“Oh, Allan, when I’m so much in earnest, how can you?”
“Well, what’s the trouble, sweetheart?”
“When the storm ends you’re going to leave me again! I wish—I almost wish it would rain forever!”
He made no answer, and she, as one who sees strange and sad visions, gazed into the leaping flames, and in her deep gray eyes lay tears unshed.
“Sing to me!” he murmured presently.
Stroking his head and brow, she sang as aforetime at the bungalow upon the Hudson:
The third trip was made in safety, and others after it, and steadily the colony took shape and growth.
More and more the caves came to be occupied. Stern set the Merucaans to work excavating the limestone, piercing tunnels and chimneys, making passageways and preparing for the ever-increasing number of settlers.
Their native arts and crafts began to flourish. In the gloomy recesses fires glowed hot. Ores began to be smelted, with primitive bellows and technique as in the Under-world, and through the night—stillness sounded the ring and clangor of anvils mightily smitten.
Palm-fibers yielded cordage for more nets or finer thread for the looms that now began to clack—for at last some few women had arrived, and even a couple of the strong, pale children, who had traveled stowed in crates like the water-fowl.
By night the pool and river gleamed more and more brightly. Boats navigated even the rapids, for these were hardy water-people, whose whole life had been semi-aquatic.
The strange fowl nested in the cliff below the settlement, hiding by day, flying abroad by night, swimming and diving in the river, even rearing their broods of squawking, naked little monsters in rough nests of twigs and mud.
Some of the hardier of the first-arrived colonists had already—far sooner than Allan had hoped—begun to tolerate a little daylight.
Following his original idea, he prepared some sets of brown mica eye-shields, and by the aid of these a number of the Merucaans were able to endure an hour or two of early dawn and late evening in the open air.
The children, he found, were far less sensitive to light than the adults—a natural sequence of the atavistic principle well known to all biologists.
He hoped that in a year or so many of the Folk might even bear the noon-day sun. Once he could get them to working with him by daylight his progress would leap forward mightily in many lines of activity that he had planned.
An occasional short raid with the Pauillac had stocked the colony with firearms, chemicals and necessary drugs, cutlery, ammunition and some glassware, from the dismantled cities of Nashville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and other places unidentified.
Allan foresaw almost infinite possibilities in these raids. Civilization he felt, would surge onward with amazing rapidity fostered by this detritus of the distant past.
He also unearthed and brought back to Settlement Cliffs the phonographs and records, sealed in their oiled canvas and hidden in the rock-cleft near the patriarch’s grave.
Thereafter of an evening the voices of other days sang in the cave. Around the entrance, now protected by stout and ample timber doors, gathered an eager, wondering, fascinated group, understanding the universal appeal of harmony, softened and humanized by the music of the world that was. And thus, too, was the education of the Folk making giant strides
Progress, tremendous progress, toward the goal!
Autumn came down the world, and the sun paled a little as it sank to southward in the heavens. Warmth and luxuriant fertility, fecundity without parallel, still pervaded the earth, but a certain change had even so become well marked. Slowly the year was dying, that another might be born.
It was of a glorious purple evening late in October that Allan made the great discovery.
He had come in from working with two or three of the hardier Folk on the temporary hangar he was building for the Pauillac on Newport Heights, to which a broad and well-graded roadway now extended through the jungle.
Entering the home-cave suddenly—and it was home now indeed, with its broad stone fireplace, its comfortable furnishings, its furs, its mats of clean, sweet-smelling rushes—he stopped, toil-worn and weary, to view the well-loved place.
“Well, little wife! Busy, as usual? Always busy, sweetheart?”
At his greeting Beatrice looked up as though startled. She was sitting in a low easy-chair he had made for her of split bamboos cleverly lashed and softly cushioned.
At her left hand, on the palm-wood table, stood a heavy bronze lamp from some forgotten millionaire’s palace in Atlanta. Its soft radiance illumined her face in profile, making a wondrous aureole of her clustered hair, as in old paintings of the Madonna at the Annunciation.
A presage gripped the man’s heart, drawing powerfully at its strings with pain, yet with delicious hope and joy as she turned toward him.
For something in her face, some new, beatified, maternal loveliness, not to be analyzed or understood, betrayed her wondrous secret.
With a little gasp, she dropped into her lap the bit of needlework and sought to hide it with her hands—a gesture wholly girlish yet—to hide and guard it with those hands, so useful and beautiful, so precious and so dearly loved.
But Allan, breathing hard and deep, strode to her, his face aflame with hope and adoration. He caught them up together in the gentle strength of his rough hands and pressed them to his heart.
Beside her he knelt silently; he encircled her with his right arm. Then he took up the tiny garment, smiling.
For a long minute their eyes met.
His brimmed with sudden tears. Hers fell, and her head drooped down upon his breast, and—as once before, at the cathedral—an eloquent tide of crimson mounted from breast to throat, from cheek to tendrilled hair.
About his neck her arms slid, trembled, tightened.
No word was uttered there under the golden lamp-glow; but the strong kiss he pressed, reverently, proudly, upon her brow, renewed with ten-time depth their eternal sacrament of love.
CHAPTER XIX. THE MASTER OF HIS RACE
DAYS, busy days, lengthened into weeks, and these to months happy and full of labor; and in the ever-growing colony progress and change came steadily forward.
All along the cliff-face and the terraces the cave-dwellings now extended, and the smoke from a score of chimneys fashioned among the clefts rose on the temperate air of that sub-tropic winter.
At the doors, nets hung drying. On the pool, boats were anchored at several well-built stone wharfs. The terraces had been walled with palisades on their outer edge and smooth roadways fashioned, leading to all the dwellings as well as to the river below.
On top of the cliff and about three hundred yards back from the edge another palisade had been built of stout timbers set firmly in the earth, interlaced with cordage and propped with strong braces.
The enclosed space, bounded to east and west by the barrier which swung toward and touched the canon, had all been cleared, save for a few palms and fern-trees left for shade.
Beside drying-frames for fish and game and a well-smoothed plaza for public assemblies and the giving of the Law, it now contained Stern’s permanent hangar. The Pauillac had been brought along the road from Newport Heights and housed there.
This road passed through strong gates of hewn planks hinged with well-wrought ironwork forged by some of the Folk under the direction of H’yemba, the smith. For H’yemba, be it known, had been brought up by Stern early in December.
The man was essential to progress, for none knew so well as he the arts of smelting and of metal-work. Stern still felt suspicious of him, but by no word or act did the smith now betray any rebellious spirit, any animosity, or aught but faithful service.