Romance Island Part 32

St. George, thrilling with the strangeness of what he saw, and the strangeness of being there with Olivia and this weird old man of the mountain, turned toward him almost fearfully. How did he know, indeed?

"Ah well," he said, striving to rea.s.sure her, "I've no doubt he has wandered in here some evening, while you were at dinner. No doubt--"

He stopped abruptly, his eyes fixed on the old man's hand. For as he lifted it St. George had thought that something glittered. Without hesitation he caught the old man's arm about the wrist, and turned his hand in his own palm. In the thin fingers he found a small sealed tube, filled with something that looked like particles of nickel.

"Do you mind telling me what that is?" asked St. George.

Old Malakh's eyes, liquid and brown and very peaceful, met his own without rebuke.

"Do you mean the gem?" he asked gently. "It is a very beautiful ruby."

Then St. George saw upon the hand that held the sealed tube a ring of matchless workmanship, set with a great ruby that smouldered in the shadow where they stood. Olivia looked at St. George with startled eyes.

"He was not wearing this when we first saw him," she said. "I haven't seen him wearing it at all."

St. George confronted the old man then and spoke with some determination.

"Will you please tell us," he said, "what there is in this tube, and how you came by this ring?"

Old Malakh looked down reflectively at his hand, and back to St.

George's face. It was wonderful, the air of courtliness and urbanity and delicate breeding which persisted through age and infirmity and the fallow mind.

"I wish that I might tell you," he said humbly, "but I have only little lights in my head, instead of words. And when I say them, they do not mean--what they _shine_. Do you not see? That is why every one laughs. But I know what the lights say."

St. George looked at Olivia helplessly.

"Will you tell me where his room is?" he said, "and I'll go back with him. I don't know what to make of this, quite, but don't be frightened. It's all right. Didn't you say he is on the second floor?"

"Yes, but don't go alone with him," begged Olivia suddenly, "let me call some of the servants. We don't know what he may do."

St. George shook his head, smiling a little in sheer boyish delight at that "we." "We" is a very wonderful word, when it is not put to unimportant uses by kings, editors and the like.

"I'd rather not, thank you," he said. "I'll have a talk with him, I think."

"His room is at the top of the stair, on the left," said Olivia reluctantly, "but I wish--"

"We shall get on all right," St. George a.s.sured her, "and don't let this worry you, will you? I was smoking on the terrace. I'll be there for a while yet. Good night," he said from the doorway.

"Good night," said Olivia. "Good night--and, oh, I thank you."

St. George's expectation of having a talk with the old man was, however, unfounded. Old Malakh led the way to his room--a great place of carven seats and a frowning bed-canopy and high windows, and doors set deep in stone; and he begged St. George to sit down and permitted him to examine the sealed tube filled with little particles that looked like nickel, and spoke with gentle irrelevance the while. At the last St. George left him, feeling as if he were committing not so much an indignity as a social solecism when he locked the door upon the lonely creature, using for the purpose a key-like implement chained to the lock without and having a ring about the size of the iron crown of the Lombards.

"Good night," old Malakh told him courteously, "good night. But yet all nights are good--save the night of the heart."

St. George went back to the terrace. For hours he paced the paths of that little upper garden or lay upon the wall among the pungent vines. But now he forgot the iridescent dark and the companion-sea and the high moon and the king's palace, for it was not these that made the necromancy of the night. It was permitted him to watch before the threshold while Olivia slept, as lovers had watched in the youth of the world. Whatever the morrow held, to-night had been added to yesternight. Not until the dawn of that morrow whitened the sky and drew from the vapourous plain the first far towers of Med, the King's City, did St. George say good night to her glimmering windows.

CHAPTER XVI

GLAMOURIE

There is a certain poster, all stars and poppies and deep gra.s.s; and over these hangs a new moon which must surely have been cut by fairy scissors, for it looks as much like a cake or a cowslip as it looks like a moon. But withal it sheds a light so eery and strangely silver that the poster seems, in spite of the poppies, to have been painted in Spring-wind.

"Never," said some chance visitors vehemently, "have I seen such a moon as that!"

"But ah, sir, and ah, madame," was the answer--it is not recorded whether the poster spoke or whether some one spoke for it--"wouldn't you like to?"

Now, therefore, concerning the sweet of those hours in the king's palace the Vehement may be tempted to exclaim that in life things never happen like that. Ah--do they not so? You have only to go back to the days when young love and young life were yours to recall distinctly that the most impossible things were every-day occurrences. What about the time that you went down one street instead of up another and _that_ changed the entire course of your days and brought you two together? What about the song, the June, the letter that touched the world to gold before your eyes and caught you up in a place of clouds? Remembering that magic, it is quite impossible to a.s.sert that any charming thing whatever would not have happened. Is there not some wonderland in every life? And is not the ancient citadel of Love-upon-the-Heights that common wonderland? One must believe in all the happiness that one can.

But if the Most Vehement--who are as thick as b.u.t.terflies--still remain unconvinced and persist that they never heard of things fallen out thus, there is left this triumph:

"Ah, sir, or ah, madame, wouldn't you like to?"

A fugitive wind rollicking in from sea next morning swept through the palace and went on around the world; and thereafter it had an hundred odourous ways of attracting attention, which were merely its own tale of what pleasant things it had seen and heard on high.

For example, that breakfast. A cloth had been laid at one end of the long stone table whereat, since the days of Abibaal, brother to Hiram, friend to David, kings had breakfasted and banqueted, and this cloth had now been set with the ancient plate of the palace--dishes that looked like helmets and urns and discs. Here Olivia and Antoinette, in charming print frocks, made a kind of tea in a kind of biblical samovar and served it in vessels that resembled individual trophies of the course. And here St. George and Amory praised the admirable English m.u.f.fins which some one had taught the dubious cook to make; and Mr. Augustus Frothingham tip-fingered his way about his plate among alien fruits and queer-shaped cakes. "Are they cookies or are they manna?" Amory wondered, "for they remind me of coriander seeds." And here Mrs.

Hastings, who always awoke a thought impatient and became ultra-complacent with no interval of real sanity, wistfully asked for a soft-boiled egg and added plaintively:

"Though I dare say the very hens in Yaque lay something besides eggs--pineapples, very likely."

"I suppose," speculated Amory, "that when we get perfectly intuitionized we won't have to eat either one because we'll know beforehand exactly how they both taste."

"A _reductio ad absurdum_, my young friend," said the lawyer sternly; "the real purpose of eating will remain for ever unchanged."

Later, while Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham went out on the terrace in the sun and wished for a morning paper ("I miss the weather report so," complained Mrs. Hastings) the four young people with Jarvo and Akko for guides set out to explore the palace. For St. George had risen from his two hours' sleep with some clearly-defined projects, and he meant first to go over every niche and corner of the great pile where one--say a king--might be hidden with twenty other kings, and no one be at all the wiser.

What a morning it was! When the rollicking wind got to that part of the story it must have told about it in such intimating perfumes that even the unimaginative were constrained to sit idle, "thinking delicate thoughts." There never was a fairer temple of romance, a very temple of Young Love's Plaisaunce; and since the coming of St.

George and Amory all the cavernous chambers and galleries were become homes of hope that the king would be found and all would yet be well.

To the main part of the palace there were storey after storey, all octagons and pentagons and labyrinths, so that incredulity and amazement might increase with every step. How they had ever raised those ma.s.sive blocks of stone to that great height no one can guess unless, indeed, Amory's theory were correct and the palace had originally been built upon level ground and had had its surroundings blasted neatly away to make a mountain. At all events there were the walls of the great airy rooms made of the naked stone, exquisitely beveled and chiseled, and frescoed with the planetary deities--Eloti, the Moon with her chariot drawn by white bulls, the Sun and his four horses, with his emblem of a column in the form of a rising flame--types taken from the heavens and from the abyss. There were roofs of sound fir and sweet cedar, carven cornices, cave-like window embrasures with no gla.s.s, and little circular rooms built about shrines in which sat broken images of Baal the sun G.o.d, of a sandaled Astarte, and a ravening Melkarth, with the lion's skin.

From a great upper corridor there went a stairway, each deep step of which was placed on the back of a stone lion of increasing size, until the tallest lion's head extended close to the painted ceiling, and there were comfortable benches cut in his gigantic paws. Many of the rooms were without furnishing, some were filled with vague, splendid stuff mouldering away, and others with most luxuriously-devised ministries to beauty and comfort. The palace was curiously and wonderfully an habitation of more than two thousand years ago, furnished with a taste and luxury in advance of this moment's civilization of the world. The heart of that elder world beat strangely in one of the upper chambers where they came upon a little work-shop, strewn with unknown metals and tools and empty crucibles, and in their midst a rectangular metallic plate partly traced with a device of boughs, appearing, in one light, slightly fluorescent.

"It is the work of the Princess Simyra, adon," said Jarvo. "She was the daughter of King Thabion, and when she died what she had touched in this room was left unmoved. But it was very many years ago--I have forgotten. Every one has forgotten."

They went down among the very roots of the palace, three full storeys below the surface of the summit. Jarvo went before, lighting the way, and they threaded vaulted corridors and winding pa.s.sages, and emerged at last in a silent, haunted chamber whose stones had been hewn and sunken there, before Issus. This was the chamber of the tombs of the kings, and its floor echoed to their footsteps, now hollowly, now with ringing clearness. Three sides of the mighty hall were lined with _loculi_ or niches, each as deep as the length of a man. About the floor stood stone sarcophagi and beneath the long flags kings were sleeping, each with his abandoned name graven on the stones, washed year-long by the dark. In the room's centre was a lofty cylindrical tomb, mounted by four steps, and this was the resting-place of King Abibaal, the younger son of King Abibaal of Tyre, and the brother to King Hiram, who ruled in Tyre when the Phoenicians who settled Yaque, or Arqua, first pa.s.sed the Straits of Gibraltar and gained the open sea. ("Dear me," said Mrs. Hastings when they told her, "I was at Mount Vernon once, and the Washingtons' tombs there impressed me very deeply, but they were nothing to these in point of age, were they?") Sunken in the wall was a tomb of white marble hewn in a five-faced pyramidion, where slept Queen Mitygen, who ruled in Yaque while Alexander was king of Persia. There was said to have been buried with her a casket of love-letters from Alexander, who may have known Yaque and probably at one time visited it and, in that case, was entertained in the very palace. And if this is true the story of his omission to conquer the island may one day divert the world.

Jarvo bent before a low tomb whose stone was delicately scored with winged circles.

"Perhaps," he said, "you will recall the accounts of the kidnapped Egyptian priestesses sold to the Theoprotions by Phoenician merchants in the heroic age of Greece? They were not all sold. Here lie the bones of four, given royal burial because of their holy office."

Nothing was unbelievable--nothing had been unbelievable for so long that these four had almost learned that everything is possible.

Which, if you come to think of it, and no matter how absurdly you learn it, is a thing immeasurably worth realizing in this world of possibilities. It is one of our two magics.