And Yi Poon knew that he could take report to Torres that the marriage would not take place and would never take place.
CHAPTER XXIV
Catching a United Fruit Company boat at Colon within fifteen minutes after landing from the small coaster, the Queen’s progress with Francis to New York had been a swift rush of fortunate connections. At New Orleans a taxi from the wharf to the station and a racing of porters with hand luggage had barely got them aboard the train just as it started. Arrived at New York, Francis had been met by Bascom, in Francis’ private machine, and the rush had continued to the rather ornate palace R.H.M. himself, Francis’ father, had built out of his millions on Riverside Drive.
So it was that the Queen knew scarcely more of the great world than when she first started her travels by leaping into the subterranean river. Had she been a lesser creature, she would have been stunned by this vast civilisation around her. As it was, she was royally inconsequential, accepting such civilization as an offering from her royal spouse. Royal he was, served by many slaves. Had she not, on steamer and train, observed it? And here, arrived at his palace, she took as a matter of course the showing of house servants that greeted them. The chauffeur opened the door of the limousine. Other servants carried in the hand baggage. Francis touched his hand to nothing, save to her arm to assist her to alight. Even Bascom—a man she divined was no servitor—she also divined as one who served Francis. And she could not but observe Bascom depart in Francis’ limousine, under instruction and command of Francis.
She had been a queen, in an isolated valley, over a handful of savages. Yet here, in this mighty land of kings, her husband ruled kings. It was all very wonderful, and she was deliciously aware that her queenship had suffered no diminishing by her alliance with Francis.
Her delight in the interior of the mansion was naïve and childlike. Forgetting the servants, or, rather, ignoring them as she ignored her own attendants in her lake dwelling, she clapped her hands in the great entrance hall, glanced at the marble stairway, tripped in a little run to the nearest apartment, and peeped in. It was the library, which she had visioned in the Mirror of the World the first day she saw Francis. And the vision realized itself, for Francis entered with her into the great room of books, his arm about her, just as she had seen him on the fluid-metal surface of the golden bowl. The telephones, and the stock-ticker, too, she remembered; and, just as she had foreseen herself do, she crossed over to the ticker curiously to examine, and Francis, his arm still about her, stood by her side.
Hardly had he begun an attempted explanation of the instrument, and just as he realized the impossibility of teaching her in several minutes all the intricacies of the stock market institution, when his eyes noted on the tape that Frisco Consolidated was down twenty points—a thing unprecedented in that little Iowa railroad which R.H.M. had financed and builded and to the day of his death maintained proudly as so legitimate a creation, that, though half the banks and all of Wall Street crashed, it would weather any storm.
The Queen viewed with alarm the alarm that grew on Francis’ face.
“It is magic—like my Mirror of the World?” she half-queried, half-stated.
Francis nodded.
“It tells you secrets, I know,” she continued. “Like my golden bowl, it brings all the world, here within this very room, to you. It brings you trouble. That is very plain. But what trouble can this world bring you, who are one of its great kings?”
He opened his mouth to reply to her last question, halted, and said nothing, realizing the impossibility of conveying comprehension to her, the while, under his eyelids, or at the foreground of his brain, burned pictures of great railroad and steamship lines, of teeming terminals and noisy docks; of miners toiling in Alaska, in Montana, in Death Valley; of bridled rivers, and harnessed waterfalls, and of power-lines stilting across lowlands and swamps and marshes on two-hundred-foot towers; and of all the mechanics and economics and finances of the twentieth century machine-civilization.
“It brings you trouble,” she repeated. “And, alas! I cannot help you. My golden bowl is no more. Never again shall I see the world in it. I am no longer a ruler of the future. I am a woman merely, and helpless in this strange, colossal world to which you have brought me. I am a woman merely, and your wife, Francis, your proud wife.”
Almost did he love her, as, dropping the tape, he pressed her closely for a moment ere going over to the battery of telephones. She is delightful, was his thought. There is neither guile nor malice in her, only woman, all woman, lovely and lovable——alas, that Leoncia should ever and always arise in my thought between her whom I have and herself whom I shall never have!
“More magic,” the Queen murmured, as Francis, getting Bascom’s office, said:
“Mr. Bascom will undoubtedly arrive back in half an hour. This is Morgan talking——Francis Morgan. Mr. Bascom left for his office not five minutes ago. When he arrives, tell him that I have started for his office and shall not be more than five minutes behind him. This is important. Tell him I am on the way. Thank you. Good bye.”
Very naturally, with all the wonders of the great house yet to be shown her, the Queen betrayed her disappointment when Francis told her he must immediately depart for a place called Wall Street.
“What is it,” she asked, with a pout of displeasure, “that drags you away from me like a slave?”
“It is business——and very important,” he told her with a smile and a kiss.
“And what is Business that it should have power over you who are a king? Is business the name of your god whom all of you worship as the Sun God is worshipped by my people?”
He smiled at the almost perfect appositeness of her idea, saying:
“It is the great American god. Also, is it a very terrible god, and when it slays it slays terribly and swiftly.”
“And you have incurred its displeasure?” she queried.
“Alas, yes, though I know not how. I must go to Wall Street——”
“Which is its altar?” she broke in to ask.
“Which is its altar,” he answered, “and where I must find out wherein I have offended and wherein I may placate and make amends.”
His hurried attempt to explain to her the virtues and functions of the maid he had wired for from Colon, scarcely interested her, and she broke him off by saying that evidently the maid was similar to the Indian women who had attended her in the Valley of Lost Souls, and that she had been accustomed to personal service ever since she was a little girl learning English and Spanish from her mother in the house on the lake.
But when Francis caught up his hat and kissed her, she relented and wished him luck before the altar.
After several hours of amazing adventures in her own quarters, where the maid, a Spanish-speaking Frenchwoman, acted as guide and mentor, and after being variously measured and gloated over by a gorgeous woman who seemed herself a queen and who was attended by two young women, and who, in the Queen’s mind, was without doubt summoned to serve her and Francis, she came back down the grand stairway to investigate the library with its mysterious telephones and ticker.
Long she gazed at the ticker and listened to its irregular chatter. But she, who could read and write English and Spanish, could make nothing of the strange hieroglyphics that grew miraculously on the tape. Next, she explored the first of the telephones. Remembering how Francis had listened, she put her ear to the transmitter. Then, recollecting his use of the receiver, she took it off its hook and placed it to her ear. The voice, unmistakably a woman’s, sounded so near to her that in her startled surprise she dropped the receiver and recoiled. At this moment, Parker, Francis’ old valet, chanced to enter the room. She had not observed him before, and, so immaculate was his dress, so dignified his carriage, that she mistook him for a friend of Francis rather than a servitor——a friend similar to Bascom who had met them at the station with Francis’ machine, ridden inside with them as an equal, yet departed with Francis’ commands in his ears which it was patent he was to obey.
At sight of Parker’s solemn face she laughed with embarrassment and pointed inquiringly to the telephone. Solemnly he picked up the receiver, murmured “A mistake,” into the transmitter, and hung up. In those several seconds the Queen’s thought underwent revolution. No god’s nor spirit’s voice had been that which she had heard, but a woman’s voice.
“Where is that woman?” she demanded.
Parker merely stiffened up more stiffly, assumed a solemner expression, and bowed.
“There is a woman concealed in the house,” she charged with quick words. “Her voice speaks there in that thing. She must be in the next room——”
“It was Central,” Parker attempted to stem the flood of her utterance.
“I care not what her name is,” the Queen dashed on. “I shall have no other woman but myself in my house. Bid her begone. I am very angry.”
Parker was even stiller and solemner, and a new mood came over her. Perhaps this dignified gentleman was higher than she had suspected in the hierarchy of the lesser kings, she thought. Almost might he be an equal king with Francis, and she had treated him peremptorily as less, as much less.
She caught him by the hand, in her impetuousness noting his reluctance, drew him over to a sofa, and made him sit beside her. To add to Parker’s discomfiture, she dipped into a box of candy and began to feed him chocolates, closing his mouth with the sweets every time he opened it to protest.
“Come,” she said, when she had almost choked him, “is it the custom of the men of this country to be polygamous?”
Parker was aghast at such rawness of frankness.
