He napped uneasily throughout the night, sleeping and waking by fits and starts, his brain insatiably occupied with an interminable succession of wretched dreams. The mad, distorted face of Drummond, bleached and degraded by his slavery to morphine, haunted Whitaker's consciousness like some frightful and hideous Chinese mask. He saw it in a dozen guises, each more pitiful and terrible than the last. It pursued him through eons of endless night, forever at his shoulder, blind and weeping. Thrice he started from his bed, wide awake and glaring, positive that Drummond had been in the room but the moment gone.... And each time that he lay back and sleep stole in numbing waves through his brain, he passed into subconsciousness with the picture before his eyes of a seething cloud of gulls seen against the sky, over the edge of a cliff.
He was up and out in the cool of dawn, before sunrise, delaying to listen for some minutes at the foot of the stairway. But he heard no sound in that still house, and there was no longer the night to affright the woman with hinted threats of nameless horrors lurking beneath its impenetrable cloak. He felt no longer bound to stand sentinel on the threshold of her apprehensions. He went out.
The day would be clear: he drew promise of this from the gray bowl of the sky, cloudless, touched with spreading scarlet only on its eastern rim. There was no wind; from the cooling ashes of yesternight's beacon-fire a slim stalk of smoke grew straight and tall before it wavered and broke. The voice of the sea had fallen to a muffled throbbing.
In the white magic of air like crystal translucent and motionless, the world seemed more close-knitted and sane. What yesterday's veiling of haze had concealed was now bold and near. In the north the lighthouse stood like a horn on the brow of the headland, the lamp continuing to flash even though its light was darkened, its beams out-stripped by the radiant forerunners of the sun. Beyond it, over a breadth of water populated by an ocean-going tug with three barges in tow and a becalmed lumber schooner, a low-lying point of land (perhaps an island) thrust out into the west. On the nearer land human life was quickening: here and there pale streamers of smoke swung up from hidden chimneys on its wooded rises.
Whitaker eyed them with longing. But they were distant from attainment by at the least three miles of tideway through which strong waters raced—as he could plainly see from his elevation, in the pale, streaked and wrinkled surface of the channel.
He wagged a doubtful head, and scowled: no sign in any quarter of a boat heading for the island, no telling when they'd be taken off the cursed place!
In his mutinous irritation, the screaming of the gulls, over in the west, seemed to add the final touch of annoyance, a superfluous addition to the sum of his trials. Why need they have selected that island for their insane parliament? Why must his nerves be racked forever by their incessant bickering? He had dreamed of them all night; must he endure a day made similarly distressing?
What was the matter with the addle-pated things, anyway?
There was nothing to hinder him from investigating for himself. The girl would probably sleep another hour or two.
He went forthwith, dulling the keen edge of his exasperation with a rapid tramp of half a mile or so over the uneven uplands.