Adventure stories; Islands -- Fiction; Journalists -- Fiction; Love stories; Science fiction; South Pacific Ocean -- Fiction
But little Cawthorne--all reality in his heliotrope outing and duck
and grey curls--raised a characteristic plaint.
"Oh, but I've done it," he mournfully reviewed. "When'll I ever be
in another island, in front of another vacated throne? Why didn't I
move into the palace, and set up a natty, up-to-date little
republic? I could have worn a crown as a matter of taste--what's the
use of a democracy if you aren't free to wear a crown? And what kind
of American am I, anyway, with this undeveloped taste for acquiring
islands? If they ever find this out at the polls my vote'll be
challenged. What?"
"Aw whee!" said Bennietod, intent upon a Roman candle, "wha' do you
care, Mr. Cawt'orne? You don't hev to go back fer to be a
child-slave to Chillingwort'. Me, I've gotta good call to jump
overboard now an' be de sonny of a sea-horse, dead to rights!"
St. George looked at them all affectionately, unconscious that
already the experience of the last three days was slipping back into
the sheathing past, like a blade used. But he was dawningly aware,
as he sat there at Olivia's feet in glorious content, that he was
looking at them all with new eyes. It was as if he had found new
names for them all; and until long afterward one does not know that
these moments of bestowing new names mark the near breathing of the
god.
The silence of Mrs. Hastings and her quiet devotion to her brother
somehow gave St. George a new respect for her. Over by the
wheel-house something made a strange noise of crying, and St. George
saw that Mr. Frothingham sat holding a weird little animal, like a
squirrel but for its stumpy tail and great human eyes, which he had
unwittingly stepped on among the rocks. The little thing was licking
his hand, and the old lawyer's face was softened and glowing as he
nursed it and coaxed it with crumbs. As he looked, St. George warmed
to them all in new fellowship and, too, in swift self-reproach; for
in what had seemed to him but "broad lines and comic masks" he
suddenly saw the authority and reality of homely hearts. The better
and more intimate names for everything which seemed now within his
grasp were more important than Yaque itself. He remembered, with a
thrill, how his mother had been wont to tell him that a man must
walk through some sort of fairy-land, whether of imagination or of
the heart, before he can put much in or take much from the
market-place. And lo! this fairy-land of his finding had
proved--must it not always prove?--the essence of all Reality.
His eyes went to Olivia's face in a flash of understanding and
belief.
"Don't you see?" he said, quite as if they two had been talking what
he had thought.
She waited, smiling a little, thrilled by his certainty of her
sympathy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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