“I knew you were calling me,” she gasped at last. “I felt it—I felt it in my flesh. Oh, my only love, I’m all yours—all, all yours! Take me, hold me, save me from every one! Hold me, hold me, my only love, hold me tight from all of them!”
They swayed together as she clung to him and, lifting her up from the ground he carried her, still wildly kissing him, into the deeper shadow of the great cedars. Exhausted at last by the extremity of her passion, she hung limp in his arms, her face white as the white light which now flooded the eastern horizon. He laid her down then at the foot of one of the largest trees and bending over her pushed back the hair from her forehead as if she had been a tired child.
By some powerful law of his strange nature, the very intensity of her passion for him and her absolute yielding to his will calmed and quieted his own desire. She was his now, at a touch, at a movement; but he would as soon have hurt an infant as have embraced her then. His emotion at that moment was such as never again in his life he was destined to experience. He felt as though, untouched as she was, she belonged to him, body and soul. He felt as though they two together were isolated, separated, divided, from the whole living world. Beneath the trunks of those black-foliaged cedars they seemed to be floating in a mystic ship over a great sea of filmy white waves.
He bent down and kissed her forehead, and under his kiss, chaste as the kiss a father might give to a little girl, she closed her eyes and lay motionless and still, a faint flickering smile of infinite contentment playing upon her lips.
They were in this position—the girl’s hand resting passively in his—and he bending over her, when through an eastward gap between the trees the sun rose above the mist. It sent towards them a long blood-coloured finger that stained the cedar trunks and caused the strangely shaped head of the stooping man to look as if it had been dipped in blood. It made the girl’s mouth scarlet-red and threw an indescribable flush over her face, a flush delicate and diaphanous as that which tinges the petals of wild hedge roses.
Linda opened her eyes and Brand leapt to his feet with a cry. “The sun!” he shouted, and then, in a lower voice, “what an omen for us, little one—what an omen! Out of the sea, out of our sea! Come, get up, and let’s watch the morning in! There won’t be a trace of mist left, or dew either, in an hour or so.”
He gave her his hand and hurriedly pulled her to her feet. “Quick!” he cried. “You can see it across the sea from over there. I’ve often seen it, but never like this, never with you!”
Hand in hand they left the shade of the trees and hastening up the slope of a little grassy mound—perhaps the grave of some viking-ancestor of his own—they stood side by side surveying the wonder of the sunrise.
As they stood there and the sun, mounting rapidly higher and higher, dispersed the mists and flooded everything with golden light, Brand’s mood began to change towards his companion. The situation was reversed now and it was his arms that twined themselves round the girl’s figure, while she, though only resisting gently and tenderly, seemed to have recovered the normal instincts of her sex, the instincts of self-protection and aloofness.
The warmer the sun became and the more clearly the familiar landscape defined itself before them, the more swiftly did the relations between the two change and reverse. No longer did Brand feel as though some mystic spiritual union had annihilated the difference between their sex. The girl was once more an evasive object of pursuit. He desired her and his desire irritated and angered him.