A VIGIL
Upon Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, drowsing over the
pocket chess-board, the sound of footsteps and men's voices in the
corridor acted with electrical effect. Then the door was opened and
behind Olivia and Antoinette appeared the two visitors who seemed to
have fallen from the neighbouring heavens. The two chess-pretenders
looked up aghast. If there were a place in the world where
chaperonage might be relaxed the uninformed observer would say that
it would be the top of Mount Khalak.
"Mercy around us!" cried Mrs. Medora Hastings, "if it isn't that
newspaper man! He's probably come over here to cable it all over the
front page of every paper in New York. Well," she added
complacently, as if she had brought it all about, "it seems good to
see some of your own race. How _did_ you get here? Some trick, I
suppose?"
"My dear fellows," burst out Mr. Augustus Frothingham fervently,
"thank God! I'm not, ordinarily, unequal to my situations, but I
confess to you, as I would not to a client, that I don't object to
sharing this one. How did you come?"
"It's a house-party!" said Antoinette ecstatically.
Amory looked at her in her blue gown in the light of the white room,
and his spirits soared heavenward. Why should St. George have an
idea that he controlled the hour?
From a tumult of questioning, none of which was fully answered
before Mrs. Hastings put another query, the lawyer at length
elicited the substance of what had occurred.
"You came up the side of the mountain, carried by four of those
frightful natives?" shrilled Mrs. Hastings. "Olivia, think. It's a
wonder they didn't murder you first and throw you over afterward,
isn't it, Olivia? Oh, and my poor dear brother. To think of his
lying somewhere all mangled and bl--"
Emotion overcame Mrs. Hastings. Her tortoise-shell glasses fell to
her lap and both her side-combs tinkled melodiously to the tiled
floor.
"This reminds me," said Mr. Frothingham, settling back and finding a
pencil with which to emphasize his story, "this reminds me very much
of a case that I had on the June calendar--"
In half an hour St. George and Amory saw that all serious
consideration of their situation must be accomplished alone with
Olivia; for in that time Mr. Frothingham had been reminded of two
more cases and Mrs. Hastings had twice been reduced to tears by the
picture of the possible fate of her brother. Moreover, there
presently appeared supper--a tray of the most savoury delicacies, to
produce which Olivia had slipped away and, St. George had no doubt,
said over some spell in the kitchens. Supper in the white marble
room of the king's palace was almost as wonderful as muffins and tea
at the Boris.
There were Olivia in her gown of roses on one side of the table and
Antoinette on the other and between them the hungry and happy
adventurers. Across the room under a tall silver vase that might
have been the one proposed by Achilles at the funeral games for
Patroclus ("that was the work of the 'skilful Sidonians'" St. George
recalled with a thrill), Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham were
conscientiously finishing their chess, since the lawyer believed in
completing whatever he undertook, if for nothing more than a warning
never to undertake it again. Manifestly the little ivory kings and
queens and castles were in league with all the other magic of the
night, for the game prolonged itself unconscionably, and the supper
party found it far from difficult to do the same. St. George looked
at Olivia in her gown of roses, and his eyes swept the high white
walls of the room with its frescoes and inscriptions, its broken
statues and defaced chests of stone and ancient armour, and so back
to Olivia in her gown of roses, with her little ringless hands
touching and lifting among the alien dishes as she ministered to
him. What a dear little gown of roses and what beautiful hands, St.
George thought; and as for the broken statues and the inscriptions
and the contents of the stone chests, nobody had paid any attention
to them for so long that they could hardly have missed his regard.
Nor Amory's. For Amory was in the midst of a reminiscent reference
to the Chiswicks, in the Adirondacks, and to Antionette Frothingham
in a launch.
At last they all were aware that the chess-board was being closed
and Mrs. Hastings had risen.
"I suppose," she was saying, "that they have an idea here, the poor
deluded creatures, that it is very late. But I tell Olivia that we
are so much farther east it _can't_ be very late in New York at this
minute, and I intend to go to bed by my watch as I always do, and
that is New York time. If I were in New York I wouldn't be sleepy
now, and I'm no different here, am I? I don't think people are half
independent enough."
Mrs. Hastings stepped round a stone god, almost faceless, that stood
in a little circular depression in the floor.
"Olivia, where," she inquired, patting the bobbing, ticking jet on
her gown, "where do you think that frightful, mad, old man is?"
"I heard him cross the corridor a little while ago," Olivia
answered. "I think he went to his room."
"I must say, Olivia," said Mrs. Hastings with a damp sigh, "that you
are very selfish where I am concerned--in _this_ matter."
"Ah," said Olivia, "please, Aunt Dora. He is far too feeble to harm
any one. And he's away there on the second floor."
"I'm sure he's a murderer," protested Mrs. Hastings. "He has the
murderer's eye. Mr. Hastings would have said he has. We all sleep on
the ground floor here," she continued plaintively, "because we are
so high up anyway that I think the air must be just as pure as it
would be up stairs. I always leave my window up the width of my
handkerchief-box."
As they went out to the great corridor Olivia spoke softly to St.
George.
"Look up," she said.
He looked, and saw that the vast circular chamber was of
incalculable height, extending up to the very dome of the palace,
and shaping itself to the lines of the topmost of the three huge
cones. It was a great well of light, playing over strange frescoes
of gods and daemons, of constellations and of beasts, and exquisite
with all the secret colours of some other way of vision. As high as
the eye could see, the precious metals upon the skeleton of the open
roof shone in the bright light that was set there--the light on the
summit of the king's palace.
St. George turned from the glory of it and looked into her eyes.
"'A new Heaven and a new earth,'" he said; but he did not mean the
dome of light nor yet the splendour of the palace.
* * * * *
Manifestly, there is no use in being asleep when one can dream
rather better awake. St. George wandered aimlessly between his room
and Amory's and took the time to reflect that when a man looks the
way Amory did he might as well have Cupids painted on his coat.
"St. George," Amory said soberly, "is this the way you've been
feeling all the way here? Is this what you came for? Then, on my
soul, I forgive you everything. I would have climbed ten mountains
to meet Antoinette Frothingham."
"I've been watching you, you son of Dixie," said St. George darkly;
"don't you lose your head just when you need it most."
"I have a notion yours is gone," defended Amory critically, "and
mine is only going."
"That's twice as dangerous," St. George wisely opined;
"besides--mine is different."
"So is mine," said Amory, "so is everybody's."
St. George stepped through the long window to the terrace. Amory
didn't care whether anybody listened; he simply longed to talk, and
St. George had things to think about. He crossed the terrace to the
south, and went back to the very spot where he and Olivia had stood;
and there, because the night would have it no other way, he
stretched along the broad wall among the vines, and lit his pipe,
and lay looking out at sea. Here he was, liberated from the business
of "buzzing in a corner, trifling with monosyllables," set upon a
field pleasant with hazard and without paths, to move in the primal
experiences where words themselves are born. Better and more
intimate names for everything seemed now almost within his ken.
He had longed unspeakably to go pilgriming, and he had forthwith
been permitted to leave the world behind with its thickets and
thresholds, its hesitations and confusions, its marching armies,
breakfasts, friendships and the like, and to live on the edge of
what will be. He thought of his mother, in her black gowns and Roman
mosaic pins with a touch of yellow lace at her throat, listening to
the bishop as he examined the dicta of still cloisters, and he told
himself that he knew a heresy or two that were like belief. His
mother and the bishop at Tübingen and on the Baltic! Curiously
enough, they did not seem very remote. He adored his mother and the
bishop, and so the thought of them was a part of this fairy tale.
All pleasant thoughts whether of adventure or impression boast
kinship, perhaps have identity. And the name of that identity was
Olivia. So he "drove the night along" on the leafy parapet.
He was not far from asleep, nor perhaps from the dream of the Roman
emperor who believed the sea to have come to his bedside and spoken
with him, when something--he was not sure whether it was a voice or
a touch--startled him awake. He rose on his elbow and looked
drowsily out at the glorified blackness--as if black were no longer
absence cf colour but, the veil of negative definitions having been
pierced, were found to be a mystic union of colour and more
inclusive than white. The very dark seemed delicately vocal and to
"fill the waste with sound" no less than the wash of the waves. St.
George awoke deliciously confused by a returning sense of the sweet
and the joy of the night.
"'This was the loneliest beach between two seas,'" there flitted
through his mind, "'and strange things had been done there in the
ancient ages.'" He turned among the vines, half listening. "And in
there is the king's daughter," he told himself, "and this is
certainly 'the strangest thing that ever befell between two seas.'
And I have a great mind to look up the old woman of that tale who
must certainly be hereabout, dancing 'widdershins.'"
Then, like a bright blade unsheathed in a quiet chamber, a cry of
great and unmistakable fear rang out from the palace--a woman's
cry, uttered but once, and giving place to a silence that was even
more terrifying. In an instant St. George was on his feet, running
with all his might.
"Coming!" he called, "where are you--where are you?" And his heart
pounded against his side with the certainty that the voice had been
Olivia's.
It was unmistakably Olivia's voice that replied to him.
"Here!" she cried clearly, and St. George followed the sound and
dashed through the long open window of the room next that in which
he had first seen her that night.
"Here," she repeated, "but be careful. Some one is in this room."
"Don't be afraid," he cried cheerily into the dark. "It's all
right," which is exactly what he would have said if there had been
about dragons and real shades from Sidon.
The room was now in darkness, and in the dim light cast by the high
moon he could at first discern nothing. He heard a silken rustling
and the tap of slippered feet. The next instant the apartment was
quick with light, and in the curtained entrance to an inner room,
Olivia, in a brown dressing-gown, her hair vaguely bright about her
flushed face, stood confronting him.
Between them, his thin hand thrown up, palm outward, to protect his
eyes from the sudden light, was the old man whom St. George had last
seen by the shrine on the terrace.
St. George was prepared for a mere procession of palace ghosts, but
at this strange visitor he stared for an uncomprehending moment.
"What are you doing here?" he said wonderingly to him; "what in the
world are you doing here?"
The old man looked uncertainly about him, one hand spread against
the pillar behind him, the other fumbling at his throat.
"I think," he answered almost indistinguishably, "I think that I
meant to sit here--to sit in the room beyond, where the mock stars
shine."
Olivia uttered an exclamation.
"How could he possibly know that?" she said.
"But what does he mean?" asked St. George.
She crossed swiftly to a portiere hanging by slender rings from the
full height of the lofty room, and at her bidding St. George
followed her. She pushed aside the curtain, revealing a huge cave of
the dark, a room whose walls were sunk in shadow. But overhead the
ceiling was constellated in stars, so that it seemed to St. George
as if he were looking into a nearer heaven, homing the far lights
that he knew. The Pleiades, Orion, and the Southern Cross, blazing
down with inconceivable brilliance, were caught and held captive in
the cup of this nearer sky.
"It is like this at night," Olivia said, "but we see nothing in the
daytime, save the vague outlines of here and there a star. But how
could he have known? There is no other door save this."
The old man had followed them and stood, his eyes fixed on the
shining points.
"It is done well," he said softly, "it makes one feel the
firmament."
St. George, thrilling with the strangeness of what he saw, and the
strangeness of being there with Olivia and this weird old man of the
mountain, turned toward him almost fearfully. How did he know,
indeed?
"Ah well," he said, striving to reassure her, "I've no doubt he has
wandered in here some evening, while you were at dinner. No doubt--"
He stopped abruptly, his eyes fixed on the old man's hand. For as he
lifted it St. George had thought that something glittered. Without
hesitation he caught the old man's arm about the wrist, and turned
his hand in his own palm. In the thin fingers he found a small
sealed tube, filled with something that looked like particles of
nickel.
"Do you mind telling me what that is?" asked St. George.
Old Malakh's eyes, liquid and brown and very peaceful, met his own
without rebuke.
"Do you mean the gem?" he asked gently. "It is a very beautiful
ruby."
Then St. George saw upon the hand that held the sealed tube a ring
of matchless workmanship, set with a great ruby that smouldered in
the shadow where they stood. Olivia looked at St. George with
startled eyes.
"He was not wearing this when we first saw him," she said. "I
haven't seen him wearing it at all."
St. George confronted the old man then and spoke with some
determination.
"Will you please tell us," he said, "what there is in this tube, and
how you came by this ring?"
Old Malakh looked down reflectively at his hand, and back to St.
George's face. It was wonderful, the air of courtliness and urbanity
and delicate breeding which persisted through age and infirmity and
the fallow mind.
"I wish that I might tell you," he said humbly, "but I have only
little lights in my head, instead of words. And when I say them,
they do not mean--what they _shine_. Do you not see? That is why
every one laughs. But I know what the lights say."
St. George looked at Olivia helplessly.
"Will you tell me where his room is?" he said, "and I'll go back
with him. I don't know what to make of this, quite, but don't be
frightened. It's all right. Didn't you say he is on the second
floor?"
"Yes, but don't go alone with him," begged Olivia suddenly, "let me
call some of the servants. We don't know what he may do."
St. George shook his head, smiling a little in sheer boyish delight
at that "we." "We" is a very wonderful word, when it is not put to
unimportant uses by kings, editors and the like.
"I'd rather not, thank you," he said. "I'll have a talk with him, I
think."
"His room is at the top of the stair, on the left," said Olivia
reluctantly, "but I wish--"
"We shall get on all right," St. George assured her, "and don't let
this worry you, will you? I was smoking on the terrace. I'll be
there for a while yet. Good night," he said from the doorway.
"Good night," said Olivia. "Good night--and, oh, I thank you."
St. George's expectation of having a talk with the old man was,
however, unfounded. Old Malakh led the way to his room--a great
place of carven seats and a frowning bed-canopy and high windows,
and doors set deep in stone; and he begged St. George to sit down
and permitted him to examine the sealed tube filled with little
particles that looked like nickel, and spoke with gentle irrelevance
the while. At the last St. George left him, feeling as if he were
committing not so much an indignity as a social solecism when he
locked the door upon the lonely creature, using for the purpose a
key-like implement chained to the lock without and having a ring
about the size of the iron crown of the Lombards.
"Good night," old Malakh told him courteously, "good night. But yet
all nights are good--save the night of the heart."
St. George went back to the terrace. For hours he paced the paths of
that little upper garden or lay upon the wall among the pungent
vines. But now he forgot the iridescent dark and the companion-sea
and the high moon and the king's palace, for it was not these that
made the necromancy of the night. It was permitted him to watch
before the threshold while Olivia slept, as lovers had watched in
the youth of the world. Whatever the morrow held, to-night had been
added to yesternight. Not until the dawn of that morrow whitened the
sky and drew from the vapourous plain the first far towers of Med,
the King's City, did St. George say good night to her glimmering
windows.