OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS
In Prince Tabnit's face there was a curious change, as if one were
suddenly to see hieroglyphics upon a star where before there had
been only shining. But his calm and his magnificent way of authority
did not desert him, as so grotesque a star would still stand lonely
and high in the heavens. He spoke, and upon the multitude fell
instant silence, not the less absolute that it harboured foreboding.
"Whatever the people would say to me," said the prince simply, "I
will hear. My right hand rests in the hand of the people. In return
I decree allegiance to the law. Your princess stands before you,
crowned. This most fortunate return of his Majesty, the King, can
not set at naught the sacred oath which has just left her lips.
Henceforth, in council and in audience, her place shall be at his
Majesty's right hand, as was the place of that Princess Athalme,
daughter of King Kab, in the dynasty of the fall of Rome. Is it not,
therefore, but the more incumbent upon your princess to own her
allegiance to the law of the island by keeping her troth with
me--that troth witnessed and sanctioned by you yourselves? This
ceremony concluded I will answer the demands of the loyal subjects
whose interests alone I serve. For we obey that which is higher than
authority--the law, born in the Beginning--"
Prince Tabnit's voice might almost have taken his place in his
absence, it was so soft, so fine of texture, no more consciously
modulated than is the going of water or the way of a wing. It was
difficult to say whether his words or, so to say, their fine fabric
of voice, begot the silence that followed. But all eyes were turned
upon Olivia. And, Prince Tabnit noting this, before she might speak
he suddenly swept his flowing robes embroidered by a thousand
needles to a posture of humility before his sovereign.
"Your Majesty," he besought, "I pray your consent to the bestowal
upon my most unworthy self of the hand of your daughter, the
Princess Olivia."
King Otho leaned upon the arm of his carven throne. Against its
strange metal his hand was cameo-clear.
"For the king," he was remembering softly, "'the Pyrenees, or so he
fancied, ceased to exist.' For another 'the mountains of Daphne are
everywhere.' Each of us has his impossible dream to prove that he
is an impossible creature. Why not I? To be normal is the cry of all
the hobgoblins ... And what does the princess say?" he asked aloud.
"Her Highness has already given me the great happiness to plight me
her troth," said Prince Tabnit.
King Otho's eyebrows flickered from their parallel of repose.
"In Yaque or in America," he murmured, "the Americans do as the
Americans do. None of us is mentioned in Deuteronomy, but what is
the will of the princess?" the American Sovereign asked.
Mrs. Hastings, seated near the dais, heard; and as she turned, a
rhinestone side-comb slipped from her hair, tinkled over the jewels
of her corsage and shot into the lap of a member of the High
Council. He, never having seen a side-comb, fancied that it might be
an infernal machine which he had never seen either, and,
palpitating, flashed it to the guardian hand of Mr. Frothingham. At
the same moment:
"Ah, why, Otho," said Mrs. Hastings audibly, "we had two ancestors
at Bannockburn!"
"Bannockburn!" argued Mr. Augustus Frothingham, below the voice,
"Bannockburn. But what, my dear Mrs. Hastings, is Bannockburn beside
the Midianites and the Moabites and the Hittites and the Ammonites
and the Levites?"
In this genealogical moment the prince leaned toward Olivia.
"Choose," he said significantly, but so softly that none might hear,
"oh, my beloved, choose!"
The faces of the great assembly blurred and wavered before Olivia,
and the low hum of the talk in the room was relative, like the
voices of passers-by. She looked up at the prince and away from him
in mute appeal to something that ought to help her and would not.
For Olivia was of those who, never having seen the face of Destiny
very near, are accustomed to look upon nothing as wholly
irrevocable; and--for one of her graces--she had the feminine
expectation that, if only events can be sufficiently postponed,
something will intervene; which is perhaps a heritage of the
gentlest women descended from Homeric days. If the island was so
historic, little Olivia may have said, where was the interfering
goddess? She looked unseeingly toward St. George and toward her
father, and the sense of the bitter actuality of the choice suddenly
wounded her, as the Actual for ever wounds the woman and the dream.
Then suddenly, above the stir of expectation of the people, and the
associate bustling of the High Council there came a vague confusion
and trampling from outside, and the far outer doors of the hall were
thrown open with a jar and a breath, vibrant as a murmur. There was
a cry, the determined resistance of some of the Golden Guard, and
shouts of expostulation and warning as they were flung aside by a
powerful arm. In the disorder that followed, a miraculously-familiar
figure--that familiarity and strangeness are both miracles ought to
explain certain mysteries--was beside St. George and a thankful
voice said in his ear:
"Mr. St. George, sir, for the mercy of Heaven, sir--come back to the
yacht. No person can tell what may happen ten minutes ahead, sir!"
The oracle of this universal truth was Rollo, palpitating, his
immaculate coat stained with earth, earth-stains on his cheeks, and
his breast labouring in an excitement which only anxiety for his
master could effect. But St. George hardly saw him. His eyes were
fixed on some one who stood towering before the dais, like the old
prints of the avenging goddesses. Clad in the hideous stripes which
boards of directors consider _de rigueur_ for the soul that is to be
won back to the normal, stood the woman Elissa, who, by all counts
of Prince Tabnit, should have been singing a hymn with Mrs. Manners
and Miss Bella Bliss Utter in the Bitley Reformatory, in Westchester
County, New York.
"Stop!" she cried in that perfect English which is not only a rare
experience but a pleasant adventure, "what new horror is this?"
To Prince Tabnit's face, as he looked at her, came once more that
indefinable change--only this time nearer and more intimately
explainable, as if something ethereal, trained to delicate lines,
like smoke, should suddenly shape itself to a menace. St. George saw
the woman step close to the dais, he saw Olivia's eyes questioning
him, and in the hurried rising of the peers and of the High Council
he heard Rollo's voice in his ear:
"It's a gr'it go, sir," observed Rollo respectfully, "the woman has
things to tell, sir, as people generally don't know. She's flew the
coop at the place she was in--it seems she's been shut up some'eres
in America, sir; an' she got 'old of the capting of a tramp boat o'
some kind--one o' them boats as smells intoxicating round the
'atches--an' she give 'im an' the mate a 'andful o' jewelry that
she'd on 'er when she was took in an' 'ad someways contrived to 'ang
on to, an' I'm blessed hif she wasn't able fer to steer fer the
island, sir--we took 'er aboard the yacht only this mornin' with 'er
'air down her back, an' we've brought 'er on here. An' she says--men
can be gr'it beasts, sir, an' no manner o' mistake," concluded Rollo
fervently.
And a little hoarse voice said in St. George's ear:
"Mr. St. George, sir--we ain't late, are we? We been flirtin' de
ger-avel up dat ka-liff since de car-rack o' day."
And there was Bennietod, with an edge of an old horse pistol
showing beneath his cuff; and, round-eyed and alert as a bird newly
alighted on a stranger sill, Little Cawthorne stood; and the sight
put strength into St. George, and so did Little Cawthorne's words:
"I didn't know whether they'd let us in or not," he said, "unless we
had on a plaited décolletté, with biases down the back."
Clearly and confidently in the silent room rang the voice of the
woman confronting Prince Tabnit, and her eyes did not leave his
face. St. George was struck with the change in her since that day in
the Reformatory chapel. Then she had been like a wild, alien thing
in dumb distress; now she was unchained and native. Her first words
explained why, in the extreme dilemma in which St. George had last
seen her, she had yet remained mute.
"I release myself," she cried, "from my oath of silence, though
until to-day I have spoken only to those who helped me to come back
to you--my master. Have you nothing to say to me? Has the time
seemed long? Is it a weary while since I left you to do your will
and murder the woman whom you were now about to make your wife?"
A cry of horror rose from the people, and then stillness came again.
"Take the woman away," said Prince Tabnit only, "she is speaking
madness."
"I am speaking the truth," said the woman clearly. "I was of
Melita--there are those here who will know my face. And it is not I
alone who have served the State. I challenge you, Tabnit--here,
before them all! Where are Gerya and Ibera, Cabulla and Taura? Have
not their people, weeping, besought news of them in vain? And what
answer have you given them?"
Murmurs and sobs rose from the assembly, stilled by the tranquil
voice of the prince.
"Where are they?" he repeated gently, his voice vibrant in its rise
and fall, its giving of delicate values. "But the people know where
they are. They have attained to the perfect life and died the
perfect death. For I have raised them to the supreme estate."
Prince Tabnit, with uplifted face, sat motionless, looking out over
the throng from beneath lowered lids; then his eyes, confident and a
little mocking, returned to the woman. But they had for her no
terror. She turned from him, confronting the pale, eager faces of
the people; and in her beauty and distinction she was like Olivia's
women, crowded beside the dais.
"Men and women of Yaque," cried Elissa, "I will tell you to what
'supreme estate' these friends whom you seek have long been raised.
For here in Med and in Melita you will find many of those whom you
have mourned as dead--you will find them as you yourselves have met
and passed them, it may have been countless times, on your streets
of Yaque--not young and beautiful as when they left you, but men and
women of incredible age. Withered, shaken by palsy, infirm, they
creep upon their lonely ways or go at will to drag themselves
unrecognized along your highways, as helpless as the dead
themselves. They number scores, and they are those who have
displeased your prince by some little word, some little wrong, or,
more than these, by some thwarting of the way of his ambition: Oblo,
who disappeared from his place as keeper at the door; Ithobal,
satrap of Melita; young Prince Kaal--ay, and how many more? You do
not understand my words? I say that your prince has knowledge of
some secret, accursed drug that can call back youth or make actual
age--_age_, do you understand--just as we of Yaque bring both
flowers and fruit to swift maturity!"
Olivia uttered a little cry, not at the grotesque horror of what the
woman had said but at the miracle of its unconscious support of the
story and theory of St. George. And St. George heard; and suddenly,
because another had voiced his own fantastic message, its
incredibility and unreality became appalling, and yet he felt
infinitely reconciled to both because he interpreted aright that
little muffled exclamation from Olivia. What did it matter--oh, what
did it matter whether or not the reality were grotesque? What seems
to be happening is always the reality, if only one understands it
sufficiently. And at all events there had been that hour in the
King's Alcove. At last, as he weighed that hour against the fantasy
of all the rest, St. George understood and lived the divine madness
of all great moments, the madness that realizes one star and is
content that all the heavens shall march unintelligibly past so long
as that single shining is not dimmed.
But King Otho was riding no such griffin with sun-gold wings. King
Otho was genuinely and personally interested in the woman's words.
He turned to Prince Tabnit with animation.
"Really, Prince," he said, "is it so? Pray do not deny it unless
there is no other way, for I am before all things interested. It is
far more important to me that you tell me as much as you can tell,
than that you deny or even disprove it."
Prince Tabnit smiled in the eagerly interested face of his
sovereign, and rose and came to the edge of the dais, his garments
embroidered by a thousand needles touching and floating about him;
and it was as if he reached those before him by a kind of spiritual
magnetism, not without sublimity.
"My people," he said--and his voice had all the tenderness that they
knew so well--"this is some conspiracy of those to whom we have
shown the utmost hospitality. I would have shielded your king, for
he was also my sovereign and I owed him allegiance. But now that is
no longer possible, and the time is come. Know then, oh my people of
Yaque, that which my loyalty has led me wrongfully to conceal: that
in the strange disappearance and return of your sovereign, King
Otho, he who will may trace the loss of that which the island has
mourned without ceasing. I accuse your king--he is no longer
mine--of being now in possession of the Hereditary Treasure of
Yaque."
Then St. George came back with a thrill to actuality. In the press
of the events of this morning, after his awakening in the room of
the tombs, he had completely forgotten the soft fire of gems that
had burned beneath the hands of old Malakh in that dark chamber
under King Abibaal's tomb. He and Amory and Jarvo had, with the
king, left the chamber by the upper passages, and Amory and Jarvo
knew nothing of the jewels. Yet St. George was certain that he could
not have been mistaken, and he listened breathlessly for what the
king would say.
King Otho, with a smile, nodded in perfect imperturbability.
"That is true," he said, "I had forgotten all about it."
They waited for him to speak, the people in amazed silence, Mrs.
Medora Hastings saying unintelligible things in whispers, for which
she had a genius.
"It is true," said King Otho, "that I am responsible for the
disappearance of the Hereditary Treasure. You will find it at this
moment in a basement dungeon of the palace on Mount Khalak. On the
very day, three months ago, that I dined with your prince I had made
a discovery of considerable importance to me, namely, that the
little island of Yaque is richer in most of the radio-active
substances than all the rest of the world. The discovery gave me
keener pleasure than I had known in years--I had suspected it for
some time after I found the noctilucous stars on the ceiling of my
sitting-room at the palace. And in the work-shop of the Princess
Simyra I came upon a quantity of metallic uranium, and a great many
other things which I question the taste of taking the time to
describe. But my experiments there with the very perfect gems of
your admirable collection had evidently been antedated by some of
your own people, for the apparatus was intact. I shall be glad to
show some charming effects to any one who cares to see them. I have
succeeded in causing the diamonds of Darius to phosphoresce most
wonderfully."
The phosphorescence of the diamonds of Darius was to the people far
less important than the joyous fact which they were not slow to
grasp, that the Hereditary Treasure was, if they might believe the
king's words, restored to them, and the burden of the tax averted.
They did not understand, nor did they seek to understand; because
they knew the inefficiency of details and they also knew the value
of mere import.
But the king, child of a social order that wreaks itself on
particularizations, returned to his quest for a certain recounting.
"Prince Tabnit," he said, "the High Council and the people of Yaque
are impatient for your answer to this woman's words."
"I rejoice with them and with your Majesty," replied Prince Tabnit
softly, "that the treasure is safe. My own explanation is far less
simple. If what this woman says is true, yet it is true in such wise
as, strive as I may, I can not speak; nor, strive as you may, can
you fathom. Therefore I say that the claim which she has made is
idle, and not within my power to answer."
At this St. George bounded to his feet. Amory looked up at him in
terror, and Little Cawthorne and Bennietod went a step or two after
him as he sprang forward, and Rollo's lean shadowed face, obvious as
his way of speech, was wrinkled in terrified appeal.
"An idle claim!" St. George thundered as he strode before the dais.
"Is this woman's story and mine an idle claim, and one not within
your power to answer? Then I will tell you how to answer, Prince
Tabnit. I challenge you now, in the presence of your people--taste
this!"
Upon the carven arm of Prince Tabnit's throne St. George set
something that he had taken from his pocket. It was the vase of
rock-crystal from which, the night before in the room of the tombs,
the king had drunk.
What followed was the last thing that St. George had expected. It
was as if his defiance had unlocked flood-gates. In an instant the
vast assembly was in motion. With a sound of garments that was like
far wind they were upon their feet and pressing toward the throne.
With all the passion of their "Yes! Yes! Yes!" in response to
Olivia's appeal they came, resistlessly demanding the answer to some
dreadful question long shrouded in their hearts. Their armour was
their silence; they made no sound save that ominous sweep of their
robes and the conspiracy of their sandaled feet upon the tiles.
St. George did not turn. Indeed, it did not once cross his mind that
their hostility could possibly be toward him. Besides, his look was
fixed upon the prince's face, and what he read there was enough. The
peers, the High Council and those nearest the throne wavered and
swerved from the man, leaving him to face what was to come.
Whatever was to come he would have met nobly. He was of those
infrequent folk of some upper air who exhibit a certain purity even
in error, or in worse. He stood with his exquisite pale face
uplifted, his white hair in a glory about it, his white gown
embroidered by a thousand needles falling in virginal lines against
the warm, pure colour of that room with its wraiths of hue and
light. And he opened the heart of the green jewel that burned upon
his breast.
"Not for me the wine of youth," he said slowly, "but the poison of
age. The poison which, without me to unlock the secret, all mankind
must drink alone. May you drink it late, my friends!" he cried. "I,
who hold in my soul the secret of the passing of time and youth,
drink now to those among you and among all men who have won and kept
the one thing dearer than these."
He touched the green gem to his lips, and let it fall upon the
embroidered laces on his breast. Then quietly and in another voice
he began to speak.
With the first words there came to St. George the thrill of
something that had possessed him--when? In that ecstatic moment on
_The Aloha_ when he had seen the light in the king's palace; in the
instant when the Isle of Yaque had first lain subject before him, "a
land which no one can define or remember--only desire;" in the
divine time of his triumph in having scaled the heights to the
palace, that sky-thing, with ramparts of air; above all, in the hour
of his joy in the King's Alcove, when Olivia had looked in his eyes
and touched his lips. Inexplicably as the way that eternity lies
barely unrevealed in some kin-thing of its own--a shell, a duty, a
vista--he suddenly felt it now in what the prince was saying. He
listened, and for one poignant stab of time he knew that he touched
hands with the elemental and saw the ancient kindliness of all those
people naked in their faces and knew himself for what he was.
He listened, and yet there was no making captive the words of the
prince in understanding. Prince Tabnit was speaking the English, and
every word was clearly audible and, moreover, was probably daily
upon St. George's lips. But if it had been to ransom the rest of the
world from its night he could not have understood what the prince
was saying. Every word was a word that belonged as much to St.
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 pass 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 butterflies 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 Banal 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 multitude 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 gods 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 multitude, 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 Cassyrus, 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 reassuring 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.
[Illustration]