Romance Island

Romance Island

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Title: Romance Island
Author: Zona Gale
Release Date: October 13, 2004 [EBook #13731]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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ISLAND ***

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[Illustration: frontispiece]
ROMANCE ISLAND
By
ZONA GALE
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY HERMANN C. WALL

INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 1906

"Who that remembers the first kind glance of her whom he loves can
fail to believe in magic?" --NOVALIS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
DINNER TIME II A SCRAP OF PAPER III ST. GEORGE AND THE
LADY IV THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY V OLIVIA PROPOSES VI
TWO LITTLE MEN VII DUSK, AND SO ON VIII THE PORCH OF
THE MORNING IX THE LADY OF KINGDOMS X TYRIAN
PURPLE XI THE END OF THE EVENING XII
BETWEEN-WORLDS XIII THE LINES LEAD UP XIV THE ISLE
OF HEARTS XV A VIGIL XVI GLAMOURIE XVII BENEATH THE
SURFACE XVIII A MORNING VISIT XIX IN THE HALL OF
KINGS XX OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS XXI OPEN SECRETS

ROMANCE ISLAND

CHAPTER I
DINNER TIME
As The Aloha rode gently to her buoy among the crafts in the harbour,
St. George longed to proclaim in the megaphone's monstrous parody
upon capital letters:
"Cat-boats and house-boats and yawls, look here. You're bound to
observe that this is my steam yacht. I own her--do you see? She
belongs to me, St. George, who never before owned so much as a piece
of rope."
Instead--mindful, perhaps, that "a man should not communicate his
own glorie"--he stepped sedately down to the trim green skiff and was
rowed ashore by a boy who, for aught that either knew, might three
months before have jostled him at some ill-favoured lunch counter. For
in America, dreams of gold--not, alas, golden dreams--do prevalently
come true; and of all the butterfly happenings in this pleasant land of
larvæ, few are so spectacular as the process by which, without warning,

a man is converted from a toiler and bearer of loads to a taker of his
bien. However, to none, one must believe, is the changeling such
gazing-stock as to himself.
Although countless times, waking and sleeping, St. George had
humoured himself in the outworn pastime of dreaming what he would
do if he were to inherit a million dollars, his imagination had never
marveled its way to the situation's less poignant advantages. Chief
among his satisfactions had been that with which he had lately seen his
mother--an exquisite woman, looking like the old lace and Roman
mosaic pins which she had saved from the wreck of her fortune--set off
for Europe in the exceptional company of her brother, Bishop Arthur
Touchett, gentlest of dignitaries. The bishop, only to look upon whose
portrait was a benediction, had at sacrifice of certain of his charities
seen St. George through college; and it made the million worth while to
his nephew merely to send him to Tübingen to set his soul at rest
concerning the date of one of the canonical gospels. Next to the rich
delight of planning that voyage, St. George placed the buying of his
yacht.
In the dusty, inky office of the New York Evening Sentinel he had been
wont three months before to sit at a long green table fitting words about
the yachts of others to the dreary music of his typewriter, the while
vaguely conscious of a blur of eight telephone bells, and the sound of
voices used merely to communicate thought and not to please the ear.
In the last three months he had sometimes remembered that black day
when from his high window he had looked toward the harbour and
glimpsed a trim craft of white and brass slipping to the river's mouth;
whereupon he had been seized by such a passion to work hard and earn
a white-and-brass craft of his own that the story which he was hurrying
for the first edition was quite ruined.
"Good heavens, St. George," Chillingworth, the city editor, had gnarled,
"we don't carry wooden type. And nothing else would set up this
wooden stuff of yours. Where's some snap? Your first paragraph reads
like a recipe. Now put your soul into it, and you've got less than fifteen
minutes to do it in."

St. George recalled that his friend Amory, as "one hackneyed in the
ways of life," had gravely lifted an eyebrow at him, and the new men
had turned different