Romance Island Part 29

"Not your coming away here," she said, "if the rest is true I wouldn't want that to be a dream. You don't know what courage this will give us all."

She said "us all," but that had to mean merely "us," as well. St.

George turned and looked over the terrace. What an Arabian night it was, he was saying to himself, and then stood in a sudden amazement, with the uncertain idea that one of the Schererazade magicians had answered that fancy of his by appearing.

A little shrine hung thick with vines, its ancient stone chipped and defaced, stood on the terrace with its empty, sightless niche turned toward the sea. Leaning upon its base was an old man watching them.

His eyes under their lowered brows were peculiarly intent, but his look was perfectly serene and friendly. His stuff robe hung in straight folds about his singularly erect figure, and his beard and hair were not all grey. But he was very old, with incredibly brown and wrinkled flesh, and his face was vacant, as if the mind were asleep.

As he looked, St. George knew him. Here on the top of this mountain was that amazing old man whom he had last seen in the banquet hall at the Palace of the Litany--that old Malakh for whom Olivia had so unexplainably interceded.

"What is that man doing here?" St. George asked in surprise.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"He is a mad old man, they said," Olivia told him, "down there they call him Malakh--that means 'salt'--because they said he always weeps. We had stopped to look at a metallurgist yesterday--he had some zinc and some metals cut out like flowers, and he was making them show phosph.o.r.escent colours in his little dark alcove. The old man was watching him and trying to tell him something, but the metallurgist was rude to him and some boys came by and jostled him and pushed him about and taunted him--and the metallurgist actually explained to us that every one did that way to old Malakh. So I thought he was better off up here," concluded Olivia tranquilly.

St. George was silent. He knew that Olivia was like this, but everything that proved anew her loveliness of soul caught at his heart.

"Tell me," he said impulsively, "what made you let him stay last night, there in the banquet hall?"

She flushed, and shook her head with a deprecatory gesture.

"I haven't an idea," she said gravely, "I think I must have done it so the fairies wouldn't p.r.i.c.k their feet on any new sorrow. One has to be careful of the fairies' feet."

St. George nodded. It was a charming reason for the left hand to give the right, and he was not deceived.

"Look at him," said St. George, almost reverently, "he looks like a shade of a G.o.d that has come back from the other world and found his shrine dishonoured."

Some echo of St. George's words reached the old man and he caught at it, smiling. It was as if he had just been thinking what he spoke.

"There are not enough shrines," he said gently, "but there are far too many G.o.ds. You will find it so."

Something in his words stirred St. George strangely. There was about the old creature an air of such gentleness, such supreme repose and detachment that, even in that place of quiet, his presence made a kind of hush. He was old and pallid and fragile, but there lingered within him, while his spirit lingered, the perfume of all fine and gentle things, all things of quietude. When he had spoken the old man turned and moved slowly down the ways of strange light, between the fallen temples builded to forgotten G.o.ds, and he seemed like the very spirit of the ancient mountain, ignorant of itself and knowing all truth.

"How strange," said St. George, looking after him, "how unutterably strange and sad."

"That is good of you," said Olivia. "Aunt Dora and Antoinette thought I'd gone quite off my head, and Mr. Frothingham wanted to know why I didn't bring back some one who could have been called as a witness."

"Witness," St. George echoed; "but the whole place is made of witnesses. Which reminds me: what is the sentence?"

"The sentence?" she wondered.

"The potatoes of Yaque," he reminded her, "and my head?"

"Ah well," said Olivia gravely, "inasmuch as the moon came up in the east to-night instead of the west, I shall be generous and give you one day's reprieve."

"Do you know, I _thought_ the moon came up in the east to-night,"

cried St. George joyfully.

It was half an hour afterward that Amory's languid voice from somewhere in the sky broke in upon their talk. As he came toward them across the terrace St. George saw that he was miraculously not alone.

Afterward Amory told him what had happened and what had made him abide in patience and such wondrous self-effacement.

When St. George had left him contemplating the far beauties of the little blur of light that was Med, Mr. Toby Amory set a match to one of his jealously expended store of Habanas and added one more aroma to the spiced air. To be standing on the doorstep of a king's palace, confidently expecting within the next few hours to a.s.sist in locating the king himself was a situation warranting, Amory thought, such fragrant celebration, and he waited in comparative content.

The moon had climbed high enough to cast a great octagonal shadow on the smooth court, and the Habana was two-thirds memory when, immediately back of Amory, a long window opened outward, releasing an apparition which converted the remainder of the Habana into a fiery trail ending out on the terrace. It was a girl of rather more than twenty, exquisitely pet.i.te and pretty, and wearing a ruffley blue evening gown whose skirt was caught over her arm. She stopped short when she saw Amory, but without a trace of fear. To tell the truth, Antoinette Frothingham had got so desperately bored withindoors that if Amory had worn a black mask or a cloak of flame she would have welcomed either.

For the last two hours Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham had sat in a white marble room of the king's palace, playing chess on Mr. Frothingham's pocket chess-board. Mr.

Frothingham, who loathed chess, played it when he was tired so that he might rest and when he was rested he played it so that he might exercise his mind--on the principle of a cool drink on a hot day and a hot drink on a cool day. Mrs. Hastings, who knew nothing at all about the game, had entered upon the hour with all the suave complacency with which she would have attacked the making of a pie.

Mrs. Hastings had a secret belief that she possessed great apt.i.tude.

Antoinette Frothingham, the lawyer's daughter, had leaned on the high cas.e.m.e.nt and looked over the sea. The window was narrow, and deep in an embrasure of stone. To be twenty and to be leaning in this palace window wearing a pale blue dinner-gown manifestly suggested a completion of the picture; and all that evening it had been impressing her as inappropriate that the maiden and the castle tower and the very sea itself should all be present, with no possibility of any knight within an alt.i.tude of many hundred feet.

"The dear little ponies' heads!" Mrs. Hastings had kept saying.

"What a poetic game chess is, Mr. Frothingham, don't you think?

That's what I always said to poor dear Mr. Hastings--at least, that's what he always said to me: 'Most games are so _needless_, but chess is really up and down poetic'"

Mr. Frothingham made all ready to speak and then gave it up in silence.

"Um," he had responded liberally.

"I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings had continued plaintively, "neither he nor I ever thought that I would be playing chess up on top of a volcano in the middle of the ocean. It's this awful feeling," Mrs. Hastings had cried querulously, "of being neither on earth nor under the water nor in Heaven that I object to. And n.o.body can get to us."

"That's just it, Mrs. Hastings," Antoinette had observed earnestly at this juncture.

"Um," said Mr. Frothingham, then, "not at all, not at all. We have all the advantages of the grave and none of its discomforts."

Whereupon Antoinette, rising suddenly, had slipped out of the white marble room altogether and had found the knight smoking in loneliness on the very veranda.

Amory put his cap under his arm and bowed.

"I hope," he said, "that I haven't frightened you."

He was an American! Antoinette's little heart leaped.

"I am having to wait here for a bit," explained Amory, not without vagueness.

Miss Frothingham advanced to the veranda rail and contrived a shy scrutiny of the intruder.

"No," she said, "you didn't frighten me in the least, of course.

But--do you usually do your waiting at this alt.i.tude?"

"Ah, no," answered Amory with engaging candour, "I don't. But I--happened up this way." Amory paused a little desperately. In that soft light he could not tell positively whether this was Miss Holland or that other figure of silver and rose which he had seen in the throne room. The blue gown was not interpretative. If she was Miss Holland it would be very shabby of him to herald the surprise.

Naturally, St. George would appreciate doing that himself. "I'm looking about a bit," he neatly temporized.

Antoinette suddenly looked away over the terrace as her eyes met his, smiling behind their pince-nez. Amory was good to look at, and he had never been more so than as he towered above her on the steps of the king's palace. Who was he--but who was he? Antoinette wondered rapidly. Had a warship arrived? Was Yaque taken? Or had--she turned eyes, round with sudden fear, upon Amory.

"Did Prince Tabnit send you?" she demanded.