THE LADY OF KINGDOMS

So there were St. George and Amory presently domiciled in a prince’s palace such as Asia and Europe have forgotten, as by and by they will forget the Taj Mahal and the Bon Marche.  And at nine o’clock the next morning in a certain Tyrian purple room in the west wing of the Palace of the Litany the two sat breakfasting.

“One always breakfasts,” observed St. George.  “The first day that the first men spend on Mars I wonder whether the first thing they do will be to breakfast.”

“Poor old Mars has got to step down now,” said Amory.  “We are one farther on.  I don’t know how it will be, but if I felt on Mars the way I do now, I should assent to breakfast.  Shouldn’t you?”

“On my life, Toby,” said St. George, “as an idealist you are disgusting.  Yes, I should.”

The table had been spread before an open window, and the window looked down upon the palace garden, steeped in the gold of the sunny morning, and formal with aisles of mighty, flowering trees.  Within, the apartment was lofty, its walls fashioned to lift the eye to light arches, light capitals, airy traceries, and spaces of the hue of old ivory, held in heavenly quiet.  The sense of colour, colour both captive and atmospheric, was a new and persistent delight, for it was colour purified, specialized, and infinitely extended in either direction from the crudity of the seven-winged spectrum.  The room was like an alcove of outdoors, not divorced from the open air and set in contra-distinction, but made a continuation of its space and order and ancient repose—­a kind of exquisite porch of light.

Across this porch of light Rollo stepped, bearing a covered dish.  The little breakfast-table and the laden side-table were set with vessels of rock-crystal and drinking-cups of silver gilt, and breakfast consisted of delicately-prepared sea-food, a pulpy fruit, thin wine and a paste of delicious powdered gums.  These things Rollo served quite as if he were managing oatmeal and eggs and china.  One would have said that he had been brought up between the covers of an ancient history, nothing in consequence being so old or so new as to amaze him.  Upon their late arrival the evening before he had instantly moved about his duties in all the quiet decorum with which he officiated in three rooms and a bath, emptying the oil-skins, disposing of their contents in great cedar chests, and, from certain rich and alien garments laid out for the guests, pretending as unconcernedly to fleck lint as if they had been broadcloth from Fifth Avenue.  He stood bending above the breakfast-table, his lean, shadowed hands perfectly at home, his lean, shadowed face all automatic attention.

“Rollo,” said St. George, “go and look out the window and see if Sodom is smoking.”

“Yes, sir,” said Rollo, and moved to the nearest casement and bent his look submissively below.

“Everything quiet, sir,” he reported literally; “a very warm day, sir.  But it’s easy to sleep, sir, no matter how warm the days are if only the nights are cool.  Begging your pardon, sir.”