"Come, I"ll dress your wound first. And after I find out just how badly you"re injured--"
He tried to stop her mouth with kisses, but she evaded him.
"No, no!" she cried. "Not now--not now!"
Allan had to cede. And now presently there he knelt on the fine white sand, his bearskin robe opened and flung back, his well-knit shoulder and sinewed arm bare and brown.
"Well, is it fatal?" he jested. "How long do you give me to survive it?" as with her hand and the cold limpid water of the Hudson she started to lave the caked blood away from his gashed triceps.
At sight of the wound she looked grave, but made no comment. She had no bandages; but with the woodland skill she had developed in the past weeks of life in close touch with nature, she bound the cleansed wound with cooling leaves and fastened them securely in place with lashings of leather thongs from the banca.
Presently the task was done. Stern slipped his bearskin back in place.
Beatrice, still solicitous, tried to clasp the silver buckle that held it; but he, unable to restrain himself, caught her hand in both of his and crushed it to his lips.
Then he took her perfect face between his palms, and for a long moment studied it. He looked at her waving hair, luxuriant and glinting rich brown gleams in the sunlight; her thick, arched brows and hazel eyes, liquid and full of mystery as woodland pools; her skin, sun-browned and satiny, with abundant tides of life-blood coursing vigorously in its warm flush; her ripe lips. He studied her, and loved and yearned toward her; and in him the pa.s.sion leaped up like living flames.
His mouth met hers again.
"My beloved!" breathed he.
Her rounded arm, bare to the shoulder, circled his neck; she hid her face in his breast.
"Not yet--not yet!" she whispered.
On the white and pink flowered bough above, the robin, unafraid, gushed into a very madness of golden song. And now the sun, higher risen, had struck the river into a broad sheet of spun metal, over which the swallows--even as in the olden days--darted and spiraled, with now and then a flick and dash of spray.
Far off, wool-white winding-sheets of mist were lifting, lagging along the purple hills, clothed with inviolate forest.
Again the man tried to raise her head, to burn his kisses on her mouth. But she, instilled with the eternal spirit of woman, denied him.
"No, not now--not yet!" she said; and in her eyes he read her meaning.
"You must let me go now, Allan. There"s so much to do; we"ve got to be practical, you know."
"Practical! When I--I love--"
"Yes, I know, dear. But there"s so much to be done first." Her womanly homemaking instinct would not be gainsaid. "There"s so much work!
We"ve got the place to explore, and the house to put in order, and--oh, thousands of things! And we must be very sensible and very wise, you and I, boy. We"re not children, you know. Now that we"ve lost our home in the Metropolitan Tower, everything"s got to be done over again."
"Except to learn to love you!" answered Stern, letting her go with reluctance.
She laughed back at him over her fur-clad shoulder as her sandaled feet followed the dim remnants of what must once have been a broad driveway from the river road along the beach, leading up to the bungalow.
Through the encroaching forest and the tangle of the degenerate apple-trees they could see the concrete walls, with here or there a bit of white still gleaming through the enlacements of ancient vines that had enveloped the whole structure--woodbine, ivy, wisterias, and the maddest jungle of climbing roses, red and yellow, that ever made a nest for love.
"Wait, I"ll go first and clear the way for you," he said cheerily. His big bulk crashed down the undergrowth. His hands held back the thorns and briers and the whipping hardbacks. Together they slowly made way toward the house.
The orchard had lost all semblance of regularity, for in the thousand years since the hand of man had pruned or cared for it Mother Nature had planted and replanted it times beyond counting. Small and gnarled and crooked the trees were, as the spine-tree souls in Dante"s dolorosa selva.
Here or there a pine had rooted and grown tall, killing the lesser tribe of green things underneath.
Warm lay the sun there. A pleasant carpet of last year"s leaves and pine-spills covered the earth.
"It"s all ready and waiting for us, all embowered and carpeted for love," said Allan musingly. "I wonder what old Van Amburg would think of his estate if he could see it now? And what would he say to our having it? You know, Van was pretty ugly to me at one time about my political opinion--but that"s all past and forgotten now. Only this is certainly an odd turn of fate."
He helped the girl over a fallen log, rotted with moss and lichens.
"It"s one awful mess, sure as you"re born. But as quick as my arm gets back into shape, we"ll have order out of chaos before you know it.
Some fine day you and I will drive our sixty horse-power car up an asphalt road here, and--"
"A car? Why, what do you mean? There"s not such a thing left in the whole world as a car!"
The engineer tapped his forehead with his finger.
"Oh, yes, there is. I"ve got several models right here. You just wait till you see the workshop I"m going to install on the bank of the river with current-power, and with an electric light plant for the whole place, and with--"
Beatrice laughed.
"You dear, big, dreaming boy!" she interrupted. Then with a kiss she took his hand.
"Come," said she. "We"re home now. And there"s work to do."
CHAPTER II
SETTLING DOWN
Together, in the comradeship of love and trust and mutual understanding, they reached the somewhat open s.p.a.ce before the bungalow, where once the road had ended in a stone-paved drive.
Allan"s wounded arm, had he but sensed it, was beginning to pain more than a little. But he was oblivious. His love, the fire of spring that burned in his blood, the lure of this great adventuring, banished all consciousness of ill.
Parting a thicket, they reached the steps. And for a while they stood there, hand in hand, silent and thrilled with vast, strange thoughts, dreaming of what must be. In their eyes lay mirrored the future of the human race. The light that glowed in them evoked the glories of the dawn of life again, after ten centuries of black oblivion.
"Our home now!" he told her, very gently, and again he kissed her, but this time on the forehead. "Ours when we shall have reclaimed it and made it ours. See the yellow roses, dear? They symbolize our golden future. The red, red roses? Our pa.s.sion and our pain!"
The girl made no answer, but tears gathered in her eyes--tears from the deepest wells of the soul. She brought his hand to her lips.
"Ours!" she whispered tremblingly.
They stood there together for a little s.p.a.ce, silent and glad. From an oak that shaded the porch a squirrel chippered at them. A sparrow--larger now than the sparrows they remembered in the time that was--peered out at them, wondering but unafraid, from its nest under the eaves; at them, the first humans it had ever seen.
"We"ve got a tenant already, haven"t we?" smiled Allan. "Well, I guess we sha"n"t have to disturb her, unless perhaps for a while, when I cut away this poison ivy here." He pointed at the glossy triple leaf. "No poisonous thing, whether plant, snake, spider, or insect, is going to stay 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 ten centuries.
The ma.s.sive blocks were still intact for the most part, for old Van Amburg had builded with endless care and with no remotest regard for cost. Here a vine, there a sapling had managed to insinuate a tap-root in some crack made by the frost, but the damage was trifling. Except for the falling of a part of a cornice, the building was complete. But it was hidden in vines and mold. Moss, lichens and weeds grew on the steps, flourishing in the detritus that had acc.u.mulated.
Allan dug the toe of his sandal into the loose drift of dead leaves and pine-spills that littered the broad piazza.
"It"ll need more than a vacuum cleaner to put this in shape!" said he.