Wings of the Wind Part 38

"Don't dance?" I must have looked my amazement, for she answered:

"I've often danced, all alone, when I just couldn't help it; but there hasn't been any one to teach me your kind!"

"I will," I cried delightedly. "We'll begin with that fox-trot!"

"We'd look awfully silly," she replied. "Besides, the name of your dance is atrocious."

I felt rather thankful that I hadn't suggested the shimmy.

"That may get you out of it now," I announced, "but when we reach the yacht I'm going to teach you ten hours a day. Understand?--ten hours a day!"

Again came the tantalizing expression, as she daintily caught her skirt and made me a royal curtsey, saying:

"It's beyond all measure charming of you, Chancellor. But shall I be so difficult?"

"Don't joke about a wonderful prospect," I answered. "You're difficult because of your grace, not the lack of it--if that's what you mean!" But from her indifferent way of dismissing the subject I judged it was not what she had meant, at all.

The sun must have set while we were encircling my pool. Then we pa.s.sed on into a still denser growth, following a crooked path that led to the fort--entering a mysterious shadow-land that twilights have the trick of producing when overhead foliage shuts out the afterglow and the serene forest gloom is painted in tones of gray. The soft earth we trod was dark, and the water lay phantom-like in its black bowl. Except for the few times I held aside a swinging wildwood vine for her to pa.s.s, we might have been two drifting spirits--so quietly did we move, and so unknowingly were we affected by the hour, the place.

At the edge of our forest, where that long ago prairie fire had blighted a grove of palm trees that subsequently fell upon each other like an entangled pile of jackstraws, she took my hand to get across and, freed from the clinging shadows, we ran out beneath the sky--then gasped in amazement at its splendor.

It was not a sunset, not an afterglow in the usual sense of afterglows, but a sky of deep, smouldering red equally distributed from horizon to horizon; as though everywhere below the world a conflagration raged. I could not at first speak for the grandeur of it, and when I turned to her words were again checked by the look upon her face. For this dull, permeating glow--this enchantment from the heavens--touched her brow, her cheeks, her parted lips, with a light that aroused in me a thousand devils and a thousand G.o.ds; it lingered over her hair as if striving to concentrate itself into a halo there; and in her eyes that gazed afar were suggested the awakening of deeper fires, of wilder mysteries.

"G.o.d, what a sky," I at last exclaimed, through sheer panic at the imminence of crying aloud my love for her.

"What a sky, O G.o.d," she whispered, delicately turning my profane outburst to a sigh of thankfulness.

But, better than she, I knew the meaning of that sky. I knew that down over the western edge of the world blazed a huge funeral pyre on which my past was being changed to harmless ashes; while in the east flames were already lighted beneath the on-coming crucible of destiny, from whose purifying heat a new love arose. Farther into obscurity would sink the one; up and on would come the other; and so the sky was now roseate unto its zenith, reflecting the glory of these miracles. I followed the look of her eyes and saw, high against the red, a lone crane flying majestically homeward to the seclusion of his swamp; and it typified my own belated heart that, without questioning the whence or why, unerringly obeyed a silent voice which called it to another sanctuary.

I wanted to tell her this, but dared not. And so we stood, spellbound, while the night brought out the blue--and the young moon changed from red to silver--and the stars came down to take their places. Then slowly we pa.s.sed on and sat by the fort, leaning our backs against it; in meditation looking across the prairie that had become so changed a place to us.

The night grew sweet with the purity of untouched wilderness as, shoulder to shoulder, we sat talking in low tones of Smilax and Echochee. She had wondered about them no few times that day, and now I, too, felt some concern. Yet the Everglades lay far eastward and, for any reason giving up Big Cove, I knew he would plunge as deeply into it as his pursuers dared follow. To-morrow would be time enough to worry, I a.s.sured her, so we talked about Monsieur, the Azurian throne, and--I could not help it--of another Chancellor who would build her kitchen fires. But I tried to keep all bitterness from my words. In the vague light I could see that her face was serious, and very tender. Then for a time we sat without speaking.

Perhaps it was the place, the charm; perhaps a magic was working stronger than I knew; but words came to my lips that I stubbornly refused to speak. I fought against them; they, too, fought with grim insistence; so as a compromise, looking straight ahead and pretending to jest even while I accused, I said:

"You've been listening!"

"Listening?" Her eyes opened prettily, alert as they always were to parry banter with banter.

"Yes, listening--at the keyhole like a common gossip. A nice pastime for a Princess, surely!"

"At the--keyhole?" She was proceeding warily now; her mind, as in a game of hide-and-seek, was on tiptoe, in expectation of discovering me at every step.

"Yes," I repeated. "And you heard my heart admitting that it's happy--to've found something it was hungry for."

For the briefest instant I thought a tremor ran through her shoulder, as if a little chilly sensation had rippled her nerves. But it was a silly idea, because she lightly replied:

"Corn cakes, maybe. It ought to feel quite stuffed after the seven you had for dinner."

"Six," I corrected.

"Seven," she insisted.

"But I know!"

"So do I," she laughed, "that you stole one from my plate when you thought I wasn't looking."

"I needed that one."

"I never doubted it," she agreed.

Wild words again sprang to my lips, but this time I ruthlessly strangled them. Yet I wanted to say: "I took from you because you stole from me!"

And I wanted to ask--O, shades of suffering Dante, how I longed to ask!--if her dear heart were hungering, too, that she should have needed my own to feed it!--if that were her excuse for thievery!

But already I had overstepped my resolution, although not feeling desperately contrite about it after the sleight-of-hand way that a declaration of love had been changed into the accusation of filching a corn cake. Yet it had been a narrow escape and I thanked my G.o.ds for the chance of pulling up, of again getting the right perspective.

To tell her anything at all before Echochee came would be the act of an utterly selfish cad, for if she did not want my love--and there was little enough reason to suppose that she did--her position would be intolerable. In such an eventuality never again could we sit beside the fort on nights like this, no longer would she want a cleared path leading to her bailiwick. We would be as two estranged creatures doomed to live near yet apart; each a daily witness of the other's unhappiness; neither able by word or deed to give relief. Ah, I was glad she did not even suspect that I cared a whit for her! I lit my pipe and in moody silence smoked.

A pipe stem is a safe thing for man to grip his teeth upon when silence is a virtue. Here in our forest I was master, the undisputed superior force; and I wondered with a fascinating wonder how that ancestor, who climbed down from his tree at nightfall, would have been greeting her! I visualized his cunning face, now peering at me through the ages, leering at me with bared tusks, bidding me take what was my own by right of might! I felt the savage splendor of it. The wildness of this place, its solitude, its distance from mankind, supported me. The cry of a night bird out on the prairie told that it, too, was preying, or being preyed upon; and, as if being stirred by this, a panther sent his wail across the night. I listened for a mate to answer, but she did not. A large, whitish moth flying out of the shadows pa.s.sed clumsily within a few inches of my face, its wings swishing as a bird's; and it, too, was without a mate.

Then, as in the following silence I continued to listen, some far off words came back to me. They came as the scent of lavender comes when rain is pattering on the shingles, and some one opens the old trunk that, ever since you can remember, has stood back under the rafters of the sloping roof; the hallowed old trunk where a veil of yellowing lace is stored--a piece of white satin, a blue or gray faded uniform, and maybe a wee shoe, and a lock of hair. Every one who has leaned above that trunk--and thank G.o.d they are legion!--has also listened to a voice coming faintly through the past. And so words out of a lesser past now came to me, as they were meant to be written on a torn wine card: "I am in danger!"

She had been in danger of a brute, and had offered the safety of her keeping to me. And the vision of my savage ancestor, though retreating sullenly, faded into nothing. Then I felt her body press against me softly and, looking down, I saw that she had fallen asleep, with her head--precious, trusting thing--resting against my shoulder.

For an hour I sat motionless, fearing to awake her. Finally one of my legs went to sleep, and soon my other leg. Yet it was a welcome discomfort because endured for her. And I suppose the numbness must eventually have crept the length of my body, for, I, too, slept; awaking, I did not know how much later, to find her gone.

Then I stumbled back to my lean-to, but did not go inside. This was not the night, nor mine the mood, to shut high heaven from my eyes, my thoughts, the lambent flame of my love? So I chose the open, and lay on my back gazing up into the silhouetted palm fronds, catching glimpses of a star that here or there peeped through at me, steeping my thoughts in solitude.

For it was that hushed hour of betwixt and between, when crickets, tree-toads and other little creatures of the darkness have wearied themselves to rest; yet also before the daylight life has stirred from its own deep sleep. The silent hour, this is; the one hour in the round of time when nature seems to be absolutely poised in breathless s.p.a.ce; when the pendulum of night hangs dead, and dawn is still a great way over the hill. I shared its mysticism, feeling also a rich contentment that she, too, was lying near me somewhere in this same solitude; dreaming, with her cheek upon her arm; her hair kissed by the same dew that cooled my face. I could not, of course, reach out my hand and touch her, but the path led straight; and along this now my heart went begging--impoverished rascal! He went on tiptoe, begging; while I continued to watch for the elusive star, and my soul looked into the level eyes of G.o.d.

CHAPTER XXI

PLANTING A MEMORY

A searching look next morning over the prairie revealed no sign of enemies, or of Smilax. Somewhat thoughtful over his continued absence I went to the kitchen and laid the fire, but did not light it because our stock of b.u.t.tonwood had become reduced to a few small sticks and sc.r.a.ps that would scarcely more than cook one meal, and the use of other woods might at this time be an unwise experiment. So with an eye to prudence I withheld the match until Her Serene Highness should arrive.

When she did not come nor answer to my call, I set out to see what might have detained her, conscious of a vague dread yet not seriously giving in to it; but, after visiting the fort, this grew into an unreasoning fear, and I began to run. It seemed so easy now to understand how some of Efaw Kotee's henchmen could have discovered us, slipped up during the night and overpowered her! What had been a remote possibility yesterday, to-day grew into a certainty. With this obsession torturing me I dashed across the Oasis, finally coming out of the forest at its extreme eastern tip.

Then I saw her but a few yards away. Perhaps the brisk wind, rustling the palms and prairie gra.s.s, drowned the noise of my impetuous rush, for she did not turn.

Her face was toward the east, looking above an orange sun that still clung to the horizon. Instinctively I felt that she was thinking of Azuria, that the pictures of it which I had drawn were recrossing before her dreamy vision, forming a panorama of splendor that called more surely than in March the Canadian flats call the Southern water bird.

This gave her eyes, her uplifted face, her slightly parted lips, a new glory, and I involuntarily exclaimed:

"Doloria of the Golden Dawn!"