"We can go now--this minute," Motauri was whispering. "There are boats to be had below on the beach. We can reach Huapu before morning. None shall see us go."
"You forget the path--the people--" She could hardly frame the words with her lips.
But Motauri laughed low for love and pride.
"I do not use a path. Am I a village-dweller to need steps to my feet? The mountain is path enough for me. That way!... Straight down to the shore."
"By the ravine?" she cried stricken. "Impossible! It has never been done. No one can climb down there. It is death!"
"It is life!" With the word he swept her up like a wisp of a thing in his strong arms. "And also I am not 'no one,' but your captor, Hokoolele. I have caught my star from the sky. See--thus is it done!"...
Such was the elopement of Miss Matilda, when she left her father's house and her father's faith in very much the same manner as her remote maternal ancestor went about the same sort of affair somewhere back in the Stone Age. And in truth Miss Matilda was living the Stone Age for the half hour it took Motauri to get them both down the untracked mountain side. How they managed she never afterward knew. Not that she slept, or fainted, or indulged in any twentieth century tantrum. But it was all too tense to hold.
Of that descent she retained chiefly a memory of the stream and its voices, now low and urgent, now babbling and chuckling in her ear. At times they groped through its luminous mists, again waded from stone to stone in the current or lowered themselves by its brink among the tangled roots. It hurried them, hid them, showed them the way, set the high pulse for their hearts and the pace for their purpose like an exultant accomplice. Nor did Miss Matilda shrink from its ardor.
Once embarked, she had no further fear. Unguessed forces awoke in her. With the hands that had never handled anything rougher than crewelwork she chose her grip along the tough ladder of looped lianas. As confidently as a creature of the wild she sprang across a gulf, or threw herself to the cliff, or slipped to the man's waiting clasp on the next lower ledge. Massed shadows, shifting patches of moonlight, the glimpsed abyss and silvered sea far down--these held no terrors. Sharp danger and quick recovery, sliding moss and rasping rock, the clutch of thorn and creeper--all the rude intricacies of wet earth and teeming jungle seemed things accepted and accessory. She was tinglingly alive, gloriously alert. This was her wonderful night, the great adventure that somehow fulfilled a profound expectancy of her being.