XI
After a moment she rose, went over and knelt down in the sand before the miniature city, studying the situation. All she could see of the lead hero in the bowler hat were his legs protruding from the drain.
"Is this battery of artillery still shelling him?" she inquired, looking over her shoulder at Smith.
He went over and dropped on his knees beside her.
"You see," he explained, "our hero is still under water."
"All this time!" she exclaimed in consternation. "He'll drown, won't he?"[104]
"He'll drown unless he can crawl into that drain."
"Then he must crawl into it immediately," she said with decision.
So he of the bowler was marched along a series of pegs indicating the subterranean drain, and set down in the court of the castle.
"Good heavens!" exclaimed the Lady Alene. "We can't leave him here! They will know him by his bowler hat!"
"No," said Smith gloomily, "we can't leave him here. But what can we do? If he runs out they'll fire at him by platoons."
"Couldn't they miss him?" pleaded the girl.
"I'm afraid not. He has already lived through several showers of bullets."
"But he can't die here!—here under the very eyes of the Princess!" she insisted.
"Then," said Smith, "the Princess will have to pull him through. It's up to her now."
The girl knelt there in excited silence, studying the problem intently.
It was bad business. The battlements bristled with bayonets; outside, cavalry, infantry, artillery were massed to destroy the gentleman in the bowler hat.
Presently the flush deepened on the girl's[105] cheeks; she took the bowler hat between her gloved fingers and set its owner in the middle of the moat again.
"Doesn't he crawl into the drain?" asked Smith anxiously.
"No. But the soldiers in the castle think he does. So," she continued with animation, "the brutal commander rushes downstairs, seizes a candle, and enters the drain from the castle court with about a thousand soldiers!"
"But——"
"With about ten thousand soldiers!" she repeated firmly. "And no sooner—no sooner—does their brutal and cowardly commander enter that drain with his lighted candle than the Princess runs downstairs, seizes a hatchet, severs the gas main with a single blow, and pokes the end of the pipe into the drain!"
"B-but——" stammered Smith, "I think——"
"Oh, please wait! You don't understand what is coming."
"What is coming?" ventured Smith timidly, instinctively closing both ears with his fingers.
"Bang!" said Lady Alene triumphantly. And struck the city of sand with her small, gloved hand.
After a silence, still kneeling there, they turned[106] and looked at each other through the red sunset light.
"The explosion of gas killed them both," said Smith, in an awed voice.
"No."
"What?"
"No. The explosion killed everybody in the city except those two young lovers," she said.
"But why?"
"Because!"
"By what logic——"
"I desire it to be so, Mr. Smith." And she picked up the bowler hat and the Princess and calmly set them side by side amid the ruins.
After a moment Smith reached over and turned the two lead figures so that they faced each other.
There was a long silence. The red sunset light faded from the sand.
Then, very slowly, the girl reached out, took the bowler hat between her small thumb and forefinger, and gently inclined the gentleman forward at the slightest of perceptible angles.
After a moment Smith inclined him still farther forward. Then, with infinite precaution, he tipped forward the Princess, so that between her lips and the lips of the bowler hat only the width of a grass blade remained.[107]
The Lady Alene looked up at him over her left shoulder, hesitated, looked at bowler hat and at the Princess. Then, supporting her weight on one hand, with the other she merely touched the Princess—delicately—so that not even a blade of grass could have been slipped between their painted lips.
She was a trifle pale as she sank back on her knees in the sand. Smith was paler.
After both her gloved hands had rested across his palm for five full minutes, his fingers closed over them, tightly, and he leaned forward a little. She, too, swayed forward a trifle. Her eyes were closed when he kissed her.
Now, whatever misgivings and afterthoughts the Lady Alene Innesly may have had, she was nevertheless certain that to resist Smith was to fight against the stars in their courses. For not only was she in the toils of an American, but more hopeless still, an American who chronicled the most daring and headlong idiosyncrasies of the sort of young men of whom he was very certainly an irresistible example.
To her there was something Shakespearean about the relentless sequence of events since the moment when she had first succumbed to the small, oblong pink package, and her first American novel.[108]
And, thinking Shakespeareanly as she stood in the purple evening light, with his arm clasping her waist, she looked up at him from her charming abstraction:
"'If 'twere done,'" she murmured, "'when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.'" And then, gazing deep into his eyes, a noble idiom of her adopted country fell from her lips:
"Dearest," she said, "my father won't do a thing to you."
And so she ran away with him to Miami where the authorities, civil and religious, are accustomed to quick action.
It was only fifty miles by train, and preliminary telephoning did the rest.
The big chartered launch that left for Verbena Inlet next morning poked its nose out of the rainbow mist into the full glory of the rising sun. Her golden head lay on his shoulder.
Sideways, with delicious indolence, she glanced at a small boat which they were passing close aboard. A fat gentleman, a fat lady, and a boatman occupied the boat. The fat gentleman was fast to a tarpon.
Up out of the dazzling Atlantic shot three hundred pounds of quivering silver. Splash!
"Why, Dad!" exclaimed the girl.[109]
Her father and mother looked over their shoulders at her in wooden amazement.
"We are married——" called out their pretty daughter across the sunlit water. "I will tell you all about it when you land your fish. Look sharp, Dad! Mind your reel!"
"Who is that damned rascal?" demanded the Duke.
"My husband, Dad! Don't let him get away!—the fish, I mean. Put the drag on! Check!"
Said his Grace of Pillchester in a voice of mellow thunder:
"If I were not fast to my first tarpon——"
"Reel in!" cried Smith sharply, "reel or you lose him!"
The Duke reeled with all the abandon of a squirrel in a wheel.
"Dearest," said Mrs. John Smith to her petrified mother, "we will see you soon at Verbena. And don't let Dad over-play that fish. He always over-plays a salmon, you know."
The Duchess folded her fat hands and watched her departing offspring until the chartered launch was a speck on the horizon. Then she looked at her husband.
"Fancy!" she said.[110]
"Nevertheless," remarked the youthful novelist, coldly, "there is nothing on earth as ignoble as a best-seller."
"I wonder," ventured Duane, "whether you know which books actually do sell the best."
"Or which books of bygone days were the best-sellers?"
"Some among them are still best-sellers," added Athalie.
"A truly important book——" began the novelist, but Athalie interrupted him:
"O solemn child," she said, "write on!—and thank the gods for their important gifts to you of hand and mind! So that you keep tired eyes awake that otherwise would droop to brood on pain or sorrow you have done well; and what you have written to this end will come nearer being important than anything you ever write."
"True, by the nine muses!" exclaimed Stafford with emphasis. Athalie glanced at him out of sweetly humourous eyes.
"There is a tenth muse," she said. "Did you never hear of her?"
"Never! Where did you discover her, Athalie?"
"Where I discover many, many things, my friend."
"In your crystal?" I said. She nodded slowly[111] while the sweetmeat was dissolving in her mouth.
Through the summer silence a bell here and there in the dusky city sounded the hour.
"The tenth muse," she repeated, "and I believe there are other sisters, also. Many a star is suspected before its unseen existence is proven.... Please—a glass of water?"[112]
