CHAPTER XVI—THE LESSON IN MAGIC
At the door of the château the Duke found a Japanese servant. This servant led him into a court paved with mosaic, set with palms and marbles about a fountain in which nymphs, sporting in abandon, splashed a god with water. From this court they ascended a stairway, rising in the circular tower which the Duke of Dorset had already noticed. The baluster of the stair, under the rail was a bronze frieze winding upward, of naiads, fauns, satyrs, dancing in a wood, group following group, like pictures in some story.
They stopped at the first landing and crossed a second corridor to a suite of rooms, finished in the style of Louis Quinze. The servant inquired about the Duke's luggage, got his direction and went out. The Duke walked idly through the suite; he might have been, at this hour, in Versailles. Every article about him belonged there in France. The bed was surely that of some departed Louis, standing on a dais, brocade curtains, drawn together at the top under a gilt crown. In this bedchamber he crossed unconsciously to the window, and remained looking out at the park descending to the river, and the mountains dreamy and beautiful beyond.
He wondered vaguely what it was that had led him over four thousand miles of sea, across a continent to this place. Did he come following the will-o'-the-wisp of a fabled legend? Did he come obeying some prenatal instinct? Did he come moved by an impulse long ago predestined?
The query, now that he stood before it, was fantastic. These, surely, were not the things that moved him. They were things merely that clouded and obscured the real impulse hiding within him. Some huge controlling emotion, dominating him, moved behind the pretense of this extravaganza; an emotion primal and common to all men born since Adam; a thing skilled in disguises, taking on the form of other and lesser motives, so that men clearheaded and practical, men hardened with a certain age, men dealing only with the realities of life, sat down with it unaware, as the patriarch sat down with angels. The wisdom of Nature moving with every trick, every lure, every artifice, to the end that life may not perish from the earth!
The Duke of Dorset turned from the window. He did not realize what this emotion was, but he felt its presence, and for the first time in his life the man had a sense of panic, like one who suddenly finds his senses tricked and his judgment unreliable. He walked across the bedchamber into the dressing room.
He found his luggage already in the room. The servant asked for the keys, the Duke gave him all but the key to the box containing the rifle that he had now no need to open. To a query, the servant answered that Mr. Childers would receive him as soon as he was pleased to come down into the library. The Duke of Dorset bathed, changed his dress, and descended.
The library was octagon in shape, carpeted with an Eastern rug, set with a great table, lined with books, and lighted with long casement windows.
Cyrus Childers was standing at one of the windows. He came forward and welcomed the Duke of Dorset.
"I am sorry," he said, "that Caroline is not here. She and the Marchesa Soderrelli are in the East yet, but they will arrive in a day or two."
He stepped over to a table and fumbled with a pile of letters. But his eyes did not follow his hands. They traveled over his guest, over his tanned face, over his broad shoulders, and as he looked, he spoke on: he regretted the Duke's long tramp across the mountains; the closed lodge at the harbor; the negligence of Caroline. He deplored the great inconveniences which the Duke had undergone.
"The Marchesa Soderrelli said that you were coming to Canada," he continued, "and I endeavored to locate you there, but I fear that I did not sufficiently persist in my effort, because the Marchesa assured rue that you would certainly let us know when you arrived on the Pacific Coast. You see, I trusted to the wisdom of the Marchesa."
Then he laughed in his big voice. "Ah," he said, "there is a woman! A remarkable woman. Did you know her before your coming to the bay of Oban?"
"I had that honor," replied the Duke.
"She said in Biarritz that you would likely be there. Your fame was going about just then in Biarritz."
"Rumor," the Duke answered, "has, I believe, dealt kindly with me."
The old man laughed again.
"With me," he said, "it is always the other way about."
He followed the remark with a few words of explanation. The Duke must manage to amuse himself until the others arrived. He would find books, horses, if he cared to ride, and excellent shooting in the river bottoms.
After luncheon Cyrus Childers rode with his guest over the cultivated portion of the estate, through the meadows, the pasture fields, the orchards, and everywhere the duke found only Japanese at work. He remarked on this:
"How do these men get on with other workmen?" he said.
The old man stopped his horse. "I solved that difficulty before it reached me," he answered. "I have no race problem, because I have only one race. I wanted a homogeneous servant body that would remain on the estate, work in harmony, and adjust its own difficulties. The Japanese met these requirements, so I took the Japanese. But I made no mistake. I did not take them to supplement white labor. I took them wholly. There is not a servant nor a workman anywhere on the entire estate who is not of this race."
"You have, then, a Japanese colony?" said the Duke.
The old man extended his arm. "It is Japan," he replied, "except for the topography of the country."
"I have been told," said the Duke, "that the instinct of the Japanese to found a colony constitutes the heart of the objection to him on the Pacific Coast. Other Orientals plan to return to their country; but this one, it is said, brings his country with him. I am told that they have already practically colonized certain portions of California."
"The Vaca Valley and sections of the Santa Clara Valley," replied Cyrus Childers, "contain Japanese settlements."
"And I am told," continued the Duke, "that with respect to such settlements, it is the plan of the Japanese first to drive out the other laborers, and then deliberately to ruin the orchards and vineyards, after which they more easily procure them."
"I have no trouble of that sort," said the old man, "since I pay in money for the service which I receive."
"It is strange," said the Duke, "how this sentiment against the Japanese extends with equal intensity along this coast through the American states and northward into the Dominion of Canada. One would say that these were the same people, since they are moved by the same influences. The riots in Vancouver seem to be facsimiles of the riots in San Francisco. When it comes to this oriental question the boundary between the two countries disappears. Our government has exerted its influence to check this sentiment, but we do not seem able to control it. Can you tell me why it is that we are unable to control it?"
"Yes," he said, "I can tell you. It is for two reasons: first, because the North American laborer wishes to suspend a law of Nature—that the one who can live on the least shall survive. The Japanese laborer can underbid him for the requirements of existence, and consequently he must supplant him. And why should he not, he is the better servant? This is the first reason. The second reason is, that the peoples of the English-speaking nations are in one of their periodic seizures of revolt against authority." And he laughed.
"The conditions maintaining a difference in men follow laws as immutable as those turning the world on its axis. Efforts at equalization are like devices to cheat gravity. Thus, the theory of rule by a universal electorate is a chimera. Men require a master as little boys in school require one. When the master goes down, terror follows until a second master emerges from the confusion. There is always back of order some one in authority. There is no distinction between the empire and republic except in a certain matter of disguises. The seizure of so-called liberty, attacking peoples, now and then, is a curious madness; a revolt against the school-master, ending always in the same fashion—disorder, riot, and a new master back at the desk. When this seizure passes, your government will again be able to control its subjects."
"But," said the Duke, "is there not an obligation on a government to see that its people are not underbid in the struggle for life!"
The old man's voice arose. "What is a government!" he said.
"It is the organized authority of a whole people," replied the Duke.
The old man laughed. "It is the pleasure of one or two powerful persons," he said.
CHAPTER XVII—THE STAIR OF VISIONS
That fantastic illusion, as of one come, after adventures, to the kingdom of some Magus, was preserved to the Duke of Dorset by the days that followed. He was for the most part wholly alone. He arose early, and lived the long day in the open; in the evening he dined with his host, and sat with him in the great library until midnight. At no other time did he see this curious old man.
He was distinctly conscious of two moods, contrary and opposite, changing with the day and night, like one going alternately into and out of the illusions of an opiate. Under the sun, in the dreamy haze of Indian summer, this beautiful château of yellow stone, set about with exquisite gardens, rimmed in the smoky distance with an amphitheater of mountains, was the handiwork of fairies, reset by enchantment from an Arabian tale. But at night, in the presence of Cyrus Childers, that mood vanished, as when one passing behind the staged scenery of a play meets there the carpenter.
The days, one following like the other, were not wholly lacking in interest. The Duke of Dorset tramped about the estate, but more usually he shot quail over dogs in the river bottoms; he found this game bird smaller than the English quail, but hardy, strong winged, wild, getting up swiftly and sailing over long distances into the forest when alarmed. When the tramping tired him, he sat down under some tree by the river and watched the panting setters swim, their red coats spreading out like a golden fleece in the amber water. The servant at the château had provided him with a gun for this shooting, since he had brought with him only a rifle, and this remained in his dressing room, unopened, locked in the ordinary luggage box.
On one of these long tramps, he solved the riddle of the vague smoke pillar, rising above the mountains east of the château. He presently observed that the great road, leading from the coast over the wilderness to this country place, continued through the park, eastward from the turf court, crossed the river, and ascended the mountain. He followed the road for an entire morning to the summit; there the mystery of the dark wisp of cloud was revealed to him. Far inland, beyond the crest of this mountain, that smoke arose from great mills for the manufacture of lumber. From huge stacks, dimly to be seen, a line of thin smoke climbed skyward, twining into that faint blot—that sign, marked by the superstitious mountaineer.
That night after dinner the Duke of Dorset brought the conversation to this wisp of smoke, and diverging from the query, he got a flood of light on the career of Childers. The sinister vapor was commercial incense. Great mills for the manufacturing of the forests into lumber were gathered into that valley. It was one example of this man's policy of consolidation, his rooting up of competition everywhere in trade, a detail of his plan for gathering the varied sources of wealth compactly together. The ambition of the man presented itself as he warmed to the discussion. The motive, moving him here in this republic, was merely that moving Alexander in Asia—moving the Corsican in France. But the times had changed and the ancient plan was no longer adapted to the purpose; the seizure of authority by force was out of fashion; one must not provoke a revolt of the eye.
The Duke of Dorset, as he listened, was struck with an inconsistency. If the secret of this man's dominion lay in covering it from the eye, was not that secret out here? No Eastern despot was more magnificently housed. His host, for explanation, again pointed out that there was no native laborer on this whole estate. Every man, every woman to be seen was Japanese, brought directly over sea here to service. The whole estate inland was sentineled with keepers. Cut off thus from the republic, as though it were a foreign province, into which no man went without a passport, except, now and then, a mountaineer traveling through the forest, and, to add thus more to this isolation, the labor employed in the group of industries lying east of this estate were wholly Japanese—the jetsam of the Orient.
The old man, moving on this topic, spoke with a certain hesitation, and the Duke of Dorset understood why it was; after all, like every other despot, this man craved his gilded chair; pride clamored for authority made manifest, for the pomp of sovereignty, and he had yielded to that weakness, as the Corsican, in the end, had yielded to it, magnificently, in a riot of purple. But he saw clearer than the Corsican; he was not convinced, as that other of the Titans was; he sought cover—the deeps of the wilderness for the staging of his sovereignty.
Then, as this old man sketched in detail the first big conception of his estate, the care, the mammoth labor, the incredible sums expended, pride moved him; whatever thing of beauty any people in any land had made, he had made here; whatever thing of beauty they had treasured, he had bought with money. He had commanded, like that one looking up at Babylon, myriad human fingers, backs that strained, faces that sweated. And he told the story of it, striding through his library under its mellow light, in pride, like that barbarian king might have told the story of his city.
And in this library, beautiful as deft human fingers could make it, lighted softly from above, on its floor a treasure of India, where in colored threads an Eastern weaver had laboriously told the tale of a religion, occult and mystic, its domed ceiling covered with a canvas, painted by a Florentine, wherein the martyred dead winged upward at the last day; here—between mysteries, between, as it were, the oldest and the newest religion of the world, both disregarded, the sacred cloths of both, a spoil to profane decorative uses—the Duke of Dorset listened to this story. And, strangely, as he listened, the words of that curious priest, reading in the blood light, painfully by his fire, returned striding through his memory.
I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water: and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the Lord of hosts.... And owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.
And on his way up to his bedchamber at midnight, as though that ancient prophecy moved here to some sinister fulfillment, as though the sign of it fantastically preceded, the naiads, the fauns, and those bronze figures with their leering human faces and their goat loins, forming the exquisite frieze under the rail of the great stairway, seemed to follow, trooping at his heels.
But on every night, at the bend of this stairway, as he ascended, any mood, any fancy coming with him was exorcised out of his mind and replaced by another. Here, as he turned, by a trick of the canvas cunningly hung, by a trick of obscured lights cunningly descending, a woman seemed to meet him passing on this stair, going down like one who hurried. A woman, perhaps thirty, in the fantastic costume of some princess out of an ancient story, without a jewel on her body, as though the delicate pink skin, the exquisite full throat, the purple dark hair, despised a lesser glory.
It was not merely the beauty of this woman that stopped the Duke of Dorset coming up this stair at night, it was two fancies attending her that seized him. One that she wished to pass him swiftly, thus with her head bowed; because from some emotion held down within her, going to the very roots of life, she did not dare, she did not trust herself to look into his face. And the other that she was passing, going at this moment down the steps on which he stood, passing there at his elbow, now swiftly, out of the influence under which he held her—escaping for this life, for all time, forever. And, strangely, there attended on these two fancies a conviction, a truth established, that this woman, ten years older, was yet, somehow, Caroline Childers.
Every night as he came up the great turning staircase, he met her thus going down; and every night as he came, as his feet moved on the stair, the huge emotion, skulking within him, behind disguises, seized him and pointed to what he already desperately saw; that he could put out his hands ever so gently and she would stop; that he could speak her name ever so softly and she would come with a cry into his arms.
The impelling, moving, overwhelming power of this illusion lay in the conviction that this moment, here on the stair, now, was final—that for this moment only, the opportunity was in his hand. The next second, ticked off by the clock, she would be gone, and something like the door of death would swing to, clicking in its lock.
Every night, when he passed on up the stairway, when his foot came to the step which followed, a sense of loss, complete and utter, like the darkness of the pit, descended on him. Loss is a word too feeble. The thing was a sense of death. Somehow the one thing, the one only thing for which he was born and suckled and ate bread and became a man—a thing, hidden until now—had, in that moment, gone, stepped out into the light, and beckoned, and he had failed it. 'And so, now, the reason for his being here was ended; all the care, the patience, the endless labor of Nature, bringing him in strength to the fullness of his life, was barren; all the agony that he had given to his mother, the milk that he had drunk, the fruits of the earth that he had eaten, were wasted; he was now a thing of no account, useless to the great plan—a thing, to be broken up by the forces of Nature in disgust. The thing was more than a sense of death. It was a sense of extermination, merited by failure.
And further, his fathers, sleeping in the earth, seemed to approach and condemn him. The gift of life handed down to him must be passed on to another; it was a chain which, for great, mysterious, unknowable reasons, must continue, lest somehow the destiny of all was periled. Did he break it, then the labor of all was lost, the immortality of all endangered. Some doom, reaching equally to the farthest ancestor, some doom, not clear, not possible to get at, but sinister and threatening, attended the breaking of that chain. The emotion, clouding his blood, was an agent in the service of these dead men. These illusions, these fancies, were from them, doing what they could to move him. They had found one pleasing to them, one suited, one fit; they had led him by invisible influences to that one; they had prevailed in argument against him; they had colored and obscured his reason; they had lured him over four thousand miles of sea to that one whom they, wise with the wisdom of the dead, had chosen. And he had failed them! They pressed around him, their faces ghastly.
The man, do what he liked, could not escape from the dominion of this mood. He stopped every night on the stair; he came every night with a quicker pulse, and he passed on with that sense of desolation. The Duke of Dorset called reason and common sense to his aid, but neither could exorcise this fancy. That emotion, cunning past belief, in the service of the principle of life, had got him under its hypnotic fingers! He spoke calmly with himself; he made observations, verbally correct, arguments, to the ear sound, conclusions that no logic could assail; this was only a picture, as he had been told, of Caroline's mother painted in a fancy costume; and he a sentimentalist, but they availed him nothing.
In the morning, when he descended, there was only the full-length portrait of a beautiful woman hanging in its frame. The illusion attending it was gone, but not wholly gone; like some fairy influence, coming to men's houses in the night, and departing to solitudes at cock-crow, it awaited him outside—in the deep places of the forest, in the high grasses by the river, in the gardens when he sat alone on the benches in the sun.
If, after three hours of shooting, he sat down at the foot of a great tree to rest, some one came and stood behind it. If, desperately, he followed some lost trail of the red Indian, twining through the mountain, at every turn of it, some one barely escaped him, and the conviction grew upon him, like a madness, that at the next turn of the trail, if he went softly forward, he would find that one. Not the serious, beautiful woman of the picture, but truant hair, whipped by the wind, eyes that danced, a mouth, sweet and young, that laughed. And drugged with the oldest opiate, the Duke of Dorset stalked the oldest illusion in the world.
So ridden was he by this mood that the significance of an incident, which he otherwise would have marked, escaped him. In the last few days he had met, more than once, a Japanese who did not seem to be engaged in any particular labor. He met this man always in the mountains, east of the château, coming down toward it or returning; twice the Duke had seen him late in the evening, and once at midday, lying under a tree watching the château below him.
The man cringed when the Duke called to him, and replied, in excellent English, that he was a forester engaged on the estate.
CHAPTER XVIII—THE SIGN BY THE WAY
At noon on a certain Thursday, seven days after his arrival, the Duke of Dorset set out to shoot quail in the river bottom south of the château. A shower of rain had fallen in the morning. The air was clear and bright. The mountains gleamed as in a mirror, the haze, by some optical illusion, banked behind them. The vigor of spring, by some trick of Nature, seemed to have crept back into the earth; to swim in the dark waters of the river; to lie at the root of the grasses; to swell under the bark of the fir tree, waiting for a day or two of sun. The great principle of life, waning in the autumn, seemed moving, potent, on the point of recovering its vitality, as under some April shower. Birds fluttered in the thickets, as though seized with a nesting instinct; the cattle wandered in their pasture; new blades started green at the roots of the brown turf; and, now and then, as though misled, as though tricked, a little flower opened to the sun.
The man, walking through the fields, the meadows, over the moist leaves, received, like every other thing, his share of this subtle influence. The clean air whipped his blood; that virility, warming in the grasses, in the green stem of the flower, under the bark of the fir tree, warmed, too, in every fiber of his body.
He walked on, following the high bank of the river, forgetting the red setter at his heels, the gun tucked under his arm. Quail got up and whirred to distant thickets, the woodcock arose from some corner of the swamp, but the gun remained under the cover of his arm. He felt somehow, on this afternoon, a certain sympathy with these little people of the fields—with the robin and his brown lady. Under what principle of selection had they mated? What trick of manner had favored this dapper gallant? What thing of special beauty had set this thicket belle, in his eye, above her rivals? The riddle, as he turned it, lifted to a broader application.
Was not that mystery a thing hidden as no other mystery moving in this world is hidden? When the King Cophetua caught up the beggar maid for queen, could he give a reason for it? Was it the blue eye that did it, or the red mouth? Other eyes were blue, other mouths, in his court, were red. Did he know any better what it was than this brown fellow in his tree top? Did one ever know? Did any living thing, since the world began its spinning, know?
Imperceptibly, creeping like some opiate, the mystery of it occupied the Duke's fancy. He returned to the picture on the stair; to the girl in Oban. What was it that his blood had caught? What thing was it that set this woman above every other in the world? Why was it that the mere memory of her voice set the nerves under his skin to tingling? Why was it that a hunger for her spread through him, as though every fiber had a mouth that starved? Had he stood up to be shot against a wall, there, in the sun, he could not have answered.
He traveled for miles south along the river, in this autumn afternoon, idly, his gun under his arm, until the trail ended at the bend of the river, where the black waters swing about a moment, before plunging over a mile of rapids seaward through the mountains. Here the red Indian, whose trail he followed, used once to cross, swimming with a long stroke of his right arm, and holding his weapon over his head that the bowstring might be dry. A fir, uprooted by the winds, lay with its top buried in the pool, its brown body warm, mottled with the sun.
The Duke of Dorset sat down on this tree, his back against a limb. And Nature, that great enchantress, that subtle guardian of life, that divine fakir, squatting on her carpet in the sun, tempted him with pictures of vivid, intoxicating detail; whispered and suggested, stretching her lures, cunning as a spider, across the door posts of every sense. The leaves, falling on his face, were soft hands that touched him, the birds, laughing in the thickets, were a human voice that laughed, the rustle of their wings were skirts trailing on a carpet.
The day waned. The sun grew thinner northward on the fields. The blue haze gathered in the pockets of the mountains, as though, like smoke, it seeped upward through the earth. A cooler air attended. An owl, sleeping in the green top of a fir tree across the river, troubled by some dream, lurched forward, lost his footing on the brown limb, awoke, and flapped, without a sound, eastward to a thicker tree top. The Duke of Dorset, sitting with the gun across his knees, caught the shadow traveling on the water, turned where he sat, and brought the gun up to his shoulder. A moment the blue barrels followed the outlaw, then his finger pressed the trigger, and that pirate had gone out no more on his robbing raids, but fate, moving to another purpose, saved him; the gun snapped; the Duke's finger instantly caught the second trigger, but that snapped, like the first, with a faint click. He brought the gun down, threw open the breech, and replaced the cartridges, but the outlaw was housed now safely in his distant tree top. The Duke of Dorset got down from his place, and turned the gun on a patch of lichen, set like a silver target against a black rock emerging from the river, but the triggers clicked again.
He broke the gun and looked carefully at the shells. There was no dent on the caps, one was wholly untouched, the other scratched faintly. He opened and closed the breech slowly to observe if the cocking mechanism were defective. The resistance, the sobbing cluck of it, showed no difficulty there. Then he drew out the shells and raised the gun butt so the strikers would fall forward, but they did not fall into sight. He struck the butt with his hand to loosen these pins, if they were sticking, but they remained even with the face of the breech action. He sprung the hammers on the strikers and still they came no farther into the breech. The difficulty was obscure, the strikers were loose in their beds, the hammers working, the gun had been perfect until to-day. He began to examine the nose of the strikers, and the explanation showed on the hard steel; both had been filed off smooth with the face of the breech action. The ends of the strikers were blunt and square. He could easily see the mark of the file on each one of them. The gun was useless. The discovery was so extraordinary that the man did not seek a theory to fit it. It was useless to speculate. He would inquire of the servant on his return.
The Duke followed the river to the park east of the château. Here the road crossed on a single stone span rising gracefully over the black water. A low wall, no higher than a man's knee, inclosed the road over the long arch. Beyond was the forest, changing under the descending light from blue to purple, from purple into blackness—all forest, from the bridge end to the distant tree-laced sky line. Westward the park lifted to the château—a park like those to be found in England; forest trees standing in no order, the undergrowth removed, and the earth carpeted with grass. At the summit, to be seen in among the gray tree tops, the dull yellow walls of the château loomed. The river, caught here in a narrow channel, boiled and roared, as though maddened by the insolence of that arch lifted over it for the human foot.
As the Duke approached he saw two men standing in the border of the forest beyond this bridge, talking together; a moment later one crossed the bridge and climbed the park to the château. The Duke, coming up the trail, observed that this man was a footman, in the livery of the house. The other, who remained by the roadside, looking after him, was the idle Japanese. He watched the footman until he disappeared among the trees, then he turned into the forest, a moment before the Duke of Dorset came up by the corner of the bridge into the park.
The incident recalled to the Duke his previous knowledge of this Japanese and with it an explanation. The man was, doubtless, a relative of some servant in the house; the father, perhaps the uncle, of this footman, and he came here for the flotsam about a country house which the footman could dispose of. It was a custom old as the oriental servant; there was always the family to benefit by the servant's fortune, and one going between surreptitiously with his basket. The incident and the explanation of it passed through the man's mind like any casual observation—as one notes and sees the reason of a hundred trivial matters, without comment, in a day.
The Duke crossed the road and turned up the hill through the park. The sun was gone now, and a hundred lights peeped through the trees, blinking from the windows of the house, as though all of its apartments were in use. At the door, as he was about to speak of the disabled gun, a valet attending brought him a message that swept so trivial an incident wholly out of his mind. Miss Childers and the party had returned. Would His Grace dress a little earlier for dinner.
The Duke of Dorset had been waiting for these words, endless day after day, and yet, now that they were spoken, he felt like one taken wholly by surprise; like one called out of his bed to face some difficult emergency, for which he needed time.
CHAPTER XIX—THE CHAMBER OP LIGHT
Caroline Childers came forward to welcome the Duke when he entered the drawing-room.
"I am so glad to see you," she said; "how did you ever find the way?"
"I had a very accurate map of the coast," replied the Duke.
"But how did you cross the mountains? The keeper's lodge was closed; there was no one to meet you. I am so sorry."
"On the contrary," answered the Duke, "there was a most delightful person to meet me."
"I am glad," said the girl, "but I am puzzled. Was it one of our servants?"
"I asked him that," replied the Duke, "and he said that he used the word 'servant' only in his prayers."
"Oh," said the girl, "I understand. It was a native. Then you were surely entertained."
"I have not been so entertained in half a lifetime," replied the Duke.
This dialogue, running before so charged a situation, seemed to the man like some sort of prelude to a drama. The moment became, for him, a vivid, luminous period. In it impressions flashed on him with the rapidity of light; details of the great drawing-room richly fitted, its Venetian mirrors, treasures of a Doge. But, more than any other thing, he saw the beauty of the girl who came up the drawingroom to meet him, who stood beside him, who spoke to him in the soft, deliberate accents of the South. He noted every detail of her, her hair, her long lashes, her exquisite mouth, her slim body, and the man's senses panted, as with a physical thirst.
But it was not these visible things, however potent, that so wholly overcame him. It was a thing for which we have no word, of which there is no material evidence, that moved from the girl, subtly, into every fiber of his body. A thing as actual and as potent as the forces moving the earth in its orbit—the wild, urgent, overpowering cry of elements, tom asunder at the beginning of things, to be rejoined. The most mysterious and the most hidden impulse in the world. And it seemed to the man that in some other incarnation this woman had been a part of him, a part of every nerve, every blood drop, every fragment of his flesh; and, at the door of life, by some divine surgery, she had been dissected out of his body; and, thus, from the day that he was born, he had been looking for her; and now that she was found, every element in him cried for that lost union.
These impressions, this sudden luminous conviction, flashed on the man, while he was speaking, while he was turning with the girl toward the others; and his mind, extraordinarily clear, seemed to observe these things as somehow detached from himself. The girl was speaking, and he walked beside her, presenting a conventional aspect. They went thus, in conversation, down the long drawing-room. The Marchesa Soderrelli advanced to meet them.
"I am delighted," she said, "to see the Duke of Dorset," then she put out her hands with a charming gesture.
At this moment the Duke saw, on a table, in its oval silver frame, a picture like that one which he had seen in the yacht at Oban—that face with its insolent, aggressive look. And fear took him by the throat. The dread, the terror, which used to seize him when he passed, each night, the picture on the stairway, descended on him. This man would strike out for what he wanted while he sat here mooning in a garden. How far had the man's suit been favored? The Duke turned the query backward and forward, like a hot coal in his hand, blowing on it while it burned him.
He trembled internally with panic. Without he was composed, he spoke calmly, he lifted his face, unmoved, like one indifferent to fortune, but every mouth in him, hungry for this woman, wailed. And that emotion in the service of the principle of life, its hands hot on him, turned his eyes constantly to what his destiny was losing.
The Duke of Dorset, like every lover with the taste of lotus in his mouth, saw this girl moving in a nimbus. He could not, for his life, fix her with things real. She came forth from haze, from shadow, like those fairy women drawn by painters to represent what the flesh of man eternally longs for. There clung about her that freshness, that mystery, beyond belief, alluring to the egoistic senses of a man. Evidenced by the immortality of that Arabian tale, wherein a Prince of Bagdad, cracking a roc's egg, found a woman sleeping within it, her elbow on her knee, her chin dimpling in her silk palm.
Moreover, he had found her traveling the highway of adventures. The perennial charm of romance attended her. He had gone, like fabled persons, desperately on a quest, seeking a dream woman, and had found her, a woman of this world, at the quest's end, against every probability of life. And, therefore, some authority, moving to a design inscrutable, had brought him to this woman; and therefore, by permission, by direction of that authority, she belonged to him.
The Duke thrilled under the proprietary word. His veins stretched with heat. Who was this man, or any man, to take what the gods, sitting in their spheres, had designed for him? All passion is essentially barbaric. Under the voices of it a man will do as his fathers did in the morning of the world, half naked in Asia. The customs, the forms of civilization may restrain him, but the impulse within him is as unchanged, after six thousand years of discipline, as fire burning in a dry tree.
That dinner the Duke of Dorset was never able to remember. The details of it passed one another into a blur. He sat down to a table beside Caroline Childers. He talked as one does conventionally at dinner. He observed the wit, the spirit of the Marchesa Soderrelli. How the host hung over her, like one charmed, how the woman had, somehow, for this night, got her beauty out of pawn! She wore a gown elaborately embroidered, her hair brightened by a jewel set here and there effectively in it, her face freshened as by a sheer determination to have back for a night's uses what the years had filched from her.
They went from dinner out into the garden. The night, like that other night in the bay of Oban, was rather a sort of fairy day, except that here the world was illumined by a great yellow moon beginning to emerge from the distant tree tops, while there the sun seemed merely to have gone behind a colored window.
The Marchesa Soderrelli and Cyrus Childers remained on the first terrace beside those exquisite pools rimmed with marble. The Duke and Caroline walked on, moved by that vague wanderlust with which this mysterious dead world seems to inspire every living creature when it moves naked and golden above the earth. They descended slowly from one terrace to another along the paths of the Italian garden to the green tile wall of the Egyptian garden. The soft white light, the broad stretches of delicate shadow, and these perfect gardens, lying one below the other, enveloped the world with an atmosphere of sorcery.
To the man this was no real land. This was some delicate, vague kingdom of illusion. It would presently vanish. There could be only an hour of it, and the value of that hour he could not measure.
It seemed to the man, walking slowly beside the girl, that he had purchased this hour at some staggering hideous cost. He must go when the hour struck, hack as he had come, through the door in the hill. There was no time, no time! The object, the sole moving object of every day that he had lived, of every day that he would yet live, seemed to converge into these moments that escaped with the sound of his feet moving in this garden. How they sped away, these moments, and how big with fate they were!
Suddenly the man spoke. "Do you know," he said, "why I have come?"
"Yes," replied the girl, "I know. You came to see if the shadow of Asia were lying on a British possession."
"No," he said, "I did not come for that. The thing that made me come was the thing that made my uncle go down to that dead pool on the coast of Brittany. I have done better than my uncle."
The girl replied softly, like one dealing with a memory.
"But have you done better than the stranger in the legend? Do not the peasants say that he, too, followed, sinking in the water to his knees?"
"I think," continued the man, "that he was one of us; that the thing has been always in our blood. But I think all the others failed. I think that first one of us finally went down as the second one of us went down. I think, I alone have been able to stagger across the sea."
"And to what have you come?" said the girl.
"That is the strange part of it," replied the man. "After all that hideous journey, after all that staggering through the sea, I seem to have come again, like that first one of us, to that ancient city, and, like him, to have entered into the king's palace and sat down."
The girl drew back against the green tile wall of the Egyptian garden.
"You make me afraid," she said.
She spread out her arms against the wall. Her eyes grew wide. Her lips trembled. She stared out over the beautiful estate, made doubly exquisite in the fantastic light.
"I have always been afraid. But how could the sea enter over this? And there is no king, and no saint."
"But there is a woman," said the Duke of Dorset, "'with hair like spun darkness, and eyes like the violet core of the night.'"
The girl gave a little cry.
The man flung up his head like one suddenly awakened. He strode across the bit of turf to where the girl stood. He caught up her hand, lying on the low cornice of the wall, and carried it to his mouth.
"Forgive me," he said, "I did not mean to frighten you—I would not for the world frighten you. I love you!"
Words old as the world; old as the first man, the first woman—old as that garden in Asia; inevitably the same since the world began its swinging, poured out over this kissed hand.
"I love you! I love you!" What do the expressions, the sentences, the other words that make a vehicle for these three words matter? They are nothing. These three words are the naked body. All the others are but the garments, the ornaments, the tinsel. These are the only words a woman ever hears. The others, all the others, running before them, following behind them, signifieth nothing. Whether there be wisdom in all the other words, it shall vanish away. Only "I love you" never faileth.
"I love you!" These words are of the divine logos. They are the words into whose keeping the Great Mother has confided the principle of life. They are the words at which the children of men are accustomed to surrender themselves to the will of Nature, which is the will of God. They are words, so old, so potent, so mysterious, that, like certain ancient, fabled formulas, they cannot be uttered without presenting something of their virtue. If a man say these words a woman will listen. Though he say them in jest, in mockery, yet will she listen. Though she do not believe them, though she do not love him, yet will she listen, so great a virtue hath this formula of the oldest magic—this rune of the oldest sorcery.
The girl standing here against the wall of the garden listened. Her body seemed to relax and cling to the wall. For a moment she did not move. For a moment, expanded into the duration of a life, she listened to these words—these old, potent, mysterious words! These words, charged with all the ecstasy of all the men and women who have ever loved, with the destiny of future generations, with the "joy that lieth at the root of life," poured out over her kissed hand.
For this long, potent, delirious moment the girl was merely a wisp of blossom, clinging to these tiles. Her consciousness, her will, her very identity had gone out from her. For this moment she was under the one tremendous dominating impulse of the world. For this moment she was only the eternal woman yielding herself to the eternal call.
Her eyes were wide. Her lips parted, her body relaxed, soft, plastic. Then suddenly, as though they had but stood aside for the passage of some authority above them, her consciousness, her will, her identity poured back into her body. She sprang up. She escaped. She drew back into the angle of the wall. She put her hands to her face, to her hair. Then almost fiercely she thrust them out before her.
"No, no, no," she cried. "You must not say it. I must not hear it. I have decided; and you helped me. You convinced me. Don't you remember that afternoon in the bay of Oban? I did not know what to do. I was undecided then, and I asked you.... No, no; you did not understand that I was asking you—you did not understand; but I was; I was asking you and you told me. Oh, I could say every word of what you told me. You told me that older persons knew, that one's own impulses were nothing; that one ought to obey—to obey—one's family. Well, I have promised to obey, and I will obey. While he lives, while my uncle lives, I will obey him."
She withdrew her hands and pressed them on her face, and on her hair. The man took a step toward her, and again, with that fierce gesture, she thrust her hands out.
"Don't," she cried. "Don't, don't come to undo what you have done."
And like a flash she was gone.
She fled past him, through the garden, from one terrace to another, swiftly toward the château.
The man turned, walked along the terrace, through a little gate, and returned by the great road, across the turf court, to the library. And he walked firmly like one who has finally laid his hands on a thing that eluded him, like one who has finally found, standing defiant in some cranny of the rocks, an enemy that, until now, he could never overtake.
In her mad flight, on the highest terrace in the exquisite Italian garden, Caroline Childers came on the Marchesa Soderrelli. She was standing erect, unmoving, like one of the figures in the niches along the wall. Her face was lifted, her arms lay stiffly extended along her body. Her eyes looked out over this sea of moonlight washing a shore of tree tops. There lay about her the atmosphere of some resolution that cast down the plans of life.
Behind her, as though they had put the riddle which she had answered, as though they had presented to her that eternal question, which they had presented to all the daughters of the world since that ball began its turning, those figures surmounting the stone pillars of the bronze gates, those figures having the face and bust of a woman and the body of a monster, those inscrutable chimeras, seemed in the soft light to lie content in the attitude of life.
The girl stopped when she saw the Marchesa Soderrelli. Then, with a cry, she flew to her and flung her arms around her and crushed her face against her bosom. The impulsive act awakened the woman. Her face softened; her body relaxed. She put her arm around the girl and drew her gently up against her heart.
"What is it, dear?" she said.
"Oh, Marchesa," the girl sobbed, "I have refused—I have refused to go to the city of Dreams."
The woman leaned over and kissed the girl's hair.
"My child," she said, "your uncle has just asked me to be his wife, and I have said that I would not."
When the Duke of Dorset entered the library he found it empty; but a casement window leading down to a terrace lying along the side of the château was open. He crossed to the window and looked out. There below him Cyrus Childers moved along this terrace; he was alone, and he walked with his curious, hovering motion; his arms and his hands moved; his plowshare jaw protruded. All the energy of the man seemed to have got into action. Something had prodded this energy into a deadly vigor.
The Duke of Dorset, having found the man for whom he was seeking, went back to the library table, got a cigar, lighted it, and sat down at the window. The potent characteristic of his race was strong on him. Now that a definite struggle for the thing he wanted was visible before him, he could wait. What it was needful to say, he would presently say when this man was finally ready to hear him.
The old man continued to walk from one end of the terrace to the other, passing below the window. And above him the Duke of Dorset waited. An hour passed and he continued to walk. A black shadow, creeping out from his feet, skulked behind him, changing, as he moved, into fantastic shapes; now a cross when he thrust out his arms; now a creature with wings when his elbows were lifted; now a formless thing that jerked itself along. Finally, the man passing the steps by the casement window, turned and entered the library. He went over to the great table, stopped and began to select a cigar. The Duke of Dorset arose. At this moment a voice spoke to Cyrus Childers from the door.
"Uncle," it said, "I cannot find a servant in the house."