M. Peyron looked on in mute astonishment.  He had heard the bird repeat that strange jargon so often that it had ceased to have even the possibility of a meaning for him.  It was the way of Methuselah—­just his language that he talked; so harsh! so guttural!  “Pretty Poll!  Pretty Poll!” he had noticed the bird harp upon those quaint words again and again.  They were part, no doubt, of that old primitive and forgotten Pacific language the creature had learned in other days from some earlier bearer of the name and ghastly honors of Tu-Kila-Kila.  Why should these English seem so profoundly moved by them?

“Mademoiselle doesn’t surely understand the barbarous dialect which our Methuselah speaks!” he exclaimed in surprise, glancing half suspiciously from one to the other of these incomprehensible Britons.  Like most other Frenchmen, he had been brought up in total ignorance of every European language except his own; and the words the parrot pronounced, when delivered with the well-known additions of parrot harshness and parrot volubility, seemed to him so inexpressibly barbaric in their clicks and jerks that he hadn’t yet arrived at the faintest inkling of the truth as he observed their emotion.

Felix seized his new friend’s hand in his and wrung it warmly.  “Don’t you see what it is?” he exclaimed, half beside himself with this vague hope of some unknown solution.  “Don’t you realize how the thing stands?  Don’t you guess the truth?  This isn’t a Polynesian, dialect at all.  It’s our own mother tongue.  The bird speaks English!”

“English!” M. Peyron replied, with incredulous scorn.  “What!  Methuselah speak English!  Oh, no, monsieur, impossible. Vous vous trompez, j’en suis sur.  I can never believe it.  Those harsh, inarticulate sounds to belong to the noble language of Shaxper and Newtowne! Ah, monsieur, incroyable! vous vous trompez; vous vous trompez!”

As he spoke, the bird put its head on one side once more, and, looking out of its half-blind old eyes with a crafty glance round the corner at Muriel, observed again, in not very polite English, “Pretty Poll!  Pretty Poll!  Polly wants some fruit!  Polly wants a nut!  Polly wants to go to bed!...  God save the king!  To hell with all papists!”

“Monsieur,” Felix said, a certain solemn feeling of surprise coming over him slowly at this last strange clause, “it is perfectly true.  The bird speaks English.  The bird that knows the secret of which we are all in search—­the bird that can tell us the truth about Tu-Kila-Kila—­can tell us in the tongue which mademoiselle and I speak as our native language.  And what is more—­and more strange—­gather from his tone and the tenor of his remarks, he was taught, long since—­a century ago, or more—­and by an English sailor!”

Muriel held out a bit of banana on a sharp stick to the bird.  Methuselah-Polly took it gingerly off the end, like a well-behaved parrot?  “God save the king!” Muriel said, in a quiet voice, trying to draw him on to speak a little further.