"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 s.p.a.ce of a few heart-beats, while the wind made a vague, melancholy music in the sentinel tree-tops 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!"
"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 cl.u.s.tering 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 pa.s.sed 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 down-wind. 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 t.i.tle, 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 ma.s.sive 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, debris-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.
Gra.s.s flourished in the gutters and on the Gothic finials; the gargoyles were bearded with vines and fern-cl.u.s.ters; the flying b.u.t.tresses and mullions stood green with moss; and in the vegetable mold that had for centuries acc.u.mulated 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 ma.s.sively 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 clear-story, 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 s.p.a.ces, pa.s.sing at will in or out the mullioned gaps whence all the painted gla.s.s 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. "Waiting 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.