CHAPTER II
SETTLING DOWN
Together, in the comradeship of love and trust and mutualunderstanding, they reached the somewhat open space before thebungalow, where once the road had ended in a stone-paved drive.Allan's wounded arm, had he but sensed it, was beginning to pain morethan a little. But he was oblivious. His love, the fire of spring thatburned in his blood, the lure of this great adventuring, banished allconsciousness of ill.
Parting a thicket, they reached the steps. And for a while they stoodthere, hand in hand, silent and thrilled with vast, strange thoughts,dreaming of what must be. In their eyes lay mirrored the future of thehuman race. The light that glowed in them evoked the glories of thedawn of life again, after ten centuries of black oblivion.
"Our home now!" he told her, very gently, and again he kissed her, butthis time on the forehead. "Ours when we shall have reclaimed it andmade it ours. See the yellow roses, dear? They symbolize our goldenfuture. The red, red roses? Our passion and our pain!"
The girl made no answer, but tears gathered in her eyes--tears fromthe deepest wells of the soul. She brought his hand to her lips.
"Ours!" she whispered tremblingly.
They stood there together for a little space, silent and glad. From anoak that shaded the porch a squirrel chippered at them. Asparrow--larger now than the sparrows they remembered in the time thatwas--peered out at them, wondering but unafraid, from its nest underthe eaves; at them, the first humans it had ever seen.
"We've got a tenant already, haven't we?" smiled Allan. "Well, I guesswe sha'n't have to disturb her, unless perhaps for a while, when I cutaway this poison ivy here." He pointed at the glossy triple leaf. "Nopoisonous thing, whether plant, snake, spider, or insect, is going tostay in this Eden!" he concluded, with a laugh.
Together, with a strange sense of violating the spirit of the past,they went up the concrete steps, untrodden now by human feet for tencenturies.
The massive blocks were still intact for the most part, for old VanAmburg had builded with endless care and with no remotest regard forcost. Here a vine, there a sapling had managed to insinuate a tap-rootin some crack made by the frost, but the damage was trifling. Exceptfor the falling of a part of a cornice, the building was complete. Butit was hidden in vines and mold. Moss, lichens and weeds grew on thesteps, flourishing in the detritus that had accumulated.
Allan dug the toe of his sandal into the loose drift of dead leavesand pine-spills that littered the broad piazza.
"It'll need more than a vacuum cleaner to put this in shape!" said he."Well, the sooner we get at it, the better. We'd do well to take alook at the inside."
The front door, one-time built of oaken planks studded withhand-worked nails and banded with huge wrought-iron hinges, now hungthere a mere shell of itself, worm-eaten, crumbling, disintegrated.
With no tools but his naked hands Stern tore and battered it away. Athick, pungent haze of dust arose, yellow in the morning sunlight thatpresently, for the first time in a thousand years, fell warm andbright across the cob-webbed front hallway, through the aperture.
Room by room Allan and Beatrice explored. The bungalow was practicallystripped bare by time.
"Only moth and rust," sighed the girl. "The same story everywhere wego. But--well, never mind. We'll soon have it looking homelike. Makeme a broom, dear, and I'll sweep out the worst of it at once."
Talking now in terms of practical detail, with romance for the hourdisplaced by harsh reality, they examined the entire house.
Of the once magnificent furnishings, only dust-piles, splinters andpunky rubbish remained. Through the rotted plank shutters, that hungdrunkenly awry from rust-eaten hinges, long spears of sunlight wanlyilluminated the wreck of all that had once been the lavish home of abillionaire.
Rugs, paintings, furniture, _bibelots_, treasures of all kinds now laycommingled in mournful decay. In what had evidently been the musicroom, overlooking the grounds to southward, the grand piano now wasonly a mass of rusted frame, twisted and broken fragments of wire anda considerable heap of wood-detritus, with a couple of corroded pedalsburied in the pile.
"And _this_ was the famous hundred-thousand-dollar harp of Sara, hisdaughter, that the papers used to talk so much about, you remember?"asked the girl, stirring with her foot a few mournful bits of rubbishthat lay near the piano.
"Sic transit gloria mundi!" growled Stern, shaking his head. "Youand she were the same age, almost. And now--"
Silent and full of strange thoughts they went on into what had beenthe kitchen. The stove, though heavily bedded in rust, retained itsform, for the solid steel had resisted even the fearful lapse ofvanished time.
"After I scour that with sand and water," said Stern, "and polish upthese aluminum utensils and reset that broken pane with a piece ofglass from up-stairs where it isn't needed, you won't know this place.Yes, and I'll have running water in here, too--and electricity fromthe power-plant, and--"
"Oh, Allan," interrupted the girl, delightedly, "this must have beenthe dining room." She beckoned from a doorway. "No end of dishes leftfor us! Isn't it jolly? This is luxury compared to the way we had tostart in the tower!"
In the dining-room a good number of the more solid cut-glass and chinapieces had resisted the shock of having fallen, centuries ago, to thefloor, when the shelves and cupboards of teak and mahogany had rottedand gone to pieces. Corroded silverware lay scattered all about; andthere was gold plate, too, intact save for the patina of extremeage--platters, dishes, beakers. But of the table and the chairs,nothing remained save dust.
Like curious children they poked and pried.
"Dishes enough!" exclaimed she. "Gold, till you can't rest. But howabout something to put _on_ the dishes? We haven't had a bite sinceyesterday noon, and I'm about starved. Now that the fighting's allover, I begin to remember my healthy appetite!"
Stern smiled.
"You'll have some breakfast, girlie," promised he. "There'll be thewherewithal to garnish our 18-k, never fear. Just let's have a lookup-stairs, and then I'll go after something for the larder."
They left the down-stairs rooms, silent save for a fly buzzing in aspider's web, and together ascended the dusty stairs. The railing wasentirely gone; but the concrete steps remained.
Stern helped the girl, in spite of the twinge of pain it caused hiswounded arm. His heart beat faster--so, too, did hers--as they gainedthe upper story. The touch of her was, to him, like a lighted matchflung into a powder magazine; but he bit his lip, and though his facepaled, then flushed, he held his voice steady as he said:
"So then, bats up here? Well, how the deuce do they get in and out?Ah! That broken window, where the elm-branch has knocked out theglass--I see! That's got to be fixed at once!"
He brushed webs and dust from the remaining panes, and together theypeered out over the orchard, out across the river, now a broad sheetof molten gold. His arm went about her; he drew her head against hisheart, fast-beating; and silence fell.
"Come, Allan," said the girl at length, calmer than he. "Let's seewhat we've got here to do with. Oh, I tell you to begin with," and shesmiled up frankly at him, "I'm a tremendously practical sort of woman.You may be an engineer, and know how to build wireless telegraphs andbridges and--and things; but when it comes to home--building--"
"I admit it. Well, lead on," he answered; and together they exploredthe upper rooms. The sense of intimacy now lay strong upon them, ofunity and of indissoluble love and comradeship. This was quite anotherventure than the exploration of the tower, for now they were choosinga home, _their_ home, and in them the mating instinct had begun tothrill, to burn.
Each room, despite its ruin and decay, took on a special charm, adignity, the foreshadowing of what must be. Yet intrinsically theplace was mournful, even after Stern had let the sunshine in.
For all was dark desolation. The rosewood and mahogany furniture,pictures, rugs, brass beds, all alike lay reduced to dust and ashes. Agold clock, the porcelain fittings of the bath-room,
and some fineclay and meerschaum pipes in what had evidently been Van Amburg'sden--these constituted all that had escaped the tooth of time.
In a front room that probably had been Sara's, a mud-swallow had builtits nest in the far corner. It flew out, frightened, when Stern thrusthis hand into the aperture to see if the nest were tenanted, flutteredabout with scared cries, then vanished up the broad fireplace.
"Eggs--warm!" announced Stern. "Well, this room will have to be shutup and left. We've got more than enough, anyhow. Less work for you,dear," he added, with a smile. "We might use only the lower floor, ifyou like. I don't want you killing yourself with housework, youunderstand."
She laughed cheerily.
"You make me a broom and get all the dishes and things together," sheanswered, "and then leave the rest to me. In a week from now you won'tknow this place. Once we clear out a little foothold here we can goback to the tower and fetch up a few loads of tools and supplies--"
"Come on, come on!" he interrupted, taking her by the hand and leadingher away. "All such planning will do after breakfast, but I'mstarving! How about a five-pound bass on the coals, eh? Come on, let'sgo fishing."
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