“Give me your hand,” he said peremptorily. They were on a pebbly
spur of the descending path, and Daunt had leaped down below her. As
she stretched it out to him, he drew it sharply toward him. She felt
herself grasped firmly in his arms, swung off and lifted to the smooth
level beneath. She could feel his uneven breaths stirring in the roots
of her hair, and his wrists straining. Her head fell against his
shoulder and her look met his, startled. His sunburned face was pale,
and his gray eyes were hazed with a daring softness.
Then, as she lay passive in his arms, a fiery longing grew swiftly in
them, and he suddenly bent his head and kissed her--again and again.
She felt her unused mouth moulding to answering kisses beneath his
own, and her cheeks rushing into a flame. Through her closed lids the
sun hung like a rosy mist of woven sparkles.
“I love you!--_you!_--_you!_” he said, stammering and hoarsely. “I
_love_ you!”
The tumbling passion of the utterance pierced through her like a spear
of desperate gladness. Every nerve reached and quivered, tendril-like.
His deep breathing, toned with the dripping lap of the shingle seemed
to throb through her. She lay quiet, breathless, her lashes drooped,
her very skin tense under the lasting burn of his lips.
“Margaret! Ardee, dear! Look at me!”
Her eyes flowed into his. From a blur under cloud-pale eyelids, they
had turned to violet balls, shot through with a trembling light. The
look she gave him melted over him in a rage of love. Desire bordered
it, a smile dipped in it, promise made it golden, and he saw his own
longing painted in it as a pilgrim sees his reflection in a slumbering
pool.
She clasped her hands on his head, pushing back his cloth cap, and
framing his face in the long, sweeping oval of her arms. He could
feel little vibrant thrills in her fingers. He held her tightly,
masterfully, first at arm’s length, laughing into her wide eyes, and
then close, folding her, pressing her hair with his hands.
The leaves from the roses she wore fell in splotches of deep red,
sprinkling the brown-veined sand at their feet; the dense, bruised
odor, mixed with the salty breath of seaweed, seemed to fill and choke
all her swaying senses.
“It is like a storm!” she said. “I have dreamed of it coming at the
last gently, like a bright morning, but it isn’t like that! It seemed
as if that were the way it would come to me--like a still, small
voice--but it isn’t! It’s the wind and the earthquake and the fire!
Oh!” she said, drawing her breath in a long, shuddering inhalation.
“Do you smell that rose-scent? Did ever any roses smell like that?
They--they make me dizzy! Feel me tremble.”
Every pulsation of her frame ran through him with a swift, delicious
sensation, like the touching of rough velvet. Her curling hair, where
it sprang against his neck, ridged his skin with a creeping delight.
“Do you know,” he said, “you are like a great, tall, yellow lily.
Some gnome has drawn amber streaks in your hair--it shines like a
gold-stone--and rubbed your cheeks with a pink tulip leaf! And your
lips are like--no, they are like nothing but ripe strawberries! Nobody
could ever describe your eyes; they are most like a bed of purple
violets set in a brown cloud with the sun shining through it. Tell me!”
he said suddenly. “Do you love me? Do you? Do you?”
“Yes! yes! yes! Oh,” she breathed, “what is there in your hands? I want
them to touch me!”
He passed his palms lightly along the bow-like curve of her cheek.
“It is like fire and flowers and music,” she said, “all rolled into
one. And those roses! They are attar. The sand looks as if it were
bleeding!”
“Shall you think of me when I am on the train to-night?”
“All the time--every minute!”
“And to-morrow, while I am in the city?”
“Yes!”
“And Monday?”
“Then you will come back to me!”
He strained her to him in the white sunlight, and kissed her again, on
the lips and forehead and hands, and she clung to him, lifting her face
to him eagerly and passionately.
* * * * *
Margaret stood watching the firm-knit figure as it crossed the sand
space. She saw the lift of his lithe shoulders as he pulled himself up
the bank, saw his form splashed against the sky, saw the flutter of his
handkerchief as he flung her a last signal.
She waved her hand in return, and he disappeared.
Then she ran to a slant spile rising lonely from the sand, and sank
down quivering. It seemed to her as if she could bear no more joy; her
body ached with it. She threw up her hands and laughed aloud in sheer
ecstasy.
Then she remembered that she had left her book in the grove, and she
stumbled up and walked back slowly, smiling and humming an air as she
went along.
The first shade of the dimming afternoon lay under the trees as
she climbed again to the little clearing, and the sunbeams glanced
obliquely from the crooked oak branches. The air was very still and
freighted only with the soft swish of the ebb-tide and the clean
fragrance of balsam. Her book lay open and face down on the plank seat.
She picked it up and sat down, leaning back.
She was still humming, low-voiced, and as she sat she began to
sing--not strongly, but hushed, as though for a drowsy ear--with her
face lifted and her dreamy eyes upon the sea margin.
“Purple flower and soaring lark,
Throbbing song and story bold,
All must pass into the dark,
Die and mingle with the mold.
Ah, but still your face I see!
Bend and clasp me; Sweet, kiss me!”
It was Daunt’s song, the one he most loved to hear her sing. But to-day
it had a new, rich meaning. She stretched her hands on either side,
grasping the seat, and sang on to the bending boughs, rubbing slowly
against the weather-stained beam arms above her head:
“Dear, to-day shall never rust!
What, are we to be o’erwise?
All that doth not smell of dust
Lieth in your lips and eyes.
So, while loving yet may be,
Bend and fold me; Sweet, kiss me!”
The shade grew darker as she sat. It deepened the brown of her eyes
and the sea-bloom in her cheeks, and the loitering lilac of the
west touched the coils of her hair, as they lay against the gray
board, blotting with their living bronze the half-effaced, forgotten
inscription:
_Pray for Her Soul._