Hearts of Three 47

Hearts of Three 47

“Would you prefer me dishonorable?” he was swift on the uptake.

 

“I am only a woman who loves,” she pleaded.

 

“You are a stinging, female wasp,” he raged, “and you are not fair.”

 

“Is any woman fair when she loves?” she made the great confession and

acknowledgment. “Men may succeed in living in their heads of honor; but

know, and as a humble woman I humbly state my womanhood, that woman

lives only in her heart of love.”

 

“Perhaps you are right. Honor, like arithmetic, can be reasoned and

calculated. Which leaves a woman no morality, but only ...”

 

“Only moods,” Leoncia completed abjectly for him.

 

Calls from Henry and the Queen put an end to the conversation, for

Leoncia and Francis quickly joined the others in gazing at the great

web.

 

“Did you ever see so monstrous a web!” Leoncia exclaimed.

 

“I’d like to see the monster that made it,” said Henry.

 

“And I’d rather see than be it,” Francis paraphrased from the “Purple

Cow.”

 

“It is our good fortune that we do not have to go that way,” the Queen

said.

 

All looked inquiry at her, and she pointed down to the stream.

 

“That is the way,” she said. “I know it. Often and often, in my Mirror

of the World, have I seen the way. When my mother died and was buried in

the whirlpool, I followed her body in the Mirror, and I saw it come to

this place and go by this place still in the water.”

 

“But she was dead,” Leoncia objected quickly.

 

The rivalry between them fanned instantly.

 

“One of my spearmen,” the Queen went on quietly, “a handsome youth,

alas, dared to look at me as a lover. He was flung in alive. I watched

him, too, in the Mirror. When he came to this place he climbed out. I

saw him crawl under the web to the day, and I saw him retreat backward

from the day and throw himself into the stream.”

 

“Another dead one,” Henry commented grimly.

 

“No; for I followed him on in the Mirror, and though all was darkness

for a time and I could see nothing, in the end, and shortly, under the

sun he emerged into the bosom of a large river, and swam to the shore,

and climbed the bank——it was the left hand bank as I remember well——and

disappeared among large trees such as do not grow in the Valley of the

Lost Souls.”

 

But, like Torres, the rest of them recoiled from thought of the dark

plunge through the living rock.

 

“These are the bones of animals and of men,” the Queen warned, “who were

daunted by the way of the water and who strove to gain the sun. Men

there are there——behold! Or at least what remains of them for a space,

the bones, ere, in time, the bones, too, pass into nothingness.”

 

“Even so,” said Francis, “I suddenly discover a pressing need to look

into the eye of the sun. Do the rest of you remain here while I

investigate.”

 

Drawing his automatic, the water-tightness of the cartridges a

guarantee, he crawled under the web. The moment he had disappeared from

view beyond the web, they heard him begin to shoot. Next, they saw him

retreating backward, still shooting. And, next, falling upon him, two

yards across from black-haired leg-tip to black-haired leg-tip, the

denizen of the web, a monstrous spider, still wriggling with departing

life, shot through and through again and again. The solid center of its

body, from which the legs radiated, was the size of a normal

waste-basket, and the substantial density of it crunched audibly as it

struck on Francis’ shoulders and back, rebounded, the hairy legs still

helplessly quivering, and pitched down into the wave-crisping water. All

four pair of eyes watched the corpse of it plunge against the wall of

rock, suck down, and disappear.

 

“Where there’s one, there are two,” said Henry, looking dubiously up

toward the daylight.

 

“It is the only way,” said the Queen. “Come, my husband, each in the

other’s arms let us win through the darkness to the sun-bright world.

Remember, I have never seen it, and soon, with you, shall I for the

first time see it.”

 

Her arms open in invitation, Francis could not decline.

 

“It is a hole in the sheer wall of a precipice a thousand feet deep,” he

explained to the others the glimpse he had caught from beyond the spider

web, as he clasped the Queen in his arms and leaped off.

 

Henry had gathered Leoncia to him and was about to leap, when she

stopped him.

 

“Why did you accept Francis’ sacrifice?” she demanded.

 

“Because ...” He paused and looked at her wonderingly.

 

“Because I wanted you,” he completed. “Because I was engaged to you as

well, while Francis was unattached. Besides, if I’m not greatly

mistaken, Francis appears to be a pretty well satisfied bridegroom.”

 

“No,” she shook her head emphatically. “He has a chivalrous spirit, and

he is acting his part in order not to hurt her feelings.”

 

“Oh, I don’t know. Remember, before the altar, at the Long House, when I

said I was going to ask the Queen to marry me, that he bragged she

wouldn’t marry me if I did ask? Well, the conclusion’s pretty obvious

that he wanted her himself. And why shouldn’t he? He’s a bachelor. And

she’s some nice woman herself.”

 

But Leoncia scarcely heard. With a quick movement, leaning back in his

arms away from him so that she could look him squarely in the eyes, she

demanded:

 

“How do you love me? Do you love me madly? Do you love me badly madly?

Do I mean that to you, and more, and more, and more?”

 

He could only look his bewilderment.

 

“Do you?—do you?” she urged passionately.

 

“Of course I do,” he made slow answer, “but it would never have entered

my head to describe it that way. Why, you’re the one woman for me.

Rather would I describe it as loving you deeply, and greatly, and

enduringly. Why, you seem so much a part of me that I feel almost as if

I had always known you. It was that way from the first.”

 

“She is an abominable woman!” Leoncia broke forth irrelevantly. “I hated

her from the first.”

 

“My! What a spitfire! I hate to think how much you would have hated her

had I married her instead of Francis.”

 

“We’d better follow them,” she put an end to the discussion.

 

And Henry, very much be-puzzled, clasped her tightly and leaped off into

the white turmoil of water.

 

* * * * *

 

On the bank of the Gualaca River sat two Indian girls fishing. Just

up-stream from them arose the precipitous cliff of one of the buttresses

of the lofty mountains. The main stream flowed past in chocolate-colored

spate; but, directly beneath them, where they fished, was a quiet eddy.

No less quiet was the fishing. No bites jerked their rods in token that

the bait was enticing. One of them, Nicoya, yawned, ate a banana, yawned

again, and held the skin she was about to cast aside suspended in her

hand.

 

“We have been very quiet, Concordia,” she observed to her companion,

“and it has won us no fish. Now shall I make a noise and a splash. Since

they say ‘what goes up must come down,’ why should not something come up

after something has gone down? I am going to try. There!”

 

She threw the banana peel into the water and lazily watched the point

where it had struck.

 

“If anything comes up I hope it will be big,” Concordia murmured with

equal laziness.

 

And upon their astonished gaze, even as they looked, arose up out of the

brown depths a great white hound. They jerked their poles up and behind

them on the bank, threw their arms about each other, and watched the

hound gain the shore at the lower end of the eddy, climb the sloping

bank, pause to shake himself, and then disappear among the trees.

 

Nicoya and Concordia giggled.

 

“Try it again,” Concordia urged.

 

“No; you this time. And see what you can bring up.”

 

Quite unbelieving, Concordia tossed in a clod of earth. And almost

immediately a helmeted head arose on the flood. Clutching each other

very tightly, they watched the man under the helmet gain the shore where

the hound had landed and disappear into the forest.

 

Again the two Indian girls giggled; but this time, urge as they would,

neither could raise the courage to throw anything into the water.

 

Some time later, still giggling over the strange occurrences, they were

espied by two young Indian men, who were hugging the bank as they

paddled their canoe up against the stream.

 

“What makes you laugh,” one of them greeted.

 

“We have been seeing things,” Nicoya gurgled down to them.