Danger Point

Chapter 44

DALE was gone – all in a moment between one breath and the next whilst she tried desperately for words that would recall the Dale who had loved her and whom she had loved, or move this dreadful stranger to let her go. No words had come and none were needed now, because Dale was gone. Just for a moment his going brought relief. The frantic effort to reach him, the terror of him standing there like a visible presence of evil – these were gone. There was a slow recovery, as from some sudden stroke of pain, but as this passed she began to see what it had left behind – desolation, the breakdown of all she had loved and trusted. He had gone, and he had left her here to die – she was to drown in this rocky pit. How long would it take for the tide to reach her? Perhaps an hour – she didn’t know.

Her first relief merged into an agony of fear. She screamed, and heard her voice come back to her from the rocky wall. It was a very hoarse, faint cry from a throat parched with terror. No one would hear it. There was no one to hear – unless the sound reached Dale and brought him back, strong and angry, to finish what he had begun. The thought was so dreadful that she dared not scream again. Not for a long, long time.

She stood there with the water up to her armpits, listening. There was no sound to listen for. The sky was getting darker and she could see the stars. She thought of all the times when she had seen them with a quiet mind. She thought, “I shall never see them like that again,” and suddenly her mind was clear and quiet under the stars. Life – She thought, “It goes on wherever you are.” She thought, “Dale can’t kill me. I shall go on.”

She stopped being afraid.

Presently she called again with all her strength, and went on calling. Dale wouldn’t come back now. He would be hurrying to the aerodrome. It was all planned. He had taken the car and driven away, and presently he would be at the airfield, taking out his plane, taking off, sweeping up into the sky with a roar. Perhaps she would hear him. Perhaps he would fly overhead and look down to see if the tide was covering her yet.

He would be safe. No one would know that they had been together. She remembered his “Don’t tell anyone, darling. Let’s have this time to ourselves.” He had betrayed her with a kiss. She hadn’t told anyone. No one had seen her go-

She lifted up her voice and called again – and again – and again – desperately.

It was at this moment that Rafe Jerningham came down the steps from the sea wall. After one of the longest half hours of his life he was doing what he had made up his mind that he would never do. Lisle had not gone to her rendezvous as unseen as she had thought. A desperately unhappy young man had stood back among the trees and watched her go down towards the sea. A day or two ago he would have followed her, but now he could no longer trust himself. Something had happened between them, without any words, and it had happened with the horrifying suddenness of a thunder clap. He had driven her into Ledlington. Nothing had happened then, nor at lunch, nor as they came and went about the business of Cissie’s funeral. He had had to endure seeing her pale, strained, with that waiting patience in her eyes. He had played the part which he had played so long that no one guessed that it was a part at all. And then something had happened. What? He had no idea, but it was something which set an unendurable barrier between them.

He came down to dinner, and she wasn’t Lisle any longer – she was a stranger. She did not look at him. He felt her shrink when he approached her. All that he had ever had of her had been withdrawn, silently, irrevocably, without reason and without relenting.

“A god, a god our severance ruled,

And bade between our shores to be

The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.”

The lines went through his head. They were most bitterly true. He accepted the severance, as he had always accepted it, but that it should become absolute at this of all moments was the final bitterness.

Days of suspicion darkening to a despairing certainty – moments, hours, when these suspicions seemed a foul miasma from his own corroding jealousy of Dale… There was a voice which talked with him in most unsparing accents – “You love Dale’s wife, and so – Dale is a murderer. You are eating your own heart, and because of that – Dale is a murderer. Lisle is the sun and the moon and the stars, and because they are out of your reach – Dale is a murderer.”

Against this a slow damning computation of pros and cons. Lydia. Lisle – drowning – all but drowned. A smashed car. A dead girl lying among rocks – a girl who was wearing Lisle’s coat. That poor devil Pell at the inquest. His face. Lisle’s coat. Lisle – Dale looking at her, putting his arm about her, smiling down at her as if she were the sun and the moon and the stars for him too. Dale – who had been the chief thing in his life – until Lisle came-

This severance – between himself and Dale – between himself and Lisle-

“The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea-”

He saw Lisle go by, bare-headed in the evening light. At the moment he could only think that he must let her go. If he went after her now, his own barriers would not hold.

He let her go, and turning, walked rapidly away in the opposite direction.

It was perhaps half an hour later that he remembered Lisle’s change of dress. She had worn black lace at dinner, but when she passed him, going down towards the sea wall, she had on a light washing frock and beach shoes. Beach shoes. Then she was not just going to sit on the wall as she often did in the cool of the evening – she wouldn’t have changed just for that. She must have been meaning to go down on to the beach. Why? In all the time he had known her, when had she ever gone to the beach by herself in the dusk? The trouble in his mind had dulled its natural acuteness. Suddenly the vague, conflicting fears and doubts, the passionate strivings and repressions which had made it their battleground, fused into certainty. If Lisle had gone beyond the sea wall, then she had not gone alone, and if she had not gone alone, then there was only one person with whom she would have gone, and that was Dale – Dale who had made a point of telling them all that he was off to the airfield.

When Rafe’s mind had reached this point it took charge of his body and sent it racing to the house. Not far to go – he had been on his way there.

He passed Alicia on the terrace.

“Where’s Lisle?”

She said, “Gone to bed.”

It took him five minutes to make sure that she was not in her room, to slip into flannels and beach shoes, to snatch up a torch and be clear of the house again.

When he came to the sea wall he stood there a moment, listening at first, and then calling her name.

“Lisle -Lisle -Lisle!”

No voice, no answer.

He ran down the steps and switched on his torch. There was still a little light in the sky. Sea, strand, and sky were still separate, but like a second and more invisible tide the dusk flowed out from the land to meet the rising tide of the sea.

He stood irresolute. There was nothing to tell him which way to go, but if the fear that had brought him here and was drenching him with its cold sweat sprang from something more than his own distorted fancy, then it was in the direction of the Shepstone Rocks that he must look for Lisle. The wildest, the most dangerous part of the coast, the least frequented – at this hour solitary as a murderer’s heart could wish. By no stretch of the imagination could he suppose that Lisle would turn that way alone. And if not alone, where had she been taken, and how would he find her?

With these thoughts he was questing to and fro, turning the torch in every direction. Not many people ever came this way. Once the immediate neighbourhood of the steps was left behind the sand was smooth and unmarked as the tide had left it. The water had not quite reached the wall. The dry sand at its foot would hold no print. But half a dozen yards along the torch found what he was looking for – Lisle’s footprints going towards the Rocks, and the larger, bolder prints which were Dale’s.

He had followed them for perhaps half a dozen yards, when the torch picked up a second set of tracks – Dale’s footprints coming back – alone. They came in at a slant past the out-going tracks and were lost in the dry sand. It was plain enough and dreadful enough to read. Two had gone out, and only one had come back. Within a few short hours the damning evidence would be smoothed out by the tide, and the sand innocently blank and bare again. Fate had not given Dale those hours.

Everything in Rafe went cold and still. There was nothing in all the world but to find Lisle, dead or alive, and it came to him that she must be dead, because Dale would not now have left her alive. He could think of this quite calmly, because at the moment when he saw that single returning track all his capacity for feeling died. He was not conscious of distress, and he was not at all conscious of his body. There remained only the capacity for thought – lucid, keen, undisturbed by any hampering emotion.

He followed the footprints to the spit of sand which ran down towards the sea and the ridge beyond the Shepstone Rocks. Half way there he lost them under the first ripple of the tide. The torch went into his pocket and he went on, ankle-deep, knee-deep, breast-deep, and then wading and pushing against the weight of the water, up the side of the long, sprawling ridge. The water was no more than ankle-deep here. He walked along the ridge past the rocky point, and as he turned shoreward he heard Lisle’s cry.

It was so faint a sound that at any other time it would have gone by with all the million sounds which are never heard, but at this moment when everything in him was strung to the utmost pitch of expectancy it reached him. His heart jerked against his side. He began to walk towards the sound, coming down off the ridge into the deeper water, and then feeling his way slowly and cautiously so as to avoid the rocks. When the water was at its deepest he heard the sound again. And then his feet were on shingle and he came up the shallow slope of the beach towards the cliff.

As soon as he was clear of the water he called out.

“Lisle – where are you?”

The words beat on the rock wall and came back in a broken echo. And on that, something that wasn’t an echo. His name – “Rafe!”

Lisle had gone on calling. There was something in her which wouldn’t give up, something which said, “If I drown, it shan’t be because I gave up.” Giving up didn’t just mean dying. It meant letting in the dark, and the loneliness, and Dale’s treachery. If she had to die, she wanted to keep those things out, right up to the end. As long as she went on calling it meant that she wasn’t letting them in. When she heard Rafe’s voice all her courage leapt. She looked up from where she stood and saw the flicker of his torch, high above her like the flash of summer lightning. Only it wasn’t lightning – it was light.

She called again, and she said, “I’m here – here – here,” and went on saying it till the light shone over the edge of the pit and she could see him kneeling there, peering down. The beam of the torch shone suddenly upon her upturned face. White, drenched and drowned, she looked at Rafe. But her eyes were alive. He saw the pupils contract and the lids come down against the glare.