“Oh, no, miss! I’m sorry, miss. It isn’t that sort of gentlemen—just a young man, and he hasn’t only one leg!”
Miriam dropped her arms with a heavy sigh. “Oh—Jim!” The intonation was not complimentary. Yet her face lightened up a little as Jim, with his indomitable grin, hobbled briskly into the room.
CHAPTER XXIII
TRUTH
LAMARA sat on a bench in the island garden, her hands folded in her lap. The bench was carved out of a piece of chalcedony, with soft orange-veins running through it, and bearing figures in high relief of little children tossing balls from one to another. The color was so adapted as to give the figures the hues of life; and if glanced at sidelong, one could fancy they had the movement and diversity of living beings. The bench was overshadowed by the level boughs of a tree, amid the dark, whispering leaves of which appeared globes of fruit that glowed and brightened as if by some innate quality; they were hidden intermittently as the breeze passed among them, and reappeared as buds, which blossomed and became fruit again. Wherever Lamara was, the fire of life seemed to be stimulated by the combined intensity and calm of her own being.
Up and down in the short pathway before her, Jack paced to and fro, restless as a high-strung horse galled by his tether. Lamara observed him with sympathy tinged with grave amusement.
He stooped before her at length, and resumed the conversation in which they had been engaged. “If it concerned only myself, it would be easy to be patient,” he expostulated. “But when a man loves a woman, and she is in danger, you might as well expect him to be dead and alive at the same moment! If I could only so much as see her—but how can I tell what may be happening to her at this moment, and me good for nothing here! There can be no possible use for me in the world except to protect her. You have the means, and you won’t give them to me! Why, even on my own earth I could use wings and weapons—and I ask nothing better! Argon is ready to help me if you give the word! But I don’t want to interfere with your laws or customs; let me go alone, as I am, and meet this robber with my bare hands. I’m not a Saturnian, and you wouldn’t be discredited by what I did. You got me out of that cave. Why should you stop there? Men where I come from have their own way of settling their quarrels, and I know no other! You’ve been kind to me, and I know how good and great you are; but it’s cruelty to keep me here! If you would speak the word, I know I could be on Tor in a moment! What right have you to refuse it?”
“My poor boy, it is you, not I, that prevents all you wish,” said Lamara gently.
“That’s hardest of all to hear!” he exclaimed. “I’d die to save her! Could I do more? And you tell me I prevent myself!”
“You can do more than die—you can live and be yourself,” she answered. “Sit beside me here for a little, Jack, and try to hear me.”
He fetched a deep breath, took his place on the bench, folded his arms, and compressed his lips. She patted his broad shoulder in a sisterly fashion and went on: