The Opal Isles
An aged French nobleman, Gustav Berency, tells a young guest at his seaside estate why he has never married in the conventional sense, though he insists he is already wed "by the law of the heart." For fifty years a locked upper room of his house has held what he calls his wife, and he does not know whether she is alive or dead. Pressed by his guest, he recounts the story of his youth: raised in a bleak Breton monastery school, he unexpectedly inherited his family's title and fortune after his father and brother died, abandoned the idea of taking holy orders, and drifted through Paris society before setting out on a grand tour that carried him across Europe and Asia and finally onto the Pacific. During a cruise through Polynesia his ship wrecked on a coral reef in a typhoon; nearly the whole crew drowned, and he and two companions were captured by islanders who planned to kill them. A native woman secretly freed him in the night and led him across the island to a hidden stairway descending beneath the sea. Left with only a basket of food, he descended for what felt like days through utter darkness and silence, eventually climbing back up into a hidden garden crowning a fantastical city of white marble arranged like a wheel, its streets radiating from a central palace to the shore. Entering the palace through a marvelous, shifting silk-hung chamber lit by phantom lights of gold and silver, he found at its center an ivory crescent cradling what seemed to be either a sleeping woman or a giant, luminous opal shaped like one. The figure then rose and became a living woman, Asra, richly and strangely dressed, who welcomed him as a guest and told him he was in the "Opal Isles," a place "in the center of the shoreless sea," from which, she implied, there was no ordinary way to leave and no wish to. Berency was given native dress and drawn into the islands' civilization, a utopia governed not by wealth or religion but by joy, fearlessness, and the cultivated love of beauty; its cities were flawless works of art, and its people seemed untouched by grief or doubt. Asra became his guide and, over weeks, his beloved. She explained that she possessed the right to choose a mate freely and chose him, but warned that living in her world required him to banish fear, doubt, and sadness absolutely — any failure of nerve would bring a ruin he could not imagine. On an isolated outer islet, in a moment of exaltation, he pledged himself wholly to her and to a life of pure, fearless joy, and she accepted him. But at the height of his rapture, a memory of his somber Breton childhood intruded, doubt and fear overtook him, and he faltered, asking about death. His hesitation itself proved fatal to the enchantment: a monstrous "white wave" rose on the horizon, and Asra, now speaking of catastrophe, hurried him toward another hidden passage through the rock, sacrificing herself to save him. As they fled into the tunnel and a stone slab sealed the entrance behind them, her body in his arms turned cold, rigid, and weightless — she had become the great opal itself, the same object he had first seen cradled in the ivory crescent. Carrying the transformed Asra, he journeyed for an unknown span through another interminable subterranean passage, sustained by the food she had given him, until he emerged on a tiny, isolated French coaling station in the South Pacific. There, by starlight, he tried desperately to see her face again within the stone and occasionally glimpsed her, smiling, but by full daylight she had faded entirely from view, leaving only a play of color in the gem. Convinced that his doubt had killed her and that only renewed faith and joy might restore her, he borrowed money from the station keeper (who quietly took him for mad), reached Melbourne, and outfitted his own ship to search for the Opal Isles again. For years he and his crew combed the Pacific and Southern Ocean, becoming a byword for ill luck among sailors, but never found any trace of the islands. Alone at night on the ship he kept a private chamber for the opal, using wine and then drugs to try to rekindle the ecstatic, fearless joy needed to see Asra's face within it, but the visions grew rarer and fainter as his health and will declined, until they ceased altogether. Exhausted and aged, he abandoned the search and built, in his own house, a replica of Asra's opal chamber facing the sea, where the stone has lain ever since, and where he has spent his last decades hoping without real expectation of ever glimpsing her again. The frame narrative closes as the young listener departs the next day; a year later, in a newspaper far away, he reads that Gustav Berency has died and left his entire fortune, by an eccentric will, to a giant opal shaped like a woman's form.
By Edna Worthley Underwood · First published 1911 · Genre: Fantasy, Romance, Gothic Romance