She saw presently that his lips were faintly blue. Her heart was pounding hard, and she gripped the oars so tightly that her fingers ached. Danny changed to a breast stroke again.
‘It rests me to change,’ he said breathlessly. ‘We’re almost to the point, aren’t we?’ The tip of the slender neck of land was in fact no more than a hundred yards away.
‘Almost,’ she agreed. ‘Once around that and you’ll be on the home stretch.’
He swam a few strokes more, then paused again, treading water in a flurried way. ‘I ate too much breakfast,’ he confessed, with a twisted, sidewise grin. ‘I’ve got a stomach-ache. It’s a peach too. I guess ’
Then he began to flounder helplessly, making some wordless sound; and then his head seemed to be pulled forward on his chest and without a word he went under. She had seen turtles, seals, loons, sink thus, not diving but just allowing themselves to settle into the water. She could still see him, see his white form, a few feet below the surface, drawn into a knot like a ball, his knees up, his head down; and after a moment he drifted to the top of the water again, and one of his arms flung out as though he tried to call to her. But then the water covered his open mouth and silenced him and he went down once more.
Ellen in this moment made no conscious decision. She knew that Danny was drowning, and with the knowledge came a tremendous, billowing, exultant comprehension. If Danny drowned, then she could make Richard wholly hers! She did not think: ‘I will let him drown!’ But neither did she think: ‘I can save him!’ Nor did she make any move to do so. A frozen paralysis held her, and she submitted to it. Like a disinterested spectator watching the playing out of a tragic drama which is about to end contentingly, she sat utterly still, making no movement at all.
Danny came to the surface a last time, his eyes wide and beseeching, eloquent to say what with his lips he could not say; for he was choking, coughing, strangling, fighting to raise his face and head clear of the water, struggling toward the skiff not twenty feet away — where Ellen sat like stone, watching him almost unseeingly.
In one of his gasping inhalations his mouth submerged, and she saw his eyes roll upward. Water entering his lungs, he lapsed into unconsciousness.
Then he sank. This time he did not come to the surface again at all.
– III –
For a moment — a minute, minutes, she did not know how long — Ellen sat motionless in the white skiff on the still water, staring at the spot where Danny had disappeared. The sun was scorching hot, but she felt cold, and she began to shiver terribly. A few bubbles broke the surface, burst and disappeared; and she saw the faint flash of prismatic color as the sun struck them for an instant before they vanished. There was a great sound in her ears, a rushing and a roaring that seemed to rebound from the steep hillsides everywhere walling in the little pond. One of the oars slipped from her slack grasp and floated beside the drifting skiff, but she did not move to pick it up again. She could not think, she could not even feel. One great hammering fact filled the world with clanging. Danny was dead!
Then, above the din which seemed to be outside her, pressing down upon her crushingly, she heard another sound; and she hearkened to it, and after a laborious moment she knew what it was. She had heard it under similar circumstances once before, that day when Danny swam across the lake and Richard came in the fast little motorboat to join them. This sound she heard was the metallic buzz of the outboard. So Richard was coming!
Richard was coming, the roar of the little engine louder all the time; and panic seized her. She dreaded to face his grief, to face perhaps his blame! Till now this tragic hour had been unreal, like a poorly-played drama on the stage; but full comprehension drove her to belated action. Danny had been in her charge. Richard would say she should have saved him. Instinctively, as though it were not already too late, she threw off her light robe and dove overboard, swimming down and down through the pearly water, peering into the shadowed depths. When her lungs were bursting, she struggled up for air, hearing the motorboat draw nearer, making a surface dive to descend into the deeps again. Danny had been a little away from the skiff; and she swam under water in that direction, and saw a pale brown shadow and felt the ridge of a great rock and set her feet against it and drove herself to the surface once more. But she knew now that the lake here was not deep enough to make her search for Danny hopeless. She dove again and again, trying desperately to find the boy and bring him back to a chance of life before Richard came.
She was so intent that when on one of her brief moments at the surface she failed to hear the motorboat, the significance of this did not at first come home to her. She dove again and came up again and saw Richard swimming toward her from the point not far away; and a red mask covered his face. She swam to meet him, crying: ‘Richard! Richard! You’re hurt!’ From an open cut on his brow, blood streamed.
He wiped it wetly away. ‘Where is he?’ he demanded, his voice hoarse and strained.
‘Right here!’ she cried. ‘Very near here.’ He dived, and she followed him down into the depths, seeing by the tawny hue of his body in the water that he had stripped off his clothes. A moment later they came together to the surface, but without pause he dived again, and so did she.
They continued for a long time this frantic search, expelling all the air from their lungs to make it easier to reach the bottom. The water was deep enough so that her ears rang painfully, but again and again she touched boulders or soft mucky sand; and in the depths there was still light enough dimly to see. She and Richard separated, covering different ground, working in silence, each nearing the exhaustion point.
Till at last, swimming along the bottom, she saw a pale brightness and knew it was Danny. She caught his arm, and his body rose easily, pressing softly against hers. His arm was slipnery in her grasp, so she laid hold of the belt of his swimming trunks, and his arms curled softly around her neck. As though in tender welcome because she had come at last to save him, he nestled close and gratefully. Kicking toward the surface, she felt his frail legs intertwined and entangled with her own, and she came up to the brightness of the sun, and supported herself and him, and then Richard’s head appeared thirty feet away and she screamed:
‘I’ve got him, Richard!’
Harland came splashing toward her. The white skiff had drifted away, so he took Danny and swam for the point. She followed, terribly weary, remembering the touch of Danny’s arms around her neck as he seemed to cling to her, and his cold cheek against her own. She saw Harland wade ashore and lay Danny’s body on the ground. He began artificial respiration, compressing Danny’s lungs and releasing them again in a steady rhythm.
Forgetting her own part in what had happened, her heart ached for his grief; and she made haste to his side and caught his shoulder pleadingly. ‘It’s no use, Richard, darling,’ she urged. ‘He was under for so long!’
But without speaking, he shook off her hand; so she drew aside and lay down, her face in her arms, and she wept terribly, for a long time, not from remorse nor from sorrow but from simple weariness. When she was drained dry of tears, she looked toward Harland again. His wound had ceased to bleed, but his face was a mask of drying blood, and blood had dripped on Danny, darkly speckling his shoulders and back. She murmured, without moving:
‘Tired, Richard? May I try for a while?’ He shook his head and she urged: ‘It’s no use! Oh my dear, my dear, it’s no use at all!’
He did not speak, and she drew her arm over her eyes against the glare and looked across the lake and saw that the white skiff had drifted almost a quarter mile away. She rose and swam slowly to recapture it, thinking how easy it would be to sink and breathe deeply of the soft sweet water and never come up again, thinking how Richard would grieve for her. She reached the boat and climbed in. It held only one oar, and she stood up and looked all around and discovered the other, and paddled toward it and recaptured it.
She was beyond the tip of the point, toward the northern shore, and when she looked bac
k she saw the motorboat in which Richard had come up the lake. It was half out of water, canted to one side, not far off shore on the opposite side of the point from where he and Danny were; and Ellen remembered a ledge there of which Richard more than once had warned her. He must have run into that ledge at full speed. The shock had thrown him forward, out of the boat. This would account for the cut across the brow.
Pushing the skiff stern first, she rowed slowly that way, wondering in dull surprise why Richard had forgotten that ledge which he knew so well. She guessed gropingly that he had finished his morning’s work and set out to find them; but if that were all, he would have remembered the rock was there. He must have remembered it was there — unless something happened to make him forget!
Then her confused conjectures came into sudden focus. He had raced up the lake in such desperate haste that he forgot the ledge; but only one thing could have swept him so completely out of himself. Her eyes lifted in instant understanding to the rocky outcropping on the hill above camp, to that outlook from which it was possible to see almost all of the pond. Richard, his morning’s work done, must have climbed the hill to look for them, and he had seen Danny in distress, had seen her sitting idly by while Danny drowned!
She whispered through trembling lips: ‘Oh no, no, no!’ Yet she was sure this was the truth. Harland’s manner was confirmation, if she needed confirmation; his blind and headlong race up the lake till he rammed that familiar sunken ledge was by itself proof enough.
So she knew that Richard, whose love she held above all the treasures of the world, had seen her let his Danny drown.
– IV –
Ellen, in that first dreadful understanding, chilled with fear; and she sat idle, with trailing oars, watching the steady movement of Harland’s brown and naked body as he compressed and released Danny’s ribs in hopeless refusal to surrender hope. Her instinct was for flight; but flight would mean confession, and also, if she fled, Harland would be lost to her. Then if not flight, denial? But she could deny nothing till he accused her, and the accusation itself, once it was put in words, would part them forever. She was tenaciously determined not to let him go; and while she sent the skiff slowly nearer, she sought in her thoughts and found at last a way to silence him, to bind him to her side.
Unhesitating then, she thrust the skiff resolutely on till it touched the beach. Along the water’s edge she saw Harland’s garments lying scattered where he had thrown them when, after plunging ashore from the wrecked motorboat, he raced across the point to swim out to where she was. She picked up his dungarees on the beach, his shoes half in the water. One sock evaded her search. His shorts were in the water, a few feet from the shore, and she salvaged them.
Then she came near him, and Harland, without ceasing his manipulations looked up at her with empty eyes, sweat dripping from his brow and streaming down his chest. Then his head drooped as he concentrated on this task again; but she had seen the blankness in his eyes and knew she need not yet speak the word she planned. So she drew away and waited, till after what must have been hours he accepted defeat. Too weary to rise, he crawled on hands and knees away from Danny’s body; and he lay down with his face buried in his arms, his shoulders heaving with fatigue.
She rose then and brought one of the blankets from the skiff and spread it over him, and she sat down by his side, touching his head caressingly. ‘Rest, Richard,’ she said softly. ‘Rest, my dear.’
He lay for a long time without moving, but at last he turned on his back and looked up at her, his eyes searching hers; and she fetched water cupped in her hands and washed the dried blood off his face, and dipped a corner of her robe in the lake to bathe his cheeks and brow.
‘It was too long before we got him,’ she said, her voice tender and low. She sat beside him, stroking his cheek, touching the cruel gash in his forehead. ‘I love you so, Richard,’ she told him. ‘I love you so.’ There was no movement in him except the laboring of his chest as he breathed; but he would presently burst into fierce, contemptuous accusations, and she must speak before he did. She asked gravely:
‘Richard, will it comfort you to know that we are going to have a child?’
She knew he had heard, for the pupils of his eyes expanded, as though he had come from light into sudden darkness. ‘We’re going to have a baby, Richard,’ she repeated. ‘A son, I hope. Our own!’
His head, at that, flung sidewise suddenly to look toward where Danny lay; and she saw his eyes. dry and burning. She rose and took the other blanket and wrapped Danny in it; and kneeling beside him, she said over her shoulder: ‘When I found him, he put his arms around me.’ She remembered so keenly that embrace, surrendering, completely trustful. ‘He always loved me, you know, as I loved him.’
Harland slowly sat up, the blanket falling across his knees. She said hurriedly: ‘Your clothes are in the skiff, except one sock I didn’t find. You’d better put them on. We must take him home, and I must tend that hurt on your forehead.’ If she could lead him to obey her, to yield to her will, then perhaps he would not believe what his own eyes had seen.
He rose, submitting silently, and pulled on his dungarees, belting them around his waist. Then, still not speaking, he came to lift Danny into the skiff. ‘I’ll hold him,’ she said, and sat in the stern and cradled Danny’s head and shoulders between her knees. He dragged the skiff off the beach and stepped into it and lifted the oars.
She wished he would say something, for this waiting was hard; but he did not even meet her eyes. He rowed the long way home without a word; nor for a while did she speak at all. If he were lost to her forever, then she too was lost, and there was no help for it. She could do no more than she had done.
Except, she remembered lucidly, that she must do one more thing. She had told him they were to have a baby. That was not true, but she must make it true, and at once. If he ever came to know that she had lied, then she was destroyed most certainly. But the thought did not dismay her. He could deny her nothing now. To remind him of his bonds she said softly: ‘I’ve thought so for days, Richard; but I wasn’t really sure, in my heart, till now when you need me so — need us both so. Baby and I will make up to you for losing Danny, darling.’
Not looking at her, he rowed slowly on. This had been a long business — Danny’s swim, the endless diving for his body, the hopeless hours of the effort at resuscitation. The day was waning, and the lofty hill above the cabin shut off the descending sun so that they moved in shadow, and the shadow thickened about them even while on the other shore the sun still lay. Since he was rowing, he faced aft, but she could look ahead; and when they rounded the last point she saw a figure on the wharf and knew Leick had returned from his trip to town, and terror swept her. Leick was shrewd and wise and not easily befooled, and she dreaded facing him. She had decided long ago that he was her enemy, persuading herself that he resented her coming between him and Harland; and he might somehow guess the truth. Holding her voice steady, fighting down her fears, seeking Harland’s protection, she said:
‘Leick’s there waiting for us. He’s back early.’
Harland’s eyes met hers, and he let the oars trail and looked this way and that, searching the opposite shores of the lake as though seeking something he could not find. Then she saw his eyes fix and go blank with hard thought, and then he began once more to row toward the boathouse, and she knew that his decision, whatever it might be, was taken. When they came to where Leick was, Harland would speak; and when he spoke she would know whether she had won. Her arms tightened around Danny’s body, clinging to him as though for sanctuary.
They drew alongside the wharf, and Leick stood just above them, looking down at that blanket-shrouded burden in Ellen’s arms. He met her eyes, then Harland’s; and he uttered some low word of question. Harland spoke, his voice husky. He coughed to clear it, said then carefully:
‘Danny’s drowned, Leick.’ Leick grunted as though under the impact of a heavy blow, and Harland wetted his lips and explained, pickin
g his words. ‘We went to swim on the far beach, and he took the motorboat, cutting circles, taking his own waves. He hit one wrong, and it threw him out. Before we could get to him — we were up at the beach with nothing but the skiff — he had drowned, trying to swim ashore.’ He added, to complete the lie: ‘The motorboat ran wild and cracked up on that ledge off the point. I guess it’s ruined.’
Ellen’s heart quickened its beat. For a long time no one spoke. Then in a heavy tone Leick said: ‘You cut your head.’ The word was a question, and Harland after an instant’s hesitation answered it.
‘We had to dive for him. I hit a rock.’
Leick nodded, but Ellen saw his eyes rest for a moment on Harland’s dungarees; and — her perceptions were always acute — she read his mind. If she and Harland and Danny had indeed gone to swim on the beach, then Richard would have worn or taken his bathing trunks; and Leick must know this. So Leick would not be thus easily deceived.
Yet she knew his devotion. While Harland protected her, so would Leick too. She did not speak, but there was a singing triumph in her blood. Harland was hers! He had made her cause his own; and with him beside her, she could face the world.
– V –
Harland lifted Danny’s body up to Leick who held it as he might have held a baby while they climbed out on the wharf. Harland secured the skiff, and Ellen said in a low voice: ‘Bring him up to the cabin. I’ll go make ready.’ It was important that she should act in what would seem to Leick, and to the world — and even to Harland — a normal fashion. She was perfectly sure that Harland knew the truth, knew she had let Danny drown. His headlong race up the lake was proof enough of this; his lie to Leick confirmed that proof. But she was equally sure that as long as he thought she was carrying his child — and perhaps forever — he would hide his knowledge of her guilt from her and from the world. He and she would play a grim farce, he pretending he did not know what she had done, she pretending she did not know he knew. Yet her part must be well played; since if it were not, if once he realized she knew he had seen her, then the ugly truth would come to the surface, and dark words would be spoken, and the tragic farce would end.
Leave Her to Heaven Page 18
