But before the man staring grimly down at the shining tokens of folly could do more than turn his tired face toward her, Kit cut in swiftly, his eyes on the tip of the cigarette between his fingers.
“Just one moment, Hanna. It was the dark that frightened you, you say? You’re quite, quite sure that it wasn’t a light?”
She stammered desperately, “A light? What light? What light do you mean?”
“You didn’t turn back because someone at the foot of the stairs lit a cigarette lighter—a cigarette lighter like this?”
His hand shot out, and above the quick spurt of blue flame that shot with it, her eyes stared back at him, piteous and distraught.
“I don’t know what you mean—I don’t—I don’t—”
“Oh, Hanna, I think you do.” The cap descended on the flame with a little click that was rather terrible in its finality. “It was I whom you followed through the closet and down the stairway, you see; and it was I who lit this at the foot of the stairs, because I couldn’t locate the thumb latch on the door to the chapel. It flickered and went out almost at once, because you’d left the closet door ajar, and there was a draught—but it stayed on long enough for you to see me, didn’t it? And I think that you told us the truth when you said that you were frightened—while I stood there listening in the darkness, I heard your footsteps on the stairs, and you were running—you were running as though death itself were at your heels.” He sat staring at the glowing tip of the cigarette for a moment in silence, ground it relentlessly against the mantel, and wheeled to face her. “Whom did you think that you were following down those stairs, Hanna? And why were you following him?”
“She thought she was following me,” said Gavin Dart, rising from the corner of the love-seat where he was sitting. “She was trying to follow me because she thought that I was going to murder Douglas King, and she wanted to stop me.”
His voice cut through the appalled silence like a knife, and Hanna lifted a frantic hand to her heart, as though the knife had gone home. He went toward her, and the great room was suddenly empty of everything but their voices, reaching for each other across the darkness.
“I’ve been the damnedest of all damned fools. You knew, then? You knew what was actually happening on the Starling?”
She said, “Oh, my darling, I know how stupid and dull I must seem to you—but how could even I seem dull and stupid enough not to know that?”
He took her hands and laid them against his cheek, saying quietly, “Poor child—poor, poor child! And all these hours you’ve thought that it was I? You lied because you thought that it was I? And I was angry with you.… I was angry because I thought that you’d gone down those stairs to meet him.” He released her hands, but his voice lingered. “You’ll forgive me, but I’ll not soon forgive myself. Sit here.”
Sherry said wildly from his corner by the fire:
“Oh, I swear I think we’re all headed for a madhouse! Why in God’s name should you have wanted to murder poor old Doug?”
“Only on the ancient theory of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” replied Gavin Dart in the pleasant, courteous voice that he had somehow managed to retrieve from chaos. “You see, Sheridan, he made a rather unsuccessful attempt to murder me last winter.… Let me have a light from that famous lighter of yours, will you, Kit? I didn’t realize that I had a nerve in my body—and look at that hand of mine now!”
“What do you mean, Doug King tried to kill you?” demanded Sherry, violently incredulous. “You took precious good care not to bring up any wild-eyed ballyhoo like that while he was here to tell you where to get off.” His voice thickened suddenly, and his pleasant, dapper face twisted. “You try slandering a dead man to that precious jury of yours and see where you—”
“Oh, shut up, Sherry!” said Trudi listlessly. “Give your voice a rest, and pour Hanna a cup of that coffee. Jill has hers, hasn’t she? This is yours, Lindy—one lump or two?”
“None, thanks—not just now, anyway. Gavin, are you going to tell us what you meant about Doug and you last winter? Was it something that happened on the Starling? Something while I was there?”
Gavin, one arm flung across the back of the love-seat behind Hanna’s golden head, leaned his own head back, watching with steel-gray eyes the smoke-gray rings hover and break.
“On the Starling, yes—and when you were there…. You’re quite right, Sherry, it would make a very poor story to tell to a jury. Any good lawyer could riddle it full of holes in less time than I’d take to tell it. It’s true, nevertheless; and I think that perhaps as we’ve gone this far, we’d better go a bit further, and try it out now before a jury of my peers.”
“Oh, rather!” concurred Kit Baird gently. “It looks as though we’d never have a better chance to try out that excellent policy of yours of open covenants openly arrived at. All the cards on the table—that’s been our slogan from the first, hasn’t it? Let’s have a look at yours, Your Honour?”
Dart turned his eyes for a moment from his contemplation of the smoke rings to the blandly enigmatic countenance of the red-headed young man.
“Hoist by my own petard, eh? You’re quite right; I’m a fairly reticent individual, and the prospect of retailing my most intimate affairs even to Hanna’s most intimate friends leaves me somewhat chilled—especially as my own rôle from the beginning to the end is not precisely a heroic one. Still, I’ll endeavour to console myself by setting the lot of you a shining example in candour! I’ll start with the least palatable portion. Here goes.… I’m twenty-two years older than Hanna. I suppose that you all know that. But I doubt whether you know that I have been acutely, and detestably, and despicably jealous of her since the hour that I married her.” Against the coral of the love-seat the fine aquiline face looked suddenly haggard and worn to the bone. “Let me say that no jealousy was ever less warranted. I have never had the remotest cause to doubt either her absolute loyalty to me, or her affection. Incredible as it still seems to me, I believe that she loves me.”
Hanna the beautiful, Hanna the proud and still, said without turning her bright head: “Gavin, you know—you know that I love you.”
He said, “Yes. I’ve not even that excuse to comfort me. I know that you love me. It’s only the lover that you should have had, you see, that I am jealous of—the young lover that I see looking out at you from all those young eyes.… I make no apologies for myself. I consider such jealousy a shameful and degrading thing; I am doing some slight penance now in even owning to it. But I’ve paid for it, I assure you, a thousand times by eating my heart out day and night in these last ten years, and I have quite honestly done my level human best not to soil Hanna’s love for me with it. That I haven’t entirely kept it from her is an unspeakable shame to me, and the fact that I haven’t is the sole cause of her having put herself in this wretchedly ambiguous position to-night, with her poor little lies about earrings and hidden stairways.… You aren’t a very good liar, Hanna!”
“Oh,” she said humbly and sadly, “it didn’t sound true to me even when I was saying it! It’s all my fault. If it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have to be saying all those terrible things. Don’t, don’t say any more, please—not about being ashamed. Gavin … I know that it’s dreadful of me, but I’m so proud that you’re jealous of me.”
“Are you, my beautiful girl? Then I’ll try to be proud, too…. All right, that’s done with, and we can get down to Doug King and the Starling. It wasn’t until after we’d dropped the Hammonds off at Kingston and were on our way to Costa Rica that it began to dawn on me that for once the lunatic suspicions that were as common to me as my daily bread had some foundation. I’d asked King to come with us because I had understood from Hanna that he was interested in Lindy, and she wanted to do some matchmaking, as she was extremely fond of them both. We really got up the trip with that end in view.… But some time before we arrived in Port Limon it became fairly obvious that the wind was blowing from another quarter.”
; He dropped his cigarette into the jade cup at his elbow, and sat staring down at the twist of charred paper and ashes as though he wondered how it had come to be there … and the wind that blew from another quarter on those far-off seas seemed suddenly to fill the room, sinister and chilled.
“King wasn’t paying the slightest attention to Lindy; he was using every device and subterfuge known to a not particularly scrupulous Don Juan to maroon Hanna and himself on an imaginary desert island—after which Lindy and myself were apparently to be graciously permitted to walk the plank. You wouldn’t believe that a two-hundred-foot yacht would afford endless opportunities for solitude à deux, but I assure you that for those four or five days that we and the Starling were drifting in toward Port Limon, there were very few minutes of sunlight or of moonlight that King didn’t manage to spend unperturbed and unmolested in the company of my wife.… I think that it must have been fairly obvious to a more casual and less prejudiced observer than myself. Did you notice it, Lindy?”
“Yes,” said Lindy. “I noticed it.” She sat for a moment twisting the pearls through her fingers, her lashes lying like little wings against the clear pallor of her face. After a moment, with lashes still lowered, she spoke again: “I noticed it quite a lot, and I wanted rather badly to stop it, because I saw how much Hanna hated it—and because I knew that, in a way, it was my fault.”
Hanna asked wonderingly, “Your fault, Lindy? How was it your fault?”
“Because—because I think that Doug started out on the Starling with the idea of having an agreeable four weeks’ flirtation with me.… I didn’t want to flirt with him, and I told him so. I didn’t want to marry him, and I told him so. I didn’t want to do anything in the world but be quite still, and let the sunlight lie on my hands all day and the moonlight lie on my eyes all night—and I told him that, too. I thought that the part about getting married was just Doug’s idea of small talk, of course, but even that I didn’t find especially ingratiating. And when he started flirting with Hanna, I thought that he was trying to make me jealous. I didn’t dream, I didn’t dream … oh, well, you can see what a preposterous little lunatic I was—self-centred and vain, and utterly oblivious of what should have been perfectly obvious to an imbecile. At first I was amused, and then I was annoyed, and then I was really worried, because I saw how abominably it was upsetting Hanna. But I was so lazy and selfish and stupid that I simply let things drift—because I knew that in a day or so we’d be at Port Limon, and Doug would be transferring to Panama—and because I didn’t think that a little of Doug’s romantic nonsense would do Hanna any harm.”
“I shouldn’t have called your friend Doug essentially a romanticist,” said Gavin Dart quietly. “He was sufficiently materialistic to decide that the quickest way to get at Hanna permanently was to get rid of me permanently. And he decided that the quickest way to do that was to murder me.… I played beautifully into his hands. It isn’t in any way either my fault or his that he didn’t succeed.”
He stirred a little, watching the long shudder ripple down from the beautiful bare shoulder to the beautiful bare hand beside him—then, dropping his hand over the long fingers, he went on slowly:
“I made up my mind well before we reached Costa Rica that nothing in God’s world—or the devil’s—wouldmake me lift a finger to interfere in this—affair—between Doug and Hanna. If this was the man that she wanted, this was the man that she should have. I swore that I would cut off my hand before I lifted a finger to stop it—that I would cut out my tongue before I lifted my voice. Twice before—no, three times before—I had played the fool and humiliated us both so that we were ashamed to meet each other’s eyes for days, by unleashing my misery and my vileness on her. I seem a rather quiet person, even to myself, but there are times when I am not—quiet. When a harmless, amiable young architect came to see Hanna three afternoons in succession a few years ago, I told her that if he came a fourth time I’d shoot him dead.… Well, he came a fourth time, and needless to say, I didn’t shoot him dead. I asked him to stay for dinner instead, and I gave Hanna those earrings to plead forgiveness for me, and we all had a very pleasant time. But I don’t believe that you forgot that young architect, did you, Hanna?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t forget him.”
“Nor that nice young Austrian lieutenant in Washington, nor the Harvard boy that winter in Nassau—you didn’t forget them either, did you? It was because you remembered him that you were afraid for Doug King.…”
He rose abruptly, crossed to the fireplace, and stood leaning against it, staring down into the flickering embers.
“I kept my tongue quiet and my hands off during that run into Port Limon, but it didn’t help my sleeping any. I’m an abominable sleeper even when I haven’t anything on my mind, and those nights I had something rather urgent on my mind. King was to leave us at Port Limon—he had business in Panama, and was going to transfer to a fruit boat headed for there while we went up in the mountains to explore San José. The night before we got there Lindy went down to pack at about ten; King and Hanna were somewhere aft with a lot of cushions and any number of stars to chaperon them. I decided to turn in, too, and about eleven or so I shut off the lights and decided that I’d see what I could do in the way of sleeping. It wasn’t a conspicuous success…. It was after twelve when Hanna came in. She had the cabin adjoining mine, and though the door was closed, and she was obviously making an effort to make as little noise as possible, I could hear her moving about quite distinctly. After a few moments the sounds ceased, and I saw the crack of light under the door go out.… And then I heard—something else. I heard her crying. Very softly—very, very softly, as though her face was buried in the pillow. That made it just a little bit worse. It’s not particularly pleasant to realize that someone that you—care for—is crying a few feet away from you in the darkness, and that you are afraid to go to her, and ask her why.… I was afraid. After an hour of it I thought that if I had to listen any longer I’d go stark, staring mad. I got up and put on a bathrobe over my pajamas and so went above to the deck. Just outside the gangway someone in white flannels was standing, leaning against the railing of the boat. It was Doug King.
“He turned around and stood staring at me for a minute, and then asked with just enough concern, ‘Anything wrong?’ I told him that there was nothing wrong whatever, except that I couldn’t sleep, and had decided to see what a little fresh air would do. He said, ‘Same here. Is insomnia in your line?’ I told him that if I could strike an average of four hours a night I counted myself lucky. King agreed that wasn’t enough, and asked if I’d tried anything to break it up. I explained that I couldn’t, as I had such a hocked-up affair as a heart that I didn’t dare play fast and loose with it by experimenting with soporifics. King said ‘Have you got one of those doggone nuisances, too? Brother, shake! But I’ve got the very thing for you—couldn’t hurt an octogenarian with angina pectoris.’ He said that a heart specialist in New York had prescribed the stuff for him when he was going through a bad time with neuritis; the things were so mild that he used to take them three times a day regularly as a sedative, or two or three at night if he required a real sleeping powder. He had two left in his cabin; he kept them handy in case of an emergency, and could get the prescription filled in Panama, when he’d mail me some more. We chatted on for a bit—it must have been close on to two when he went down to fetch them from his cabin and he turned them over with the suggestion that I keep them until the following night to give them a real chance, as I’d have to be up and about again in a couple of hours if I was to see him off. I agreed that that was good advice, and that I’d spend what was left of the night with one of the famous British Trials, trying to figure out why Bywaters kept those ruinous letters of Mrs. Thompson’s.… King got off at dawn. Hanna didn’t get up to see him off; it was infernally hot even at that hour of the morning, and she sent up word by her maid that she was having a hard time with her head, and that she had decided to see whether a dar
k room and ice-packs and an electric fan would do her any good. King left some amiable messages and regrets and vanished over the boat rail into space.… That was the last time I saw him until this afternoon.”
A log at the back of the fire broke in two with an ominous little crash, and he bent to replace it with the mechanical precision of a sleep-walker. In the light that flared up the circle of eyes stared down at him, filled with many things—Chatty’s with the still inextinguishable tears, Lindy’s with soft wonder, Sherry’s with hostile incredulity, Larry Redmond’s with a quiet and steady question. Of them all, only Hanna’s did not follow him. She sat silent, motionless, watching the firelight flicker and ebb in the great square diamonds on her linked hands, so still that it hardly seemed that she breathed.
Kit, replenishing his coffee cup at the hospitably bubbling urn, inquired gently: “And was that all that happened before you saw him this afternoon?”
Gavin Dart straightened as abruptly as though a whip had been cracked across his shoulders. After a moment he said quietly:
Hide in the Dark Page 21
