“It would be regarded as embarrassing.”
“I would not have Dan embarrassed.”
“You can obviate the embarrassment. Come with us to Tahiti and marry Dan legally before the child is born. Nobody in his world, then, need know.”
“I could not be happy in Dan’s world any more than he can be happy in mine. You do not seem to understand, Mellengair. I love him. I do not delude myself, my friend. If I want him I can hold fast to him. I know my power. But I love him too greatly to hold him when the holding will smash his life. It is better that I should smash my own, for look you, Mellengair,” she explained with an odd wistfulness, “I am but Tamea, the half-caste Queen of Riva. I am old—very old—and I—I do not matter. I have known the fulness of life. I am content. I cannot leave this land in which the roots of my soul will ever cling; always when I dwelt with Dan Pritchard in San Francisco I heard the sound of the surf on the reef yonder I heard the sigh of these coco-palms, I heard the songs and the woes of my people. You will, perhaps, not understand, Mellengair, but I know that I am right.”
He bowed his head. He knew she was right, knew that only a great and noble soul could so calmly enunciate such a bitter truth. The old, immutable law of existence could not be shattered. Kind begets kind, yearns for it, is happy with nothing else. Human beings, habituated to their environment, cast in certain molds of evolution, may not progress forward or backward when such progression is not a part of the Infinite Plan. To attempt it is ruinous; to defy that immutable law—particularly in the case of super-intelligences like Dan and Tamea—invites disaster.
“Dan Pritchard will go tonight and I shall not see him again,” Tamea said, following the long silence while Mellenger revolved this sad puzzle in his poor brain. “Farewells do but bear down the heart, and if I do not see him again it will be much easier for him, poor dear. He knows I love him. Why, then, tell him this at parting, why hurt him with my tears, why subject him to the shame of having me see him bent and broken? He will go. He greatly desires to go, and I know why, and it is the law and I am not embittered. Nothing matters in life save that human beings shall know true happiness—and I have known that. When my baby comes I shall know it again. I have in me the blood of my mother, and we were proud of our line. And I have in me the blood of my father and he was brave and laughed when the seas boiled over the knightheads. I too shall laugh.”
“I dare say you do not care to visit Maisie, or have her visit you.”
“You are right. You are always right, dear Stoneface. I give to her the man she loves, the man who, in the bottom of his heart, has always loved her, the man I took from her. From me he has learned something of life; at least I have not hurt him, nor have I dwelt with him in dishonor. He will be comforted by Maisie; life will have a taste for him again; and of his life here with me, none in his world should ever know. You see, I understand your people, Mellengair,” she added, with that same odd, twisted, wistful little smile. “It is that you do not like to be found out.”
Fell a silence. “You will go now, please, and take Dan Pritchard with you. Sooey Wan is ready and the sailors from the Pelorus will come for his trunk.” She gave him her hand.
“May I kiss you, Tamea?” he whispered, and there was that in his deep-set, unlovely eyes, in his poker face, that might have been seen in the face of Christ, writhing on the Cross. She lifted her face to his and he kissed her, very tenderly, on each cheek, after the fashion of her father’s people. Then he left her, and he descended the hill to the beach.