N McDougle Street had been chosen
as a likely market by a “hokey-pokey”
man, who had wheeled his cart to the curb before the
entrance. There, despite Mrs. Hastings’
coach-man’s peremptory appeal, he continued
to dispense stained ice-cream to the little denizens
of N and the other houses in the row. The
brougham, however, at once proved a counter-attraction
and immediately an opposition group formed about the
carriage step and exchanged penetrating comments upon
the livery.
“Mrs. Hastings, you and Miss
Holland would better sit here, perhaps,” suggested
St. George, alighting hurriedly, “until I see
if this man is to be found.”
“Please,” said Miss Holland,
“I’ve always been longing to go into one
of these houses, and now I’m going. Aren’t
we, Aunt Dora?”
“If you think ”
ventured Mr. Frothingham in perplexity; but Mr. Frothingham’s
perplexity always impressed one as duty-born rather
than judicious, and Miss Holland had already risen.
“Olivia!” protested Mrs.
Hastings faintly, accepting St. George’s hand,
“do look at those children’s aprons.
I’m afraid we’ll all contract fever after
fever, just coming this far.”
Unkempt women were occupying the doorstep
of N. St. George accosted them and asked
the way to the rooms of a Mr. Tabnit. They smiled,
displaying their wonderful teeth, consulted together,
and finally with many labials and uncouth pointings
of shapely hands they indicated the door of the “first
floor front,” whose wooden shutters were closely
barred. St. George led the way and entered the
bare, unclean passage where discordant voices and the
odours of cooking wrought together to poison the air.
He tapped smartly at the door.
Immediately it was opened by a graceful
boy, dressed in a long, belted coat of dun-colour.
He had straight black hair, and eyes which one saw
before one saw his face, and he gravely bowed to each
of the party in turn before answering St. George’s
question.
“Assuredly,” said the
youth in perfect English, “enter.”
They found themselves in an ample
room extending the full depth of the house; and partly
because the light was dim and partly in sheer amazement
they involuntarily paused as the door clicked behind
them. The room’s contrast to the squalid
neighbourhood was complete. The apartment was
carpeted in soft rugs laid one upon another so that
footfalls were silenced. The walls and ceiling
were smoothly covered with a neutral-tinted silk,
patterned in dim figures; and from a fluted pillar
of exceeding lightness an enormous candelabrum shed
clear radiance upon the objects in the room. The
couches and divans were woven of some light reed,
made with high fantastic backs, in perfect purity
of line however, and laid with white mattresses.
A little reed table showed slender pipes above its
surface and these, at a touch from the boy, sent to
a great height tiny columns of water that tinkled
back to the square of metal upon which the table was
set. A huge fan of blanched grasses automatically
swayed from above. On a side-table were decanters
and cups and platters of a material frail and transparent.
Before the shuttered window stood an observable plant
with coloured leaves. On a great table in the
room’s centre were scattered objects which confused
the eye. A light curtain stirring in the fan’s
faint breeze hung at the far end of the room.
In a career which had held many surprises,
some of which St. George would never be at liberty
to reveal to the paper in whose service he had come
upon them, this was one of the most alluring.
The mere existence of this strange and luxurious habitation
in the heart of such a neighbourhood would, past expression,
delight Mr. Crass, the feature man, and no doubt move
even Chillingworth to approval. Chillingworth
and Crass! Already they seemed strangers.
St. George glanced at Miss Holland; she was looking
from side to side, like a bird alighted among strange
flowers; she met his eyes and dimpled in frank delight.
Mrs. Hastings sat erectly beside her, her tortoise-rimmed
glasses expressing bland approval. The improbability
of her surroundings had quite escaped her in her satisfied
discovery that the place was habitable. The lawyer,
his thin lips parted, his head thrown back so that
his hair rested upon his coat collar, remained standing,
one long hand upon a coat lapel.
“Ah,” said Miss Holland
softly, “it is an adventure, Aunt Dora.”
St. George liked that. It irritated
him, he had once admitted, to see a woman live as
if living were a matter of life and death. He
wished her to be alive to everything, but without suspiciously
scrutinizing details, like a census-taker. To
appreciate did not seem to him properly to mean to
assess. Miss Holland, he would have said, seemed
to live by the beats of her heart and not by the waves
of her hair but another proof, perhaps,
of “if thou likest her opinions thou wilt praise
her virtues.”
It was but a moment before the curtain
was lifted, and there approached a youth, apparently
in the twenties, slender and delicately formed as
a woman, his dark face surmounted by a great deal
of snow-white hair. He was wearing garments of
grey, cut in unusual and graceful lines, and his throat
was closely wound in folds of soft white, fastened
by a rectangular green jewel of notable size and brilliance.
His eyes, large and of exceeding beauty and gentleness,
were fixed upon St. George.
“Sir,” said St. George,
“we have been given this address as one where
we may be assisted in some inquiries of the utmost
importance. The name which we have is simply
‘Tabnit.’ Have I the honour ”
Their host bowed.
“I am Prince Tabnit,” he said quietly.
St. George, filled with fresh amazement,
gravely named himself and, making presentation of
the others, purposely omitted the name of Miss Holland.
However, hardly had he finished before their host
bowed before Miss Holland herself.
“And you,” he said, “you
to whom I owe an expiation which I can never make, do
you know it is my servant who would have taken your
life?”
In the brief interval following this
naïve assertion, his guests were not unnaturally speechless.
Miss Holland, bending slightly forward, looked at
the prince breathlessly.
“I have suffered,” he
went on, “I have suffered indescribably since
that terrible morning when I missed her and understood
her mission. I followed quickly I
was without when you entered, but I came too late.
Since then I have waited, unwilling to go to you, certain
that the gods would permit the possible. And
now what shall I say?”
He hesitated, his eyes meeting Miss
Holland’s. And in that moment Mrs. Hastings
found her voice. She curved the chain of her
eye-glasses over her ear, threw back her head until
the tortoise-rims included her host, and spoke her
mind.
“Well, Prince Tabnit,”
she said sharply quite as if, St. George
thought, she had been nursery governess to princes
all her life “I must say that I think
your regret comes somewhat late in the day. It’s
all very well to suffer as you say over what your servant
has tried to do. But what kind of man must you
be to have such a servant, in the first place?
Didn’t you know that she was dangerous and blood-thirsty,
and very likely a maniac-born?”
Her voice, never modulated in her
excitements, was so full that no one heard at that
instant a quick, indrawn breath from St. George, having
something of triumph and something of terror.
Even as he listened he had been running swiftly over
the objects in the room to fasten every one in his
memory, and his eyes had rested upon the table at
his side. A disc of bronze, supported upon a carven
tripod, caught the light and challenged attention
to its delicate traceries; and within its border of
asps and goat’s horns he saw cut in the dull
metal a sphinx crucified upon an upright cross an
exact facsimile of the device upon that strange opalized
glass from some far-away island which he had lately
noted in the window in Mrs. Hastings’ drawing-room.
Instantly his mind was besieged by a volley of suppositions
and imaginings, but even in his intense excitement
as to what this simple discovery might bode, he heard
the prince’s soft reply to Mrs. Hastings:
“Madame,” said the prince,
“she is a loyal creature. Whatever she
does, she believes herself to be doing in my service.
I trusted her. I believed that such error was
impossible to her.”
“Error!” shrilled Mrs.
Hastings, looking about her for support and finding
little in the aspect of Mr. Augustus Frothingham, who
appeared to be regarding the whole proceeding as one
from which he was to extract data to be thought out
at some future infinitely removed.
As for St. George, he had never had
great traffic with a future infinitely removed; he
had a youthful and somewhat imaginative fashion of
striking before the iron was well in the fire.
“Your servant believed, then,
your Highness,” he said clearly, “that
in taking Miss Holland’s life she was serving
you?”
“I must regretfully conclude so.”
St. George rose, holding the little
brazen disc which he had taken from the table, and
confronted his host, compelling his eyes.
“Perhaps you will tell us, Prince
Tabnit,” he said coolly, “what it is that
the people who use this device find against Miss Holland’s
father?”
St. George heard Olivia’s little broken cry.
“It is the same!” she
exclaimed. “Aunt Dora Mr. Frothingham it
is the crucified sphinx that was on so many of the
things that father sent. Oh,” she cried
to the prince, “can it be possible that you
know him that you know anything of my father?”
To St. George’s amazement the
face of the prince softened and glowed as if with
peculiar delight, and he looked at St. George with
admiration.
“Is it possible,” he murmured,
half to himself, “that your race has already
developed intuition? Are you indeed so near to
the Unknown?”
He took quick steps away and back,
and turned again to St. George, a strange joy dawning
in his face.
“If there be some who are ready
to know!” he said. “Ah,” he
recalled himself penitently to Miss Holland, “your
father Otho Holland, I have seen him many
times.”
“Seen Otho!” shrilled
Mrs. Hastings, as pink and trembling and expressionless
as a disturbed mold of jelly. “Oh, poor,
dear Otho! Did he live where there are people
like your frightful servant? Olivia, think!
Maybe he is lying at the bottom of a gorge, all wounded
and bloody, with a dagger in his back! Oh, my
poor, dear Otho, who used to wheel me about!”
Mrs. Hastings collapsed softly on
the divan, her glasses fallen in her lap, her side-combs
slipping silently to the rug. Olivia had risen
and was standing before Prince Tabnit.
“Tell me,” she said trembling,
“when have you seen him? Is he well?”
Prince Tabnit swept the faces of the
others and his eyes returned to Miss Holland and dropped
to the floor.
“The last time that I saw him,
Miss Holland,” he answered, “was three
months ago. He was then alive and well.”
Something in his tone chilled St.
George and sent a sudden thrill of fear to his heart.
“He was then alive and well?”
St. George repeated slowly. “Will you tell
us more, your Highness? Will you tell us why the
death of his daughter should be considered a service
to the prince of a country which he had visited?”
“You are very wonderful,”
observed the prince, smiling meditatively at St. George,
“and your penetration gives me good news news
that I had not hoped for, yet. I can not tell
you all that you ask, but I can tell you much.
Will you sit down?”
He turned and glanced at the curtain
at the far end of the room. Instantly the boy
servant appeared, bearing a tray on which were placed,
in dishes of delicate-coloured filigree, strange dainties
not to be classified even by a cosmopolitan, with his
Flemish and Finnish and all but Icelandic cafes in
every block.
“Pray do me the honour,”
the prince besought, taking the dishes from the hands
of the boy. “It gives me pleasure, Miss
Holland, to tell you that your father has no doubt
had these very plates set before him.”
Upon a little table he deftly arranged
the dishes with all the smiling ease of one to whom
afternoon tea is the only business toward, and to
whom an attempted murder is wholly alien. He
impressed St. George vaguely as one who seemed to have
risen from the dead of the crudities of mere events
and to be living in a rarer atmosphere. The lawyer’s
face was a study. Mr. Augustus Frothingham never
went to the theatre because he did not believe that
a man of affairs should unduly stimulate the imagination.
There was set before them honey made
by bees fed only upon a tropical flower of rare fragrance;
cakes flavoured with wine that had been long buried;
a paste of cream, thick with rich nuts and with the
preserved buds of certain flowers; and little white
berries, such as the Japanese call “pinedews”;
there was a tea distilled from the roots of rare exotics,
and other things savoury and fantastic. So potent
was the spell of the prince’s hospitality, and
so gracious the insistence with which he set before
them the strange and odourous dishes, that even Olivia,
eager almost to tears for news of her father, and
Mrs. Hastings, as critical and suspicious as some
beetle with long antennæ, might not refuse them.
As for Mr. Augustus Frothingham, although this might
be Cagliostro’s spagiric food, or “extract
of Saturn,” for aught that his previous experience
equipped him to deny, yet he nibbled, and gazed, and
was constrained to nibble again.
When they had been served, Prince
Tabnit abruptly began speaking, the while turning
the fine stem of his glass in his delicate fingers.
“You do not know,” he
said simply, “where the island of Yaque lies?”
Mrs. Hastings sat erect.
“Yaque!” she exclaimed.
“That was the name of the place where your father
was, Olivia. I know I remembered it because it
wasn’t like the man What’s-his-name in
As You Like It, and because it didn’t
begin with a J.”
“The island is my home,”
Prince Tabnit continued, “and now, for the first
time, I find myself absent from it. I have come
a long journey. It is many miles to that little
land in the eastern seas, that exquisite bit of the
world, as yet unknown to any save the island-men.
We have guarded its existence, but I have no fear to
tell you, for no mariner, unaided by an islander, could
steer a course to its coasts. And I can tell
you little about the island for reasons which, if
you will forgive me, you would hardly understand.
I must tell you something of it, however, that you
may know the remarkable conditions which led to the
introduction of Mr. Holland to Yaque.
“The island of Yaque,”
continued the prince, “or Arquà, as the
name was written by the ancient Phoenicians, has been
ruled by hereditary monarchs since 1050 B.C., when
it was settled.”
“What date did I understand
you to say, sir?” demanded Mr. Augustus Frothingham.
The prince smiled faintly.
“I am well aware,” he
said, “that to the western mind indeed,
to any modern mind save our own I shall
seem to be speaking in mockery. None the less,
what I am saying is exact. It is believed that
the enterprises of the Phoenicians in the early ages
took them but a short distance, if at all, beyond
the confines of the Mediterranean. It is merely
known that, in the period of which I speak, a more
adventurous spirit began to be manifested, and the
Straits of Gibraltar were passed and settlements were
made in Iberia. But how far these adventurers
actually penetrated has been recorded only in those
documents that are in the hands of my people descendants
of the boldest of these mariners who pushed their
galleys out into the Atlantic. At this time the
king of Tyre was Abibaal, soon to be succeeded by
his son Hiram, the friend, you will remember, of King
David, ”
Mr. Frothingham, who did not go to
the theatre for fear of exciting his imagination,
uttered the soft non-explosion which should have been
speech.
“King Abibaal,” continued
the prince, “who maintained his court in great
pomp, had a younger and favourite son who bore his
own name. He was a wild youth of great daring,
and upon the accession of Hiram to the throne he left
Tyre and took command of a galley of adventuresome
spirits, who were among the first to pass the straits
and gain the open sea. The story of their wild
voyage I need not detail; it is enough to say that
their trireme was wrecked upon the coast of Yaque;
and Abibaal and those who joined him among
them many members of the court circle and even of the
royal family settled and developed the island.
And there the race has remained without taint of admixture,
down to the present day. Of what was wrought
on the island I can tell you little, though the time
will come when the eyes of the whole world will be
turned upon Yaque as the forerunner of mighty things.
Ruled over by the descendants of Abibaal, the islanders
have dwelt in peace and plenty for nearly three thousand
years until, in fact, less than a year
ago. Then the line thus traceable to King Hiram
himself abruptly terminated with the death of King
Chelbes, without issue.”
Again Mr. Frothingham attempted to
speak, and again he collapsed softly, without expression,
according to his custom. As for St. George, he
was remembering how, when he first went to the paper,
he had invariably been sent to the anteroom to listen
to the daily tales of invention, oppression and projects
for which a continual procession of the more or less
mentally deficient wished the Sentinel to stand
sponsor. St. George remembered in particular one
young student who soberly claimed to have invented
wireless telegraphy and who molested the staff for
months. Was this olive prince, he wondered, going
to prove himself worth only a half-column on a back
page, after all?
“I understand you to say,”
said St. George, with the weary self-restraint of
one who deals with lunatics, “that the line of
King Hiram, the friend of King David of Israel, became
extinct less than a year ago?”
The prince smiled.
“Do not conceal your incredulity,”
he said liberally, “for I forgive it. You
see, then,” he went on serenely, “how in
Yaque the question of the succession became engrossing.
The matter was not merely one of ascendancy, for the
Yaquians are singularly free from ambition. But
their pride in their island is boundless. They
see in her the advance guard of civilization, the
peculiar people to whom have come to be intrusted
many of the secrets of being. For I should tell
you that my people live a life that is utterly beyond
the ken of all, save a few rare minds in each generation.
My people live what others dream about, what scientists
struggle to fathom, what the keenest philosophers
and economists among you can not formulate. We
are,” said Prince Tabnit serenely, “what
the world will be a thousand years from now.”
“Well, I’m sure,”
Mrs. Hastings broke in plaintively, “that I hope
your servant, for instance, is not a sample of what
the world is coming to!”
The prince smiled indulgently, as
if a child had laid a little, detaining hand upon
his sleeve.
“Be that as it may,” he
said evenly, “the throne of Yaque was still
empty. Many stood near to the crown, but there
seemed no reason for choosing one more than another.
One party wished to name the head of the House of
the Litany, in Med, the King’s city, who was
the chief administrator of justice. Another,
more democratic than these, wished to elevate to the
throne a man from whose family we had won knowledge
of both perpetual motion and the Fourth Dimension ”
St. George smiled angelically, as
one who resignedly sees the last fragments of a shining
hope float away. This quite settled it. The
olive prince was crazy. Did not St. George remember
the old man in the frayed neckerchief and bagging
pockets who had brought to the office of the Sentinel
chart after chart about perpetual motion, until St.
George and Amory had one day told him gravely that
they had a machine inside the office then that could
make more things go for ever than he had ever dreamed
of, though they had not said that the machine
was named Chillingworth.
“You have knowledge of both
these things?” asked St. George indulgently.
“Yaque understood both those
laws,” said the prince quietly, “when
William the Conqueror came to England.”
He hesitated for a moment and then,
regardless of another soft explosion from Mr. Frothingham’s
lips, he added:
“Do you not see? Will you
not understand? It is our knowledge of the Fourth
Dimension which has enabled us to keep our island a
secret.”
St. George suddenly thrilled from
head to foot. What if he were speaking the truth?
What if this man were speaking the truth?
“Moreover,” resumed the
prince, “there were those among us who had long
believed that new strength would come to my people
by the introduction of an inhabitant of one of the
continents. His coming would, however, necessitate
his sovereignty among us, in fulfilment of an ancient
Phoenician law, providing that the state, and every
satrapy therein, shall receive no service, either of
blood or of bond, nor enter into the marriage contract
with an alien; from which law only the royal house
is exempt. Thus were the two needs of our land
to be served by the means to which we had recourse.
For there being no way to settle the difficulty, we
vowed to leave the matter to Chance, that great patient
arbiter of destinies of which your civilization takes
no account, save to reduce it to slavery. Accordingly
each inhabitant of the island took a solemn oath to
await, with an open mind free from choice or prejudice,
the settlement of the event, certain that the gods
would permit the possible. Five days after this
decision our watchers upon the hills sighted a South
African transport bound for the Azores to coal.
A hundred miles from our coast she was wrecked, and
it was thought that all on board had been lost.
A submarine was ordered to the spot ”
“Do you mean,” interrupted
St. George, “that you were able to see the wreck
at that distance?”
“Certainly,” said the
prince. “Pray forgive me,” he added
winningly, “if I seem to boast. It is difficult
for me to believe that your appliances are so immature.
We were using steamship navigation and limiting our
vision at the time of Pericles, but the futility of
these was among our first discoveries.”
Involuntarily St. George turned to
Miss Holland. What would she think, he found
himself wondering. Her eyes were luminous and
her breath was coming quickly; he was relieved to
find that she had not the infectious vulgarity to
doubt the possibility of what seemed impossible.
This was one of the qualities of Mr. Augustus Frothingham,
who had assumed an air of polite interest and an accurately
cynical smile, and the manner of generously lending
his professional attention to any of the vagaries
of the client. Mrs. Hastings stirred uneasily.
“I’m sure,” she
said fretfully, “that I must be very stupid,
but I simply can not follow you. Why,
you talk about things that don’t exist!
My husband, who was a very practical and advanced man,
would have shown you at once that what you say is
impossible.”
Here was the attitude of the Commonplace
the world over, thought St. George: to believe
in wireless telegraphy simply because it has been
found out, and to disbelieve in the Fourth Dimension
because it has not been.
“I can not explain these things,”
admitted the prince gravely, “and I dare say
that you could prove that they do not exist, just as
a man from another planet could show us to his own
satisfaction that there are no such things as music
or colour.”
“Go on, please,” said Olivia eagerly.
“Olivia, I’m sure,”
protested Mrs. Hastings, “I think it’s
very unwomanly of you to show such an interest in
these things.”
“Will you bear with me for one
moment, Mrs. Hastings?” begged the prince, “and
perhaps I shall be able to interest you. The submarine
returned, bringing the sole survivor of the wreck of
the African transport.”
“Ah, now,” Mrs. Hastings
assured him blandly, “you are dealing with things
that can happen. My brother Otho, my niece’s
father, was just this last year the sole survivor
of the wreck of a very important vessel.”
“I have the honour, Mrs. Hastings,
to be narrating to you the circumstances attending
the discovery of your brother and Miss Holland’s
father, after the wreck of that vessel.”
“My father?” cried Olivia.
The prince bowed.
“After this manner, Chance had
rewarded us. We crowned your father King of Yaque.”