Romance Island Part 36

For there, beside the beetling throne, was standing a man, slenderly built, with a youthful, sensitive face and critically-drooping lids, and upon them all his eyes were turned in faint amus.e.m.e.nt warmed by an idle approbation.

"Perfect--perfect. Quite perfect," he was saying below his breath.

Olivia turned. The next moment she stood with outstretched arms before her father; and King Otho, in his long, straight robe, encrusted with purple amethysts, bent with exquisite courtesy above his daughter's hands.

"My dear child," he murmured, "the picture that you make entirely justifies my existence, but hardly my absence. Shall we ask his Highness to do that?"

It mattered little who was to do that so long as it was done. For to that people, steeped in dream, risen from the crudity of mere events to breathe in the rarer atmosphere of their significance, here was a happening worthy their attention, for it had the dignity of mystery.

Even Mrs. Medora Hastings, billowing toward the throne with cries, was less poignantly a challenge to be heard. Upon her the king laid a tranquillizing hand and, with a droop of eyelids in recognition of Mr. Frothingham, he murmured: "Ah, Medora--Medora! Delight in the moment--but do not embrace it," while beside him, star-eyed, Olivia stood waiting for Prince Tabnit to speak.

To Olivia, trembling a little as she leaned upon his arm, King Otho bent with some word, at which she raised to his her startled face, and turned from him uncertainly, and burned a heavenly colour from brow to chin. Then, her father's words being insistent in her ear, and her own heart being tumultuous with what he had told her, she turned as he bade her, and, following his glance, slipped beneath a shining curtain that cut from the audience chamber the still seclusion of the King's Alcove, a chamber long sacred to the sovereigns of Yaque.

Confused with her wonder and questioning, hardly daring to understand the import of her father's words, Olivia went down a pa.s.sage set between two high white walls of the palace, open to-day to the upper blue and to the floating pennons of the dome.

Here, p.r.i.c.kly-leaved plants had shot to the cornices with uncouth contorting of angled boughs, and in their inner green ruffle-feathered birds looked down on her with the uncanny interest of myriapods. She caught about her the lace of her skirts and of her floating veil, and the way echoed musically to the touch of her little sandals and was bright with the shining of her diadem. And at the end of the pa.s.sage she lifted a swaying curtain of soft dyes and entered the King's Alcove.

The King's Alcove laid upon one the delicate demands of calm open water--for its floor of white transparent tiles was cunningly traced with the reflected course of the carven roof, and one seemed to look into mirrored depths of disappearing line between s.p.a.ces shaped like petals and like chevrons. In the King's Alcove one stood in a world of white and one's sight was exquisitely won, now by a niche open to a blue well of sea and s.p.a.ce, now by silver plants lucent in high cas.e.m.e.nts. And there one was spellbound with this mirroring of the Near which thus became the Remote, until one questioned gravely which was "there" and which was "here," for the real was extended into vision, and vision was quickened to the real, and nothing lay between. But to Olivia, entering, none of these things was clearly evident, for as the curtain of many dyes fell behind her she was aware of two figures--but the one, with a murmured word which she managed somehow to answer without an idea what she said or what it had said either, vanished down the way that she had come. And she stood there face to face with St. George.

He had risen from a low divan before a small table set with figs and bread and a decanter of what would have been bordeaux if it had not been distilled from the vineyards of Yaque. He was very pale and haggard, and his eyes were darkly circled and still fever-bright.

But he came toward her as if he had quite forgotten that this is a world of danger and that she was a princess and that, little more than a week ago, her name was to him the unknown music. He came toward her with a face of unutterable gladness, and he caught and crushed her hands in his and looked into her eyes as if he could look to the distant soul of her. He led her to a great chair hewn from quarries of things silver and unremembered, and he sat at her feet upon a bench that might have been a stone of the altar of some forgotten deity of dreams, at last worshiped as it should long have been worshiped by all the host that had pa.s.sed it by. He looked up in her face, and the room was like a place of open water where heaven is mirrored in earth, and earth reflects and answers heaven.

St. George laughed a little for sheer, inextinguishable happiness.

"Once," he said, "once I breakfasted with you, on tea and--if I remember correctly--gold and silver m.u.f.fins. Won't you breakfast with me now?"

Olivia looked down at him, her heart still clamourous with its anxiety of the night and of the morning.

"Tell me where you can have been," she said only; "didn't you know how distressed we would be? We imagined everything--in this dreadful place. And we feared everything, and we--" but yet the "we" did not deceive St. George; how could it with her eyes, for all their avoidings, so divinely upon him?

"Did you," he said, "ah--did you wonder? I wish I knew!"

"And my father--where did you find him?" she besought. "It was you?

You found him, did you not?"

St. George looked down at a fold of her gown that was fallen across his knee. How on earth was he ever to move, he wondered vaguely, if the slightest motion meant the withdrawing of that fold. He looked at her hand, resting so near, so near, upon the arm of the chair; and last he looked again into her face; and it seemed wonderful and before all things wonderful, not that she should be here, jeweled and crowned, but that he should so unbelievably be here with her.

And yet it might be but a moment, as time is measured, until this moment would be swept away. His eyes met hers and held them.

"Would you mind," he said, "now--just for a little, while we wait here--not asking me that? Not asking me anything? There will be time enough in there--when _they_ ask me. Just for now I only want to think how wonderful this is."

She said: "Yes, it is wonderful--unbelievable," but he thought that she might have meant the white room or her queen's robe or any one of all the things which he did not mean.

"_Is_ it wonderful to you?" he asked, and he said again: "I wish--I wish I knew!"

He looked at her, sitting in the moon of her laces and the stars of her gems, and the sense of the immeasurableness of the hour came upon him as it comes to few; the knowledge that the evanescent moment is very potent, the world where the siren light of the Remote may at any moment lie quenched in some ashen present. To him, held momentarily in this place that was like sh.o.r.eless, open water, the present was inestimably precious and it lay upon St. George like the delicate claim of his love itself. What the next hour held for them neither could know, and this universal uncertainty was for him crystallized in an instant of high wisdom; over the little hand lying so perilously near, his own closed suddenly and he crushed her fingers to his lips.

"Olivia--dear heart," he said, "we don't know what they may do--what will happen--oh, may I tell you _now_?"

There was no one to say that he might not, for the hand was not withdrawn from his. And so he did tell her, told her all his heart as he had known his heart to be that last night on _The Aloha_, and in that divine twilight of his arriving on the island, and in those hours beside the airy ramparts of the king's palace, and in the vigil that followed, and always--always, ever since he could remember, only that he hadn't known that he was waiting for her, and now he knew--now he knew.

"Must you not have known, up there in the palace," he besought her, "the night that I got there? And yesterday, all day yesterday, you must have known--didn't you know? I love you, Olivia. I couldn't have told you, I couldn't have let you know, only now, when we can't know what may come or what they may do--oh, say you forgive me.

Because I love you--I love you."

She rose swiftly, her veil floating about her, silver over the gold of her hair; and the light caught the enchantment of the gems of the strange crown they had set upon her head, and she looked down at him in almost unearthly beauty. He stood before her, waiting for the moment when she should lift her eyes. And the eyes were lifted, and he held out his arms, and straight to them, regardless of the coronation laces of Queen Mitygen, went Olivia, Princess of Yaque.

He put aside her shining hair, as he had put it aside in that divine moment in the motor in the palace wood; and their lips met, in that world that was like the sh.o.r.eless open sea where earth reflects heaven, and heaven comes down.

They sat upon the white-cushioned divan, and St. George half knelt beside her as he had knelt that night in the fleeing motor, and there were an hundred things to say and an hundred things to hear.

And because this fragment of the past since they had met was incontestably theirs, and because the future hung trembling before them in a mist of doubt, they turned happy, hopeful eyes to that future, clinging to each other's hands. The little chamber of translucent white, where one looked down to a mirrored dome and up to a kind of sky, became to them a place bounded by the touch and the look and the voice of each other, as every place in the world is bounded for every heart that beats.

"Sweetheart," said St. George presently, "do you remember that you are a princess, and I'm merely a kind of man?"

Was it not curious, he thought, that his lips did not speak a new language of their own accord?

"I know," corrected Olivia adorably, "that I'm a kind of princess.

But what use is that when it only makes trouble for us?"

"Us"--"makes trouble for us." St. George wondered how he could ever have thought that he even guessed what happiness might be when "trouble for us" was like this. He tried to say so, and then:

"But do you know what you are doing?" he persisted. "Don't you see--dear, don't you see that by loving me you are giving up a world that you can never, never get back?"

Olivia looked down at the fair disordered hair on his temples. It seemed incredible that she had the right to push it from his forehead. But it was not incredible. To prove it Olivia touched it back. To prove that _that_ was not incredible, St. George turned until his lips brushed her wrist.

"Don't you know, don't you, dear," he pressed the matter, "that very possibly these people here have really got the secret that all the rest of the world is talking about and hoping about and dreaming they will sometime know?"

Olivia heard of this likelihood with delicious imperturbability.

"I know a secret," she said, just above her breath, "worth two of that."

"You'll never be sorry--never?" he urged wistfully, resolutely denying himself the entire bliss of that answer.

"Never," said Olivia, "never. Shall you?"

That was exceptionally easy to make clear, and thereafter he whimsically remembered something else:

"You live in the king's palace now," he reminded her, "and this is another palace where you might live if you chose. And you might be a queen, with drawing-rooms and a poet laureate and all the rest. And in New York--in New York, perhaps we shall live in a flat."

"No," she cried, "no, indeed! Not 'perhaps,' I _insist_ upon a flat." She looked about the room with its bench brought from the altar of a forgotten deity of dreams, with its line and colour dissolving to mirrored point and light--the mystic union of sight with dream--and she smiled at the divine incongruity and the divine resemblance. "It wouldn't be so very different--a flat," she said shyly.

Wouldn't it--wouldn't it, after all, be so very different?

"Ah, if you only think so, really," cried St. George.

"But it will be different, just different enough to like better,"

she admitted then. "You know that I think so," she said.

"If only you knew how much I think so," he told her, "how I have thought so, day and night, since that first minute at the Boris.

Olivia, dear heart--when did you think so first--"

She shook her head and laid her hands upon his and drew them to her face.