She Buildeth Her House

by Will Levington Comfort

Thither Charter went the next morning and sat down in the cherished coolness. Peter Stock had reminded him of their former talks there, over a particular wine of Epernay, and had arranged to meet him this morning.... In the foreground of Charter's mind a gritty depression had settled, but throughout the finer, farther consciousness, where realities abide, there hung a mystic constellation, which every little while (and with a shock of ecstasy, so wonderful that his mere brain was alarmed and called it scandalous), fused together into a great, glowing ardent Star of Bethlehem....

Again, the mere brain said: "What have you done with your three years? The actress knew you better than you knew yourself. All your letters, and the spirit of your letters, have fallen into ruin before the first woman you meet down here in a dreamy, tropic isle. How can you—you, who have lived truly for a little while, and seemed to have felt the love that lifts—sink into the fragrant meshes of romance, through the beautiful eyes of a stranger to your world and to your ways? And what of Skylark, the lovely, the winged?..." And the soul of the man riding at its moorings in the bright calm of wisdom's anchorage, made laughing answer: "This is the Skylark—ah, not that Wyndam is Linster,—but this is the veiled queen who has waited so long for the House of Charter to be ready. This is the forever-fairy that puzzled the nights and mornings of the long-ago Charter boy. It was her wing that held the last dart of light in the gardens of boyhood before the frowning thunders came. It was her songs that made the youth's mind magic with lyrics, certain ones so very clear that they fitted into words. It was to find her dazzling brow that lured him to prodigious wanderings, until he fell fainting in the dust of other women's chariots. It was the rustling of her wings that he heard from without, when he lay in the Caverns of Devouring, where the twain, Flesh and Death, hold ghastly carnival; the flash of her wings again that lifted his eyes to the Rising Road. It was her spirit in the splendid East whose miracles of singing and shining made glorious, with creative touch, his hours by the garret window.... It was she of exquisite shoulder and starry eyes and radiant sympathies—before whom the boy, the man and the spirit, bowed in thankfulness yesterday...."

And so he sat there thinking, thinking,—glimpsing the errant centuries in the same high light of memory that this very morning recurred—an hour or two ago, when he had walked with her through the mango-grove in the coolness following a dawn-shower that had washed the white weight of Pelée's ash-winter from the trees.... "What a chaos I must be," he murmured in dull anguish, "with the finest of my life plighted to a vision that is lost—while I linger desolate in the presence of wondrous reality!" ... Some one was moving and whispering in the little room across the court of the song-birds.... Peter Stock entered, his white hair and mustache dulled with ash; his eyes red and angry.

"Well, I think I've got Father Fontanel frightened," he said, sinking down across the little round table. "He's telling the people to shut up their houses and go to Fort de France. Sixty or seventy have started, and many more have gone up to Morne Rouge and Ajoupa Boullion, where it happens to be cool, though they're just as close to the craters. Fontanel has come into a very proper spirit of respect for Pelée's destructive capacity. By the way, did you hear what happened yesterday, during the darkness and racket while we were at dinner?"

"Not definitely. Tell me," Charter urged.

"The extreme northern end of the city, or part of it, was flooded out like an ant-hill under a kettle boiling over. The River Blanche overflowed her banks, and ran with boiling mud from the volcano. Thirty people were killed and the Usine Guerin destroyed."

"I didn't think it was so bad as that."

"I hope I'm wrong, but the Guerin disaster may be only a preliminary demonstration—like the operator experimenting to find if it is dark enough to start the main fireworks. Nobody can complain to Saint Peter that Pelée hasn't warned."

"There's another way to look at it," Charter said. "The volcano's overflow into the River Blanche might have eased the pressure upon the craters. I wonder if there is any authority or precedent for such a hope?"

"If Pelée's fuse is burning shorter and shorter toward a Krakatoan cataclysm," Peter Stock declared moodily, "it's not for man to say what spark will shake the world.... I tried to see Mondet this morning—but couldn't get in. You wouldn't think one white, small person could contain so much poison. I am haunted with the desire to commit physical depredations."