Romance Island Part 12

St. George set off at once for the McDougle Street house. A thousand doubts beset him and he felt that if he could once more be face to face with the amazing prince these might be better cleared away.

Moreover, the glimpses which the prince had given him of a world which seemed to lie as definitely outside the bourne of present knowledge as does death itself filled St. George with unrest, spiced his incredulity with wonder, and he found himself longing to talk more of the things at which the strange man had hinted.

The squalor of the street was even less bearable in the early morning. St. George wondered, as he hurried across from the Grand Street station, how the prince had understood that he must not only avoid the great hotels, but that he must actually seek out incredible surroundings like these to be certain of privacy. For only the very poor are sufficiently immersed in their own affairs to be guiltless of curiosity, save indeed a kind of surface morbid wonderment at crepe upon a door or the coming of a well-dressed woman to their neighbourhood. The prince might have lived in McDougle Street for years without exciting more than derisive comment of the denizens, derision being no other than their humour gone astray.

St. George tapped at the door which the night before had admitted him to such revelation. There was no answer, and a repeated summons brought no sound from within. At length he tentatively touched the latch. The door opened. The room was quite empty. No remnant of furniture remained.

He entered, involuntarily peering about as if he expected to find the prince in a dusty corner. The windows were still shuttered, and he threw open the blinds, admitting rectangles of sunlight. He could have found it in his heart, as he looked blankly at the four walls, to doubt that he had been there at all the night before, so emphatically did the surroundings deny that they had ever harboured a t.i.tle. But on the floor at his feet lay a sc.r.a.p of paper, twisted and torn. He picked it up. It was traced in indistinguishable characters, but it bore the Holland coat of arms and crown which the prince had shown them. St. George put the paper in his pocket and questioned a group of boys in the pa.s.sage.

"Yup," shouted one of the boys with that prodigality of intonation distinguishing the child of the streets, who makes every statement as if his word had just been contradicted out of hand, "he means de bloke wid de black block. Aw, he lef' early dis mornin' wid 's junk follerin.' Dey's two of 'em. Wot's he t'ink? Dis ain't no n.i.g.g.e.r's Rest. Dis yere's all Eyetalian."

St. George hurried to Fifty-ninth Street. It was not yet ten o'clock, but the departure of the prince made him vaguely uneasy and for his life he could not have waited longer. Perhaps it was not true at all; perhaps none of it had happened. The McDougle Street part had vanished; what if the Boris too were a myth? But as he sprang up the steps at the apartment house St. George knew better.

The night before her hand had lain in his for an infinitesimal time, and she had said "Until to-morrow."

On sending his name to Mrs. Hastings he was immediately bidden to her apartment. He found the drawing-room in confusion--the furniture covered with linen, the bric-a-brac gone, and three steamer trunks strapped and standing outside the door. All of which mattered to him less than nothing, for Olivia was there alone.

She came down the dismantled room to meet him, smiling a little and very pale but, St. George thought, even more beautiful than she had been the day before. She was dressed for walking and had on a sober little hat, and straightway St. George secretly wondered how he could ever have approved of anything so flagrant as a Gainsborough.

She lifted her veil as they sat down, and St. George liked that. To complete his capitulation she turned to a little table set before the bowing flames of juniper branches in the grate.

"This is breakfast," she told him; "won't you have a cup of tea and a m.u.f.fin? Aunt Medora will be back presently from the chemist's."

For the first time St. George blessed Mrs. Hastings.

"You are really leaving to-day, Miss Holland?" he asked, noting the little ringless hand that gave him two lumps.

"Really leaving," she a.s.sented, "at noon to-day. Mr. Frothingham sails with us, and his daughter Antoinette, who will be a great comfort to me. The prince doesn't know about her yet," she added navely, "but he must take her."

St. George nodded approvingly. Unless all signs failed, he reflected, Yaque had some surprises in store at the hands of the daughter of its sovereign.

"Where does the prince appoint?" he asked.

He listened in entire disapproval while she told him of the place below quarantine where they were to board the submarine. The prince, it appeared, had sent his servant early that morning to a.s.sure them that all was in readiness, a bit of oriental courtesy which made no impression upon St. George, though it explained the prompt withdrawal from 19 McDougle Street. When she had finished, St.

George rose and stood before the fire, looking down at her from a world of uncertainty.

"I don't like it, Miss Holland," he declared, and hesitated, divided between the desire to tell her that he was going too, and the fear lest Mrs. Hastings should arrive from the chemist's.

Olivia made a gesture of throwing it all from her.

"Have a m.u.f.fin--do," she begged. "This is my last breakfast in America for a time--let me have a pleasant memory of it. Mr. St.

George, I want--oh, I want to tell you how greatly I appreciate--"

"Ah, please," urged St. George, and smiled while he protested, "you see, I've been very selfish about the whole matter. I'm selfish now to be here at all when, I dare say, you've no end of things to do."

"No," Olivia disclaimed, "I have not," and thus proved that she was a woman of genius. For a less complex woman always flutters through the hour of her departure. Only Juno can step from the clouds without packing a bag and feeding the peac.o.c.ks and leaving, pinned to an asphodel, a note for Jupiter.

"Then tell me what you are going to do in Yaque," he besought.

"Forgive me--what are you going to do all alone there in that strange land, and such a land?"

He divined that at this she would be very brave and buoyant, and he was lost in antic.i.p.ative admiration; when she was neither he admired more than ever.

"I don't know," said Olivia gravely, "I only know that I must go.

You see that, do you not--that I must go?"

"Ah, yes," St. George a.s.sured her, "I do indeed, believe me. Don't you think," he said, "that I might give you a lamp to rub if you need help? And then I'll appear."

"In Yaque?"

He nodded gravely.

"Yes, in Yaque. I shall rise out of a jar like the Evil Genie; and though I shall be quite helpless you will still have the lamp. And I shall be no end glad to have appeared."

"But suppose," said Olivia merrily, "that when I have eaten a pomegranate or a potato or something in Yaque I forget all about America? And when you step out of the jar I say 'Off with his head,'

by mistake. How shall I know it is you when the jar is opened?"

"I shall ask you what the population of Yaque is," he a.s.sured her, "and how the island compares with Manhattan, and if this is your first visit, and how you are enjoying your stay; and then you will recognize the talk of civilization and spare me."

"No," she protested, "I've longed to say 'Off with his head' to too many people who have said all that to me. And you mustn't say that a holiday always seems like Sunday, either."

Whereat they both laughed, and it seemed an uncommonly pleasant world, and even the sad errand that was taking Olivia to Yaque looked like a hope.

Then the talk ran on pleasantly, and things went very briskly forward, and there was no dearth of fleet little smiles at this and that. What was she to bring him from Yaque--a pet ibis? No, he had no taste for ibises--unless indeed there should be Fourth-Dimension ibises; and even then he begged that she would select instead a magic field-gla.s.s, with which one might see what is happening at an infinite distance; although of what use would that be to him, he wanted to know, since it would be his too late to follow her errantry through Yaque? They felt, as they talked, quite like the puppets of the days of Haroun-al-Raschid; only the puppets, poor children of mere magic, had not the traditions of the golden age of science for a setting, and were obliged to content themselves with mere tricks of jars of genii instead of applied electricity and its daring. What an Arabian Nights' Entertainment we might have had if only Scheherazade had ever heard of the Present! As for the thousand-and-one-nights, they would not have contained all her invention. No wonder that the time went trippingly for the two who were concerned in such bewildering speculation as the prince had made possible and who were furthering acquaintanceship besides.

"Ah, well now, at all events," begged St. George at length, "will you remember something while you are away?"

"Your kindness, always," she returned.

"But will you remember," said St. George with his boy's eagerness, "that there is some one who hopes no less than you for your success, and who will be infinitely proud of any command at all from you? And will you remember that, though I may not be successful, I shall at least be doing something to try to help you?"

"You are very good," she said gently, "I shall remember. For already you have not only helped me--you have made the whole matter possible."

"And what of that," propounded St. George gloomily, "if I can't help you just when the danger begins? I insist, Miss Holland, that it takes far more good nature to see some one else set off at adventure than it takes to go one's self. Won't you let me come back here at twelve o'clock and go down with you to the boat?"

"By all means," Olivia a.s.sented, "my aunt and I shall both be glad, Mr. St. George. Then you can wish us well. What is a submarine like," she wanted to know; "were you ever on one?"

"Never, excepting a number of times," replied St. George, supremely unconscious of any vagueness. He was rapidly losing count of all events up to the present. He was concerned only with these things: that she was here with him, that the time might be measured by minutes until she would be caught away to undergo neither knew what perils, and that at any minute Mrs. Hastings might escape from the chemist's.

Although the commonplace is no respecter of enchantments, it was quite fifteen minutes before the sword fell and Mrs. Hastings did make the moment her prey, as pinkly excited as though her drawing-room had been untenanted. And in the meantime no one knows what pleasantly absurd thing St. George longed to say, it is so perilous when one is sailing away to Yaque and another stands upon the sh.o.r.e for a word of farewell. But, indeed, if it were not for the soberest moments of farewell, journeys and their returns would become very tame affairs. When the first man and maid said even the most formal farewell, providing they were the right man and the right maid, the very stars must have begun their motion. Very likely the fixed stars are nothing but grey-beards with no imagination.

Distance lends enchantment, but the frivolous might say that the preliminary farewell is the mint that coins it. And, enchantment being independent of the commonplace, after all, it may have been that certain stars had already begun to sing while St. George sat staring at the little bowing flames of the juniper branches and Olivia was taking her tea. Then in came Mrs. Hastings, a very literal interfering G.o.ddess, and her bonnet was frightfully awry so that the parrot upon it looked shockingly coquettish and irreverent and lent to her dignity a flavour of ill-timed waggishness. But it must be admitted that Mrs. Hastings and everything that she wore were "_les antipodes des graces_." She was followed by a footman, his arms filled with parcels, and she sank among them on the divan and held out her limp, plump hand for a cup of tea. Mrs. Hastings had the hands that are fettered by little creases at the wrists and whose wedding rings always seem to be uncomfortably snug. She sat down, and her former activity dissolved, as it were, into another sort of energy and became fragments of talk. Mrs. Hastings was like the old woman in Ovid who sacrificed to the G.o.ddess of silence, but could never keep still; save that Mrs. Hastings did not sacrifice.

"Good morning, Mr. St. George," she said. "I'm sure I've quite forgotten everything. Olivia dear, I've had all the prescriptions made up that I've ever taken to Rutledge's, because no one can tell what the climate will be like, it's so low on the map. I've looked up the Azores--that's where we get some of our choicest cheese. And camphor--I've got a pound of camphor. And I must say positively that I always was against these wars in the far East, because all the camphor comes from Korea or one of those frightful islands and now it has gone up twenty-six cents a pound. And then the flaxseed, Olivia dear. I've got a tin of flaxseed, for no one can tell--"

St. George doubted if she knew when he said good morning, although she named him Mr. St. John, gave him permission to go to the boat, hoped in one breath that he would come again to see them, and in the next that he would send them a copy of whatever the _Sentinel_ might publish about them, in serene oblivion of the state of the post-office department in Yaque. Mrs. Hastings, in short, was one of the women who are thrown into violent mental convulsions by the prospect of a journey; this was not at all because she was setting sail specifically for Yaque, for the moment that she saw a porter or a pier, though she was bound only for the Bronx or Staten Island, she was affected in the same way.

As Olivia gave St. George her hand he came perilously near telling her that he would follow her to Yaque; but he reflected that if he were to tell her at all, he would better do so on the way to the submarine. So he went blindly down the hall and rang the elevator bell for so long that the boy deliberately stopped on the floor below and waited, with the diabolical independence of the American lords of the lift, "for to teach 'im a lessing," this one explained to a pa.s.sing chamber-maid.

St. George hurried to his apartment to leave a note for Amory who was directed upon his arrival to bide there and await his host's return. Then he paced the floor until it was time to go back to the Boris, deaf to Rollo's solemn information that the dust comes up out of the varnish of furniture during the night, like cream out of milk. By the time he had boarded a down-town car, St. George had tortured himself to distraction, and his own responsibility in this submarine voyage loomed large and threatening. Therefore, it suddenly a.s.sumed the proportion of mountains yet unseen when, though it wanted ten minutes to twelve when he reached the Boris, his card was returned by a faint polite clerk with the information that Mrs.

Hastings and Miss Holland had been gone from the hotel for half an hour. There was a note for him in their box the clerk believed, and presently produced it--a brief, regretful word from Olivia telling him that the prince had found that they must leave fully an hour earlier than he had planned.

Sick with apprehension, cursing himself for the ease and dexterity with which he had permitted himself to be outwitted by Tabnit, St.

George turned blindly from the office with some vague idea of chartering all the tugs in the harbour. It came to him that he had bungled the matter from first to last, and that Bud or Bennietod would have used greater shrewdness. And while he was in the midst of anathematizing his characteristic confidence he stepped in the outer hallway and saw that which caused that confidence to balloon smilingly back to support him.