Phantom Wires Part 16

They watched the s.h.i.+p's officer put ash.o.r.e to obtain _pratique_, and the yellow flag come down, and heard the signal-bells of the engine-room, as the officer returned, with a great cigar in one corner of his bearded mouth.

There was nothing amiss. There were neither Carabinieri nor Guardie di Pubblica Sicurezza to come on board with papers and cross-questions.

Before the break of day their discharged cargo would be in the lighters and they would be steaming southward for the Straits of Messina.

That night, on the deserted deck, at anchor between the city and the sea, they watched the glimmering lights of Naples, rising tier after tier from the _Immacolatella Nuova_ and its s.h.i.+p lamps to the _Palazzo di Capodimonte_ and its near-by _Osservatorio_. And when the lights of the city thinned out and the crowning haze of gold melted from its hillsides, with the advancing night, Frank and Durkin sat back in their steamer-chairs and looked up at the stars, talking of Home, and of the future.

Yet the beauty of that balmy and tranquil night seemed to bring little peace of mind to Durkin. There were reasons, of late, when moments of meditation were not always moments of contentment to him. His wife had noticed that ever-increasing trouble of soul, and although she said nothing of it, she had watched him narrowly and not altogether despondently. For she knew that whatever the tumult or contest that might be taking place within the high-walled arena of his own Ego, it was a clash of forces of which she must remain merely a spectator. So she went below, leaving him in that hour of pa.s.sive yet troubled thought, to stare up at the tranquil southern stars, as he meditated on life, and the meaning of life, and what lay beyond it all. She knew men and the world too well to look for any sudden and sweeping reorganization of Durkin's disturbed and restless mind. But she nursed the secret hope that out of that spiritual ferment would come some ultimate clearness of vision.

It was late when he called her up on deck again, ostensibly to catch a glimpse of Vesuvius breaking and bursting into flame, above _Barra_ and _Portici_. She knew, however, that slumbering and subterranean fires other than Vesuvius had erupted into light and life. She could see it by the new misery on his moonlit face, as she sat beside him. Yet she sat there in silence; there was so little that she could say.

"Do you know, you've changed, Frank, these last few months!" he at last essayed.

"Haven't there been reasons enough for it?" she asked, making no effort to conceal the bitterness of her tone.

"You're not happy, are you?"

"Are _you_?" she asked, in turn.

"Who can be happy, and think?"

She waited, pa.s.sively, for him to go on again.

"You said you didn't much care what happened, so long as it kept us together, and left us satisfied."

"Isn't that enough?" she broke in, hotly, yet thrilling with the thought that he was about to tear away the mockery behind which she had tried to mask herself.

"No, it isn't enough! And now we're out of the dust of it, these last few days, I can see that it never can be enough. I've just been wondering where it leads to, and what it amounts to. I've had a feeling, for days, now, that there's something between us. What is it?"

"Ourselves!" she answered, at last.

"Exactly! And that is what makes me think you're wrong when you cry that you'll stoop every time I stoop. Every single crime that seems to be bringing us together is only keeping us apart. It's making you hate yourself, and because of that, hate me as well!"

"I couldn't do _that_!" she protested, catching at his hands.

"But I can see it with my own eyes, whether you want to or not. It can't be helped. It's beginning to frighten me, this very willingness of yours to do the things we oughtn't to. Why, I'd be happier, even, if you did them under protest!"

"But what is the difference, if I still _do_ them?"

"It would show me that you weren't as bad as I am--that you hadn't altogether given up."

"I couldn't altogether give up, and live!" she cried, with sudden pa.s.sion.

"But you told me as much, that night in Monte Carlo?"

"I didn't _mean_ it. I was tired out that night; I was embittered, and insane, if you like! I _want_ to be good! No woman wants sin and wrongdoing! But, O Jim, can't you see, it's you, you, I want, before everything else!"

He smote the palms of his hands together, in a little gesture of impotent misery.

"That's just it--you tried to make me save myself for my own sake,--and it couldn't be done. It was a failure. And now you're trying to make me save myself for your sake----"

"It's not your salvation I want--it's _you_!"

"But it's only through being honest that I can hold and keep you; can't you see that? If I can't trust myself, I can't possibly trust _you_!"

"Couldn't we try--once more?" Her voice was little more than a whisper.

He looked up at the soft and velvet stars that peered down so voluptuously from a soft and velvet sky. He looked at them for many moments, before he spoke again.

"If I got back to my work again, my right and honest work, I _could_ be honest!" he declared, vehemently.

"But we _are_ going back," she a.s.suaged.

"Yes, but see what we have to go through, first!"

"I know," she admitted, unhappily. "But even then, we could say that it was to be for the last time."

"As we said before--and failed!"

"But this time we needn't fail. Think what it will mean if you have your work on your transmitting camera waiting for you--months and years of hard and honest work--work that you love, work that will lead to bigger things, and give you the time, yes, and the money, you need to perfect your amplifier. But outside of that, even to have your work--surely that's enough!"

"I'd have to have you, as well!" he said, out of the silence that had fallen upon them.

"You always will, Jim, you know that!"

"But I'm afraid of myself! I'm afraid of my moods--I'm afraid of my own distrust. I have a feeling that it may hurt you, sometime, almost beyond forgiveness!"

"I'll try to understand!" she murmured. And again silence fell over them.

"I'm afraid of making promises," he said, half whimsically, half weakly, after many minutes of thought.

"I don't want you to promise--only _try_!" she pleaded, swept by a wave of grat.i.tude that seemed to fling her more intimately than ever before into her husband's arms. Yet it was a wave, and nothing more. For it receded as it came, leaving her, a moment later, chilled and apprehensive before their over-troubled future. With a little m.u.f.fled cry of emotion, almost animal-like in its inarticulate intensity, she turned to her husband, and strained him in her arms, in her human and unhappy and unsatisfied arms.

"Oh, love me!" she pleaded, brokenly. "Love me! Love me--for I need it!"

They seemed strangely nearer to each other, after that night, and the peacefulness of their cruise to Bari remained uninterrupted. And once clear of that port Durkin's nervousness somewhat lightened, for he had figured out that they would be able to connect with one of the Cunard liners at Trieste. From there, if only they escaped attention and detection in the harbor, they would be turning homeward in two days.

One thing, and one thing only, lay between Frank and her husband: She had not yet found courage to tell him of the loss of the Penfield papers. And the more she thought of it, the more she dreaded it, teased and mocked by the very irony of the situation, disquieted and humiliated at the memory of her own pleadings for honesty while she herself was so far astray from the paths she was pointing out.

That sacrifice of scrupulosity on the altar of expediency, trivial as it was, was the heritage of her past life, she told herself. And she felt, vaguely, that in some form or another it would be paid for, and dearly paid for, as she had paid for everything.

It was only as they steamed into the harbor of Trieste, in the teeth of a _bora_ and a high-running sea, that this woman who longed to be altogether honest allowed herself any fleeting moment of self-pity.

For as she gazed up at the bald and sterile hills behind that clean and wind-swept Austrian city, she remembered they had been thus denuded that their timbers might make a foundation for Venice. She felt, in that pa.s.sing mood, that her own life had been denuded, that all its softening and shrouding beauties had been cut out and carried away, that from now on she was to be torn by winds and scorched by open suns--while the best of her slept submerged, beyond the reach of her unhappy hands.

But Durkin, at her side, through the driving spray and rain, pointed out to her the huge rolling bulk and the red funnels of the Cunarder.

"Thank heaven!" he said, with a sigh of relief, "we'll be in time to catch her!"

The _Laminian_ dropped anchor to the windward of the liner, and as dusk settled down over the harbor Frank took a wordless pleasure in studying the shadowy hulk which was to carry her back to America, to her old life and her old a.s.sociations. But she was wondering how she should tell him of the loss of the Penfield securities. It was true that the very crimes that should have bound them together were keeping them apart!