIS, then, their cursed cure?--this foggy nightmare through which he moved like a shade in the realm of phantoms? Little by little what had happened to him was becoming an obsession, as he began to remember in detail. Now he brooded on it and looked askance at the girl who was primarily responsible--conscious in a confused sort of way that he was a blackguard for his ingrat.i.tude.

But his mind had been badly knocked about, and its limping machinery creaked.

”That meddling woman,” he thought, knowing all the time what he owed her, remembering her courage, her unselfishness, her loveliness.

”Curse her!” he muttered, amid the shadows confusing his wounded mind.

Then a meaningless anger grew with him: She had him, now! he was trapped and caged. A girl who drags something floundering out of h.e.l.l is ent.i.tled to the thing if she wants it. He admitted that to himself.

But how about that ”cure”?

Was THIS it--this terrible blankness--this misty unreality of things? Surcease from craving--yes. But what to take its place--what to fill in, occupy mind and body? What sop to his restless soul?

What had this young iconoclast offered him after her infernal era of destruction? A distorted world, a cloudy mind, the body-substance of a ghost? And for the magic world she had destroyed she offered him a void to live in--Curse her!

There were no lights showing aboard the transport; all ports remained screened. Arrows, painted on the decks in luminous paint, pointed out the way. Below decks, a blue globe here and there emitted a feeble glimmer, marking corridors which pierced a depthless darkness.

No noise was permitted on board, no smoking, no other lights in cabin or saloon. There was scarcely a sound to be heard on the s.h.i.+p, save the throbbing of her engines, the long, splintering crash of heavy seas, and the dull creak of her steel vertebrae tortured by a million rivets.

As for the accursed ocean, that to McKay was the enemy paramount which had awakened him to the stinging vagueness of things out of his stupid acquiescence in convalescence.

He hated the sea. It was becoming a crawling horror to him in its every protean phase, whether flecked with ghastly lights in storms or haunted by pallid shapes in colour--always, always it remained repugnant to him under its eternal curse of endless motion.

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