Kingdom Lost

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Kingdom Lost

Patricia Wentworth

CHAPTER I

The cliff rose sheer from the blue, untroubled sea. Between sea and sky the sun made a shimmer of heat. The air was unstirred by the lightest breath.

Austin Muir looked down and saw the yacht below him. She looked small, like a toy; the sun dazzled on her, and dazzled on the water. It didn't do to look down. He frowned, and looked up instead. The top of the cliff cut across the hot blue sky in a sort of jagged scribble. And between cliff and sky something moved.

Austin threw back his head and stared. Something moved, peered down at him; a pebble tinkled against the zig-zag outcrop of rock and skipped past him. He hung there on the rocky face of the cliff and stared at the moving thing a good twenty feet above his head.

It was a hen.

He saw the craned neck, the beady eyes, hard, shiny and inquisitive, the half open beak. It was, most unbelievably, most indubitably, a hen. The rock to which he was holding cut his hand, and as he shifted his grip and took an upward step, he heard above him a squawk and a kind of flapping scramble. The hen was gone. But he had seen it.

He began to climb again. The hen was unbelievable; but he had just seen the hen. If he went back and told Barclay that he had seen a hen, Barclay would laugh himself purple in the face. Uninhabited islands don't grow hens. He would have to prove his hen or suppress it altogether. By the time he had reached the top of the cliff he had decided to suppress the hen.

The top of the cliff was not really the top at all—he knew that of course already; it was merely the edge of the crater. Seen from below from the yacht, the wall he had just climbed had appeared unclimbable; even if Barclay had not twisted his ankle he would never have got up it. Barclay would have to take off three or four stone before you could make a climber of him.

Well, the worst of the climbing was over now. The island was certainly volcanic—just the top of an old volcano stuck out of the bare blue water like Stromboli. The outer rim of the crater lay before him now; but inside the outer circle there was another wall, hiding the real cup of the crater.

Austin began to scramble down into the outer circle. He thought the island was a good deal like a Norman castle—first the wall, then this deep moat, and then the castle itself. Barclay's great-grandfather—was it two greats or three?—had certainly climbed the wall; the description in the old diary was quite a good one. But where did the hen come in?

Not for the first time, the suspicion that Barclay had not told him everything presented itself to Austin's mind. Barclay had never let him handle the diary. Why?—unless he was keeping something back. He had, of course, a perfect right to keep back anything he chose, the diary being his, to say nothing of the yacht. A man isn't bound to tell his secretary everything—Austin Muir had always felt that there might be something more to tell. Hang it all, a man doesn't go pelting off to look for an uninhabited island just to prove that his several times great-grandfather knew what he was talking about, and that the modern maps didn't. On the other hand, Barclay was such a rum fellow. Barclay might do a thing just because it wasn't the likely thing to do. Odd fellow Barclay.

He proceeded across the moat, thinking that it was hard luck on Barclay to have proved his ancestor right and then be done out of exploring the island he had found. It was like Barclay to keep the crew close to the ship and forbid them to land. He thought Barclay would have liked to forbid him to land too; he was as jealous over his island as if it was the sort of thing you could put under lock and key. He wondered again whether there was any secret about it.

So far, he had seen no water and no vegetation; they had sailed all round the island without seeing any; the unbroken, harsh volcanic cliff had confronted them. But the hen—a hen can't live on grit and do without water. He had an idea that they drank a lot. Hens—his mother had kept them; he could remember having to carry water, lots of it, in a battered tin can.

It was when he had come to the foot of the second wall that he saw the hen again. Perched on a tumbled heap of lava, it fixed him with a glassy, fascinated eye, then once more squawked and fled. As he climbed the second wall, he heard a prolonged and agitated cackle that died away in the distance.

There is a moment when sound trembles on the edge of silence. Austin could not have said just when this moment came. He heard the faint echoes fade. But just as silence came, something stirred it; the silence moved and was troubled; a new sound came to his ears.

He had come to the top of the wall. The ascent was an easy one. He passed through a gap, and the new sound met him—not as sound, but as a voice—words:

The islands feel th' enclasping flow,

And then their endless bounds they know.

Austin stood still in the most utter amazement he had ever known. The voice was a woman's voice, speaking clearly and sweetly Matthew Arnold's words. He had learnt them once, or he would scarcely have caught them now. The voice was clear and sweet, but it came from far away.

The sound ceased. He came through the mouth of the gap and looked down into a green hollow. The old crater was a garden. That was his first impression. The graceful feathered top of a cocoanut palm touched his foot. The place was a palm-grove. And somewhere in that green shade below him the voice took up another verse:

Oh, then a longing like despair

Is to their farthest caverns sent;

For surely once, they feel, we were

Parts of a single continent!

Now round us spreads the watery plain—

Oh, might our marges meet again!

The descent before him was precipitous. He looked to his left and saw steps cut in the face of the cliff. The voice went on, but as he reached the steps and began to descend, it became a low wordless murmur. He heard above it the sound of his own feet on the gritty path, the movement of the palm leaves as he brushed past them and descended into a shade as grateful as any he had known.

The trees grew as if planted in rows. He walked between them, rather past wonder, but conscious of a half angry sense of anticipation. A hen, palm-trees, and Matthew Arnold! The thing passed the bounds of the permissible; it was the sort of thing that didn't happen—a ridiculous thing.

Austin Muir had no affection for the ridiculous. He quickened his steps; but he was frowning as he came in sight of the clearing. The voice came from close at hand, speaking the last words of the poem with a certain musing beauty:

A God, a God that severance ruled!

And bade betwixt their shores to be

The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

Austin stood between the last two palm-trees and looked for the speaker.

Where the trees ended, the ground had been levelled. In the middle of the open space the sun shone on a wide, deep pool. On the farther side of the pool the rocks rose in a rough jumble; and ten feet up on an overhanging buttress sat a girl with bare brown legs and bare brown arms and a bare brown head; brown hands clasped her knee. She wore a brief, shift-like garment of old yellowish cotton. The brown head bore a mass of curling hair and a wreath of bright pink shells.

Austin stared. The face under the curls was brown too; but it was the brown of sunburn, not of pigment, and out of the brown there looked eyes as blue as seawater. He moved, and the eyes turned on him. Austin felt that half angry anticipation of his leap up into actual anger. He had the impression of some happening which he did not understand, something that antagonized and challenged. He saw the blue eyes sparkle and the vivid colour run to the roots of the brown hair. But behind these outward signs was that sense of clash, of anger. He took a step forward, and the girl sprang up, standing on the edge of the overhanging rock with a light, sure balance that amazed him. She leaned forward above the water, and her voice came to him, trembling with something that made the words sound strangely:

“Who—are—you?”

He came nearer before he answered, and as he moved, she sprang back and he was reminded of the recoil of some wild thing.

He said, “My name is Austin Muir,” and she stood poised for another spring.

“Stay where you are!”

Voice, manner, accent spoke of culture, civilization, of a lettered, sheltered world, just as surely as her every look and movement betrayed the wild.

He said, “What are you afraid of?” and said it roughly because of that strange antagonism.

“How did you come here?” The blue eyes darkened as she spoke, her left hand touched the rocky wall.

Muir laughed.

“That was what I was going to ask you,” he said; and then, “What on earth are you afraid of? I shan't hurt you.”

He saw her quiver.

“Edward said—”

“Oh—so there's an Edward! Hadn't I better talk to him?”

She relaxed mournfully, drooped let her hand fall from the rock.

“You can't—he's dead. I'm all alone.”

A little compunction came to him.

“I didn't know—” (Of all the ridiculous things to say!) He stopped short.

“Edward said someone would come some day. He said to be careful. Do you drink gin?”

“No, I don't.”

“Or whisky?”

“Sometimes.”

“Or rum?”

“Lord, no! I don't drink, if that's what you're driving at.”

“Edward said I must be sure. How can I be sure?”

“I really don't know.” (What a preposterous situation!)

She came a step nearer, brightening.

“Did you come in a ship?”

“In a yacht.”

“That's a sort of ship, isn't it?—a little one?”

“Yes.”

She brightened still more.

“Have you got a nice lady on your yacht?”