Chapter XX: “good-Bye!”

Regan returned to the palace as the darkness was deepening. The lamps in the great hall were unlit. Probably the bird women were asleep, but he knew it was not that. Into the silent rooms he hastened.

Not there! No fire! No light! He ran to Father Renaudin’s apartments. There lay Father Renaudin asleep!

“Awake! awake!”

With a groan of agony Regan called to him. With a curse of rage he shook him, shrieking at the senseless form:

“Awake! awake! you sleeping traitor, and tell me where is the wife whom I left with you!”

As well trouble the dead!

Gone, gone, gone!

Regan rushed through the corridor with a flaming torch, heedlessly stumbling on the sleepers lying wherever they had fallen, heedless of the fact that the cold was chilling the fireless palace.

“Rondah, come back! Rondah, come back!”

He repeated that call from the verandas; possibly she had not gone far; she might hear. He lighted a great lamp in the glass tower. She would perhaps see the lamp and return.

A white note lay on the floor. He seized it. “Good-bye” was written on it.

“Good-bye! Good-bye!” Not for him those words!

He held the letters far from him and looked at them. “Good-bye!”

Rondah’s writing. Rondah’s paper, with the crown in the corner. She had written on it “Good-bye!”

Staggering to a chair, Regan sat before the ash-covered hearth and crushed the white ghost of love in his powerful hand. The cold was creeping all around him; he noted it not; a worse chill was on his heart. He was fighting against human suspicion with the remembrance of human love!

There it was to condemn her. “Good-bye!”

In his heart was untold misery, but in his long life he had gained in many things more than human wisdom.

“It looks like treachery! It looks like desertion!” he admitted; “but in thirty-three hopeless years on Earth she did not forget me! Can she forget in a day here! A doom—that was what Father Renaudin called it. It could not be averted. It was to fall on Rondah; this has fallen on me!”

“Good-bye! Good-bye!”

But where would she go? That other man, the one who walked on the cliffs! Regan had never seen him; but Father Renaudin had seen him and had reported to Regan his wonderful, God-like beauty.

“The Sun Island! Perhaps she is there!”

Regan rushed into the night; darkness was there; he could see nothing, but he cared for nothing. The winds cut like a keen knife, but a knife more cruel had cut his heart.

“Good-bye! Good-bye!”

The winds howled those words. They would say nothing else.

“Rondah, Rondah,” he whispered to the night, “it would have been better not to have written it—‘Good-bye!’”

He saw the blaze of light of the Sun Island; he climbed the cliffs to his own stone house. The bird people looked like corpses in the gray light. He drank a stimulating liquid. He lighted the firewood which he had ordered so carefully piled to make a great, cheerful blaze for Rondah.

He sat beside this blaze and waited for the whitening of darkness, which was day.

If the sleep had not been almost death, they would have wakened to mourn with him, those tender-hearted, sympathetic bird people. As it was, they moved not while the awful sobs sounded in the drear house.

But why did Regan read, and again read, those cruel words, “Good-bye?”

When day came he strengthened himself with food and went out to see if there was not a frozen bridge to the isle. No; only a place where over the shallows of lava there were formed little, shifting, flake-like spots of ice.

Then Regan brought the great sledges and for three days he ceased not to throw cargoes of snow into the sea where the waves were so shallow. Not pausing for night, as if to save a lost soul, he worked for three terrible days, and he had almost bridged the short way.

One sledgeful fell. It struck on the invisible wall and rolled into the waves.

“I will not be stopped!” shrieked Regan.

With all his power he struck the wall; he threw himself against it, he cast ice at it.

He went back to the house, took another drink of the stimulant, returned with a heavy sledgehammer which three bird men could not swing. With this he struck the wall, that wall which could not be seen. The concussion knocked the hammer from his hand; the shock threw Regan into the snow.

The wall remained.

Like Rondah, he called the name of the one whom he loved. A new horror came upon him—he was going to sleep!

“My God, not this!” he cried when he saw it was sleep and not weariness. “My God, not this and Rondah still lost! Mercy! mercy!”

He dashed ice-cold water on his face. He deluged his head and hands with snow. He again roused himself with draughts of the powerful stimulant and rushed back to the wall. He was sure that she was there.

“Oh, death of years,” he cried, “stand back until I find her, or come forever!”

Of all the star’s promise Regan neither remembered nor thought. That with it they must live he had forgot. Only for time to find her!

Half-asleep, he struggled over the narrow, icy trails to that wall only to fall in the snow beside it.

Do you not hear it, Rondah? So near, can tinkle of diamond leaves and hum of musical air drown that horrid call, as Regan, beating the wall in despair, helplessly fighting off the sleep which comes with the force of the star itself, a force as resistless as that of tempest or earthquake, falls with that paper clutched in his hand, the paper with “Good-bye” written on it?