The Slayer Of souls Part 23

and murmuring caressingly in an unknown tongue.

Then, suddenly in the pale suns.h.i.+ne, scores of little birds came hovering around them, alighting all over them. And he saw them swarming out of the mossy festoons of the water-oaks--scores and scores of tiny birds--Parula warblers, mostly--all flitting fearlessly down to alight upon his shoulders and knees, all keeping up their sweet, dreamy little twittering sound.

"This is wonderful," he whispered.

The girl laughed, took several birds on her forefinger.

"This is nothing," she said. "If I only dared--wait a moment!----" And, to the Parula warblers:

"Go home, little friends of G.o.d!"

The air was filled with the musical whisper of wings. She pa.s.sed her right arm around her husband's neck.

"Look at the river," she said.

"Good G.o.d!" he blurted out. And sat dumb.

For, over the St. John's misty surface, there was the span of a bridge--a strange, marble bridge humped up high in the centre.

And over it were pa.s.sing thousands of people--he could make them out vaguely--see them pa.s.sing in two never-ending streams--tinted shapes on the marble bridge.

And now, on the farther sh.o.r.e of the river, he was aware of a city--a vast one, with spectral paG.o.da shapes against the sky----

Her arm tightened around his neck.

He saw boats on the river--like the grotesque shapes that decorate ancient lacquer.

She rested her face lightly against his cheek.

In his ears was a far confusion of voices--the stir and movement of mult.i.tudes--noises on s.h.i.+ps, boatmen's cries, the creak of oars.

Then, far and sonorous, quavering across the water from the city, the din of a temple gong.

There were bells, too--very sweet and silvery--camel bells, bells from the Buddhist temples.

He strained his eyes, and thought, amid the paG.o.das, that there were minarets, also.

Suddenly, clear and ringing came the distant muezzin's cry: "There is no other G.o.d but G.o.d!... It is noon. Mussulmans, pray!"

The girl's arm slipped from his neck and she shuddered and pushed him from her.

There was nothing, now, on the river or beyond it but the curtain of hanging mist; no sound except the cry of a gull, sharp and querulous in the vapours overhead.

"Have--have you been amused?" she asked.

"What did you do to me!" he demanded harshly.

She smiled and drew a light breath like a sigh.

"G.o.d knows what we living do to one another,--or to ourselves," she said. "I only tried to amuse you--after taking counsel with the birds."

"What was that bridge I saw!"

"The Bridge of Ten Thousand Felicities."

"And the city?"

"Yian."

"You lived there?"

"Yes."

He moistened his dry lips and stole another glance at this very commonplace Florida river. Sky and water were blank and still, and the ghostly trees stood tall, reflected palely in the translucent tide.

"You merely made me visualise what you were thinking about," he concluded in a voice which still remained unsteady.

"Did you _hear_ nothing?"

He was silent, remembering the bells and the enormous murmur of a living mult.i.tude.

"And--there were the birds, too." She added, with an uncertain smile: "I do not mean to worry you.... And you did ask me to amuse you."

"I don't know how you did it," he said harshly. "And the details--those thousands and thousands of people on the bridge!... And there was one, quite near this end of the bridge, who looked back.... A young girl who turned and laughed at us--"

"That was Yulun."

"Who?"

"Yulun. I taught her English."

"A temple girl?"

"Yes. From Black China."

"How could you make _me_ see _her_!" he demanded.

"Why do you ask such things? I do not know how to tell you how I do it."

"It's a dangerous, uncanny knowledge!" he blurted out; and suddenly checked himself, for the girl's face went white.

"I don't mean uncanny," he hastened to add. "Because it seems to me that what you did by juggling with invisible currents to which, when attuned, our five senses respond, is on the same lines as the wireless telegraph and telephone."

She said nothing, but her colour slowly returned.

"You mustn't be so sensitive," he added. "I've no doubt that it's all quite normal--quite explicable on a perfectly scientific basis. Probably it's no more mysterious than a man in an airplane over midocean conversing with people ash.o.r.e on two continents."