CHAPTER TWO--THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT
BEFORE the dream had fairly enchained him Colton was buffeted back toconsciousness by a slamming of doors and a general bustling about in thehouse. He sat up in bed, and looked out over the ocean just in time tosee a fiery serpent writhe up through the blackness and thrust into theclouds a head which burst into wind-driven fragments of radiance, beforethe vaster glory of the lightning surrounded and wiped it out.
"A wreck, I fear," said Professor Eavenden in the hall outside. "I shallgo down to the shore, in case I can be of assistance."
"Indeed you shall not!" came a quick contradiction from the room at theend of the hall. "Not until I'm ready to go with you."
It was the voice of the Vision. Colton observed that, soft as the toneswere, a certain quality of decisiveness inhered in them.
"Can't Mr. Haynes bring you?" suggested the professor mildly. "I see alight in his room."
"He'll have his hands full with Helga. Please wait, Dad. I won't be tenminutes."
From downstairs rose a banging of doors, a tramping of feet and thegruff voice of Johnston, the host, mingled with the gentle remonstrancesof his wife, in which a certain insistence upon rubber boots wasdiscernible. On the other side of Colton there was a swishing andthumping, as of one in hasty search for some article that had declinedto stay put. "Where the devil is that sweater?" came in a sort ofgrowling appeal to whatever Powers of Detection might be within hearing.
"Don't swear, Mr. Haynes," sounded in tones of soft gaiety from the endroom, and the sweaterless one responded: "The half of it hath not beentold you. Got a sweater to lend a poor man with a weak chest, MissRavenden?"
"I'm just getting into my one and only garment of the kind," was themuffled answer.
A second woman's voice, low, but with a wonderful, deep, full-throatedsonance in it, broke in:
"My dream has come true," it said gravely. "The ship is coming in onGraveyard Point. How long, Petit Pere?"
"With you in a minute, Princess. Just let me get into my boots,"returned the voice of the seeker, but so altered by a certain caressingfellowship that Colton was half-minded to think he heard a newparticipant.
"Are you dressed already, Helga?" demanded Miss Ravenden. "How _do_ youdo it?"
"I hadn't undressed, Dolly," said the other girl, gravely. "I knew--Ifelt that something----"
She paused.
"Helga's dreams always come to pass, you know," said the man of theelusive sweater half banteringly. "_What_ infernal kind of a knot hasthat shoe lace tied itself into?"
"Pray God this dream doesn't come to pass," said the girl outside, underher breath as she passed Colton's door.
Another rocket and a third pierced the night and the response came, ina rising glow of light from the beach. "The life-savers are at hand,"observed the professor below. "Make haste, daughter. If we are--"
A burst of thunder drowned him out.
"This," said Colton with conviction, as he dove into his heavy jerseyjacket and seized a cap from a peg, "is going to be a grand place for aninsomnia patient! I can see that, right at the start."
As he ran out of his door he collided violently with a small, dark,sinewy man who had hurriedly emerged from the opposite room.
"Don't apologise, and I won't," said Colton as they clutched each other."My name is Colton. Yours is Haynes. May I go to the shore with you? Idon't know the way."
"Apparently you don't know the way to the stairs," returned the othera trifle tartly. Looking at his keen, pallid and deeply lined face, theyoung doctor set him down as a rather irritable fellow, and suspecteddyspepsia. "Everybody will be going to the beach," he added. "If youfollow along you'll probably get there."
"Thanks," said Dick undisturbedly. It was a principle of his that theill-temper of others was no logical reason for ill-temper in himself.In this case his principle worked well, for Haynes said with tolerablecivility:
"You just came in this evening, didn't you?"
"Yes. I seem to have met the market for excitement."
By this time they had reached the large living-room, where they foundMrs. Johnston presiding with ill-directed advice over the strugglesof her grey-bearded husband to insert himself into a pair of boots ofinsufficient calibre.
"Twenty-five years o' service in the life-savin' corps an' ain't let togo out now without these der-r-r-ratted contraptions!" he fumed.
A splendid, tawny-haired girl in an oilskin jacket stood looking outinto the night, her eyes vivid with a brooding excitement. She turned asHaynes came in.
"Are you ready, Petit Pere? I'm smothering in these things."
Expressively she passed her hands down along the oilskins, which coveredher dress without concealing the sumptuous beauty of her young figure.
Filled as was Colton's mind with the image of another face, he lookedat her with astonished admiration. Such, thought he, must have been thesuperb maids in whose inspiration the Vikings fought and conquered.
"If you knew what a gallant wet-weather figure you make," Haynesanswered her (Colton wondered how he could ever have thought the facedisagreeable, so complete was the change of expression), "your vanitywould keep you comfortable."
"Dinna blether," returned the girl, smiling with affectionatecomradeship, and slipping her arm through his to draw him to the door."Father's boots are on at last."
"We're to have company," said Haynes. "Mr. Colton--I think you said yourname was Colton--wants to come along."
"I'm sorry that you should have been awakened," said the girl, turningto him. "You don't mind rough weather?"
"At least I'm not likely to blow away," returned the young mangood-humouredly, looking down at her from his six-feet-one ofheight. Inwardly he was saying: "You are never the daughter of thatweather-beaten old shore man and that mild and ancient hen of a woman."
Haynes, who had caught up a lantern and was moving toward the door,turned and said to him: "You had better keep between Mr. Johnston andmyself. What are you waiting for?"
"Aren't there others coming? I thought I heard someone upstairs speakof it." He paused in some embarrassment, as he realised the intensity ofhis own wish to see that dark and lovely face again.
"Oh, Dolly Ravenden. Her father will bring her," said Miss Johnston. "Weshall meet them at the beach."
With heads bent, the four plunged out into the storm. The wind now wasblowing furiously, but there was little rain. Over the sea hung a blackbank of cloud, from which spurted great charges of lightning. Colton,implicitly following his guides, presently found himself passing downa little gully where the still air bore an uncanny contrast to thegale overhead. Hardly had they entered the hollow when Haynes checkedhimself.
"Did you hear it?" he said in a low voice to the girl.
Colton saw her press closer to her companion, shudderingly. She poisedher head, staring with great eager, sombre eyes, into the void above.
"When haven't I heard it, in my dreams!" she half whispered.
"There!" cried Haynes.
"Yes," said the girl. "To seaward, wasn't it?"
On the word, Colton, straining his ears, heard through the multiformclamour of the gale aloft the same faint, strange, wailing note of hisearlier experience, not unlike the shrieking of metal upon metal, yet ananimate voice, infinitely melancholy, infinitely lonely.
"It chills me like a portent," said Helga.
"Never mind, Princess," reassured Haynes, in his caressing voice. "Itwas stupid of me to say anything about it, and make you more nervous."
"Nervous! I never knew I had nerves--until now." She turned to Colton.
"Did you hear it too?"
"Yes. What was it?"
A furious flurry of the gale intervened. The girl shook her head.Johnston in the lead now turned to climb a grassy knoll, andconversation became impossible.
At the top they came in view of a score of busy figures outlined sharplyagainst a lurid background as the lightning spread its shining draperyfrom horizon to zenith. Presently the fo
ur people from Third Housestood on the cliff overhanging the sledge-hammer surf, and watched thelife-saving crews of two stations, Bow Hill to the east, Sand Spitto the west, play their desperate game for a hazard of human lives.Straining their eyes, they could discern, in the whiteness of thewhipped seas, a dull, undefined lump, which ever and anon flashed, likea magician's trick, into the clean, pencilled outlines of a schooner,lying on her beam ends, and swept by every giant comber that rolled infrom the wide Atlantic. She lay broadside to the surges, harpooned andheld by the deadly pinnacled reef of Graveyard Point.