The Haunted Storm Read Online Free PDF Page A

I knew from his expression that he was – throwing acid in my father’s face; that’s what it came to. And my father went as white as a sheet and asked him in a sneering sort of way what he wanted it for. My head was spinning, but I had to side with my lover! I had to champion him! He wanted it for his party, he told me later, but I never found out why.
    “And my father was getting frightened. He was so strong, my lover, so – implacable. It got worse and worse and then we were all talking together; my father got to his feet and then he started shouting and told him to go, and forbade me to see him again; but I ran out of the house and as I caught him up he was calm, so calm, and smiling gently – I was trembling, wild and upset – he smiled gently and told me where to meet him, and left without another word.”
    While she said this the girl sat quite still, with her eyes closed and her face tense and stiff. Matthew left his hand where it was, with the knuckles pressed against her belly, and strained to listen. He was absorbed in it all to the point where he forgot even to ask “why? what’s the meaning of all this? who is she and who’s this lover of hers?”
    And when she stopped for a moment and opened her eyes, he saw that there were tears in them. It wasn’t the rain, because the instant the eyelids opened and the dark eyes looked at his, they brimmed over with moisture that ran down her cheeks, running swiftly from rain-drop to rain drop where they lay on her skin. She smiled at the same moment, a brilliant and rueful smile that admitted everything, admitted the tears, admitted the openness of her body to him, and admitted the fact that the two of them had now, on this Plutonian shore, become united in a firm and dreamlike closeness.
    As for him, he longed with all his soul to hold her close to him and to go much further than the conditions he’d accepted allowed; but he saw clearly that the whole encounter was based on extraordinary conditions, of the earth itself and of its atmosphere as much as anything else, and so he stayed where he was without moving.
    But just beneath his hand there was the opening into her body, and he could, perhaps, let something of his love into her through his fingers. He pressed gently into her belly with his knuckles and ran his fingers along inside the elastic of her panties to loosen it; the thin nylon caught on a rough fingernail. At the same time he lifted his head and looked at the beach below. The men he had seen approaching were now – though, seemingly, at a vast distance – at the foot of the Spur, buffeted by the wind and busying themselves with ropes. He could hear snatches of shouting above the roar of the waves.
    He turned back to the girl; and she, when his fingers reached their goal, smiled and laid her head on one side as if it were on his shoulder, and he could feel the tenderness and confidence of the gesture across the cold, rain-dashed air between them as if there was nothing there but a pillow.
    He caressed her up and down until she was as soft as a cloud, with all his heart in the careful movement of his hand. After a minute she began to speak again.
    “The next time I saw him it was in secret just outside the village; and he told me that he’d let my father keep the Well for a time and do the restoring for him. He trusted him to that extent, he said. I didn’t care; I was his to do anything with, his for ever and not my family’s any more. I wanted to live with him and work for him but he wouldn’t let me. It was his secret heart I coveted. It became a symbol like an eagle. Yes, and like matter, that started to withdraw itself from that moment on, taking itself out of me like a hasty lover before – oh, before anything had happened to me – it stole out of me by night and left me open and empty, while his secret heart circled above me like an eagle waiting; was it threatening, or did it protect me from something? I didn’t know, and I couldn’t