"More than anything," declared St. George. "What?"
"I think--" Olivia said slowly, "that it began--then--just when I first thought how wonderful that ride would have been. Except--that it had begun a great while before," she ended suddenly.
And at these enigmatic words St. George sent a quick look over the forward deck. It was of no use. Mr. Frothingham was well within range.
"Heavens, good heavens, how happy I am," said St. George instead.
"And then," Olivia went on presently, "sometimes when there are a lot of people about--literary-theory persons and all--I shall look across at you, differently, and that will mean that you are to remember the exact minute when you looked in the window up at the palace, on the mountain, and I saw you. Won"t it?"
"It will," said St. George fervently. "Don"t try to persuade me that there wasn"t any such mountain," he challenged her. "I suppose," he added in wonder, "that lovers have been having these secret signs time out of mind--and we never knew."
Olivia drew a little breath of content.
"Bless everybody," she said.
So they made invasion of that pure, dim world before them; and the serene mystery of the distance came like a thought, drawn from a state remote and immortal, to clasp the hand of There in the hand of Here.
"And then sometimes," St. George went on, his exultation proving greater than his discretion, "we"ll take the yacht and pretend we"re going back--"
He stopped abruptly with a quick indrawn breath and the hope that she had not noticed. He was, by several seconds, too late.
"Whose yacht is it?" Olivia asked promptly. "I wondered."
St. George had dreaded the question. Someway, now that it was all over and the prize was his, he was ashamed that he had not won it more fairly and humiliated that he was not what she believed him, a pillar of the _Evening Sentinel_. But Amory had miraculously heard and turned himself about.
"It"s his," he said briefly, "I may as well confess to you, Miss Holland," he enlarged somewhat, "he"s a great cheat. _The Aloha_ is his, and so am I, busy body and idle soul, for using up his yacht and his time on a newspaper story. You were the "story," you know."
"But," said Olivia in bewilderment, "I don"t understand. Surely--"
"Nothing whatever is sure, Miss Holland," Amory sadly a.s.sured her, but his eyes were smiling behind his pince-nez. "You would think one might be sure of him. But it isn"t so. Me, you may depend upon me,"
he impressed it lightly. "I"m what I say I am--a poor beggar of a newspaper man, about to be held to account by one Chillingworth for this whole millenial occurrence, and sent off to a political convention to steady me, unless I"m fired. But St. George, he"s a gay dilettante."
Then Amory resumed a better topic of his own; and Olivia, when she understood, looked down at her lover as miserably as one is able when one is perfectly happy.
"Oh," she said, "and up there--in the palace to-day--I did think for a minute that perhaps you wanted me to marry the prince so that--they could--."
One could smile now at the enormity of that.
"So that I could put it in the paper?" he said. "But, you see, I never could put it in any paper, even if I didn"t love you. Who would believe me? A thousand years from now--maybe less--the _Evening Sentinel_, if it is still in existence, can publish the story, perhaps. Until then I"m afraid they"ll have to confine themselves to the doings of the precincts."
Olivia waived the whole matter for one of vaster importance.
"Then why did you come to Yaque?" she demanded.
Mr. Frothingham had left his place by the wheel-house and wandered forward. The steamer chair had a back that was both broad and high, and one sitting in its shadow was hermetically veiled from the rest of the deck. So St. George bent forward, and told her.
After that they sat in silence, and together they looked back toward the island with its black rocks smitten to momentary gold by a last javelin of light. There it lay--the land locking away as realities all the fairy-land of speculation, the land of the miracles of natural law. They had walked there, and had glimpsed the shadowy threshold of the Morning. Suppose, St. George thought, that instead of King Otho, with his delicate sense of the merely visible, a great man had chanced to be made sovereign of Yaque? And instead of Mr. Frothingham, slave to the contestable, and Little Cawthorne in bondage to humour, and Amory and himself swept off their feet by a heavenly romance, suppose a party of savants and economists had arrived in Yaque, with a poet or two to bring away the fire--what then? St. George lost the doubt in the noon of his own certainty.
There could be no greater good, he chanted to the G.o.d who had breathed upon him, than this that he and Amory shared now with the wise and simple world, the world of the resonant new names. He even doubted that, save in degree, there could be a purer talisman than the spirit that inextinguishably shone in the face of the childlike old lawyer as the strange little animal nestled in his coat and licked his hand. And these were open secrets. Open secrets of the ultimate attainment.
They watched the land dissolving in the darkness like a pearl in wine of night. But at last, when momentarily they had turned happy eyes to each other"s faces, they looked again and found that the dusk, taking ancient citadels with soundless tread, had received the island. And where on the brow of the mountain had sprung the white pillars of the king"s palace glittered only the early stars.
"Crown jewels," said Olivia softly, "for everybody"s head."