Romance Island Part 37

"Now, now--now!" she cried, "and there never was any time but now."

"But there will be--there will be," he said, his lips upon her hair.

After a time--for Time, that seems to have no boundaries in the abstract, is a very fiend for bounding the divine concrete--after a time Amory spoke hesitatingly on the other side of the curtain of many dyes.

"St. George," he said, "I'm afraid they want you. Mr. Holland--the king, he's got through playing them. He wants you to get up and give 'em the truth, I think."

"Come in--come in, Amory," St. George said and lifted the curtain, and "I beg your pardon," he added, as his eyes fell upon Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated. She had followed Olivia from the hall, and had met Amory midway the avenue of p.r.i.c.kly trees, and they had helpfully been keeping guard. Now they went on before to the Hall of Kings, and St. George, remembering what must happen there, turned to Olivia for one crowning moment.

"You know," she said fearfully, "before father came the prince intended the most terrible things--to set you and Mr. Amory adrift in a rudderless airship--"

St. George laughed in amus.e.m.e.nt. The poor prince with his impossible devices, thinking to harm him, St. George--_now_.

"He meant to marry you, he thought," he said, "but, thank Heaven, he has your father to answer to--and me!" he ended jubilantly.

And yet, after all, Heaven knew what possibilities hemmed them round. And Heaven knew what she was going to think of him when she heard his story. He turned and caught her to him, for the crowning moment.

"You love me--you love me," he said, "no matter what happens or what they say--no matter what?"

She met his eyes and, of her own will, she drew his face down to hers.

"No matter what," she answered. So they went together toward the chamber which they had both forgotten.

When they reached the Hall of Kings they heard King Otho's voice--suave, mellow, of perfect enunciation:

"--some one," the king was concluding, "who can tell this considerably better than I. And it seems to me singularly fitting that the recognition of the part eternally played by the 'possible'

be temporarily deferred while we listen to--I dislike to use the word, but shall I say--the facts."

It seemed to St. George when he stood beside the dais, facing that strange, eager mult.i.tude with his strange unbelievable story upon his lips--the story of the finding of the king--as if his own voice were suddenly a part of all the gigantic incredibility. Yet the divinely real and the fantastic had been of late so fused in his consciousness that he had come to look upon both as the normal--which is perhaps the only sane view. But how could he tell to others the monstrous story of last night, and hope to be believed?

None the less, as simply as if he had been narrating to Chillingworth the high moment of a political convention, St. George told the people of Yaque what had happened in that night in the room of the tombs with that mad old Malakh whom they all remembered. It came to him as he spoke that it was quite like telling to a field of flowers the real truth about the wind of which they might be supposed to know far more than he; and yet, if any one were to tell the truth about the wind who would know how to listen? He was not amazed that, when he had done, the people of Yaque sat in a profound silence which might have been the silence of innocent amazement or of utter incredulity.

But there was no mistaking the face of Prince Tabnit. Its cool tolerant amus.e.m.e.nt suddenly sent the blood p.r.i.c.king to St. George's heart and filled him with a kind of madness. What he did was the last thing that he had intended. He turned upon the prince, and his voice went cutting to the farthest corner of the hall:

"Men and women of Yaque," he cried, "I accuse your prince of the knowledge that can take from and add to the years of man at will. I accuse him of the deliberate and criminal use of that knowledge to take King Otho from his throne!"

St. George hardly knew what effect his words had. He saw only Olivia, her hands locked, her lips parted, looking in his face in anguish; and he saw Prince Tabnit smile. Prince Tabnit sat upon the king's left hand, and he leaned and whispered a smiling word in the ear of his sovereign and turned a smiling face to Olivia upon her father's right.

"I know something of your American newspapers, your Majesty," the prince said aloud, "and these men are doing their part excellently, excellently."

"What do you mean, your Highness?" demanded St. George curtly.

"But is it not simple?" asked the prince, still smiling. "You have contrived a sensation for the great American newspaper. No one can doubt."

King Otho leaned back in the beetling throne.

"Ah, yes," he said, "it is true. Something has been contrived.

But--is the sensation of _his_ contriving, Prince?"

Olivia stood silent. It was not possible, it was not possible, she said over mechanically. For St. George to have come with this story of a potion--a drug that had restored youth to her father, had transformed him from that mad old Malakh--

"Father!" she cried appealingly, "don't you remember--don't you know?"

King Otho, watching the prince, shook his head, smiling.

"At dawn," he said, "there are few of us to be found remaining still at table with Socrates. I seem not to have been of that number."

"Olivia!" cried St. George suddenly.

She met his eyes for a moment, the eyes that had read her own, that had given message for message, that had seen with her the glory of a mystic morning willingly relinquished for a diviner dawn. Was she not princess here in Yaque? She laid her hand upon her father's hand; the crown that they had given her glittered as she turned toward the mult.i.tude.

"My people," she said ringingly, "I believe that that man speaks the truth. Shall the prince not answer to this charge before the High Council now--here--before you all?"

At this King Otho did something nearly perceptible with his eyebrows. "Perfect. Perfect. Quite perfect," he said below his breath. The next instant the eyelids of the sovereign drooped considerably less than one would have supposed possible. For from every part of the great chamber, as if a storm long-pent had forced the walls of the wind, there came in a thousand murmurs--soft, tremulous, definitive--the answering voice to Olivia's question:

"Yes. Yes. Yes..."

CHAPTER XX

OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS

In Prince Tabnit's face there was a curious change, as if one were suddenly to see hieroglyphics upon a star where before there had been only shining. But his calm and his magnificent way of authority did not desert him, as so grotesque a star would still stand lonely and high in the heavens. He spoke, and upon the mult.i.tude fell instant silence, not the less absolute that it harboured foreboding.

"Whatever the people would say to me," said the prince simply, "I will hear. My right hand rests in the hand of the people. In return I decree allegiance to the law. Your princess stands before you, crowned. This most fortunate return of his Majesty, the King, can not set at naught the sacred oath which has just left her lips.

Henceforth, in council and in audience, her place shall be at his Majesty's right hand, as was the place of that Princess Athalme, daughter of King Kab, in the dynasty of the fall of Rome. Is it not, therefore, but the more inc.u.mbent upon your princess to own her allegiance to the law of the island by keeping her troth with me--that troth witnessed and sanctioned by you yourselves? This ceremony concluded I will answer the demands of the loyal subjects whose interests alone I serve. For we obey that which is higher than authority--the law, born in the Beginning--"

Prince Tabnit's voice might almost have taken his place in his absence, it was so soft, so fine of texture, no more consciously modulated than is the going of water or the way of a wing. It was difficult to say whether his words or, so to say, their fine fabric of voice, begot the silence that followed. But all eyes were turned upon Olivia. And, Prince Tabnit noting this, before she might speak he suddenly swept his flowing robes embroidered by a thousand needles to a posture of humility before his sovereign.

"Your Majesty," he besought, "I pray your consent to the bestowal upon my most unworthy self of the hand of your daughter, the Princess Olivia."

King Otho leaned upon the arm of his carven throne. Against its strange metal his hand was cameo-clear.

"For the king," he was remembering softly, "'the Pyrenees, or so he fancied, ceased to exist.' For another 'the mountains of Daphne are everywhere.' Each of us has his impossible dream to prove that he is an impossible creature. Why not I? To be normal is the cry of all the hobgoblins ... And what does the princess say?" he asked aloud.

"Her Highness has already given me the great happiness to plight me her troth," said Prince Tabnit.

King Otho's eyebrows flickered from their parallel of repose.

"In Yaque or in America," he murmured, "the Americans do as the Americans do. None of us is mentioned in Deuteronomy, but what is the will of the princess?" the American Sovereign asked.

Mrs. Hastings, seated near the dais, heard; and as she turned, a rhinestone side-comb slipped from her hair, tinkled over the jewels of her corsage and shot into the lap of a member of the High Council. He, never having seen a side-comb, fancied that it might be an infernal machine which he had never seen either, and, palpitating, flashed it to the guardian hand of Mr. Frothingham. At the same moment:

"Ah, why, Otho," said Mrs. Hastings audibly, "we had two ancestors at Bannockburn!"

"Bannockburn!" argued Mr. Augustus Frothingham, below the voice, "Bannockburn. But what, my dear Mrs. Hastings, is Bannockburn beside the Midianites and the Moabites and the Hitt.i.tes and the Ammonites and the Levites?"