Cursed

Hal Briggs had little thought of trouble as he strode away in search of Laura. Very hot was his blood as he swung down the shaded street toward the house of Nathaniel Maynard, father of the girl. Some of the good folk frowned and were silent as he greeted them, but others had to smile and raise a hand of recognition. Still at some distance from Laura’s house, the boy caught sight of a creamy-toned voile dress among the hollyhocks in the side yard. He whistled, waved his hand, hurried his pace. And something leaped within him, so that his heart beat up a little thickly, as the girl waved an answering hand.

Another look came to his eyes. Another light began to burn in their blue depths.

“Geyser Rock!” he whispered. “By God, the very place!”

Geyser Rock boldly fronts the unbroken sweep of the sea at Thunder Head. Up it leaps, sheer two hundred feet, from great deeps. Fifty feet from the barnacle-crusted line of high-tide a ledgelike path leads to the face of the cliff. From this ledge Hal often took the plunge that had won him local fame – a plunge into frothing surf that even in the calmest of midsummer days was never still.

Few visitors ever struggle up through sumacs, brakes and undergrowth, to gain the vantage-point of the pinnacle. Rolling boulders, slippery ledge and dizzying overlook upon the shining sea deter all but the hardy. The very solitude of the place had greatly endeared it to Hal. To him it was often a solace and a comfort after his strange fits of rage and viciousness.

All alone, up in that isolated height, he had passed long hours reading, smoking, musing in the tiny patch of grass there under the canopy of the white-birches’ filigree of green, or under the huge pine that carpeted the north slope of the crest with odorous, russet spills. Some of his happiest hours had been spent on the summit, through the tree-tops watching sky-shepherds tend their flocks across the pastures infinitely far and blue above him.

Strangely secluded was the top of Geyser Rock. Though it lay hardly a pistol-shot from the main coast-road, it seemed almost as isolated as if it had been down among the Celebes.

For that reason Hal loved it best of all, with its grasses, flowers, ferns and tangled thickets, its rock-ridges filigreed with silvery lichens or sparkling with white quartz-crystals. From this aerie Hal could glimpse a bit of the village; the prim church spire; the tiny, far gravestones sleeping on Croft Hill. The solitude of this, his own domain by right of conquest, had grown ever more dear and needful to him as he had advanced toward manhood.

Such was the place toward which Laura and he were now walking along the road, with tilled fields and rock-bossed rolling hills to right of them; and, to their left, the restless flashings of the sea.

Laura had never been more charming. Her happiness in his return had flushed her cheeks with color and had brightened her eyes – thoughtful, deep, loyal eyes – till they looked clear and fresh as summer skies after rain.

Everything wholesome and glad seemed joined in Laura; her health and spirits were like the morning breeze itself that came to court the land, from the golden sparklings that stretched away to the shadowed, purple rim of the ocean. The June within her heart mirrored itself through her face, reflecting the June that overbrooded earth and sea and sky.

Hal sensed all this and more, as with critical keenness he looked down at her, walking beside him. He noted the wind-blown hair that shaded her eyes; he saw the health and vigor of that lithe, firm-breasted young body of hers. His look, brooding, glowed evilly. Fifty years ago thus had his grandsire’s eyes kindled at sight of Kuala Pahang in her tight little Malay jacket. And as if words from the past had audibly echoed from some vibrant chord in the old-time captain’s symphony of desire, once more the thought formed in his brain:

“She’s mine, the girl is! She’s plump as a young porpoise, and, by God, I’m going to have her!”

The words he uttered, though, were far afield from these. He was saying:

“So now, Laura, you see I wasn’t really to blame, after all. ‘A lie runs round the world, while truth is getting on its sandals.’ That proverb’s as true here as in Siam, where it originated. People are saying I was drunk and brutal, and all that, when the fact is – ”

“I know, Hal,” she answered, her eyes troubled. “I know how this country gossip exaggerates. But, even so, did you do right in beating Captain McLaughlin as you did?”

“It was the only thing I could do, Laura!” he protested. “The bully tried to humiliate me. I – I just licked him, that’s all. You wouldn’t want me to be a milksop, would you?”

“No, not that, Hal. But a fair fight is one thing and brutality is another. And then, too, they say you’d been drinking.”

He laughed and slid his hand about her arm.

“I give you my word of honor, Laura, all I’d had was just a little nip to take the sea-chill out of my bones. Come, now, look at me, and tell me if I look like a thug and a drunkard!”

He stopped in the deserted road, swung the girl round toward him, and laid his hands on her shoulders. Through the sheer thinness of her dress he felt the warmth of her. The low-cut V of her waist tempted him, dizzyingly, to plant a kiss there; but he held steady, and met her questioning eyes with a look that seemed all candor.

For a long moment Laura kept silence, searching his face. Far off, mournfully the bell-buoy sent in its blur of musical tolling across the moving sea-floor.

“Well, Laura, do I look a ruffian?” asked Hal again, smiling.

Laura’s eyes fell.

“I’m going to believe you, Hal, whatever people say,” she whispered. “I’m sorry it happened at all, but I suppose that’s the way of a man. You won’t do anything like that again, though, will you?”

“No – dear! Never!”

He drew her toward him, but she shook her head and pressed him back. Wise with understanding, from sources of deep instinct, he let her go. But now the fires in his eyes were burning more hotly. And as they once more started down along the road he cast on her a glance of quick and all-inclusive desire.

Silence a minute or two. Then Hal asked:

“Laura, have you ever been up Geyser Rock?”

“No. Why?” Her look was wondering.

“Let’s go!”

“That’s pretty rough climbing for a girl, isn’t it?”

“Not for a girl like you, Laura. You can make it, all right. And the view – oh, wonderful!” His enthusiasm quickened now that he saw her coming to his hand. “On a clear day you can see Cape Ann, to northward, and Cross Rip Light, to the south. See that big Norway pine right there? That’s where the path leads in. Come on, Laura!”

“I – I don’t know – ”

“Afraid?”

“Not where you are, Hal, to protect me!”

He took her hand and drew her into the thick-wooded path, in under the cool green shadows, gold-sprinkled with the magic of the sun’s morris-dance of little elfin light-fairies. New strength seemed to flood him. His heart, beginning to beat quickly, flushed his face with hot blood. Something as yet unawakened, something potent, atavistic, something that had its roots twined far into the past, surged through his veins.

“Come on, Laura!” he repeated. “Come on, I’ll show you the way!”

Half an hour had passed before they stood upon the summit. They had perhaps lingered a bit more than needful, even with so many leaves and flowers to pick and study over; and, moreover, part of the way their progress had been really difficult. Hal had carried her in his arms up some of the more dangerous pitches – carried her quite as if she had been a child. The clinging of her arms to his shoulders, the warmth and yielding of her, the blowing of her hair across his face, the faint perfume of her alluring femininity had kindled fires that glowed from his eyes – eyes like the eyes of Alpheus Briggs in the old days when the Malay girl had been his captive. Yet still the atavisms in him had been stifled down. For Hal was sober now. And still the metes and bounds of civilization and of law had held the boy in leash.

Thus they had reached the summit. Far up past the diving-ledge they had made their way, and so had climbed to the little sheltered nook facing the sky.

“I think you’re wonderful, Laura!” Hal said as he pressed aside the bushes for her to enter the grassy sward. His voice was different now; his whole manner had subtly altered. No longer words of college argot came to his lips. “I think you’re really very wonderful! There’s not another girl in this town who’d take a risk like this!”

“It’s nothing, Hal,” she answered, looking up at him in the sunshine with a smile. “I told you before I couldn’t possibly be afraid where you were. How could I be afraid?”

“Lots of girls would be, all the same,” said he. “You’re just a wonder. Well, now, let’s go over there to the edge. I won’t let you fall. I want you to see the view. Just through that fringe of birches there you’ll see it.”

With quickened breath the girl peered down through the trees, at land and sea spread far below, while Hal’s arm held her from disaster. Branches and twigs had pulled at her, in the ascent. Her voile dress showed a tear or two; and all about her face the disordered hair strayed as the sea-breeze freshened over the top of Geyser. The boy kept silence that matched hers. A kind of vague, half-realized struggle seemed taking place in him – a conflict between the sense of chivalry, protecting this woman in his absolute power, and the old demon-clutch that reached from other days and other places.

Now, though his thoughts and hers lay far apart as the world’s poles, each felt something of the same mysterious oppression. For the first time quite alone together, up there aloft in that snug, sun-warm nest embowered in greenery, a kind of mystic and half-sensed languor seemed to envelop them; a yearning that is older than old Egypt; a wonder and a dream.

Hal’s arm tightened a very little ’round her body. She felt it tremble, and, wondering, understood that she, too, felt a little of that tremor in her own heart. She realized in a kind of half-sensed way that more dangers lay here than the danger of falling from the cliff. Yet in her soul she knew that she was glad to be there.

CHAPTER XXVIII

LAURA UNDERSTANDS

Thus she remained, holding to a silver birch, leaning out a little toward the chasm. Up from the depths echoed a gurgling roar as the white fury drenched and belabored the gray, sheer wall, then fell back, hissing.

For a moment Laura peered down, held by the boy’s encircling arm. She looked abroad upon the sun-shining waters flecked with far, white boats and smudged with steamer-smoke. Then she breathed deep and lifted up her face toward the gold filigree of sun and leaf, and sighed: