Pere Rabeaut's wine was very good, and some of it was very cheap. The service was much as you made it, for if you were known you were permitted to help yourself. In this world there was no one of station too lofty to go to Pere Rabeaut's; and since those of no station drank rum, instead of wine, you would meet no one there to whom it was not a privilege to say "Bon jour."
"Come and see my birds," the Rabeaut would say if he approved of you.
"Where do you live?" you might ask, being a stranger.
"In the coolest hovel of Saint Pierre," was his invariable answer.
And presently, if you were truly alive, you would find yourself in the little stone wine-shop, listening to the birds and looking over the stalled casks, demijohns, and bottles, filled with more or less concentrated soil and sun. In due course, Soronia would appear in the shadowy (it would seem that the bird-songs were hushed as she crossed the court), and she would show you a vintage of especially long ago. After that, though you became a in Shantung, or a remittance-man in Tahiti, you would never forget the of the Rabeaut wines, the of the canaries, nor the witchery of Soronia's eyes.... If the little stone wine-shop were transplanted in New York, artists would find it, and you would be forced to fetch your own and have difficulty in getting in and out for the crowd o' nights.
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 , there hung a mystic , which every little while (and with a shock of , so wonderful that his brain was alarmed and called it scandalous), fused together into a great, glowing 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 . How can you—you, who have lived truly for a little while, and seemed to have felt the love that lifts—sink into the 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 of light in the gardens of boyhood before the frowning thunders came. It was her songs that made the youth's mind magic with , certain ones so very clear that they fitted into words. It was to find her dazzling brow that him to wanderings, until he fell fainting in the dust of other women's chariots. It was the of her wings that he heard from without, when he lay in the of , where the twain, Flesh and Death, hold ghastly ; 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 shoulder and 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 I must be," he murmured in dull , "with the finest of my life to a vision that is lost—while I linger in the presence of 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 and Ajoupa Boullion, where it happens to be cool, though they're just as close to the . 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 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 into the River Blanche might have eased the pressure upon the craters. I wonder if there is any authority or for such a hope?"
"If Pelée's fuse is burning shorter and shorter toward a Krakatoan cataclysm," Peter Stock declared , "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
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