As he spoke, the bird put its head on one side once more, and, looking out of its half-blind old eyes with a crafty glance round the corner at Muriel, observed again, in not very polite English, “Pretty Poll! Pretty Poll! Polly wants some fruit! Polly wants a nut! Polly wants to go to bed!... God save the king! To hell with all papists!”
“Monsieur,” Felix said, a certain solemn feeling of surprise coming over him slowly at this last strange clause, “it is perfectly true. The bird speaks English. The bird that knows the secret of which we are all in search—the bird that can tell us the truth about Tu-Kila-Kila—can tell us in the tongue which mademoiselle and I speak as our native language. And what is more—and more strange—gather from his tone and the tenor of his remarks, he was taught, long since—a century ago, or more—and by an English sailor!”
Muriel held out a bit of banana on a sharp stick to the bird. Methuselah-Polly took it gingerly off the end, like a well-behaved parrot? “God save the king!” Muriel said, in a quiet voice, trying to draw him on to speak a little further.
Methuselah twisted his eye sideways, first this way, then that, and responded in a very clear tone, indeed, “God save the king! Confound the Duke of York! Long live Dr. Oates! And to hell with all papists!”
CHAPTER XXII. — TANTALIZING, VERY.
They looked at one another again with a wild surmise. The voice was as the voice of some long past age. Could the parrot be speaking to them in the words of seventeenth-century English?
Even M. Peyron, who at first had received the strange discovery with incredulity, woke up before long to the importance of this sudden and unexpected revelation. The Tu-Kila-Kila who had taught Methuselah that long poem or sermon, which native tradition regarded as containing the central secret of their creed or its mysteries, and which the cruel and cunning Tu-Kila-Kila of to-day believed to be of immense importance to his safety—that Tu-Kila-Kila of other days was, in all probability, no other than an English sailor. Cast on these shores, perhaps, as they themselves had been, by the mercy of the waves, he had managed to master the language and religion of the savages among whom he found himself thrown; he had risen to be the representative of the cannibal god; and, during long months or years of tedious exile, he had beguiled his leisure by imparting to the unconscious ears of a bird the weird secret of his success, for the benefit of any others of his own race who might be similarly treated by fortune in future. Strange and romantic as it all sounded, they could hardly doubt now that this was the real explanation of the bird’s command of English words. One problem alone remained to disturb their souls. Was the bird really in possession of any local secret and mystery at all, or was this the whole burden of the message he had brought down across the vast abyss of time—“God save the king, and to hell with all papists?”
Felix turned to M. Peyron in a perfect tumult of suspense. “What he recites is long?” he said, interrogatively, with profound interest. “You have heard him say much more than this at times? The words he has just uttered are not those of the sermon or poem you mentioned?”