When distance had blotted from our ears the sound of Farallone's
laughter, and when we had humbled ourselves to the bride for allowing
her to be maltreated, I told the groom what Farallone had said about a
man who should follow the stream by which we were encamped.
"See," I said, "we have a whole day's start of him. Even he can't make
that up. We must go at once, and there mustn't be any letting up till we
get somewhere."
The groom was all for running away, and the bride, silent and white,
acquiesced with a nod. We made three light packs, and started--_bolted_
is the better word.
For a mile or more, so thick was the underwood, we walked in the bed of
the stream; now freely, where it was smooth-spread sand, and now where
it narrowed and deepened among rocks, scramblingly and with many a
splashing stumble. The bride met her various mishaps with a kind of
silent disdain; she made no complaints, not even comments. She made me
think of a sleep-walker. There was a set, far-off, cold expression upon
her usually gentle and vivacious face, and once or twice it occurred to
me that she went with us unwillingly. But when I remembered the
humiliation that Farallone had put upon her and the blows that he had
struck her, I could not well credit the recurrent doubt of her
willingness. The groom, on the other hand, recovered his long-lost
spirits with immeasurable rapidity. He talked gayly and bravely, and you
would have said that he was a man who had never had occasion to be
ashamed of himself. He went ahead, the bride following next, and he kept
giving a constant string of advices and imperatives. "That stone's
loose"; "keep to the left, there's a hole." "Splash--dash--damn, look
out for that one." Branches that hung low across our course he bent and
held back until the bride had passed. Now he turned and smiled in her
face, and now he offered her the helping hand. But she met his
courtesies, and the whole punctilious fabric of his behavior, with the
utmost absence and nonchalance. He had, it seemed, been too long in
contempt to recover soon his former position of husband and beloved. For
long days she had contemplated his naked soul, limited, weak, incapable.
He had shown a certain capacity for sudden, explosive temper, but not
for courage of any kind, or force. Nor had he played the gentleman in
his helplessness. Nor had I. We had not in us the stuff of heroes; at
first sight of instruments of torture we were of those who would confess
to anything, abjure, swear falsely, beg for mercy, change our so-called
religions--anything. The bride had learned to despise us from the bottom
of her heart. She despised us still. And I would have staked my last
dollar, or, better, my hopes of escaping from Farallone, that as man and
wife she and the groom would never live together again. I felt terribly
sorry for the groom. He had, as had I, been utterly inefficient,
helpless, babyish, and cowardly--yet the odds against us had seemed
overwhelming. But now as we journeyed down the river, and the distance
between us and Farallone grew more, I kept thinking of men whom I had
known; men physically weaker than the groom and I, who, had Farallone
offered to bully them, would have fought him and endured his torture
till they died. In my immediate past, then, there was nothing of which I
was not burningly ashamed, and in the not-too-distant future I hoped to
separate from the bride and the groom, and never see them or hear of
them in this world again. At that, I had a real affection for the bride,
a real admiration. On the yacht, before trouble showed me up, we had
bid fair to become fast and enduring friends. But that was all over--a
bud, nipped by the frost of conduct and circumstance, or ever the fruit
could so much as set. For many days now I had avoided her eye; I had
avoided addressing her; I had exerted my ingenuity to keep out of her
sight. It is a terrible thing for a man to be thrown daily into the
society of a woman who has found him out, and who despises him, mind,
soul, marrow, and bone.
The stream broke at length from the forest and, swelled by a sizable
tributary, flowed broad and deep into a rolling, park-like landscape.
Grass spread over the country's undulations and looked in the distance
like well-kept lawns; and at wide intervals splendidly grown live-oaks
lent an effect of calculated planting. Here our flight, for our muscles
were hardened to walking, became easy and swift. I think there were
hours when we must have covered our four miles, and even on long, upward
slopes we must have made better than three. There is in swift walking,
when the muscles are hard, the wind long, and the atmosphere
exhilarating, a buoyant rhythm that more, perhaps, than merited success,
or valorous conduct, smoothes out the creases in a man's soul. And so
quick is a man to recover from his own baseness, and to ape outwardly
his transient inner feelings, that I found myself presently, walking
with a high head and a mind full of martial thoughts.
All that day, except for a short halt at noon, we followed the river
across the great natural park; now paralleling its convolutions, and now
cutting diagonals. Late in the afternoon we came to the end of the park
land. A more or less precipitous formation of glistening quartz marked
its boundary, and into a fissure of this the stream, now a small river,
plunged with accelerated speed. The going became difficult. The walls of
the fissure through which the river rushed were smooth and water-worn,
impossible to ascend; and between the brink of the river and the base of
the walls were congestions of boulders, jammed drift-wood, and tangled
alder bushes. There were times when we had to crawl upon our hands and
knees, under one log and over the next. To add to our difficulties
darkness was swiftly falling, and we were glad, indeed, when the wall of
the fissure leaned at length so far from the perpendicular that we were
able to scramble up it. We found ourselves upon a levelish little meadow
of grass. In the centre of it there grew a monstrous and gigantic
live-oak, between two of whose roots there glittered a spring. On all
sides of the meadow, except on that toward the river, were
superimpending cliffs of quartz. Along the base of these was a dense
growth of bushes.
"We'll rest here," said the groom. "What a place. It's a natural
fortress. Only one way into it." He stood looking down at the noisy
river and considering the steep slope we had just climbed. "See this
boulder?" he said. "It's wobbly. If that damned longshoreman tries to
get us here, all we've got to do is to choose the psychological moment
and push it over on him."
The groom looked quite bellicose and daring. Suddenly he flung his
fragment of a cap high into the air and at the very top of his lungs
cried: "Liberty!"
The echoes answered him, and the glorious, abused word was tossed from
cliff to cliff, across the river and back, and presently died away.
At that, from the very branches of the great oak that stood in the
centre of the meadow there burst a titanic clap of laughter, and
Farallone, literally bursting with merriment, dropped lightly into our
midst.
I can only speak for myself. I was frightened--I say it deliberately and
truthfully--_almost_ into a fit. And for fully five minutes I could not
command either of my legs. The groom, I believe, screamed. The bride
became whiter than paper--then suddenly the color rushed into her
cheeks, and she laughed. She laughed until she had to sit down, until
the tears literally gushed from her eyes. It was not hysterics
either--could it have been amusement? After a while, and many prolonged
gasps and relapses, she stopped.
"This," said Farallone, "is my building site. Do you like it?"
"Oh, oh," said the bride, "I think it's the m--most am--ma--musing site
I ever saw," and she went into another uncontrollable burst of laughter.
"Oh--oh," she said at length, and her shining eyes were turned from the
groom to me, and back and forth between us, "if you _could_ have seen
your faces!"
V
It seemed strange to us, an alteration in the logical and natural, but
neither the groom nor I received corporal punishment for our attempt at
escape. Farallone had read our minds like an open book; he had, as it
were, put us up to the escapade in order to have the pure joy of
thwarting us. That we should have been drawn to his exact waiting-place
like needles to the magnet had a smack of the supernatural, but was in
reality a simple and explicable happening. For if we had not ascended to
the little meadow, Farallone, alertly watching, would have descended
from it, and surprised us at some further point. That we should have
caught no glimpse of his great bulk anywhere ahead of us in the day-long
stretch of open, park-like country was also easily explained. For
Farallone had made the most of the journey in the stream itself,
drifting with a log.
And although, as I have said, we were not to receive corporal
punishment, Farallone visited his power upon us in other ways. He would
not at first admit that we had intended to escape, but kept praising us
for having followed him so loyally and devotedly, for saving him the
trouble of a return journey, and for thinking to bring along the bulk of
our worldly possessions. Tiring at length of this, he switched to the
opposite point of view. He goaded us nearly to madness with his
criticisms of our inefficiency, and he mocked repeatedly the groom's
ill-timed cry of Liberty.
"Liberty!" he said, "you never knew, you never will know, what that
is--you miserable little pin-head. Liberty is for great natures.
'Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage.'
But the woman shall know what liberty is. If she had wanted to leave me
there was nothing to stop her. Do you think she'd have followed the
river, leaving a broad trail? Do you think she'd have walked right into
this meadow--unless she hadn't cared? Not she. Did you ask her advice,
you self-sufficiencies? Not you. You were the men-folk, you thought, and
you were to have the ordering of everything. You make me sick, the pair
of you...."
He kept us awake until far into the night with his jibes and his
laughter.
"Well," he said lastly, "good-night, girls. I'm about sick of you, and
in the morning we part company...."
At the break of dawn he waked us from heavy sleep--me with a cuff, the
groom with a kick, the bride with a feline touch upon the hair.
"And now," said he, "be off."
He caught the bride by the shoulder.
"Not _you_," he said.
"I am to stay?" she asked, as if to settle some trivial and unimportant
point.
"Do you ask?" said he; "Was man meant to live alone? This will be enough
home for us." And he turned to the groom. "Get," he said savagely.
"Mr. Farallone," said the bride--she was very white, but calm,
apparently, and collected--"you have had your joke. Let us go now, or
better, come with us. We will forget our former differences, and you
will never regret your future kindnesses."
"Don't you _want_ to stay?" exclaimed Farallone in a tone of
astonishment.
"If I did," said the bride gently, "I could not, and I would not."
"What's to stop you?" asked Farallone.
"My place is with my husband," said the bride, "whom I have sworn to
love, and to honor, and to obey."
"Woman," said Farallone, "do you love him, do you honor him?"
She pondered a moment, then held her head high.
"I do," she said.
"God bless you," cried the groom.
"Rats," said Farallone, and he laughed bitterly. "But you'll get over
it," he went on. "Let's have no more words." He turned to the groom and
to me.
"Will you climb down the cliff or shall I throw you?"
"Let us all go," said the bride, and she caught at his trembling arm,
"and I will bless you, and wish you all good things--and kiss you
good-by."
"If you go," said Farallone, and his great voice trembled, "I die. You
are everything. You know that. Would I have hit you if I hadn't loved
you so--poor little cheek!" His voice became a kind of mumble.
"Let us go," said the bride, "if you love me."
"Not _you_," said Farallone, "while I live. I would not be such a fool.
Don't you know that in a little while you'll be glad?"
"Is that your final word?" said the bride.
"It must be," said Farallone. "Are you not a gift to me from God?"
"I think you must be mad," said the bride.
"I am unalterable," said Farallone, "as God made me--I _am_. And you
are mine to take."
"Do you remember," said the bride, "what you said when you gave me the
revolver? You said that if ever I thought it best to shoot you--you
would let me do it."
"I remember," said Farallone, and he smiled.
"That was just talk, of course?" said the bride.
"It was not," said Farallone; "shoot me."
"Let us go," said the bride. Her voice faltered.
"Not you," said Farallone, "while I live."
His voice, low and gentle, had in it a kind of far-off sadness. He
turned his eyes from the bride and looked the rising sun in the face. He
turned back to her and smiled.
"You haven't the heart to shoot me," he said. "My darling."
"Let us go."
"_Let--you--go!_" He laughed. "_Send--away--my--mate!_"
His eyes clouded and became vacant. He blinked them rapidly and raised
his hand to his brow. It seemed to me that in that instant, suddenly
come and suddenly gone, I perceived a look of insanity in his face. The
bride, too, perhaps, saw something of the kind, for like a flash she had
the revolver out and cocked it.
"Splendid," cried Farallone, and his eyes blazed with a tremendous love
and admiration. "This is something like," he cried. "Two forces face to
face--a man and a bullet--love behind them both. Ah, you do love
me--don't you?"
"Let us go," said the bride. Her voice shook violently.
"Not you," said Farallone, "while I live."
He took a step toward her, his eyes dancing and smiling. "Do you know,"
he said, "I don't know if you'll do it or not. By my soul, I don't know.
This is living, this is. This is gambling. I'll do nothing violent," he
said, "until my hands are touching you. I'll move toward you slowly one
slow step at a time--with my arms open--like this--you'll have plenty of
chance to shoot me--we'll see if you'll do it."
"We shall see," said the bride.
They faced each other motionless. Then Farallone, his eyes glorious with
excitement and passion, his arms open, moved toward her one slow,
deliberate step.
"Wait," he cried suddenly. "This is too good for _them_." He jerked his
thumb toward the groom and me. "This is a sight for gods--not jackasses.
Go down to the river," he said to us. "If you hear a shot come back. If
you hear a scream--then as you value your miserable hides--get!"
We did not move.
The bride, her voice tense and high-pitched, turned to us.
"Do as you're told," she cried, "or I shall ask this man to throw you
over the cliff." She stamped her foot.
"And this man," said Farallone, "will do as he's told."
There was nothing for it. We left them alone in the meadow and descended
the cliff to the river. And there we stood for what seemed the ages of
ages, listening and trembling.
A faint, far-off detonation, followed swiftly by louder and fainter
echoes, broke suddenly upon the rushing noises of the river. We
commenced feverishly to scramble back up the cliff. Half-way to the top
we heard another shot, a second later a third, and after a longer
interval, as if to put a quietus upon some final show of life--a fourth.
A nebulous drift of smoke hung above the meadow.
Farallone lay upon his face at the bride's feet. The groom sprang to her
side and threw a trembling arm about her.
"Come away," he cried, "come away."
But the bride freed herself gently from his encircling arm, and her eyes
still bent upon Farallone----
"Not till I have buried my dead," she said.