THE LADY OF KINGDOMS
So there were St. George and Amory presently domiciled in a prince's
palace such as Asia and Europe have forgotten, as by and by they
will forget the Taj Mahal and the Bon Marché. And at nine o'clock
the next morning in a certain Tyrian purple room in the west wing of
the Palace of the Litany the two sat breakfasting.
"One always breakfasts," observed St. George. "The first day that
the first men spend on Mars I wonder whether the first thing they do
will be to breakfast."
"Poor old Mars has got to step down now," said Amory. "We are one
farther on. I don't know how it will be, but if I felt on Mars the
way I do now, I should assent to breakfast. Shouldn't you?"
"On my life, Toby," said St. George, "as an idealist you are
disgusting. Yes, I should."
The table had been spread before an open window, and the window
looked down upon the palace garden, steeped in the gold of the sunny
morning, and formal with aisles of mighty, flowering trees. Within,
the apartment was lofty, its walls fashioned to lift the eye to
light arches, light capitals, airy traceries, and spaces of the hue
of old ivory, held in heavenly quiet. The sense of colour, colour
both captive and atmospheric, was a new and persistent delight, for
it was colour purified, specialized, and infinitely extended in
either direction from the crudity of the seven-winged spectrum. The
room was like an alcove of outdoors, not divorced from the open air
and set in contra-distinction, but made a continuation of its space
and order and ancient repose--a kind of exquisite porch of light.
Across this porch of light Rollo stepped, bearing a covered dish.
The little breakfast-table and the laden side-table were set with
vessels of rock-crystal and drinking-cups of silver gilt, and
breakfast consisted of delicately-prepared sea-food, a pulpy fruit,
thin wine and a paste of delicious powdered gums. These things Rollo
served quite as if he were managing oatmeal and eggs and china. One
would have said that he had been brought up between the covers of an
ancient history, nothing in consequence being so old or so new as to
amaze him. Upon their late arrival the evening before he had
instantly moved about his duties in all the quiet decorum with which
he officiated in three rooms and a bath, emptying the oil-skins,
disposing of their contents in great cedar chests, and, from
certain rich and alien garments laid out for the guests, pretending
as unconcernedly to fleck lint as if they had been broadcloth from
Fifth Avenue. He stood bending above the breakfast-table, his lean,
shadowed hands perfectly at home, his lean, shadowed face all
automatic attention.
"Rollo," said St. George, "go and look out the window and see if
Sodom is smoking."
"Yes, sir," said Rollo, and moved to the nearest casement and bent
his look submissively below.
"Everything quiet, sir," he reported literally; "a very warm day,
sir. But it's easy to sleep, sir, no matter how warm the days are if
only the nights are cool. Begging your pardon, sir."
St. George nodded.
"You don't see Jezebel down there in the trees," he pressed him, "or
Elissa setting off to found Carthage? Chaldea and Egypt all calm?"
he anxiously put it.
Rollo stirred uneasily.
"There's a couple o' blue-tailed birds scrappin' in a palm tree,
sir," he submitted hopefully.
"Ah," said St. George, "yes. There would be. Now, if you like," he
gave his servant permission, "you may go to the festivals or the
funeral games or wherever you choose to-day. Or perhaps," he
remembered with solicitude, "you would prefer to be present at the
wedding-of-the-land-water-with-the-sea-water, providing, as I
suspect, Tyre is handy?"
"Thank you, sir," said Rollo doubtfully.
"Mind you put your money on the crack disc-thrower, though," warned
St. George, "and you might put up a couple of darics for me."
"No," languidly begged Amory, "pray no. You are getting your periods
mixed something horrid."
"A person's recreation is as good for him as his food, sir,"
proclaimed Rollo, sententious, anxious to agree.
"Food," said Amory languidly, "this isn't food--it's molten history,
that's what it is. Think--this is what they had to eat at the cafés
boulevardes of Gomorrah. And to think we've been at Tony's, before
now. Do you remember," he asked raptly, "those brief and savoury
banquets around one o'clock, at Tony's? From where Little Cawthorne
once went away wearing two omelettes instead of his overshoes? Don't
tell me that Tonycana and all this belong to the same system in
space. Don't tell me--"
He stopped abruptly and his eyes sought those of St. George. It was
all so incredible, and yet it was all so real and so essentially,
distractingly natural.
"I feel as if we had stepped through something, to somewhere else.
And yet, somehow, there is so little difference. Do you suppose when
people die _they_ don't notice any difference, either?"
"What I want to know," said Amory, filling his pipe, "is how it's
going to look in print. Think of Crass--digging for head-lines."
St. George rose abruptly. Amory was delicious, especially his drawl;
but there were times--
"Print it," he exclaimed, "you might as well try to print the
absolute."
Amory nodded.
"Oh, if you're going to be Neoplatonic," he said, "I'm off to hum an
Orphic hymn. Isn't it about time for the prince? I want to get out
with the camera, while the light is good."
The lateness of the hour of their arrival at the palace the evening
before had prevented the prince from receiving them, but he had sent
a most courteous message announcing that he himself would wait upon
them at a time which he appointed. While they were abiding his
coming, Rollo setting aside the dishes, Amory smoking, strolling up
and down, and examining the faint symbolic devices upon the walls'
tiling, St. George stood before one of the casements, and looked
over the aisles of flowering tree-tops to the grim, grey sides of
Mount Khalak, inscrutable, inaccessible, now not even hinting at the
walls and towers upon its secret summit. He was thinking how
heavenly curious it was that the most wonderful thing in his
commonplace world of New York--that is, his meeting with
Olivia--should, out here in this world of things wonderful beyond
all dream, still hold supreme its place as the sovereign wonder, the
sovereign delight.
"I dare say that means something," he said vaguely to himself, "and
I dare say all the people who are--in love--know what it does mean,"
and at this his spirit of adventure must have nodded at him, as if
it understood, too.
When, in a little time, Prince Tabnit appeared at the open door of
the "porch of light," it was as if he had parted from St. George in
McDougle Street but the night before. He greeted him with exquisite
cordiality and his welcome to Amory was like a welcome unfeigned. He
was clad in white of no remembered fashion, with the green gem
burning on his breast, but his manner was that of one perfectly
tailored and about the most cosmopolitan offices of modernity. One
might have told him one's most subtly humourous story and rested
certain of his smile.
"I wonder," he asked with engaging hesitation when he was seated,
"whether I may have a--cigarette? That is the name? Yes, a
cigarette. Tobacco is unknown in Yaque. We have invented no colonies
useful for the luxury. How can it be--forgive me--that your people,
who seem remote from poetry, should be the devisers and popularizers
of this so poetic pastime? To breathe in the green of earth and the
light of the dead sun! The poetry of your American smoke delights
me."
St. George smiled as he offered the prince his case.
"In America," he said, "we devised it as a vice, your Highness. We
are obliged to do the same with poetry, if we popularize it."
And St. George was thinking:
"Miss Holland. He has seen Miss Holland--perhaps yesterday. Perhaps
he will see her to-day. And how in this world am I ever to mention
her name?"
But the prince was in the idlest and most genial of humours. He
spoke at once of the matters uppermost in the minds of his guests,
gave them news of the party from New York, told how they were in
comfort in the palace on the summit of Mount Khalak, struck a
momentary tragic note in mention of the mystery still mantling the
absence of the king and repeated the announcement already made by
Cassyrus, the premier, that in two days' time, failing the return of
the sovereign, the king's daughter would be publicly recognized,
with solemn ceremonial, as Princess of Yaque. Then he turned to St.
George, his eyes searching him through the haze of smoke.
"Your own coming to Yaque," he said abruptly, "was the result of a
sudden decision?"
"Quite so, your Highness," replied St. George. "It was wholly
unexpected."
"Then we must try to make it also an unexpected pleasure," suggested
the prince lightly. "I am come to ask you to spend the day with me
in looking about Med, the King's City."
He dropped the monogrammed stub of his cigarette in a little jar of
smaragdos, brought, he mentioned in passing, from a despoiled temple
of one of the Chthonian deities of Tyre, and turned toward his
guests with a winning smile.
"Come," he said, "I can no longer postpone my own pleasure in
showing you that our nation is the Lady of Kingdoms as once were
Babylon and Chaldea."
It was as if the strange panorama of the night before had once more
opened its frame, and they were to step within. As the prince left
them St. George turned to Rollo for the novelty of addressing a
reality.
"How do you wish to spend the day, Rollo?" he asked him.
Rollo looked pensive.
"Could I stroll about a bit, sir?" he asked.
"Stroll!" commanded St. George cheerfully.
"Thank you, sir," said Rollo. "I always think a man can best learn
by observation, sir."
"Observe!" supplemented his master pleasantly, as a detachment of
the guard appeared to conduct Amory and him below.
"Don't black up the sandals," Amory warned Rollo as he left him,
"and be back early. We may want you to get us ready for a mastodon
hunt."
"Yes, sir," said Rollo with simplicity, "I'll be back quite some
time before tea-time, sir."
St. George was smiling as they went down the corridor. He had been
vain of his love that, in Yaque as in America, remained the thing it
was, supreme and vital. But had not the simplicity of Rollo taken
the leap in experience, and likewise without changing? For a moment,
as he went down the silent corridors, lofty as the woods, vocal with
faint inscriptions on the uncovered stone, the old human doubt
assailed him. The very age of the walls was a protest against the
assumption that there is a touchstone that is ageless. Even if there
is, even if love is unchanging, the very temper of unconcern of his
valet might be quite as persistent as love itself. But the gallery
emptying itself into a great court open to the blue among graven
rafters, St. George promptly threw his doubt to the fresh,
heaven-kissing wind that smote their faces, and against mystery and
argument and age alike he matched only the happy clamour of his
blood. Olivia Holland was on the island, and all the age was gold.
In Yaque or on the continents there can be no manner of doubt that
this is love, as Love itself loves to be.
They emerged in the appeasing air of that perfect morning, and the
sweetness of the flowering trees was everywhere, and wide roads
pointed invitingly to undiscovered bournes, and overhead in the
curving wind floated the flags and streamers of those joyous, wizard
colours.
They went out into the rejoicing world, and it was like penetrating
at last into the heart of that "land a great way off" which holds
captive the wistful thought of the children of earth, and reveals
itself as elusively as ecstasy. If one can remember some journey
that he has taken long ago--Long Ago and Far Away are the great
touchstones--and can remember the glamourie of the hour and forget
the substructure of events, if he can recall the pattern and forget
the fabric, then he will understand the spirit that informed that
first morning in Yaque. It was a morning all compact of wonder and
delight--wonder at that which half-revealed itself, delight in the
ever-present possibility that here, there, at any moment, Olivia
Holland might be met. As for the wonder, that had taken some three
thousand years to accumulate, as nearly as one could compute; and as
for the delight, that had taken less than ten days to make possible;
and yet there is no manner of doubt which held high place in the
mind of St. George as the smooth miles fled away from hurrying
wheels.
Such wheels! Motors? St. George asked himself the question as he
took his place beside the prince in the exquisitely light vehicle,
Amory following with Cassyrus, and the suites coming after, like the
path from a lanthorn. For the vehicles were a kind of electric
motor, but constructed exquisitely in a fashion which, far from
affronting taste, delighted the eye by leading it to lines of
unguessed beauty. They were motors as the ancients would have built
them if they had understood the trick of science, motors in which
the lines of utility were veiled and taught to be subordinate. The
speed attained was by no means great, and the motion was gentle and
sacrificed to silence. And when St. George ventured to ask how they
had imported the first motors, the prince answered that as Columbus
was sailing on the waters of the Atlantic at adventure, the people
of Yaque were touring the island in electric motors of much the same
description, though hardly the clumsiness, of those which he had
noticed in New York.
This was the first astonishment, and other astonishments were to
follow. For as they went about the island it was revealed that the
remainder of the world is asleep with science for a pillow and the
night-lamp of philosophy casting shadows. Yet as the prince
exhibited wonders, one after another, St. George, dimly conscious
that these are the things that men die to discover, would have given
them all for one moment's meeting with Olivia on that high-road of
Med. If you come to think of it, this may be why science always has
moved so slowly, creeping on from point to point.
Thus it came about that when Prince Tabnit indicated a low,
pillared, temple-like building as the home of perpetual motion,
which gave the power operating the manufactures and water supply of
the entire island, St. George looked and understood and resolved to
go over the temple before he left Yaque, and then fell a-wondering
whether, when he did so, Olivia would be with him. When the prince
explained that it is ridiculous to suppose that combustion is the
chief means of obtaining light and heat, or that Heaven provided
divinely-beautiful forests for the express purpose of their being
burned up; and when he told him that artificial light and heat were
effected in a certain reservoir (built with a classic regard for the
dignity of its use as a link with unspoken forces) St. George
listened, and said over with attention the name of the substance
acted upon by emanations--and wondered if Olivia were not afraid of
it. So it was all through the exhibition of more wonders scientific
and economic than any one has dreamed since every one became a
victim of the world's habit of being afraid to dream. Although it is
true that when St. George chanced to observe that there were about
Med few farms of tilled ground, the prince's reply did startle him
into absorbed attention:
"You are referring to agriculture?" Prince Tabnit said after a
moment's thought. "I know the word from old parchments brought from
Phoenicia by our ancestors. But I did not know that the art is in
practice anywhere in the world. Do you mean to assure me," cried the
prince suddenly, "that the vegetables which I ate in America were
raised by what is known as 'tilling the soil'?"
"How else, your Highness?" doubted St. George, wondering if he were
responsible for the fading mentality of the prince.
Prince Tabnit looked away toward the splendour of some new thought.
"How beautiful," he said, "to subsist on the sun and the dust.
Beautiful and lost, like the dreams of Mitylene. But I feel as if I
were reading in Genesis," he declared. "Is it possible that in this
'age of science' of yours it has not occurred to your people that if
plants grow by slowly extracting their own elements from the soil,
those elements artificially extracted and applied to the seed will
render growth and fruitage almost instantaneous?"
"At all events we've speculated about it," St. George hastened to
impart with pride, "just as we do about telephones that will let
people see one another when they talk. But nearly every one smiles
at both."
"Don't smile," the prince warned him. "Yaque has perfected both
those inventions only since she ceased to smile at their
probability. Nothing can be simpler than instantaneous vegetation.
Any Egyptian juggler can produce it by using certain acids. We have
improved the process until our fruits and vegetables are produced as
they are needed, from hour to hour. This was one of the so-called
secrets of the ancient Phoenicians--has it never occurred to you as
important that the Phoenician name for Dionysos, the god of
wine-growers, was lost?"
Mentally St. George added another barrel to the cargo of _The
Aloha_, and wondered if the _Sentinel_ would start botanical gardens
and a lighting plant and turn them to the account of advertisers.
All the time, mile upon mile, was unrolling before them the
unforgetable beauty of the island. So perfectly were its features
marshaled and so exact were its proportions that, as in many great
experiences and as in all great poems, one might not, without
familiarity, recall its detail, but must instead remain wrapped in
the glory of the whole. The avenues, wide as a river, swept between
white banks of majestic buildings combining with the magic of great
mass the pure beauty of virginal line. Line, the joy of line, the
glory of line, almost, St. George thought, the divinity of line, was
everywhere manifest; and everywhere too the divinity of colour, no
longer a quality extraneous, laid on as insecure fancy dictates,
but, by some law long unrevealed, now actually identified with the
object which it not so much decorated as purified. The most
interesting of the thoroughfares led from the Eurychôrus, or public
square, along the lagoon. This fair water, extending from Med to
Melita, was greenly shored and dotted with strange little pleasure
crafts with exquisite sweeping prows and silken canopies. Before a
white temple, knee-deep in whose flowered ponds the ibises dozed
and contemplated, was anchored the imperial trireme, with
delicately-embroidered sails and prow and poop of forgotten metals.
From within, temple music sounded softly and was never permitted to
be silenced, as the flame of the Vestals might never be
extinguished. Here on the shores had begun the morning traffic of
itinerant merchants of Med and Melita, compelled by law to carry on
their exchange in the morning only, when the light is least lovely.
Upon canopied wagons drawn by strange animals, with shining horns,
were displayed for sale all the pleasantest excuses for
commerce--ostrich feathers, gums, gems, quicksilver, papyrus, bales
of fair cloth, pottery, wine and oranges. The sellers of salt and
fish and wool and skins were forced down under the wharfs of the
lagoon, and there endeavoured to attract attention by displaying
fanciful and lovely banners and by liberating faint perfumes of the
native orris and algum. Street musicians, playing tunefully upon the
zither and upon the crowd, wandered, wearing wreaths of fir, and
clustered about stalls where were offered tenuous blades, and
statues, and temple vessels filled with wine and flowers.
At the head of the street leading to the temple of Baaltis (My
Lady--Aphrodite) the prince's motor was checked while a procession
of pilgrims, white-robed and carrying votive offerings, passed
before them, the votive tablet to the Lady Tanith and the Face of
Baal being borne at the head of the line by a dignitary in a smart
electric victoria. This was one of the frequent Festival Embassies
to Melita, to combine religious rites with mourning games and the
dedication of the tablet, and there was considerable delay incident
to the delivery of a wireless message to the dignitary with the
tablet of the Semitic inscription. St. George wondered vaguely why,
in a world of marvels, progress should not already have outstripped
the need of any communication at all. This reminded him of something
at which the prince had hinted away off in another æon, in another
world, when St. George had first seen him, and there followed ten
minutes of talk not to be forgotten.
"Would it be possible for you to tell me, your Highness," St. George
asked,--and thereafter even a lover must have forgiven the brief
apostasy of his thought--"how it can be that you know the English?
How you are able to speak it here in Yaque?"
The motor moved forward as the procession passed, and struck into a
magnificent country avenue bordered by trees, tall as elms and
fragrant as acacias.
"I can tell you, yes," said the prince, "but I warn you that you
will not in the least understand me. I dare say, however, that I may
illustrate by something of which you know. Do there chance to be,
for example, any children in America who are regarded as prodigies
of certain understanding?"
"You mean," St. George asked, "children who can play on a musical
instrument without knowing how they do it, and so on?"
"Quite so," said the prince with interest.
"Many, your Highness," affirmed St. George. "I myself know a child
of seven who can play most difficult piano compositions without ever
having been taught, or knowing in the least how he does it."
"Do you think of any one else?" asked the prince.
"Yes," said St. George, "I know a little lad of about five, I should
say, who can add enormous numbers and instantly give the accurate
result. And he has no idea how he does that, and no one has ever
taught him to count above twelve. Oh--every one knows those cases, I
fancy."
"Has any one ever explained them, Mr. St. George?" asked the prince.
"How should they?" asked St. George simply. "They are prodigies."
"Quite so," said the prince again. "It is almost incredible that
these instances seem to suggest to no one that there must be other
ways to 'learn' music and mathematics--and, therefore, everything
else--than those known to your civilization. Let me assure you that
such cases as these, far from being miracles and prodigies, are
perfectly normal when once the principle is understood, as we of
Yaque understand it. It is the average intelligence among your
people which is abnormal, inasmuch as it is unable to perform these
functions which it was so clearly intended to exercise."
"Do you mean," asked St. George, "that we need not learn--as we
understand 'learn'?"
"Precisely," said the prince simply. "You are accustomed, I was told
in New York, to say that there is 'no royal road to learning.' On
the contrary, I say to you that the possibilities of these children
are in every one. But to my intense surprise I find that we of Yaque
are the only ones in the world who understand how to use these
possibilities. Our system of education consists simply in mastering
this principle. After that, all knowledge--all languages, for
instance--everything--belongs to us."
St. George looked away to the rugged sides of Mount Khalak, lying in
its clouds of iris morning mist, unreal as a mountain of Ultima
Thule. It was all right--what he had just been hearing was a part of
this ultimate and fantastic place to which he had come. And yet _he_
was real enough, and so, according to certain approved dialectic,
perhaps these things were realities, too. He stole a glance at the
prince's profile. Here was actually a man who was telling him that
he need not have faced Latin and Greek and calculus; that they might
have been his of his own accord if only he had understood how to
call them in!
"That would make a very jolly thing of college," he pensively
conceded. "You could not show me how it is managed, your Highness?"
he besought. "That will hardly come in bulk, too--"
The prince shook his head, smiling.
"I could not 'show you,' as you say," he answered, "any more than I
could, at present, send a wireless communication without the
apparatus--though it will be only a matter of time until that is
accomplished, too."
St. George pulled himself up sharply. He glanced over his shoulder
and saw Amory polishing his pince-nez and looking quite as if he
were leaning over hansom-doors in the park, and he turned quickly to
the prince, half convinced that he had been mocked.
"Suppose, your Highness," he said, "that I were to print what you
have just told me on the front page of a New York morning paper,
for people to glance over with their coffee? Do you think that even
the most open-minded among them would believe that there is such a
place as Yaque?"
The prince smiled curiously, and his long-fringed lids drooped in
momentary contemplation. The auto turned into that majestic avenue
which terminates in the Eurychôrus before the Palace of the Litany.
St. George's eye eagerly swept the long white way. At its far end
stood Mount Khalak. _She_ must have passed over this very ground.
"There is," the prince's smooth voice broke in upon his dream, "no
such place as Yaque--as you understand 'place.'"
"I beg your pardon, your Highness?" St. George doubted blankly. Good
Heavens. Maybe there had arrived in Yaque no Olivia, as he
understood Olivia.
"You showed some surprise, I remember," continued the prince, "when
I told you, in McDougle Street, that we of Yaque understand the
Fourth Dimension."
McDougle Street. The sound smote the ear of St. George much as would
the clang of the fire patrol in the midst of light opera.
"Yes, yes," he said, his attention now completely chained. Yet even
then it was not that he cared so absorbingly about the Fourth
Dimension. But what if this were all some trick and if, in this
strange land, Olivia had simply been flashed before his eyes by the
aid of mirrors?
"I find," said the prince with deliberation, "that in America you
are familiar with the argument that, if your people understood
only length and breadth and did _not_ understand the Third
Dimension--thickness--you could not then conceive of lifting, say,
a square or a triangle and laying it down upon another square or
triangle. In other words, you would not know anything of _up_ and
_down_."
St. George nodded. This was the familiar talk of college
class-rooms.
"As it is," pursued the prince, "your people do perfectly understand
lifting a square and placing it upon a square, or a triangle upon a
triangle. But you do not know anything about placing a cube upon a
cube, or a pyramid upon a pyramid _so that both occupy the same
space at the same time_. We of Yaque have mastered that principle
also," the prince tranquilly concluded, "and all that of which this
is the alphabet. That is why we are able to keep our island unknown
to the world--not to say 'invisible.'"
For a moment St. George looked at him speechlessly; then, in spite
of himself, a slow smile overspread his face.
"But," he said, "your Highness, there is not a mathematician in the
civilized world who has not considered that problem and cast it
aside, with the word that if fourth-dimensional space does exist it
can not possibly be inhabited."
"Quite so," said the prince, "and yet here we are."
And, if you come to think of it--as St. George did--that is the only
answer to a world of impossibilities already proved possible. But
the vista which all this opened smote him with irresistible humour.
"Ah well now, I suppose, your Highness," he said, "that our ocean
liners sail clean through the island of Yaque, then, and never even
have their smoke pushed sidewise?"
The prince laughed pleasantly.
"Have you ever," he asked, "had occasion to explain the principles
of hydraulics, or chess, or philosophical idealism to a
three-year-old child, or a charwoman? You must forgive me, but
really I can think of no better comparison. I am quite as powerless
now as you have been if you have ever attempted it. I can only
assure you that such things _are_. Without Jarvo or Akko or some one
who understood, you might have sailed the high seas all your life
and never have come any nearer to Yaque."
St. George reflected.
"Is Yaque the only example of this kind of thing," he asked, "that
the Fourth Dimension would reveal?"
"By no means," said the prince in surprise, "the world is
literally teeming with like revelations, once the key is in your
hands. The Fourth Dimension is only the beginning. We utilize that
to isolate our island. But the higher dimensions are gradually
being conquered, too. Nearly all of us can pass into the Fifth at
will, 'disappearing,' as you have the word, from the lower
dimensions. It is well-known to you that in a land whose people
knew length and breadth, but no _up_ and _down_, an object might
be pushed, but never lifted _up_ or put _down_. If it were to be
lifted, such a people would believe it to have 'disappeared.' So,
from you who know only three dimensions, Yaque has 'disappeared,'
until one of us guides you here. Also we pass at will into the
Fifth Dimension and even higher, and seem to 'disappear'; the only
difference is that, there, we should not be able yet to guide one
who did not himself understand how to pass there. Just as one who
understands how to die and to come to life, as you have the
phrase, would not be able to take with him any one who did not
understand how to take himself there..."
St. George listened, grasping at straws of comprehension,
remembering how he had heard all this theorized about and smiled at;
but most of all he was beset by a practical consideration.
"Then," he said suddenly, the question leaping to his lips almost
against his will, "if you hold this key to all knowledge, how is it
that the king--Mr. Holland--could get away from you, and the
Hereditary Treasure be lost?"
The prince sighed profoundly.
"We have by no means," he said, "perfected our knowledge. We are at
one with the absolute in knowledge--true. But the affairs of every
day most frequently elude us. Not even the most advanced among us
are perfect intuitionists. We have by no means reached that
desirable and inevitable day when our minds shall flow together,
without need of communication, without possibility of secret. We
still suffer the disadvantage of a slight barrier of personality."
"And it is into one of these lapses," thought St. George
irreverently, "that the king has disappeared." Aloud he asked
curiously concerning a matter which was every moment becoming more
incomprehensible.
"But how, your Highness," he said simply, "did your people ever
consent to have an American for your king?"
Before the prince could reply there occurred a phenomenon that sent
all thought of such insubstantialities as the secrets of the Fourth
Dimension far in the background.
The prince's motor, closely followed by the others of the train, had
reached a little eminence from which the island unrolled in fair
patterns. Before them the smooth road unwound in varied light. At
their left lay a still grove from whose depths was glimpsed a slim
needle of a tower, rising, arrow-like, from the green. In the
distance lay Med, with shining domes. The water of the lagoon gave
brightness here and there among the hills. And as St. George and the
prince looked over the prospect they saw, far down the avenue toward
Med, a little, moving speck--a speck moving with a rapidity which
neither the prince's motor nor any known motor of Yaque had ever
before permitted itself.
In an instant the six members of the Royal Golden Guard, who upon
beautiful, spirited horses rode in advance of the train of the
prince, wheeled and thundered back, lifting glittering hands of
warning. "Aside! Aside!" shrieked the main Golden Guard, "a motor is
without control!"
Immediately there was confusion. At a touch the prince's car was
drawn to the road's extreme edge, and the Golden Guards rode
furiously back along the train, hailing the peaceful, slow-going
machines into orderly retreat. They were all sufficiently amenable,
for at sight of the alarming and unprecedented onrush of the growing
speck that was bearing full down upon them, anxiety sat upon every
face.
St. George watched. And as the car drew nearer the thought which, at
first sight of its speed, had vaguely flashed into being, took
definite shape, and his blood leaped to its music. Whose hand would
be upon that lever, whose daring would be directing its flight,
whose but one in all Yaque--and that Olivia's?
It was Olivia. That was plain even in the mere instant that it took
the great, beautiful motor, at thirty miles an hour, to flash past
them. St. George saw her--coat of hunting pink and fluttering veil
and shining eyes; he was dimly conscious of another little figure
beside her, and of the unmistakable and agonized Mrs. Hastings in
the tonneau; but it was only Olivia's glance that he caught as it
swept the prince. There was the faintest possible smile, and she was
gone; and St. George, his heart pounding, sat staring stupidly after
that shining cloud of dust, frantically wondering whether she could
just possibly have seen him. For this was no trick of the
imagination, his galloping heart told him that. And whether or not
Yaque was a place, the world, the world was within his grasp,
instinct with possibilities heavenly sweet. His eyes met Amory's in
the minute when Cassyrus, prime minister of Yaque, had it borne in
upon him that this was no runaway machine, but the ordinary and
preferred pace of the daughter of their king; and while Cassyrus, at
the enormity of the conception, breathed out expostulations in
several languages--some of them known to us only by means of
inscriptions on tombs--Amory spoke to St. George:
"Who was the other girl?" he asked comprehensively.
"What other girl?" St. George blankly murmured.
And at this, Amory turned away with a look that could be made to
mean whatever Amory meant.
On went the imperial train faring back to Med over the road lately
stirred to shining dust by the wheels of Olivia's auto. Olivia's
auto. St. George was secretly saying over the words with a kind of
ecstatic non-comprehension, when the prince spoke:
"That," he said, "may explain why an American has been able to
govern us. Chance crowned him, but he made himself king."
Prince Tabnit hesitated and his eyes wandered--and those of St.
George followed--to a far winding dot in that opal valley, a mere
speck of silver with a prick of pink, fleeing in a cloud of sunny
dust.
"I do not know if you will know what I mean," said the prince, "but
hers is the spirit, and the spirit of her father, the king, which
Yaque had never known. It is the spirit which we of Phoenicia seem
to have lost since the wealth of the world accumulated at her ports
and she gave her trust to the hands of mariners and mercenaries, and
later bowed to the conqueror. It is the spirit that not all the
continental races, I fancy, have for endowment, but yours possesses
in rich measure. For this we would exchange half that we have
achieved."
St. George nodded, glowing.
"It is a great tribute, your Highness," he said simply, and in his
heart he laid it at Olivia's feet.
Thereafter, in the long ride to Melita, during luncheon upon a high
white terrace overlooking the sailless sea, and in the hours on the
unforgetable roads of the islands, St. George, while incommunicable
marvels revealed themselves linked with incommunicable beauty, sat
in the prince's motor, his eyes searching the horizon for that
fleeing speck of silver and pink. It did not appear again. And when
the train of the prince rolled into the yard of the Palace of the
Litany it trembled upon St. George's lips to ask whether the
formalities of the court would permit him that day to scale the
skies and call upon the royal household.
"For whatever he says, I've got to do," thought St. George, "but no
matter what he says, I shall go. Doesn't Amory realize that we've
been more than twelve hours on this island, and that nothing has
been done?"
And then as they crossed the grassy court in the delicate hush of
the merging light--the nameless radiance already penetrating the
dusk--the prince spoke smoothly, as if his words bore no import
deeper than his smile:
"You are come," he said courteously, "in time for one of the
ceremonies of our régime most important--to me. You will, I hope, do
honour to the occasion by your presence. This evening, in the Hall
of Kings in the Palace of the Litany, will occur the ceremony of my
betrothal."
"Your betrothal, your Highness?" repeated St. George uncertainly.
"You will be attended by an escort," the prince continued, "and
Balator, the commander of the guard, will receive you in the hall.
May the gods permit the possible."
He swept through the portico before them, and they followed dumbly.
The betrothal of the prince.
St. George heard, and his eager hope went down in foreboding. He
turned, hardly daring to read his own dread in the eyes of Amory.
Amory, as St. George had said, was delicious, especially his drawl;
but there were times--now, for example, when all that the eyes of
Amory expressed was what his lips framed, _sotto-voce_:
"An American heiress, betrothed to the prince of a cannibal island!
Wouldn't Chillingworth turn in his grave at his desk?"