CHAPTER XX

ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

There was a pause not to be reckoned by minutes but suffocatingly long. She had grown as pale as he.

"That was ungenerous of you," she said then with icy slowness. "Though no doubt you--found it entertaining. It must have still further amused you to be taken for an architect?"

"I am flattered," he replied, with a trace of bitterness, "to have suggested, even for a moment, so worthy a calling."

Though he spoke calmly enough, his thoughts were in ragged confusion. As her gaze dived into his, he was conscious of outre fancies. She seemed to him like some snow-cloud in woman's shape, edged with anger and swept by a wrathful wind into this summery afternoon. For her part she was telling herself with passionate resentment that he had no right so to misrepresent himself--to lead her on to such a denouement. At his answer she put out her hand with a sudden gesture, as if bluntly thrusting the matter from her concern, and turning, went back along the tree-shadowed path.

He followed glumly, gnawing his lip, wanting to say he knew not what, but wretchedly tongue-tied, noting that the great white moth was still waving its creamy wings on the dead stump and wondering if she would take the cape jessamines. He felt an embarrassed relief when, passing the roots where they lay, she stooped to raise them.

Then all at once the blood seemed to shrink from his heart. With a hoarse cry he leaped toward her, seized her wrist and roughly dragged her back, feeling as he did so, a sharp fiery sting on his instep. The next moment, with clenched teeth, he was viciously stamping his heel again and again, driving into the soft earth a twisting root-like something that slapped the brown wintered leaves into a hissing turmoil.

He had flung her from him with such violence that she had fallen sidewise. Now she raised herself, kneeling in the feathery light, both hands clasped close to her breast, trembling excessively with loathing and feeling the dun earth-floor billow like a canvas sea in a theater. Little puffs of dust from the protesting ground were wreathing about her set face, and she pressed one hand against her shoulder to repress her shivers.

"The horrible--horrible--thing!" she said whisperingly. "It would have bitten me!"

He came toward her, panting, and grasping her hand, lifted her to her feet. He staggered slightly as he did so, and she saw his lips twist together oddly. "Ah," she gasped, "it bit you! It bit you!"

"No," he said, "I think not."

"Look! There on your ankle--that spot!"

"I did feel something, just that first moment." He laughed uncertainly. "It's queer. My foot's gone fast asleep."

Every remnant of color left her face. She had known a negro child who had died of a water-moccasin's bite some years before--the child of a house-servant. It had been wading in the creek in the gorge. The doctor had said then that if one of the other children....

She grasped his arm. "Sit down," she commanded, "here, on this log, and see."

Her pale fright caught him. He obeyed, dragged off the low shoe and bared the tingling spot. The firm white flesh was puffing up around two tiny blue-rimmed punctures. He reached into his pocket, then remembered that he had no knife. As a next best thing he knotted his handkerchief quickly above the ankle, thrust a stick through the loop and twisted it till the ligature cut deeply, while she knelt beside him, her lips moving soundlessly, saying over and over to herself words like these: "I must not be frightened. He doesn't realize the danger, but I do! I must be quite collected. It is a mile to the doctor's. I might run to the house and send Unc' Jefferson, but it would take too long. Besides, the doctor might not be there. There is no one to do anything but me."

She crouched beside him, putting her hands by his on the stick and wrenching it over with all her strength. "Tighter, tighter," she said. "It must be tighter." But, to her dismay, at the last turn the improvised cord snapped, and the released stick flew a dozen feet away.

Her heart leaped chokingly, then dropped into hammer-like thudding. He leaned back on one arm, trying to laugh, but she noted that his breath came shortly as if he had been running. "Absurd!" he said, frowning. "How such--a fool thing--can hurt!"

Suddenly she threw herself on the ground and grasped his foot with both her hands. He could see her face twitch with shuddering, and her eyes dilating with some determined purpose.

"What are you going to do?"

"This," she said, and he felt her shrinking lips, warm and tremulous, pressed hard against his instep.

He drew away sharply, with savage denial. "No--no! Not that! You shan't! My lord--you shan't!" He dragged his numbing foot from her desperate grasp, lifting himself, pushing her from him; but she fought with him, clinging, panting broken sentences:

"You must! It's the only way. It was--a moccasin, and it's deadly. Every minute counts!"

"I won't. No, stop! How do you know? It's not going to--here, listen! Take your hands away. Listen!--_Listen!_ I can go to the house and send Uncle Jefferson for the doctor and he--No! stop, I say! Oh--I'm sorry if I hurt you. How strong you are!"

"Let me!"

"No! Your lips are not for that--good God, that damnable thing! You yourself might be--"

"Let me! Oh, how cruel you are! It was my fault. But for me it would never have--"

"No! I would rather--"

"_Let me!_ Oh, if you _died_!"

With all the force of her strong young body she wrenched away his protestant hands. A thirst and a sickish feeling were upon him, a curious irresponsible giddiness, and her hair which that struggle had brought in tumbled masses about her shoulders, seemed to have little flames running all over it. His foot had entirely lost its feeling. There was a strange weakness in his limbs.

He felt it with a cool thriving surprise. Could it be death stealing over him--really death, in this silly inglorious guise, from a miserable crawling reptile? Death, when he had just begun a life that seemed so worth living?

A sense of unreality came. He was asleep! The failure, the investigation, Virginia--all was a dream. Presently he would wake in his bachelor quarters to find his man setting out his coffee and grapefruit. He settled back and closed his eyes.

Moments of half-consciousness, or consciousness jumbled with strange imaginings, followed. At times he felt the pressure upon the wounded foot, was sensible of the suction of the young mouth striving desperately to draw the poison from the wound. From time to time he was conscious of a white desperate face haloed with hair that was a mist of woven sparkles. At times he thought himself a recumbent stone statue in a wood, and her a great tall golden-headed flower lying broken at his feet. Again he was a granite boulder and she a vine with yellow leaves winding and clinging about him. Then a blank--a sense of movement and of troublous disturbance, of insistent voices that called to him and inquisitive hands that plucked at him, and then voices growing distant again, and hands falling away, and at last--silence.