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Pieces of Eight, a novel by Richard Le Gallienne |
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Book 3 - Chapter 12 |
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_ BOOK III CHAPTER XII In Which the "King" Imprisons Me with Some Old Books and Pictures.
Then there was nothing to do but sit down and await events--amongst them, the coming of Charlie Webster. In regard to this, we had decided that it would be as well that, instead of disembarking at the settlement, he should come and join the _Flamingo_ in the hidden creek; so Samson was once more despatched down to Sweeney with a letter for him to hand to Charlie on his arrival, giving him direction how to find us. Meanwhile, our two men on the _Flamingo_ could keep watch for him by day, and have a light burning for him at the entrance of the creek by night. The "King's" instructions to me were that I was not to show my nose outside the house. Possibly I might expose the tip of it once in a while, for a little exercise in the garden--where all this time the little silver fountain went on playing amid the golden hush of the orange trees, filling the lotus flowers with big pearls of spray. But, most of the day, I must regard myself as a prisoner, with the entire freedom of his study--a large airy room on the second floor, well furnished with all manner of books, old prints, strange fishes in glass cases, rods, guns, pipe-racks, curiosities of every kind from various parts of the world--India, the South Seas, Australia, not forgetting London and Paris--and all the flotsam and jetsam of a far-wandered man, who--as the "King" remarked, introducing their autobiographic display with a comprehensive wave of his hand--had, like that other wanderer unbeloved of all schoolboys, the pious AEneas, been so much tossed about on land and sea--_vi superum, saevae memorem Junonis ob iram_--that he might found his city and bring safe his household gods from Latium. Touching his hand lightly on a row of old quartos, in the stout calfskin and tarnished gold dear to bookmen, he said: "These I recommend to you in your enforced leisure." They were a collection of old French voyages--Dampier and others--embellished with copper-plate maps and quaint engravings of the fauna and flora of the world, still in all the romantic virginity of its first discovery. "This," he said, pointing to a stout old jar of Devonshire ware, "is some excellent English tobacco--my one extravagance; and here," pointing to a pipe-rack, "are some well-tried friends from that same 'dear, dear land,' 'sceptred isle of kings,' and so forth. And now I am going to leave you, while I go with Samson and Erebus on a little reconnoitring tour around our domains." So he left me, and I settled down to a pipe and a volume of Dampier; but, interesting as I found the sturdy old pages, my thoughts, and perhaps particularly my heart, were too much in the present for my attention long to be held by even so adventurous a past; so, laying the book down, I rose from my chair, and made a tour of inspection of the various eloquent objects about the room--objects which made a sort of chronicle in bric-a-brac of my fantastic friend's earthly pilgrimage, and here and there seemed to hint at the story of his strange soul. Among the books, for example, was a fine copy of Homer, with the arms of a well-known English college stamped on the binding, and near by was the faded photograph of a beautiful old Elizabethan house, with mouldering garden walls, and a moat brimming with water-lilies surrounding it. Hanging close by it, was another faded photograph, of a tall stately old lady, who, at a glance, I surmised must be the "King's" mother. As I looked at it, my eyes involuntarily sought the garden with its palms and its orange trees. Far indeed had the son of her heart wandered, like so many sons of stately English mothers, from that lilied moat and those old gables, and the proud old eyes that would look on her son no more forever. And then in my privileged inspection of these sacred symbols, carried across so many storm-tossed seas from that far-away Latium, I came upon another photograph, hanging over the writing-desk--a tall, Spanish-looking young woman of remarkable beauty. It needed but one glance to realise that here was Calypso's mother; and, as was natural, I stood a long time scanning the countenance that was so like the face which, from my first sight of it, had seemed the loveliest in the world. This was a flower that had been the mother of a flower. It was a face more primitive in its beauty, a little less touched with race, than the one I loved, but the same fearless natural nobility was in it, and the figure had the same wild grace of pose, the same lithe strength of carriage. As I stood looking at it, lost in thought, I heard the "King's" voice behind me. His step was so light that I had not heard him enter the room. "You are looking at Calypso's mother!" he said. "She was a beautiful creature. I will tell you of her some day, Ulysses." And indeed, that very night, as we sat over our pipes, he told me; and without a word of his, I knew that the loneliness of his heart had singled me out for his friend, since, for all his love of speech, he was not the man to speak easily of the deep things of his heart. "Beauty is a very mysterious thing, friend Ulysses," he began, his eyes musing on the face above his desk, "as our old friends of the Siege of Troy knew all too well. The eternal Helen! And in nothing is the divinity of youth so clearly shown as in its worship of beauty, its faith that there is nothing the world holds--the power and the glory, the riches and the honours--nothing so well worth fighting for as a beautiful face. When the world was young, the whole world thought that too. Now we make ignoble war for markets, but the Greeks made nobler warfare--for a beautiful face--
"So, long years before my coming, had it befallen also with a certain young French nobleman, out there on military service, who had set eyes on Calypso's grandmother in the streets of that quaint little town, where the French soul seems almost more at home than in France itself. All had seemed nothing to him--his ancestral ties, his brilliant future--compared with that glory of a woman. He married her and settled down for good, the world well lost, in that dream island. And the dream he had been faithful to remained faithful to him. He seems to have been a singularly happy man. I never saw him, for he was dead when I set foot on his island--destined, though I knew it not, to live his life again in the love of his daughter. "She and her mother were living quietly on the small fortune he had left them, in an old palm-shaded house backed by purple mountains, and sung to by the sea. The soul of old France seemed to haunt that old house like a perfume, taking on a richer colour and drawing a more ardent life from the passionate tropic soul that enfolded it. Both had mysteriously met and become visibly embodied in the lovely girl, in whose veins the best blood of France blended with the molten gold of tropic suns. So, as had happened with her mother, again it happened with her--she took the wandering man to her heart"--he paused--"held him there for some happy years"--he paused again--"and the rest is--Calypso." We did not speak for a long time after he had ended, but his confidence had touched me so nearly that I felt I owed him my heart in exchange, and it was hard not to cry out: "And now I love Calypso. Once more the far-wandered man has found the great light on a lonely shore." But I felt that to speak yet--believer in the miracle of love though he had declared himself to be--would seem as though I set too slight a value on the miracle itself. There should be a long hush before we speak, when a star has fallen out of heaven into our hearts. _ |
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