Part 19

Charter arose. "Perhaps the lover is across the court. I heard a whispering through the bird-songs--and one could not fail to note how she hurried back.... I must go on. The water is no better here than elsewhere."

"But the wine is," said Peter Stock. "Wait luncheon for me at the _Palms_.... By the way, how'd you like to take a little cruise--feel the _Saragossa_ under you, running like a scared deer to hitch herself to the solid old Horn, built of rock and sealed with icebergs----"

"A clean thought, in this air--but the eventualities here attract. When Father Fontanel grows afraid for the city, well, it may not be scientific, but it's ominous.... I wanted to ask if it ever occurred to you that even the _Morne d'Orange_ might fall into the sweeping range of Pelee's guns?"

"In other words--if the mountain won't recede from Miss Wyndam, we'd better snatch up Miss Wyndam and make a getaway from the mountain?"

From far within a "Yea" was acclaimed, yet there was a sullen Charter integrity which had given its word to Skylark, and feared the test of being shut on the same ship with a woman who endowed him with such power that he felt potent to go to the craters and remonstrate with the Monster.

"It might be well to ask her," Charter replied gloomily, "but I'm rather absorbed in the action here and Father Fontanel's work. I want to look at the craters from behind----"

"Twice you've said that," said Peter Stock, "and each time it reminds me that I'm old, yet there's a lure about it. I'm thinking----"

Their heads were together at the little round window for the mountain had rumbled again, and they stared beyond the city into the ashen shroud.

"Grand old martyr," Charter muttered, "hang on, hang on!... The flag of truce still flies."

* * * * *

Paula at the _Palms_ reflected the Charter conflict that morning. She had seen it in his eyes and felt it in his heart, as they had walked together in the mock-winter of the mango-grove before breakfast. Away from him now, however, she could not be sure that "Wyndam," representing the woman, altogether satisfied his vision of Skylark. Very strange, he was, in his struggling, and it became harder, and a more delicate thing than she had believed, to say, "I am Paula Linster." She had felt this great restlessness of his spirit vaguely in the early letters--a stormy, battling spirit which his brain constantly labored to interpret. She had seen his moments of calm, too, when the eyes and smile of the boy rendered his attractions so intimate to her, that she could have told him anything--but these calms did not endure even in her presence. She did not want the woman, Wyndam, despised, nor yet the Skylark put from him. It became a reality, that out of his struggle Truth would rise; meanwhile, though not with the entire sanction of a certain inner voice, she withheld her secret, remaining silent and watchful in the midst of the greatest drama the world could bring to her understanding....

Paula did not fail to note that Peter Stock was somewhat surprised when she refused for the present his invitation to spend the nights at least out in the cool Caribbean. She saw, moreover, that Quentin Charter was beginning to fear the mountain, because she remained at the _Palms_. Indeed, it was hard for all to remember that in form, at least, they were mere acquaintances, so familiar had they become to each other in the pressure of Pelee. Above all this, she was almost continually conscious of Bellingham since the receipt of Madame Nestor's letter. It was not that his power was formidable enough to disorder the unfolding of the drama, but she felt his nearness, his strategies--all the more strange, as there had been no sign of him since the arrival of the _Panther_. If for no other reason, she would have found it difficult to disclose her real name to Quentin Charter, while her mind was even distantly the prey of the black giant.

These were tremendous hours--when but a word from her withheld two hearts from bursting into anthems. Bravely, she gloried in these last great refinings--longings, fears, exaltations, but never was she without the loftiest hope of her life. The man who had come was so much that _the man_ should be. She saw his former years as the wobblings of a top that has not yet gained its momentum. Only at its highest speed does the top sing its peace with God.... Had not the finest glow of his powers been reserved until her coming?...

In such moments as these, she could look back upon her own agonies with gratitude. She had needed a Bellingham. Should she not be thankful that a beyond-devil had been required to test her soul? In the splendid renewals of her spirit, Paula felt that she could look into the magician's eyes now and command him from her. She was even grateful that she had been swept in the fury of The High Tide, nor would she have had that supreme night of trial when she fled from the _Zoroaster_, stricken from her past. Just as Quentin Charter, of the terrible thirsts, had required his years of wrath and wandering, so her soul had needed the test of a woman's revelations and man's sublimated passion. Deep within lived a majestic happiness--earned.

At one o'clock, as she was going below for luncheon, the sun gave up trying to shine through the ash-fog, but volumes of dreadful heat found the earth. The _Saragossa_ was invisible in the roadstead; there was no line dividing shore and sea, nor sea and sky. It was all an illimitable mask, whose fabric was the dust which for centuries had lain upon the dynamos of Pelee.

TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER

CHARTER COMMUNES WITH THE WYNDAM WOMAN, AND CONFESSES THE GREAT TROUBLE OF HIS HEART TO FATHER FONTANEL

"Do you know what I discovered this morning?" Peter Stock asked, after the three had found a table together. "M. Mondet is trying to keep the people in town for political reasons. It appears that there is to be an election in a few days. All my efforts, and, by non-parishioners, the efforts of Father Fontanel, are regarded as a political counter-stroke--to rush a certain element of the suffrage out of the town.... This is certainly Ash-Wednesday, isn't it?"

Charter laughed. "My theory that the Guerin disaster might relieve the craters and give surcease to Saint Pierre--doesn't seem to work out. The air is getting thicker, even."

"It isn't really ash, you know," explained Mr. Stock, "but rock, ground fine as neat in the hell-mills under the mountain and shot out by steam through Pelee's valves----"

"Intensely graphic," said Paula.

"It has been rather a graphic morning," Charter remarked. "Friend Stock is virile from his activities with Father Fontanel."

"Well, I didn't make a covenant with the mountain--as you did this morning in the wine-shop. You should have seen him, Miss Wyndam, staring away at the volcano and, muttering, 'Hang on, old chap, hang on!....' My dear young woman, doesn't a ride on the ocean sound good for this afternoon? You can sit on deck and hold the little black babies. The _Saragossa_ takes another load to Fort de France in two or three hours."

She shook her head. "Not just yet. You don't realize how wonderful the drama is to me--you and Father Fontanel, playing Cassandra down in the city--the groaning mountain, and the pity of it all. I confess a little inconvenience of the weather isn't enough to drive me out. It isn't very often given to a woman to watch the operations of a destiny so big as this."

The capitalist turned to Charter. "You know Empress Josephine was born in Martinique and has become a sort of patron saint for the Island. A beautiful statue of her stands in the square at Fort de France where our refugees are encamped. I was only thinking that the map of Europe and the history of France might have been altered greatly if our beloved Josephine had been gifted with a will like this--of Miss Wyndam's."

Her pale, searching face regarded Charter for a second, and his eyes said plainly as words, "Don't you think you'd better consider this more seriously?"

"Maybe you'll like the idea better for the evening, when the _Saragossa_ is back in the roadstead again, comparatively empty," Peter Stock added presently. "Father Fontanel and I have a lot to do in the meantime. Can you imagine our first parents occupying themselves when the first tornado was swooping down--our dear initial mother, surpassingly wind-blown, driving the geese to shelter, propping up the orchards, getting out the rain-barrels, and tightening tent-pins?"

"Vividly," said Paula.

"That's just how busy we are--Father Fontanel and I."

It was to be expected that a sophomoric pointlessness should characterize the sayings of the two in the midst of Peter Stock's masculinity and the thrilling magnitude of the marvel each was to the other.... They were left together presently, and the search for treasure began at once:

"... The present is a time of readjustment between men and women," he was saying. "It seems to me that the great mistake people make--men and women alike--is that each sex tries to raise itself by lowering the other. It hardly could be any other way just now, and at first--with woman filled with the turmoil of emerging from ages of oppression--fighting back the old and fitting to the new. But in man and woman--not in either alone--lies completion. If the two do not quite complete each other, a Third often springs from them with an increased spiritual development."

"Yes," she answered, leaning forward, her chin fitted to her palms. "The _I-am_ and the _You-are-not_ will soon be put away. I like to think of it--that man and woman are together in the complete human. There is a glorious, an arch-feminine ideal in the nature of the Christ----"

"Even in the ineffable courage," he added softly. "That is woman's--the finer courage that never loses its tenderness.... His Figure sometimes, as now, becomes an intimate passion to me----"

"As if He were near?"

"As if He were near--still loving, still mediating--all earth's struggle and anguish passing through Him and becoming glorified with His pity and tenderness--before it reaches the eyes of the Father.... There is no other way. Man and woman must be One in Two--before Two in One. They must not war upon each other. Woman is receptive; man the origin. Woman is a planet cooled to support life; man, still an incandescent sun, generates the life."

"That is clear and inspiring," she said. "I have always wanted it said just like that--that one is as important as the other in the evolution of the Individual----"

"And for that Individual are swung the solar systems.... Look at Job--denuded of all but the Spirit. There is an Individual, and his story is the history of an Initiation.... We are coming to a time when Mind will operate in man and woman _conscious_ of the Soul. When that time comes true, how the progress to God will be cleared and speeded! It will be a flight----"

"Instead of a crawl," she finished.

They were alone in the big dining-room. Their voices could not have reached the nearest empty table. It was like a communion--their first communion.

"I have felt it," she went on in a strange, low tone, "and heard the New Voices--Preparers of the Way. Sometimes it came to me in New York--the stirring of a great, new spiritual life. I have felt the hunger--that awful hollowness in the breasts of men and women, who turn to each other in mute agony, who turn to a thousand foolish sensations--because they do not realize what they hunger for. Their breasts cry out to be filled----"

"And the Spirit cries out to flood in."

"Yes, and the Spirit asks only for Earth-people to listen to their inner voices and love one another," she completed. "It demands no macerations, no fetters, no fearful austerities--only fineness and loving kindness."

"How wonderfully they have come to me, too--those radiant moments--as I sat by my study window, facing the East," he whispered, not knowing what the last words meant to her. "How clear it is that all great and good things come with this soul-age--this soul-consciousness. I have seen in those lovely moments that Mother Earth is but one of many of God's gardens; that human life is but a day in a glorious culture-scheme which involves many brighter and brighter transplantings; that the radiance of the Christ, our Exemplar, but shows us the loveliness which shall be ours when we approach that lofty maturity of bloom----"

A waiter entered with the word that a man from the city, Pere Rabeaut, desired to see Mr. Charter. Each felt the dreadfulness of returning so abruptly to sordid exterior consciousness--each felt the gray ghost of Pelee.

"I shall go and see what is wanted, Miss Wyndam, and hurry back--if I may?" he said in a dull, tired tone.

It was the first time he had said "Wyndam," and it hurt cruelly at this moment.... "No, no," she said rising hastily. "It would spoil it to come back. We could not forget ourselves like that--so soon again. It always spoils--oh, what am I saying? I think our talk must have interested me very much."

"I understand," he said gently. "But we shall talk again--and for this little hour, my whole heart rises to thank you."

Pere Rabeaut was waiting upon the veranda. Peculiarly, at this moment he seemed attached to the crook of wine-shop servitude, which Charter had never noticed with such evidence among the familiar casks. Moreover, disorder was written upon the gray face.

"_Mon Dieu_, what a day, M. Charter!--a day of judgment! Soronia's little birds are dying!"

Charter regarded the sharp, black eyes, which darted over his own face, but would not be held in any gaze.

"I heard from my daughter that you are going to the craters of the mountain," the old man said. "'He will need a guide,' said I at once. 'And guides are scarce just now, for the people are afraid of Pelee. Still, he's an old patron,' I said to Soronia. 'He cannot go to the mountain without a guide, so I shall do this little thing for him. He must have our Jacques.'"

Charter drew him away. He did not care to have it known at the _Palms_ that he was projecting a trip to the summit. Perhaps the inscrutable Pere Rabeaut was conferring a considerable favor. It was arranged that if he decided to make the journey, the American should call at the wine-shop for Jacques early the following morning. Pere Rabeaut left him none the poorer for his queer errand.

Charter avoided Miss Wyndam for the rest of the day. Beyond all the words of their little talk, had come to him a fullness of womanhood quite beyond the dreamer. As he remembered the lustrous face, the completion of his sentences, the mutual sustaining of their thoughts, their steady, tireless ascent beyond the need of words; as he remembered her calms, and the glimpses of cosmic consciousness, her grasp, her expression, her silences, the exquisite refinement of her face, and the lingering adoration in her eyes--the ideal of the Skylark was so clearly and marvellously personified that for moments at a time the vision was lost in the living woman. And for this, Quentin Charter proposed to suffer--and to suffer alone.

So he supped down-town, and waited for Father Fontanel at the parish-house. The priest came in during the evening and Charter saw at once, what the other never could have admitted, that the last few days had borne the good man to the uttermost edges of his frail vitality. Under the lamp, the beautiful old face had the whiteness of that virgin wax of Italian hives in which the young queens lie until the hour of awakening. The tired, smiling eyes, deeply shadowed under a brow that was blest, gazed upon the young man with a light in his eyes not reflected from the lamp, but from his great love--in that pure fatherhood of celibacy....

"Ah, no, I'm not weary, my son. We must have our walks and talks together on the _Morne_ again.... When old Father Pelee rests once more from his travail, and the people are happy again, you and I shall walk under the stars, and you shall tell me of those glorious saints, who felt in the presence of God that they must put such violent constraint upon themselves.... When I think of my suffering people--it comes to me that the white ship was sent like a good angel--and how I thank that noble lady for taking me at once to this great rock of an American, who bluffs me about so cheerily and grants all things before they are asked. What wonderful people you are from America! But it is always so--always these good things come to me. Indeed, I am very grateful.... Weary?--what a poor old man I should be to fall weary in the midst of such helpers...."

Charter sat down beside him under the lamp and told him what an arena his mind had become for conflict between a woman and a vision. Even with the writer's trained designing, the tale drew out with an oriental patience of weaving and coloring. Charter had felt a woman's need for the ease of disclosure, and indeed there was no other man whom he would have told. He had a thought, too, that if by any chance Pelee should intervene--both the woman and the Skylark might learn. He did not tell of his plan to go to the mountain--lest he be dissuaded. In his mind the following day was set apart--as a sort of pilgrimage sacred to Skylark.

"Old Pelee has shadowed my mind," Father Fontanel said, when the story was done. "I see him before and between all things, but I shall meditate and tell you what seems best in my sight. Only this, my son, you may know, that when first the noble lady filled my eyes--I felt you near her--as if she had come to me from you, whom I always loved to remember."

Charter bowed and went his way, troubled by the shadow of Pelee in the holy man's mind; and yet glad, too, that the priest had felt him near when he first saw Miss Wyndam. It was late when he reached the _Palms_ yet sleeplessness ranged through his mind, and he did not soon go to his room. The house and grounds were all his own. He paced the veranda, the garden paths and drives; crossed the shadowy lawns, brooded upon the rumbling mountain and the foggy moon high in the south.... At the side of the great house to the north, there was a trellis heavily burdened with lianas. Within, he found the orifice of an old cistern, partially covered by unfixed planking. A startling thought caused him to wonder why he had not explored the place before. The moonlight, faint at best, gave but ghostly light through the foliage, yet he kicked away a board and lit a match. A heavy wooden bar crossed the rim and was set stoutly in the masonry. His mind keenly grasped each detail at the exterior. A rusty chain depended from the thick cross-piece. He dropped several ignited matches into the chamber. Slabs of stone from the side-walls had fallen into the cistern, which seemed to contain little or no water.... From one of the native cabins came the sound of a dog barking. A shutter clicked in one of the upper windows of the plantation-house.

TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER

CHARTER MAKES A PILGRIMAGE TO THE CRATERS OF _PELEE_--ONE LAST DAY DEVOTED TO THE SPIRIT OF OLD LETTERS

Charter left the _Palms_ early to join his guide at the wine-shop. He had kept apart from Peter Stock for two reasons. The old capitalist easily could have been tempted to accompany him. Personally, Charter did not consider a strong element of danger, and a glimpse into the volcano's mouth would give him a grasp and handling of the throes of a sick world, around which all natural phenomena would assume thereafter an admirable repression. To Peter Stock it would be an adventure, merely. More than all this, he wanted to go to the mountain alone. It was the Skylark's day; and for this reason, he hurried out of the _Palms_ and down to the city without breakfast.... A last look from the _Morne_, as it dipped into the _Rue Victor Hugo_--at a certain upper window of the plantation-house, where it seemed he was leaving all the bright valiant prodigies of the future. He turned resolutely toward Pelee--but the Skylark's song grew fainter _behind_.

* * * * *

Pere Rabeaut's interest in the venture continued to delight him. Procuring a companion was no common favor, since inquiries in the town proved that the regular guides were in abject dread of approaching the Monster now. Soronia, Pere Rabeaut, and his new servant awaited him in the _Rue Rivoli_. The latter was a huge Creole, of gloomy visage. They would not find any one to accompany them in the lower part of the city, he said, as the fear there was greater than ever since the Guerin disaster. In Morne Rouge, however, they would doubtless be able to procure mules, food, and other servants if necessary, for a day's trip to the craters. All of which appeared reasonable to Charter, though he wondered again at the vital interest of Pere Rabeaut, and the general tension of the starting.

The two passed down through the city, and into the crowd of the market-place, where a blithesome little drama unfolded. Peter Stock had apparently been talking to the people about their volcano, urging them, no doubt, to take the advice of Father Fontanel and flee to Fort de France, when he had perceived M. Mondet passing in his carriage. Charter saw his friend dart quickly from the crowd and seize the bridle. Despite the protestations of the driver, the capitalist drew the vehicle into view of all. His face was red with the heat and ashine with laughter and perspiration. Alarm and merriment mingled in the native throng. All eyes followed the towering figure of the American who now swung open the door of the carriage and bowed low to M. Mondet.

"This, dear friends," Peter Stock announced, as one would produce a rabbit from a silk hat,--"this, you all perceive, is your little editor of _Les Colonies_. Is he not bright and clean and pretty? He is very fond of American humor. See how the little editor laughs!"

M. Mondet's smile was yellowish-gray and of sickly contour. His article relative to the American appealed to him now entirely stripped of the humor with which it was fraught a few days before, as he had composed it in the inner of inner-offices. This demon of crackling French and restless hands would stop at nothing. M. Mondet pictured himself being picked up for dead presently. As the blow did not fall on the instant, the sorry thought tried him that he was to be played with before being dispatched.

"This is the man who tells you that Saint Pierre is in no danger--who scoffs at those who have already gone--who inquires in his paper, 'Where on the Island could a more secure place than Saint Pierre be found in the event of an earthquake visitation?' M. Mondet advises us to flee with all dispatch to the live craters of a volcano to escape his hypothetical earthquake." Peter Stock was now holding up the Frenchman's arm, as a referee upraises the whip of a winning fighter. "He says there's no more peril from Pelee than from an old man shaking ashes out of his pipe. I proposed to wager my ship against M. Mondet's rolled-top desk that he was wrong, but there was a difficulty in the way. Do you not see, my friends of Saint Pierre, that, if I won the wager, I should not be able to distinguish between M. Mondet's rolled-top desk and M. Mondet's cigarette case in the ruins of the city----"

There had been a steady growling from the mountain.

"Ah!" Stock exclaimed after a pause, "Pelee speaks again! 'I will repay--verily, I will repay!' growls the Monster. Let it be so, then, friends of mine. I will turn over my little account to the big fire-eater yonder who will collect all debts. I tell you, we who tarry too long will be buying political extras and last editions in hell from this bit of a newspaper man!"