CHAPTER II
ARISTIDE DESSALINES
I WILL pole you down to the old milldam," said Giles, "and then you can get out and walk along the edge of the slide and try a cast into the pool below. I have taken some nice ones from there when the water is high, as it is just now. You see, they get close under the bank on the west side, because there is such a rush of water coming down that it makes an eddy where they get shelter."
"How can we get back?" asked Virginia. "Surely you can't pole against such a strong current."
"I could," replied Giles, "but it would take too long. We will leave the punt down there and walk back across the meadows. It's not much over a mile, because, you see, the river winds."
He placed the pole against the end of the little jetty and with a powerful shove sent the punt well out into the stream which, swollen by the recent heavy rains, was transformed from its peaceful, gentle-flowing quiet into a cataract. The current caught the light punt and whirled it down between flower-covered banks.
"How jolly!" cried Virginia; "it is like running the rapids!"
"You should see it in the spring," said Giles; "it's ripping then. We'll have to shoot into the bank below this bend; there's a nasty spot down stream a bit, an old weir that is just awash when the water's up like this."
"How exciting!" cried Virginia. She leaned back and watched him from beneath her curved lashes, darker than her hair, as he skillfully wielded the long pole, noting in delight the ease with which he handled it. There was to Virginia a fascinating quality in sheer physical strength either of man or beast. She loved to feel the powerful shoulders of a big Irish hunter working under the saddle as she rode; she liked to watch the tug that came on the traces of a heavy drag as a strong four breasted a sharp rise; she reveled in the leap of a shell under the oars of a lusty eight; there was something primitive in the exultation with which physical strength inspired her.
Since the week before, when she had fled from the tennis court, there had come between the two a new and odd restraint, a strange shyness on Virginia's part; an awkward embarrassment from Giles. Each realized the changed relations. It was for Giles to explain it, but he was lacking, not in courage, but in self-assurance. He appreciated that he was in love as much as it could be appreciated by a man for whom its course had always run smooth, and it filled him with a joyful misery, for he could not understand the possibility of a man like himself arousing any deeper sentiment than friendship in a woman of Virginia's talents. Her look had told him nothing; it spoke in a language which he did not understand, and each time it was recalled with a different interpretation.
Then it had rained for a week, and they had been shut up in the house, and grown fretful and doubtful and unhappy, and were worse friends than ever before in the most wretched moments of misunderstanding, because there had been present an odd new element of constraint. In a drawing-room Giles would have told his love like a schoolboy attempting to recite a half-learned piece of elocution. He needed the sky over his head and the ground under his feet and the strain of many pounds on his strong muscles. He realized this, but now that such conditions were about him, to talk of love seemed an insult in the face of friendship, so he bent the punt pole to the point of breaking, and felt unhappy and wishful to go ashore and tear up a tree by the roots. Then perversity settled on Virginia and as they glided swiftly on the current for perhaps a furlong with no word spoken, she grew suddenly vexed. Giles was stupid; donkeys were strong; he was bored, no doubt, and in her presence. She was divided between resentment and a strange new shyness which grew as they drifted on in silence, and finally became quite insupportable. She looked away from Giles, toward the shore, and presently discovered that there were many wild flowers growing near the bank.
"Please land me here!" she said imperiously; "I want to gather some of those flowers."
"Oh, I wouldn't bother with them now, Ginny," said Giles, inadvisedly, his mind intent on the fish.
"May I not gather some flowers if I like?" asked Virginia sharply. Giles stared at her in bewilderment.
"Of course, Ginny," he answered, surprised; "but I will land you higher up, as I don't care to cross the river so close to the weir; it's just below this bend."
"What is the danger?" asked Virginia coldly.
"There's no danger, but if we were to be swept down against it we'd have trouble to get clear of the thing; the current would jam us up against it." He thrust the punt to the other bank of the stream, shoving the bow against the turf which lined the water's edge.
"It is quite wet," said Giles. "Let me get them for you." He stepped ashore and made his way along the side of the steep bank.
Virginia, left alone, vexed and angry more with herself for her petulance, was suddenly seized by one of the mad caprices to which she was sometimes a victim. With the willful intention of provoking Giles, she picked up the punt pole and shoved the boat a few yards from the bank. Although familiar with the art of handling such craft, she had not properly estimated the force of the current; before she realized it, the stern of the punt was being swung swiftly down stream. Startled, she decided to forego her pleasantry, but discovered, when she tried to arrest her course, that the water was far stronger than she. A swifter eddy caught the boat, turning it completely about, while at the same moment she drifted clear of the bend and saw a hundred yards below a forbidding line of stakes through which the current was setting swiftly.
Abreast of her, on the bank, Giles was gathering the flowers, his back turned to the river.
"Giles!" she called, frightened and forgetting her pride.
Giles took in the situation at a glance; he saw that the current was setting away from his side of the stream.
"Push straight across to the other bank!" he called.
Virginia, now thoroughly alarmed, tried her best to follow his directions; she pushed vigorously, but in the middle of the stream, where the water ran deeper, the end of the pole found the smooth surface of a flat stone; as she threw her weight downward, the pole slipped, the punt shot ahead, and the next instant she was struggling in the water.
Giles was in the stream at almost the same instant. Virginia could swim a few strokes, enough to keep her afloat until Giles reached her; the danger lay in the obstruction to which the current was rapidly bearing her, the old, dilapidated, deep-water weir; a sort of fence built out into the stream and constructed of a framework of stakes joined by rough planks, the whole woven together by a thatch of brush. It had been built originally as a fish trap, the design being to lead the fish into a pen built upon the principle of a flytrap, but it had long before fallen into decay, until all that remained were the stakes and a framework of water-logged planking. As the river was swollen the upper stringpiece was just awash, and it was impossible to tell what might be underneath; along this upper barrier there was caught a mass of driftwood—broken limbs, with fragments of the original brushwood filling and other detritus.
After her first plunge Virginia floated easily, the air in the folds of her dress buoying her up so that she had no difficulty in keeping her head above the water. When Giles reached her they were not more than thirty yards above the weir, toward which they were being borne with all of the force of a swift current; and as Giles looked ahead and saw the black water swirling into the mass of débris, a chill, not of the river, which was cold enough, struck deeply at his heart.
"Catch my shoulder!" he gasped. Virginia obeyed and pushed the hair from her eyes with her free hand. Giles, cool and resourceful in moments of active danger, saw that it was futile to waste his strength in an effort to swim clear of the obstruction; he saved it all for the struggle ahead. He looked at Virginia, and she smiled at him encouragingly; a pale, wet, and somewhat frightened smile, but full of pluck and confidence.
Then they struck. At the first shock Giles was almost sucked under the weir by the weight of water, and, planting his foot on the edge of a broken plank, struggled to hold his head above the surface. The strain was terrific; and, even while afraid to shift his position, he realized that he could not maintain it long. He knew, of course, that if he could manage to get under the weir his danger would be over, as the current would then float his body from, instead of against, the obstruction, and so enable him to get upon the upper beam and lift Virginia up after him. But the current had swept the girl's skirts between the open spaces of the planks in such a way as to hold her fast, and Giles was afraid to ease his hold for an instant, lest she be drawn down and entangled under the surface.
He groped below with his free foot, but although the rotten structure was full of crevices he could find none large enough to let him through, and he knew that should he try and fail the weight of the water would hold him jammed against the stakes.
As Giles realized the fatal helplessness of their position there swept over him something of the old Berserker madness, transmitted to him through a strain of viking blood; a mighty rage and refusal to accept his doom. With an extreme effort he managed to shift his hold; then, gripping the slippery beam beneath Virginia's arm, he began to haul his way, hand over hand, along the weir by the sheer output of physical force opposed to that of the stream. Ten feet, perhaps, he gained in this way, bruised against projecting snags, torn and cut and buffeted, but fighting stubbornly for every inch. Perhaps by virtue of indomitable will coercing an unblemished physical machine he might have fought on so to the end of the obstruction and won his way clear; it is impossible to fix a limit to human endurance when the body is sound and the mind refuses to accept defeat. Had it been purely a matter of endurance one cannot say, but suddenly a plank beneath the water against which he had braced his foot gave way and before he could get a fresh foothold both legs were swept into the aperture and held as if in a vise, by the suction of the stream.
With this the calmness of despair settled upon Giles; he could not move, could scarcely support the strain necessary to hold his own and Virginia's head above the water. He realized that it was the end. It seemed to him that the day grew suddenly dark, and for the first time the icy chill of the water struck deeply into him. He turned his wild eyes to the girl who was whipped against the side of a rotten spile like a marsh lily gathered by the flood.
"Virginia," he gasped, "awfully sorry, but it's all—all up! My fault … darling"
Her pallid face was almost against his own, but all that he could see were her great hazel eyes staring at him appealingly. She was bewildered—could not understand—her trust in the invincibility of his strength was so entire; she had felt safe from the moment in which she felt the first strong clutch of his hand; then, as she searched his face in vain for the promise of safety and found none there, it seemed as if she suddenly realized. She tried bravely to smile; her voice came in a sob.
"Giles … kiss me, dear"
He leaned toward her and pressed his wet face to hers; he had always kissed her at parting, but this kiss was different, and seemed to inspire him with a fresh strength; he lifted his voice in a wild, husky-throated cry for help.
There came from the bank a deep-voiced, resonant hail. Tightening his grip upon Virginia, Giles writhed around against the stakes which were cutting into his flesh.
"Dessalines!" he gasped.
Virginia, looking over his shoulder, wondered if her senses were becoming vague. On the farther bank there stood a towering figure who, even as she watched, threw down a fishing rod he held in his hand and rushed to the brink of the steep bank; at a point where it jutted abruptly over the black, swirling water he loomed for an instant against the sky, then his great frame hurtled through the air and struck the stream with a crash which rose above the singing in her ears, and, even at that moment, numbed as her senses were from the chaos of wild impressions, Virginia was startled to see, as he towered above them, that the face of the man was as black as the shadows in the deep pool beneath.
Her next clear consciousness was of a fierce, black, scowling face beside her own and a mass of sooty, kinky hair from which the water dripped as from an oiled fabric, so that neither skin nor hair seemed wet. A gorillalike hand closed about her shoulder in a grip which made her scream with pain; the next moment she was lifted bodily from the water and flung across the weir. She grasped a stake and clung to it, looking back with terror; Giles had disappeared.
"Giles!" she gasped. "Save Giles!"
"He has sunk," came the deep-toned answer in a voice which seemed to boom up from the river's bed. "I will get him! Don't fear."
The water closed over the huge black head, with its close, kinky hair; a moment later she caught the flash of Giles's white face as it shone for an instant beneath the surface; beside him there appeared the black one. Giles seemed to rise, did rise, an inert mass, and rolled face downward across the beam to which she clung. How it happened Virginia could not have told, but as she threw her arm about Giles's head she saw that the force which had propelled him lay in a Titan hand which seemed to envelop his whole shoulder and a bulging bar of ebony from which the light serge sleeve was ripped.
"Wait a moment," rumbled the deep voice, "and we will get to the shore." The voice was low and rich, vibrant, resonant, magnetic. It filled the ears in a satisfying way, compelled confidence, utter and absolute. It was un-English in tone and accent, and there was a purring roll to the "r" sounds; the girl noticed this, but her thoughts were for the moment drowned in her senses.
The negro twisted himself about; a great, black, sinewy hand seemed to wrap itself about the head of a stake beside him, the other gripped the slippery edge of the upper beam until the fingers sank deep into its slimy coat; there came a sound of tearing and splintering, the upper part of the stake was twisted bodily from the beam, the long, rusted spikes protruding from its end giving evidence of the power which had wrenched it loose; its splintered lower fragment, as it rose, showed where it had been torn bodily away.
"Good!" said the voice, "that is better; now I can get through."
Again the black head sank, to reappear a moment later on the down-stream side of the weir.
"Now let me have him," rumbled the deep voice. "My word, but this water is cold—" Two great arms, disproportionately long, reached for Giles's inert frame and drew him gently into the water.
"If madam will now place her hand upon my shoulder——"
"But you cannot swim with us both!" cried Virginia.
The answer was a quick flash of two even rows of glittering white teeth; a flash so quick and dazzling and unexpected that she was startled, even while fascinated.
"Madam is not so heavy—" The coaxing voice was such as one would use to reassure a frightened child. "It is most necessary to make haste."
Virginia glanced at Giles, then with a shudder slipped back into the swirling water. For a moment she clung to the beam, away from which the trend of the current carried her; then, with a gasp, her hand fell upon the shoulder of the black, and it seemed to her as if she had placed it upon a corrugated iron post
"Cling to my coat—" came close in her ear, in what seemed the gurgle of the river. Beneath the light fabric she could feel the massive muscles swell and harden; the water trickled past her face, Giles's body floated against hers, his head was awash, but the face was turned upward, clear of the water's rim.
Soon the beat of the great engine ceased. Dessalines arose; Virginia's feet sank and touched the ground; she arose to find herself chest deep. One of Dessalines' arms was thrown about Giles; the other he reached to the support of Virginia, but she edged away with a sudden shrinking. She was dimly conscious of an agonizing pain in her shoulder; then the river seemed to arise and flow about with an odd circular motion, the light grew dim, the heaviness left her limbs, and she sank softly into oblivion.
When she recovered she was lying on the sward with the sun blazing into her face; she stared at the sky; then turned her head weakly, and, with no clear perception of the spectacle, watched the negro who was kneeling at Giles's side, rhythmically moving his arms up and down. As she watched inertly, Giles's eyelids quivered, opened, and she saw the flash of his deep-blue eyes.