With a word and a sign to Toko, Ula glided away stealthily, with the cat-like tread of the native Polynesian woman, back to her hated husband.
Felix went out to the door and heliographed with his bright metal plate, turned on the Frenchman’s hill, “What is it?”
In a moment the answer flashed back, word by word, “Come quick, if you want to hear. Methuselah is reciting!”
A few seconds later Muriel emerged from her hut, and the two Europeans, closely followed, as always, by their inseparable Shadows, took the winding side-path that led through the jungle by a devious way, avoiding the front of Tu-Kila-Kila’s temple, to the Frenchman’s cottage.
They found M. Peyron very much excited, partly by Ula’s news of Tu-Kila-Kila’s attitude, but more still by Methuselah’s agitated condition. “The whole night through, my dear friends,” he cried, seizing their hands, “that bird has been chattering, chattering, chattering. Oh, mon Dieu, quel oiseau! It seems as though the words heard yesterday from mademoiselle had struck some lost chord in the creature’s memory. But he is also very feeble. I can see that well. His garrulity is the garrulity of old age in its last flickering moments. He mumbles and mutters. He chuckles to himself. If you don’t hear his message now and at once, it’s my solemn conviction you will never hear it.”
He led them out to the aviary, where Methuselah, in effect, was sitting on his perch, most tremulous and woebegone. His feathers shuddered visibly; he could no longer preen himself. “Listen to what he says,” the Frenchman exclaimed, in a very serious voice. “It is your last, last chance. If the secret is ever to be unravelled at all, by Methuselah’s aid, now is, without doubt, the proper moment to unravel it.”
Muriel put out her hand and stroked the bird gently. “Pretty Poll,” she said, soothingly, in a sympathetic voice. “Pretty Poll! Poor Poll! Was he ill! Was he suffering?”
At the sound of those familiar words, unheard so long till yesterday, the parrot took her finger in his beak once more, and bit it with the tenderness of his kind in their softer moments. Then he threw back his head with a sort of mechanical twist, and screamed out at the top of his voice, for the last time on earth, his mysterious message:
“Pretty Poll! Pretty Poll! God save the king! Confound the Duke of York! Death to all arrant knaves and roundheads!
“In the nineteenth year of the reign of his most gracious majesty, King Charles the Second, I, Nathaniel Cross, of the borough of Sunderland, in the county of Doorham, in England, an able-bodied mariner, then sailing the South Seas in the good bark Martyr Prince, of the Port of Great Grimsby, whereof one Thomas Wells, gent., under God, was master, was, by stress of weather, wrecked and cast away on the shores of this island, called by its gentile inhabitants by the name of Boo Parry. In which wreck, as it befell, Thomas Wells, gent., and his equipment were, by divine disposition, killed and drowned, save and except three mariners, whereof I am one, who in God’s good providence swam safely through an exceeding great flood of waves and landed at last on this island. There my two companions, Owen Williams, of Swansea, in the parts of Wales, and Lewis le Pickard, a French Hewgenott refugee, were at once, by the said gentiles, cruelly entreated, and after great torture cooked and eaten at the temple of their chief god, Too-Keela-Keela. But I, myself, having through God’s grace found favor in their eyes, was promoted to the post which in their speech is called Korong, the nature of which this bird, my mouthpiece, will hereafter, to your ears, more fully discover.”