The Nymph and the Lamp (50 page)

“Of course not. It's Mr. Markham's. I use it a lot for business errands but this is the first time I've ever taken it for pleasure.”

“Thank you, Ma'am. It's very nice of you to say so. But why didn't you phone me yesterday? I thought I'd go wacky sitting about the hotel parlor, smoking myself blue in the face and looking out at the rain.”

Isabel turned off the main highway towards Scotch Springs. “All the wires were down—you ought to have known that. Besides, there was nothing to do. I'd thought we might go to the movies but of course there was no electricity. When the Kingsbridge movie man can't put on a show for any reason he always says he's got a dark house. Last night he really had one.”

Skane watched her as she drove. “I like your suit. Nice fit. Lovely figure. Seems to me I've told you that before somewhere. Where are we going? Looks to me as if you're heading straight for the North Mountain—which, I may say, we'd consider just a good steep ridge in Cape Breton.”

She went on for a time without answering. Then she said quietly, “I thought it was time we finished what we were talking about the night you came.”

“Aha!”

“You sound like the villain in the play. I'm taking you to a place where we can talk freely without being watched or over-heard by anybody, and you mustn't presume on the fact. Is that agreed?”

“It's all very cold and businesslike. Why don't you just drive around in the car?”

“Because I can't drive and look you in the face at the same time.

“Okay. Anything to please.”

They left the car at the roadside beyond Scotch Springs and walked up the log road to the old mill. The stream was a shouting torrent. The pool above the crazy dam had spread and flooded the grass where Isabel had lain, and upon its surface a thick mat of colored leaves eddied slowly like a great painted wheel. Around the mill itself the stripped maples had a wintry look. The firs, dense and dripping still, remained triumphant and untouched after the great wind.

“I used to come here a lot during the summer,” Isabel explained. “It was quiet and sunny, a good place to lie and smoke.”

Skane glanced about the sodden edges of the stream, “You couldn't say that now. Rum sort of spot. That sawmill looks like something Champlain left behind. Where shall we sit? That log over there?”

He produced cigarettes and they smoked for a time in silence, sitting well apart, each waiting for the other to speak.

“Well?” Skane exclaimed impatiently at last. He regarded the flooded grass with a wry expression. He was bareheaded and wearing a gray suit with a smart blue polka-dot tie. He looked no more like the shabby and savage Skane of Marina than this torrent in the woods resembled the quiet pool amongst the dunes. He might have stepped out of an office in St. James Street.

“You want me to come with you to Montreal,” Isabel said. “I suppose that means you'll marry me?”

“Of course, as soon as you're free. Carney will give you a divorce all right. We'll get a lawyer in Halifax to draw up the necessary papers and send 'em to Marina for him to sign. The
Elgin
sails in two days' time—I phoned to make sure. You'll have to write a formal letter to Carney saying you don't intend to return to him, and that should be all the evidence required. If desertion isn't sufficient grounds for divorce in the Nova Scotia courts we'll take the papers some place where it is. In the meantime, well, after all we've been to each other I suggest that we go on right where we left off. Why waste any more of our lives over some legal fiddlesticks?”

“Greg,” she said carefully, “suppose I told you that Matthew and I weren't married?”

He looked up sharply. “You don't mean it!”

“I do. We got a license and a wedding ring, but we discovered that you have to wait three days—and we had to catch the boat. So we dashed off just as we were, without benefit of clergy or even a justice of the peace.”

“Well I'm damned! Why didn't you tell me that before?”

“Does it make any difference?” Isabel said bluntly.

“No—not at all. It—simplifies things, doesn't it?” He was still amazed.

“So you see, you can really make an honest woman of me,” she went on in a composed voice. “That's rather important, isn't it? At least it's important for a woman to know if a man wants a wife and companion or if he just wants to go to bed with her.”

Skane uttered a short laugh. “You're very frank, aren't you?”

“Shouldn't I be? We're considering a frank relationship.”

Skane looked at the stream again, sucking hard on his cigarette and blowing out the smoke through his nostrils slowly. For a time he seemed lost in thought. His jaw tightened. He turned to face her with the old hot blue blaze in his eyes.

“I don't care. Say anything you like. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters except that I'm mad about you and I've got to have you. You've been frank. I'll be frank with you. When I left Halifax after that empty search I cursed you thoroughly. I convinced myself that our affair on the island was just one of those things, that you'd seemed attractive there for lack of any comparison, and that anyway the whole thing was a shabby trick on Carney, who trusted me, who'd trusted both of us. It seemed to me that you'd run away and hid because you felt guilty. Well, so should I. For a man running away from anything I can recommend Montreal. Prohibition doesn't trouble them up there. You don't have to sneak behind a fence and drink hard cider and furniture polish. And there are droves of pretty women ready to amuse a lonely man.

“I don't mean that I behaved like a sailor on a spree. There was too much work, too many interesting things to learn about Hartigan's business, to leave time for much foolery. But at certain times I tried very hard to confirm the notion that you meant absolutely nothing to me. Well, it didn't work. Every time I came back to my room Monna Pomona was there to remind me of that idyll on Marina. If I'd thrown the picture out of the window it wouldn't have made any difference. The whole truth was that there was something about you no other woman had, and it spoiled me for anyone else. When I told you that on the island you thought I was just swinging the lead. Well, I was stating a simple fact. One woman in a thousand has what you've got and none of the rest are worth a damn. Isabel, I don't know what else I can say. There isn't anything to say. That's everything.”

He tossed the cigarette into the stream with the gesture of a man throwing everything to the wind. With this rush of words he had brought his emotions to a sudden pitch. He was visibly excited. He regarded Isabel with an almost arrogant impatience. She ground out her own cigarette on the log, very slowly and carefully.

“And Matthew?” she asked deliberately. “Surely Matthew found that quality in me, whatever it is? You must remember that for a time we were very much in love. He was passionate in my arms. Don't look so incredulous. He was my lover and I know. I was the first woman in his life. And having had me after all those lonely years do you think he can forget so easily?”

“Matthew!” Skane snapped. “For God's sake put Carney out of your mind, Isabel. Carney hadn't an earthly right to you. He deliberately swindled you. He was going blind and he damned well knew it.”

CHAPTER 36

Isabel gazed at the crushed cigarette stub lying on the log between them. She said in a small voice, “Please say that again—that last.”

“He's going blind,” Skane repeated contemptuously. “He made me promise not to tell anyone, but there it is. He noticed it first in the spring before he went to the mainland. He was a great reader—always had his nose in a book or a magazine or anything else in print that he could get his hands on. And one graveyard watch, after a winter's reading by the light of oil lamps, suddenly he couldn't see. He told me everything went green. For several hours he sat there at the instruments doing everything by touch. After a day or so his sight cleared again. But he found that when he walked the beach at night, as he liked to do, things weren't as distinct as before. He could always see like a cat in the dark. Suddenly he couldn't. And it worried him. He decided to go ashore on the spring boat and see an oculist, and at the same time to hunt up his mother, whom he hadn't seen since he was a boy. A business-and-pleasure sort of thing.

“He went to an oculist in Halifax, who told him that in a year, or two at the outside, he'd be stone blind, and that nothing could be done about it. It seems that years before, on a voyage to the West Indies, Carney's ship had gone into a port where there was an epidemic of malignant ophthalmia, and he caught it. He had the devil of a time in some miserable port hospital but eventually he recovered and shipped north again. His eyes seemed to be all right and he didn't give it another thought. But apparently after all this time the thing's caught up with him. Some sort of optical atrophy—I think that's the term—has set in, aggravated no doubt by all those years in the sun-blaze of Marina, and all that poring over books in the winter nights.

“Well, Carney went to Newfoundland to see his mother but apparently she'd died a good many years before. So he went on to Montreal. He saw oculists there. Then to Toronto—more oculists, and always the same story. They told him he'd see all right by daylight for a time; the weakness would manifest itself at night or in a dim light of any sort. He could see movies or anything like that, but walking in starlight, say, he'd notice it. Then he'd become completely night-blind. Then he'd find his daylight vision shrinking. Nothing sudden, you understand, but day by day, a bit at a time. He'd notice it especially when winter came, when the days got very short and the sunlight was weak or shut off by clouds most of the time.

“It was like a sentence of death. Carney refused to believe it. After all, he'd recovered after that West Indian affair, and that spell at Marina had passed off all right. A bit of weakness at night, that was all. The doctors didn't know what they were talking about. So back he came to Marina—with you. It was still summer and the light was strong. His eyes were all right, by Jingo—you know the way he talks. But he found he couldn't walk the beaches at night any more. That's why he objected when you insisted on walking back from Main Station in the dark. But he got away with that all right. You didn't notice. He memorized the lagoon shore, where nothing ever changes much and the going's pretty smooth. He couldn't have done it on the seashore because a high tide or a big surf always shifts the raffle about. But it's a wonder you didn't notice how clumsy he was at evening before the lamps were lit.

“When the cloudy autumn days began he noticed a change in his vision by day. That's why he quit duck-hunting. A flying duck's a small object and it moves very fast. He couldn't spot 'em coming till they were right down to the decoys—and that's much too late. And he noticed it at his work. His handwriting got bigger and bigger all the time. And at night, even by the light of a good lamp, he had to take a magnifying glass to read the smaller print. You didn't notice that of course, because he wouldn't try to read anything like that when you were around. He cut out his walks. For a time he'd go for pony rides and even gallop about the dunes—because he could trust the pony's eyes. But then he had to give that up as well.

“I'll say this for him—he put up a wonderful bluff. He knew where everything was, about the station, and he'd go straight to it, day or night, and do whatever had to be done. He'd hear a bird in the grass, or see a pony vaguely at a distance, and tell you all about it just as if he could see every detail of the thing. And he cultivated his sense of touch. I've seen him close his eyes and go all over the receiving apparatus with his fingers, adjusting this and changing that, and then checking everything with his eyes open and if necessary with his magnifying glass. He persisted in his notion that all this was just a sudden case of shortsightedness and that he'd never go really blind. He deceived himself just as willfully as he'd deceived you in the first place.

“By November, when the weather shut in and the long winter nights began, he had to face the truth. He knew by the end of that month that the oculists were right—he knew the worst. He was very upset. Especially about you. We were chums, remember, and he told me everything. He felt that he'd swindled you—which was the truth—and that by another year you'd find yourself tied hopelessly to a man as blind as a bat. He didn't seem to care so much about himself. But he felt—he still feels that he can keep on running the station, sight or no sight. The old apparatus he knows like the palm of his hand. He can take the engine or the generator apart and put it together again blindfolded. The same with the other gear. He could depend on the loyalty of the ops—and on their eyes—for everything else. He told me again and again, ‘I'm good for several years yet.' He'd always said that when it came time to retire he'd build himself a small shack in the dunes to the east of the station and live out his days there. And I suppose that's what he had in mind ultimately when he found he was going blind. The only problem was you.”

Isabel spoke. “How true!” And she asked in the same low voice, “Did anyone else know this?”

Skane waved a hand. “I think O'Dell suspected something wrong—he's known Carney longer than any of us, although not so closely of course. Nobody else knew except Sargent, not even McBain. Sargent was a shrewd young chap behind that innocent face of his. You couldn't fool him very long about anything. I rather think he knew what was afoot between you and me. He used to come out with some odd sayings from time to time—you could take 'em any way you liked. But he was a nice kid, a happy-go-lucky sort. He was in love with you and he felt sorry for Carney, but after all that was Carney's worry. When he left the island he was like a dog with two tails—he didn't know which to wag first. He was crazy to be off to sea again.