"But there was no understanding."
"No. Not in so many words. But at the last talk we had together he was humble and pathetic and rather manly, and I did a very foolish thing."
"What?"
"Oh," she said with a blush, "I sat still."
"Let me blot it out," said McAllen, drawing her very close.
"But I can only remember up to seven," said she, "and I am afraid that nothing can blot them out as far as David is concerned. He will come to-morrow as sure that I have been faithful to him as that he has been faithful to me.... It's all very dreadful.... He will pay me back the money, and the interest; and then I shall give him back the promises that he gave, and then he will make love to me...."
She sighed, and said that the thought of the pickle she had got herself into made her temples ache. McAllen kissed them for her.
"But why," he said, "when you got to care for me, didn't you let this young man learn gradually in your letters to him that—that it was all off?"
"I was afraid, don't you see," said she, "that if the incentive was suddenly taken away from him—he might go to pieces. And I was fond of him, and I am proud to think that he has made good for my sake, and the letters.... Oh, Billy, it's a dreadful mess. My letters to him have been rather warm, I am afraid."
"Damn!" said McAllen.
"Damn!" said Miss Tennant.
"If he would have gone to pieces before this," said McAllen, "why not now?—after you tell him, I mean."
"Why not?" said she dismally. "But if he does, Billy, I can only be dreadfully sorry. I'm certainly not going to wreck our happiness just to keep him on the war-path."
"But you'll not be weak, Dolly?"
"How!—weak?"
"He'll be very sad and miserable—you won't be carried away? You won't, upon the impulse of the moment, feel that it is your duty to go on saving him?... If that should happen, Dolly, I should go to pieces."
"Must I tell him," she said, "that I never really cared? He will think me such a—a liar. And I'm not a liar, Billy, am I? I'm just unlucky."
"I don't believe," said he tenderly, "that you ever told a story in your whole sweet life."
"Oh," she cried, "I do love you when you say things like that to me.... Let's not talk about horrid things any more, and mistakes, and bugbears.... If we're going to show up at the golf club tea.... It's Mrs. Carrol's to-day and we promised her to come."
"Oh," said McAllen, "we need not start for ten minutes.... When will you marry me?"
"In May," she said.
"Good girl," said he.
"Billy," she said presently, "it was all the first Mrs. Billy's fault—wasn't it?"
"No, dear," said he, "it wasn't. It's never all of anybody's fault. Do you care?"
"No."
"Are you afraid?"
"No."
"Do you love me?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"So much," and she made the gesture that a baby makes when you ask, "How big's the baby?"
"What's your name?"
"Dolly."
"Whose girl are you?"
"I'm Billy McAllen's girl."
"All of you?"
She grew very serious in a moment.
"All of me, Billy—all that is straight in me, all that is crooked, all that is white, all that is black...."
But he would not be serious.
"How about this hand? Is that mine?"
"Yours."
He kissed it.
"This cheek?"
"Yours."
"And this?"
"Yours."
"These eyes?"
"Both yours."
He closed them, first one, then the other.
Then a kind of trembling seized him, so that it was evident in his speech.
"This mouth, Dolly?"
"Mumm."
And so, as the romantic school has it, "the long day dragged slowly on."
David may have thought it pure chance that he should find Dolly Tennant alone. But it was not. She had given the matter not a little strategy and arrangement. Why, however, in view of her relations with McAllen, she should have made herself as attractive as possible to the eye is for other women to say.
It was to be April in a few days, and March was going out like a fiery dragon. The long, broad shadow of the terrace awning helped to darken the Tennants' drawing-room, and Venetian blinds, half-drawn, made a kind of cool dusk, in which it came natural to speak in a lowered voice, and to move quietly, as if some one were sick in the house. Miss Tennant sat very low, with her hands clasped over her knees; a brocade and Irish lace work-bag spilled its contents at her feet. She wore a twig of tea olive in her dress so that the whole room smelled of ripe peaches. She had never looked lovelier or more desirable.
"David!" she exclaimed. Her tone at once expressed delight at seeing him, and was an apology for remaining languidly seated. And she looked him over in a critical, maternal way.
"If you hadn't sent in your name," she said, "I should never have known you. You stand taller and broader, David. You filled the door-way. But you're not really much bigger, now that I look at you. It's your character that has grown.... I'm so proud of you."
David was very pale. It may have been from his long journey. But he at least did not know, because he said that he didn't when she asked him.
"And now," she said, "you must tell me all that you haven't written."
"Not quite yet," said David. "There is first a little matter of business...."
"Oh—" she protested.
But David counted out his debt to her methodically, with the accrued interest.
"Put it in my work-bag," she said.
"Did you ever expect to see it again?"
"Yes, David."
"Thank you," he said.
"But I," she said, "I, too, have things of yours to return."
"Of mine?" He lifted his eyebrows expectantly.
She waved a hand, white and clean as a cherry blossom, toward a claw-footed table on which stood decanters, ice, soda, cigarettes, cigars, and matches.
"Your collateral," she said.
"Oh," said David. "But I have decided not to be a backslider."
"I know," she said. "But in business—as a matter of form."
"Oh," said David, "if it's a matter of form, it must be complied with."
He stepped to the table, smiling charmingly, and poured from the nearest decanter into a glass, added ice and soda, and lifting the mixture touched it to his lips, and murmured, "To you."
Then he put a cigarette in his mouth, and, after drawing the one breath that served to light it, flicked it, with perfect accuracy, half across the room and into the fireplace.
Still smiling, he walked slowly toward Miss Tennant, who was really excited to know what he would do next.
"Betcher two cents it snows to-morrow," said he.
"Done with you, David," she took him up merrily. And after that a painful silence came over them. David set his jaws.
"I gave you one more promise," he said. "Is that, too, returned?"
"Of course," she said, "all the promises you gave are herewith returned."
"Then I may make love?" he asked very gently.
She did not answer for some moments, and then, steeling herself, for she thought that she must hurt him:
"Yes, David," she said slowly, "you may—as a matter of form."
"Only in that way?"
"In that way only, David—to me."
"I thought—I thought," said the young man in confusion.
"I made you think so," she said generously. "Let all of the punishment, that can, be heaped on me ... David...." There was a deep appeal in her voice as for mercy and forgiveness.
"Then," said he, "you never did care—at all."
But even at this juncture Miss Tennant could not speak the truth.
"Never, David—never at all—at least not in that way," she said. "If I let you think so it was because I thought it would help you to be strong and to succeed.... God knows I think I was wrong to let you think so...."
But she broke off suddenly a stream of extenuation that was welling in her mind; for David did not look like a man about to be cut off in the heyday of his youth by despair.
She had the tenderest heart; and in a moment the truth blossomed therein—a truth that brought her pleasure, bewilderment, and was not unmixed with mortification.
"The man," she said gently, "has found him another girl!"
The man bowed his head and blushed.
"But I have kept my promise, Dolly."
"Of course you have, you poor, dear, long-suffering soul. Oh, David, when I think what I have been taking for granted I am humiliated, and ashamed—but I am glad, too. I cannot tell you how glad."
A pair of white gloves, still showing the shape of her hands, lay in the chair where Miss Tennant had tossed them. David brought her one of these gloves.
"Put it on," he said.
When she had done so, he took her gloved hand in his and kissed it.
"As a matter of form," he said.
She laughed easily, though the blush of humiliation had not yet left her cheeks.
"Tell me," she said, "what you would have done, David, if—if I did care."
"God punish me," he said gravely, "oh, best friend that ever a man had in the world, if I should not then have made you a good husband."
Not long after McAllen was with her.
"Well?" he said.
"Well," said she, "there was a train that he could catch. And I suppose he caught it."
"How did he—er, behave?"
"Considering the circumstances," said she, "he behaved very well."
"Is he hard hit?"
She considered a while; but the strict truth was not in that young lady.
"I think," she said, "that you may say that he is hard hit—very hard hit."
"Poor soul," said Billy tenderly.
"Oh, Billy!" she exclaimed, "I feel so false and so old."
"Old!" he cried. "You! You at twenty-five say that to me at——"
"It isn't as if I was just twenty-five, Billy," and she burst out laughing. "The terrible part of it is that I'm still twenty-five."
But he only smiled and smiled. She seemed like a little child to him, all innocence, and inexperience, and candor.
Then as her laughter merged into tears he knelt and caught her in his arms.
"Dolly—Dolly!" he said in a choking voice. "What is your name?"
"Dolly." The tears came slowly.
"Whose girl are you?"
"I'm Billy McAllen's girl." The tears ceased.
"All of you?"
"All of me.... Oh, Billy—love me always—only love me...."
And for these two the afternoon dragged slowly on, and very much as usual.
"You are two days ahead of schedule, David. I'm glad to see you."
Though Uriah Grey's smile was bland and simple, beneath it lay a complicated maze of speculation; and the old man endeavored to read in the young man's face the answers to those questions which so greatly concerned him. Uriah Grey's eyesight was famous for two things: for its miraculous, almost chemical ability to detect the metals in ore and the gold in men. He sighed; but not so that David could hear. The magnate detected happiness where less than two weeks before he had read doubt, hesitation, and a kind of dumb misery.
"You have had a pleasant holiday?"
"A happy one, Mr. Grey." David's eyes twinkled and sparkled.
"Tell me about it."
"Well, sir, I paid my debts and got back my collateral."
"Well, sir?"
"I tasted whiskey," said David. "I lighted a cigarette, I registered a bet of two cents upon the weather, and I made love."
Uriah Grey with difficulty suppressed a moan.
"Did you!" he said dully.
"Yes," said David. "I kissed the glove upon a lady's hand." He laughed. "It smelled of gasoline," he said.
Mr. Grey grunted.
"And what are your plans?"
"What!" cried David offendedly. "Are you through with me?"
"No, my boy—no."
David hesitated.
"Mr. Grey," he began, and paused.
"Well, sir?"
"It is now lawful for me to make love," said David; "but I should do so with a better grace if I had your permission and approval."
Mr. Grey was puzzled.
"What have I to do with it?"
"You have a granddaughter...."
"What!" thundered the old man. "You want to make love to my granddaughter!"
"Yes," said David boldly, "and I wonder what you are going to say."
"I have only one word to say—Hurry!"
"David!"
Spools of silk rattled from her lap to the floor. She was frankly and childishly delighted to see him again, and she hurried to him and gave him both her hands. But he looked so happy that her heart misgave her for a moment, and then she read his eyes aright, just as long since he must have read the confession in hers. At this juncture in their lives there could not have been detected in either of them the least show of hesitation or embarrassment. It was as if two travellers in the desert, dying of thirst, should meet, and each conceive in hallucination that the other was a spring of sweet water.
Presently David was looking into the lovely face that he held between his hands. He had by this time squeezed her shoulders, patted her back, kissed her feet, her dress, her hands, her eyes, and pawed her hair. They were both very short of breath.
"Violet," he gasped, "what is your name?"
"Violet."
"Whose girl are you?"
"I'm David Larkin's girl."
"All of you?"
"All—all—all——"
It was the beginning of another of those long, tedious afternoons. But to the young people concerned it seemed that never until then had such words as they spoke to each other been spoken, or such feelings of almost insupportable tenderness and adoration been experienced.
Yet back there in Aiken, Sapphira was experiencing the same feelings, and thinking the same thoughts about them; and so was Billy McAllen. And when you think that he had already been divorced once, and that Sapphira, as she herself (for once truthfully) confessed, was still twenty-five, it gives you as high an opinion of the little bare god—as he deserves.
THE BRIDE'S DEAD
I
Only Farallone's face was untroubled. His big, bold eyes held a kind of grim humor, and he rolled them unblinkingly from the groom to the bride, and back again. His duck trousers, drenched and stained with sea-water, clung to the great muscles of his legs, particles of damp sand glistened upon his naked feet, and the hairless bronze of his chest and columnar throat glowed through the openings of his torn and buttonless shirt. Except for the life and vitality that literally sparkled from him, he was more like a statue of a shipwrecked sailor than the real article itself. Yet he had not the proper attributes of a shipwrecked sailor. There was neither despair upon his countenance nor hunger; instead a kind of enjoyment, and the expression of one who has been set free. Indeed, he must have secured a kind of liberty, for after the years of serving one master and another, he had, in our recent struggle with the sea, but served himself. His was the mind and his the hand that had brought us at length to that desert coast. He it was that had extended to us the ghost of a chance. He who so recently had been but one of forty in the groom's luxurious employ; a polisher of brass, a holy-stoner of decks, a wage-earning paragon who was not permitted to think, was now a thinker and a strategist, a wage-taker from no man, and the obvious master of us three.
The bride slept on the sand where Farallone had laid her. Her stained and draggled clothes were beginning to dry and her hair to blaze in the pulsing rays of the sun. Her breath came and went with the long-drawn placidity of deep sleep. One shoe had been torn from her by the surf, and through a tear in her left stocking blinked a pink and tiny toe. Her face lay upon her arm and was hidden by it, and by her blazing hair. In the loose-jointed abandon of exhaustion and sleep she had the effect of a flower that has wilted; the color and the fabric were still lovely, but the robust erectness and crispness were gone. The groom, almost unmanned and wholly forlorn, sat beside her in a kind of huddled attitude, as if he was very cold. He had drawn his knees close to his chest, and held them in that position with thin, clasped fingers. His hair, which he wore rather long, was in a wild tangle, and his neat eye-glasses with their black cord looked absurdly out of keeping with his general dishevelment. The groom, never strong or robust, looked as if he had shrunk. The bride, too, looked as if she had shrunk, and I certainly felt as if I had. But, however strong the contrast between us three small humans and the vast stretches of empty ocean and desert coast, there was no diminution about Farallone, but the contrary. I have never seen the presence of a man loom so strongly and so large. He sat upon his rock with a kind of vastness, so bold and strong he seemed, so utterly unperturbed.
Suddenly the groom, a kind of querulous shiver in his voice, spoke.
"The brandy, Farallone, the brandy."
The big sailor rolled his bold eyes from the groom to the bride, but returned no answer.
The groom's voice rose to a note of vexation.
"I said I wanted the brandy," he said.
Farallone's voice was large and free like a fresh breeze.
"I heard you," said he.
"Well," snapped the groom, "get it."
"Get it yourself," said Farallone quickly, and he fell to whistling in a major key.
The groom, born and accustomed to command, was on his feet shaking with fury.
"You damned insolent loafer—" he shouted.
"Cut it out—cut it out," said the big sailor, "you'll wake her."
The groom's voice sank to an angry whisper.
"Are you going to do what I tell you or not?"
"Not," said Farallone.
"I'll"—the groom's voice loudened—his eye sought an ally in mine. But I turned my face away and pretended that I had not seen or heard. There had been born in my breast suddenly a cold unreasoning fear of Farallone and of what he might do to us weaklings. I heard no more words and, venturing a look, saw that the groom was seating himself once more by the bride.
"If you sit on the other side of her," said Farallone, "you'll keep the sun off her head."
He turned his bold eyes on me and winked one of them. And I was so taken by surprise that I winked back and could have kicked myself for doing so.
II
Farallone helped the bride to her feet. "That's right," he said with a kind of nursely playfulness, and he turned to the groom.
"Because I told you to help yourself," he said, "doesn't mean that I'm not going to do the lion's share of everything. I am. I'm fit. You and the writer man aren't. But you must do just a little more than you're able, and that's all we'll ask of you. Everybody works this voyage except the woman."
"I can work," said the bride.
"Rot!" said Farallone. "We'll ask you to walk ahead, like a kind of north star. Only we'll tell you which way to turn. Do you see that sugar-loaf? You head for that. Vamoose! We'll overhaul you."
The bride moved upon the desert alone, her face toward an easterly hill that had given Farallone his figure of the sugar-loaf. She had no longer the effect of a wilted flower, but walked with quick, considered steps. What the groom carried and what I carried is of little moment. Our packs united would not have made the half of the lumbersome weight that Farallone swung upon his giant shoulders.
"Follow the woman," said he, and we began to march upon the shoe-and-stocking track of the bride. Farallone, rolling like a ship (I had many a look at him over my shoulder) brought up the rear. From time to time he flung forward a phrase to us in explanation of his rebellious attitude.
"I take command because I'm fit; you're not. I give the orders because I can get 'em obeyed; you can't." And, again: "You don't know east from west; I do."
All the morning he kept firing disagreeable and very personal remarks at us. His proposition that we were not in any way fit for anything he enlarged upon and illustrated. He flung the groom's unemployed ancestry at him; he likened the groom to Rome at the time of the fall, which he attributed to luxury; he informed me that only men who were unable to work, or in any way help themselves, wrote books. "The woman's worth the two of you," he said. "Her people were workers. See it in her stride. She could milk a cow if she had one. If anything happens to me she'll give the orders. Mark my words. She's got a head on her shoulders, she has."
The bride halted suddenly in her tracks and, turning, faced the groom.
"Are you going to allow this man's insolence to run on forever?" she said.
The groom frowned at her and shook his head covertly.
"Pooh," said the bride, and I think I heard her call him "my champion," in a bitter whisper. She walked straight back to Farallone and looked him fearlessly in the face.
"The bigger a man is, Mr. Farallone," she said, "and the stronger, the more he ought to mind his manners. We are grateful to you for all you have done, but if you cannot keep a civil tongue in your head, then the sooner we part company the better."
For a full minute the fearless eyes snapped at Farallone, then, suddenly abashed, softened, and turned away.
"There mustn't be any more mutiny," said Farallone. "But you've got sand, you have. I could love a woman like you. How did you come to hitch your wagon to little Nicodemus there? He's no star. You deserved a man. You've got sand, and when your poor feet go back on you, as they will in this swill (here he kicked the burning sand), I'll carry you. But if you hadn't spoken up so pert, I wouldn't. Now you walk ahead and pretend you're Christopher Columbus De Soto Peary leading a flock of sheep to the Fountain of Eternal Youth.... Bear to the left of the sage-brush, there's a tarantula under it...."
We went forward a few steps, when suddenly I heard Farallone's voice in my ear. "Isn't she splendid?" he said, and at the same time he thumped me so violently between the shoulders that I stumbled and fell. For a moment all fear of the man left me on the wings of rage, and I was for attacking him with my fists. But something in his steady eye brought me to my senses.
"Why did you do that?" I meant to speak sharply, but I think I whined.
"Because," said Farallone, "when the woman spoke up to me you began to brindle and act lion-like and bold. For a minute you looked dangerous—for a little feller. So I patted your back, in a friendly way—as a kind of reminder—a feeble reminder."
We had dropped behind the others. The groom had caught up with the bride, and from his nervous, irritable gestures I gathered that the poor soul was trying to explain and to ingratiate himself. But she walked on, steadily averted, you might say, her head very high, her shoulders drawn back. The groom, his eyes intent upon her averted face, kept stumbling with his feet.
"Just look," said Farallone in a friendly voice. "Those whom God hath joined together. What did the press say of it?"
"I don't remember," I said.
"You lie," said Farallone. "The press called it an ideal match. My God!" he cried—and so loudly that the bride and the groom must have heard—"think of being a woman like that and getting hitched to a little bit of a fuss with a few fine feathers"; and with a kind of sing-song he began to misquote and extemporize:
"But she'd never seen me," he went on, and mused for a moment. "Having seen me—do you guess what she's saying to herself? She's saying: 'Thank God I'm not too old to begin life over again,' or thinking it. Look at him! Even you wouldn't have been such a joke. I've a mind to kick the life out of him. One little kick with bare toes. Life? There's no life in him—nothing but a jenny-wren."
The groom, who must have heard at least the half of Farallone's speech, stopped suddenly and waited for us to come up. His face was red and white—blotchy with rage and vindictiveness. When we were within ten feet of him he suddenly drew a revolver and fired it point-blank at Farallone. He had no time for a second shot. Farallone caught his wrist and shook it till the revolver spun through the air and fell at a distance. Then Farallone seated himself and, drawing the groom across his knee, spanked him. Since the beginning of the world children have been punished by spankings, and the event is memorable, if at all, as a something rather comical and domestic. But to see a grown man spanked for the crime of attempted murder is horrible. Farallone's fury got the better of him, and the blows resounded in the desert. I grappled his arm, and the recoil of it flung me head over heels. When Farallone had finished, the groom could not stand. He rolled in the sands, moaning and hiding his face.
The bride was white as paper; but she had no eye for the groom.
"Did he miss you?" she said.
"No," said Farallone, "he hit me—Nicodemus hit me."
"Where?" said the bride.
"In the arm."
Indeed, the left sleeve of Farallone's shirt was glittering with blood.
"I will bandage it for you," she said, "if you will tell me how."
Farallone ripped open the sleeve of his shirt.
"What shall I bandage it with?" asked the bride.
"Anything," said Farallone.
The bride turned her back on us, stooped, and we heard a sound of tearing. When she had bandaged Farallone's wound (it was in the flesh and the bullet had been extracted by its own impetus) she looked him gravely in the face.
"What's the use of goading him?" she said gently.
"Look," said Farallone.
The groom was reaching for the fallen revolver.
"Drop it," bellowed Farallone.
The groom's hand, which had been on the point of grasping the revolver's stock, jerked away. The bride walked to the revolver and picked it up. She handed it to Farallone.
"Now," she said, "that all the power is with you, you will not go on abusing it."
"You carry it," said Farallone, "and any time you think I ought to be shot, why, you just shoot me. I won't say a word."
"Do you mean it?" said the bride.
"I cross my heart," said Farallone.
"I sha'n't forget," said the bride. She took the revolver and dropped it into the pocket of her jacket.
"Vamoose!" said Farallone. And we resumed our march.
III
The line between the desert and the blossoming hills was as distinctly drawn as that between a lake and its shore. The sage-brush, closer massed than any through which we had yet passed, seemed to have gathered itself for a serried assault upon the lovely verdure beyond. Outposts of the sage-brush, its unsung heroes, perhaps, showed here and there among ferns and wild roses—leafless, gaunt, and dead; one knotted specimen even had planted its banner of desolation in the shade of a wild lilac and there died. A twittering of birds gladdened our dusty ears, and from afar there came a splashing of water. Our feet, burned by the desert sands, torn by yucca and cactus, trod now upon a cool and delicious moss, above which nodded the delicate blossoms of the shooting-star, swung at the ends of strong and delicate stems. In the shadows the chocolate lilies and trilliums dully glinted, and flag flowers trooped in the sunlight. The resinous paradisiacal smell of tarweed and bay-tree refreshed us, and the wonder of life was a something strong and tangible like bread and wine.
The wine of it rushed in particular to Farallone's head; his brain became flooded with it; his feet cavorted upon the moss; his bellowed singing awoke the echoes, and the whole heavenly choir of the birds answered him.
"You, Nicodemus," he cried gayly, "thought that man was given a nose to be a tripod for his eye-glasses—but now—oh, smell—smell!"
His great bulk under its mighty pack tripped lightly, dancingly at the bride's elbow. Now his agile fingers nipped some tiny, scarce perceivable flower to delight her eye, and now his great hand scooped up whole sheaves of strong-growing columbine, and flung them where her feet must tread. He made her see great beauties and minute, and whatever had a look of smelling sweet he crushed in his hands for her to smell.
He was no longer that limb of Satan, that sardonic bully of the desert days, but a gay wood-god intent upon the gentle ways of wooing. At first the bride turned away her senses from his offerings to eye and nostril; for a time she made shift to turn aside from the flowers that he cast for her feet to tread. But after a time, like one in a trance, she began to yield up her indifference and aloofness. The magic of the riotous spring began to intoxicate her. I saw her turn to the sailor and smile a gracious smile. And after awhile she began to talk with him.
We came at length to a bright stream, from whose guileless superabundance Farallone, with a bent pin and a speck of red cloth, jerked a string of gaudy rainbow-trout. He made a fire and began to broil them; the bride searched the vicinal woods for dried branches to feed the fire. The groom knelt by the brook and washed the dust from his face and ears, snuffing the cool water into his dusty nose and blowing it out.
And I lay in the shade and wondered by what courses the brook found its way to what sea or lake; whether it touched in its wanderings only the virginal wilderness, or flowed at length among the habitations of men.
Farallone, of a sudden, jerked up his head from the broiling and answered my unspoken questions.
"A man," he said, "who followed this brook could come in a few days to the river Maria Cleofas, and following that, to the town of that name, in a matter of ten days more. I tell you," he went on, "because some day some of you may be going that voyage; no ill-found voyage either—spring-water and trout all the way to the river; and all the rest of the way river-water and trout; and at this season birds' eggs in the reeds and a turtlelike terrapin, and Brodeia roots and wild onion, and young sassafras—a child could do it. Eat that...." he tossed me with his fingers a split, sputtering, piping hot trout....
We spent the rest of that day and the night following by the stream. Farallone was in a riotous good-humor, and the fear of him grew less in us until we felt at ease and could take an unmixed pleasure in the loafing.
Early the next morning he was astir, and began to prepare himself for further marching, but for the rest of us he said there would be one day more of rest.
"Who knows," he said, "but this is Sunday?"
"Where are you going?" asked the bride politely.
"Me?" said Farallone, and he laughed. "I'm going house-hunting—not for a house, of course, but for a site. It's not so easy to pick out just the place where you want to spend the balance of your days. The neighborhood's easy, but the exact spot's hard." He spoke now directly to the bride, and as if her opinion was law to him. "There must be sun and shade, mustn't there? Spring-water?—running water? A hill handy to take the view from? An easterly slope to be out of the trades? A big tree or two.... I'll find 'em all before dark. I'll be back by dark or at late moonrise, and you rest yourselves, because to-morrow or the next day we go at house-raising."
Had he left us then and there, I think that we would have waited for him. He had us, so to speak, abjectly under his thumbs. His word had come to be our law, since it was but child's play for him to enforce it. But it so happened that he now took a step which was to call into life and action that last vestige of manhood and independence that flickered in the groom and me. For suddenly, and not till after a moment of consideration, he took a step toward the bride, caught her around the waist, crushed her to his breast, and kissed her on the mouth.
But she must have bitten him, for the tender passion changed in him to an unmanly fury.
"You damned cat!" he cried; and he struck her heavily upon the face with his open palm. Not once only, but twice, three, four times, till she fell at his feet.
By that the groom and I, poor, helpless atoms, had made shift to grapple with him. I heard his giant laugh. I had one glimpse of the groom's face rushing at mine—and then it was as if showers of stars fell about me. What little strength I had was loosened from my joints, and more than half-senseless I fell full length upon my back. Farallone had foiled our attack by the simple method of catching us by the hair and knocking our heads together.
I could hear his great mocking laugh resounding through the forest.
"Let him go," I heard the groom moan.
The bride laughed. It was a very curious laugh. I could not make it out. There seemed to be no anger in it, and yet how, I wondered, could there be anything else?
IV
When distance had blotted from our ears the sound of Farallone's laughter, and when we had humbled ourselves to the bride for allowing her to be maltreated, I told the groom what Farallone had said about a man who should follow the stream by which we were encamped.
"See," I said, "we have a whole day's start of him. Even he can't make that up. We must go at once, and there mustn't be any letting up till we get somewhere."
The groom was all for running away, and the bride, silent and white, acquiesced with a nod. We made three light packs, and started—bolted is the better word.
For a mile or more, so thick was the underwood, we walked in the bed of the stream; now freely, where it was smooth-spread sand, and now where it narrowed and deepened among rocks, scramblingly and with many a splashing stumble. The bride met her various mishaps with a kind of silent disdain; she made no complaints, not even comments. She made me think of a sleep-walker. There was a set, far-off, cold expression upon her usually gentle and vivacious face, and once or twice it occurred to me that she went with us unwillingly. But when I remembered the humiliation that Farallone had put upon her and the blows that he had struck her, I could not well credit the recurrent doubt of her willingness. The groom, on the other hand, recovered his long-lost spirits with immeasurable rapidity. He talked gayly and bravely, and you would have said that he was a man who had never had occasion to be ashamed of himself. He went ahead, the bride following next, and he kept giving a constant string of advices and imperatives. "That stone's loose"; "keep to the left, there's a hole." "Splash—dash—damn, look out for that one." Branches that hung low across our course he bent and held back until the bride had passed. Now he turned and smiled in her face, and now he offered her the helping hand. But she met his courtesies, and the whole punctilious fabric of his behavior, with the utmost absence and nonchalance. He had, it seemed, been too long in contempt to recover soon his former position of husband and beloved. For long days she had contemplated his naked soul, limited, weak, incapable. He had shown a certain capacity for sudden, explosive temper, but not for courage of any kind, or force. Nor had he played the gentleman in his helplessness. Nor had I. We had not in us the stuff of heroes; at first sight of instruments of torture we were of those who would confess to anything, abjure, swear falsely, beg for mercy, change our so-called religions—anything. The bride had learned to despise us from the bottom of her heart. She despised us still. And I would have staked my last dollar, or, better, my hopes of escaping from Farallone, that as man and wife she and the groom would never live together again. I felt terribly sorry for the groom. He had, as had I, been utterly inefficient, helpless, babyish, and cowardly—yet the odds against us had seemed overwhelming. But now as we journeyed down the river, and the distance between us and Farallone grew more, I kept thinking of men whom I had known; men physically weaker than the groom and I, who, had Farallone offered to bully them, would have fought him and endured his torture till they died. In my immediate past, then, there was nothing of which I was not burningly ashamed, and in the not-too-distant future I hoped to separate from the bride and the groom, and never see them or hear of them in this world again. At that, I had a real affection for the bride, a real admiration. On the yacht, before trouble showed me up, we had bid fair to become fast and enduring friends. But that was all over—a bud, nipped by the frost of conduct and circumstance, or ever the fruit could so much as set. For many days now I had avoided her eye; I had avoided addressing her; I had exerted my ingenuity to keep out of her sight. It is a terrible thing for a man to be thrown daily into the society of a woman who has found him out, and who despises him, mind, soul, marrow, and bone.
The stream broke at length from the forest and, swelled by a sizable tributary, flowed broad and deep into a rolling, park-like landscape. Grass spread over the country's undulations and looked in the distance like well-kept lawns; and at wide intervals splendidly grown live-oaks lent an effect of calculated planting. Here our flight, for our muscles were hardened to walking, became easy and swift. I think there were hours when we must have covered our four miles, and even on long, upward slopes we must have made better than three. There is in swift walking, when the muscles are hard, the wind long, and the atmosphere exhilarating, a buoyant rhythm that more, perhaps, than merited success, or valorous conduct, smoothes out the creases in a man's soul. And so quick is a man to recover from his own baseness, and to ape outwardly his transient inner feelings, that I found myself presently, walking with a high head and a mind full of martial thoughts.
All that day, except for a short halt at noon, we followed the river across the great natural park; now paralleling its convolutions, and now cutting diagonals. Late in the afternoon we came to the end of the park land. A more or less precipitous formation of glistening quartz marked its boundary, and into a fissure of this the stream, now a small river, plunged with accelerated speed. The going became difficult. The walls of the fissure through which the river rushed were smooth and water-worn, impossible to ascend; and between the brink of the river and the base of the walls were congestions of boulders, jammed drift-wood, and tangled alder bushes. There were times when we had to crawl upon our hands and knees, under one log and over the next. To add to our difficulties darkness was swiftly falling, and we were glad, indeed, when the wall of the fissure leaned at length so far from the perpendicular that we were able to scramble up it. We found ourselves upon a levelish little meadow of grass. In the centre of it there grew a monstrous and gigantic live-oak, between two of whose roots there glittered a spring. On all sides of the meadow, except on that toward the river, were superimpending cliffs of quartz. Along the base of these was a dense growth of bushes.
"We'll rest here," said the groom. "What a place. It's a natural fortress. Only one way into it." He stood looking down at the noisy river and considering the steep slope we had just climbed. "See this boulder?" he said. "It's wobbly. If that damned longshoreman tries to get us here, all we've got to do is to choose the psychological moment and push it over on him."
The groom looked quite bellicose and daring. Suddenly he flung his fragment of a cap high into the air and at the very top of his lungs cried: "Liberty!"
The echoes answered him, and the glorious, abused word was tossed from cliff to cliff, across the river and back, and presently died away.
At that, from the very branches of the great oak that stood in the centre of the meadow there burst a titanic clap of laughter, and Farallone, literally bursting with merriment, dropped lightly into our midst.
I can only speak for myself. I was frightened—I say it deliberately and truthfully—almost into a fit. And for fully five minutes I could not command either of my legs. The groom, I believe, screamed. The bride became whiter than paper—then suddenly the color rushed into her cheeks, and she laughed. She laughed until she had to sit down, until the tears literally gushed from her eyes. It was not hysterics either—could it have been amusement? After a while, and many prolonged gasps and relapses, she stopped.
"This," said Farallone, "is my building site. Do you like it?"
"Oh, oh," said the bride, "I think it's the m—most am—ma—musing site I ever saw," and she went into another uncontrollable burst of laughter.
"Oh—oh," she said at length, and her shining eyes were turned from the groom to me, and back and forth between us, "if you could have seen your faces!"
V
It seemed strange to us, an alteration in the logical and natural, but neither the groom nor I received corporal punishment for our attempt at escape. Farallone had read our minds like an open book; he had, as it were, put us up to the escapade in order to have the pure joy of thwarting us. That we should have been drawn to his exact waiting-place like needles to the magnet had a smack of the supernatural, but was in reality a simple and explicable happening. For if we had not ascended to the little meadow, Farallone, alertly watching, would have descended from it, and surprised us at some further point. That we should have caught no glimpse of his great bulk anywhere ahead of us in the day-long stretch of open, park-like country was also easily explained. For Farallone had made the most of the journey in the stream itself, drifting with a log.
And although, as I have said, we were not to receive corporal punishment, Farallone visited his power upon us in other ways. He would not at first admit that we had intended to escape, but kept praising us for having followed him so loyally and devotedly, for saving him the trouble of a return journey, and for thinking to bring along the bulk of our worldly possessions. Tiring at length of this, he switched to the opposite point of view. He goaded us nearly to madness with his criticisms of our inefficiency, and he mocked repeatedly the groom's ill-timed cry of Liberty.
"Liberty!" he said, "you never knew, you never will know, what that is—you miserable little pin-head. Liberty is for great natures.