Chapter XXI. Methuselah Gives Sign - Page 2

intercourse with their fellow-exile and victim, the Frenchman. It was this that made them have recourse to the device of the heliograph.

So three or four days passed before Muriel dared to approach M. Peyron's cottage. When she did at last go there with Felix, it was in the early morning, before the fierce tropical sun, that beat full on the island, had begun to exert its midday force and power. The path that led there lay through the thick and tangled mass of brushwood which covered the greater part of the island with its dense vegetation; it was overhung by huge tree-ferns and broad-leaved Southern bushes, and abutted at last on the little wind-swept knoll where the King of the Birds had his appropriate dwelling-place. The Frenchman received them with studied Parisian hospitality. He had decorated his arbor with fresh flowers for the occasion, and bright tropical fruits, with their own green leaves, did duty for the coffee or the absinthe of his fatherland on his homemade rustic table. Yet in spite of all the rudeness of the physical surroundings, they felt themselves at home again with this one exiled European; the faint flavor of civilization pervaded and permeated the Frenchman's hut after the unmixed savagery to which they had now been so long accustomed.

Muriel's curiosity, however, centred most about the mysterious old parrot, of whose strange legend so much had been said to her. After they had sat for a little under the shade of the spreading banyan, to cool down from their walk--for it was an oppressive morning--M. Peyron led her round to his aviary at the back of the hut, and introduced her, by their native names, to all his subjects. "I am responsible for their lives," he said, gravely, "for their welfare, for their happiness. If I were to let one of them grow old without a successor in the field to follow him up and receive his soul--as in the case of my friend Methuselah here, who was so neglected by my predecessors--the whole species would die out for want of a spirit, and my own life would atone for that of my people. There you have the central principle of the theology of Boupari. Every race, every element, every power of nature, is summed up for them in some particular person or thing; and on the life of that person or thing depends, as they believe, the entire health of the species, the sequence of events, the whole order and succession of natural phenomena."

Felix approached the mysterious and venerable bird with somewhat incautious fingers. "It looks very old," he said, trying to stroke its head and neck with a friendly gesture. "You do well, indeed, in calling it Methuselah."

As he spoke, the bird, alarmed at the vague consciousness of a hand and voice which it did not recognize and mindful of Tu-Kila-Kila's recent attack, made a vicious peck at the fingers outstretched to caress it. "Take care!" the Frenchman cried, in a warning