“It is the first time I have been in the heart of a mountain with my husband,” the Queen laughed back, and the barb of her dart sank deep into Leoncia.
“Seems as though your wife, Francis, and my wife-to-be, aren’t going to hit it off too well together,” Henry said, with the sharpness of censure that man is wont to employ to conceal the embarrassment caused by his womankind.
And, as inevitable result of such male men’s ways, all that Henry gained was a silence more awkward and more embarrassing. The two women almost enjoyed the situation. Francis cudgeled his brains vainly for some remark that would ameliorate matters; while Henry, in desperation, arose suddenly with the observation that he was going to “explore a bit,” and invited, by his hand out to help her to her feet, the Queen to accompany him. Francis and Leoncia sat on for a moment in stubborn silence. He was the first to break it.
“For two cents I’d give you a thorough shaking, Leoncia.”
“And what have I done now?” she countered.
“As if you didn’t know. You’ve been behaving abominably.”
“It is you who have behaved abominably,” she half-sobbed, in spite of her determination to betray no such feminine signs of weakness. “Who asked you to marry her? You did not draw the short straw. Yet you must volunteer, must rush in where even angels would fear to tread? Did I ask you to? Almost did my heart stop beating when I heard you tell Henry you would marry her. I thought I was going to faint. You had not even consulted me; yet it was on my suggestion, in order to save you from her, that the straws were drawn——yes, and I am not too little shameless to admit that it was because I wanted to save you for myself. Henry does not love me as you led me to believe you loved me. I never loved Henry as I loved you, as I do love you even now, God forgive me.”
Francis was swept beyond himself. He caught her and pressed her to him in a crushing embrace.
“And on your very wedding day,” she gasped reproachfully in the midmost of his embrace.
His arm died away from about her.
“And this from you, Leoncia, at such a moment,” he murmured sadly.
“And why not?” she flared. “You loved me. You gave me to understand, beyond all chance of misunderstanding, that you loved me; yet here, to-day, you went out of your way, went eagerly and gladly, and married yourself to the first woman with a white skin who presented herself.”
“You are jealous,” he charged, and knew a heart-throb of joy as she nodded. “And I grant you are jealous; but at the same time, exercising the woman’s prerogative of lying, you are lying now. What I did, was not done eagerly nor gladly. I did it for your sake and my sake——or for Henry’s sake, rather. Thank God, I have a man’s honor still left to me!”
“Man’s honour does not always satisfy woman,” she replied.
“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.
