The Web of the Golden Spider

She led the pace, he falling back to keep with her instead of dragging her on. So they ran until they were breathless. Then as before they moved a-tiptoe.

They knew the little door when they reached it.

“I must break it in again,” he said.

So she stood back while he threw his weight against it, meeting it with his shoulders. She watched him with a thrill–her heart leaping with every thud of his body against the wood. It was her man forcing a path for her,–her man beating down a barrier. She felt the sting of the wind-driven spray against her cheek, but the depths from which it came no longer called to her. Rather they drove her in. She was content to be here with her man. Life opened big to her from just where she stood.

The door gave finally, as she knew it must, and hand in hand they entered the paved yard. He fastened the door behind them and yet as he put the joist in place, it was not as it was before. There was no one in pursuit now. She found herself, however, as anxious to see his face and learn what this meant to him as she had been the first time. For after all, even if it were different, it was just as new and unpathed a world they were entering as the other. She took his hand.

“Stoop nearer to me, David.”

She saw that his lips were less tense, that there was less of a strain to his shoulders, but that his eyes burned no less brightly.

“Come,” she said.

He went in through the window and opened the door for her. The house smelled just as musty as before, but there was less thrill to the dark. They lighted a bit of candle and made their way along the lower hall, up the broad stairs and so into the very room where they had stood a few months before. There were no strange creakings now, no half-guessed movements among the curtains, no swift-gliding shadows more felt than seen. There were no such vast spaces above, and no uncertain alleys of dark. They were among the known things, the certain, the sure.

He found kindling and lighted the fire. It flared up briskly and threw flickering rays into the big room. The two pressed close to it, for their clothes were wet. Not a thing was altered in the room and yet it was a different room. The room was now a part of this house, the house was part of the street, the street was part of the city, the city part of the man-made world. For a moment the walls pressed in upon them as the hotel walls had done, and the ceilings shut out the stars. Then he turned and met her eyes. They were clear now–unshadowed by doubt, fear, or question. He knew what it meant,–at length she was altogether out of the web. It was odd but he had never kissed her lips. He had waited for this.

She looked up at him and as she looked, she seemed to sink deeper than ever into the golden, misty region which lay below the outer dark of his eyes. She felt a tingling warmth suffuse her whole body; she felt the room about her quicken to new life; and above her head she knew the stars were shining again. She came into his arms putting her hands upon his shoulder, throwing back her head with half-closed eyes. He stooped, his lips brushed her lips; then met firmly in a clinging kiss which set the world about them into a mad riot.