Romance Island Part 7

"Olivia!" protested Mrs. Hastings faintly, accepting St. George's hand, "do look at those children's ap.r.o.ns. I'm afraid we'll all contract fever after fever, just coming this far."

Unkempt women were occupying the doorstep of No. 19. St. George accosted them and asked the way to the rooms of a Mr. Tabnit. They smiled, displaying their wonderful teeth, consulted together, and finally with many l.a.b.i.als and uncouth pointings of shapely hands they indicated the door of the "first floor front," whose wooden shutters were closely barred. St. George led the way and entered the bare, unclean pa.s.sage where discordant voices and the odours of cooking wrought together to poison the air. He tapped smartly at the door.

Immediately it was opened by a graceful boy, dressed in a long, belted coat of dun-colour. He had straight black hair, and eyes which one saw before one saw his face, and he gravely bowed to each of the party in turn before answering St. George's question.

"a.s.suredly," said the youth in perfect English, "enter."

They found themselves in an ample room extending the full depth of the house; and partly because the light was dim and partly in sheer amazement they involuntarily paused as the door clicked behind them.

The room's contrast to the squalid neighbourhood was complete. The apartment was carpeted in soft rugs laid one upon another so that footfalls were silenced. The walls and ceiling were smoothly covered with a neutral-tinted silk, patterned in dim figures; and from a fluted pillar of exceeding lightness an enormous candelabrum shed clear radiance upon the objects in the room. The couches and divans were woven of some light reed, made with high fantastic backs, in perfect purity of line however, and laid with white mattresses. A little reed table showed slender pipes above its surface and these, at a touch from the boy, sent to a great height tiny columns of water that tinkled back to the square of metal upon which the table was set. A huge fan of blanched gra.s.ses automatically swayed from above. On a side-table were decanters and cups and platters of a material frail and transparent. Before the shuttered window stood an observable plant with coloured leaves. On a great table in the room's centre were scattered objects which confused the eye. A light curtain stirring in the fan's faint breeze hung at the far end of the room.

In a career which had held many surprises, some of which St. George would never be at liberty to reveal to the paper in whose service he had come upon them, this was one of the most alluring. The mere existence of this strange and luxurious habitation in the heart of such a neighbourhood would, past expression, delight Mr. Cra.s.s, the feature man, and no doubt move even Chillingworth to approval.

Chillingworth and Cra.s.s! Already they seemed strangers. St. George glanced at Miss Holland; she was looking from side to side, like a bird alighted among strange flowers; she met his eyes and dimpled in frank delight. Mrs. Hastings sat erectly beside her, her tortoise-rimmed gla.s.ses expressing bland approval. The improbability of her surroundings had quite escaped her in her satisfied discovery that the place was habitable. The lawyer, his thin lips parted, his head thrown back so that his hair rested upon his coat collar, remained standing, one long hand upon a coat lapel.

"Ah," said Miss Holland softly, "it _is_ an adventure, Aunt Dora."

St. George liked that. It irritated him, he had once admitted, to see a woman live as if living were a matter of life and death. He wished her to be alive to everything, but without suspiciously scrutinizing details, like a census-taker. To appreciate did not seem to him properly to mean to a.s.sess. Miss Holland, he would have said, seemed to live by the beats of her heart and not by the waves of her hair--but another proof, perhaps, of "if thou likest her opinions thou wilt praise her virtues."

It was but a moment before the curtain was lifted, and there approached a youth, apparently in the twenties, slender and delicately formed as a woman, his dark face surmounted by a great deal of snow-white hair. He was wearing garments of grey, cut in unusual and graceful lines, and his throat was closely wound in folds of soft white, fastened by a rectangular green jewel of notable size and brilliance. His eyes, large and of exceeding beauty and gentleness, were fixed upon St. George.

"Sir," said St. George, "we have been given this address as one where we may be a.s.sisted in some inquiries of the utmost importance.

The name which we have is simply 'Tabnit.' Have I the honour--"

Their host bowed.

"I am Prince Tabnit," he said quietly.

St. George, filled with fresh amazement, gravely named himself and, making presentation of the others, purposely omitted the name of Miss Holland. However, hardly had he finished before their host bowed before Miss Holland herself.

"And you," he said, "you to whom I owe an expiation which I can never make,--do you know it is my servant who would have taken your life?"

In the brief interval following this nave a.s.sertion, his guests were not unnaturally speechless. Miss Holland, bending slightly forward, looked at the prince breathlessly.

"I have suffered," he went on, "I have suffered indescribably since that terrible morning when I missed her and understood her mission.

I followed quickly--I was without when you entered, but I came too late. Since then I have waited, unwilling to go to you, certain that the G.o.ds would permit the possible. And now--what shall I say?"

He hesitated, his eyes meeting Miss Holland's. And in that moment Mrs. Hastings found her voice. She curved the chain of her eye-gla.s.ses over her ear, threw back her head until the tortoise-rims included her host, and spoke her mind.

"Well, Prince Tabnit," she said sharply--quite as if, St. George thought, she had been nursery governess to princes all her life--"I must say that I think your regret comes somewhat late in the day.

It's all very well to suffer as you say over what your servant has tried to do. But what kind of man must you be to have such a servant, in the first place? Didn't you know that she was dangerous and blood-thirsty, and very likely a maniac-born?"

Her voice, never modulated in her excitements, was so full that no one heard at that instant a quick, indrawn breath from St. George, having something of triumph and something of terror. Even as he listened he had been running swiftly over the objects in the room to fasten every one in his memory, and his eyes had rested upon the table at his side. A disc of bronze, supported upon a carven tripod, caught the light and challenged attention to its delicate traceries; and within its border of asps and goat's horns he saw cut in the dull metal a sphinx crucified upon an upright cross--an exact facsimile of the device upon that strange opalized gla.s.s from some far-away island which he had lately noted in the window in Mrs.

Hastings' drawing-room. Instantly his mind was besieged by a volley of suppositions and imaginings, but even in his intense excitement as to what this simple discovery might bode, he heard the prince's soft reply to Mrs. Hastings:

"Madame," said the prince, "she is a loyal creature. Whatever she does, she believes herself to be doing in my service. I trusted her.

I believed that such error was impossible to her."

"Error!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, looking about her for support and finding little in the aspect of Mr. Augustus Frothingham, who appeared to be regarding the whole proceeding as one from which he was to extract data to be thought out at some future infinitely removed.

As for St. George, he had never had great traffic with a future infinitely removed; he had a youthful and somewhat imaginative fashion of striking before the iron was well in the fire.

"Your servant believed, then, your Highness," he said clearly, "that in taking Miss Holland's life she was serving you?"

"I must regretfully conclude so."

St. George rose, holding the little brazen disc which he had taken from the table, and confronted his host, compelling his eyes.

"Perhaps you will tell us, Prince Tabnit," he said coolly, "what it is that the people who use this device find against Miss Holland's father?"

St. George heard Olivia's little broken cry.

"It is the same!" she exclaimed. "Aunt Dora--Mr. Frothingham--it is the crucified sphinx that was on so many of the things that father sent. Oh," she cried to the prince, "can it be possible that you know him--that you know anything of my father?"

To St. George's amazement the face of the prince softened and glowed as if with peculiar delight, and he looked at St. George with admiration.

"Is it possible," he murmured, half to himself, "that your race has already developed intuition? Are you indeed so near to the Unknown?"

He took quick steps away and back, and turned again to St. George, a strange joy dawning in his face.

"If there be some who are ready to know!" he said. "Ah," he recalled himself penitently to Miss Holland, "your father--Otho Holland, I have seen him many times."

"_Seen Otho_!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, as pink and trembling and expressionless as a disturbed mold of jelly. "Oh, poor, dear Otho!

Did he live where there are people like your frightful servant?

Olivia, think! Maybe he is lying at the bottom of a gorge, all wounded and b.l.o.o.d.y, with a dagger in his back! Oh, my poor, dear Otho, who used to wheel me about!"

Mrs. Hastings collapsed softly on the divan, her gla.s.ses fallen in her lap, her side-combs slipping silently to the rug. Olivia had risen and was standing before Prince Tabnit.

"Tell me," she said trembling, "when have you seen him? Is he well?"

Prince Tabnit swept the faces of the others and his eyes returned to Miss Holland and dropped to the floor.

"The last time that I saw him, Miss Holland," he answered, "was three months ago. He was then alive and well."

Something in his tone chilled St. George and sent a sudden thrill of fear to his heart.

"He was then alive and well?" St. George repeated slowly. "Will you tell us more, your Highness? Will you tell us why the death of his daughter should be considered a service to the prince of a country which he had visited?"

"You are very wonderful," observed the prince, smiling meditatively at St. George, "and your penetration gives me good news--news that I had not hoped for, yet. I can not tell you all that you ask, but I can tell you much. Will you sit down?"

He turned and glanced at the curtain at the far end of the room.

Instantly the boy servant appeared, bearing a tray on which were placed, in dishes of delicate-coloured filigree, strange dainties not to be cla.s.sified even by a cosmopolitan, with his Flemish and Finnish and all but Icelandic cafes in every block.

"Pray do me the honour," the prince besought, taking the dishes from the hands of the boy. "It gives me pleasure, Miss Holland, to tell you that your father has no doubt had these very plates set before him."

Upon a little table he deftly arranged the dishes with all the smiling ease of one to whom afternoon tea is the only business toward, and to whom an attempted murder is wholly alien. He impressed St. George vaguely as one who seemed to have risen from the dead of the crudities of mere events and to be living in a rarer atmosphere. The lawyer's face was a study. Mr. Augustus Frothingham never went to the theatre because he did not believe that a man of affairs should unduly stimulate the imagination.

There was set before them honey made by bees fed only upon a tropical flower of rare fragrance; cakes flavoured with wine that had been long buried; a paste of cream, thick with rich nuts and with the preserved buds of certain flowers; and little white berries, such as the j.a.panese call "pinedews"; there was a tea distilled from the roots of rare exotics, and other things savoury and fantastic. So potent was the spell of the prince's hospitality, and so gracious the insistence with which he set before them the strange and odourous dishes, that even Olivia, eager almost to tears for news of her father, and Mrs. Hastings, as critical and suspicious as some beetle with long antennae, might not refuse them.

As for Mr. Augustus Frothingham, although this might be Cagliostro's spagiric food, or "extract of Saturn," for aught that his previous experience equipped him to deny, yet he nibbled, and gazed, and was constrained to nibble again.