Hearts of Three 52

Hearts of Three 52

Nor was Leoncia long in following him. In the library she came upon him,

seated at the reading table, his telegram unwritten, while his gaze was

fixed upon a large photograph of her which he had taken from its place

on top the low bookshelves. All of which was too much for her. Her

involuntary gasping sob brought him to his feet in time to catch her as

she swayed into his arms. And before either knew it their lips were

together in fervent __EXPRESSION__.

 

Leoncia struggled and tore herself away, gazing upon her lover with

horror.

 

“This must stop, Francis!” she cried. “More: you cannot remain here for

my wedding. If you do, I shall not be responsible for my actions. There

is a steamer leaves San Antonio for Colon. You and your wife must sail

on it. You can easily catch passage on the fruit boats to New Orleans

and take train to New York. I love you!—you know it.”

 

“The Queen and I are not married!” Francis pleaded, beside himself,

overcome by what had taken place. “That heathen marriage before the

Altar of the Sun was no marriage. In neither deed nor ceremony are we

married. I assure you of that, Leoncia. It is not too late——”

 

“That heathen marriage has lasted you thus far,” she interrupted him

with quiet firmness. “Let it last you to New York, or, at least, to ...

Colon.”

 

“The Queen will not have any further marriage after our forms,” Francis

said. “She insists that all her female line before her has been so

married and that the Sun Altar ceremony is sacredly binding.”

 

Leoncia shrugged her shoulders non-committally, although her face was

stern with resolution.

 

“Marriage or no,” she replied, “you must go—to-night—the pair of you.

Else I shall go mad. I warn you: I shall not be able to withstand the

presence of you. I cannot, I know I cannot, be able to stand the sight

of you while I am being married to Henry and after I am married to

Henry.—Oh, please, please, do not misunderstand me. I do love Henry, but

not in the ... not in that way ... not in the way I love you. I—and I am

not ashamed of the boldness with which I say it—I love Henry about as

much as you love the Queen; but I love you as I should love Henry, as

you should love the Queen, as I know you do love me.”

 

She caught his hand and pressed it against her heart.

 

“There! For the last time! Now go!”

 

But his arms were around her, and she could not help but yield her lips.

Again she tore herself away, this time fleeing to the doorway. Francis

bowed his head to her decision, then picked up her picture.

 

“I shall keep this,” he announced.

 

“You oughtn’t to,” she flashed a last fond smile at him. “You may,” she

added, as she turned and was gone.

 

* * * * *

 

Yet Yi Poon had a commission to execute, for which Torres had paid him

one hundred gold in advance. Next morning, with Francis and the Queen

hours departed on their way to Colon, Yi Poon arrived at the Solano

hacienda. Enrico, smoking a cigar on the veranda and very much pleased

with himself and all the world and the way the world was going,

recognized and welcomed Yi Poon as his visitor of the day before. Even

ere they talked, Leoncia’s father had dispatched Alesandro for the five

hundred pesos agreed upon. And Yi Poon, whose profession was trafficking

in secrets, was not averse to selling his secret the second time. Yet

was he true to his salt, in so far as he obeyed Torres’ instructions in

refusing to tell the secret save in the presence of Leoncia and Henry.

 

“That secret has the string on it,” Yi Poon apologized, after the couple

had been summoned, as he began unwrapping the parcel of proofs. “The

Senorita Leoncia and the man she is going to marry must first, before

anybody else, look at these things. Afterward, all can look.”

 

“Which is fair, since they are more interested than any of us,” Enrico

conceded grandly, although at the same time he betrayed his eagerness by

the impatience with which he motioned his daughter and Henry to take the

evidence to one side for examination.

 

He tried to appear uninterested, but his side-glances missed nothing of

what they did. To his amazement, he saw Leoncia suddenly cast down a

legal-appearing document, which she and Henry had read through, and

throw her arms, whole-heartedly and freely about his neck, and

whole-heartedly and freely kiss him on the lips. Next, Enrico saw Henry

step back and exclaim in a dazed, heart-broken way:

 

“But, my God, Leoncia! This is the end of everything. Never can we be

husband and wife!”

 

“Eh?” Enrico snorted. “When everything was arranged! What do you mean,

sir? This is an insult! Marry you shall, and marry to-day!”

 

Henry, almost in stupefaction, looked to Leoncia to speak for him.

 

“It is against God’s law and man’s,” she said, “for a man to marry his

sister. Now I understand my strange love for Henry. He is my brother. We

are full brother and sister, unless these documents lie.”

 

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