"Mr. St. George"s disappearance," he said, "has prevented a still more unpleasant catastrophe."
"Catastrophe!" repeated Mrs. Hastings, quite without tucking in her voice at the corners, "I have thought of no other word since I got to be royalty."
"A world experience, a world experience, dear Madame," contributed Mr. Frothingham, his hands laid trimly along his blue velvet lap.
"But that doesn"t make it any easier to bear, no matter what anybody says," retorted the lady.
"Inasmuch," pursued Prince Tabnit with infinite regret, "as these Americans have, as you say, a.s.sisted in the search for your father, the king, they have most unfortunately violated that ancient law which provides that no State or satrapy shall receive aid, whether of blood or of bond, from an alien. The Royal House alone is exempt."
"And the penalty," demanded Olivia fearfully. "Is there a penalty?
What is that, Prince Tabnit?"
The voice of the prince was never more mellow.
"Do not be alarmed, I beg," he hastened his rea.s.surance. "Upon the return of Mr. St. George, he and his friend will simply be set adrift in a rudderless airship, an offering to the great idea of s.p.a.ce."
Mrs. Hastings swayed toward the prince in her chair of verd antique, and her voice seemed to become brittle in the air.
"Oh, is that what you call being ahead of the time," she demanded shrilly, "getting behind science to behave like Nero? And for my part I don"t see anything whatever about the island that is ahead of the times. You haven"t even got silk shoe-laces. I actually had to use a cloth-of-gold sandal strap to lace my oxfords, and when I lost a cuff-link I was obliged to make shift with two sides of one of Queen Agothonike"s ear-rings that I found in the museum at the palace. And that isn"t all," went on the lady, wrong kindling wrong, "what do you do for paper and envelopes? There is not a quire to be found in Med. They offered me _wireless blanks_--an ultra form that Mr. Hastings would never have considered in good taste. And how about visiting cards? I tried to have a plate made, and they showed me a wireless apparatus for flashing from the doorstep the name of the visitor--an electrical entrance which Mr. Hastings would have considered most inelegant. Ahead of the times, with your rudderless airships! I have always said that the electric chair is a way to be barbarous and good form at the same time, and that is what I think about Yaque!"
Mr. Frothingham"s hands worked forward convulsively on his blue velvet knees.
"My dear Madame," he interposed earnestly, "the history of criminal jurisprudence, not to mention the remarkable essay of the Marquis Beccaria--proves beyond doubt that the extirpation of the offender is the only possible safety for the State--"
Olivia rose and stood before the prince, her eyes meeting his.
"You will permit this sentence?" she asked steadily. "As head of the House of the Litany, you will execute it, Prince Tabnit?"
"Alas!" said the prince humbly, "it is customary on the day of the coronation to set adrift all offenders. I am the servant of the State."
"Then, Prince Tabnit, I can not marry you."
At this Mrs. Hastings looked blindly about for support, and Mr.
Frothingham and Antoinette flew to her side. In that moment the lady had seen herself, prophetically, in black samite and her parrot bonnet, set adrift in the penitential airship with her rebellious niece.
For a moment Prince Tabnit hesitated: he looked at Olivia, who was never more beautiful than as she defied him; then he walked slowly toward her, with sweep and fall of his garments embroidered by a thousand needles. Antoinette and her father, ministering to Mrs.
Hastings, heard only the new note that had crept into his voice, a thrill, a tremour--
"Olivia!" he said.
Her eyes met his in amazement but no fear.
"In a land more alien to me than the sun," said the prince, "I saw you, and in that moment I loved you. I love you more than the life beyond life upon which I have laid hold. I brought you to this island to make you my wife. Do you understand what it is that I offer you?"
Olivia was silent. She was trembling a little at the sheer enormity of the moment. Suddenly, Prince Tabnit seemed to her like a name that she did not know.
"Will you not understand what I mean?" he besought with pa.s.sionate earnestness. "Can I make my words mean nothing to you? Do you not see that it is indeed as I say--that I have grasped the secret of life within life, beyond life, transcending life, as his understanding transcends the man? The wonder of the island is but the alphabet of wisdom. The secrets of life and death and being itself are in my grasp. The hidden things that come near to you in beauty, in dream, in inspiration are mine and my people"s. All these I can make yours--I offer you life of a fullness such as the people of the world do not dream. I will love you as the G.o.ds love, and as the G.o.ds we will live and love--it may be for ever. Nothing of high wisdom shall be unrevealed to us. We shall be what the world will be when it nears the close of time. Come to me--trust me--be beside me in all the wonder that I know. But above all, love me, for I love you more than life, and wisdom, and mystery!"
Olivia understood, and she believed. The mystery of life had always been more real to her than its commonplaces, and all her years she had gone half-expecting to meet some one, unheralded, to whom all things would be clear, and who should make her know by some secret sign that this was so, and should share with her. She had no doubt whatever that Prince Tabnit spoke the truth--just as the daughter of the river-G.o.d Inachus knew perfectly that she was being wooed by a voice from the air. Indeed, the world over, lovers promise each other infinite things, and are infinitely believed.
"I do understand you, Prince Tabnit," Olivia said simply, "I do understand something of what you offer me. I think that these things were not meant to be hidden from men always, so I can even believe that you have all that you say. But--there is something more."
Olivia paused--and swiftly, as if some little listening spirit had released the picture from the air, came the memory of that night when she had stood with St. George on that airy rampart beside the wall of blossoming vines.
"There is something more," she repeated, "when two love each other very much I think that they have everything that you have said, and more."
He looked at her in silence. The stained light from some high window caught her veil in meshes of rose and violet--fairy colours, witnessing the elusive, fairy, invincible truth of what she said.
"You mean that you do not love me?" said the prince gently.
"I do not love you, your Highness," said Olivia, "and as for the wisdom of which you speak, that is worse than useless to you if you can do as you say with two quite innocent men." She hesitated, searching his face. "Is there no way," she said, "that I, the daughter of your king, can save them? I will appeal to the people!"
The prince met her eyes steadily, adoringly.
"It would avail nothing," he said, "they are at one with the law.
Yet there is a way that I can help you. If Mr. St. George returns, as he must, he and his friends shall be set adrift with due ceremony--but in an imperial airship, with a man secretly in control. By night they can escape to their yacht. This I will do--upon one condition."
"Oh--what is that?" she asked, and for all the reticence of her eagerness, her voice was a betrayal.
Prince Tabnit turned to the window. Below, in the palace grounds, and without, in the Eurychorus, a thousand people awaited the opening of the palace doors. They filled the majestic avenue, poured up the shadowed alleys that taught the necessity of mystery, were grouped beneath the honey-sweet trees; and above their heads, from every dome and column in the fair city, flowed and streamed the joyous, wizard, nameless colours of the pennons blown heavenward against the blue. They were come, this strange, wise, elusive people, to her marriage.
The prince was smiling as he met her eyes; for the world was always the exquisite intaglio, and to-day was its design.
"They know," he said simply, "what was to have been at noon to-day.
Do you not understand my condition?"
CHAPTER XIX
IN THE HALL OF KINGS
Somewhat before noon the great doors of the Palace of the Litany and of the Hall of Kings were thrown open, and the people streamed in from the palace grounds and the Eurychorus. Abroad among them--elusive as that by which we know that a given moment belongs to dawn, not dusk--was the sense of questioning, of unrest, of expectancy that belongs to the dawn itself. Especially the youths and maidens--who, besides wisdom, knew something of spells--waited with a certain wistfulness for what might be, for Change is a kind of G.o.d even to the immortals. But there were also those who weighed the departures incident to the coming of the strange people from over-seas; and there were not lacking conservatives of the old regime to shake wise heads and declare that a barbarian is a barbarian, the world over.
All that rainbow mult.i.tude, clad for festival, rose with the first light music that stole, winged and silken, from hidden cedar alcoves, and some minutes past the sounding of the hour of noon the chamfered doors set high in the south wall of the Hall of Kings were swung open, and at the head of the stair appeared Olivia.
She was alone, for the custom of Yaque required that the island princesses should on the day of their recognition first appear alone before their people in token of their mutual faith. From the wardrobes at the castle Olivia had chosen the coronation gown of Queen Mitygen herself. It was of fine lace woven in a single piece, and it lay in a foam of shining threads traced with pure lines of shadow. On her head were a jeweled coronal and jeweled hair-loops in the Phoenician fashion, once taken from a king"s casket and sent secretly, upon the decline of a.s.syrian ascendancy, to be bartered in the marts of Coele-Syria. Chains of jewels, in a noon of colour, lay about her throat, as once they lay upon the shoulders of the dead queens of Yaque and, before them, of the women of the elder dynasties long since recorded in indifferent dust. Girdling her waist was a zone of rubies that burned positive in the tempered light. With all her delicacy, Olivia was like her rubies--vivid, graphic, delineated not by light but by line.
The members of the High Council rustled in their colour and white, and flashed their golden stars; the Golden Guards (save the apostate few who were that day sentenced to be set adrift) were filling the stairway like a bank of b.u.t.tercups; and Olivia"s women, led by Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated, were entering by an opposite door. In the raised seats near the High Council, Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham leaned to wave a sustaining greeting. Until that high moment Mrs. Medora Hastings had been by no means certain that Olivia would appear at all, though she openly nourished the hope that "everything would go off smoothly."
("I don"t care much for foreigners and never have," she confided to Mr. Frothingham, "still, I was thinking while I was at breakfast, after all, to the prince _we are_ the foreigners. There is something in that, don"t you think? And then the dear prince--he is so very metaphysical!")
Upon the beetling throne Olivia took her place, and her women sank about her like tiers of sunset clouds. She was so little and so beautiful and so unconsciously appealing that when Prince Tabnit and Ca.s.syrus and the rest of the court entered, it is doubtful if an eye left Olivia, to homage them. But Prince Tabnit was the last to note that, for he saw only Olivia; and the world--the world was an intaglio of his own designing.
With due magnificence the preliminary ceremonies of the coronation proceeded--musty necessities, like oaths and historical truths, being mingled with the most delicate observances, such as the naming of the former princesses of the island, from Adija, daughter of King Abibaal, to Olivia, daughter of King Otho; and such as counting the clouds for the misfortunes of the regime. This last duty fell to the office of the lord chief-chancellor, and from an upper porch he returned quickening with the intelligence that there was not a cloud in the sky, a state of the heavens known to no coronation since Babylon was ruled by a.s.syrian viceroys. The lord chief-chancellor and Ca.s.syrus themselves brought forth the crown--a beautiful crown, shining like dust-in-the-sun--and Ca.s.syrus, in a voice that trumpeted, rehea.r.s.ed its history: how it had been made of jewels brought from the coffers of Amasis and Apries, when King Nebuchadnezzar wrested Phoenicia from Egypt, and, too, of all manner of precious stones sent by Queen Atossa, wife of Darius, when the Crotoniat Democedes, with two triremes and a trading vessel, visited Yaque before they went to survey h.e.l.lenic sh.o.r.es, with what disastrous result. And Olivia, standing in the queen"s gown, listened without hearing one word, and turned to have her veil lifted by Antoinette and the daughter of a peer of Yaque; and she knelt before the people while the lord chief-chancellor set the crown on her bright hair. It was a picture that thrilled the lord chief-chancellor himself--who was a worshiper of beauty, and a man given to angling in the lagoon and making metric translations of the inscriptions.
Then it was in the room as if a faint flame had been breathed upon and had upleaped in a thousand ways of expectancy, and as if a secret sign had been set in the lift and dip of the music--the music that was so like the great chamber with its lift and dip of carven line. The thrill with which one knows the glad news of an unopened letter was upon them all, and they heard that swift breath of an event that stirs before its coming. When Olivia"s women fell back from the dais with wonder and murmur, the murmur was caught up in the great hall, and ran from tier to tier as amazement, as incredulity, and as thanksgiving.