Prisoners of Hope Part 46

"I did not mean to be so cowardly," she said simply. "I will be brave now."

"You are the bravest woman in the world," he answered.

Below them waved the painted forest flaunting triumphant banners of crimson and gold. A strong south wind was blowing, and it brought to them a sound as of the whispering of many voices. The shining river, too, murmured to its reeds and pebbles, and in the air was the dull whirr of wings as the vast flocks of wild fowl rose like dark smoke from the water, or, skimming along its surface, broke it into myriad diamond sprays. Around the horizon towered heaped-up ma.s.ses of cloud--Ossa piled on Pelion--fantastic Jack-and-the-Beanstalk castles, built high above the world, with rampart and turret and bastion of pearl and coral. Above rose the sky intensely blue and calm.

All the wealth, the warmth and loveliness of the world they were about to leave flowed over the souls of the doomed pair. In their hearts they each said farewell to it forever. Patricia stood with uplifted face and clear eyes, looking deep into the azure heaven. "I am trying to think,"

she said, "that death is not so bitter after all. To-day is beautiful--but ours will be a fairer morrow! After to-day we will never be tired, or fear, or be in danger any more. I am not afraid to die; but ah! if it could only come to us now, swiftly, silently, out of the blue yonder; if we could go without the blood--the horror--" she broke off shuddering. Her eyes closed and she rested her head against the rock.

Landless watched the beautiful, pale face, the quivering eyelids, the coral underlip drawn between the pearly teeth, in a pa.s.sion of pity and despair. Horrid visions of torture flashed through his brain; he saw the delicate limbs writhing, heard the agonized screams.... If he killed the mulatto, it might come to that; if the mulatto lived, he knew that she would kill herself. He had given her the knife that had been Monakatocka's, and she had it now, hidden in her bosom.... The glory of the autumn day darkened and went out, the bitter waters of affliction surged over him, an immeasurable sea; it seemed to him that until then he had never suffered. A cold sweat broke out upon him, and with an inarticulate cry of rage and despair he struck at his wounded foot as at a deadly foe. The girl cried out at the sound of the blow.

"Oh, don't, don't! What are you doing? You have loosened the bandage, and it is bleeding afresh."

Despite his effort to prevent her she readjusted the kerchief which she had wound about the torn and crushed foot, very carefully and tenderly.

"It must hurt you very much," she said pityingly.

He took the little ministering hands in his and kissed them. "Oh, madam, madam!" he groaned. "G.o.d knows I would shed every drop of my blood a thousand times to save you. Death to me is nothing, nor life so fair that I should care to keep it. The grave is a less dreadful prison than those on earth, and I think to find in G.o.d a more merciful Judge. But you--so young and beautiful, with friends, love--"

She stopped him with a gesture full of dignity and sweetness. "That life is gone forever,--it is thousands of miles and ages on ages away. It is a world more distant than the stars, and we are nearer to Heaven than to it.... It is strange to think how we have drifted, you and I, to this rock. A year ago we had never seen each other's faces, had never heard each other's names, and yet you were coming to this rock from prison and over seas, and I was coming to meet you.... And it is our death place, and we will die together, and to-morrow maybe the little birds will cover us with leaves as they did the children in the story. They were brother and sister.... When our time comes I will not be afraid, for I will be with you ... my brother."

Landless covered his face with his hands.

The shadows grew longer and the cloud castles began to flush rosily, though the sun still rode above the tree tops. A purple light filled the aisles of the forest, through which a herd of deer, making for some accustomed lick, pa.s.sed like a phantom troop. They vanished, and from out the stillness of the glades came the sudden, startled barking of a fox. A shadow darted across a sunlit alley from gloom to gloom, paused on the outskirts of the wood below the crags while one might count ten, then turned and flitted back into the darkness from whence it came. They beneath the crags did not see it.

Suddenly Landless raised his head. Upon his face was the look of one who has come through much doubt and anguish of spirit to an immutable resolve. He looked to the priming of his gun and laid it upon the rock beside him, together with his powderhorn and pouch of bullets. Raising himself to his knees he gazed long and intently into the forest below.

There was no sign of danger. On the checkered ground beneath two mighty oaks squirrels were playing together like frolicsome kittens, and through the clear air came the tapping of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r. The forest was silent as to the shadow that had flitted through it. It can keep a secret very well.

Landless sank back against the rock. He had lost much blood, and that and the pain of his mangled foot turned him faint and sick for minutes at a time. He clenched his teeth and forced back the deadly faintness, then turned to the woman who stood beside him, her hands clasped before her, her eyes following the declining sun, her lips sometimes set in mournful curves, sometimes murmuring broken and inaudible words of prayer. He called her twice before she answered, turning to him with eyes of feverish splendor which saw and yet saw not. "What is it?" she asked dreamily.

"Come back to earth, madam," he said. "There is that that I wish to say to you. Listen to me kindly and pitifully, as to a dying man."

"I am listening," she answered. "What is it?"

"It is this, madam: I love you. For G.o.d's sake don't turn away! Oh, I know that I should have been strong to the end, that I should not vex you thus! It is the coward's part I play, perhaps, but I must speak! I cannot die without. I love you, I love you, I love you!"

His voice rose into a cry; in it rang long repressed pa.s.sion, hopeless adoration, fierce joy in having broken the bonds of silence. He spoke rapidly, thickly, with a stammering tongue, now throwing out his hands in pa.s.sionate appeal, now crushing between his fingers the dried moss and twigs with which the ground was strewn. "I loved you the day I first saw you. I have loved you ever since. I love you now. My G.o.d! how I love you! Die for you? I would die for you ten thousand times! I would _live_ for you! Oh, the day I first saw you! I was in h.e.l.l and I looked at you as lost Dives might have looked at the angel on the other side of the gulf.... I never thought to tell you this. I know that never, never, never.... But this is the day of our death. In a few hours we shall be gone. Do not leave the world in anger with me. Say that you pity, understand, forgive.... Speak to me, madam!"

The sun sank lower and the shadows lengthened and deepened, and still Patricia stood silent with uplifted and averted face, and fingers tightly locked together. With a moan of mortal weakness Landless dragged himself nearer until he touched with his forehead the low pedestal of rock upon which she stood. "I understand," he said quietly. "After all, there is nothing to be said, is there? Try to forget my--madness. Think of it, if you will, as the raving of one at death's door. Let it be as it was between us."

Patricia turned--her beautiful face transfigured. Roses bloomed in her cheeks, her eyes were fathomless wells of splendor, an exquisite smile played about her lips; with her nimbus of golden hair she looked a rapt mediaeval saint. Her slender figure swayed towards Landless, and when she spoke her voice was like the tone of a violin, soft, rich, caressing, tremulous.

"There was no boat," she said.

"No boat!" he cried. "What do you mean?"

"The canoe going down the river. I told you that it held seven Indians and the mulatto. I lied to you. There were no Indians, no mulatto, no canoe. The shadows of the clouds have been upon the river, and the wild fowl, and once a fish-hawk plunged. I have seen nothing else."

Landless gazed at her with staring eyeb.a.l.l.s. "You have thrown away your life," he said at last in a voice that did not seem his own.

"Yes, I have thrown away my life."

"But why--why--"

The rich color surged over her face and neck. She swayed towards him with the grace of a wind-bowed lily, her breath fanning his forehead, and her hand touching his, softly, flutteringly, like a young bird.

"Can you not guess why?" she said with an enchanting smile.

All the anguish of a little while back, all the terror of the fate that hung over her, all the white calm of despair was gone. The horror that moved nearer and nearer, moment by moment, through the painted forest, was forgotten. She looked at him shyly from under her long lashes and with another wonderful blush.

Landless gazed at her, comprehension slowly dawning in his eyes. For five minutes there was a silence as of the dead beneath the crags. Then with a great cry he caught her hands in his and drew her towards him.

"Is it?" he cried.

"Yes," she answered with laughter trembling on her lips. "Death hath enfranchised us, you and me. Give me my betrothal kiss, my only love."

For them one moment of Paradise, of bliss ineffable and supreme. The next, the crags behind them rang to the sound of the war whoop.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

THE LAST FIGHT

Out from the forest rushed the remnant of that band which had smoked the peace pipe with the Governor one sunny afternoon on the banks of the Pamunkey. Tall and large of limb, painted with all fantastic and ghastly devices, and decorated with hideous mementoes of nameless deeds; with the l.u.s.t of blood written large in every fierce lineament and dark and rolling eye; with raised hands grasping knife and tomahawk, and lips uttering cries that seemed not of earth--a more appalling vision could not have issued from out the beautiful, treacherous forest, a more crashing discord have come into the music of the golden evening.

For the two in their rocky fortress beneath the crags the apparition had no terrors. All the pain, the anguish, the hopelessness of the world was pa.s.sing from them--the cry that swelled through the forest was its knell. They smiled to hear it, and with raised faces looked beyond the many-tinted evening skies into clear s.p.a.ces where Love was all. The intoxication of the moment when hidden and despairing love became love triumphant and acknowledged abode with them. In the very grasp of death ineffable bliss possessed them. Their countenances changed; the lines of care and pain, the marks of tears, were all gone and the beauty of the happy soul shone out. For that brief s.p.a.ce of time transcendent youth and loveliness was theirs. About them, as about the sun now sinking behind the low hills, there breathed a glory, a dying splendor as bright as it was fleeting. They felt, too, a lightness and gaiety of spirit--they had drunk of the nectar of the G.o.ds, and no leaden weight of care, no heavy sorrow, could ever touch them, ever drag them down again to the sad earth.

"You are beautiful," said Landless, gazing at her, even in the act of raising his gun to his shoulder; "as beautiful as you were the day I first saw you. I hear the drone of the bees in the vines at Verney Manor. I smell the roses. I look up and see the Rose of the World. My eyes were dazzled then, are dazzled now, my Rose of the World."

"That day I wore brocade and lace, and there were pearls around my throat," she said with a laugh of pure delight. "There was rouge upon my cheeks, too, sir, and my eyes were darkened. To-day I go a beggar maid, in rags, burnt by the sun--"

"The nut-brown maid," he said.

"Ay," she answered, "the nut-brown maid--'For in my mind of all mankind'--you may e'en finish it yourself, sir."

The Ricahecrians had paused at the foot of the ascent to hold a council.

It was soon over. With another burst of cries they rushed up the steep and upon the rocks, behind which were hidden their victims. Landless, kneeling to one side of the gap between the boulders by which he and Patricia had entered, fired, and the foremost of the savages threw up his arms, uttered a dreadful cry, and fell across the path of his fellows. For one moment the rush was checked, the next on they came, yelling furiously and brandishing their weapons. Landless fired and missed, fired again and pierced the thigh of a gigantic warrior, bringing him crashing to the ground. The line wavered, paused, then turning, swept to one side and so pa.s.sed out of sight.

"They have found this pa.s.s too formidable," said Landless. "They will try now to force an entrance from the side. Do you watch the front, my queen, while I face them, coming over the rocks."

"I looked only at the mulatto," she said. "The others are shadows to me."

"His time is come," said Landless. "Do not fear him, sweetheart."

"I fear not," she answered. "I have the perfect love."

Along the top of a tall boulder to their right appeared a dark red line--the arm of a savage, with clutching fingers. Above it, very slowly and cautiously, there rose first an eagle's feather, then a coa.r.s.e black scalp lock, then a high forehead and fierce eyes. The echo of Landless's shot reverberated through the cliffs, and when the smoke cleared only the bare gray boulder faced him. But from behind it came a derisive yell.

"Thou wilt think me a poor marksman, my dear," he said, smiling, as he reloaded his musket. "I have missed again."