Radnor looked startled. “It will do no good,” I cried, “to contradict me or to deny it.”
“I believe you,” Radnor said, as if thinking out loud. He went on:
“You are right. Except Mother Bevan and me and Lucille every human being on this island is completely under Pembroke's influence, gained largely through the help of Mother Bevan.”
“Why not you and your wife?” I queried.
“Lucille, because of me,” he replied. “Pembroke found out, by trying Melville here and Kennard, that, after being put under his influence, while retaining surgical skill, a physician loses all ability to diagnose and prescribe. He had to ship Kennard and Melville back home, and pension them till their faculties recovered their tone.”
I looked him straight in the eyes. He forestalled my impending outburst by saying: “As far as I can discern, Pembroke's influence over his retainers does them no harm, physical or mental. Kennard and Melville have as large incomes and as many patients and are as successful and prosperous, as popular and prominent among their fellow-physicians as if they had never sojourned here. Except in their enthusiasm for and admiration of Pembroke every human being on this island appears to me as healthy as if not under any influence of any kind.”
“Even so,” I blurted out, “you ought not to abet any such deviltries.”
“I don't admit,” said Radnor, hotly, “that any deviltries exist on this island or that there is any approach to deviltry in what you have partly divined. Also I abet nothing, as I ought, but, as I also ought, I conceive that I am under obligations not to thwart Pembroke in any way. I am the island's resident physician and his personal physician; I am here to treat injuries, cure maladies, relieve pain, and do all I can to keep healthy every dweller on this island. I live up to my conception of my duty. Don't attempt to preach at me.
“I am impatient,” I said, “at my enforced stay here, and revolted at the idea of succumbing to Pembroke's influence.”
Radnor laughed.
“You are,” he said, “the only human being who has reached the island, since Pembroke bought it, uninvited. You'll get away by and by. And you are most unlikely to be affected by anything he or Mother Bevan may have in their power to do. Neither Kennard nor Melville ever suspected anything, or grew suspicious. You alone have half seen through the situation here. You are Mother Bevan's most refractory subject, so far. Have no fear.”
He went off, whistling Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz.
I had frequent and recurrent fears, but I dissembled them. I think, among all the terrors which haunted me during the remainder of my sojourn on the island, that I came nearest to panic and horror within an hour after Radnor had left me. Hardly was he gone when Pembroke, arrayed precisely as before and reminding me of a stage-frog in a goblin pantomime, sauntered up and seated himself by me.
I sweated with tremors of dismay, I was ready to despair, when I found myself, however I tried, unable to utter a word to him concerning the gander, Mother Bevan, or my suspicions; unable even to allude to the subject in any way, although he asked me bluntly:
“Have you anything to complain of?”
“Only that I am here,” I replied.
“I had nothing to do with your coming here,” he retorted. 'You came uninvited, of your own accord, or by accident. I trust I have been a courteous host, but I have not tried to pretend that you are welcome. I am endeavoring to arrange that your departure shall not entail upon me any inconvenience or any danger of disadvantageous consequences. Believe me, I am doing all I can to expedite your return to your normal haunts. Meantime you'll have to be patient.”
I was most impatient and very nearly frantic at finding myself, no matter how I struggled inwardly, totally unable so much as to refer or allude to what lay heaviest on my mind.
We exchanged vaguely generalized sentences for awhile and he left as abruptly as before, left me quivering with consternation, dreading that my inability to broach the subject on which I was eager to beard him was a premonition of my total enthrallment to Pembroke's influence.
As the days passed I became habituated to stoning that uncanny gander, chasing him into the basin of the fountain and having him hiss at me from behind one of the gratings; I became indifferent to the glimpses I caught of Mother Bevan hovering in the middle distance. I had a good appetite for my meals: in fact, the food set before me at my abode would have awakened the most finicky dyspeptic to zest and relish, even to voracity; while the dinners to which I was invited were delectable.
But from night to night I slept less and less, until I was near insomnia. And, from day to day, I found it more and more difficult to absorb myself in reading, to keep my mind on what I read; even to read at all.
Again I waylaid Radnor. I described to him my progressively worsening discomfort and distress.
“I am now,” I said, “or soon shall be, not merely in need of your help, but beyond any help from you or anybody. If you don't do something for me I'll go crazy, I'll do something desperate, I'll commit suicide.”
“I have been pondering,” he said, “how to help you, and I have almost bit upon a method. Your condition does not yet justify my giving you anything to make you sleep. As yet I do not want to give you any sort of drug, not even the simplest sedative. Honestly try to get to sleep to-night. Before tomorrow I think I'll hit upon an entirely suitable prescription salutary for you and yet avoiding any appearance any hint, of my antagonizing Pembroke.”
I did try to sleep that night, but I was still wide awake long after midnight. So tossing and turning on my comfortable bed, I heard outside in the moonless darkness some one whistling a tune. As the sound came nearer I made sure it was Radnor. Also I recognized the tune.
It was that of “The Ballad of Nell Flaherty's Drake.”
The tune brought to my mind the words of the song's refrain:
“The dear little fellow,
“His legs were so yellow,
“He could fly like a swallow and swim like a hake!
“Bad luck to the tober,
“The haythen cashlober,
“The monsther thot murthered Nell Flaherty's drake!”
All of a sudden I conceived that this was Radnor's method of intimating to me by indirection what he did not dare to utter to me in plain words. thought I knew what he meant as well as if it had been put into the plainest words. I rolled over, was asleep in three breaths, and slept till Fong ventured to waken me.
After breakfast I went upstairs again and rummaged about in the closet where Fong had deposited what I had worn when I came under his care. I found there everything I remembered to have had about me. My automatic was well oiled and in good working order and its clip of cartridges was full. My belt, with the extra clips of cartridges, was as it had been when I last put it on. I put it on, over my feather-weight hot-weather habiliments; I strapped on my automatic; I strolled out, intent on somehow coming within speaking distance of Pembroke.
Chance, or some unconscious whim, guided my footsteps to the beach and, in spite of the rapidly intensifying heat of the sun rays, along it to the remaining fragments of my wreck, barely visible under a great accumulation of beach foam, left by the breakers, hurled shorewards during the thunder storm which had raged while I slept.