LAURA UNDERSTANDS

Thus she remained, holding to a silver birch, leaning out a little toward the chasm. Up from the depths echoed a gurgling roar as the white fury drenched and belabored the gray, sheer wall, then fell back, hissing.

For a moment Laura peered down, held by the boy’s encircling arm. She looked abroad upon the sun-shining waters flecked with far, white boats and smudged with steamer-smoke. Then she breathed deep and lifted up her face toward the gold filigree of sun and leaf, and sighed:

“Oh, it’s wonderful, Hal! I never even guessed it could be anything like this!”

“Wonderful isn’t the name for it, Laura,” he answered. He pointed far. “See the lighthouse? And Cape Ann in the haze? And the toy boats? Everything and everybody’s a toy now except just you and me. We’re the only real people. I wish it were really so, don’t you?”

“Why, Hal? What would you do if it were?”

“Oh,” he answered with that heart-warming smile of his, “I’d take you in a yacht, Laura, away off to some of those wonderful places the Oriental poems tell about. We’d sail away ‘through the Silken Sea,’ and ‘Beyond the Wind,’ wherever that is. Wouldn’t you like to go there with me, dear?”

“Yes. But—”

“But what, Laura?” His lips were almost brushing the curve of her neck, where the wind-blown hair fell in loose ringlets. “But what?”

“I—I mustn’t answer that, Hal. Not now!”

“Why not now?”

“While you’re still in college, Hal? While there’s so much work and struggle still ahead of you?”

The boy frowned, unseen by her, for her eyes were fixed on the vague horizons beyond which, no doubt, lay Silken Seas and far, unknown places of enchantment beyond all winds whatsoever. Not thus did he desire to be understood by Laura. The whim of June shrinks from being mistaken for a thing of lifelong import. Laura drew back from the chasm and faced him with a little smile.

“It’s very wrong for people to make light of such things,” she said. Her look lay steadily upon his face. “While the sun is shining it’s so easy to say more than one means. And then, at the first cloud, the fancy dies like sunlight fading.”

“But this isn’t a mere fancy that I feel for you,” Hal persisted, sensing that he had lost ground with her. “I’ve had plenty of foolish ideas about girls. But this is different. It’s so very, very different every way!” His voice, that he well knew how to make convincing, really trembled a little with the thrill of this adventuring.

“I wish I could believe you, Hal!”

He drew her toward him again. This time she did not resist. He felt the yielding of her sinuous young body, its warmth and promise of intoxication.

“You can believe me, Laura! Only trust in me!”

“I—I don’t know, Hal. I know what men are. They’re all so much alike.”

“Not all, dear! You ought to know me well enough to have confidence in me. Think of the long, long time we’ve known each other. Think of the years and years of friendship! Why, Laura, we’ve known each other ever since we were a couple of children playing on the beach, writing each other’s names in the sand—”

“For the next high tide to wash away!”

“But we’re not children now. There’s something in my heart no tide can obliterate!”

“I hope that’s true, Hal. But you’re not through college yet. Wait till you are. You’ve got to graduate with flying colors, and make your dear old grandfather the proudest man in the world, and be the wonderful success I know you’re going to be! And make me the happiest girl! You will, won’t you?”

“I’ll do anything in the world for you, Laura!” he exclaimed. His face, flushed with enkindling desire, showed no sign of shame or dejection. Laura knew nothing of his dÉbÂcle at the university. Of course she must soon know; but all that still lay in the future. And to Hal nothing mattered now but just the golden present with its nectar in the blossom and its sunshine on the leaf. He drew her a little closer.

“Tell me,” he whispered. “Do you really care?”

“Don’t ask me—yet!” she denied him, turning her face away. “Come, let’s be going down!”

“Why, we’ve only just come!”

“I know, but—”

“You needn’t be afraid of me!” he exclaimed. “You aren’t, are you, dear?”

“No more than I am of myself,” she answered frankly, while her throat and face warmed with blood that suddenly burned there. “We—really oughtn’t to be alone like this, Hal.”

He laughed and opened his arms to let her go. For a moment she stood looking up at him; then her eyes, too innocent to find the guile in his, smiled with pure-hearted affection.

“Forgive me, Hal!” said she. “I didn’t mean that. But, you know, when you put your arms round me like that—”

“I won’t do it again,” he answered, instinct telling him the bird would take fright if the trap seemed too tightly closed. He dropped his arms, the palms of his hands spread outward. “You see, when you tell me to let you go, I mind you?”

“Yes, like the good, dear boy you are!” she exclaimed with sudden, impulsive affection. She reached up, took his face in both hands and studied his eyes. He thought she was about to kiss him, and his heart leaped. He quivered to seize her, to burn his kisses on her lips, there in the leafy, sun-glimmering shade; but already Laura’s arms had fallen, and she had turned away, back toward the path that would lead them downward from this tiny enchanted garden to the common level of the world again.

“Come, Hal,” said she, “we must be going now!”

He nodded, his eyes glowering coals of desire, and followed after. Was the bird, then, going to escape his hand? A sinister look darkened his face; just such a look as had made Captain Briggs a brute when he had shouldered his way into his cabin aboard the Silver Fleece, to master the captive girl.

“Laura, wait a minute, please!” begged Hal.

“Well, what is it?” she asked, half-turning, a beautiful, white, gracious figure in the greenery—a very wood-nymph of a figure, sylvan, fresh, enwoven with life’s most mystic spell—the magic of youth.

“You haven’t seen half my little Mysterious Island up here!”

“Mysterious Island?” asked she, pleased by the fanciful whim. “You call it that, do you?”

“Yes, I’ve always called it that ever since I read Jules Verne, when I was only a youngster. I’ve never told anybody, though. I haven’t told that, or a hundred other imaginings.” He had come close to her again, had taken her by the arm, was drawing her away from the path and toward the little flower-enameled greensward among the boulders crowned with birch and pine. “You’re the only one that knows my secret, Laura. You’ll never, never tell, now, will you?”

“Never!” she answered, uneasiness dispelled by his frank air. “Do you imagine things like that, too, Hal? I thought I was the only one around here who ever ‘pretended.’ Are you a dreamer, too?”

“Very much a dreamer. Sit down here, Laura, and let me tell you some of my dreams.”

He sat down in the grass, and drew her down beside him. She yielded “half willing and half shy.” For a moment he looked at her with eyes of desire. Then, still holding her hand, he said:

“It was all fairies and gnomes up here when I first came. Fairyland in those boyhood days. After a while the fairies went away and pirates began to come; pirates and Indians and a wild crew. I was sometimes a victim, sometimes a member of the brotherhood. There’s treasure buried all ’round here. Those were the days when I was reading about Captain Kidd and Blackbeard. You understand?”

“Indeed I do! Go on!”

He laughed, as her mood yielded under the subtle mastery of his voice, his eyes.

“Oh, but it’s a motley crew we’ve been up here, the pirates and I!” said he, leaning still closer. “‘Treasure Island’ peopled the place with adventurers—Long John Silver, and Pew and the Doctor, and all the rest. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ swept them all away, all but Man Friday; and then the savages had to come. If there’s anything at all I haven’t suffered in the way of shipwreck, starvation, cannibals and being rescued just in the nick of time up here, really I don’t know what it is. And since I’ve grown up, though of course I can’t ‘pretend’ any more, I’ve always loved this place to day-dream in, and wonder in, about the thing that every man hopes will come to him some day.”

“And what’s that, Hal?” she asked in a lower voice.

“Love!” he whispered. “Love—and you!”

“Hal, is that really true?”

“Look at me, Laura, and you’ll know!”

She could not meet his gaze. Her eyes lowered. He drew his arm about her as she drooped a little toward him.

“Listen to me!” he commanded, masterfully lying. “There’s never been anybody but you, Laura. There never will be. You’ve been in all my dreams, by night, my visions by day, up here in fairyland!”

His words were coming impetuously now. In his eyes the golden flame of desire was burning hot.

“You’re everything to me! Everything! I’ve sensed it for a long time, but only in the last month or two I’ve really understood. It all came to me in a kind of revelation, Laura, one day when I was translating a poem from the Hindustani.”

“A poem, Hal?” The girl’s voice was tremulous. Her eyes had closed. Her head, resting on his shoulder, thrilled him with ardor; and in his nostrils the perfume of her womanhood conjured up shimmering dream-pictures of the Orient—strange lands that, though unseen, he mysteriously seemed to know. “Tell me the poem, dear!” Laura whispered. “A love-poem?”

“Such a love-poem! Listen, sweetheart! It’s a thousand years old, and it comes from the dim past to tell you what I feel for you. It runs this way:

“BelovÈd, were I to name the blossoms of the spring,
And all the fruits of autumn’s bounteousness;
Were I to name all things that charm and thrill,
And earth, and Heaven, all in one word divine,

I would name thee!

“Had I the gold of Punjab’s golden land,
Had I as many diamonds, shining bright
As leaves that tremble in a thousand woods,
Or sands along ten thousand shining seas;
Had I as many pearls of shifting hue
As blades of grass in fields of the whole world,
Or stars that shine on the broad breast of night,
I’d give them all, a thousand, thousand times,

To make thee mine!”

For a minute, while Hal watched her with calculation, Laura kept silence. Then she looked up at him, dreamy-eyed, and smiled.

“That’s wonderful, Hal. I only wish you meant it!”

“You know I do! I want you, Laura—God, how much! You’re all I need to make my fairyland up here a heaven!”

“What—what do you mean, Hal? Are you asking me to—to be your wife?”

His face contracted, involuntarily, but he veiled his true thought with a lie. What mattered just a lie to gain possession of her in this golden hour of sunshine?

“Yes, yes, of course!” he cried, drawing her to his lips in a betraying kiss—a kiss, to her, culminant with wonder and mystic with a good woman’s aspiration for a life of love and service—a kiss, to him, only a trivial incident, lawless, unbridled. At heart he cursed the girl’s pure passion for him. Not this was what he wanted; and dimly, even through the flame of his desire, he could see a hundred complications, perils. But now the lie was spoken—and away with to-morrow!

Again he kissed the girl, sensing, in spite of his desire, the different quality of her returning kiss. Then she smiled up at him, and with her hand smoothed back the thick, black hair from his forehead.

“It’s all so wonderful, Hal!” she whispered fondly. “I can’t believe it’s true. But it is true, isn’t it? Even though we’ve got to wait till you get through college. I’m willing to. I love you enough, Hal, to wait forever. And you will, too, won’t you?”

“Of—of course I will!”

“And it’s really, really true? It’s not just a fairy dream of wonderland, up here, that will vanish when we go down to the world again?”

“No, no, it’s all true, Laura,” he was forced to answer, baffled and at a loss. Not at all was this adventure developing as he had planned it. Why, Laura was taking it seriously! Laura was acting like a child—a foolish, preposterous child! The web that he had hoped to spread for her undoing had, because of her own trusting confidence, been tangled all about himself.

Abashed and angry, he sought some way to break its bonds. Another poem rose to memory, a poem that he hoped might make her understand. He had read it the day before in a little book called “The Divine Image,” and it had instantly burned itself into his brain. Now said he:

“Listen, dear. I’ve got another verse for you. It’s called: ‘His Woman.’”

“And I’m really yours, forever?”

“Of course you are, dear! Listen, now:

“‘In the pale, murmuring dawn she lay
Alone, with nothing more to lose.

Her eyes one warm, soft arm espied,

And lips too tired to voice her pride
Caressed and kissed a bruise.’”

The girl looked up at him a moment, circled with his arm, as she lay there content. For a little she seemed not to understand. Then, slowly, a puzzled look and then a look of hurt rose to her eyes.

“Hal, you—you mustn’t—”

“Why mustn’t I, dear?”

She tried to answer, but his lips upon her mouth stifled her speech.

Swift fear leaped through her as she fought away from him.

“Oh, Hal!” she cried. “What—what are you looking at me that way for? Your eyes, Hal—your eyes—”

In vain he tried to kiss her. Her face was turned away, her hands repulsing him.

“Kiss me, Laura! Kiss me!”

“No, no—not now! Oh, Hal, you have only yourself to resist. I have you to resist, and myself, too!”

The thought gave him a minute’s pause. Did some instinct of chivalry, deep-buried, try for a second to struggle up through his evil heritage, or was it but surprise that loosed his grip upon her so that she escaped his hands, his arms?

“God forgive you, Hal, for having killed the most wonderful treasure I had—my faith in you!” she cried from where she stood now, looking down at him with tragic eyes of disillusion. “Oh, God forgive you!”

He would have spoken, but she turned and fled toward the tangled thicket through which the path led downward.

“Laura! Wait!” He sprang to his feet, peering after her with hateful eyes. No answer as she vanished through the greenery.

For all his rage and passion, Hal realized how absurd a figure he would make, pursuing her. Swift anger swept over him, broke all down, rushed in uncontrolled floods.

A moment he stood there, brutal, venomous. Then with a laugh, the echo of that which had sounded when Alpheus Briggs had flung the Malay girl to death, he clutched at his thick hair, tugging at it with excess of madness. He broke into wild curses that rose against the sky with barbarous blasphemy.

Foam slavered upon his lips. His face grew black; the veins stood out upon his neck and temples. A madman, he trampled through the bushes, stamping, striking, lusting to kill.

So for a time he raged in blind, stark passion; while Laura, shaken and afraid, bleeding at her heart of hearts, made her way all alone back to the safety of the seashore road.

At last, his rage burned out, Hal flung himself down in the grass. Face buried in hands, teeth set in bleeding lip, he lay there.

And over him the heavens, like an eyeless face, smiled down with calm, untroubled purpose.