CHAPTER LII
THE VOICE IN THE DARK
Barbara rested ill in her cabin bed that night. Confused dreams troubledher, mingling familiar thoughts in kaleidoscopic confusion, dragging herfrom one tangle to another in a wearying rapidity against which shestruggled in vain. One thing ran through them all--the gold-lacquerBuddha that had stood on the Sendai chest in her bedroom at the Embassy;only it seemed to be also that lost image before which she had used tosit as a child.
She had no feeling of awakening, but all at once the visions were goneand she lay open-eyed, swinging to the movement of the sea, feeling thenight to be very long. There came over her a creeping oppression--asense of terror of the night, of its hidden mysteries and occult forces.The darkness seemed to be holding some dreadful, stolid, lethargic thingthat sprawled from horizon to horizon.
A small, noiseless clock was hung beside the bed. She could see its paleface in the light of the thick ground-glass bulb that served asnight-lamp. It was nearly four o'clock.
She twisted back the tawny-brown surge of her hair, rose, and dressed ashastily as she could in the lurching space. Then she opened the door andpassed into the saloon. A roll of the yacht slammed to the cabin doorand left her in darkness. She felt for the electric switch, but beforeshe could find it, another movement sent her reeling against a stand.She threw out her arm to stay her fall and struck something.
There was a clicking sound, a soft whir, and then the music of _samisen_filled the dark room. She realized that she had staggered against thephonograph in the corner and that the shock had started its mechanism.Wincing, she groped her way to a chair and sat down trembling.
The music died away. There was a pause, a sharp click, a curiousconfusion of sounds, and then husky and filmy, _a human voice_:
"Barbara!"
She caught her hands to her throat, her blood chilling to ice. It wasthe voice of Austen Ware, speaking, it seemed to her, from the worldbeyond. She crouched back, breathing fast and hard, while the voice wenton, in strange broken periods, threaded by a whir and clamor that seemedthe noise of the wind outside.
"What is that I knocked over? It's buzzing and wheels are turning init--or is it the pain? Can't you stop it, Barbara? No, I know you aren'there, really. I'm all alone ... I must be light-headed. How stupid!"
The strange truth came to her in a stab of realization. What she heardwas no supernatural voice. In its fall that night the phonograph'sspring had been released and the _samisen_ record had registered alsothe delirious muttering of the dying man. She felt herself shudderingviolently.
"I can't go any farther.... You--you've done it for me, Phil. It ... wasthe second blow. It seemed to crash right through...."
Barbara's heart was beating to bursting. "Austen, Austen," she whisperedto herself, in an agony. "Tell me! Was it _Phil_? You can't know whatyou're saying!"
"No one must know it. The law would ... no, no! What good would it donow? He's a bad egg, but I ... I was always proud of the family name.Barbara! Remember, it _wasn't Phil_! It _wasn't Phil_!"
She fell on her knees, her hands clasping the arms of the chair,thrilling to the truth beneath that pitiful denial. Phil, not Daunt! Theman she had loved had no stain of blood on his soul! She sobbed aloud.With the whir of the machinery there mixed a grating, scratchingdiscord, as though an automaton had attempted to laugh.
"How ridiculous it seems to die like this! Only this morning I was sonear ... so near to what I wanted most. It was your losing the locketthat checkmated me. Why couldn't I have found it instead of Phil?... DidI tell you I was there that day, Barbara--behind the _shikiri_, when youfollowed the Japanese girl into the house? I could see just what youwere thinking ... I would never have told you the truth ... never."
With a faint cry Barbara dragged herself backward. In the illusion,everything about her for the instant vanished. The yacht's walls hadrolled away. She was on a gloomy hillside, and a stricken man wasspeaking--confessing.
Again the ghastly attempt to laugh.
"A contemptible thing, wasn't it! I knew that. I've ... I've felt it....I never seemed contemptible to myself before. But I should have had you,and that ... would have repaid. It was all coming my ... way. Then, justthe dropping of a locket, and ... Phil ... and now, it's all over!"
Barbara felt herself engulfed in a wave of complex emotions. She wastorn with a great repugnance, a greater joy, and a sense of acute pitythat overmastered them both. Then there rolled over all the recollectionthat what she now listened to was but a mechanical echo. The hillsidefaded, the walls of the yacht came back.
"I never believed in much, and I'm going without whining. Are you near,Barbara? Sometimes there are many people around me ... and then onlyyou. I ... I think I'm beginning to wander!"
She was weeping now, unrestrained.
There was a long pause, in which the whir of the wheels rasped on.Then--
"Is it your ... arms I feel, Barbara? Or ... is it...."
That was all. The wheels whirred on a little longer, a clickand--silence. Only the rush of the wind outside and the passionatesobbing of the girl who knelt in the dark room, her face buried in herhand, her heart tossed on the cross-tides of anguish and of joy.
A long time she knelt there. She was recalled by a confusion on the deckabove her--shouts and a hastening of feet. She lifted her face. The dawnhad come--its pale, faint radiance sifted through the heavy glass portsand dimly lit the room. The shouts and running multiplied.
She sprang to her feet, opened the door and hurried up thecompanion-way.