GEYSER ROCK
Hal Briggs had little thought of trouble as he strode away in search
of Laura. Very hot was his blood as he swung down the shaded street
toward the house of Nathaniel Maynard, father of the girl. Some of the
good folk frowned and were silent as he greeted them, but others had
to smile and raise a hand of recognition. Still at some distance from
Laura’s house, the boy caught sight of a creamy-toned voile dress among
the hollyhocks in the side yard. He whistled, waved his hand, hurried
his pace. And something leaped within him, so that his heart beat up a
little thickly, as the girl waved an answering hand.
Another look came to his eyes. Another light began to burn in their
blue depths.
“Geyser Rock!” he whispered. “By God, the very place!”
* * * * *
Geyser Rock boldly fronts the unbroken sweep of the sea at Thunder
Head. Up it leaps, sheer two hundred feet, from great deeps. Fifty feet
from the barnacle-crusted line of high-tide a ledgelike path leads to
the face of the cliff. From this ledge Hal often took the plunge that
had won him local fame—a plunge into frothing surf that even in the
calmest of midsummer days was never still.
Few visitors ever struggle up through sumacs, brakes and undergrowth,
to gain the vantage-point of the pinnacle. Rolling boulders, slippery
ledge and dizzying overlook upon the shining sea deter all but the
hardy. The very solitude of the place had greatly endeared it to Hal.
To him it was often a solace and a comfort after his strange fits of
rage and viciousness.
All alone, up in that isolated height, he had passed long hours
reading, smoking, musing in the tiny patch of grass there under the
canopy of the white-birches’ filigree of green, or under the huge pine
that carpeted the north slope of the crest with odorous, russet spills.
Some of his happiest hours had been spent on the summit, through the
tree-tops watching sky-shepherds tend their flocks across the pastures
infinitely far and blue above him.
Strangely secluded was the top of Geyser Rock. Though it lay hardly a
pistol-shot from the main coast-road, it seemed almost as isolated as
if it had been down among the Celebes.
For that reason Hal loved it best of all, with its grasses, flowers,
ferns and tangled thickets, its rock-ridges filigreed with silvery
lichens or sparkling with white quartz-crystals. From this aerie Hal
could glimpse a bit of the village; the prim church spire; the tiny,
far gravestones sleeping on Croft Hill. The solitude of this, his own
domain by right of conquest, had grown ever more dear and needful to
him as he had advanced toward manhood.
Such was the place toward which Laura and he were now walking along
the road, with tilled fields and rock-bossed rolling hills to right of
them; and, to their left, the restless flashings of the sea.
Laura had never been more charming. Her happiness in his return had
flushed her cheeks with color and had brightened her eyes—thoughtful,
deep, loyal eyes—till they looked clear and fresh as summer skies
after rain.
Everything wholesome and glad seemed joined in Laura; her health and
spirits were like the morning breeze itself that came to court the
land, from the golden sparklings that stretched away to the shadowed,
purple rim of the ocean. The June within her heart mirrored itself
through her face, reflecting the June that overbrooded earth and sea
and sky.
Hal sensed all this and more, as with critical keenness he looked down
at her, walking beside him. He noted the wind-blown hair that shaded
her eyes; he saw the health and vigor of that lithe, firm-breasted
young body of hers. His look, brooding, glowed evilly. Fifty years ago
thus had his grandsire’s eyes kindled at sight of Kuala Pahang in her
tight little Malay jacket. And as if words from the past had audibly
echoed from some vibrant chord in the old-time captain’s symphony of
desire, once more the thought formed in his brain:
“She’s mine, the girl is! She’s plump as a young porpoise, and, by God,
I’m going to have her!”
The words he uttered, though, were far afield from these. He was saying:
“So now, Laura, you see I wasn’t really to blame, after all. ‘A lie
runs round the world, while truth is getting on its sandals.’ That
proverb’s as true here as in Siam, where it originated. People are
saying I was drunk and brutal, and all that, when the fact is—”
“I know, Hal,” she answered, her eyes troubled. “I know how this
country gossip exaggerates. But, even so, did you do right in beating
Captain McLaughlin as you did?”
“It was the only thing I _could_ do, Laura!” he protested. “The bully
tried to humiliate me. I—I just licked him, that’s all. You wouldn’t
want me to be a milksop, would you?”
“No, not that, Hal. But a fair fight is one thing and brutality is
another. And then, too, they say you’d been drinking.”
He laughed and slid his hand about her arm.
“I give you my word of honor, Laura, all I’d had was just a little nip
to take the sea-chill out of my bones. Come, now, look at me, and tell
me if I look like a thug and a drunkard!”
He stopped in the deserted road, swung the girl round toward him, and
laid his hands on her shoulders. Through the sheer thinness of her
dress he felt the warmth of her. The low-cut V of her waist tempted
him, dizzyingly, to plant a kiss there; but he held steady, and met her
questioning eyes with a look that seemed all candor.
For a long moment Laura kept silence, searching his face. Far off,
mournfully the bell-buoy sent in its blur of musical tolling across the
moving sea-floor.
“Well, Laura, do I look a ruffian?” asked Hal again, smiling.
Laura’s eyes fell.
“I’m going to believe you, Hal, whatever people say,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry it happened at all, but I suppose that’s the way of a man.
You won’t do anything like that again, though, will you?”
“No—dear! Never!”
He drew her toward him, but she shook her head and pressed him back.
Wise with understanding, from sources of deep instinct, he let her go.
But now the fires in his eyes were burning more hotly. And as they once
more started down along the road he cast on her a glance of quick and
all-inclusive desire.
Silence a minute or two. Then Hal asked:
“Laura, have you ever been up Geyser Rock?”
“No. Why?” Her look was wondering.
“Let’s go!”
“That’s pretty rough climbing for a girl, isn’t it?”
“Not for a girl like you, Laura. You can make it, all right. And the
view—oh, wonderful!” His enthusiasm quickened now that he saw her
coming to his hand. “On a clear day you can see Cape Ann, to northward,
and Cross Rip Light, to the south. See that big Norway pine right
there? That’s where the path leads in. Come on, Laura!”
“I—I don’t know—”
“Afraid?”
“Not where _you_ are, Hal, to protect me!”
He took her hand and drew her into the thick-wooded path, in under
the cool green shadows, gold-sprinkled with the magic of the sun’s
morris-dance of little elfin light-fairies. New strength seemed to
flood him. His heart, beginning to beat quickly, flushed his face with
hot blood. Something as yet unawakened, something potent, atavistic,
something that had its roots twined far into the past, surged through
his veins.
“Come on, Laura!” he repeated. “Come on, I’ll show you the way!”
* * * * *
Half an hour had passed before they stood upon the summit. They had
perhaps lingered a bit more than needful, even with so many leaves and
flowers to pick and study over; and, moreover, part of the way their
progress had been really difficult. Hal had carried her in his arms up
some of the more dangerous pitches—carried her quite as if she had
been a child. The clinging of her arms to his shoulders, the warmth and
yielding of her, the blowing of her hair across his face, the faint
perfume of her alluring femininity had kindled fires that glowed from
his eyes—eyes like the eyes of Alpheus Briggs in the old days when the
Malay girl had been his captive. Yet still the atavisms in him had been
stifled down. For Hal was sober now. And still the metes and bounds of
civilization and of law had held the boy in leash.
Thus they had reached the summit. Far up past the diving-ledge they had
made their way, and so had climbed to the little sheltered nook facing
the sky.
“I think you’re wonderful, Laura!” Hal said as he pressed aside the
bushes for her to enter the grassy sward. His voice was different now;
his whole manner had subtly altered. No longer words of college argot
came to his lips. “I think you’re really very wonderful! There’s not
another girl in this town who’d take a risk like this!”
“It’s nothing, Hal,” she answered, looking up at him in the sunshine
with a smile. “I told you before I couldn’t possibly be afraid where
you were. How _could_ I be afraid?”
“Lots of girls would be, all the same,” said he. “You’re just a wonder.
Well, now, let’s go over there to the edge. I won’t let you fall. I
want you to see the view. Just through that fringe of birches there
you’ll see it.”
With quickened breath the girl peered down through the trees, at land
and sea spread far below, while Hal’s arm held her from disaster.
Branches and twigs had pulled at her, in the ascent. Her voile dress
showed a tear or two; and all about her face the disordered hair
strayed as the sea-breeze freshened over the top of Geyser. The boy
kept silence that matched hers. A kind of vague, half-realized struggle
seemed taking place in him—a conflict between the sense of chivalry,
protecting this woman in his absolute power, and the old demon-clutch
that reached from other days and other places.
Now, though his thoughts and hers lay far apart as the world’s poles,
each felt something of the same mysterious oppression. For the first
time quite alone together, up there aloft in that snug, sun-warm nest
embowered in greenery, a kind of mystic and half-sensed languor seemed
to envelop them; a yearning that is older than old Egypt; a wonder and
a dream.
Hal’s arm tightened a very little ’round her body. She felt it tremble,
and, wondering, understood that she, too, felt a little of that tremor
in her own heart. She realized in a kind of half-sensed way that more
dangers lay here than the danger of falling from the cliff. Yet in her
soul she knew that she was glad to be there.