Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/239

 No, the great waves had knocked Marua to pieces, either that or Uta Matu had veiled it from their sight ... and so the talk went on and all the time the sun was falling towards the west and Le Moan’s palms were itching to feel again the spokes of the wheel and the kick of the rudder; for a plan had come into the mind of Le Moan, a plan put there maybe by Uta Matu, who can tell; or Passion, who can tell? But a perfectly definite plan to take the wheel, steer through the night and put the schooner absolutely and fatally astray: Put her away from Karolin so far and so much to the east that the lagoon light would be no guide and a course to the south no road of return.

The plan had come to her, fallen into her head, only just now; it was indefinite, but cruelly straight like the flight of an arrow, and in one direction—away from Karolin.

Great love is an energy that, born in mind, has little to do with mind. It is a thing by itself, furiously alive, torturing the body it feeds on and the mind that holds it. Hell is the place where lovers live. Even when they escape from it to heaven as in the case of Katafa, it is always waiting to receive them back, as also in her case.

To Le Moan, dumbly suffering, the message of the cassi flowers telling that Taori was hers by virtue of the power of her passion for him, had suddenly lost all significance. He was here now by the power of the wheel of the ship over the rudder. She could take him away, now, to be always with him—take