“Our bungalow! Our precious home!”
“I know.” He saw that she was crying: “It’s a rotten shame and all that, but it isn’t fatal.”
He brought the Pauillac downwind again, coasting high over the bungalow, whence smoke now issued ever more and more thickly.
“We’re simply hamstrung this time, that’s all. Where those devils have come from and how many there may be, God knows. Thousands, perhaps; the woods may be full of em. It’s lucky for us they didn’t attack while we were there!
“Now—well, the only thing to do is let ‘em have their way for the present. Eventually—”
“Oh, can’t we ever get rid of the horrid little beasts for good?”
“We can and will!” He spoke very grimly, soaring the machine still higher over the river and once more coming round above the upper end of the beach. “One of these days there’s got to be a final reckoning, but not yet!”
“So it’s good-by to Hope Villa, Allan? There’s no way?”
“It’s good-by. Humanly speaking, none.”
“Couldn’t we land, blockade ourselves in the boat-house, and—”
Her eyes sparkled with the boldness of the plan—its peril, its possibilities. But Allan only shook his head.
“And expose the Pauillac on the beach?” he asked. “One good swing with a war-club into the motor and then a week’s siege and slow starvation, with a final rush—interesting, but not practical, little girl. No, no; the better part of valor is to recognize force majeure and wait! Remember what we’ve said already? ‘Je recule pour mieux sauter?’ Wait till we get a fresh start on these hell-hounds; we’ll jump ‘em far enough!”
The bungalow now lay behind. The whole clearing seemed alive with the little blue demons, like vermin crawling everywhere. Thicker and thicker now the smoke was pouring upward. The scene was one of utter desolation.
Then suddenly it faded. The plane had borne its riders onward and away from the range of vision. Again only dense forest lay below, while to eastward sparkled the broad reach where, in the first days of their happiness at Hope Villa, the girl and Allan had fished and bathed.
Her tears were unrestrained at last; but Allan, steadying the wheel with one hand, drew an arm about her and kissed and comforted her.
“There, there, little girl! The world’s not ended yet, even if they have burned up our home-made mission furniture! Come, Beatrice, no tears—we’ve other things to think of now!”
“Where away, since our home’s gone?” she queried pitifully.
“Where away? Why, Storm King, of course! And the cathedral and the records, and—and—”
CHAPTER IV
“TO-MORROW IS OUR WEDDING-DAY”
Purple and gold the light of that dying day still glowed across the western sky when the stanch old Pauillac, heated yet throbbing with power, skimmed the last league and swung the last great bend of the river that hid old Storm King from the wanderers’ eager sight.
Stern’s eyes brightened at vision of that vast, rugged headland, forest-clad and superb in the approaching twilight. Beatrice, weary now and spent—for the long journeys, the excitements and griefs of the day had worn her down despite her strength—paled a little and grew pensive as the massive structure of the cathedral loomed against the sky-line.
What thoughts were hers now that the goal lay near—what longings, fears and hopes, what exultation and what pain? She shivered slightly; but perhaps the evening coolness at that height had pierced her cloak. Her hands clasped tightly, she tried to smile but could not.
Allan could notice nothing of all this. His gaze was anxiously bent on the earth below, to find a landing for the great machine. He skimmed the broad brow of the mountain, hardly a hundred feet above the spires of the massive concrete pile that still reared itself steadfastly upon the height facing the east.
All about it the dense unbroken forest spread impenetrable to the eye. Below the bold breast of the cliff a narrow strip of beach appeared.
“Hard job to land, that’s one sure thing!” exclaimed the man, peering at the inhospitable contours of the land. “No show to make it on top of the mountain, and if we take the beach it means a most tremendous climb up the cliff or through the forest on the flank. Here is a situation, Beatrice! Now—ah—see there? Look! that barren ridge to westward!”
Half a mile back from the river on the western slope of the highlands, a spur of Storm King stretched water-worn and bare, a sandy spit dotted only sparsely with scrub-pine.
“It’s that, or nothing!” cried the man, banking in a wide sweep.
“Can you make it? Even the clearest space at this end is terribly short!”
Allan laughed and cut off power. In the old days not for ten thousand dollars would he have tried so ticklish a descent, but now his mettle was of sterner stuff and his skill with the machine developed to a point where man and biplane seemed almost one organism.
With a swift rush the Pauillac coasted down. He checked her at precisely the right moment, as the sand seemed whirling up to meet them, swerved to dodge a fire-blasted trunk, and with a shout took the earth.
The plane bounced, creaked, skidded on the long runners he had fitted to her, and with a lurch came to rest not ten yards from an ugly stump dead ahead.
“Made it, by Heaven!” he exulted. “But a few feet more and it wouldn’t have been—well, no matter. We’re here, anyhow. Now, supper and a good sleep. And to-morrow, the cathedral!”
He helped the girl alight, for she was cramped and stiff. Presently their camp-fire cheered the down-drawing gloom, as so many other times in such strange places. And before long their evening meal was in course of preparation, close by a great glacial boulder at the edge of the sand-barren.
In good comradeship they ate, then wheeled the biplane over to the rock, and under the shelter of its widespreading wings made their camp for the night. An hour or so they sat talking of many things—their escape from the Abyss, the patriarch’s death, their trip east again, the loss of their little home, their plans, their hopes, their work.
Beatrice seemed to grieve more than Stern over the destruction of the bungalow. So much of her woman’s heart had gone into the making of that nest, so many thoughts had centered on a return to it once more, that now when it lay in ruins through the spiteful mischief of the Horde, she found sorrow knocking insistently at the gates of her soul. But Allan comforted her as best he might.
“Never you mind, little girl!” said he bravely. “It’s only an incident, after all. A year from now another and a still more beautiful home will shelter us in some more secure location. And there’ll be human companionship, too, about us. In a year many of the Folk will have been brought from the depths. In a year miracles may happen—even the greatest one of all!”
Her eyes met his a moment by the ruddy fire-glow and held true.
“Yes,” answered she, “even the greatest in the world!”
A sudden tenderness swept over him at thought of all that had been and was still to be, at sight of this woman’s well-loved face irradiated by the leaping blaze—her face now just a little wan with long fatigues and sad as though with realization, with some compelling inner sense of vast, impending responsibilities.
He gathered her in his strong arms, he drew her yielding body close, and kissed her very gently.
“To-morrow!” he whispered. “Do you realize it?”
“To-morrow,” she made answer, her breath mingling with his. “To-morrow, Allan—one page of life forever closed, another opened. Oh, may it be for good—may we be very strong and very wise!”
Neither spoke for the space of a few heart-beats, while the wind made a vague, melancholy music in the sentinel treetops and the snapping sparks danced upward by the rock.
“Life, all life—just dancing sparks—then gone!” said Beatrice slowly. “And yet—yet it is good to have lived, Allan. Good to have lighted the black mystery of the universe, formless and endless and inscrutable, by even so brief a flicker!”
&nb
sp; “Is it my little pessimist to-night?” he asked. “Too tired, that’s all. In the morning things will look different. You must smile, then, Beta, and not think of formless mystery or—or anything sad at all. For to-morrow is our wedding-day.”
He felt her catch her breath and tremble just a bit.
“Yes, I know. Our wedding-day, Allan. Surely the strangest since time began. No friends, no gifts, no witnesses, no minister, no—”
“There, there!” he interrupted, smiling. “How can my little girl be so wrong-headed? Friends? Why, everything’s our friend! All nature is our friend—the whole life-process is our friend and ally! Gifts? What need have we of gifts? Aren’t you my gift, surely the best gift that a man ever had since the beginning of all things? Am I not yours?
“Minister? Priest? We need none! The world-to-be shall have got far away from such, far beyond its fairy-tale stage, its weaknesses and fears of the Unknown, which alone explain their existence. Here on Storm King, under the arches of the old cathedral our clasped hands, our—mutual words of love and trust and honor—these shall suffice. The river and the winds and forest, the sunlight and the sky, the whole infinite expanse of Nature herself shall be our priest and witnesses. And never has a wedding been so true, so solemn and so holy as yours and mine shall be. For you are mine, my Beatrice, and I am yours—forever!”
A little silence, while the flames leaped higher and the shadows deepened in the dim aisles of the fir-forest all about them. In the vast canopy of evening sky clustering star-points had begun to shimmer.
Redly the camp-fire lighted man and woman there alone together in the wild. For them there was no sense of isolation nor any loneliness. She was his world now, and he hers.
Up into his eyes she looked fairly and bravely, and her full lips smiled.
“Forgive me, Allan!” she whispered. “It was only a mood, that’s all. It’s passed now—it won’t come back. Only forgive me, boy!”
“My dear, brave girl!” he murmured, smoothing the thick hair back from her brow. “Never complaining, never repining, never afraid!”
Their lips met again and for a time the girl’s heart throbbed on his.
Afar a wolf’s weird, tremulous call drifted downwind. An owl, disturbed in its nocturnal quest, hooted upon the slope above to eastward; and across the darkening sky reeled an unsteady bat, far larger than in the old days when there were cities on the earth and ships upon the sea.
The fire burned low. Allan arose and flung fresh wood upon it, while sheaves of winking light gyrated upward through the air. Then he returned to Beatrice and wrapped her in his cloak.
And for a long, long time they both talked of many things—intimate, solemn, wondrous things—together in the night.
And the morrow was to be their wedding-day.
CHAPTER V
THE SEARCH FOR THE RECORDS
Morning found them early astir, to greet the glory of June sunlight over the shoulder of Storm King. A perfect morning, if ever any one was perfect since the world began—soft airs stirring in the forest, golden robins’ full-throated song, the melody of the scarlet tropic birds they had named “fire-birds” for want of any more descriptive title, the chatter of gray squirrels on the branches overhead, all blent, under a sky of wondrous azure, to tell them of life, full and abundant, joyous and kind.
Two of the squirrels had to die, for breakfast, which Beta cooked while Allan quested the edges of the wood for the ever-present berries. They drank from a fern-embowered spring a hundred yards or so to south of their camp in the forest, and felt the vigorous tides of life throb hotly through their splendid bodies.
Allan got together the few simple implements at their disposal for the expedition—his ax, a torch made of the brown weed of the Abyss, oil-soaked and bound with wire that fastened it to a metal handle, and a skin bag of the rude matches he had manufactured in the village of the Folk.
“Now then, en marche!” said he at length. “The old cathedral and the records are awaiting a morning call from us—and there are all the wedding preparations to make as well. We’ve got no time to lose!”
She laughed happily with a blush and gave him her hand.
“Lead on, Sir Knight!” she jested. “I’m yours by right of capture and conquest, as in the good old days!”
“The good new days will have better and higher standards,” he answered gravely. “To-day, one age is closed, another opened for all time.”
Hand in hand they ascended the barren spur to eastward, and presently reached the outposts of the forest that rose in close-ranked majesty over the brow of Storm King.
The going proved hard, for with the warmer climate that now favored the country, undergrowth had sprung up far more luxuriantly than in the days of the old-time civilization; but Stern and Beatrice were used to labor, and together—he ahead to break or cut a path—they struggled through the wood.
Half an hour’s climb brought them to their first dim sight of the massive towers of the cathedral, rising beyond the tangle of trees, majestic in the morning sun.
Soon after they had made their way close up to the huge, lichen-crusted walls, and in the shadow of the gigantic pile slowly explored round to the vast portals facing eastward over the Hudson.
“Wonderful work, magnificent proportions and design,” Stern commented, as they stopped at last on the broad, débris-littered steps and drew breath. “Brick and stone have long since perished. Even steel has crumbled. But concrete seems eternal. Why, the building’s practically intact even to-day, after ten centuries of absolute abandonment. A week’s work with a force of men would quite restore it. The damage it’s suffered is absolutely insignificant. Concrete. A lesson to be learned, is it not, in our rebuilding of the world?”
The mighty temple stood, in fact, almost as men had left it in the long ago, when the breath of annihilation had swept a withering blast over the face of the earth. The broad grounds and driveways that had led up to the entrance had, of course, long since absolutely vanished under rank growths.
Grass flourished in the gutters and on the Gothic finials; the gargoyles were bearded with vines and fern-clusters; the flying buttresses and mullions stood green with moss; and in the vegetable mold that had for centuries accumulated on the steps and in the vestibule—for the oaken doors had crumbled to powder—many a bright-flowered plant raised its blossoms to the sun.
The tall memorial windows and the great rose-window in the eastern facade had long since been shattered out of their frames by hail and tempest. But the main body of the cathedral seemed yet as massively intact as when the master-builders of the twentieth century had taken down the last scaffold, and when the gigantic organ had first pealed its “Laus Deo” through the vaulted apse.
Together they entered the vast silent space, and—awed despite themselves—gazed in wonder at the beauties of this, the most magnificent temple ever built in the western hemisphere.
The marble floor was covered now with windrows of dead leaves and pine-spills, and with the litter from myriads of birds’-nests that sheltered themselves on achitraves and galleries, and on the lofty capitals of the fluted pillars which rose, vistalike, a hundred feet above the clearstory, spraying out into a wondrous complexity of ribs to sustain the marvelous concrete vaultings full two hundred feet in air.
Through the shattered windows broad slants of sunshine fell athwart the walls and floor. Swallows chirped and twittered far aloft, or winged their swift way through the dusky upper spaces, passing at will in or out the mullioned gaps whence all the painted glass had long since fallen.
An air of mystery, of long expectancy seemed brooding everywhere; it seemed almost as though the spirit of the past were waiting to receive them—waiting now, as it had waited a thousand years, patiently, inexorably, untiringly for those to come who should some day reclaim the hidden secrets in the crypt, once more awaken human echoes in the vault, and so redeem the world. “Waiting!” breathed Stern, as if the thought hung pregnant in the very air. “W
aiting all these long centuries—for us! For you, Beatrice, for me! And we are here, at last, we of the newer time; and here we shall be one. The symbol of the pillars, mounting, ever mounting toward the infinite, the hope of life eternal, the majesty and mystery of this great temple, welcome us! Come!”
He took her hand again and now in silence they walked forward noiselessly over the thick leaf-carpet on the pavement of rare marble.
“Oh, Allan, I feel so very small in here!” she whispered, drawing close to him. “You and I, all alone in this tremendous place built for thousands—”
“You and I are the world to-day!” he answered very gravely; and so together they made way toward the vast transept, arched with a bewildering lacery of vaultings.
All save the concrete had long vanished. No traces now remained of pews, or railings, altars, pulpits, or any of the fittings of the vast cathedral.
Majestic in its naked strength, the building stood in light and shadow, here banded with strong sun, there lost in cool purple shade that foiled the eye far up among the hanging miracles of the roof.
At the transept-crossing they stood amazed; for here the flutings ran up five hundred feet inside the stupendous central spire, among a marvelous filigree of windows which diminished toward the top—a lacework as of frost-patterns etched into the solid substance of the flèche.
“Higher than that, more massive and more beautiful the buildings of the future shall arise,” said Allan slowly after a pause. “But they shall not serve creed or faction. They shall be for all mankind, for the great race still to come. Beauty shall be its heritage, its right.
“‘And loveliness shall crown the waiting world
As with a garland of immortal joy!’
“But come, come, Beatrice—there’s work to do. The records, girl! We mustn’t stand here admiring architecture and dreaming dreams while those records are still undiscovered. Down into the crypt we go, to dig among the relics of a vanished age!”
“The crypt, Allan? Where is it?”
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