Part 32 (1/2)

”It isn't the fault of the bird of paradise, either, is it?”

Forbes shook his head and sighed: ”It's the fault of the man that puts it in the cage.”

”Well, maybe he means well. He may be crazy about the bird, just crazy to keep it near him, but--he can't. That's all, he can't. It'll beat itself to death or break loose.”

”Unless he lets it go,” said Forbes.

”That's it! You understand me, don't you, old man?”

”I get you, Steve.”

”And you won't feel too hard about it, will you? There's a lot of other birds besides the big ones. There's nothing cozier than a little canary--is there?”

”I reckon not,” said Forbes, dismally.

”And there's a lot of them to be had. And some of them are very pretty.”

They sat and smoked a long while. Then Ten Eyck yawned, and gripped Forbes' shoulder hard and went out, pausing to look at him sadly. For his good night he dropped into a c.o.c.kney quotation: ”'Wot I meanter s'y, Pip, is: allus the best o' friends?'”

He ended with a querying inflection, and Forbes echoed it with a period:

”Allus the best o' friends.”

He sat smoking his cigar till it was gone. Then he made ready for bed, blew out the candle, raised the curtain, and paused to stare blankly into the dark ma.s.s of a green hill or a great cloud, whichever it was, piled up against a sky sprinkled over with a powder of little stars.

Among them was one planet whose name he did not know. As he watched, it moved with imperceptible stealth out of his sight behind the hill.

He gave up Persis as completely as he gave up the planet. A few days ago he did not know her name. A few days more and she would have slipped from his sky.

He was so tired, so full of the need of sleep, that despair was only another kind of night, black but blessed, without ecstasy, but void of torment.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The only dream that Forbes knew that night--or remembered, at least--was a dream of his latest garrison, and the same bugle humming like the single nagging morning fly that frets a sleeper awake. It was warily intoning its old ”I can't get 'em up, I can't get 'em up, I can't get 'em up in the morning.”

He leaped from his bed, and was astonished to find himself standing in a strange room with an open window facing an unknown landscape. He screwed his fists into his eyes boyishly before he realized his whereabouts.

At night he had seen his room in vast shadows clouded about a meek candle. The window had shown him only a blur of gloom against a sky of star-dust.

Now he found himself in a sumptuously furnished chamber, whose window framed a scene of royally ordered beauty--a great lawn as level and almost as s.p.a.cious as a parade-ground, and bordered with a marble bal.u.s.trade that seemed to run on forever regardless of expense. Marble statues and bronzes and fountains were here and there. And up a n.o.ble hill a stairway, as beautiful as a sea-gull's wings, soared to a parked s.p.a.ce where a little marble temple sheltered an image which he judged to be Cupid's.

Beyond the big hill reared aloft a primeval forest which the sunrise wind was shaking. The tips of the topmost trees were crimsoned, as if roses had bloomed at last on pines. The climbing sun had just reached them, its rays climbing down the hill as itself climbed the east.

Forbes crept back to bed, but only to reproach himself with sloth. He could not afford to miss a sunrise such as this would be. There would be occasions enough for sleep; but he was going to leave the Enslee Eden this very day forever. The flaming sword of gold would keep him from re-entering the Paradise he had got into as a boy crawls under a circus tent.

He flung himself from the alien linen and mahogany, and, hastening into the bathroom, stepped into the tub, drew the circular curtain around him quietly not to waken his neighbor, Ten Eyck, and turned the little wheels marked ”shower” and ”needle” and ”cold,” and received the responding rains. There was no question that they were cold.

But the reaction was a jubilee in every artery, and he dressed with eagerness for whatever the day might bring. He opened his door softly and went down the twilight of the stairway like an escaping thief. The servantless tenants had neglected to bolt and chain the outside door. He swung it back and stepped out.