In vain she called, commanded, pleaded, explained, entreated. No answer. The white barbarians, all banded against her now, had shut themselves up with their wounded and their dying, to wait their destiny alone.
How many were already dead? How many might yet be saved, who would die without her help? She could not tell. The uncertainty maddened her.
“If they den up, that way,” she said, “pestilence may break out among them and all may die! And then what? If I’m left all alone in the wilderness with Gesafam and the boy—what then?”
The thought was too horrible for contemplation. So many blows had crashed home to her soul the past week—even the past few hours—that the girl felt numbed and dazed as in a nightmare.
It was, it must be, all some frightful unreality—Allan’s absence, the avalanche, H’yemba’s attack, and this widespread, silent defiance of her power.
Only a few days before Allan had been there with her—strong, vigorous, confident.
Authority had been supreme. Labor, content, prosperity had reigned. Health and life and vigor had been everywhere. On the horizon of existence no cloud; none over the sun of progress.
And now, suddenly—annihilation!
With a groan that was a sob, her face drawn and pale, eyes fixed and unseeing, Beatrice turned back up the terrace path, back up the steep, toward the only door still at her command—Hope Villa.
Back toward the only one of these strange Folk still loyal; back toward her child.
Her head felt strangely giddy. The depths at her left hand, below the parapet of stone, seemed to be calling—calling insistently. Before her sight something like a veil was drawn; and yet it was not a veil, but a peculiar haze, now and then intershot with sparkles of pale light.
Through her mind flittered for the first time something like an adequate realization of the vast, abysmal gulf in culture-status still yawning between these barbarians and Allan and herself.
“Civilization,” she stammered in an odd voice; “why that means—generations!”
All at once she wondered if she were going to faint. A sudden pain had stabbed her temples; a humming had attacked her ears.
She put out her hand against the rock wall of the cliff at the right to steady herself. Her mouth felt hot and very dry.
“I—I must get back home,” she said weakly. “I’m not at all well—this morning. Overexertion—”
Painfully she began to climb the stepped path toward the upper level and Cliff Villa. And again it seemed to her the depths were calling; but now she felt positive she heard a voice—a voice she knew but could not exactly place—a hail very far away yet near—all very strange, unreal and terrifying.
“Oh—am I going to be ill?” she panted. “No, no! I mustn’t! For the boy’s sake, I mustn’t! I can’t!”
With a tremendous effort, now crawling rather than walking—for her knees were as water—the girl dragged herself up the path almost to her doorway.
Again she heard the call, this time no hallucination, but reality.
“Beatrice! Beatrice!” the voice was shouting. “O-he! Beatrice!”
His hail! Allan’s!
Her heart stopped, a long minute, and then, leaping with joy, a very anguish of revulsion from long pain, thrashed terribly in her breast.
Gasping with emotion, burned with the first sudden onset of a consuming fever, half-blind, shivering, parched and in agony, the girl made a tremendous effort to hear, to see, to understand.
“Allan! Allan!” she shouted wildly. “Where are you? Where?”
“Beatrice! Here! On the bridge! I’m coming!”
She turned her dimming eyes toward the suspension bridge hung high above the swift and lashing rapids of New Hope River—the bridge, a cobweb-strand in space, across the chasm.
There it seemed to her, though now she could be sure of nothing, so strangely did the earth and sky and cliffs, the bridge, the jungle, all dance and interplay—there, it seemed, she saw a moving figure.
Disheveled, torn, almost naked, lame and slow, yet with something still of power and command in its bearing, this figure was advancing over the swaying path of bamboo-rods lashed to the cables of twisted fiber.
Now it halted as in exhaustion and great pain; now, once more, it struggled forward, limping, foot by foot; crawling, hanging fast to the ropes like some great insect meshed in the wind-swung filaments.
She saw it, and she knew the truth at last.
“Allan! Allan—come quick! Help me—help!”
Then she collapsed. At her door she fell. All things blent and swirled, faded, darkened.
She knew no more.
CHAPTER XXIV. THE BOY IS GONE!
THE man, weak, wounded, racked with exhaustion from the terrible ordeal of the past days, felt fresh vigor leap through his spent veins at sight of her distress, afar.
He broke into a strange, limping run across the slight and shaking bridge; and as he ran he called to her, words of cheer and greeting, words of encouragement and love.
But when, having penetrated the palisaded area and stumbled down the terraces, he reached her side, he stopped short, shaking, speechless, with wide and terror-stricken eyes.
“Beatrice! Beta! My God, what’s—what’s happened here?” he stammered, kneeling beside her, raising her in his weakened arms, covering her pallid face with kisses, chafing her throat, her temples, her hands.
The girl gave no sign of returning consciousness. Allan stared about him, sensing a great and devastating change since his departure, but as yet unable to comprehend its nature.
Giddy himself with loss of blood and terrible fatigues, he hardly more than half saw what lay before him; yet he knew catastrophe had befallen Settlement Cliffs.
The river now foamed through strange new obstructions. A whole section of the cliff was gone. No sign of life at all was to be seen anywhere down the terraces or paths.
None of the Folk, their blinking eyes shielded by their mica glasses from the morning sun, were drying fish or fruit at the frames.
The nets hung brown, and stiff, and dry; they should, at this hour, have been limp and wet, from the night’s fishing. The life of the colony, he knew, had suddenly and for some incomprehensible reason stopped, as a watch stops when the spring is broken.
And, worse than all, here Beatrice now lay in his arms, stricken by some strange malady. He could not know the cause—the sleepless nights, the terrible toil, the shattering nervous strain of catastrophe, of nursing, of the swift rebellion.
But he saw plainly now, the girl was burning with fever. And, raising his face to heaven, he uttered a cry, half a groan, half a sob—the cry of a soul racked too long upon the torture-wheel of fate.
“But—but where’s the boy?” he asked himself, striving to recover his self-control; trying to understand, to act, to save. “What’s happened here? God knows! An earthquake? Disaster, at any rate! Beatrice! Oh, my Beta! Speak to me!”
Unable to solve any of the terrible problems now beating in upon him, he raised her still higher in his arms.
Loudly he shouted for help down the terrace, calling on his Folk to show themselves; to come to him and to obey.
But though the shattered cliff rang with his commands, no one appeared. In all seeming as deserted and as void of human life as on the first day he and Beta had set foot there, the canon brooded under the morning sun, and for all answer rose only the foaming tumult of the rapids far below.
“Merciful Heavens, I’ve got to do something!” cried Allan, forgetting his own lacerations and his pain, in this supreme crisis. “She—she’s sick! She’s got a fever! I’ve got to put her to bed anyhow! After that we’ll see!”
With a strength he knew not lay now in his wasted arms, he lifted her bodily and carried her to the door of Cliff Villa, their home among the massive buttresses of rock.