Romance Island Part 27

"Look," cried St. George victoriously, "the moon!"

From the sea the moon was momently growing, like a giant bubble, and a bright path had issued to the mountain's foot. "See," she would doubtless have said if she could, "I would have shown you the way here all your life if only you had looked properly." But at all events St. George's prophecy was fulfilled: From the top of Mount Khalak they were watching the moon rise. St. George, however, was not yet in the company whose image had pleasantly besieged him when he had prophesied. He turned impatiently to the palace. Jarvo, resting on the stones where he had sunk down, signaled them to go on, and the two needed no second bidding. They set off briskly across the plateau, Amory looking about him with eager curiosity, St. George on the crest of his divine expectancy.

The palace was set on the west of the gentle slope to which the mountain-top had been artificially leveled. The terrace led up on three sides from the marge of the height to the great portals. Over everything hung that imponderable essence that was clearer and purer than any light--"better than any light that ever shone." In its glamourie, with that far ocean background, the palace of pale stone looked unearthly, a sky thing, with ramparts of air. The principle of the builders seemed not to have been the ancient dictum that "ma.s.s alone is admirable," for the great pile was shaped, with beauty of unknown line, in three enormous cylinders, one rising from another, the last magnificently curved to a huge dome on whose summit burned with inconceivable brilliance the light which had been a beacon to the longing eyes turned toward it from the deck of _The Aloha_. In the shadow of the palace rose two high towers, obelisk-shaped from the pure white stone. Scattered about the slope were detached buildings, consisting of marble monoliths resting upon double bases and crowned with carved cornices, or of truncated pyramids and pyramidions. These had plinths of delicately-coloured stone over which the light diffused so that they looked luminous, and the small blocks used to fill the apertures of the courses shone like precious things. Adjacent to one of the porches were two conical shrines, for images and little lamps; and, near-by, a fallen pillar of immense proportions lay undisturbed upon the court of sward across which it had some time shivered down.

But if the palace had been discovered to be the preserved and transported Temple of Solomon it could not have stayed St. George for one moment of admiration. He was off up the slope, seeing only the great closed portals, and with Amory beside him he ran boldly up the long steps. It was a part of the unreality of the place that there seemed absolutely no sign of life about the King's palace. The windows glowed with the soft light within, but there were no guards, no servants, no sign of any presence. For the first time, when they reached the top of the steps, the two men hesitated.

"Personally," said Amory doubtfully, "I have never yet tapped at a king's front door. What does one do?"

St. George looked at the long stone porches, uncovered and girt by a parapet following the curve of the facade.

"Would you mind waiting a minute?" he said.

With that he was off along the balcony to the south--and afterward he wondered why, and if it is true that Fate tempts us in the way that she would have us walk by luring us with unseen roses budding from the air.

Where the porch abruptly widened to a kind of upper terrace, like a hanging garden set with flowering trees, three high archways opened to an apartment whose bright lights streamed across the gra.s.s-plots.

St. George felt something tug at his heart, something that urged him forward and caught him up in an ecstasy of triumph and hope fulfilled. He looked back at Amory, and Amory was leaning on the parapet, apparently sunk in reflections which concerned n.o.body. So St. George stepped softly on until he reached the first archway, and there he stopped, and the moment was to him almost past belief.

Within the open doorway, so near that if she had lifted her eyes they must have met his own, was the woman whom he had come across the sea to seek.

St. George hardly knew that he spoke, for it was as if all the world were singing her name.

"Olivia!" he said.

CHAPTER XIV

THE ISLE OF HEARTS

The room in which St. George was looking was long and lofty and hung with pale tapestries. White pillars supporting the domed white ceiling were wound with garlands. The smoke from a little brazen tripod ascended pleasantly, and about the windows stirred in the faint wind draperies of exceeding thinness, woven in looms stilled centuries ago.

Olivia was crossing before the windows. She wore a white gown strewn with roses, and she seemed as much at home on this alien mountain-top as she had been in her aunt's drawing-room at the Boris. But her face was sad, and there was not a touch of the piquancy which it had worn the night before in the throne-room, nor of its delicious daring as she had sped past him in the big Yaque touring car. Save for her, the room was deserted; it was as if the prince had come to the castle and found the Sleeping Princess the only one awake.

If in that supreme moment St. George had leaped forward and taken her in his arms no one--no one, that is, in the fairy-tale of what was happening--would greatly have censured him. But he stood without for a moment, hardly daring to believe his happiness, hardly knowing that her name was on his lips.

He had spoken, however, and she turned quickly, her look uncertainly seeking the doorway, and she saw him. For a moment she stood still, her eyes upon his face; then with a little incredulous cry that thrilled him with a sudden joyous hope that was like belief, she came swiftly toward him.

St. George loved to remember that she did that. There was no waiting for a.s.surance and no fear; only the impulse, gloriously obeyed, to go toward him.

He stepped in the room, and took her hands in his and looked into her eyes as if he would never turn away his own. In her face was a dawning of glad certainty and welcome which he could not doubt.

"You," she cried softly, "you. How is it possible? But how is it possible?"

Her voice trembled a little with something so sweet that it raced through his veins with magic.

"Did you rub the lamp?" he said. "Because I couldn't help coming."

She looked at him breathlessly.

"Have you," he asked her gravely, "eaten of the potatoes of Yaque?

And are you going to say, 'Off with his head'? And can you tell me what is the population of the island?"

At that they both laughed--the merry, irrepressible laugh of youth which explains that the world is a very good place indeed and that one is glad that one belongs there. And the memory of that breakfast on the other side of the world, of their happy talk about what would happen if they two were impossibly to meet in Yaque came back to them both, and set his heart beating and flooded her face with delicate colour. In her laugh was a little catching of the breath that was enchanting.

"Not yet," she said, "your head is safe till you tell me how you got here, at all events. Now tell me--oh, tell me. I can't believe it until you tell me."

She moved a little away from the door.

"Come in," she said shyly, "if you've come all the way from America you must be very tired."

St. George shook his head.

"Come out," he pleaded, "I want to stand on top of a high mountain and show you the whole world."

She went quite simply and without hesitation--because, in Yaque, the maddest things would be the truest--and when she had stepped from the low doorway she looked up at him in the tender light of the garden terrace.

"If you are quite sure," she said, "that you will not disappear in the dark?"

St. George laughed happily.

"I shall not disappear," he promised, "though the world were to turn round the other way."

They crossed the still terrace to the parapet and stood looking out to sea with the risen moon shining across the waters. The light wind stirred in the cedrine junipers, shaking out perfume; the great fairy pile of the palace rose behind them; and before them lay the monstrous moon-lit abyss than whose depths the very stars, warm and friendly, seemed nearer to them. To the big young American in blue serge beside the little new princess who had drawn him over seas the dream that one is always having and never quite remembering was suddenly come true. No wonder that at that moment the patient Amory was far enough from his mind. To St. George, looking down upon Olivia, there was only one truth and one joy in the universe, and she was that truth and that joy.

"I can't believe it," he said boyishly.

"Believe--what?" she asked, for the delight of hearing him say so.

"This--me--most of all, you!" he answered.

"But you must believe it," she cried anxiously, "or maybe it will stop being."

"I will, I will, I am now!" promised St. George in alarm.

Whereat they both laughed again in sheer light-heartedness. Then, resting his broad shoulders against a prism of the parapet, St.

George looked down at her in infinite content.

"You found the island," she said; "what is still more wonderful you have come here--but _here_--to the top of the mountain. Oh, did you bring news of my father?"

St. George would have given everything save the sweet of the moment to tell her that he did.

"But now," he added cheerfully, and his smile disarmed this of its over-confidence, "I've only been here two days or so. And, though it may look easy, I've had my hands full climbing up this. I ought to be allowed another day or two to locate your father."

"Please tell me how you got here," Olivia demanded then.

St. George told her briefly, omitting the yacht's ownership, explaining merely that the paper had sent him and that Jarvo and Akko had pointed the way and, save for that journey down nebulous ways in the wake of her veil the night before, sketching the incidents which had followed his arrival upon the island.