Romance Island Part 39

George as to the prince; but in some unfathomable fashion the inner sense of what he said for ever eluded, dissolving in the air of which it was a part. And yet, past all doubting, St. George knew that he was hearing the essence of that strange knowledge which the Isle of Yaque had won while all the rest of mankind struggled for it--he knew with the certainty with which we recognize strange forces in a dozen of the every-day things of life, in electricity, in telepathy, in dreams. With the same certainty he realized that what the prince was saying would, if he could understand, lift a certain veil. Here, put in words at last, was manifestly the secret, that catch of understanding without which men are groping in the dark, perhaps that mere pointing of relations which would make clear, without blasphemy, time and the future, rebirth and old existence, it might be; and certainly the accident of personality.

Here, crystallized, were the things that men almost know, the dream that has just escaped every one, the whisper in sleep that would have explained if one could remember when one woke, the word that has been thrillingly flashed to one in moments of absorption and has fled before one might catch the sound, the far hope of science, the glimpse that comes to dying eyes and is voiced in fragments by dying lips. Here without penetrating the great reserve or tracing any principle to its beginning, was the truth about both. And St. George was powerless to receive it.

He turned fearfully to Olivia. Ah--what if she did not guess anything of the meaning of what she was hearing? For one instant he knew all the misery of one whose friend stands on another star. But when he saw her uplifted face, her eager eyes and quick breath and her look divinely questioning his, he was certain that though she might not read the figures of the veil, yet she too knew how near, how near they Stood; and to be with her on this side was dearer--nay, was nearer the Secret--than without her to pa.s.s the veil that they touched. Then he looked at Amory; wouldn't old Amory know, he wondered. Wouldn't his mere understanding of news teach him what was happening? But old Amory, the light flashing on his pince-nez, was keeping one eye on the prince and wondering if the chair that he had just placed for Antoinette was not in the draught of the dome; and little Antoinette was looking about her like a rosebud, new to the b.u.t.terflies of June; and King Otho was listening, languid, heavy-lidded, sensitive to little values, sophisticating the moment; and Little Cawthorne stood with eyes raised in simple, tolerant wonder; and the others, Bennietod, Mrs.

Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, showed faces like the pools in which pebbles might be dropped, making no ripples--one must suppose that there are such pools, since there are certainly such faces. St. George saw how it was. Here, spoken casually by the prince, just as the Ba.n.a.l would speak of the visible and invisible worlds, here was the Sesame of understanding toward which the centuries had striven, the secret of the link between two worlds; and here, of all mankind, were only they two to hear--they two and that motionless company who knew what the prince knew and who kept it sealed within their eyes.

St. George looked at the mult.i.tude in swift understanding. They were like a Greek chorus, signifying what is. They knew what the prince was saying, they had the secret and yet--they were _no nearer, no nearer_ than he. With their ancient kindliness naked in their faces, St. George knew that through his love he was as near to the Source as were they. And it was suddenly as it had been that first night when he had stridden buoyantly through the island; for he could not tell which was the secret of the prince and of these people and which was the blessedness of his love.

None the less he clung desperately to the last words of Prince Tabnit in a vain effort to hold, to make clear, to sophisticate one single phrase, as one waking in the night says over, in a vain effort to fix it, some phantom sentence cried to him in dreams by a shadowy band destined to be dissolved when, in bright day, he would reclaim it. He even managed frantically to write down a jumble of words of which he could make nothing, save here and there a phrase like a touch of hands from the silence: "...the infinite moment that is pending" ... "all is become a window where had been a wall" ...

"the wintry vision" ... they were all words that beckon without replying. And all the time it was curiously as if the Something Silent within St. George himself, that so long had striven to speak, were crying out at last in the prince's words--and he could not understand. Yet in spite of it all, in spite of this imminent satisfying of the strange, dreadful curiosity which possesses all mankind, St. George, even now, was far less keen to comprehend than he was to burst through the throng with Olivia in his arms, gain the waiting _Aloha_ and sail into the New York harbour with the prize that he had won. "I drink now to those among you and among all men who have won and kept that which is greater than these," the prince had said, and St. George perfectly understood. He had but to look at Olivia to be triumphantly willing that the G.o.ds should keep their secrets about time and the link between the two worlds so long as they had given him love. What should he care about time? He had this hour.

When the prince ceased speaking the hall was hushed; but because of the tempest in the hearts of them all the silence was as if a strong wind, sweeping powerfully through a forest, were to sway no boughs and lift no leaves, only to strive noiselessly round one who walked there.

Prince Tabnit wrapped his white mantle about him and sat upon his throne. Spell-stricken, they watched him, that great mult.i.tude, and might not turn away their eyes. Slowly, imperceptibly, as Time touches the familiar, the face of the prince took on its change--and one could not have told wherein the change lay, but subtly as the encroachment of the dark, or the alchemy of the leaves, or the betrayal of certain modes of death, the finger was upon him. While they watched he became an effigy, the hideous face of a fantasy of smoke against the night sky, with a formless hand lifted from among the delicate laces in farewell. There was no death--the horror was that there was no death. Only this curse of age drying and withering at the bones.

A long, whining cry came from Ca.s.syrus, who covered his face with his mantle and fled. The spell being broken, by common consent the great hall was once more in motion--St. George would never forget that tide toward all the great portals and the shuddering backward glances at the white heap upon the beetling throne. They fled away into the rea.s.suring sunlight, leaving the echoless hall deserted, save for that breathing one upon the throne.

There was one other. From somewhere beside the dais the woman Elissa crept and knelt, clasping the knees of the man.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XXI

OPEN SECRETS

"Will you have tea?" asked Olivia.

St. George brought a deck cushion and tucked it in the willow steamer chair and said adoringly that he would have tea. Tea. In a world where the essentials and the inessentials are so deliciously confused, to think that tea, with some one else, can be a kind of Heaven.

"Two lumps?" pursued Olivia.

"Three, please," St. George directed, for the pure joy of watching her hands. There were no tongs.

"Aren't the rest going to have some?" Olivia absently shared her attention, tinkling delicately about among the tea things. "Doesn't every one want a cup of tea?" she inquired loud enough for n.o.body to hear. St. George, shifting his shoulder from the rail, looked vaguely over the deck of _The Aloha_, sighed contentedly, and smiled back at her. No one else, it appeared, would have tea; and there was none to regret it.

St. George's cursory inspection had revealed the others variously absorbed, though they were now all agreed in breathing easily since Barnay, interlarding rational speech with Irishisms of thanksgiving, had announced five minutes before that the fires were up and that in half an hour _The Aloha_ might weigh anchor. The only thing now left to desire was to slip clear of the shadow of the black reaches of Yaque, shouldering the blue.

Meanwhile, Antoinette and Amory sat in the comparative seclusion of the bow with their backs to the forward deck, and it was definitely manifest to every one how it would be with them, but every one was simply glad and dismissed the matter with that. Mr. Frothingham, in his steamer chair, looked like a soft collapsible tube of something; Bennietod, at ease upon the uncovered boards of the deck, was circ.u.mspectly having cheese sandwiches and wastefully shooting the ship's rockets into the red sunset, in general celebration; and Rollo, having taken occasion respectfully to submit to whomsoever it concerned that fact is ever stranger than fiction, had gone below.

Mr. Otho Holland and Little Cawthorne--but their smiles were like different names for the same thing--were toasting each other in something light and dry and having a bouquet which Mr. Holland, who ought to know, compared favourably with certain vintages of 1000 B.C. In a hammock near them reclined Mrs. Medora Hastings, holding two kinds of smelling salts which invariably revived her simply by inducing the mental effort of deciding which was the better. Her hair, which was exceedingly pretty, now rippled becomingly about her flushed face and was guiltless of side-combs--she had lost them both down a chasm in that headlong flight from the cliff's summit, and they irrecoverably reposed in the bed of some brook of the Miocene period. And Mrs. Hastings, her hand in that of her brother, lay in utter silence, smiling up at him in serene content.

For King Otho of Yaque was turning his back upon his island domain for ever. In that hurried flight across the Eurychorus among his distracted subjects, his resolution had been taken. Jarvo and Akko, the adieux to whom had been every one's sole regret in leaving the island, had miraculously found their way to the king and his party in their flight, and were despatched to Mount Khalak for such of their belongings as they could collect, and the island sovereign was well content.

"Ah well now," he had just observed, languidly surveying the tropical horizon through a cool gla.s.s of winking amber bubbles, "one must learn that to touch is far more delicate than to lift. It is more wonderful to have been the king of one moment than the ruler of many. It is better to have stood for an instant upon a rainbow than to have taken a morning walk through a field of clouds. The principle has long been understood, but few have had--shall I say the courage?--to practise it. Yet 'courage' is a term from-the-shoulder, and what I require is a word of finger-tips, over-tones, ultra-rays--a word for the few who understand that to leave a thing is more exquisite than to outwear it. It is by its very fineness circ.u.mscribed--a feminine virtue. Women understand it and keep it secret. I flatter myself that I have possessed the high moment, vanished against the noon. Ah, my dear fellow--" he added, lifting his gla.s.s to St. George's smile.

But little Cawthorne--all reality in his heliotrope outing and duck and grey curls--raised a characteristic plaint.

"Oh, but I've done it," he mournfully reviewed. "When'll I ever be in another island, in front of another vacated throne? Why didn't I move into the palace, and set up a natty, up-to-date little republic? I could have worn a crown as a matter of taste--what's the use of a democracy if you aren't free to wear a crown? And what kind of American am I, anyway, with this undeveloped taste for acquiring islands? If they ever find this out at the polls my vote'll be challenged. What?"

"Aw whee!" said Bennietod, intent upon a Roman candle, "wha' do you care, Mr. Cawt'orne? You don't hev to go back fer to be a child-slave to Chillingwort'. Me, I've gotta good call to jump overboard now an' be de sonny of a sea-horse, dead to rights!"

St. George looked at them all affectionately, unconscious that already the experience of the last three days was slipping back into the sheathing past, like a blade used. But he was dawningly aware, as he sat there at Olivia's feet in glorious content, that he was looking at them all with new eyes. It was as if he had found new names for them all; and until long afterward one does not know that these moments of bestowing new names mark the near breathing of the G.o.d.

The silence of Mrs. Hastings and her quiet devotion to her brother somehow gave St. George a new respect for her. Over by the wheel-house something made a strange noise of crying, and St. George saw that Mr. Frothingham sat holding a weird little animal, like a squirrel but for its stumpy tail and great human eyes, which he had unwittingly stepped on among the rocks. The little thing was licking his hand, and the old lawyer's face was softened and glowing as he nursed it and coaxed it with crumbs. As he looked, St. George warmed to them all in new fellowship and, too, in swift self-reproach; for in what had seemed to him but "broad lines and comic masks" he suddenly saw the authority and reality of homely hearts. The better and more intimate names for everything which seemed now within his grasp were more important than Yaque itself. He remembered, with a thrill, how his mother had been wont to tell him that a man must walk through some sort of fairy-land, whether of imagination or of the heart, before he can put much in or take much from the market-place. And lo! this fairy-land of his finding had proved--must it not always prove?--the essence of all Reality.

His eyes went to Olivia's face in a flash of understanding and belief.

"Don't you see?" he said, quite as if they two had been talking what he had thought.

She waited, smiling a little, thrilled by his certainty of her sympathy.

"None of this happened really," triumphantly explained St. George, "I met you at the Boris, did I not? Therefore, I think that since then you have graciously let me see you for the proper length of time, and at last we've fallen in love just as every one else does.

And true lovers always do have trouble, do they not? So then, Yaque has been the usual trouble and happiness, and here we are--engaged."

"I'm not engaged," Olivia protested serenely, "but I see what you mean. No, none of it happened," she gravely agreed. "It couldn't, you know. Anybody will tell you that."

In her eyes was the sparkle of understanding which made St. George love her more every time that it appeared. He noted, the white cloth frock, and the coat of hunting pink thrown across her chair, and he remembered that in the infinitesimal time that he had waited for her outside the Palace of the Litany, she must have exchanged for these the coronation robe and jewels of Queen Mitygen. St. George liked that swift practicality in the race of faery, though he was completely indifferent to Mrs. Hastings' and Antoinette's claims to it; and he wondered if he were to love Olivia more for everything that she did, how he could possibly live long enough to tell her.

When one has been to Yaque the simplest gifts and graces resolve themselves into this question.

_The Aloha_ gently freed herself from the shallow green pocket where she had lain through three eventful days, and slipped out toward the waste of water bound by the flaunting autumn of the west. An island wind, fragrant of bark and secret berries, blew in puffs from the steep. A gull swooped to her nest in a cranny of the basalt. From below a servant came on deck, his broad American face smiling over a tray of gla.s.ses and decanters and tinkling ice. It was all very tranquil and public and almost commonplace--just the high tropic seas at the moment of their unrestrained sundown, and the odour of tea-cakes about the pleasantly-littered deck. And for the moment, held by a common thought, every one kept silent. Now that _The Aloha_ was really moving toward home, the affair seemed suddenly such a gigantic impossibility that every one resented every one else's knowing what a trick had been played. It was as if the curtain had just fallen and the lights of the auditorium had flashed up after the third act, and they had all caught one another breathless or in tears, pretending that the tragedy had really happened.

"Promise me something," begged St. George softly, in sudden alarm, born of this inevitable aspect; "promise me that when we get to New York you are not going to forget all about Yaque--and me--and believe that none of us ever happened."

Olivia looked toward the serene mystery of the distance.

"New York," she said only, "think of seeing you in New York--now."

"Was I of more account in Yaque?" demanded St. George anxiously.

"Sometimes," said Olivia adorably, "I shall tell you that you were.

But that will be only because I shall have an idea that in Yaque you loved me more."

"Ah, very well then. And sometimes," said St. George contentedly, "when we are at dinner I shall look down the table at you sitting beside some one who is expounding some baneful literary theory, and I shall think: What do I care? He doesn't know that she is really the Princess of Far-Away. But I do."

"And he won't know anything about our motor ride, alone, the night that I was kidnapped, either--the literary-theory person," Olivia tranquilly took away his breath by observing.

St. George looked up at her quickly and, secretly, Olivia thought that if he had been attractive when he was courageous he was doubly so with the present adorably abashed look in his eyes.

"When--alone?" St. George asked unconvincingly.

She laughed a little, looking down at him in a reproof that was all approbation, and to be reproved like that is the divinest praise.

"How did you know?" protested St. George in fine indignation.

"Besides," he explained, "I haven't an idea what you mean."

"I guessed about that ride," she went on, "the night before last, when you were walking up and down outside my window. I don't know what made me--and I think it was very forward of me. Do you want to know something?" she demanded, looking away.