"If the ship should come to-morrow, you would go out of my life? You would go away and leave me here--"
"No, no!" she cried, turning upon him suddenly. "You _could_ not stay here. You shall not!"
"But, dearest love, I am bound to stay--I cannot go And, G.o.d help me, I want to stay. If I could go into your world and take you unto myself forever--if you will tell me now that some day you may forget your world and come to live in mine--then, ah, then, it would be different! But without you I have no choice of abiding place. Here, as well as anywhere."
She put her hands over her eyes.
"I cannot bear the thought of--of leaving you behind--of leaving you here to die at the hands of those beasts down there. Hollingsworth, I implore you--come! If the opportunity comes--and it will, I know--you will leave the island with the rest of us?"
"Not unless I am commanded to do so by the man who sent me here to serve these beasts, as you call them."
"They do not want you! They are your enemies!"
"Time will tell," he said sententiously. He leaned over and took her hand in his. "You do love me?"
"You know I do--yes, yes!" she cried from her heart, keeping her face resolutely turned away from him. "I am sick with love for you. Why should I deny the thing that speaks so loudly for itself--my heart!
Listen! Can you not hear it beating? It is hurting me--yes, it is hurting me!"
He trembled at this exhibition of released, unchecked pa.s.sion, and yet he did not clasp her in his arms.
"Will you come into my world, Genevra?" he whispered. "All my life would be spent in guarding the love you would give to me--all my life given to making you love me more and more until there will be no other world for you to think of."
"I wish that I had not been born," she sobbed. "I cannot, dearest--I cannot change the laws of fate. I am fated--I am doomed to live forever in the dreary world of my fathers. But how can I give you up? How can I give up your love? How can I cast you out of my life?"
"You do not love Prince Karl?"
"How can you ask?" she cried fiercely. "Am I not loving you with all my heart and soul?"
"And you would leave me behind if the ship should come?" he persisted, with cruel insistence. "You will go back and marry that--him? Loving me, you will marry him?" Her head dropped upon her arm. He turned cold as death. "G.o.d help and G.o.d pity you, my love. I never knew before what your little world means to you. I give you up to it. I crawl back into the one you look down upon with scorn. I shall not again ask you to descend to the world where love is."
Her hand lay limp in his. They stared bleakly out into the night and no word was spoken.
The minutes became an hour, and yet they sat there with set faces, bursting hearts, unseeing eyes.
Below them in the shadows, Bobby Browne was pacing the embankment, his wife drawn close to his side. Three men, Britt, Saunders and Bowles, were smoking their pipes on the edge of the terrace. Their words came up to the two in the gallery.
"If I have to die to-morrow," Saunders, the bridegroom, was saying, with real feeling in his voice, "I should say, with all my heart, that my life has been less than a week long. The rest of it was nothing. I never was happy before--and happiness is everything."
CHAPTER x.x.xIII
THE SHIPS THAT Pa.s.s
The next morning was rainy. A quick, violent storm had rushed up from the sea during the night.
Chase, after a sleepless night, came down and, without waiting for his breakfast, hurried out upon the gallery overlooking the harbour. Genevra was there before him, pale, wistful, heavy-eyed--standing in the shelter of a huge pilaster. The wind swept the thin, swishing raindrops across the gallery on both sides of her position. He came up from behind. She was startled by the sound of his voice saying "good-morning."
"Hollingsworth," she said drearily, "do you believe he will come to-day?"
"He?" he asked, puzzled.
"My uncle. The yacht was to call for me not later than to-day."
"I remember," he said slowly. "It may come, Genevra. The day is young."
She clasped his hand convulsively, a desperate revolt in her soul.
"I almost hope that it may not come for me!" she said, her voice shaking with suppressed emotion.
"I am not so selfish as to wish that, dear one," he said, after a moment of inconceivable ecstasy in which his own longing gave the lie to the words which followed.
"It will not come. I feel it in my heart. We shall die here together, Hollingsworth. Ah, in that way I may escape the other life. No, no! What am I saying? Of course I want to leave this dreadful island--this dreadful, beautiful, hateful, happy island. Am I not too silly?" She was speaking rapidly, almost hysterically, a nervous, flickering smile on her face.
"Dear one," he said gently, "the yacht will come. If it should not come to-day, my cruisers will forestall its mission. As sure as there is a sea, those cruisers will come." She looked into his eyes intently, as if afraid of something there. "Oh, I"m not mad!" he laughed. "You brought a cruiser to me one day; I"ll bring one to you in return. We"ll be quits."
"Quits?" she murmured, hurt by the word.
"Forgive me," he said, humbled.
"Hollingsworth," she said, after a long, tense scrutiny of the sea, "how long will you remain on this island?"
"Perhaps until I die--if death should come soon. If not, then G.o.d knows how long."
"Listen to me," she said intensely. "For my sake, you will not stay long. You will come away before they kill you. You will! Promise me. You will come--to Paris? Some day, dear heart? Promise!"
He stared at her beseeching face in wide-eyed amazement. A wave of triumphant joy shot through him an instant later. To Paris! She was asking him--but then he understood! Despair was the inspiration of that hungry cry. She did not mean--no, no!
"To Paris?" he said, shaking his head sadly. "No, dearest one. Not now.
Listen: I have in my bag upstairs an offer from a great American corporation. I am asked to a.s.sume the management of its entire business in France. My headquarters would be in Paris. My duties would begin as soon as my contract with Sir John Brodney expires. The position is a lucrative one; it presents unlimited opportunities. I am a comparatively poor man. The letter was forwarded to me by Sir John. I have a year in which to decide."
"And you--you will decline?" she asked.
"Yes. I shall go back to America, where there are no princesses of the royal blood. Paris is no place for the disappointed, cast-off lover. I can"t go there. I love you too madly. I"d go on loving you, and you--good as you are, would go on loving me. There is no telling what would come of it. It will be hard for me to--to stay away from Paris--desperately hard. Sometimes I feel that I will not be strong enough to do it, Genevra."
"But Paris is huge, Hollingsworth," she argued, insistently, an eager, impelling light in her eyes. "We would be as far apart as if the ocean were between us."
"Ah, but would we?" he demanded.
"It is almost unheard-of for an American to gain _entree_ to our--to the set in which--well, you understand," she said, blushing painfully in the consciousness that she was touching his pride. He smiled sadly.
"My dear, you will do me the honour to remember that I am not trying to get into your set. I am trying to induce you to come into mine. You won"t be tempted, so that"s the end of it. Beastly day, isn"t it?" He uttered the trite commonplace as if no other thought than that of the weather had been in his mind. "By the way," he resumed, with a most genial smile, "for some queer, un-masculine reason, I took it into my head last night to worry about the bride"s trousseau. How are you going to manage it if you are unable to leave the island until--well, say June?"
She returned his smile with one as sweetly detached as his had been, catching his spirit. "So good of you to worry," she said, a defiant red in her cheeks. "You forget that I have a postponed trousseau at home. A few st.i.tches here and there, an alteration or two, some smart summer gowns and hats--Oh, it will be so simple. What is it? What do you see?"
He was looking eagerly, intently toward the long, low headland beyond the town of Aratat.