Blue Magic/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
"PASTURES NEW"
WHEN Fen first awoke he was puzzled by a dominant throbbing sound. Then he realized that it was the engine, and saw the pale river-banks slipping past the port-hole. And his first thought was not one of excitement, that he should be once more outward bound, but of desolation, that he should not see Siddereticus again.
The impression of the evening before was still very strong, and he longed to be able to stop Larry's ceasless babble about the picnic. At breakfast, Jackson, the colored steward, approached Fen, holding a small package rather gingerly.
"For you, Massa Fen," said the man. "Dis mawnin' early come a black man—black man wid a black mus-tash, and one ob dem fezzies on. He said, 'Gib dis to young Fen Eifendi,—he know.' I say, 'I ain't offended nobuddy.' But I tuk dis yer little passel, though I done distrus' sech a lookin' man. I thought mebbe—"
"That's quite enough, Jackson," said Mrs. Norvell, from behind the coffee-urn.
"'Scuse me, missis, 'scuse me!" muttered the steward, withdrawing. "Jest 'splainin'—"
Fen tucked the package beside him, whither the eyes of his cousins followed it.
"Is it from your Djinn? Aren't you going to even look at it?" they demanded in chorus.
"I know perfitly well what's in it," said Fen, imperturbably.
The first moment he was alone, however, he opened the parcel, which contained, sure enough, the little black box with the blue figure in it—quite whole again. There was also a little slip of thin paper, on which was printed in round black letters, quite easy to read:
"HIS NAME IS THOTH. AMONG OTHER THINGS, HE IS GOD OF MAGIC."
Meanwhile, the engines churned on steadily, and the monotonous Nile banks slipped as steadily astern.
The amulet certainly fulfilled its mission during the days which followed, since Sally and Larry were present almost all the time. Sometimes Fen grew very tired, watching their boundless energy and listening to their far from inspiring conversation with each other. Very often he longed to be alone with Siddereticus; and often when Larry was asleep, he talked to Thoth, whom he had installed on a little shelf beside his bed.
When at last the yacht left the Nile, and, having touched at Alexandria for supplies, breasted out once more into the Mediterranean, Fen gave up all hope of seeing again his dear Djinn, whom he somehow thought of as being inseparable from Egypt. The bracing sting of the sea wind and the sight of the high, blue waves running past were very welcome after the sluggish Nile and the heat of the Egyptian sun. Fen grew a little stronger, and a faint color tinged his cheeks.
The weather was unusually fair, and day followed blue day as the yacht passed Crete, skirted up the Grecian coast, and went through the Strait of Otranto into the Adriatic, bound for Venice. There was the usual monotonous routine of a sea voyage. Sally and Larry played hopscotch on the deck and climbed into places where they weren't allowed to climb; while Mrs. Norvell read or sewed under the awning beside Fen. They did not talk a great deal.
"He always seems to be so perfectly contented with his own thoughts that I rather hate to intrude on them," she told her husband. "He sits for hours looking out to sea without moving a muscle, and then suddenly turns around and looks right through me, and asks some extraordinary question."
She was often puzzled by her son, and because she had never learned to touch the responsive chords in him, she really understood him very little.
"He's such an un-get-at-able person, somehow," she complained to his father.
Then one evening, just at sunset, they entered the Porto di Lido, threaded among the outer islands, and came to anchor in the great lagoon. Far off, outlined against the saffron sky, lay Venice, with its tumbled silhouette of domes and campaniles. Lights were coming out in clusters along the water-front, and glancing here and there across the shimmering lagoon.
Fen begged so hard to sit up a little later than usual that he was allowed to stay on deck until the sunset glow had faded and the sky had paled and then deepened to dusk.
"It's a much beautifuller place to look at than Egypt," he thought as he fell asleep. "Oh, if Siddereticus were only here to tell me things—he makes everything be diff'rent, somehow."
It was the next afternoon that Sally dropped breathless into a chair beside Fen.
"Tell me about it, tell me all about everything—oh, please!" he begged.
"Oh, I can't!" said Sally. "Oh, it was wonderful—you can't even imagine it. Fen! 'Most all the streets are water, and we went around in one of those boat-things—what's-their-names?—gondolas: and Larry wants to live there always, so's he can fish out of the windows."
Larry, appearing over the side just then, spoke for himself.
"Really, you could, you know, Fen. Just hang a line out of the window and catch fishes. An' you'd have to stand on the door-step an' call a boat, 'stead of a taxi. Wouldn't it be fun, though?"
"But tell me all about it," pleaded their cousin, "everything you saw."
"I can't," insisted Sally; "there was such a lot,—lots of old palaces and churches and things,—simply heaps of 'em!"
"Siddereticus could tell me," thought Fen, wistfully.
There followed a week fraught with exciting expeditions ashore for the active members of the party, and with fruitless questioning for Fen, who was forced to content himself with the sight of the lagoon, busy with plying barges and gondolas and bright with orange-painted sails. And just too far away to distinguish anything clearly, Venice lay like the opalescent mirage of a fairy city.
Late one afternoon a big yawl, her shining sails spread like wings to the fresh breeze, stooped into the lagoon and anchored at some distance from the yacht. Norvell's attention was momentarily drawn to her, as she was unlike the other sailing-craft in the harbor.
"Looks like an American boat," he said, marine-glass in hand. "Wonder how she got here?" He did not waste much time or thought over the problem, however, and the yawl was quickly forgotten, almost lost to sight among the shipping of which the lagoon was full.
"You really must go to bed, my dear," said Fen's mother. "Here's Father now—he'll carry you down."
"Please," begged Fen; "just a few minutes more! I—I feel as if it was sort of special to-night. The lights are so nice—an' please, if you don't mind, I'd rather be all alone."
"Well," said his mother, "five minutes—but not more than that. Isn't it queer, Hal?" she added, as she walked toward the bow with her husband. "I never heard of children wanting to be alone, to watch things, the way he does."
A dark figure slipped quietly into a chair beside Fen, and a low voice remarked: "I came to kiss you good-night, mio caro."
"Oh, oh!" whispered Fen. "I didn't think it would really work! The lights were so lovely, an' everything was so still, an' I just held the amulet an' said, 'Come, dear Siddereticus,' over an' over—an' you did come! I wanted you so awfully," he said, with just the shadow of a break in his voice.
"Of course I came!" said Siddereticus, blithely. "You never can tell what amulets will do. But I think your five minutes are nearly gone."
"How did you know about a five minutes?" said Fen. "You aren't going, are you? Oh, I want you so to tell me all about Venice things."
"Not to-night. I couldn't tell you, anyway. You have to see it."
Fen's lip quivered a little.
"But I couldn't," he faltered. "Oh, I did think you could tell me!"
"I came to carry you to bed," said Siddereticus, as he gathered Fen into his arms, "not to talk about Venice."
"It seems, now, as if you hadn't ever been away," murmured the little boy, his head against the Djinn's broad shoulder.
Fen's chair was empty when his mother and father returned to it, and for a moment they were dumfounded.
"I suppose Mammy took him," said Norvell; and then, all at once, "Upon my word, Thornton, is it you?"
"Even I—Siddereticus," said a tall figure that loomed toward them out of the dusk.
"Then I have your consent, Mrs. Norvell?" Thornton asked, as he stood ready to take his leave some little time later.
"Well—yes," she replied, "I really don't see how it could do any harm, as you speak of it, though I never should have thought of it as possible; and it's really too kind of you, Mr.-er-Siddereticus."