The man bent toward her. She recoiled from the contact of his foul and ragged garments. She shuddered as his hot breath scorched her cheek. In a single word he gave the answer to her question:
“Murder!”
A dizziness came over her; she reeled, and put out her hands to save herself from falling. They touched the cold stone of the harbor wall. Her drooping lids lifted, she looked round vacantly. The man was gone.
“The dreadful word!” she whispered—“oh, the cruel word! It blights the present, it blackens the future. What can the future hold for Frank—or for me? What does it promise to our child? A stained title, a heritage of guilt and shame—a heavy, heavy weight for my innocent love to bear. Oh, my heart! My heart is breaking!”
Tears came to her relief. She pulled down her veil hastily, and hurried home, as the dusk October evening closed in. Late that night she knelt by the open window of her bedroom, and looked out upon the stormy heavens, upon the quiet sea. Herm loomed near the horizon, a dark and shapeless mass upon the sleeping ocean. The restless eye of the lightship opened and shut; a bat flittered noiselessly past, and vanished in the velvet darkness.
“Three days more,” Fenella said, “only three days. Oh, my son, my little son! Does the time seem as long to you as it does to your mother?”
She closed the window and went to her bed. Sleep would not come at first. But toward the time of the flood tide she slept and dreamed. She dreamed that she saw a great ship—an ocean steamer—plowing homeward through a waste of waters. She knew that the vessel carried those three lives that were so dear to her. Friend, husband, child lay sleeping in the cabins, lulled by the throbbing of the incessant screw. All peace, all security apparently. And yet a voice kept whispering in her ear, “Watch, watch! Danger!”
It seemed to the dreaming woman then that she stood upon the vessel’s quiet deck. Not a sound broke the quiet except that throbbing of the screw. Not a sign of life appeared, until from the dark companion-hatch of the steerage deckhouse a solitary figure crept—the figure of a woman. And the white face it turned upon her, illumined by the pale rays of the moon, was the face of Mme. de Vigny.
And the voice kept whispering, “Watch, watch! Danger!” She strove to shriek aloud and warn those on board, but her lips were sealed. She followed the creeping figure aft. Followed it down a narrow brass-bound stairway, with no conscious movement of her feet. Followed it through dusky passages, lighted by dim, swinging lanterns, and down stairways narrower still. Then it came to a halt and she stood behind it, listening and watching.
A faint rasping sound. The striking of a match. A flickering light that revealed the place in which they stood together to be a place used for the keeping of ship’s stores. Oil and tallow, firewood and candles, coils of dry rope, bundles of matches and other inflammable articles were gathered there. And then she knew, as another match struck and fired, and the pale blue flame lighted that evil face, the deadly purpose of her enemy. And even as she strove to burst the bonds of silence that held her, darkness fell upon the scene.