Romance Island written by Zona Gale
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20 [Illustration: frontispiece]
ROMANCE ISLAND
By
ZONA GALE
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HERMANN C. WALL
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
1906
"Who that remembers the first kind glance of her
whom he loves can fail to believe in magic?"
--NOVALIS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I DINNER TIME
II A SCRAP OF PAPER
III ST. GEORGE AND THE LADY
IV THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY
V OLIVIA PROPOSES
VI TWO LITTLE MEN
VII DUSK, AND SO ON
VIII THE PORCH OF THE MORNING
IX THE LADY OF KINGDOMS
X TYRIAN PURPLE
XI THE END OF THE EVENING
XII BETWEEN-WORLDS
XIII THE LINES LEAD UP
XIV THE ISLE OF HEARTS
XV A VIGIL
XVI GLAMOURIE
XVII BENEATH THE SURFACE
XVIII A MORNING VISIT
XIX IN THE HALL OF KINGS
XX OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS
XXI OPEN SECRETS
ROMANCE ISLAND
CHAPTER I
DINNER TIME
As _The Aloha_ rode gently to her buoy among the crafts in the
harbour, St. George longed to proclaim in the megaphone's monstrous
parody upon capital letters:
"Cat-boats and house-boats and yawls, look here. You're bound to
observe that this is my steam yacht. I own her--do you see? She
belongs to me, St. George, who never before owned so much as a piece
of rope."
Instead--mindful, perhaps, that "a man should not communicate his
own glorie"--he stepped sedately down to the trim green skiff and
was rowed ashore by a boy who, for aught that either knew, might
three months before have jostled him at some ill-favoured lunch
counter. For in America, dreams of gold--not, alas, golden
dreams--do prevalently come true; and of all the butterfly
happenings in this pleasant land of larvae, few are so spectacular as
the process by which, without warning, a man is converted from a
toiler and bearer of loads to a taker of his _bien_. However, to
none, one must believe, is the changeling such gazing-stock as to
himself.
Although countless times, waking and sleeping, St. George had
humoured himself in the outworn pastime of dreaming what he would do
if he were to inherit a million dollars, his imagination had never
marveled its way to the situation's less poignant advantages. Chief
among his satisfactions had been that with which he had lately seen
his mother--an exquisite woman, looking like the old lace and Roman
mosaic pins which she had saved from the wreck of her fortune--set
off for Europe in the exceptional company of her brother, Bishop
Arthur Touchett, gentlest of dignitaries. The bishop, only to look
upon whose portrait was a benediction, had at sacrifice of certain
of his charities seen St. George through college; and it made the
million worth while to his nephew merely to send him to Tuebingen to
set his soul at rest concerning the date of one of the canonical
gospels. Next to the rich delight of planning that voyage, St.
George placed the buying of his yacht.
In the dusty, inky office of the _New York Evening Sentinel_ he had
been wont three months before to sit at a long green table fitting
words about the yachts of others to the dreary music of his
typewriter, the while vaguely conscious of a blur of eight telephone
bells, and the sound of voices used merely to communicate thought
and not to please the ear. In the last three months he had sometimes
remembered that black day when from his high window he had looked
toward the harbour and glimpsed a trim craft of white and brass
slipping to the river's mouth; whereupon he had been seized by such
a passion to work hard and earn a white-and-brass craft of his own
that the story which he was hurrying for the first edition was quite
ruined.
"Good heavens, St. George," Chillingworth, the city editor, had
gnarled, "we don't carry wooden type. And nothing else would set up
this wooden stuff of yours. Where's some snap? Your first paragraph
reads like a recipe. Now put your soul into it, and you've got less
than fifteen minutes to do it in."
St. George recalled that his friend Amory, as "one hackneyed in the
ways of life," had gravely lifted an eyebrow at him, and the new men
had turned different colours at the thought of being addressed like
that before the staff; and St. George had recast the story and had
received for his diligence a New Jersey assignment which had kept
him until midnight. Haunting the homes of the club-women and the
common council of that little Jersey town, the trim white-and-brass
craft slipping down to the river's mouth had not ceased to lure him.
He had found himself estimating the value--in money--of the
bric-a-brac of every house, and the self-importance of every
alderman, and reflecting that these people, if they liked, might own
yachts of white and brass; yet they preferred to crouch among the
bric-a-brac and to discourse to him of one another's violations and
interferences. By the time that he had reached home that dripping
night and had put captions upon the backs of the unexpectant-looking
photographs which were his trophies, he was in that state of
comparative anarchy to be effected only by imaginative youth and a
disagreeable task.
Next day, suddenly as its sun, had come the news which had
transformed him from a discontented grappler with social problems to
the owner of stocks and bonds and shares in a busy mine and other
things soothing to enumerate. The first thing which he had added
unto these, after the departure of his mother and the bishop, had
been _The Aloha_, which only that day had slipped to the river's
mouth in the view from his old window at the _Sentinel_ office. St.
George had the grace to be ashamed to remember how smoothly the
social ills had adjusted themselves.
Now they were past, those days of feverish work and unexpected
triumph and unaccountable failure; and in the dreariest of them St.
George, dreaming wildly, had not dreamed all the unobvious joys
which his fortune had brought to him. For although he had accurately
painted, for example, the delight of a cruise in a sea-going yacht
of his own, yet to step into his dory in the sunset, to watch _The
Aloha's_ sides shine in the late light as he was rowed ashore past
the lesser crafts in the harbour; to see the man touch his cap and
put back to make the yacht trim for the night, and then to turn his
own face to his apartment where virtually the entire day-staff of
the _Evening Sentinel_ was that night to dine--these were among the
pastimes of the lesser angels which his fancy had never compassed.
A glow of firelight greeted St. George as he entered his apartment,
and the rooms wore a pleasant air of festivity. A table, with covers
for twelve, was spread in the living-room, a fire of cones was
tossing on the hearth, the curtains were drawn, and the sideboard
was a thing of intimation. Rollo, his man--St. George had easily
fallen in all the habits which he had longed to assume--was just
closing the little ice-box sunk behind a panel of the wall, and he
came forward with dignified deference.
"Everything is ready, Rollo?" St. George asked. "No one has
telephoned to beg off?"
"Yes, sir," answered Rollo, "and no, sir."
St. George had sometimes told himself that the man looked like an
oval grey stone with a face cut upon it.
"Is the claret warmed?" St. George demanded, handing his hat. "Did
the big glasses come for the liqueur--and the little ones will set
inside without tipping? Then take the cigars to the den--you'll have
to get some cigarettes for Mr. Provin. Keep up the fire. Light the
candles in ten minutes. I say, how jolly the table looks."
"Yes, sir," returned Rollo, "an' the candles 'll make a great
difference, sir. Candles do give out an air, sir."
One month of service had accustomed St. George to his valet's gift
of the Articulate Simplicity. Rollo's thoughts were doubtless
contrived in the cuticle and knew no deeper operance; but he always
uttered his impressions with, under his mask, an air of keen and
seasoned personal observation. In his first interview with St.
George, Rollo had said: "I always enjoy being kep' busy, sir. _To
me_, the busy man is a grand sight," and St. George had at once
appreciated his possibilities. Rollo was like the fine print in an
almanac.
When the candles were burning and the lights had been turned on in
the little ochre den where the billiard-table stood, St. George
emerged--a well-made figure, his buoyant, clear-cut face accurately
bespeaking both health and cleverness. Of a family represented by
the gentle old bishop and his own exquisite mother, himself
university-bred and fresh from two years' hard, hand-to-hand
fighting to earn an honourable livelihood, St. George, of sound body
and fine intelligence, had that temper of stability within vast
range which goes pleasantly into the mind that meets it. A symbol of
this was his prodigious popularity with those who had been his
fellow-workers--a test beside which old-world traditions of the
urban touchstones are of secondary advantage. It was deeply
significant that in spite of the gulf which Chance had digged the
day-staff of the _Sentinel_, all save two or three of which were not
of his estate, had with flattering alacrity obeyed his summons to
dine. But, as he heard in the hall the voice of Chillingworth, the
difficulty of his task for the first time swept over him. It was
Chillingworth who had advocated to him the need of wooden type to
suit his literary style and who had long ordered and bullied him
about; and how was he to play the host to Chillingworth, not to
speak of the others, with the news between them of that million?
When the bell rang, St. George somewhat gruffly superseded Rollo.
"I'll go," he said briefly, "and keep out of sight for a few
minutes. Get in the bath-room or somewhere, will you?" he added
nervously, and opened the door.
At one stroke Chillingworth settled his own position by dominating
the situation as he dominated the city room. He chose the best chair
and told a good story and found fault with the way the fire burned,
all with immediate ease and abandon. Chillingworth's men loved to
remember that he had once carried copy. They also understood all the
legitimate devices by which he persuaded from them their best
effort, yet these devices never failed, and the city room agreed
that Chillingworth's fashion of giving an assignment to a new man
would force him to write a readable account of his own entertainment
in the dark meadows. Largely by personal magnetism he had fought his
way upward, and this quality was not less a social gift.
Mr. Toby Amory, who had been on the Eleven with St. George at
Harvard, looked along his pipe at his host and smiled, with
flattering content, his slow smile. Amory's father had lately had a
conspicuous quarter of an hour in Wall Street, as a result of which
Amory, instead of taking St. George to the cemetery at Clusium as he
had talked, himself drifted to Park Row; and although he now knew
considerably less than he had hoped about certain inscriptions, he
was supporting himself and two sisters by really brilliant work, so
that the balance of his power was creditably maintained. Surely the
inscriptions did not suffer, and what then was Amory that he should
object? Presently Holt, the middle-aged marine man, and Harding
who, since he had lost a lightweight sparring championship, was
sporting editor, solemnly entered together and sat down with the
social caution of their class. So did Provin, the "elder giant," who
gathered news as he breathed and could not intelligibly put six
words together. Horace, who would listen to four lines over the
telephone and therefrom make a half-column of American newspaper
humour or American newspaper tears, came in roaring pacifically and
marshaling little Bud, that day in the seventh heaven of his first
"beat." Then followed Crass, the feature man, whose interviews were
known to the new men as literature, although he was not above
publicly admitting that he was not a reporter, but a special writer.
Mr. Crass read nothing in the paper that he had not written, and St.
George had once prophesied that in old age he would use his
scrap-book for a manual of devotions, as Klopstock used his
_Messiah_. With him arrived Carbury, the telegraph editor, and later
Benfy, who had a carpet in his office and wrote editorials and who
came in evening clothes, thus moving Harding and Holt to instant
private conversation. The last to appear was Little Cawthorne who
wrote the fiction page and made enchanting limericks about every one
on the staff and went about singing one song and behaving, the
dramatic man flattered him, like a motif. Little Cawthorne entered
backward, wrestling with some wiry matter which, when he had
executed a manoeuvre and banged the door, was thrust through the
passage in the form of Bennie Todd, the head office boy,
affectionately known as Bennietod. Bennietod was in every one's
secret, clipped every one's space and knew every one's salary, and
he had lately covered a baseball game when the man whose copy he was
to carry had, outside the fence, become implicated in allurements.
He was greeted with noise, and St. George told him heartily that he
was glad he had come.
"He made me," defensively claimed Bennietod; frowning deferentially
at Little Cawthorne.
"Hello, St. George," said the latter, "come on back to the office.
Crass sits in your place and he wears cravats the colour of goblin's
blood. Come back."
"Not he," said Chillingworth, smoking; "the Dead-and-Done-with
editor is too keen for that; I won't give him a job. He's ruined.
Egg sandwiches will never stimulate him now."
St. George joined in the relieved laugh that followed. They were
remembering his young Sing Sing convict who had completed his
sentence in time to step in a cab and follow his mother to the
grave, where his stepfather refused to have her coffin opened. And
St. George, fresh from his Alma Mater, had weighted the winged words
of his story with allusions to the tears celestial of Thetis, shed
for Achilles, and Creon's grief for Haemon, and the Unnatural Combat
of Massinger's father and son; so that Chillingworth had said things
in languages that are not dead (albeit a bit Elizabethan) and the
composing room had shaken mailed fists.
"Hi, you!" said Little Cawthorne, who was born in the South, "this
is a mellow minute. I could wish they came often. This shall be a
weekly occurrence--not so, St. George?"
"Cawthorne," Chillingworth warned, "mind your manners, or they'll
make you city editor."
A momentary shadow was cast by the appearance of Rollo, who was
manifestly a symbol of the world Philistine about which these guests
knew more and in which they played a smaller part than any other
class of men. But the tray which Rollo bore was his passport.
Thereafter, they all trooped to the table, and Chillingworth sat at
the head, and from the foot St. George watched the city editor break
bread with the familiar nervous gesture with which he was wont to
strip off yards of copy-paper and eat it. There was a tacit
assumption that he be the conversational sun of the hour, and in
fostering this understanding the host took grateful refuge.
"This is shameful," Chillingworth began contentedly. "Every one of
you ought to be out on the Boris story."
"What is the Boris story?" asked St. George with interest. But in
all talk St. George had a restful, host-like way of playing the role
of opposite to every one who preferred being heard.
"I'll wager the boy hasn't been reading the papers these three
months," Amory opined in his pleasant drawl.
"No," St. George confessed; "no, I haven't. They make me homesick."
"Don't maunder," said Chillingworth in polite criticism. "This is
Amory's story, and only about a quarter of the facts yet," he added
in a resentful growl. "It's up at the Boris, in West Fifty-ninth
Street--you know the apartment house? A Miss Holland, an heiress,
living there with her aunt, was attacked and nearly murdered by a
mulatto woman. The woman followed her to the elevator and came
uncomfortably near stabbing her from the back. The elevator boy was
too quick for her. And at the station they couldn't get the woman to
say a word; she pretends not to understand or to speak anything
they've tried. She's got Amory hypnotized too--he thinks she can't.
And when they searched her," went on Chillingworth with enjoyment,
"they found her dressed in silk and cloth of gold, and loaded down
with all sorts of barbarous ornaments, with almost priceless jewels.
Miss Holland claims that she never saw or heard of the woman before.
Now, what do you make of it?" he demanded, unconcernedly draining
his glass.
"Splendid," cried St. George in unfeigned interest. "I say,
splendid. Did you see the woman?" he asked Amory.
Amory nodded.
"Yes," he said, "Andy fixed that for me. But she never said a word.
I _parlez-voused_ her, and _verstehen-Sied_ her, and she sighed and
turned her head."
"Did you see the heiress?" St. George asked.
"Not I," mourned Amory, "not to talk with, that is. I happened to be
hanging up in the hall there the afternoon it occurred;" he modestly
explained.
"What luck," St. George commented with genuine envy. "It's a
stunning story. Who is Miss Holland?"
"She's lived there for a year or more with her aunt," said
Chillingworth. "She is a New Yorker and an heiress and a great
beauty--oh, all the properties are there, but they're all we've got.
What do you make of it?" he repeated.
St. George did not answer, and every one else did.
"Mistaken identity," said Little Cawthorne. "Do you remember
Provin's story of the woman whose maid shot a masseuse whom she took
to be her mistress; and the woman forgave the shooting and seemed to
have her arrested chiefly because she had mistaken her for a
masseuse?"
"Too easy, Cawthorne," said Chillingworth.
"The woman is probably an Italian," said the telegraph editor,
"doing one of her Mafia stunts. It's time they left the politicians
alone and threw bombs at the bonds that back them."
"Hey, Carbury. Stop writing heads," said Chillingworth.
"Has Miss Holland lived abroad?" asked Crass, the feature man.
"Maybe this woman was her nurse or ayah or something who got fond of
her charge, and when they took it away years ago, she devoted her
life to trying to find it in America. And when she got here she
wasn't able to make herself known to her, and rather than let any
one else--"
"No more space-grabbing, Crass," warned Chillingworth.
"Maybe," ventured Horace, "the young lady did settlement work and
read to the woman's kid, and the kid died, and the woman thought
she'd said a charm over it."
Chillingworth grinned affectionately.
"Hold up," he commanded, "or you'll recall the very words of the
charm."
Bennietod gasped and stared.
"Now, Bennietod?" Amory encouraged him.
"I t'ink," said the lad, "if she's a heiress, dis yere
dagger-plunger is her mudder dat's been shut up in a mad-house to a
fare-you-well."
Chillingworth nodded approvingly.
"Your imagination is toning down wonderfully," he flattered him. "A
month ago you would have guessed that the mulatto lady was an
Egyptian princess' messenger sent over here to get the heart from an
American heiress as an ingredient for a complexion lotion. You're
coming on famously, Todd."
"The German poet Wieland," began Benfy, clearing his throat, "has,
in his epic of the _Oberon_ made admirable use of much the same
idea, Mr. Chillingworth--"
Yells interrupted him. Mr. Benfy was too "well-read" to be wholly
popular with the staff.
"Oh, well, the woman was crazy. That's about all," suggested
Harding, and blushed to the line of his hair.
"Yes, I guess so," assented Holt, who lifted and lowered one
shoulder as he talked, "or doped."
Chillingworth sighed and looked at them both with pursed lips.
"You two," he commented, "would get out a paper that everybody would
know to be full of reliable facts, and that nobody would buy. To be
born with a riotous imagination and then hardly ever to let it riot
is to be a born newspaper man. Provin?"
The elder giant leaned back, his eyes partly closed.
"Is she engaged to be married?" he asked. "Is Miss Holland engaged?"
Chillingworth shook his head.
"No," he said, "not engaged. We knew that by tea-time the same day,
Provin. Well, St. George?"
St. George drew a long breath.
"By Jove, I don't know," he said, "it's a stunning story. It's the
best story I ever remember, excepting those two or three that have
hung fire for so long. Next to knowing just why old Ennis
disinherited his son at his marriage, I would like to ferret out
this."
"Now, tut, St. George," Amory put in tolerantly, "next to doing
exactly what you will be doing all this week you'd rather ferret out
this."
"On my honour, no," St. George protested eagerly, "I mean quite what
I say. I might go on fearfully about it. Lord knows I'm going to see
the day when I'll do it, too, and cut my troubles for the luck of
chasing down a bully thing like this."
If there was anything to forgive, every one forgave him.
"But give up ten minutes on _The Aloha_," Amory skeptically put it,
adjusting his pince-nez, "for anything less than ten minutes on _The
Aloha_?"
"I'll do it now--now!" cried St. George. "If Mr. Chillingworth will
put me on this story in your place and will give you a week off on
_The Aloha_, you may have her and welcome."
Little Cawthorne pounded on the table.
"Where do I come in?" he wailed. "But no, all I get is another wad
o' woe."
"What do you say, Mr. Chillingworth?" St. George asked eagerly.
"I don't know," said Chillingworth, meditatively turning his glass.
"St. George is rested and fresh, and he feels the story. And
Amory--here, touch glasses with me."
Amory obeyed. His chief's hand was steady, but the two glasses
jingled together until, with a smile, Amory dropped his arm.
"I _am_ about all in, I fancy," he admitted apologetically.
"A week's rest on the water," said Chillingworth, "would set you on
your feet for the convention. All right, St. George," he nodded.
St. George leaped to his feet.
"Hooray!" he shouted like a boy. "Jove, won't it be good to get
back?"
He smiled as he set down his glass, remembering the day at his desk
when he had seen the white-and-brass craft slip to the river's
mouth.
Rollo, discreet and without wonder, footed softly about the table,
keeping the glasses filled and betraying no other sign of life. For
more than four hours he was in attendance, until, last of the
guests, Little Cawthorne and Bennietod departed together, trying to
remember the dates of the English kings. Finally Chillingworth and
Amory, having turned outdoors the dramatic critic who had arrived
at midnight and was disposed to stay, stood for a moment by the fire
and talked it over.
"Remember, St. George," Chillingworth said, "I'll have no
monkey-work. You'll report to me at the old hour, you won't be late;
and you'll take orders--"
"As usual, sir," St. George rejoined quietly.
"I beg your pardon," Chillingworth said quickly, "but you see this
is such a deuced unnatural arrangement."
"I understand," St. George assented, "and I'll do my best not to get
thrown down. Amory has told me all he knows about it--by the way,
where is the mulatto woman now?"
"Why," said Chillingworth, "some physician got interested in the
case, and he's managed to hurry her up to the Bitley Reformatory in
Westchester for the present. She's there; and that means, we need
not disguise, that nobody can see her. Those Bitley people are like
a rabble of wild eagles."
"Right," said St. George. "I'll report at eight o'clock. Amory can
board _The Aloha_ when he gets ready and take down whom he likes."
"On my life, old chap, it's a private view of Kedar's tents to me,"
said Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez. "I'll probably
win wide disrespect by my inability to tell a mainsail from a
cockpit, but I'm a grateful dog, in spite of that."
When they were gone St. George sat by the fire. He read Amory's
story of the Boris affair in the paper, which somewhere in the
apartment Rollo had unearthed, and the man took off his master's
shoes and brought his slippers and made ready his bath. St. George
glanced over his shoulder at the attractively-dismantled table, with
its dying candles and slanted shades.
"Gad!" he said in sheer enjoyment as he clipped the story and saw
Rollo pass with the towels.
It was so absurdly like a city room's dream of Arcady.
CHAPTER II
A SCRAP OF PAPER
To be awakened by Rollo, to be served in bed with an appetizing
breakfast and to catch a hansom to the nearest elevated station were
novel preparations for work in the _Sentinel_ office. The
impossibility of it all delighted St. George rather more than the
reality, for there is no pastime, as all the world knows, quite like
that of practising the impossible. The days when, "like a man
unfree," he had fared forth from his unlovely lodgings clandestinely
to partake of an evil omelette, seemed enchantingly far away. It
was, St. George reflected, the experience of having been released
from prison, minus the disgrace.
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