THE CERTAIN HOUR
THE SOUL OF MELICENT
THE RIVET IN GRANDFATHER'S
NECK
CHIVALRY
THE CORDS OF VANITY
GALLANTRY
THE LINE OF LOVE
THE EAGLE'S SHADOW
BRANCH OF ABINGDON
BRANCHIANA
THE MAJORS AND THEIR MARRIAGES
FROM THE HIDDEN WAY
THE CERTAIN HOUR
(Dizain des Poetes)
By JAMES BRANCH CABELL
"Criticism, whatever may
be its pretensions, never does more than to define the impression which is made
upon it at a certain moment by a work wherein the writer himself noted the
impression of the world which he received at a certain hour."
"Ballad of the
Double-Soul" . . . . . . 9
AUCTORIAL INDUCTION . . . . .
. . . . . 11
BELHS CAVALIERS . . . . . . .
. . . . . 35
BALTHAZAR'S DAUGHTER. . . . .
. . . . . 61
JUDITH'S CREED. . . . . . . .
. . . . . 85
CONCERNING CORINNA. . . . . .
. . . . . 105
OLIVIA'S POTTAGE. . . . . . .
. . . . . 125
A BROWN WOMAN . . . . . . . .
. . . . . 147
PRO HONORIA . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . 169
THE IRRESISTIBLE OGLE . . . .
. . . . . 189
A PRINCESS OF GRUB STREET . .
. . . . . 209
THE LADY OF ALL OUR DREAMS. .
. . . . . 233
"Ballad of
Plagiary". . . . . . . . . . 251
"Les Dieux, qui
trop aiment ses faceties cruelles"
"These questions, so long as they remain with the Muses, may very
well be unaccompanied with severity, for where there is no other end of
contemplation and inquiry but that of pastime alone, the understanding is not
oppressed; but after the Muses have given over their riddles to Sphinx,--that
is, to practise, which urges and impels to action, choice and determination,
--then it is that they become torturing, severe and trying." From the dawn
of the day to the dusk he toiled, Shaping fanciful playthings, with tireless
hands,-- Useless trumpery toys; and, with vaulting heart, Gave them unto all
peoples, who mocked at him, Trampled on them, and soiled them, and went their
way. Then he toiled from the morn to the dusk again, Gave his gimcracks to
peoples who mocked at him, Trampled on them, deriding, and went their way. Thus
he labors, and loudly they jeer at him;-- That is, when they remember he still
exists. Who, you ask, is this fellow?--What matter names? He is only a
scribbler who is content. FELIX KENNASTON.The Toy-Maker. The desire to write perfectly of beautiful
happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills--and as immortal.
Questionless, there was many a serviceable brick wasted in Nineveh because
finicky persons must needs be deleting here and there a phrase in favor of its
cuneatic synonym; and it is not improbable that when the outworn sun expires in
clinkers its final ray will gild such zealots tinkering with their
"style." Some few there must be in every age and every land of whom
life claims nothing very insistently save that they write perfectly of
beautiful happenings.
Yet, that the work of a
man of letters is almost always a congenial product of his day and environment,
is a contention as lacking in novelty as it is in the need of any upholding
here. Nor is the rationality of that axiom far to seek; for a man of genuine
literary genius, since he possesses a temperament whose susceptibilities are of
wider area than those of any other, is inevitably of all people the one most
variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he, in consequence, who of
all people most faithfully and compactly exhibits the impress of his times and
his times' tendencies, not merely in his writings--where it conceivably might
be just predetermined affectation--but in his personality.
Such being the
assumption upon which this volume is builded, it appears only equitable for the
architect frankly to indicate his cornerstone. Hereinafter you have an attempt
to depict a special temperament--one in essence "literary"--as very
variously molded by diverse eras and as responding in proportion with its
ability to the demands of a certain hour.
In proportion with its
ability, be it repeated, since its ability is singularly hampered. For, apart
from any ticklish temporal considerations, be it remembered, life is always
claiming of this temperament's possessor that he write perfectly of beautiful
happenings.
To disregard this vital
longing, and flatly to stifle the innate striving toward artistic creation, is
to become (as with Wycherley and Sheridan) a man who waives, however
laughingly, his sole apology for existence. The proceeding is paltry enough, in
all conscience; and yet, upon the other side, there is much positive danger in
giving to the instinct a loose rein. For in that event the familiar
circumstances of sedate and wholesome living cannot but seem, like paintings
viewed too near, to lose in gusto and winsomeness. Desire, perhaps a craving
hunger, awakens for the impossible. No emotion, whatever be its sincerity, is
endured without a side-glance toward its capabilities for being written about.
The world, in short, inclines to appear an ill-lit mine, wherein one quarries
gingerly amidst an abiding loneliness (as with Pope and Ufford and Sire Raimbaut)--and
wherein one very often is allured into unsavory alleys (as with Herrick and
Alessandro de Medici)--in search of that raw material which loving labor will
transshape into comeliness.
Such, if it be allowed
to shift the metaphor, are the treacherous by-paths of that admirably policed
highway whereon the well-groomed and well-bitted Pegasi of Vanderhoffen and
Charteris (in his later manner) trot stolidly and safely toward oblivion. And
the result of wandering afield is of necessity a tragedy, in that the
deviator's life, if not as an artist's quite certainly as a human being's, must
in the outcome be adjudged a failure.
Hereinafter, then, you
have an attempt to depict a special temperament--one in essence
"literary"--as very variously molded by diverse eras and as
responding in proportion with its ability to the demands of a certain hour.
And this much said, it
is permissible to hope, at least, that here and there some reader may be found
not wholly blind to this book's goal, whatever be his opinion as to this book's
success in reaching it. Yet many honest souls there be among us
average-novel-readers in whose eyes this volume must rest content to figure as
a collection of short stories having naught in common beyond the feature that
each deals with the affaires du coeur of a poet.
Such must always be the
book's interpretation by mental indolence. The fact is incontestable; and this
fact in itself may be taken as sufficient to establish the inexpediency of
publishing The Certain Hour. For that "people will not buy a volume of
short stories" is notorious to all publishers. To offset the axiom there
are no doubt incongruous phenomena--ranging from the continued popularity of
the Bible to the present general esteem of Mr. Kipling, and embracing the
rather unaccountable vogue of "O. Henry";--but, none the less, the
superstition has its force.
Here intervenes the
multifariousness of man, pointed out somewhere by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, which
enables the individual to be at once a vegetarian, a golfer, a vestryman, a
blond, a mammal, a Democrat, and an immortal spirit. As a rational person, one
may debonairly consider The Certain Hour possesses as large license to look
like a volume of short stories as, say, a backgammon-board has to its customary
guise of a two-volume history; but as an average-novel-reader, one must vote
otherwise. As an average-novel-reader, one must condemn the very book which, as
a seasoned scribbler, one was moved to write through long consideration of the
drama already suggested--that immemorial drama of the desire to write perfectly
of beautiful happenings, and the obscure martyrdom to which this desire
solicits its possessor.
Now, clearly, the
struggle of a special temperament with a fixed force does not forthwith begin
another story when the locale of combat shifts. The case is, rather, as
when--with certainly an intervening change of apparel--Pompey fights Caesar at
both Dyrrachium and Pharsalus, or as when General Grant successively encounters
General Lee at the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor and Appomattox. The
combatants remain unchanged, the question at issue is the same, the tragedy has
continuity. And even so, from the time of Sire Raimbaut to that of John
Charteris has a special temperament heart-hungrily confronted an ageless
problem: at what cost now, in this fleet hour of my vigor, may one write
perfectly of beautiful happenings?
Thus logic urges, with
pathetic futility, inasmuch as we average-novel-readers are profoundly
indifferent to both logic and good writing. And always the fact remains that to
the mentally indolent this book may well seem a volume of disconnected short
stories. All of us being more or less mentally indolent, this possibility
constitutes a dire fault.
Three other damning
objections will readily obtrude themselves: The Certain Hour deals with past
epochs--beginning before the introduction of dinner-forks, and ending at that
remote quaint period when people used to waltz and two-step--dead eras in which
we average-novel-readers are not interested; The Certain Hour assumes an
appreciable amount of culture and information on its purchaser's part, which we
average-novel-readers either lack or, else, are unaccustomed to employ in
connection with reading for pastime; and--in our eyes the crowning
misdemeanor--The Certain Hour is not "vital."
Having thus candidly
confessed these faults committed as the writer of this book, it is still
possible in human multifariousness to consider their enormity, not merely in
this book, but in fictional reading-matter at large, as viewed by an
average-novel-reader--by a representative of that potent class whose
preferences dictate the nature and main trend of modern American literature.
And to do this, it may be, throws no unsalutary sidelight upon the still-existent
problem: at what cost, now, may one attempt to write perfectly of beautiful
happenings?
Indisputably the most
striking defect of this modern American literature is the fact that the
production of anything at all resembling literature is scarcely anywhere
apparent. Innumerable printing-presses, instead, are turning out a vast
quantity of reading-matter, the candidly recognized purpose of which is to kill
time, and which--it has been asserted, though perhaps too sweepingly--ought not
to be vended over book-counters, but rather in drugstores along with the other
narcotics.
It is begging the question
to protest that the class of people who a generation ago read nothing now at
least read novels, and to regard this as a change for the better. By similar
logic it would be more wholesome to breakfast off laudanum than to omit the
meal entirely. The nineteenth century, in fact, by making education popular,
has produced in America the curious spectacle of a reading-public with
essentially nonliterary tastes. Formerly, better books were published, because
they were intended for persons who turned to reading through a natural bent of
mind; whereas the modern American novel of commerce is addressed to us average
people who read, when we read at all, in violation of every innate instinct.
Such grounds as yet
exist for hopefulness on the part of those who cordially care for belles
lettres are to be found elsewhere than in the crowded market-places of fiction,
where genuine intelligence panders on all sides to ignorance and indolence. The
phrase may seem to have no very civil ring; but reflection will assure the
fair-minded that two indispensable requisites nowadays of a pecuniarily
successful novel are, really, that it make no demand upon the reader's
imagination, and that it rigorously refrain from assuming its reader to possess
any particular information on any subject whatever. The author who writes over
the head of the public is the most dangerous enemy of his publisher--and the
most insidious as well, because so many publishers are in private life
interested in literary matters, and would readily permit this personal foible
to influence the exercise of their vocation were it possible to do so upon the
preferable side of bankruptcy.
But publishers, among
innumerable other conditions, must weigh the fact that no novel which does not
deal with modern times is ever really popular among the serious-minded. It is
difficult to imagine a tale whose action developed under the rule of the
Caesars or the Merovingians being treated as more than a literary hors
d'oeuvre. We purchasers of "vital" novels know nothing about the
period, beyond a hazy association of it with the restrictions of the
schoolroom; our sluggish imaginations instinctively rebel against the exertion
of forming any notion of such a period; and all the human nature that exists
even in serious-minded persons is stirred up to resentment against the book's
author for presuming to know more than a potential patron. The book, in fine,
simply irritates the serious-minded person; and she--for it is only women who
willingly brave the terrors of department-stores, where most of our new books
are bought nowadays--quite naturally puts it aside in favor of some keen and
daring study of American life that is warranted to grip the reader. So,
modernity of scene is everywhere necessitated as an essential qualification for
a book's discussion at the literary evenings of the local woman's club; and
modernity of scene, of course, is almost always fatal to the permanent worth of
fictitious narrative.
It may seem banal here
to recall the truism that first-class art never reproduces its surroundings;
but such banality is often justified by our human proneness to shuffle over the
fact that many truisms are true. And this one is pre-eminently indisputable:
that what mankind has generally agreed to accept as first-class art in any of
the varied forms of fictitious narrative has never been a truthful reproduction
of the artist's era. Indeed, in the higher walks of fiction art has never
reproduced anything, but has always dealt with the facts and laws of life as so
much crude material which must be transmuted into comeliness. When Shakespeare
pronounced his celebrated dictum about art's holding the mirror up to nature,
he was no doubt alluding to the circumstance that a mirror reverses everything
which it reflects.
Nourishment for much
wildish speculation, in fact, can be got by considering what the world's
literature would be, had its authors restricted themselves, as do we Americans
so sedulously--and unavoidably--to writing of contemporaneous happenings. In
fiction-making no author of the first class since Homer's infancy has ever in
his happier efforts concerned himself at all with the great
"problems" of his particular day; and among geniuses of the second
rank you will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are
distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broad humor of a
Dickens or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such cases as the latter two
writers, however, we have an otherwise competent artist handicapped by a
personality so marked that, whatever he may nominally write about, the result
is, above all else, an exposure of the writer's idiosyncrasies. Then, too, the
laws of any locale wherein Mr. Pickwick achieves a competence in business, or
of a society wherein Vautrin becomes chief of police, are upon the face of it
extra-mundane. It suffices that, as a general rule, in fiction-making the true
artist finds an ample, if restricted, field wherein the proper functions of the
preacher, or the ventriloquist, or the photographer, or of the public
prosecutor, are exercised with equal lack of grace.
Besides, in dealing
with contemporary life a novelist is goaded into too many pusillanimous
concessions to plausibility. He no longer moves with the gait of omnipotence.
It was very different in the palmy days when Dumas was free to play at ducks
and drakes with history, and Victor Hugo to reconstruct the whole system of
English government, and Scott to compel the sun to set in the east, whenever
such minor changes caused to flow more smoothly the progress of the tale these
giants had in hand. These freedoms are not tolerated in American noveldom, and
only a few futile "high-brows" sigh in vain for Thackeray's
"happy harmless Fableland, where these things are." The majority of
us are deep in "vital" novels. Nor is the reason far to seek.
One hears a great deal
nowadays concerning "vital" books. Their authors have been widely
praised on very various grounds. Oddly enough, however, the writers of these
books have rarely been commended for the really praiseworthy charity evinced
therein toward that large long-suffering class loosely describable as the
average-novel-reader.
Yet, in connection with
this fact, it is worthy of more than passing note that no great while ago the
New York Times' carefully selected committee, in picking out the hundred best
books published during a particular year, declared as to novels--"a `best'
book, in our opinion, is one that raises an important question, or recurs to a
vital theme and pronounces upon it what in some sense is a last word." Now
this definition is not likely ever to receive more praise than it deserves.
Cavilers may, of course, complain that actually to write the last word on any
subject is a feat reserved for the Recording Angel's unique performance on
judgment Day. Even setting that objection aside, it is undeniable that no work
of fiction published of late in America corresponds quite so accurately to the
terms of this definition as do the multiplication tables. Yet the
multiplication tables are not without their claims to applause as examples of
straightforward narrative. It is, also, at least permissible to consider that
therein the numeral five, say, where it figures as protagonist, unfolds under
the stress of its varying adventures as opulent a development of real human
nature as does, through similar ups-and-downs, the Reverend John Hodder in The
Inside of the Cup. It is equally allowable to find the less simple evolution of
the digit seven more sympathetic, upon the whole, than those of Undine Spragg
in The Custom of the Country. But, even so, this definition of what may now,
authoritatively, be ranked as a "best novel" is an honest and
noteworthy severance from misleading literary associations such as have too
long befogged our notions about reading-matter. It points with emphasis toward
the altruistic obligations of tale-tellers to be "vital."
For we
average-novel-readers--we average people, in a word--are now, as always, rather
pathetically hungry for "vital" themes, such themes as appeal directly
to our everyday observation and prejudices. Did the decision rest with us all
novelists would be put under bond to confine themselves forevermore to themes
like these.
As touches the appeal
to everyday observation, it is an old story, at least coeval with Mr. Crummles'
not uncelebrated pumps and tubs, if not with the grapes of Zeuxis, how
unfailingly in art we delight to recognize the familiar. A novel whose scene of
action is explicit will always interest the people of that locality, whatever
the book's other pretensions to consideration. Given simultaneously a
photograph of Murillo's rendering of The Virgin Crowned Queen of Heaven and a
photograph of a governor's installation in our State capital, there is no one
of us but will quite naturally look at the latter first, in order to see if in
it some familiar countenance be recognizable. And thus, upon a larger scale,
the twentieth century is, pre-eminently, interested in the twentieth century.
It is all very well to
describe our average-novel-readers' dislike of Romanticism as "the rage of
Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass." It is even within the scope
of human dunderheadedness again to point out here that the supreme artists in
literature have precisely this in common, and this alone, that in their
masterworks they have avoided the "vital" themes of their day with
such circumspection as lesser folk reserve for the smallpox. The answer, of
course, in either case, is that the "vital" novel, the novel which
peculiarly appeals to us average-novel-readers, has nothing to do with
literature. There is between these two no more intelligent connection than
links the paint Mr. Sargent puts on canvas and the paint Mr. Dockstader puts on
his face.
Literature is made up
of the re-readable books, the books which it is possible--for the people so
constituted as to care for that sort of thing--to read again and yet again with
pleasure. Therefore, in literature a book's subject is of astonishingly minor
importance, and its style nearly everything: whereas in books intended to be
read for pastime, and forthwith to be consigned at random to the wastebasket or
to the inmates of some charitable institute, the theme is of paramount
importance, and ought to be a serious one. The modern novelist owes it to his public
to select a "vital" theme which in itself will fix the reader's
attention by reason of its familiarity in the reader's everyday life.
Thus, a lady with whose
more candid opinions the writer of this is more frequently favored nowadays
than of old, formerly confessed to having only one set rule when it came to
investment in new reading-matter--always to buy the Williamsons' last book. Her
reason was the perfectly sensible one that the Williamsons' plots used
invariably to pivot upon motor-trips, and she is an ardent automobilist. Since,
as of late, the Williamsons have seen fit to exercise their typewriter upon
other topics, they have as a matter of course lost her patronage.
This principle of
selection, when you come to appraise it sanely, is the sole intelligent method
of dealing with reading-matter. It seems here expedient again to state the
peculiar problem that we average--novel-readers have of necessity set the
modern novelist--namely, that his books must in the main appeal to people who
read for pastime, to people who read books only under protest and only when
they have no other employment for that particular half-hour.
Now, reading for
pastime is immensely simplified when the book's theme is some familiar matter
of the reader's workaday life, because at outset the reader is spared
considerable mental effort. The motorist above referred to, and indeed any
average-novel-reader, can without exertion conceive of the Williamsons' people
in their automobiles. Contrariwise, were these fictitious characters embarked
in palankeens or droshkies or jinrikishas, more or less intellectual exercise
would be necessitated on the reader's part to form a notion of the conveyance.
And we average-novel-readers do not open a book with the intention of making a
mental effort. The author has no right to expect of us an act so unhabitual, we
very poignantly feel. Our prejudices he is freely chartered to stir up--if,
lucky rogue, he can!--but he ought with deliberation to recognize that it is
precisely in order to avoid mental effort that we purchase, or borrow, his
book, and afterward discuss it.
Hence arises our
heartfelt gratitude toward such novels as deal with "vital" themes,
with the questions we average-novel-readers confront or make talk about in
those happier hours of our existence wherein we are not reduced to reading.
Thus, a tale, for example, dealing either with "feminism" or
"white slavery" as the handiest makeshift of spinsterdom--or with the
divorce habit and plutocratic iniquity in general, or with the probable
benefits of converting clergymen to Christianity, or with how much more than
she knows a desirable mother will tell her children--finds the book's tentative
explorer, just now, amply equipped with prejudices, whether acquired by second
thought or second hand, concerning the book's topic. As endurability goes,
reading the book rises forthwith almost to the level of an afternoon-call where
there is gossip about the neighbors and Germany's future. We
average-novel-readers may not, in either case, agree with the opinions
advanced; but at least our prejudices are aroused, and we are interested.
And these
"vital" themes awake our prejudices at the cost of a minimum--if not
always, as when Miss Corelli guides us, with a positively negligible--tasking
of our mental faculties. For such exemption we average-novel-readers cannot but
be properly grateful. Nay, more than this: provided the novelist contrive to
rouse our prejudices, it matters with us not at all whether afterward they be
soothed or harrowed. To implicate our prejudices somehow, to raise in us a
partizanship in the tale's progress, is our sole request. Whether this
consummation be brought about through an arraignment of some social condition
which we personally either advocate or reprehend--the attitude weighs
little--or whether this interest be purchased with placidly driveling
preachments of generally "uplifting" tendencies--vaguely titillating
that vague intention which exists in us all of becoming immaculate as soon as
it is perfectly convenient--the personal prejudices of us average-novel-readers
are not lightly lulled again to sleep.
In fact, the jealousy
of any human prejudice against hinted encroachment may safely be depended upon
to spur us through an astonishing number of pages--for all that it has of late
been complained among us, with some show of extenuation, that our original
intent in beginning certain of the recent "vital" novels was to kill
time, rather than eternity. And so, we average--novel-readers plod on jealously
to the end, whether we advance (to cite examples already somewhat of yesterday)
under the leadership of Mr. Upton Sinclair aspersing the integrity of modern
sausages and millionaires, or of Mr. Hall Caine saying about Roman Catholics
what ordinary people would hesitate to impute to their relatives by
marriage--or whether we be more suavely allured onward by Mrs. Florence
Barclay, or Mr. Sydnor Harrison, with ingenuous indorsements of the New
Testament and the inherent womanliness of women.
The "vital"
theme, then, let it be repeated, has two inestimable advantages which should
commend it to all novelists: first, it spares us average-novel-readers any
preliminary orientation, and thereby mitigates the mental exertion of reading;
and secondly, it appeals to our prejudices, which we naturally prefer to
exercise, and are accustomed to exercise, rather than our mental or idealistic
faculties. The novelist who conscientiously bears these two facts in mind is
reasonably sure of his reward, not merely in pecuniary form, but in those
higher fields wherein he harvests his chosen public's honest gratitude and
affection.
For we
average-novel-readers are quite frequently reduced by circumstances to
self-entrustment to the resources of the novelist, as to those of the dentist.
Our latter-day conditions, as we cannot but recognize, necessitate the
employment of both artists upon occasion. And with both, we
average-novel-readers, we average people, are most grateful when they make the
process of resorting to them as easy and unirritating as may be possible.
So much for the plea of
us average-novel-readers; and our plea, we think, is rational. We are "in
the market" for a specified article; and human ingenuity, co-operating
with human nature, will inevitably insure the manufacture of that article as
long as any general demand for it endures.
Meanwhile, it is small
cause for grief that the purchaser of American novels prefers Central Park to
any "wood near Athens," and is more at home in the Tenderloin than in
Camelot. People whose tastes happen to be literary are entirely too prone to
too much long-faced prattle about literature, which, when all is said, is never
a controlling factor in anybody's life. The automobile and the telephone, the
accomplishments of Mr. Edison and Mr. Burbank, and it would be permissible to
add of Mr. Rockefeller, influence nowadays, in one fashion or another, every
moment of every living American's existence; whereas had America produced,
instead, a second Milton or a Dante, it would at most have caused a few of us
to spend a few spare evenings rather differently.
Besides, we know--even
we average-novel-readers--that America is in fact producing her enduring
literature day by day, although, as rarely fails to be the case, those who are
contemporaneous with the makers of this literature cannot with any certainty point
them out. To voice a hoary truism, time alone is the test of
"vitality." In our present flood of books, as in any other flood, it
is the froth and scum which shows most prominently. And the possession of
"vitality," here as elsewhere, postulates that its possessor must
ultimately perish.
Nay, by the time these
printed pages are first read as printed pages, allusion to those modern authors
whom these pages cite--the pre-eminent literary personages of that hour wherein
these pages were written--will inevitably have come to savor somewhat of
antiquity: so that sundry references herein to the "vital" books now
most in vogue will rouse much that vague shrugging recollection as wakens, say,
at a mention of Dorothy Vernon or Three Weeks or Beverly of Graustark. And
while at first glance it might seem expedient--in revising the last
proof-sheets of these pages--somewhat to "freshen them up" by
substituting, for the books herein referred to, the "vital" and more
widely talked-of novels of the summer of 1916, the task would be but wasted
labor; since even these fascinating chronicles, one comprehends forlornly, must
needs be equally obsolete by the time these proof-sheets have been made into a
volume. With malice aforethought, therefore, the books and authors named herein
stay those which all of three years back our reviewers and advertising pages,
with perfect gravity, acclaimed as of enduring importance. For the quaintness
of that opinion, nowadays, may profitably round the moral that there is really
nothing whereto one may fittingly compare a successful contribution to
"vital" reading-matter, as touches evanescence.
And this is as it
should be. Tout passe.--L'art robust seul a l'eternite, precisely as Gautier
points out, with bracing common-sense; and it is excellent thus to comprehend
that to-day, as always, only through exercise of the auctorial virtues of
distinction and clarity, of beauty and symmetry, of tenderness and truth and
urbanity, may a man in reason attempt to insure his books against oblivion's voracity.
Yet the desire to write
perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills--and
as immortal. Questionless, there was many a serviceable brick wasted in Nineveh
because finicky persons must needs be deleting here and there a phrase in favor
of its cuneatic synonym; and it is not improbable that when the outworn sun
expires in clinkers its final ray will gild such zealots tinkering with their
"style." This, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter. Some few
there must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothing very
insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful happenings. And even we
average-novel-readers know it is such folk who are to-day making in America
that portion of our literature which may hope for permanency. Dumbarton Grange,
1914-1916
"For this RAIMBAUT
DE VAQUIERAS lived at a time when prolonged habits of extra-mundane
contemplation, combined with the decay of real knowledge, were apt to
volatilize the thoughts and aspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy
unrealities, and to lend a false air of mysticism to love. . . . It is as if
the intellect and the will had become used to moving paralytically among
visions, dreams, and mystic terrors, weighed down with torpor."
Fair friend, since that hour I took leave of thee I have not slept nor
stirred from off my knee, But prayed alway to God, S. Mary's Son, To give me
back my true companion; And soon it will be Dawn. Fair friend, at parting, thy
behest to me Was that all sloth I should eschew and flee, And keep good Watch
until the Night was done: Now must my Song and Service pass for none? For soon
it will be Dawn. RAIMBAUT DE VAQUIERAS. Aubade, from F. York Powells version. You may read elsewhere of the long
feud that was between Guillaume de Baux, afterward Prince of Orange, and his
kinsman Raimbaut de Vaquieras. They were not reconciled until their youth was
dead. Then, when Messire Raimbaut returned from battling against the Turks and
the Bulgarians, in the 1,210th year from man's salvation, the Archbishop of
Rheims made peace between the two cousins; and, attended by Makrisi, a
converted Saracen who had followed the knight's fortunes for well nigh a
quarter of a century, the Sire de Vaquieras rode homeward.
Many slain men were
scattered along the highway when he came again into Venaissin, in April, after
an absence of thirty years. The crows whom his passing disturbed were too
sluggish for long flights and many of them did not heed him at all. Guillaume
de Baux was now undisputed master of these parts, although, as this host of
mute, hacked and partially devoured witnesses attested, the contest had been
dubious for a while: but now Lovain of the Great-Tooth, Prince Guillaume's last
competitor, was captured; the forces of Lovain were scattered; and of Lovain's
lieutenants only Mahi de Vernoil was unsubdued.
Prince Guillaume
laughed a little when he told his kinsman of the posture of affairs, as more
loudly did Guillaume's gross son, Sire Philibert. But Madona Biatritz did not
laugh. She was the widow of Guillaume's dead brother--Prince Conrat, whom
Guillaume succeeded--and it was in her honor that Raimbaut had made those songs
which won him eminence as a practitioner of the Gay Science.
Biatritz said, "It
is a long while since we two met."
He that had been her
lover all his life said, "Yes."
She was no longer the
most beautiful of women, no longer his be-hymned Belhs Cavaliers--you may read
elsewhere how he came to call her that in all his canzons--but only a fine and
gracious stranger. It was uniformly gray, that soft and plentiful hair, where
once such gold had flamed as dizzied him to think of even now; there was no
crimson in these thinner lips; and candor would have found her eyes less
wonderful than those Raimbaut had dreamed of very often among an alien and
hostile people. But he lamented nothing, and to him she was as ever Heaven's
most splendid miracle.
"Yes," said
this old Raimbaut,--"and even to-day we have not reclaimed the Sepulcher
as yet. Oh, I doubt if we shall ever win it, now that your brother and my most
dear lord is dead." Both thought a while of Boniface de Montferrat, their
playmate once, who yesterday was King of Thessalonica and now was so much
Macedonian dust.
She said: "This
week the Prince sent envoys to my nephew. . . . And so you have come home
again----" Color had surged into her time-worn face, and as she thought of
things done long ago this woman's eyes were like the eyes of his young
Biatritz. She said: "You never married?"
He answered: "No,
I have left love alone. For Love prefers to take rather than to give; against a
single happy hour he balances a hundred miseries, and he appraises one pleasure
to be worth a thousand pangs. Pardieu, let this immortal usurer contrive as may
seem well to him, for I desire no more of his bounty or of his penalties."
"No, we wish
earnestly for nothing, either good or bad," said Dona Biatritz--"we
who have done with loving."
They sat in silence,
musing over ancient happenings, and not looking at each other, until the Prince
came with his guests, who seemed to laugh too heartily.
Guillaume's frail arm
was about his kinsman, and Guillaume chuckled over jests and by-words that had
been between the cousins as children. Raimbaut found them no food for laughter
now. Guillaume told all of Raimbaut's oath of fealty, and of how these two were
friends and their unnatural feud was forgotten. "For we grow old,--eh,
maker of songs?" he said; "and it is time we made our peace with
Heaven, since we are not long for this world."
"Yes," said
the knight; "oh yes, we both grow old." He thought of another April
evening, so long ago, when this Guillaume de Baux had stabbed him in a hedged
field near Calais, and had left him under a hawthorn bush for dead; and Raimbaut
wondered that there was no anger in his heart. "We are friends now,"
he said. Biatritz, whom these two had loved, and whose vanished beauty had been
the spur of their long enmity, sat close to them, and hardly seemed to listen.
Thus the evening passed
and every one was merry, because the Prince had overcome Lovain of the
Great-Tooth, and was to punish the upstart on the morrow. But Raimbaut de
Vaquieras, a spent fellow, a derelict, barren of aim now that the Holy Wars
were over, sat in this unfamiliar place--where when he was young he had laughed
as a cock crows!--and thought how at the last he had crept home to die as a
dependent on his cousin's bounty.
Thus the evening
passed, and at its end Makrisi followed the troubadour to his regranted fief of
Vaquieras. This was a chill and brilliant night, swayed by a frozen moon so
powerful that no stars showed in the unclouded heavens, and everywhere the bogs
were curdled with thin ice. An obdurate wind swept like a knife-blade across a
world which even in its spring seemed very old.
"This night is
bleak and evil," Makrisi said. He rode a coffin's length behind his
master. "It is like Prince Guillaume, I think. What man will sorrow when
dawn comes?"
Raimbaut de Vaquieras
replied: "Always dawn comes at last, Makrisi."
"It comes the more
quickly, messire, when it is prompted."
The troubadour only
smiled at words which seemed so meaningless. He did not smile when later in the
night Makrisi brought Mahi de Vernoil, disguised as a mendicant friar. This
outlaw pleaded with Sire Raimbaut to head the tatters of Lovain's army, and
showed Raimbaut how easy it would be to wrest Venaissin from Prince Guillaume.
"We cannot save Lovain," de Vemoil said, "for Guillaume has him
fast. But Venaissin is very proud of you, my tres beau sire. Ho, maker of
world-famous songs! stout champion of the faith! my men and I will now make you
Prince of Orange in place of the fiend who rules us. You may then at your
convenience wed Madona Biatritz, that most amiable lady whom you have loved so
long. And by the Cross! you may do this before the week is out."
The old knight
answered: "It is true that I have always served Madona Biatritz, who is of
matchless worth. I might not, therefore, presume to call myself any longer her
servant were my honor stained in any particular. Oh no, Messire de Vernoil, an
oath is an oath. I have this day sworn fealty to Guillaume de Baux."
Then after other talk
Raimbaut dismissed the fierce-eyed little man. The freebooter growled curses as
he went. On a sudden he whistled, like a person considering, and he began to
chuckle.
Raimbaut said, more
lately: "Zoraida left no wholesome legacy in you, Makrisi." This
Zoraida was a woman the knight had known in Constantinople--a comely outlander
who had killed herself because of Sire Raimbaut's highflown avoidance of all
womankind except the mistress of his youth.
"Nay, save only in
loving you too well, messire, was Zoraida a wise woman, notably. . . . But this
is outworn talk, the prattle of Cain's babyhood. As matters were, you did not
love Zoraida. So Zoraida died. Such is the custom in my country."
"You trouble me,
Makrisi. Your eyes are like blown coals. . . . Yet you have served me long and
faithfully. You know that mine was ever the vocation of dealing honorably in
battle among emperors, and of spreading broadcast the rumor of my valor, and of
achieving good by my sword's labors. I have lived by warfare. Long, long ago,
since I derived no benefit from love, I cried farewell to it."
"Ay," said
Makrisi. "Love makes a demi-god of all--just for an hour. Such hours as
follow we devote to the concoction of sleeping-draughts." He laughed, and
very harshly.
And Raimbaut did not
sleep that night because this life of ours seemed such a piece of tangle-work
as he had not the skill to unravel. So he devoted the wakeful hours to
composition of a planh, lamenting vanished youth and that Biatritz whom the
years had stolen.
Then on the ensuing
morning, after some talk about the new campaign, Prince Guillaume de Baux
leaned back in his high chair and said, abruptly:
"In perfect
candor, you puzzle your liege-lord. For you loathe me and you still worship my
sister-in-law, an unattainable princess. In these two particulars you display
such wisdom as would inevitably prompt you to make an end of me. Yet, what the
devil! you, the time-battered vagabond, decline happiness and a kingdom to boot
because of yesterday's mummery in the cathedral! because of a mere promise
given! Yes, I have my spies in every rat-hole. I am aware that my barons hate
me, and hate Philibert almost as bitterly,--and that, in fine, a majority of my
barons would prefer to see you Prince in my unstable place, on account of your
praiseworthy molestations of heathenry. Oh, yes, I understand my barons
perfectly. I flatter myself I understand everybody in Venaissin save you."
Raimbaut answered:
"You and I are not alike."
"No, praise each
and every Saint!" said the Prince of Orange, heartily. "And yet, I am
not sure----" He rose, for his sight had failed him so that he could not
distinctly see you except when he spoke with head thrown back, as though he
looked at you over a wall. "For instance, do you understand that I hold
Biatritz here as a prisoner, because her dower-lands are necessary to me, and
that I intend to marry her as soon as Pope Innocent grants me a dispensation?"
"All Venaissin
knows that. Yes, you have always gained everything which you desired in this
world, Guillaume. Yet it was at a price, I think."
"I am no haggler.
. . . But you have never comprehended me, not even in the old days when we
loved each other. For instance, do you understand--slave of a spoken
word!--what it must mean to me to know that at this hour to-morrow there will
be alive in Venaissin no person whom I hate?"
Messire de Vaquieras
reflected. His was never a rapid mind. "Why, no, I do not know anything
about hatred," he said, at last. "I think I never hated any
person."
Guillaume de Baux gave
a half-frantic gesture. "Now, Heaven send you troubadours a clearer
understanding of what sort of world we live in----!" He broke off short
and growled, "And yet--sometimes I envy you, Raimbaut!"
They rode then into the
Square of St. Michel to witness the death of Lovain. Guillaume took with him
his two new mistresses and all his by-blows, each magnificently clothed, as if
they rode to a festival. Afterward, before the doors of Lovain's burning house,
a rope was fastened under Lovain's armpits, and he was gently lowered into a
pot of boiling oil. His feet cooked first, and then the flesh of his legs, and
so on upward, while Lovain screamed. Guillaume in a loose robe of green
powdered with innumerable silver crescents, sat watching, under a canopy woven
very long ago in Tarshish, and cunningly embroidered with the figures of
peacocks and apes and men with eagles' heads. His hands caressed each other meditatively.
It was on the afternoon
of this day, the last of April, that Sire Raimbaut came upon Madona Biatritz
about a strange employment in the Ladies' Court. There was then a well in the
midst of this enclosure, with a granite ledge around it carven with lilies; and
upon this she leaned, looking down into the water. In her lap was a rope of
pearls, which one by one she unthreaded and dropped into the well.
Clear and warm the
weather was. Without, forests were quickening, branch by branch, as though a
green flame smoldered from one bough to another. Violets peeped about the roots
of trees, and all the world was young again. But here was only stone beneath
their feet; and about them showed the high walls and the lead-sheathed towers
and the parapets and the sunk windows of Guillaume's chateau. There was no
color anywhere save gray; and Raimbaut and Biatritz were aging people now. It
seemed to him that they were the wraiths of those persons who had loved each
other at Montferrat; and that the walls about them and the leaden devils who
grinned from every waterspout and all those dark and narrow windows were only
part of some magic picture, such as a sorceress may momentarily summon out of
smoke-wreaths, as he had seen Zoraida do very long ago.
This woman might have
been a wraith in verity, for she was clothed throughout in white, save for the
ponderous gold girdle about her middle. A white gorget framed the face which
was so pinched and shrewd and strange; and she peered into the well, smiling
craftily.
"I was thinking
death was like this well," said Biatritz, without any cessation of her
singular employment--"so dark that we may see nothing clearly save one
faint gleam which shows us, or which seems to show us, where rest is. Yes, yes,
this is that chaplet which you won in the tournament at Montferrat when we were
young. Pearls are the symbol of tears, we read. But we had no time for reading
then, no time for anything except to be quite happy. . . . You saw this
morning's work. Raimbaut, were Satan to go mad he would be such a fiend as this
Guillaume de Baux who is our master!"
"Ay, the man is as
cruel as my old opponent, Mourzoufle," Sire Raimbaut answered, with a
patient shrug. "It is a great mystery why such persons should win all
which they desire of this world. We can but recognize that it is for some
sufficient reason." Then he talked with her concerning the aforementioned
infamous emperor of the East, against whom the old knight had fought, and of
Enrico Dandolo and of King Boniface, dead brother to Madona Biatritz, and of
much remote, outlandish adventuring oversea. Of Zoraida he did not speak. And
Biatritz, in turn, told him of that one child which she had borne her husband,
Prince Conrat--a son who died in infancy; and she spoke of this dead baby, who
living would have been their monarch, with a sweet quietude that wrung the old
knight's heart.
Thus these spent people
sat and talked for a long while, the talk veering anywhither just as chance
directed. Blurred gusts of song and laughter would come to them at times from
the hall where Guillaume de Baux drank with his courtiers, and these would
break the tranquil flow of speech. Then, unvexedly, the gentle voice of the
speaker, were it his or hers, would resume.
She said: "They
laugh. We are not merry."
"No," he
replied; "I am not often merry. There was a time when love and its service
kept me in continuous joy, as waters invest a fish. I woke from a high dream. .
. . And then, but for the fear of seeming cowardly, I would have extinguished
my life as men blow out a candle. Vanity preserved me, sheer vanity!" He
shrugged, spreading his hard lean hands. "Belhs Cavaliers, I grudged my
enemies the pleasure of seeing me forgetful of valor and noble enterprises. And
so, since then, I have served Heaven, in default of you."
"I would not have
it otherwise," she said, half as in wonder; "I would not have you be
quite sane like other men. And I believe," she added--still with her wise
smile--"you have derived a deal of comfort, off and on, from being heart-broken."
He replied gravely:
"A man may always, if he will but take the pains, be tolerably content and
rise in worth, and yet dispense with love. He has only to guard himself against
baseness, and concentrate his powers on doing right. Thus, therefore, when
fortune failed me, I persisted in acting to the best of my ability. Though I
had lost my lands and my loved lady, I must hold fast to my own worth. Without
a lady and without acreage, it was yet in my power to live a cleanly and
honorable life; and I did not wish to make two evils out of one."
"Assuredly, I
would not have you be quite sane like other men," she repeated. "It
would seem that you have somehow blundered through long years, preserving
always the ignorance of a child, and the blindness of a child. I cannot
understand how this is possible; nor can I keep from smiling at your high-flown
notions; and yet,--I envy you, Raimbaut."
Thus the afternoon
passed, and the rule of Prince Guillaume was made secure. His supper was
worthily appointed, for Guillaume loved color and music and beauty of every
kind, and was on this, the day of his triumph, in a prodigal humor. Many
lackeys in scarlet brought in the first course, to the sound of exultant drums
and pipes, with a blast of trumpets and a waving of banners, so that all hearts
were uplifted, and Guillaume jested with harsh laughter.
But Raimbaut de
Vaquieras was not mirthful, for he was remembering a boy whom he had known of
very long ago. He was swayed by an odd fancy, as the men sat over their wine,
and jongleurs sang and performed tricks for their diversion, that this boy, so
frank and excellent, as yet existed somewhere; and that the Raimbaut who moved
these shriveled hands before him, on the table there, was only a sad dream of
what had never been. It troubled him, too, to see how grossly these soldiers
ate, for, as a person of refinement, an associate of monarchs, Sire Raimbaut
when the dishes were passed picked up his meats between the index-and the
middle-finger of his left hand, and esteemed it infamous manners to dip any
other fingers into the gravy.
Guillaume had left the
Warriors' Hall. Philibert was drunk, and half the men-at-arms were snoring
among the rushes, when at the height of their festivity Makrisi came. He
plucked his master by the sleeve.
A swarthy, bearded
Angevin was singing. His song was one of old Sire Raimbaut's famous canzons in
honor of Belhs Cavaliers. The knave was singing blithely: Pus mos Belhs
Cavaliers grazitz E joys m'es lunhatz e faiditz, Don no m' venra jamais
conortz; Fer qu'ees mayer l'ira e plus fortz--
The Saracen had said
nothing. He showed a jeweled dagger, and the knight arose and followed him out
of that uproarious hall. Raimbaut was bitterly perturbed, though he did not
know for what reason, as Makrisi led him through dark corridors to the
dull-gleaming arras of Prince Guillaume's apartments. In this corridor was an
iron lamp swung from the ceiling, and now, as this lamp swayed slightly and
burned low, the tiny flame leaped clear of the wick and was extinguished, and
darkness rose about them.
Raimbaut said:
"What do you want of me? Whose blood is on that knife?"
"Have you
forgotten it is Walburga's Eve?" Makrisi said. Raimbaut did not regret he
could not see his servant's countenance. "Time was we named it otherwise
and praised another woman than a Saxon wench, but let the new name stand. It is
Walburga's Eve, that little, little hour of evil! and all over the world surges
the full tide of hell's desire, and mischief is a-making now, apace, apace,
apace. People moan in their sleep, and many pillows are pricked by needles that
have sewed a shroud. Cry Eman hetan now, messire! for there are those to-night
who find the big cathedrals of your red-roofed Christian towns no more imposing
than so many pimples on a butler's chin, because they ride so high, so very
high, in this brave moonlight. Full-tide, full-tide!" Makrisi said, and
his voice jangled like a bell as he drew aside the curtain so that the old
knight saw into the room beyond.
It was a place of many
lights, which, when thus suddenly disclosed, blinded him at first. Then
Raimbaut perceived Guillaume lying a-sprawl across an oaken chest. The Prince
had fallen backward and lay in this posture, glaring at the intruders with horrible
eyes which did not move and would not ever move again. His breast was crimson,
for some one had stabbed him. A woman stood above the corpse and lighted yet
another candle while Raimbaut de Vaquieras waited motionless. A hand meant only
to bestow caresses brushed a lock of hair from this woman's eyes while he
waited. The movements of this hand were not uncertain, but only quivered
somewhat, as a taut wire shivers in the wind, while Raimbaut de Vaquieras
waited motionless.
"I must have
lights, I must have a host of candles to assure me past any questioning that he
is dead. The man is of deep cunning. I think he is not dead even now."
Lightly Biatritz touched the Prince's breast. "Strange, that this wicked
heart should be so tranquil when there is murder here to make it glad! Nay,
very certainly this Guillaume de Baux will rise and laugh in his old fashion
before he speaks, and then I shall be afraid. But I am not afraid as yet. I am
afraid of nothing save the dark, for one cannot be merry in the dark."
Raimbaut said:
"This is Belhs Cavaliers whom I have loved my whole life through.
Therefore I do not doubt. Pardieu, I do not even doubt, who know she is of
matchless worth."
"Wherein have I
done wrong, Raimbaut?" She came to him with fluttering hands. "Why,
but look you, the man had laid an ambuscade in the marsh and he meant to kill
you there to-night as you rode for Vaquieras. He told me of it, told me how it
was for that end alone he lured you into Venaissin----" Again she brushed
the hair back from her forehead. "Raimbaut, I spoke of God and knightly
honor, and the man laughed. No, I think it was a fiend who sat so long beside
the window yonder, whence one may see the marsh. There were no candles in the
room. The moonlight was upon his evil face, and I could think of nothing, of
nothing that has been since Adam's time, except our youth, Raimbaut. And he
smiled fixedly, like a white image, because my misery amused him. Only, when I
tried to go to you to warn you, he leaped up stiffly, making a mewing noise. He
caught me by the throat so that I could not scream. Then while we struggled in
the moonlight your Makrisi came and stabbed him----"
"Nay, I but
fetched this knife, messire." Makrisi seemed to love that bloodied knife.
Biatritz proudly said:
"The man lies, Raimbaut."
"What need to tell
me that, Belhs Cavaliers?"
And the Saracen
shrugged. "It is very true I lie," he said. "As among friends, I
may confess I killed the Prince. But for the rest, take notice both of you, I
mean to lie intrepidly."
Raimbaut remembered how
his mother had given each of two lads an apple, and he had clamored for
Guillaume's, as children do, and Guillaume had changed with him. It was a
trivial happening to remember after fifty years; but Guillaume was dead, and
this hacked flesh was Raimbaut's flesh in part, and the thought of Raimbaut
would never trouble Guillaume de Baux any more. In addition there was a fire of
juniper wood and frankincense upon the hearth, and the room smelt too cloyingly
of be-drugging sweetness. Then on the walls were tapestries which depicted
Merlin's Dream, so that everywhere recoiling women smiled with bold eyes; and
here their wantonness seemed out of place.
"Listen,"
Makrisi was saying; "listen, for the hour strikes. At last, at last!"
he cried, with a shrill whine of malice.
Raimbaut said, dully:
"Oh, I do not understand----"
"And yet Zoraida
loved you once! loved you as people love where I was born!" The Saracen's
voice had altered. His speech was like the rustle of papers. "You did not
love Zoraida. And so it came about that upon Walburga's Eve, at midnight,
Zoraida hanged herself beside your doorway. Thus we love where I was born. . .
. And I, I cut the rope--with my left hand. I had my other arm about that
frozen thing which yesterday had been Zoraida, you understand, so that it might
not fall. And in the act a tear dropped from that dead woman's cheek and wetted
my forehead. Ice is not so cold as was that tear. . . . Ho, that tear did not
fall upon my forehead but on my heart, because I loved that dancing-girl,
Zoraida, as you do this princess here. I think you will understand,"
Makrisi said, calmly as one who states a maxim.
The Sire de Vaquieras
replied, in the same tone: "I understand. You have contrived my
death?"
"Ey, messire,
would that be adequate? I could have managed that any hour within the last
score of years. Oh no! for I have studied you carefully. Oh no! instead, I have
contrived this plight. For the Prince of Orange is manifestly murdered. Who
killed him?--why, Madona Biatritz, and none other, for I will swear to it. I, I
will swear to it, who saw it done. Afterward both you and I must be questioned
upon the rack, as possibly concerned in the affair, and whether innocent or
guilty we must die very horribly. Such is the gentle custom of your Christian
country when a prince is murdered. That is not the point of the jest, however.
For first Sire Philibert will put this woman to the Question by Water, until
she confesses her confederates, until she confesses that every baron whom
Philibert distrusts was one of them. Oh yes, assuredly they will thrust a
hollow cane into the mouth of your Biatritz, and they will pour water a little
by a little through this cane, until she confesses what they desire. Ha,
Philibert will see to this confession! And through this woman's torment he will
rid himself of every dangerous foe he has in Venaissin. You must stand by and
wait your turn. You must stand by, in fetters, and see this done--you, you, my
master!--you, who love this woman as I loved that dead Zoraida who was not fair
enough to please you!"
Raimbaut, trapped,
impotent, cried out: "This is not possible----" And for all that, he
knew the Saracen to be foretelling the inevitable.
Makrisi went on,
quietly: "After the Question men will parade her, naked to the middle,
through all Orange, until they reach the Marketplace, where will be four
horses. One of these horses they will harness to each arm and leg of your
Biatritz. Then they will beat these horses. These will be strong horses. They
will each run in a different direction."
This infamy also was
certain. Raimbaut foresaw what he must do. He clutched the dagger which Makrisi
fondled. "Belhs Cavaliers, this fellow speaks the truth. Look now, the
moon is old--is it not strange to know it will outlive us?"
And Biatritz came close
to Sire Raimbaut and said: "I understand. If I leave this room alive it
will purchase a hideous suffering for my poor body, it will bring about the
ruin of many brave and innocent chevaliers. I know. I would perforce confess
all that the masked men bade me. I know, for in Prince Conrat's time I have
seen persons who had been put to the Question----" She shuddered; and she
re-began, without any agitation: "Give me the knife, Raimbaut."
"Pardieu! but I
may not obey you for this once," he answered, "since we are informed
by those in holy orders that all such as lay violent hands upon themselves must
suffer eternally." Then, kneeling, he cried, in an extremity of adoration:
"Oh, I have served you all my life. You may not now deny me this last
service. And while I talk they dig your grave! O blind men, making the new
grave, take heed lest that grave be too narrow, for already my heart is
breaking in my body. I have drunk too deep of sorrow. And yet I may not fail
you, now that honor and mercy and my love for you demand I kill you before I
also die--in such a fashion as this fellow speaks of."
She did not dispute
this. How could she when it was an axiom in all Courts of Love that Heaven held
dominion in a lover's heart only as an underling of the man's mistress?
And so she said, with a
fond smile: "It is your demonstrable privilege. I would not grant it,
dear, were my weak hands as clean as yours. Oh, but it is long you have loved
me, and it is faithfully you have served Heaven, and my heart too is breaking
in my body now that your service ends!"
And he demanded,
wearily: "When we were boy and girl together what had we said if any one
had told us this would be the end?"
"We would have
laughed. It is a long while since those children laughed at Montferrat. . . .
Not yet, not yet!" she said. "Ah, pity me, tried champion, for even
now I am almost afraid to die."
She leaned against the
window yonder, shuddering, staring into the night. Dawn had purged the east of
stars. Day was at hand, the day whose noon she might not hope to witness. She
noted this incuriously. Then Biatritz came to him, very strangely proud, and
yet all tenderness.
"See, now,
Raimbaut! because I have loved you as I have loved nothing else in life, I will
not be unworthy of your love. Strike and have done."
Raimbaut de Vaquieras
raised an already bloodied dagger. As emotion goes, he was bankrupt. He had no
longer any dread of hell, because he thought that, a little later, nothing its
shrewdest overseer could plan would have the power to vex him. She, waiting,
smiled. Makrisi, seated, stretched his legs, put fingertips together with the
air of an attendant amateur. This was better than he had hoped. In such a
posture they heard a bustle of armored men, and when all turned, saw how a
sword protruded through the arras.
"Come out,
Guillaume!" people were shouting. "Unkennel, dog! Out, out, and
die!" To such a heralding Mahi de Vernoil came into the room with mincing
steps such as the man affected in an hour of peril. He first saw what a grisly
burden the chest sustained. "Now, by the Face!" he cried, "if he
that cheated me of quieting this filth should prove to be of gentle birth I
will demand of him a duel to the death!" The curtains were ripped from
their hangings as he spoke, and behind him the candlelight was reflected by the
armor of many followers.
Then de Vernoil
perceived Raimbaut de Vaquieras, and the spruce little man bowed ceremoniously.
All were still. Composedly, like a lieutenant before his captain, Mahi narrated
how these hunted remnants of Lovain's army had, as a last cast, that night
invaded the chateau, and had found, thanks to the festival, its men-at-arms in
uniform and inefficient drunkenness. "My tres beau sire," Messire de
Vernoil ended, "will you or nill you, Venaissin is yours this morning. My
knaves have slain Philibert and his bewildered fellow-tipplers with less effort
than is needed to drown as many kittens."
And his followers
cried, as upon a signal: "Hail, Prince of Orange!"
It was so like the
wonder-working of a dream--this sudden and heroic uproar--that old Raimbaut de
Vaquieras stood reeling, near to intimacy with fear for the first time. He
waited thus, with both hands pressed before his eyes. He waited thus for a long
while, because he was not used to find chance dealing kindlily with him. Later
he saw that Makrisi had vanished in the tumult, and that many people awaited
his speaking.
The lord of Venaissin
began: "You have done me a great service, Messire de Vemoil. As
recompense, I give you what I may. I freely yield you all my right in
Venaissin. Oh no, kingcraft is not for me. I daily see and hear of battles won,
cities beleaguered, high towers overthrown, and ancient citadels and new walls
leveled with the dust. I have conversed with many kings, the directors of these
events, and they were not happy people. Yes, yes, I have witnessed divers
happenings, for I am old. . . . I have found nothing which can serve me in
place of honor."
He turned to Dona
Biatritz. It was as if they were alone. "Belhs Cavaliers," he said,
"I had sworn fealty to this Guillaume. He violated his obligations; but
that did not free me of mine. An oath is an oath. I was, and am to-day, sworn
to support his cause, and to profit in any fashion by its overthrow would be an
abominable action. Nay, more, were any of his adherents alive it would be my
manifest duty to join them against our preserver, Messire de Vernoil. This
necessity is very happily spared me. I cannot, though, in honor hold any fief
under the supplanter of my liege-lord. I must, therefore, relinquish Vaquieras
and take eternal leave of Venaissin. I will not lose the right to call myself
your servant!" he cried out--"and that which is noblest in the world
must be served fittingly. And so, Belhs Cavaliers, let us touch palms and bid
farewell, and never in this life speak face to face of trivial happenings which
we two alone remember. For naked of lands and gear I came to you--a prince's
daughter--very long ago, and as nakedly I now depart, so that I may retain the
right to say, `All my life long I served my love of her according to my
abilities, wholeheartedly and with clean hands.'"
"Yes, yes! you
must depart from Venaissin," said Dona Biatritz. A capable woman, she had
no sympathy with his exquisite points of honor, and yet loved him all the more
because of what seemed to her his surpassing folly. She smiled, somewhat as
mothers do in humoring an unreasonable boy. "We will go to my nephew's
court at Montferrat," she said. "He will willingly provide for his
old aunt and her husband. And you may still make verses--at Montferrat, where
we lived verses, once, Raimbaut."
Now they gazed full
upon each other. Thus they stayed, transfigured, neither seeming old. Each had
forgotten that unhappiness existed anywhere in the whole world. The armored,
blood-stained men about them were of no more importance than were those wantons
in the tapestry. Without, dawn throbbed in heaven. Without, innumerable birds
were raising that glad, piercing, hurried morning-song which very anciently
caused Adam's primal waking, to behold his mate.
"A curious
preference for the artificial should be mentioned as characteristic of
ALESSANDRO DE MEDICI'S poetry. For his century was anything but artless; the
great commonplaces that form the main stock of human thought were no longer in
their first flush, and he addressed a people no longer childish. . . .
Unquestionably his fancies were fantastic, anti-natural, bordering on
hallucination, and they betray a desire for impossible novelty; but it is
allowable to prefer them to the sickly simplicity of those so-called poems that
embroider with old faded wools upon the canvas of worn-out truisms, trite,
trivial and idiotically sentimental patterns."
Let me have dames and damsels richly clad To feed and tend my mirth, Singing
by day and night to make me glad; Let me have fruitful gardens of great girth
Fill'd with the strife of birds, With water-springs, and beasts that house i'
the earth. Let me seem Solomon for lore of words, Samson for strength, for
beauty Absalom. Knights as my serfs be given; And as I will, let music go and
come; Till, when I will, I will to enter Heaven. ALESSANDRO DE MEDICI.
Madrigal, from D. G. Rossetti's version. Graciosa
was Balthazar's youngest child, a white, slim girl with violet eyes and strange
pale hair which had the color and glitter of stardust. "Some day at
court," her father often thought complacently, "she, too, will make a
good match." He was a necessitous lord, a smiling, supple man who had
already marketed two daughters to his advantage. But Graciosa's time was not
yet mature in the year of grace 1533, for the girl was not quite sixteen. So
Graciosa remained in Balthazar's big cheerless house and was tutored in all
needful accomplishments. She was proficient in the making of preserves and
unguents, could play the harpsichord and the virginals acceptably, could
embroider an altarcloth to admiration, and, in spite of a trivial lameness in
walking, could dance a coranto or a saraband against any woman between two
seas.
Now to the north of
Balthazar's home stood a tall forest, overhanging both the highway and the
river whose windings the highway followed. Graciosa was very often to be
encountered upon the outskirts of these woods. She loved the forest, whose
tranquillity bred dreams, but was already a woman in so far that she found it
more interesting to watch the highway. Sometimes it would be deserted save for
small purple butterflies which fluttered about as if in continuous indecision,
and rarely ascended more than a foot above the ground. But people passed at
intervals--as now a page, who was a notably fine fellow, clothed in ash-colored
gray, with slashed, puffed sleeves, and having a heron's feather in his cap; or
a Franciscan with his gown tucked up so that you saw how the veins on his naked
feet stood out like the carvings on a vase; or a farmer leading a calf; or a
gentleman in a mantle of squirrel's fur riding beside a wonderful proud lady,
whose tiny hat was embroidered with pearls. It was all very interesting to
watch, it was like turning over the leaves of a book written in an unknown
tongue and guessing what the pictures meant, because these people were intent
upon their private avocations, in which you had no part, and you would never
see them any more.
Then destiny took a hand
in the affair and Guido came. He reined his gray horse at the sight of her
sitting by the wayside and deferentially inquired how far it might be to the
nearest inn. Graciosa told him. He thanked her and rode on. That was all, but
the appraising glance of this sedate and handsome burgher obscurely troubled
the girl afterward.
Next day he came again.
He was a jewel-merchant, he told her, and he thought it within the stretch of
possibility that my lord Balthazar's daughter might wish to purchase some of
his wares. She viewed them with admiration, chaffered thriftily, and finally
bought a topaz, dug from Mount Zabarca, Guido assured her, which rendered its
wearer immune to terrors of any kind.
Very often afterward
these two met on the outskirts of the forest as Guido rode between the coast
and the hill-country about his vocation. Sometimes he laughingly offered her a
bargain, on other days he paused to exhibit a notable gem which he had procured
for this or that wealthy amateur. Count Eglamore, the young Duke's favorite
yonder at court, bought most of them, it seemed. "The nobles complain
against this upstart Eglamore very bitterly," said Guido, "but we
merchants have no quarrel with him. He buys too lavishly."
"I trust I shall
not see Count Eglamore when I go to court," said Graciosa, meditatively;
"and, indeed, by that time, my father assures me, some honest gentleman
will have contrived to cut the throat of this abominable Eglamore." Her
father's people, it should be premised, had been at bitter feud with the
favorite ever since he detected and punished the conspiracy of the Marquis of
Cibo, their kinsman. Then Graciosa continued: "Nevertheless, I shall see
many beautiful sights when I am taken to court. . . . And the Duke, too, you
tell me, is an amateur of gems."
"Eh, madonna, I
wish that you could see his jewels," cried Guido, growing fervent; and he
lovingly catalogued a host of lapidary marvels.
"I hope that I
shall see these wonderful jewels when I go to court," said Graciosa
wistfully.
"Duke
Alessandro," he returned, his dark eyes strangely mirthful, "is, as I
take it, a catholic lover of beauty in all its forms. So he will show you his
gems, very assuredly, and, worse still, he will make verses in your honor. For
it is a preposterous feature of Duke Alessandro's character that he is always
making songs."
"Oh, and such
strange songs as they are, too, Guido. Who does not know them?"
"I am not the best
possible judge of his verses' merit," Guido estimated, drily. "But I
shall never understand how any singer at all came to be locked in such a
prison. I fancy that at times the paradox puzzles even Duke Alessandro."
"And is he as
handsome as people report?"
Then Guido laughed a
little. "Tastes differ, of course. But I think your father will assure
you, madonna, that no duke possessing such a zealous tax-collector as Count
Eglamore was ever in his lifetime considered of repulsive person."
"And is he
young?"
"Why, as to that,
he is about of an age with me, and in consequence old enough to be far more
sensible than either of us is ever likely to be," said Guido; and began to
talk of other matters.
But presently Graciosa
was questioning him again as to the court, whither she was to go next year and
enslave a marquis, or, at worst, an opulent baron. Her thoughts turned toward
the court's predominating figure. "Tell me of Eglamore, Guido."
"Madonna, some say
that Eglamore was a brewer's son. Others--and your father's kinsmen in
particular--insist that he was begot by a devil in person, just as Merlin was,
and Plato the philosopher, and puissant Alexander. Nobody knows anything about
his origin." Guido was sitting upon the ground, his open pack between his
knees. Between the thumb and forefinger of each hand he held caressingly a
string of pearls which he inspected as he talked. "Nobody," he idly
said, "nobody is very eager to discuss Count Eglamore's origin now that
Eglamore has become indispensable to Duke Alessandro. Yes, it is thanks to
Eglamore that the Duke has ample leisure and needful privacy for the pursuit of
recreations which are reputed to be curious."
"I do not
understand you, Guido." Graciosa was all wonder.
"It is perhaps as
well," the merchant said, a trifle sadly. Then Guido shrugged. "To be
brief, madonna, business annoys the Duke. He finds in this Eglamore an
industrious person who affixes seals, draughts proclamations, makes treaties,
musters armies, devises pageants, and collects revenues, upon the whole, quite
as efficiently as Alessandro would be capable of doing these things. So
Alessandro makes verses and amuses himself as his inclinations prompt, and
Alessandro's people are none the worse off on account of it."
"Heigho, I foresee
that I shall never fall in love with the Duke," Graciosa declared.
"It is unbefitting and it is a little cowardly for a prince to shirk the
duties of his station. Now, if I were Duke I would grant my father a pension,
and have Eglamore hanged, and purchase a new gown of silvery green, in which I
would be ravishingly beautiful, and afterward--Why, what would you do if you
were Duke, Messer Guido?"
"What would I do
if I were Duke?" he echoed. "What would I do if I were a great lord
instead of a tradesman? I think you know the answer, madonna."
"Oh, you would
make me your duchess, of course. That is quite understood," said Graciosa,
with the lightest of laughs. "But I was speaking seriously, Guido."
Guido at that considered
her intently for a half-minute. His countenance was of portentous gravity, but
in his eyes she seemed to detect a lurking impishness.
"And it is not a
serious matter that a peddler of crystals should have dared to love a
nobleman's daughter? You are perfectly right. That I worship you is an affair
which does not concern any person save myself in any way whatsoever, although I
think that knowledge of the fact would put your father to the trouble of
sharpening his dagger. . . . Indeed, I am not certain that I worship you, for
in order to adore wholeheartedly, the idolater must believe his idol to be
perfect. Now, your nails are of an ugly shape, like that of little fans; your
mouth is too large; and I have long ago perceived that you are a trifle lame in
spite of your constant care to conceal the fact. I do not admire these faults,
for faults they are undoubtedly. Then, too, I know you are vain and
self-seeking, and look forward contentedly to the time when your father will
transfer his ownership of such physical attractions as heaven gave you to that
nobleman who offers the highest price for them. It is true you have no choice
in the matter, but you will participate in a monstrous bargain, and I would
prefer to have you exhibit distaste for it." And with that he returned
composedly to inspection of his pearls.
"And to what end,
Guido?" It was the first time Graciosa had completely waived the reticence
of a superior caste. You saw that the child's parted lips were tremulous, and
you divined her childish fits of dreading that glittering, inevitable
court-life shared with an unimaginable husband.
But Guido only grumbled
whimsically. "I am afraid that men do not always love according to the
strict laws of logic. I desire your happiness above all things; yet to see you
so abysmally untroubled by anything that troubles me is another matter."
"But I am not
untroubled, Guido----she began swiftly. Graciosa broke off in speech, shrugged,
flashed a smile at him. "For I cannot fathom you, Ser Guido, and that
troubles me. Yes, I am very fond of you, and yet I do not trust you. You tell
me you love me greatly. It pleases me to have you say this. You perceive I am
very candid this morning, Messer Guido. Yes, it pleases me, and I know that for
the sake of seeing me you daily endanger your life, for if my father heard of
our meetings he would have you killed. You would not incur such hare-brained
risks unless you cared very greatly; and yet, somehow, I do not believe it is
altogether for me you care."
Then Guido was in train
to protest an all-mastering and entirely candid devotion, but he was
interrupted.
"Most women have
these awkward intuitions," spoke a melodious voice, and turning, Graciosa
met the eyes of the intruder. This magnificent young man had a proud and bloodless
face which contrasted sharply with his painted lips and cheeks. In the contour
of his protruding mouth showed plainly his negroid ancestry. His scanty beard,
as well as his frizzled hair, was the color of dead grass. He was sumptuously
clothed in white satin worked with silver, and around his cap was a gold chain
hung with diamonds. Now he handed his fringed riding-gloves to Guido to hold.
"Yes, madonna, I
suspect that Eglamore here cares greatly for the fact that you are Lord
Balthazar's daughter, and cousin to the late Marquis of Cibo. For Cibo has many
kinsmen at court who still resent the circumstance that the matching of his
wits against Eglamore's earned for Cibo a deplorably public demise. So they
conspire against Eglamore with vexatious industry, as an upstart, as a nobody
thrust over people of proven descent, and Eglamore goes about in hourly
apprehension of a knife-thrust. If he could make a match with you, though, your
father--thrifty man!-- would be easily appeased. Your cousins, those proud,
grumbling Castel-Franchi, Strossi and Valori, would not prove over-obdurate
toward a kinsman who, whatever his past indiscretions, has so many pensions and
offices at his disposal. Yes, honor would permit a truce, and Eglamore could
bind them to his interests within ten days, and be rid of the necessity of
sleeping in chain armor. . . . Have I not unraveled the scheme correctly,
Eglamore?"
"Your highness was
never lacking in penetration," replied the other in a dull voice. He stood
motionless, holding the gloves, his shoulders a little bowed as if under some
physical load. His eyes were fixed upon the ground. He divined the change in
Graciosa's face and did not care to see it.
"And so you are
Count Eglamore," said Graciosa in a sort of whisper. "That is very
strange. I had thought you were my friend, Guido. But I forget. I must not call
you Guido any longer." She gave a little shiver here. He stayed motionless
and did not look at her. "I have often wondered what manner of man you
were. So it was you--whose hand I touched just now--you who poisoned Duke
Cosmo, you who had the good cardinal assassinated, you who betrayed the brave
lord of Faenza! Oh, yes, they openly accuse you of every imaginable crime--this
patient Eglamore, this reptile who has crept into his power through filthy
passages. It is very strange you should be capable of so much wickedness, for
to me you seem only a sullen lackey."
He winced and raised
his eyes at this. His face remained expressionless. He knew these accusations
at least to be demonstrable lies, for as it happened he had never found his
advancement to hinge upon the commission of the crimes named. But even so, the
past was a cemetery he did not care to have revivified.
"And it was you
who detected the Marquis of Cibo's conspiracy. Tebaldeo was my cousin, Count
Eglamore, and I loved him. We were reared together. We used to play here in
these woods, and I remember how Tebaldeo once fetched me a wren's nest from
that maple yonder. I stood just here. I was weeping because I was afraid he
would fall. If he had fallen and been killed, it would have been the luckier
for him," Graciosa sighed. "They say that he conspired. I do not
know. I only know that by your orders, Count Eglamore, my playmate Tebaldeo was
fastened upon a Saint Andrew's cross and his arms and legs were each broken in
two places with an iron bar. Then your servants took Tebaldeo, still living,
and laid him upon a carriage-wheel which was hung upon a pivot. The upper edge
of this wheel was cut with very fine teeth like those of a saw, so that his
agony might be complete. Tebaldeo's poor mangled legs were folded beneath his
body so that his heels touched the back of his head, they tell me. In such a
posture he died very slowly while the wheel turned very slowly there in the
sunlit market-place, and flies buzzed greedily about him, and the shopkeepers
took holiday in order to watch Tebaldeo die--the same Tebaldeo who once fetched
me a wren's nest from yonder maple."
Eglamore spoke now.
"I gave orders for the Marquis of Cibo's execution. I did not devise the
manner of his death. The punishment for Cibo's crime was long ago fixed by our
laws. Cibo plotted to kill the Duke. Cibo confessed as much."
But the girl waved this
aside. "And then you plan this masquerade. You plan to make me care for
you so greatly that even when I know you to be Count Eglamore I must still care
for you. You plan to marry me, so as to placate Tebaldeo's kinsmen, so as to
bind them to your interests. It was a fine bold stroke of policy, I know, to
use me as a stepping-stone to safety--but was it fair to me?" Her voice
rose now a little. She seemed to plead with him. "Look you, Count
Eglamore, I was a child only yesterday. I have never loved any man. But you
have loved many women, I know, and long experience has taught you many ways of
moving a woman's heart. Oh, was it fair, was it worth while, to match your
skill against my ignorance? Think how unhappy I would be if even now I loved
you, and how I would loathe myself. . . . But I am getting angry over nothing.
Nothing has happened except that I have dreamed in idle moments of a brave and
comely lover who held his head so high that all other women envied me, and now
I have awakened."
Meanwhile, it was with
tears in his eyes that the young man in white had listened to her quiet talk,
for you could nowhere have found a nature more readily sensitive than his to
all the beauty and wonder which life, as if it were haphazardly, produces every
day. He pitied this betrayed child quite ineffably, because in her sorrow she
was so pretty.
So he spoke
consolingly. "Fie, Donna Graciosa, you must not be too harsh with
Eglamore. It is his nature to scheme, and he weaves his plots as inevitably as
the spider does her web. Believe me, it is wiser to forget the rascal--as I
do--until there is need of him; and I think you will have no more need to
consider Eglamore's trickeries, for you are very beautiful, Graciosa."
He had drawn closer to
the girl, and he brought a cloying odor of frangipani, bergamot and vervain.
His nostrils quivered, his face had taken on an odd pinched look, for all that
he smiled as over some occult jest. Graciosa was a little frightened by his
bearing, which was both furtive and predatory.
"Oh, do not be
offended, for I have some rights to say what I desire in these parts. For, Dei
gratia, I am the overlord of these parts, Graciosa--a neglected prince who
wondered over the frequent absences of his chief counselor and secretly set
spies upon him. Eglamore here will attest as much. Or if you cannot believe
poor Eglamore any longer, I shall have other witnesses within the half-hour.
Oh, yes, they are to meet me here at noon--some twenty crop-haired stalwart
cut-throats. They will come riding upon beautiful broad-chested horses covered
with red velvet trappings that are hung with little silver bells which jingle
delightfully. They will come very soon, and then we will ride back to
court."
Duke Alessandro touched
his big painted mouth with his forefinger as if in fantastic mimicry of a man
imparting a confidence.
"I think that I
shall take you with me, Graciosa, for you are very beautiful. You are as slim
as a lily and more white, and your eyes are two purple mirrors in each of which
I see a tiny image of Duke Alessandro. The woman I loved yesterday was a big
splendid wench with cheeks like apples. It is not desirable that women should
be so large. All women should be little creatures that fear you. They should
have thin, plaintive voices, and in shrinking from you be as slight to the
touch as a cobweb. It is not possible to love a woman ardently unless you
comprehend how easy it would be to murder her."
"God, God!"
said Count Eglamore, very softly, for he was familiar with the look which had
now come into Duke Alessandro's face. Indeed, all persons about court were
quick to notice this odd pinched look, like that of a traveler nipped at by
frosts, and people at court became obsequious within the instant in dealing
with the fortunate woman who had aroused this look, Count Eglamore remembered.
And the girl did not
speak at all, but stood motionless, staring in bewildered, pitiable, childlike
fashion, and the color had ebbed from her countenance.
Alessandro was frankly
pleased. "You fear me, do you not, Graciosa? See, now, when I touch your hand
it is soft and cold as a serpent's skin, and you shudder. I am very tired of
women who love me, of all women with bold, hungry eyes. To you my touch will
always be a martyrdom, you will always loathe me, and therefore I shall not
weary of you for a long while. Come, Graciosa. Your father shall have all the
wealth and state that even his greedy imaginings can devise, so long as you can
contrive to loathe me. We will find you a suitable husband. You shall have
flattery and titles, gold and fine glass, soft stuffs and superb palaces such
as are your beauty's due henceforward."
He glanced at the
peddler's pack, and shrugged. "So Eglamore has been wooing you with
jewels! You must see mine, dear Graciosa. It is not merely an affair of
possessing, as some emperors do, all the four kinds of sapphires, the twelve
kinds of emeralds, the three kinds of rubies, and many extraordinary pearls,
diamonds, cymophanes, beryls, green peridots, tyanos, sandrastra, and fiery
cinnamon-stones"--he enumerated them with the tender voice of their
lover--"for the value of these may at least be estimated. Oh, no, I have
in my possession gems which have not their fellows in any other collection,
gems which have not even a name and the value of which is incalculable--strange
jewels that were shot from inaccessible mountain peaks by means of slings,
jewels engendered by the thunder, jewels taken from the heart of the Arabian
deer, jewels cut from the brain of a toad and the eyes of serpents, and even
jewels that are authentically known to have fallen from the moon. We will
select the rarest, and have a pair of slippers encrusted with them, in which
you shall dance for me."
"Highness,"
cried Eglamore, with anger and terror at odds in his breast, "Highness, I
love this girl!"
"Ah, then you
cannot ever be her husband," Duke Alessandro returned. "You would
have suited otherwise. No, no, we must seek out some other person of
discretion. It will all be very amusing, for I think that she is now quite
innocent, as pure as the high angels are. See, Eglamore, she cannot speak, she
stays still as a lark that has been taken in a snare. It will be very marvelous
to make her as I am. . . ." He meditated, as, obscurely aware of
opposition, his shoulders twitched fretfully, and momentarily his eyes
lightened like the glare of a cannon through its smoke. "You made a beast
of me, some long-faced people say. Beware lest the beast turn and rend
you."
Count Eglamore plucked
aimlessly at his chin. Then he laughed as a dog yelps. He dropped the gloves
which he had held till this, deliberately, as if the act were a rite. His
shoulders straightened and purpose seemed to flow into the man. "No,"
he said quietly, "I will not have it. It was not altogether I who made a
brain-sick beast of you, my prince; but even so, I have never been too nice to
profit by your vices. I have taken my thrifty toll of abomination, I have stood
by contentedly, not urging you on, yet never trying to stay you, as you waded
deeper and ever deeper into the filth of your debaucheries, be cause meanwhile
you left me so much power. Yes, in some part it is my own handiwork which is my
ruin. I accept it. Nevertheless, you shall not harm this child."
"I venture to
remind you, Eglamore, that I am still the master of this duchy." Alessandro
was languidly amused, and had begun to regard his adversary with real
curiosity.
"Oh, yes, but that
is nothing to me. At court you are the master. At court I have seen mothers
raise the veil from their daughters' faces, with smiles that were more loathsome
than the grimaces of a fiend, because you happened to be passing. But here in
these woods, your highness, I see only the woman I love and the man who has
insulted her."
"This is very
admirable fooling," the Duke considered. "So all the world is changed
and Pandarus is transformed into Hector? These are sonorous words, Eglamore,
but with what deeds do you propose to back them?"
"By killing you,
your highness."
"So!" said
the Duke. "The farce ascends in interest." He drew with a flourish,
with actual animation, for sottish, debauched and power-crazed as this man was,
he came of a race to whom danger was a cordial. "Very luckily a sword
forms part of your disguise, so let us amuse ourselves. It is always diverting
to kill, and if by any chance you kill me I shall at least be rid of the
intolerable knowledge that to-morrow will be just like to-day." The Duke
descended blithely into the level road and placed himself on guard.
Then both men silently
went about the business in hand. Both were oddly calm, almost as if preoccupied
by some more important matter to be settled later. The two swords clashed,
gleamed rigidly for an instant, and then their rapid interplay, so far as
vision went, melted into a flickering snarl of silver, for the sun was high and
each man's shadow was huddled under him. Then Eglamore thrust savagely and in
the act trod the edge of a puddle, and fell ignominiously prostrate. His sword
was wrenched ten feet from him, for the Duke had parried skilfully. Eglamore
lay thus at Alessandro's mercy.
"Well, well!"
the Duke cried petulantly, "and am I to be kept waiting forever? You were
a thought quicker in obeying my caprices yesterday. Get up, you muddy lout, and
let us kill each other with some pretension of adroitness."
Eglamore rose, and,
sobbing, caught up his sword and rushed toward the Duke in an agony of shame
and rage. His attack now was that of a frenzied animal, quite careless of
defense and desirous only of murder. Twice the Duke wounded him, but it was
Alessandro who drew backward, composedly hindering the brutal onslaught he was
powerless to check. Then Eglamore ran him through the chest and gave vent to a
strangled, growling cry as Alessandro fell. Eglamore wrenched his sword free
and grasped it by the blade so that he might stab the Duke again and again. He
meant to hack the abominable flesh, to slash and mutilate that haughty mask of
infamy, but Graciosa clutched his weapon by the hilt.
The girl panted, and
her breath came thick. "He gave you your life."
Eglamore looked up. She
leaned now upon his shoulder, her face brushing his as he knelt over the
unconscious Duke; and Eglamore found that at her dear touch all passion had
gone out of him.
"Madonna," he
said equably, "the Duke is not yet dead. It is impossible to let him live.
You may think he voiced only a caprice just now. I think so too, but I know the
man, and I know that all this madman's whims are ruthless and irresistible.
Living, Duke Alessandro's appetites are merely whetted by opposition, so much
so that he finds no pleasures sufficiently piquant unless they have God's
interdiction as a sauce. Living, he will make of you his plaything, and a
little later his broken, soiled and castby plaything. It is therefore necessary
that I kill Duke Alessandro."
She parted from him,
and he too rose to his feet.
"And
afterward," she said quietly, "and afterward you must die just as
Tebaldeo died."
"That is the law,
madonna. But whether Alessandro enters hell to-day or later, I am a lost
man."
"Oh, that is very
true," she said. "A moment since you were Count Eglamore, whom every
person feared. Now there is not a beggar in the kingdom who would change lots
with you, for you are a friendless and hunted man in peril of dreadful death.
But even so, you are not penniless, Count Eglamore, for these jewels here which
formed part of your masquerade are of great value, and there is a world
outside. The frontier is not two miles distant. You have only to escape into
the hill-country beyond the forest, and you need not kill Duke Alessandro after
all. I would have you go hence with hands as clean as possible."
"Perhaps I might
escape." He found it quaint to note how calm she was and how tranquilly
his own thoughts ran. "But first the Duke must die, because I dare not
leave you to his mercy."
"How does that
matter?" she returned. "You know very well that my father intends to
market me as best suits his interests. Here I am so much merchandise. The Duke
is as free as any other man to cry a bargain." He would have spoken in protest,
but Graciosa interrupted wearily: "Oh, yes, it is to this end only that we
daughters of Duke Alessandro's vassals are nurtured, just as you told me--eh,
how long ago!--that such physical attractions as heaven accords us may be
marketed. And I do not see how a wedding can in any way ennoble the transaction
by causing it to profane a holy sacrament. Ah, no, Balthazar's daughter was
near attaining all that she had been taught to desire, for a purchaser came and
he bid lavishly. You know very well that my father would have been delighted.
But you must need upset the bargain. `No, I will not have it!' Count Eglamore
must cry. It cost you very highly to speak those words. I think it would have
puzzled my father to hear those words at which so many fertile lands, stout
castles, well-timbered woodlands, herds of cattle, gilded coaches, liveries and
curious tapestries, fine clothing and spiced foods, all vanished like a puff of
smoke. Ah, yes, my father would have thought you mad."
"I had no
choice," he said, and waved a little gesture of impotence. He spoke as
with difficulty, almost wearily. "I love you. It is a theme on which I do
not embroider. So long as I had thought to use you as an instrument I could woo
fluently enough. To-day I saw that you were frightened and helpless--oh, quite
helpless. And something changed in me. I knew for the first time that I loved
you and that I was not clean as you are clean. What it was of passion and
horror, of despair and adoration and yearning, which struggled in my being then
I cannot tell you. It spurred me to such action as I took,--but it has robbed
me of sugared eloquence, it has left me chary of speech. It is necessary that I
climb very high because of my love for you, and upon the heights there is
silence."
And Graciosa meditated.
"Here I am so much merchandise. Heigho, since I cannot help it, since
bought and sold I must be, one day or another, at least I will go at a noble
price. Yet I do not think I am quite worth the value of these castles and lands
and other things which you gave up because of me, so that it will be necessary
to make up the difference, dear, by loving you very much."
And at that he touched
her chin, gently and masterfully, for Graciosa would have averted her face, and
it seemed to Eglamore that he could never have his fill of gazing on the
radiant, shamed tenderness of Graciosa's face. "Oh, my girl!" he
whispered. "Oh, my wonderful, worshiped, merry girl, whom God has
fashioned with such loving care! you who had only scorn to give me when I was a
kingdom's master! and would you go with me now that I am friendless and
homeless?"
"But I shall
always have a friend," she answered"--a friend who showed me what
Balthazar's daughter was and what love is. And I am vain enough to believe I
shall not ever be very far from home so long as I am near to my friend's
heart."
A mortal man could not
but take her in his arms.
"Farewell, Duke
Alessandro!" then said Eglamore; "farewell, poor clay so plastic the
least touch remodels you! I had a part in shaping you so bestial; our age, too,
had a part--our bright and cruel day, wherein you were set too high. Yet for me
it would perhaps have proved as easy to have made a learned recluse of you,
Alessandro, or a bloodless saint, if to do that had been as patently profitable.
For you and all your kind are so much putty in the hands of circumspect fellows
such as I. But I stood by and let our poisoned age conform that putty into the
shape of a crazed beast, because it took that form as readily as any other, and
in taking it, best served my selfish ends. Now I must pay for that sorry
shaping, just as, I think, you too must pay some day. And so, I cry farewell
with loathing, but with compassion also!"
Then these two turned
toward the hills, leaving Duke Alessandro where he lay in the road, a very
lamentable figure in much bloodied finery. They turned toward the hills, and
entered a forest whose ordering was time's contemporary, and where there was no
grandeur save that of the trees.
But upon the summit of
the nearest hill they paused and looked over a restless welter of foliage that
glittered in the sun, far down into the highway. It bustled like an unroofed
ant-hill, for the road was alive with men who seemed from this distance very
small. Duke Alessandro's attendants had found him and were clustered in a
hubbub about their reviving master. Dwarfish Lorenzino de Medici was the most
solicitous among them.
Beyond was the broad
river, seen as a ribbon of silver now, and on its remoter bank the leaded roofs
of a strong fortress glistened like a child's new toy. Tilled fields showed
here and there, no larger in appearance than so many outspread handkerchiefs.
Far down in the east a small black smudge upon the pearl-colored and vaporous
horizon was all they could discern of a walled city filled with factories for
the working of hemp and furs and alum and silk and bitumen.
"It is a very rich
and lovely land," said Eglamore--"this kingdom which a half-hour
since lay in the hollow of my hand." He viewed it for a while, and not
without pensiveness. Then he took Graciosa's hand and looked into her face, and
he laughed joyously.
"It does not
appear that the age thought his works worthy of posterity, nor that this great
poet himself levied any ideal tribute on future times, or had any further
prospect than of present popularity and present profit. So careless was he,
indeed, of fame, that, when he retired to ease and plenty, while he was yet
little declined into the vale of years, and before he could be disgusted with
fatigue or disabled by infirmity, he desired only that in this rural quiet he
who had so long mazed his imagination by following phantoms might at last be
cured of his delirious ecstasies, and as a hermit might estimate the
transactions of the world."
Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have's my own,
Which is most faint. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my
ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so, that it
assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardon'd
be, Let your indulgence set me free. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Epilogue to The
Tempest. He was hoping, while his
fingers drummed in unison with the beat of his verse, that this last play at
least would rouse enthusiasm in the pit. The welcome given its immediate
predecessors had undeniably been tepid. A memorandum at his elbow of the
receipts at the Globe for the last quarter showed this with disastrous
bluntness; and, after all, in 1609 a shareholder in a theater, when writing
dramas for production there, was ordinarily subject to more claims than those
of his ideals.
He sat in a neglected
garden whose growth was in reversion to primal habits. The season was
September, the sky a uniform and temperate blue. A peachtree, laden past its
strength with fruitage, made about him with its boughs a sort of tent. The
grass around his writing-table was largely hidden by long, crinkled peach
leaves--some brown and others gray as yet--and was dotted with a host of
brightly-colored peaches. Fidgeting bees and flies were excavating the decayed
spots in this wasting fruit, from which emanated a vinous odor. The bees hummed
drowsily, their industry facilitating idleness in others. It was curious--he
meditated, his thoughts straying from "an uninhabited island"--how
these insects alternated in color between brown velvet and silver, as they
blundered about a flickering tessellation of amber and dark green . . . in
search of rottenness. . . .
He frowned. Here was an
arid forenoon as imagination went. A seasoned plagiarist by this, he opened a
book which lay upon the table among several others and duly found the chapter
entitled Of the Cannibals.
"So, so!" he
said aloud. "`It is a nation,' would I answer Plato, `that has no kind of
traffic, no knowledge of letters----'" And with that he sat about
reshaping Montaigne's conceptions of Utopia into verse. He wrote--while his
left hand held the book flat--as orderly as any county-clerk might do in the
recordance of a deed of sale.
Midcourse in larceny,
he looked up from writing. He saw a tall, dark lady who was regarding him
half-sorrowfully and half as in the grasp of some occult amusement. He said
nothing. He released the telltale book. His eyebrows lifted, banteringly. He
rose.
He found it
characteristic of her that she went silently to the table and compared the
printed page with what he had just written. "So nowadays you have turned
pickpocket? My poet, you have altered."
He said: "Why,
yes. When you broke off our friendship, I paid you the expensive compliment of
falling very ill. They thought that I would die. They tell me even to-day I did
not die. I almost question it." He shrugged. "And to-day I must
continue to write plays, because I never learned any other trade. And so, at
need, I pilfer." The topic did not seem much to concern him.
"Eh, and such
plays!" the woman cried. "My poet, there was a time when you created
men and women as glibly as Heaven does. Now you make sugar-candy dolls."
"The last comedies
were not all I could have wished," he assented. "In fact, I got only
some £30 clear profit."
"There speaks the
little tradesman I most hated of all persons living!" the woman sighed.
Now, as in impatience, she thrust back her traveling-hood and stood
bare-headed.
Then she stayed
silent,--tall, extraordinarily pallid, and with dark, steady eyes. Their gaze
by ordinary troubled you, as seeming to hint some knowledge to your
belittlement. The playmaker remembered that. Now he, a reputable householder,
was wondering what would be the upshot of this intrusion. His visitor, as he
was perfectly aware, had little patience with such moments of life as could not
be made dramatic. . . . He was recollecting many trifles, now his mind ran upon
old times. . . . No, no, reflection assured him, to call her beautiful would
be, and must always have been, an exaggeration; but to deny the exotic and
somewhat sinister charm of her, even to-day, would be an absurdity.
She said, abruptly:
"I do not think I ever loved you as women love men. You were too anxious
to associate with fine folk, too eager to secure a patron--yes, and to get your
profit of him--and you were always ill-at-ease among us. Our youth is so long
past, and we two are so altered that we, I think, may speak of its happenings
now without any bitterness. I hated those sordid, petty traits. I raged at your
incessant pretensions to gentility because I knew you to be so much more than a
gentleman. Oh, it infuriated me--how long ago it was!--to see you cringing to
the Court blockheads, and running their errands, and smirkingly pocketing their
money, and wheedling them into helping the new play to success. You complained
I treated you like a lackey; it was not unnatural when of your own freewill you
played the lackey so assiduously."
He laughed. He had
anatomized himself too frequently and with too much dispassion to overlook
whatever tang of snobbishness might be in him; and, moreover, the charge thus
tendered became in reality the speaker's apology, and hurt nobody's
self-esteem.
"Faith, I do not
say you are altogether in the wrong," he assented. "They could be
very useful to me--Pembroke, and Southampton, and those others--and so I
endeavored to render my intimacy acceptable. It was my business as a poet to
make my play as near perfect as I could; and this attended to, common-sense
demanded of the theater-manager that he derive as much money as was possible
from its representation. What would you have? The man of letters, like the
carpenter or the blacksmith, must live by the vending of his productions, not
by the eating of them." The woman waved this aside.
She paced the grass in
meditation, the peach leaves brushing her proud head--caressingly, it seemed to
him. Later she came nearer in a brand-new mood. She smiled now, and her voice
was musical and thrilled with wonder. "But what a poet Heaven had locked
inside this little parasite! It used to puzzle me." She laughed, and ever
so lightly. "Eh, and did you never understand why by preference I talked
with you at evening from my balcony? It was because I could forget you then
entirely. There was only a voice in the dark. There was a sorcerer at whose
bidding words trooped like a conclave of emperors, and now sang like a bevy of
linnets. And wit and fancy and high aspirations and my love--because I knew
then that your love for me was splendid and divine--these also were my
sorcerer's potent allies. I understood then how glad and awed were those
fabulous Greekish queens when a god wooed them. Yes, then I understood. How
long ago it seems!"
"Yes, yes,"
he sighed. "In that full-blooded season was Guenevere a lass, I think, and
Charlemagne was not yet in breeches."
"And when there
was a new play enacted I was glad. For it was our play that you and I had
polished the last line of yesterday, and all these people wept and laughed
because of what we had done. And I was proud----" The lady shrugged
impatiently. "Proud, did I say? and glad? That attests how woefully I fall
short of you, my poet. You would have found some magic phrase to make that
ancient glory articulate, I know. Yet,--did I ever love you? I do not know
that. I only know I sometimes fear you robbed me of the power of loving any
other man."
He raised one hand in
deprecation. "I must remind you," he cried, whimsically, "that a
burnt child dreads even to talk of fire."
Her response was a
friendly nod. She came yet nearer. "What," she demanded, and her
smile was elfish, "what if I had lied to you? What if I were hideously
tired of my husband, that bluff, stolid captain? What if I wanted you to plead
with me as in the old time?"
He said: "Until
now you were only a woman. Oh, and now, my dear, you are again that resistless
gipsy who so merrily beguiled me to the very heart of loss. You are Love. You
are Youth. You are Comprehension. You are all that I have had, and lost, and
vainly hunger for. Here in this abominable village, there is no one who
understands--not even those who are more dear to me than you are. I know. I
only spoil good paper which might otherwise be profitably used to wrap herrings
in, they think. They give me ink and a pen just as they would give toys to a
child who squalled for them too obstinately. And Poesy is a thrifty oracle with
no words to waste upon the deaf, however loudly her interpreter cry out to her.
Oh, I have hungered for you, my proud, dark lady!" the playmaker said.
Afterward they stood
quite silent. She was not unmoved by his outcry; and for this very reason was
obscurely vexed by the reflection that it would be the essay of a braver man to
remedy, rather than to lament, his circumstances. And then the moment's rapture
failed him.
"I am a sorry
fool," he said; and lightly he ran on: "You are a skilful witch. Yet
you have raised the ghost of an old madness to no purpose. You seek a
master-poet? You will find none here. Perhaps I was one once. But most of us
are poets of one sort or another when we love. Do you not understand? To-day I
do not love you any more than I do Hecuba. Is it not strange that I should tell
you this and not be moved at all? Is it not laughable that we should stand here
at the last, two feet apart as things physical go, and be as profoundly severed
as if an ocean tumbled between us?"
He fell to walking to
and fro, his hands behind his back. She waited, used as she was to his unstable
temperament, a trifle puzzled. Presently he spoke:
"There was a time
when a master-poet was needed. He was found--nay,--rather made. Fate hastily
caught up a man not very different from the run of men--one with a taste for
stringing phrases and with a comedy or so to his discredit. Fate merely bid him
love a headstrong child newly released from the nursery."
"We know her well
enough," she said. "The girl was faithless, and tyrannous, and proud,
and coquettish, and unworthy, and false, and inconstant. She was black as hell
and dark as night in both her person and her living. You were not niggardly of
vituperation."
And he grimaced.
"Faith," he replied, "but sonnets are a more natural form of
expression than affidavits, and they are made effective by compliance with
different rules. I find no flagrant fault with you to-day. You were a child of
seventeen, the darling of a noble house, and an actor--yes, and not even a
pre-eminent actor--a gross, poor posturing vagabond, just twice your age,
presumed to love you. What child would not amuse herself with such engaging
toys? Vivacity and prettiness and cruelty are the ordinary attributes of
kittenhood. So you amused yourself. And I submitted with clear eyes, because I
could not help it. Yes, I who am by nature not disposed to underestimate my
personal importance--I submitted, because your mockery was more desirable than
the adoration of any other woman. And all this helped to make a master-poet of
me. Eh, why not, when such monstrous passions spoke through me--as if some
implacable god elected to play godlike music on a mountebank's lute? And I made
admirable plays. Why not, when there was no tragedy more poignant than
mine?--and where in any comedy was any figure one-half so ludicrous as mine?
Ah, yes, Fate gained her ends, as always."
He was a paunchy,
inconsiderable little man. By ordinary his elongated features and high, bald
forehead loaned him an aspect of serene and axiom-based wisdom, much as we see
him in his portraits; but now his countenance was flushed and mobile. Odd
passions played about it, as when on a sullen night in August summer lightnings
flicker and merge.
His voice had found
another cadence. "But Fate was not entirely ruthless. Fate bade the child
become a woman, and so grow tired of all her childhood's playthings. This was
after a long while, as we estimate happenings. . . . I suffered then. Yes, I
went down to the doors of death, as people say, in my long illness. But that
crude, corporal fever had a providential thievishness; and not content with
stripping me of health and strength,--not satisfied with pilfering
inventiveness and any strong hunger to create--why, that insatiable fever even
robbed me of my insanity. I lived. I was only a broken instrument flung by
because the god had wearied of playing. I would give forth no more
heart-wringing music, for the musician had departed. And I still lived--I, the
stout little tradesman whom you loathed. Yes, that tradesman scrambled through
these evils, somehow, and came out still able to word adequately all such
imaginings as could be devised by his natural abilities. But he transmitted no
more heart-wringing music."
She said, "You
lie!"
He said, "I thank
Heaven daily that I do not." He spoke the truth. She knew it, and her
heart was all rebellion.
Indefatigable birds
sang through the following hush. A wholesome and temperate breeze caressed
these silent people. Bees that would die to-morrow hummed about them
tirelessly.
Then the poet said:
"I loved you; and you did not love me. It is the most commonplace of
tragedies, the heart of every man alive has been wounded in this identical
fashion. A master-poet is only that wounded man--among so many other bleeding
folk--who perversely augments his agony, and utilizes his wound as an inkwell.
Presently time scars over the cut for him, as time does for all the others. He
does not suffer any longer. No, and such relief is a clear gain; but none the
less, he must henceforward write with ordinary ink such as the lawyers
use."
"I should have
been the man," the woman cried. "Had I been sure of fame, could I
have known those raptures when you used to gabble immortal phrases like a
stammering infant, I would have paid the price without all this
whimpering."
"Faith, and I
think you would have," he assented. "There is the difference. At
bottom I am a creature of the most moderate aspirations, as you always complained;
and for my part, Fate must in reason demand her applause of posterity rather
than of me. For I regret the unlived life that I was meant for--the comfortable
level life of little happenings which all my schoolfellows have passed through
in a stolid drove. I was equipped to live that life with relish, and that life
only; and it was denied me. It was demolished in order that a book or two be
made out of its wreckage."
She said, with
half-shut eyes: "There is a woman at the root of all this." And how he
laughed!
"Did I not say you
were a witch? Why, most assuredly there is."
He motioned with his
left hand. Some hundred yards away a young man, who was carrying two logs
toward New Place, had paused to rest. A girl was with him. Now laughingly she
was pretending to assist the porter in lifting his burden. It was a quaintly
pretty vignette, as framed by the peach leaves, because those two young people
were so merry and so candidly in love. A symbolist might have wrung pathos out
of the girl's desire to aid, as set against her fond inadequacy; and the
attendant playwright made note of it.
"Well, well!"
he said: "Young Quiney is a so-so choice, since women must necessarily
condescend to intermarrying with men. But he is far from worthy of her. Tell
me, now, was there ever a rarer piece of beauty?"
"The wench is not
ill-favored," was the dark lady's unenthusiastic answer. "So!--but
who is she?"
He replied: "She
is my daughter. Yonder you see my latter muse for whose dear sake I spin
romances. I do not mean that she takes any lively interest in them. That is not
to be expected, since she cannot read or write. Ask her about the poet we were
discussing, and I very much fear Judith will bluntly inform you she cannot tell
a B from a bull's foot. But one must have a muse of some sort or another; and
so I write about the world now as Judith sees it. My Judith finds this world an
eminently pleasant place. It is full of laughter and kindliness--for could
Herod be unkind to her?--and it is largely populated by ardent young fellows
who are intended chiefly to be twisted about your fingers; and it is
illuminated by sunlight whose real purpose is to show how pretty your hair is.
And if affairs go badly for a while, and you have done nothing very wrong--why,
of course, Heaven will soon straighten matters satisfactorily. For nothing that
happens to us can possibly be anything except a benefit, because God orders all
happenings, and God loves us. There you have Judith's creed; and upon my word,
I believe there is a great deal to be said for it."
"And this is
you," she cried--"you who wrote of Troilus and Timon!"
"I lived all
that," he replied--"I lived it, and so for a long while I believed in
the existence of wickedness. To-day I have lost many illusions, madam, and that
ranks among them. I never knew a wicked person. I question if anybody ever did.
Undoubtedly short-sighted people exist who have floundered into ill-doing; but
it proves always to have been on account of either cowardice or folly, and
never because of malevolence; and, in consequence, their sorry pickle should
demand commiseration far more loudly than our blame. In short, I find humanity
to be both a weaker and a better-meaning race than I had suspected. And so, I
make what you call `sugar-candy dolls,' because I very potently believe that
all of us are sweet at heart. Oh no! men lack an innate aptitude for sinning;
and at worst, we frenziedly attempt our misdemeanors just as a sheep retaliates
on its pursuers. This much, at least, has Judith taught me."
The woman murmured:
"Eh, you are luckier than I. I had a son. He was borne of my anguish, he
was fed and tended by me, and he was dependent on me in all things." She
said, with a half-sob, "My poet, he was so little and so helpless! Now he
is dead."
"My dear, my
dear!" he cried, and he took both her hands. "I also had a son. He
would have been a man by this."
They stood thus for a
while. And then he smiled.
"I ask your
pardon. I had forgotten that you hate to touch my hands. I know--they are too
moist and flabby. I always knew that you thought that. Well! Hamnet died. I
grieved. That is a trivial thing to say. But you also have seen your own flesh
lying in a coffin so small that even my soft hands could lift it. So you will
comprehend. To-day I find that the roughest winds abate with time. Hatred and
self-seeking and mischance and, above all, the frailties innate in us--these
buffet us for a while, and we are puzzled, and we demand of God, as Job did,
why is this permitted? And then as the hair dwindles, the wit grows."
"Oh, yes, with age
we take a slackening hold upon events; we let all happenings go by more
lightly; and we even concede the universe not to be under any actual bond to be
intelligible. Yes, that is true. But is it gain, my poet? for I had thought it
to be loss."
"With age we gain
the priceless certainty that sorrow and injustice are ephemeral. Solvitur
ambulando, my dear. I have attested this merely by living long enough. I, like
any other man of my years, have in my day known more or less every grief which
the world breeds; and each maddened me in turn, as each was duly salved by
time; so that to-day their ravages vex me no more than do the bee-stings I got
when I was an urchin. To-day I grant the world to be composed of muck and sunshine
intermingled; but, upon the whole, I find the sunshine more pleasant to look
at, and--greedily, because my time for sightseeing is not very long--I stare at
it. And I hold Judith's creed to be the best of all imaginable creeds--that if
we do nothing very wrong, all human imbroglios, in some irrational and quite
incomprehensible fashion, will be straightened to our satisfaction. Meanwhile,
you also voice a tonic truth--this universe of ours, and, reverently speaking,
the Maker of this universe as well, is under no actual bond to be intelligible
in dealing with us." He laughed at this season and fell into a lighter
tone. "Do I preach like a little conventicle-attending tradesman? Faith,
you must remember that when I talk gravely Judith listens as if it were an
oracle discoursing. For Judith loves me as the wisest and the best of men. I
protest her adoration frightens me. What if she were to find me out?"
"I loved what was
divine in you," the woman answered.
"Oddly enough,
that is the perfect truth! And when what was divine in me had burned a
sufficiency of incense to your vanity, your vanity's owner drove off in a fine
coach and left me to die in a garret. Then Judith came. Then Judith nursed and
tended and caressed me--and Judith only in all the world!--as once you did that
boy you spoke of. Ah, madam, and does not sorrow sometimes lie awake o' nights
in the low cradle of that child? and sometimes walk with you by day and clasp
your hand--much as his tiny hand did once, so trustingly, so like the clutching
of a vine--and beg you never to be friends with anything save sorrow? And do
you wholeheartedly love those other women's boys--who did not die? Yes, I
remember. Judith, too, remembered. I was her father, for all that I had
forsaken my family to dance Jack-pudding attendance on a fine Court lady. So
Judith came. And Judith, who sees in play-writing just a very uncertain way of
making money--Judith, who cannot tell a B from a bull's foot,--why, Judith,
madam, did not ask, but gave, what was divine."
"You are
unfair," she cried. "Oh, you are cruel, you juggle words, make knives
of them. . . . You"and she spoke as with difficulty--"you have no
right to know just how I loved my boy! You should be either man or woman!"
He said pensively:
"Yes, I am cruel. But you had mirth and beauty once, and I had only love
and a vocabulary. Who then more flagrantly abused the gifts God gave? And why
should I not be cruel to you, who made a master-poet of me for your recreation?
Lord, what a deal of ruined life it takes to make a little art! Yes, yes, I
know. Under old oaks lovers will mouth my verses, and the acorns are not yet
shaped from which those oaks will spring. My adoration and your perfidy, all
that I have suffered, all that I have failed in even, has gone toward the
building of an enduring monument. All these will be immortal, because youth is
immortal, and youth delights in demanding explanations of infinity. And only to
this end I have suffered and have catalogued the ravings of a perverse disease
which has robbed my life of all the normal privileges of life as flame shrivels
hair from the arm--that young fools such as I was once might be pleased to
murder my rhetoric, and scribblers parody me in their fictions, and schoolboys
guess at the date of my death!" This he said with more than ordinary
animation; and then he shook his head. "There is a leaven," he
said--"there is a leaven even in your smuggest and most inconsiderable
tradesman."
She answered, with a
wistful smile: "I, too, regret my poet. And just now you are more like
him----"
"Faith, but he was
really a poet--or, at least, at times----?"
"Not marble, nor
the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme----'"
"Dear, dear!"
he said, in petulant vexation; "how horribly emotion botches verse. That
clash of sibilants is both harsh and ungrammatical. Shall should be changed to
will." And at that the woman sighed, because, in common with all persons
who never essayed creative verbal composition, she was quite certain perdurable
writing must spring from a surcharged heart, rather than from a rearrangement
of phrases. And so,
"Very unfeignedly
I regret my poet," she said, "my poet, who was unhappy and
unreasonable, because I was not always wise or kind, or even just. And I did
not know until to-day how much I loved my poet. . . . Yes, I know now I loved
him. I must go now. I would I had not come."
Then, standing face to
face, he cried, "Eh, madam, and what if I also have lied to you--in part?
Our work is done; what more is there to say?"
"Nothing,"
she answered--"nothing. Not even for you, who are a master-smith of words
to-day and nothing more."
"I?" he
replied. "Do you so little emulate a higher example that even for a moment
you consider me?"
She did not answer.
When she had gone, the
playmaker sat for a long while in meditation; and then smilingly he took up his
pen. He was bound for "an uninhabited island" where all disasters
ended in a happy climax.
"So, so!" he
was declaiming, later on: "We, too, are kin To dreams and visions; and our
little life Is gilded by such faint and cloud-wrapped suns--Only, that needs a
homelier touch. Rather, let us say, We are such stuff As dreams are made
on--Oh, good, good!--Now to pad out the line. . . . In any event, the Bermudas
are a seasonable topic. Now here, instead of thickly-templed India, suppose we
write the still-vexed Bermoothes--Good, good! It fits in well enough. . .
."
And so in clerkly
fashion he sat about the accomplishment of his stint of labor in time for
dinner. A competent workman is not disastrously upset by interruption; and,
indeed, he found the notion of surprising Judith with an unlooked-for trinket
or so to be at first a very efficacious spur to composition.
And presently the
strong joy of creating kindled in him, and phrase flowed abreast with thought,
and the playmaker wrote fluently and surely to an accompaniment of contented
ejaculations. He regretted nothing, he would not now have laid aside his pen to
take up a scepter. For surely--he would have said--to live untroubled, and
weave beautiful and winsome dreams is the most desirable of human fates. But he
did not consciously think of this, because he was midcourse in the evoking of a
mimic tempest which, having purged its victims of unkindliness and error, aimed
(in the end) only to sink into an amiable calm.
"DR. HERRICK told
me that, in common with all the Enlightened or Illuminated Brothers, of which
prying sect the age breeds so many, he trusted the great lines of Nature, not
in the whole, but in part, as they believed Nature was in certain senses not
true, and a betrayer, and that she was not wholly the benevolent power to
endow, as accorded with the prevailing deceived notion of the vulgar. But he
wished not to discuss more particularly than thus, as he had drawn up to
himself a certain frontier of reticence; and so fell to petting a great black
pig, of which he made an unseemly companion, and to talking idly."
A Gyges ring they bear about them still, To be, and not, seen when and
where they will; They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall, They
fall like dew, and make no noise at all: So silently they one to th' other come
As colors steal into the pear or plum; And air-like, leave no pression to be
seen Where'er they met, or parting place has been. ROBERT HERRICK. My Lovers
how They Come and Part. The matter
hinges entirely upon whether or not Robert Herrick was insane. Sir Thomas
Browne always preferred to think that he was; whereas Philip Borsdale
perversely considered the answer to be optional. Perversely, Sir Thomas
protested, because he said that to believe in Herrick's sanity was not
conducive to your own.
This much is certain:
the old clergyman, a man of few friends and no intimates, enjoyed in Devon,
thanks to his time-hallowed reputation for singularity, a certain immunity. In
and about Dean Prior, for instance, it was conceded in 1674 that it was unusual
for a divine of the Church of England to make a black pig---and a pig of
peculiarly diabolical ugliness, at that--his ordinary associate; but Dean Prior
had come long ago to accept the grisly brute as a concomitant of Dr. Herrick's
presence almost as inevitable as his shadow. It was no crime to be fond of dumb
animals, not even of one so inordinately unprepossessing; and you allowed for
eccentricities, in any event, in dealing with a poet.
For Totnes,
Buckfastleigh, Dean Prior--all that part of Devon, in fact--complacently basked
in the reflected glory of Robert Herrick. People came from a long distance, now
that the Parliamentary Wars were over, in order just to see the writer of the
Hesperides and the Noble Numbers. And such enthusiasts found in Robert Herrick
a hideous dreamy man, who, without ever perpetrating any actual discourtesy,
always managed to dismiss them, somehow, with a sense of having been rebuffed.
Sir Thomas Browne, that
ardent amateur of the curious, came into Devon, however, without the risk of
incurring any such fate, inasmuch as the knight traveled westward simply to
discuss with Master Philip Borsdale the recent doings of Cardinal Alioneri.
Now, Philip Borsdale, as Sir Thomas knew, had been employed by Herrick in
various transactions here irrelevant. In consequence, Sir Thomas Browne was not
greatly surprised when, on his arrival at Buckfastleigh, Borsdale's
body-servant told him that Master Borsdale had left instructions for Sir Thomas
to follow him to Dean Prior. Browne complied, because his business with
Borsdale was of importance.
Philip Borsdale was
lounging in Dr. Herrick's chair, intent upon a lengthy manuscript, alone and to
all appearances quite at home. The state of the room Sir Thomas found
extraordinary; but he had graver matters to discuss; and he explained the results
of his mission without extraneous comment.
"Yes, you have
managed it to admiration," said Philip Borsdale, when the knight had made
an end. Borsdale leaned back and laughed, purringly, for the outcome of this
affair of the Cardinal and the Wax Image meant much to him from a pecuniary
standpoint. "Yet it is odd a prince of any church which has done so much
toward the discomfiture of sorcery should have entertained such ideas. It is
also odd to note the series of coincidences which appears to have attended this
Alioneri's practises."
"I noticed
that," said Sir Thomas. After a while he said: "You think, then, that
they must have been coincidences?"
"Must is a word
which intelligent people do not outwear by too constant usage."
And "Oh----?"
said the knight, and said that alone, because he was familiar with the sparkle
now in Borsdale's eyes, and knew it heralded an adventure for an amateur of the
curious.
"I am not
committing myself, mark you, Sir Thomas, to any statement whatever, beyond the
observation that these coincidences were noticeable. I add, with superficial
irrelevance, that Dr. Herrick disappeared last night."
"I am not
surprised," said Sir Thomas, drily. "No possible antics would
astonish me on the part of that unvenerable madman. When I was last in Totnes,
he broke down in the midst of a sermon, and flung the manuscript of it at his
congregation, and cursed them roundly for not paying closer attention. Such was
never my ideal of absolute decorum in the pulpit. Moreover, it is unusual for a
minister of the Church of England to be accompanied everywhere by a pig with
whom he discusses the affairs of the parish precisely as if the pig were a
human being."
"The pig--he
whimsically called the pig Corinna, sir, in honor of that imaginary mistress to
whom he addressed so many verses--why, the pig also has disappeared. Oh, but of
course that at least is simply a coincidence. . . . I grant you it was an
uncanny beast. And I grant you that Dr. Herrick was a dubious ornament to his
calling. Of that I am doubly certain to-day," said Borsdale, and he waved
his hand comprehensively, "in view of the state in which--you see--he left
this room. Yes, he was quietly writing here at eleven o'clock last night when
old Prudence Baldwin, his housekeeper, last saw him. Afterward Dr. Herrick
appears to have diverted himself by taking away the mats and chalking
geometrical designs upon the floor, as well as by burning some sort of incense
in this brasier."
"But such
avocations, Philip, are not necessarily indicative of sanity. No, it is not,
upon the whole, an inevitable manner for an elderly parson to while away an
evening."
"Oh, but that was
only a part, sir. He also left the clothes he was wearing--in a rather
peculiarly constructed heap, as you can see. Among them, by the way, I found
this flattened and corroded bullet. That puzzled me. I think I understand it
now." Thus Borsdale, as he composedly smoked his churchwarden. "In
short, the whole affair is as mysterious----"
Here Sir Thomas raised
his hand. "Spare me the simile. I detect a vista of curious perils such as
infinitely outshines verbal brilliancy. You need my aid in some insane
attempt." He considered. He said: "So! you have been retained?"
"I have been asked
to help him. Of course I did not know of what he meant to try. In short, Dr.
Herrick left this manuscript, as well as certain instructions for me. The last are--well!
unusual."
"Ah, yes! You
hearten me. I have long had my suspicions as to this Herrick, though. . . . And
what are we to do?"
"I really cannot
inform you, sir. I doubt if I could explain in any workaday English even what
we will attempt to do," said Philip Borsdale. "I do say this: You
believe the business which we have settled, involving as it does the lives of
thousands of men and women, to be of importance. I swear to you that, as set
against what we will essay, all we have done is trivial. As pitted against the
business we will attempt to-night, our previous achievements are suggestive of
the evolutions of two sand-fleas beside the ocean. The prize at which this
adventure aims is so stupendous that I cannot name it."
"Oh, but you must,
Philip. I am no more afraid of the local constabulary than I am of the local
notions as to what respectability entails. I may confess, how ever, that I am
afraid of wagering against unknown odds."
Borsdale reflected.
Then he said, with deliberation: "Dr. Herrick's was, when you come to
think of it, an unusual life. He is--or perhaps I ought to say he was--upward
of eighty-three. He has lived here for over a half-century, and during that
time he has never attempted to make either a friend or an enemy. He was--indifferent,
let us say. Talking to Dr. Herrick was, somehow, like talking to a man in a
fog. . . . Meanwhile, he wrote his verses to imaginary women--to Corinna and
Julia, to Myrha, Electra and Perilla--those lovely, shadow women who never, in
so far as we know, had any real existence----"
Sir Thomas smiled.
"Of course. They are mere figments of the poet, pegs to hang rhymes on.
And yet--let us go on. I know that Herrick never willingly so much as spoke
with a woman."
"Not in so far as
we know, I said." And Borsdale paused. "Then, too, he wrote such
dainty, merry poems about the fairies. Yes, it was all of fifty years ago that
Dr. Herrick first appeared in print with his Description of the King and Queen
of the Fairies. The thought seems always to have haunted him."
The knight's face
changed, a little by a little. "I have long been an amateur of the
curious," he said, strangely quiet. "I do not think that anything you
may say will surprise me inordinately."
"He had found in
every country in the world traditions of a race who were human--yet more than
hu man. That is the most exact fashion in which I can express his beginnings.
On every side he found the notion of a race who can impinge on mortal life and
partake of it--but always without exercising the last reach of their
endowments. Oh, the tradition exists everywhere, whether you call these
occasional interlopers fauns, fairies, gnomes, ondines, incubi, or demons. They
could, according to these fables, temporarily restrict themselves into our life,
just as a swimmer may elect to use only one arm--or, a more fitting comparison,
become apparent to our human senses in the fashion of a cube which can obtrude
only one of its six surfaces into a plane. You follow me, of course, sir?--to
the triangles and circles and hexagons this cube would seem to be an ordinary
square. Conceiving such a race to exist, we might talk with them, might jostle
them in the streets, might even intermarry with them, sir--and always see in
them only human beings, and solely because of our senses' limitations."
"I comprehend.
These are exactly the speculations that would appeal to an unbalanced mind--is
that not your thought, Philip?"
"Why, there is
nothing particularly insane, Sir Thomas, in desiring to explore in fields
beyond those which our senses make perceptible. It is very certain these fields
exist; and the question of their extent I take to be both interesting and
important."
Then Sir Thomas said:
"Like any other rational man, I have occasionally thought of this endeavor
at which you hint. We exist--you and I and all the others--in what we glibly
call the universe. All that we know of it is through what we entitle our five
senses, which, when provoked to action, will cause a chemical change in a few
ounces of spongy matter packed in our skulls. There are no grounds for
believing that this particular method of communication is adequate, or even
that the agents which produce it are veracious. Meanwhile, we are in touch with
what exists through our five senses only. It may be that they lie to us. There
is, at least, no reason for assuming them to be infallible."
"But reflection
plows a deeper furrow, Sir Thomas. Even in the exercise of any one of these
five senses it is certain that we are excelled by what we vaingloriously call
the lower forms of life. A dog has powers of scent we cannot reach to, birds
hear the crawling of a worm, insects distinguish those rays in the spectrum
which lie beyond violet and red, and are invisible to us; and snails and fish
and ants--perhaps all other living creatures, indeed--have senses which man
does not share at all, and has no name for. Granted that we human beings alone
possess the power of reasoning, the fact remains that we invariably start with
false premises, and always pass our judgments when biased at the best by
incomplete reports of everything in the universe, and very possibly by reports
which lie flat-footedly."
You saw that Browne was
troubled. Now he rose. "Nothing will come of this. I do not touch upon the
desirability of conquering those fields at which we dare only to hint. No, I am
not afraid. I dare assist you in doing anything Dr. Herrick asks, because I
know that nothing will come of such endeavors. Much is permitted us--`but of
the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, to us
who are no more than human, Ye shall not eat of it.'"
"Yet Dr. Herrick,
as many other men have done, thought otherwise. I, too, will venture a
quotation. `Didst thou never see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the
body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heavens o'er our
heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small
compass of our prison.' Many years ago that lamentation was familiar. What
wonder, then, that Dr. Herrick should have dared to repeat it yesterday? And
what wonder if he tried to free the prisoner?"
"Such freedom is
forbidden," Sir Thomas stubbornly replied. "I have long known that
Herrick was formerly in correspondence with John Heydon, and Robert Flood, and
others of the Illuminated, as they call themselves. There are many of this sect
in England, as we all know; and we hear much silly chatter of Elixirs and
Philosopher's Stones in connection with them. But I happen to know somewhat of
their real aims and tenets. I do not care to know any more than I do. If it be
true that all of which man is conscious is just a portion of a curtain, and
that the actual universe in nothing resembles our notion of it, I am willing to
believe this curtain was placed there for some righteous and wise reason. They
tell me the curtain may be lifted. Whether this be true or no, I must for my
own sanity's sake insist it can never be lifted."
"But what if it
were not forbidden? For Dr. Herrick asserts he has already demonstrated
that."
Sir Thomas interrupted,
with odd quickness. "True, we must bear it in mind the man never
married--Did he, by any chance, possess a crystal of Venice glass three inches
square?"
And Borsdale gaped.
"I found it with his manuscript. But he said nothing of it. . . . How
could you guess?"
Sir Thomas reflectively
scraped the edge of the glass with his finger-nail. "You would be none the
happier for knowing, Philip. Yes, that is a blood-stain here. I see. And
Herrick, so far as we know, had never in his life loved any woman. He is the
only poet in history who never demonstrably loved any woman. I think you had
better read me his manuscript, Philip."
This Philip Borsdale
did.
Then Sir Thomas said,
as quiet epilogue: "This, if it be true, would explain much as to that
lovely land of eternal spring and daffodils and friendly girls, of which his
verses make us free. It would even explain Corinna and Herrick's rapt living
without any human ties. For all poets since the time of AEschylus, who could
not write until he was too drunken to walk, have been most readily seduced by
whatever stimulus most tended to heighten their imaginings; so that for the
sake of a song's perfection they have freely resorted to divers artificial
inspirations, and very often without evincing any undue squeamishness. . . . I
spoke of AEschylus. I am sorry, Philip, that you are not familiar with ancient
Greek life. There is so much I could tell you of, in that event, of the quaint
cult of Kore, or Pherephatta, and of the swine of Eubouleus, and of certain
ambiguous maidens, whom those old Grecians fabled--oh, very ignorantly fabled,
my lad, of course--to rule in a more quietly lit and more tranquil world than
we blunder about. I think I could explain much which now seems mysterious--yes,
and the daffodils, also, that Herrick wrote of so constantly. But it is better
not to talk of these sinister delusions of heathenry." Sir Thomas
shrugged. "For my reward would be to have you think me mad. I prefer to
iterate the verdict of all logical people, and formally to register my opinion
that Robert Herrick was indisputably a lunatic."
Borsdale did not seem
perturbed. "I think the record of his experiments is true, in any event.
You will concede that their results were startling? And what if his deductions
be the truth? what if our limited senses have reported to us so very little of
the universe, and even that little untruthfully?" He laughed and drummed
impatiently upon the table. "At least, he tells us that the boy returned.
I fervently believe that in this matter Dr. Herrick was capable of any crime
except falsehood. Oh, no I depend on it, he also will return."
"You imagine
Herrick will break down the door between this world and that other
inconceivable world which all of us have dreamed of! To me, my lad, it seems as
if this Herrick aimed dangerously near to repetition of the Primal Sin, for all
that he handles it like a problem in mechanical mathematics. The poet writes as
if he were instructing a dame's school as to the advisability of becoming
omnipotent."
"Well, well! I am
not defending Dr. Herrick in anything save his desire to know the truth. In
this respect at least, he has proven himself to be both admirable and fearless.
And at worst, he only strives to do what Jacob did at Peniel," said Philip
Borsdale, lightly. "The patriarch, as I recall, was blessed for acting as
he did. The legend is not irrelevant, I think."
They passed into the
adjoining room.
Thus the two men came
into a high-ceiled apartment, cylindrical in shape, with plastered walls
painted green everywhere save for the quaint embellishment of a large oval,
wherein a woman, having an eagle's beak, grasped in one hand a serpent and in
the other a knife. Sir Thomas Browne seemed to recognize this curious design,
and gave an ominous nod.
Borsdale said:
"You see Dr. Herrick had prepared everything. And much of what we are
about to do is merely symbolical, of course. Most people undervalue symbols.
They do not seem to understand that there could never have been any conceivable
need of inventing a periphrasis for what did not exist."
Sir Thomas Browne
regarded Borsdale for a while intently. Then the knight gave his habitual
shrugging gesture. "You are braver than I, Philip, because you are more
ignorant than I. I have been too long an amateur of the curious. Sometimes in
over-credulous moments I have almost believed that in sober verity there are
reasoning beings who are not human--beings that for their own dark purposes
seek union with us. Indeed, I went into Pomerania once to talk with John
Dietrick of Ramdin. He told me one of those relations whose truth we dread, a
tale which I did not dare, I tell you candidly, even to discuss in my Vulgar
Errors. Then there is Helgi Thorison's history, and that of Leonard of Basle
also. Oh, there are more recorded stories of this nature than you dream of,
Philip. We have only the choice between believing that all these men were
madmen, and believing that ordinary human life is led by a drugged animal who
drowses through a purblind existence among merciful veils. And these female
creatures--these Corinnas, Perillas, Myrhas, and Electras--can it be possible
that they are always striving, for their own strange ends, to rouse the
sleeping animal and break the kindly veils?--and are they permitted to use such
amiable enticements as Herrick describes? Oh, no, all this is just a madman's
dream, dear lad, and we must not dare to consider it seriously, lest we become
no more sane than he."
"But you will aid
me?" Borsdale said.
"Yes, I will aid
you, Philip, for in Herrick's case I take it that the mischief is consummated
already; and we, I think, risk nothing worse than death. But you will need
another knife a little later--a knife that will be clean."
"I had
forgotten." Borsdale withdrew, and presently returned with a bone-handled
knife. And then he made a light. "Are you quite ready, sir?"
Sir Thomas Browne, that
aging amateur of the curious, could not resist a laugh.
And then they sat about
proceedings of which, for obvious reasons, the details are best left
unrecorded. It was not an unconscionable while before they seemed to be aware
of unusual phenomena. But as Sir Thomas always pointed out, in subsequent
discussions, these were quite possibly the fruitage of excited imagination.
"Now,
Philip!--now, give me the knife!" cried Sir Thomas Browne. He knew for the
first time, despite many previous mischancy happenings, what real terror was.
The room was thick with
blinding smoke by this, so that Borsdale could see nothing save his co-partner
in this adventure. Both men were shaken by what had occurred before. Borsdale
incuriously perceived that old Sir Thomas rose, tense as a cat about to pounce,
and that he caught the unstained knife from Borsdale's hand, and flung it like a
javelin into the vapor which encompassed them. This gesture stirred the smoke
so that Borsdale could see the knife quiver and fall, and note the tiny
triangle of unbared plaster it had cut in the painted woman's breast. Within
the same instant he had perceived a naked man who staggered.
"Iz adu
kronyeshnago----!" The intruder's thin, shrill wail was that of a
frightened child. The man strode forward, choked, seemed to grope his way. His
face was not good to look at. Horror gripped and tore at every member of the
cadaverous old body, as a high wind tugs at a flag. The two witnesses of
Herrick's agony did not stir during the instant wherein the frenzied man
stooped, moving stiffly like an ill-made toy, and took up the knife.
"Oh, yes, I knew
what he was about to do," said Sir Thomas Browne afterward, in his quiet
fashion. "I did not try to stop him. If Herrick had been my dearest
friend, I would not have interfered. I had seen his face, you comprehend. Yes,
it was kinder to let him die. It was curious, though, as he stood there hacking
his chest, how at each stab he deliberately twisted the knife. I suppose the
pain distracted his mind from what he was remembering. I should have forewarned
Borsdale of this possible outcome at the very first, I suppose. But, then,
which one of us is always wise?"
So this adventure came
to nothing. For its significance, if any, hinged upon Robert Herrick's sanity,
which was at best a disputable quantity. Grant him insane, and the whole
business, as Sir Thomas was at large pains to point out, dwindles at once into
the irresponsible vagaries of a madman.
"And all the
while, for what we know, he had been hiding somewhere in the house. We never
searched it. Oh, yes, there is no doubt he was insane," said Sir Thomas,
comfortably.
"Faith! what he
moaned was gibberish, of course----"
"Oddly enough, his
words were intelligible. They meant in Russian `Out of the lowest hell.'"
"But, why, in
God's name, Russian?"
"I am sure I do
not know," Sir Thomas replied; and he did not appear at all to regret his
ignorance.
But Borsdale meditated,
disappointedly. "Oh, yes, the outcome is ambiguous, Sir Thomas, in every
way. I think we may safely take it as a warning, in any event, that this world
of ours, whatever its deficiencies, was meant to be inhabited by men and women
only."
"Now I," was
Sir Thomas's verdict, "prefer to take it as a warning that insane people
ought to be restrained."
"Ah, well,
insanity is only one of the many forms of being abnormal. Yes, I think it
proves that all abnormal people ought to be restrained. Perhaps it proves that
they are very potently restrained," said Philip Borsdale, perversely.
Perversely, Sir Thomas
always steadfastly protested, because he said that to believe in Herrick's
sanity was not conducive to your own.
So Sir Thomas shrugged,
and went toward the open window. Without the road was a dazzling gray under the
noon sun, for the sky was cloudless. The ordered trees were rustling
pleasantly, very brave in their autumnal liveries. Under a maple across the way
some seven laborers were joking lazily as they ate their dinner. A wagon
lumbered by, the driver whistling. In front of the house a woman had stopped to
rearrange the pink cap of the baby she was carrying. The child had just reached
up fat and uncertain little arms to kiss her. Nothing that Browne saw was out
of ordinary, kindly human life.
"Well, after
all," said Sir Thomas, upon a sudden, "for one, I think it is an
endurable world, just as it stands."
And Borsdale looked up
from a letter he had been reading. It was from a woman who has no concern with
this tale, and its contents were of no importance to any one save Borsdale.
"Now, do you
know," said Philip Borsdale, "I am beginning to think you the most
sensible man of my acquaintance! Oh, yes, beyond doubt it is an endurable
sun-nurtured world--just as it stands. It makes it doubly odd that Dr. Herrick
should have chosen always to
Write of groves, and twilights, and to sing The court of Mab, and of the
Fairy King, And write of Hell.'" Sir
Thomas touched his arm, protestingly. "Ah, but you have forgotten what
follows, Philip--
`I sing, and ever shall, Of Heaven,--and hope to have it after
all.'" "Well! I cry Amen,"
said Borsdale. "But I wish I could forget the old man's face."
"Oh, and I
also," Sir Thomas said. "And I cry Amen with far more heartiness, my
lad, because I, too, once dreamed of--of Corinna, shall we say?"
MR. WYCHERLEY was
naturally modest until King Charles' court, that late disgrace to our times,
corrupted him. He then gave himself up to all sorts of extravagances and to the
wildest frolics that a wanton wit could devise. . . . Never was so much ill-nature
in a pen as in his, joined with so much good nature as was in himself, even to
excess; for he was bountiful, even to run himself into difficulties, and
charitable even to a fault. It was not that he was free from the failings of
humanity, but he had the tenderness of it, too, which made everybody excuse
whom everybody loved; and even the asperity of his verses seems to have been
forgiven."
I the Plain Dealer am to act to-day. * * * * * * Now, you shrewd judges,
who the boxes sway, Leading the ladies' hearts and sense astray, And for their
sakes, see all and hear no play; Correct your cravats, foretops, lock behind:
The dress and breeding of the play ne'er mind; For the coarse dauber of the
coming scenes To follow life and nature only means, Displays you as you are,
makes his fine woman A mercenary jilt and true to no man, Shows men of wit and
pleasure of the age Are as dull rogues as ever cumber'd stage. WILLIAM
WYCHERLEY. Prologue to The Plain Dealer. It
was in the May of 1680 that Mr. William Wycherley went into the country to
marry the famed heiress, Mistress Araminta Vining, as he had previously settled
with her father, and found her to his vast relief a very personable girl. She
had in consequence a host of admirers, pre-eminent among whom was young Robert
Minifie of Milanor. Mr. Wycherley, a noted stickler for etiquette, decorously
made bold to question Mr. Minifie's taste in a dispute concerning waistcoats. A
duel was decorously arranged and these two met upon the narrow beach of Teviot
Bay.
Theirs was a spirited
encounter, lasting for ten energetic minutes. Then Wycherley pinked Mr. Minifie
in the shoulder, just as the dramatist, a favorite pupil of Gerard's, had
planned to do; and the four gentlemen parted with every imaginable courtesy,
since the wounded man and the two seconds were to return by boat to Mr.
Minifie's house at Milanor.
More lately Wycherley
walked in the direction of Ouseley Manor, whistling Love's a Toy. Honor was
satisfied, and, happily, as he reflected, at no expense of life. He was a
kindly hearted fop, and more than once had killed his man with perfectly
sincere regret. But in putting on his coat--it was the black camlet coat with
silver buttons--he had overlooked his sleevelinks; and he did not recognize,
for twenty-four eventful hours, the full importance of his carelessness.
In the heart of Figgis
Wood, the incomparable Countess of Drogheda, aunt to Mr. Wycherley's betrothed,
and a noted leader of fashion, had presently paused at sight of him--laughing a
little--and with one tiny hand had made as though to thrust back the staghound
which accompanied her. "Your humble servant, Mr. Swashbuckler," she
said; and then: "But oh! you have not hurt the lad?" she demanded,
with a tincture of anxiety.
"Nay, after a
short but brilliant engagement," Wycherley returned, "Mr. Minifie was
very harmlessly perforated; and in consequence I look to be married on
Thursday, after all."
"Let me die but
Cupid never meets with anything save inhospitality in this gross world!"
cried Lady Drogheda. "For the boy is heels over head in love with
Araminta,--oh, a second Almanzor! And my niece does not precisely hate him
either, let me tell you, William, for all your month's assault of essences and
perfumed gloves and apricot paste and other small artillery of courtship. La,
my dear, was it only a month ago we settled your future over a couple of Naples
biscuit and a bottle of Rhenish?" She walked beside him now, and the
progress of these exquisites was leisurely. There were many trees at hand so
huge as to necessitate a considerable detour.
"Egad, it is a
month and three days over," Wycherley retorted, "since you suggested
your respected brother-in-law was ready to pay my debts in full, upon condition
I retaliated by making your adorable niece Mistress Wycherley. Well, I stand
to-day indebted to him for an advance of £1500 and am no more afraid of
bailiffs. We have performed a very creditable stroke of business; and the day
after to-morrow you will have fairly earned your £500 for arranging the marriage.
Faith, and in earnest of this, I already begin to view you through appropriate
lenses as undoubtedly the most desirable aunt in the universe."
Nor was there any
unconscionable stretching of the phrase. Through the quiet forest, untouched as
yet by any fidgeting culture, and much as it was when John Lackland wooed
Hawisa under, its venerable oaks, old even then, the little widow moved like a
light flame. She was clothed throughout in scarlet, after her high-hearted
style of dress, and carried a tall staff of ebony; and the gold head of it was
farther from the dead leaves than was her mischievous countenance. The big
staghound lounged beside her. She pleased the eye, at least, did this
heartless, merry and selfish Olivia, whom Wycherley had so ruthlessly depicted
in his Plain Dealer. To the last detail Wycherley found her, as he phrased it,
"mignonne et piquante," and he told her so.
Lady Drogheda observed,
"Fiddle-de-dee!" Lady Drogheda continued: "Yes, I am a fool, of
course, but then I still remember Bessington, and the boy that went mad
there----"
"Because of a
surfeit of those dreams `such as the poets know when they are young.' Sweet
chuck, beat not the bones of the buried; when he breathed he was a likely
lad," Mr. Wycherley declared, with signal gravity.
"Oh, la, la!"
she flouted him. "Well, in any event you were the first gentleman in
England to wear a neckcloth of Flanders lace."
"And you were the
first person of quality to eat cheesecakes in Spring Garden," he not half
so mirth-fully retorted. "So we have not entirely failed in life, it may
be, after all."
She made of him a quite
irrelevant demand: "D'ye fancy Esau was contented, William?"
"I fancy he was
fond of pottage, madam; and that, as I remember, he got his pottage. Come, now,
a tangible bowl of pottage, piping hot, is not to be despised in such a
hazardous world as ours is."
She was silent for a
lengthy while. "Lord, Lord, how musty all that brave, sweet nonsense
seems!" she said, and almost sighed. "Eh, well! le vin est tire, et
il faut le boire."
"My adorable aunt!
Let us put it a thought less dumpishly; and render thanks because our pottage
smokes upon the table, and we are blessed with excellent appetites."
"So that in a
month we will be back again in the playhouses and Hyde Park and Mulberry
Garden, or nodding to each other in the New Exchange,--you with your debts
paid, and I with my £500----?" She paused to pat the staghound's head.
"Lord Remon came this afternoon," said Lady Drogheda, and with
averted eyes.
"I do not approve
of Remon," he announced. "Nay, madam, even a Siren ought to spare her
kin and show some mercy toward the more stagnant-blooded fish."
And Lady Drogheda
shrugged. "He is very wealthy, and I am lamentably poor. One must not seek
noon at fourteen o'clock or clamor for better bread than was ever made from
wheat."
Mr. Wycherley laughed,
after a pregnant silence.
"By heavens,
madam, you are in the right! So I shall walk no more in Figgis Wood, for its
old magic breeds too many day-dreams. Besides, we have been serious for
half-an-hour. Now, then, let us discuss theology, dear aunt, or millinery, or
metaphysics, or the King's new statue at Windsor, or, if you will, the last
Spring Garden scandal. Or let us count the leaves upon this tree; and afterward
I will enumerate my reasons for believing yonder crescent moon to be the paring
of the Angel Gabriel's left thumb-nail."
She was a woman of
eloquent silences when there was any need of them; and thus the fop and the
coquette traversed the remainder of that solemn wood without any further
speech. Modish people would have esteemed them unwontedly glum.
Wycherley discovered in
a while the absence of his sleeve-links, and was properly vexed by the loss of
these not unhandsome trinkets, the gifts of Lady Castlemaine in the old days
when Mr. Wycherley was the King's successful rival for her favors. But
Wycherley knew the tide filled Teviot Bay and wondering fishes were at liberty
to muzzle the toys, by this, and merely shrugged at his mishap, midcourse in
toilet.
Mr. Wycherley, upon
mature deliberation, wore the green suit with yellow ribbons, since there was a
ball that night in honor of his nearing marriage, and a confluence of gentry to
attend it. Miss Vining and he walked through a minuet to some applause; the two
were heartily acclaimed a striking couple, and congratulations beat about their
ears as thick as sugar-plums in a carnival. And at nine you might have found
the handsome dramatist alone upon the East Terrace of Ouseley, pacing to and
fro in the moonlight, and complacently reflecting upon his quite indisputable
and, past doubt, unmerited good fortune.
There was never any
night in June which nature planned the more adroitly. Soft and warm and
windless, lit by a vainglorious moon and every star that ever shone, the beauty
of this world caressed and heartened its beholder like a gallant music. Our
universe, Mr. Wycherley conceded willingly, was excellent and kindly, and the
Arbiter of it too generous; for here was he, the wastrel, like the third prince
at the end of a fairy-tale, the master of a handsome wife, and a fine house and
fortune. Somewhere, he knew, young Minifie, with his arm in a sling, was
pleading with Mistress Araminta for the last time; and this reflection did not
greatly trouble Mr. Wycherley, since incommunicably it tickled his vanity. He
was chuckling when he came to the open window.
Within a woman was
singing, to the tinkling accompaniment of a spinet, for the delectation of Lord
Remon. She was not uncomely, and the hard, lean, stingy countenance of the
attendant nobleman was almost genial. Wycherley understood with a great rending
shock, as though the thought were novel, that Olivia, Lady Drogheda, designed
to marry this man, who grinned within finger's reach--or, rather, to ally
herself with Remon's inordinate wealth,--and without any heralding a brutal
rage and hatred of all created things possessed the involuntary eavesdropper.
She looked up into
Remon's face and, laughing with such bright and elfin mirth as never any other
woman showed, thought Wycherley, she broke into another song. She would have
spared Mr. Wycherley that had she but known him to be within earshot. . . . Oh,
it was only Lady Drogheda who sang, he knew,--the seasoned gamester and
coquette, the veteran of London and of Cheltenham,--but the woman had no right
to charm this haggler with a voice that was not hers. For it was the voice of
another Olivia, who was not a fine and urban lady, and who lived nowhere any
longer; it was the voice of a soft-handed, tender, jeering girl, whom he alone
remembered; and a sick, illimitable rage grilled in each vein of him as
liltingly she sang, for Remon, the old and foolish song which Wycherley had
made in her praise very long ago, and of which he might not ever forget the
most trivial word.
Men, even beaux, are
strangely constituted; and so it needed only this--the sudden stark brute
jealousy of one male animal for another. That was the clumsy hand which now
unlocked the dyke; and like a flood, tall and resistless, came the recollection
of their far-off past and of its least dear trifle, of all the aspirations and
absurdities and splendors of their common youth, and found him in its path, a
painted fellow, a spendthrift king of the mode, a most notable authority upon
the set of a peruke, a penniless, spent connoisseur of stockings, essences and
cosmetics.
He got but little rest
this night.
There were too many
plaintive memories which tediously plucked him back, with feeble and
innumerable hands, as often as he trod upon the threshold of sleep. Then too,
there were so many dreams, half-waking, and not only of Olivia Chichele, naive
and frank in divers rural circumstances, but rather of Olivia, Lady Drogheda,
that perfect piece of artifice; of how exquisite she was! how swift and
volatile in every movement! how airily indomitable, and how mendacious to the
tips of her polished finger-nails! and how she always seemed to flit about this
world as joyously, alertly, and as colorfully as some ornate and tiny bird of
the tropics!
But presently parochial
birds were wrangling underneath the dramatist's window, while he tossed and
assured himself that he was sleepier than any saint who ever snored in Ephesus;
and presently one hand of Moncrieff was drawing the bed-curtains, while the
other carefully balanced a mug of shaving-water.
Wycherley did not see
her all that morning, for Lady Drogheda was fatigued, or so a lackey informed
him, and as yet kept her chamber. His Araminta he found deplorably sullen. So
the dramatist devoted the better part of this day to a refitting of his
wedding-suit, just come from London; for Moncrieff, an invaluable man, had
adjudged the pockets to be placed too high; and, be the punishment deserved or
no, Mr. Wycherley had never heard that any victim of law appeared the more
admirable upon his scaffold for being slovenly in his attire.
Thus it was as late as
five in the afternoon that, wearing the peach-colored suit trimmed with scarlet
ribbon, and a new French beaver, the exquisite came upon Lady Drogheda walking
in the gardens with only an appropriate peacock for company. She was so
beautiful and brilliant and so little--so like a famous gem too suddenly disclosed,
and therefore oddly disparate in all these qualities, that his decorous
pleasant voice might quite permissibly have shaken a trifle (as indeed it did),
when Mr. Wycherley implored Lady Drogheda to walk with him to Teviot Bay, on
the off-chance of recovering his sleeve-links.
And there they did find
one of the trinkets, but the tide had swept away the other, or else the sand
had buried it. So they rested there upon the rocks, after an unavailing search,
and talked of many trifles, amid surroundings oddly incongruous.
For this Teviot Bay is
a primeval place, a deep-cut, narrow notch in the tip of Carnrick, and is
walled by cliffs so high and so precipitous that they exclude a view of
anything except the ocean. The bay opens due west; and its white barriers were
now developing a violet tinge, for this was on a sullen afternoon, and the sea
was ruffled by spiteful gusts. Wycherley could find no color anywhere save in
this glowing, tiny and exquisite woman; and everywhere was a gigantic peace,
vexed only when high overhead a sea-fowl jeered at these modish persons, as he
flapped toward an impregnable nest.
"And by this hour
to-morrow," thought Mr. Wycherley, "I shall be chained to that good,
strapping, wholesome Juno of a girl!"
So he fell presently into
a silence, staring at the vacant west, which was like a huge and sickly pearl,
not thinking of anything at all, but longing poignantly for something which was
very beautiful and strange and quite unattainable, with precisely that anguish
he had sometimes known in awaking from a dream of which he could remember
nothing save its piercing loveliness.
"And thus ends the
last day of our bachelorhood!" said Lady Drogheda, upon a sudden.
"You have played long enough--La, William, you have led the fashion for
ten years, you have written four merry comedies, and you have laughed as much
as any man alive, but you have pulled down all that nature raised in you, I
think. Was it worth while?"
"Faith, but
nature's monuments are no longer the last cry in architecture," he
replied; "and I believe that The Plain Dealer and The Country Wife will
hold their own."
"And you wrote
them when you were just a boy! Ah, yes, you might have been our English
Moliere, my dear. And, instead, you have elected to become an authority upon
cravats and waistcoats."
"Eh,
madam"--he smiled--"there was a time when I too was foolishly intent
to divert the leisure hours of posterity. But reflection assured me that
posterity had, thus far, done very little to place me under that or any other
obligation. Ah, no! Youth, health and--though I say it--a modicum of
intelligence are loaned to most of us for a while, and for a terribly brief
while. They are but loans, and Time is waiting greedily to snatch them from us.
For the perturbed usurer knows that he is lending us, perforce, three priceless
possessions, and that till our lease runs out we are free to dispose of them as
we elect. Now, had I jealously devoted my allotment of these treasures toward
securing for my impressions of the universe a place in yet unprinted libraries,
I would have made an investment from which I could not possibly have derived
any pleasure, and which would have been to other people of rather dubious
benefit. In consequence, I chose a wiser and devouter course."
This statement Lady
Drogheda afforded the commentary of a grimace.
"Why, look
you," Wycherley philosophized, "have you never thought what a vast
deal of loving and painstaking labor must have gone to make the world we
inhabit so beautiful and so complete? For it was not enough to evolve and set a
glaring sun in heaven, to marshal the big stars about the summer sky, but even
in the least frequented meadow every butterfly must have his pinions jeweled,
very carefully, and every lovely blade of grass be fashioned separately. The
hand that yesterday arranged the Himalayas found time to glaze the wings of a
midge! Now, most of us could design a striking Flood, or even a Last judgment,
since the canvas is so big and the colors used so virulent; but to paint a
snuff-box perfectly you must love the labor for its own sake, and pursue it
without even an underthought of the performance's ultimate appraisement. People
do not often consider the simple fact that it is enough to bait, and quite
superfluous to veneer, a trap; indeed, those generally acclaimed the best of
persons insist this world is but an antechamber, full of gins and pit falls,
which must be scurried through with shut eyes. And the more fools they, as all
we poets know! for to enjoy a sunset, or a glass of wine, or even to admire the
charms of a handsome woman, is to render the Artificer of all at least the
tribute of appreciation."
But she said, in a
sharp voice: "William, William----!" And he saw that there was no
beach now in Teviot Bay except the dwindling crescent at its farthest
indentation on which they sat.
Yet his watch, on
consultation, recorded only five o'clock; and presently Mr. Wycherley laughed,
not very loudly. The two had risen, and her face was a tiny snowdrift where
every touch of rouge and grease-pencils showed crudely.
"Look now,"
said Wycherley, "upon what trifles our lives hinge! Last night I heard you
singing, and the song brought back so many things done long ago, and made me so
unhappy that--ridiculous conclusion!--I forgot to wind my watch. Well! the tide
is buffeting at either side of Carnrick; within the hour this place will be
submerged; and, in a phrase, we are as dead as Hannibal or Hector."
She said, very quiet:
"Could you not gain the mainland if you stripped and swam for it?"
"Why,
possibly," the beau conceded. "Meanwhile you would have drowned.
Faith, we had as well make the best of it."
Little Lady Drogheda
touched his sleeve, and her hand (as the man noted) did not shake at all, nor
did her delicious piping voice shake either. "You cannot save me. I know
it. I am not frightened. I bid you save yourself."
"Permit me to
assist you to that ledge of rock," Mr. Wycherley answered, "which is
a trifle higher than the beach; and I pray you, Olivia, do not mar the dignity
of these last passages by talking nonsense."
For he had spied a
ledge, not inaccessible, some four feet higher than the sands, and it offered
them at least a respite. And within the moment they had secured this niggardly
concession, intent to die, as Wycherley observed, like hurt mice upon a
pantry-shelf. The business smacked of disproportion, he considered, although
too well-bred to say as much; for here was a big ruthless league betwixt earth
and sea, and with no loftier end than to crush a fop and a coquette, whose
speedier extinction had been dear at the expense of a shilling's worth of
arsenic!
Then the sun came out,
to peep at these trapped, comely people, and doubtless to get appropriate mirth
at the spectacle. He hung low against the misty sky, a clearly-rounded orb that
did not dazzle, but merely shone with the cold glitter of new snow upon a fair
December day; and for the rest, the rocks, and watery heavens, and all these
treacherous and lapping waves, were very like a crude draught of the world,
dashed off conceivably upon the day before creation.
These arbiters of
social London did not speak at all; and the bleak waters crowded toward them as
in a fretful dispute of precedence.
Then the woman said:
"Last night Lord Remon asked me to marry him, and I declined the honor.
For this place is too like Bessington--and, I think, the past month has changed
everything----"
"I thought you had
forgotten Bessington," he said, "long, long ago."
"I did not ever
quite forget--Oh, the garish years," she wailed, "since then! And how
I hated you, William--and yet liked you, too,--because you were never the boy
that I remembered, and people would not let you be! And how I hated them--the
huzzies! For I had to see you almost every day, and it was never you I saw--Ah,
William, come back for just a little, little while, and be an honest boy for
just the moment that we are dying, and not an elegant fine gentleman!"
"Nay, my
dear," the dramatist composedly answered, "an hour of naked candor is
at hand. Life is a masquerade where Death, it would appear, is master of the
ceremonies. Now he sounds his whistle; and we who went about the world so long
as harlequins must unmask, and for all time put aside our abhorrence of the
disheveled. For in sober verity, this is Death who comes, Olivia,--though I had
thought that at his advent one would be afraid."
Yet apprehension of
this gross and unavoidable adventure, so soon to be endured, thrilled him, and
none too lightly. It seemed unfair that death should draw near thus sensibly,
with never a twinge or ache to herald its arrival. Why, there were fifty years
of life in this fine, nimble body but for any con tretemps like that of the
deplorable present! Thus his meditations stumbled.
"Oh,
William," Lady Drogheda bewailed, "it is all so big--the incurious
west, and the sea, and these rocks that were old in Noah's youth,--and we are
so little----!"
"Yes," he
returned, and took her hand, because their feet were wetted now; "the trap
and its small prey are not commensurate. The stage is set for a Homeric
death-scene, and we two profane an over-ambitious background. For who are we
that Heaven should have rived the world before time was, to trap us, and should
make of the old sea a fowling-net?" Their eyes encountered, and he said,
with a strange gush of manliness: "Yet Heaven is kind. I am bound even in
honor now to marry Mistress Araminta; and you would marry Remon in the end,
Olivia,--ah, yes! for we are merely moths, my dear, and luxury is a
disastrously brilliant lamp. But here are only you and I and the master of all
ceremony. And yet--I would we were a little worthier, Olivia!"
"You have written
four merry comedies and you were the first gentleman in England to wear a
neckcloth of Flanders lace," she answered, and her smile was sadder than
weeping.
"And you were the
first person of quality to eat cheese-cakes in Spring Garden. There you have
our epitaphs, if we in truth have earned an epitaph who have not ever lived."
"No, we have only
laughed--Laugh now, for the last time, and hearten me, my handsome William! And
yet could I but come to God," the woman said, with a new voice, "and
make it clear to Him just how it all fell out, and beg for one more chance! How
heartily I would pray then!"
"And I would cry
Amen to all that prayer must of necessity contain," he answered.
"Oh!" said Wycherley, "just for applause and bodily comfort and
the envy of innumerable other fools we two have bartered a great heritage! I
think our corner of the world will lament us for as much as a week; but I fear
lest Heaven may not condescend to set apart the needful time wherein to frame a
suitable chastisement for such poor imbeciles. Olivia, I have loved you all my
life, and I have been faithful neither to you nor to myself! I love you so that
I am not afraid even now, since you are here, and so entirely that I have
forgotten how to plead my cause convincingly. And I have had practice, let me
tell you. . . . !" Then he shook his head and smiled. "But candor is
not a la mode. See, now, to what outmoded and bucolic frenzies nature brings
even us at last."
She answered only, as
she motioned seaward, "Look!"
And what Mr. Wycherley
saw was a substantial boat rowed by four of Mr. Minifie's attendants; and in
the bow of the vessel sat that wounded gentleman himself, regarding Wycherley
and Lady Drogheda with some disfavor; and beside the younger man was Mistress
Araminta Vining.
It was a perturbed
Minifie who broke the silence. "This is very awkward," he said,
"because Araminta and I are eloping. We mean to be married this same night
at Milanor. And deuce take it, Mr. Wycherley! I can't leave you there to drown,
any more than in the circumstances I can ask you to make one of the party."
"Mr.
Wycherley," said his companion, with far more asperity, "the vanity
and obduracy of a cruel father have forced me to the adoption of this desperate
measure. Toward yourself I entertain no ill-feeling, nor indeed any sentiment
at all except the most profound contempt. My aunt will, of course, accompany
us; for yourself, you will do as you please; but in any event I solemnly
protest that I spurn your odious pretensions, release myself hereby from an
enforced and hideous obligation, and in a phrase would not marry you in order
to be Queen of England."
"Miss Vining, I
had hitherto admired you," the beau replied, with fervor, "but now
esteem is changed to adoration."
Then he turned to his
Olivia. "Madam, you will pardon the awkward but unavoidable publicity of
my proceeding. I am a ruined man. I owe your brother-in-law some £1500, and,
oddly enough, I mean to pay him. I must sell Jephcot and Skene Minor, but while
life lasts I shall keep Bessington and all its memories. Meanwhile there is a
clergyman waiting at Milanor. So marry me to-night, Olivia; and we will go back
to Bessington to-morrow."
"To
Bessington----!" she said. It was as though she spoke of something very
sacred. Then very musically Lady Drogheda laughed, and to the eye she was all
flippancy. "La, William, I can't bury myself in the country until the end
of time," she said, "and make interminable custards," she added,
"and superintend the poultry," she said, "and for recreation
play short whist with the vicar."
And it seemed to Mr.
Wycherley that he had gone divinely mad. "Don't lie to me, Olivia. You are
thinking there are yet a host of heiresses who would be glad to be a famous
beau's wife at however dear a cost. But don't lie to me. Don't even try to seem
the airy and bedizened woman I have known so long. All that is over now. Death
tapped us on the shoulder, and, if only for a moment, the masks were dropped.
And life is changed now, oh, everything is changed! Then, come, my dear! let us
be wise and very honest. Let us concede it is still possible for me to find
another heiress, and for you to marry Remon; let us grant it the only outcome
of our common-sense! and for all that, laugh, and fling away the pottage, and
be more wise than reason."
She irresolutely said:
"I cannot. Matters are altered now. It would be madness----"
"It would
undoubtedly be madness," Mr. Wycherley assented. "But then I am so
tired of being rational! Oh, Olivia," this former arbiter of taste
absurdly babbled, "if I lose you now it is forever! and there is no health
in me save when I am with you. Then alone I wish to do praiseworthy things, to
be all which the boy we know of should have grown to. . . . See how profoundly
shameless I am become when, with such an audience, I take refuge in the pitiful
base argument of my own weakness! But, my dear, I want you so that nothing else
in the world means anything to me. I want you! and all my life I have wanted
you."
"Boy,
boy----!" she answered, and her fine hands had come to Wycherley, as white
birds flutter homeward. But even then she had to deliberate the matter--since
the habits of many years are not put aside like outworn gloves,--and for
innumerable centuries, it seemed to him, her foot tapped on that wetted ledge.
Presently her lashes
lifted. "I suppose it would be lacking in reverence to keep a clergyman
waiting longer than was absolutely necessary?" she hazarded.
"A critical age
called for symmetry, and exquisite finish had to be studied as much as nobility
of thought. . . . POPE aimed to take first place as a writer of polished verse.
Any knowledge he gained of the world, or any suggestion that came to him from
his intercourse with society, was utilized to accomplish his main purpose. To
put his thoughts into choice language was not enough. Each idea had to be put
in its neatest and most epigrammatic form."
Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipt me in ink, my parents', or
my own? As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisped in numbers, for the
numbers came. The muse but served to ease some friend, not wife, To help me
through this long disease, my life. * * * * * * Who shames a scribbler? break
one cobweb through, He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew; Destroy his
fib or sophistry in vain, The creature's at his foolish work again, Throned in
the centre of his thin designs, Proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines!
ALEXANDER POPE.Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. But
I must be hurrying home now," the girl said, "for it is high time I
were back in the hayfields."
"Fair
shepherdess," he implored, "for heaven's sake, let us not cut short
the pastorelle thus abruptly."
"And what manner
of beast may that be, pray?"
"'Tis a
conventional form of verse, my dear, which we at present strikingly illustrate.
The plan of a pastorelle is simplicity's self: a gentleman, which I may fairly
claim to be, in some fair rural scene--such as this--comes suddenly upon a
rustic maiden of surpassing beauty. He naturally falls in love with her, and
they say all manner of fine things to each other."
She considered him for
a while before speaking. It thrilled him to see the odd tenderness that was in
her face. "You always think of saying and writing fine things, do you not,
sir?"
"My dear," he
answered, gravely, "I believe that I was undoubtedly guilty of such folly
until you came. I wish I could make you understand how your coming has changed
everything."
"You can tell me
some other time," the girl gaily declared, and was about to leave him.
His hand detained her
very gently. "Faith, but I fear not, for already my old hallucinations
seem to me incredible. Why, yesterday I thought it the most desirable of human
lots to be a great poet"--the gentleman laughed in self-mockery. "I
positively did. I labored every day toward becoming one. I lived among books,
esteemed that I was doing something of genuine importance as I gravely tinkered
with alliteration and metaphor and antithesis and judicious paraphrases of the
ancients. I put up with life solely because it afforded material for
versification; and, in reality, believed the destruction of Troy was
providentially ordained lest Homer lack subject matter for an epic. And as for
loving, I thought people fell in love in order to exchange witty rhymes."
His hand detained her,
very gently. . . . Indeed, it seemed to him he could never tire of noting her
excellencies. Perhaps it was that splendid light poise of her head he chiefly
loved; he thought so at least, just now. Or was it the wonder of her walk,
which made all other women he had ever known appear to mince and hobble, like
rusty toys? Something there was assuredly about this slim brown girl which
recalled an untamed and harmless woodland creature; and it was that, he knew,
which most poignantly moved him, even though he could not name it. Perhaps it was
her bright kind eyes, which seemed to mirror the tranquillity of forests. . . .
"You gentry are
always talking of love," she marveled.
"Oh," he
said, with acerbity, "oh, I don't doubt that any number of beef-gorging
squires and leering, long-legged Oxford dandies----" He broke off here,
and laughed contemptuously. "Well, you are beautiful, and they have eyes
as keen as mine. And I do not blame you, my dear, for believing my designs to
be no more commendable than theirs--no, not at all."
But his mood was
spoiled, and his tetchy vanity hurt, by the thought of stout well-set fellows
having wooed this girl; and he permitted her to go without protest.
Yet he sat alone for a
while upon the fallen tree--trunk, humming a contented little tune. Never in
his life had he been happier. He did not venture to suppose that any creature
so adorable could love such a sickly hunchback, such a gargoyle of a man, as he
was; but that Sarah was fond of him, he knew. There would be no trouble in
arranging with her father for their marriage, most certainly; and he meant to
attend to that matter this very morning, and within ten minutes. So Mr.
Alexander Pope was meanwhile arranging in his mind a suitable wording for his
declaration of marital aspirations.
Thus John Gay found him
presently and roused him from phrase-spinning. "And what shall we do this
morning, Alexander?" Gay was always demanding, like a spoiled child, to be
amused.
Pope told him what his
own plans were, speaking quite simply, but with his countenance radiant. Gay
took off his hat and wiped his forehead, for the day was warm. He did not say
anything at all.
"Well----?"
Mr. Pope asked, after a pause.
Mr. Gay was dubious.
"I had never thought that you would marry," he said. "And--why,
hang it, Alexander! to grow enamored of a milkmaid is well enough for the hero
of a poem, but in a poet it hints at injudicious composition."
Mr. Pope gesticulated
with thin hands and seemed upon the verge of eloquence. Then he spoke
unanswerably. "But I love her," he said.
John Gay's reply was a
subdued whistle. He, in common with the other guests of Lord Harcourt, at
Nuneham Courtney, had wondered what would be the outcome of Mr. Alexander
Pope's intimacy with Sarah Drew. A month earlier the poet had sprained his
ankle upon Amshot Heath, and this young woman had found him lying there,
entirely helpless, as she returned from her evening milking. Being hale of
person, she had managed to get the little hunchback to her home unaided. And
since then Pope had often been seen with her.
This much was common
knowledge. That Mr. Pope proposed to marry the heroine of his misadventure
afforded a fair mark for raillery, no doubt, but Gay, in common with the run of
educated England in 1718, did not aspire to be facetious at Pope's expense. The
luxury was too costly. Offend the dwarf in any fashion, and were you the
proudest duke at Court or the most inconsiderable rhymester in Petticoat Lane,
it made no difference; there was no crime too heinous for "the great Mr.
Pope's" next verses to charge you with, and, worst of all, there was no
misdoing so out of character that his adroit malignancy could not make it seem
plausible.
Now, after another
pause, Pope said, "I must be going now. Will you not wish me luck?"
"Why,
Alexander--why, hang it!" was Mr. Gay's observation, "I believe that
you are human after all, and not just a book in breeches."
He thereby voiced a
commentary patently uncalled--for, as Mr. Pope afterward reflected. Mr. Pope
was then treading toward the home of old Frederick Drew. It was a gray morning
in late July.
"I love her,"
Pope had said. The fact was undeniable; yet an expression of it necessarily
halts. Pope knew, as every man must do who dares conserve his energies to
annotate the drama of life rather than play a part in it, the nature of that
loneliness which this conservation breeds. Such persons may hope to win a
posthumous esteem in the library, but it is at the bleak cost of making life a
wistful transaction with foreigners. In such enforced aloofness Sarah Drew had
come to him--strong, beautiful, young, good and vital, all that he was not--and
had serenely befriended "the great Mr. Pope," whom she viewed as a
queer decrepit little gentleman of whom within a week she was unfeignedly fond.
"I love her,"
Pope had said. Eh, yes, no doubt; and what, he fiercely demanded of himself,
was he--a crippled scribbler, a bungling artisan of phrases--that he should
dare to love this splendid and deep-bosomed goddess? Something of youth awoke,
possessing him--something of that high ardor which, as he cloudily remembered
now, had once controlled a boy who dreamed in Windsor Forest and with the
lightest of hearts planned to achieve the impossible. For what is more
difficult of attainment than to achieve the perfected phrase, so worded that to
alter a syllable of its wording would be little short of sacrilege?
"What
whimwhams!" decreed the great Mr. Pope, aloud. "Verse-making is at
best only the affair of idle men who write in their closets and of idle men who
read there. And as for him who polishes phrases, whatever be his fate in
poetry, it is ten to one but he must give up all the reasonable aims of life
for it."
No, he would have no
more of loneliness. Hence-forward Alexander Pope would be human--like the
others. To write perfectly was much; but it was not everything. Living was
capable of furnishing even more than the raw material of a couplet. It might,
for instance, yield content.
For instance, if you
loved, and married, and begot, and died, with the seriousness of a person who
believes he is performing an action of real importance, and conceded that the
perfection of any art, whether it be that of verse-making or of rope-dancing,
is at best a by-product of life's conduct; at worst, you probably would not be
lonely. No; you would be at one with all other fat-witted people, and there was
no greater blessing conceivable.
Pope muttered, and
produced his notebook, and wrote tentatively.
Wrote Mr. Pope: The
bliss of man (could pride that blessing find) Is not to act or think beyond
mankind; No powers of body or of soul to share But what his nature and his
state can bear.
"His state!"
yes, undeniably, two sibilants collided here. "His wit?"--no, that
would be flat-footed awkwardness in the management of your vowel--sounds; the
lengthened "a" was almost requisite. . . . Pope was fretting over the
imbroglio when he absent-mindedly glanced up to perceive that his Sarah, not
irrevocably offended, was being embraced by a certain John Hughes--who was a
stalwart, florid personable individual, no doubt, but, after all, only an
unlettered farmer.
The dwarf gave a hard,
wringing motion of his hands. The diamond-Lord Bolingbroke's gift--which
ornamented Pope's left hand cut into the flesh of his little finger, so cruel
was the gesture; and this little finger was bleeding as Pope tripped forward,
smiling. A gentleman does not incommode the public by obtruding the ugliness of
a personal wound.
"Do I
intrude?" he queried. "Ah, well! I also have dwelt in Arcadia."
It was bitter to comprehend that he had never done so.
The lovers were visibly
annoyed; yet, if an interruption of their pleasant commerce was decreed to be,
it could not possibly have sprung, as they soon found, from a more sympathetic
source.
These were not subtle
persons. Pope had the truth from them within ten minutes. They loved each
other; but John Hughes was penniless, and old Frederick Drew was, in
consequence, obdurate.
"And, besides, he
thinks you mean to marry her!" said John Hughes.
"My dear man, he
pardonably forgets that the utmost reach of my designs in common reason would
be to have her as my kept mistress for a month or two," drawled Mr. Pope.
"As concerns yourself, my good fellow, the case is somewhat different.
Why, it is a veritable romance--an affair of Daphne and Corydon--although, to
be unpardonably candid, the plot of your romance, my young Arcadians, is not
the most original conceivable. I think that the denouement need not baffle our
imaginations."
The dwarf went toward
Sarah Drew. The chary sunlight had found the gold in her hair, and its glint
was brightly visible to him. "My dear--" he said. His thin long
fingers touched her capable hand. It was a sort of caress--half-timid. "My
dear, I owe my life to you. My body is at most a flimsy abortion such as a
night's exposure would have made more tranquil than it is just now. Yes, it was
you who found a caricature of the sort of man that Mr. Hughes here is,
disabled, helpless, and--for reasons which doubtless seemed to you
sufficient--contrived that this unsightly parody continue in existence. I am
not lovable, my dear. I am only a hunchback, as you can see. My aspirations and
my sickly imaginings merit only the derision of a candid clean-souled being
such as you are." His finger-tips touched the back of her hand again.
"I think there was never a maker of enduring verse who did not at one
period or another long to exchange an assured immortality for a sturdier pair
of shoulders. I think--I think that I am prone to speak at random," Pope
said, with his half-drowsy smile. "Yet, none the less, an honest man, as
our kinsmen in Adam average, is bound to pay his equitable debts."
She said, "I do
not understand."
"I have
perpetrated certain jingles," Pope returned. "I had not comprehended
until to-day they are the only children I shall leave behind me. Eh, and what
would you make of them, my dear, could ingenuity contrive a torture dire enough
to force you into reading them! . . . Misguided people have paid me for
contriving these jingles. So that I have money enough to buy you from your
father just as I would purchase one of his heifers. Yes, at the very least I
have money, and I have earned it. I will send your big-thewed adorer--I believe
that Hughes is the name?--£500 of it this afternoon. That sum, I gather, will
be sufficient to remove your father's objection to your marriage with Mr.
Hughes."
Pope could not but
admire himself tremendously. Moreover, in such matters no woman is blind. Tears
came into Sarah's huge brown eyes. This tenderhearted girl was not thinking of
John Hughes now. Pope noted the fact with the pettiest exultation. "Oh,
you--you are good." Sarah Drew spoke as with difficulty.
"No adjective, my
dear, was ever applied with less discrimination. It is merely that you have
rendered no inconsiderable service to posterity, and merit a reward."
"Oh, and indeed,
indeed, I was always fond of you----" The girl sobbed this.
She would have added
more, no doubt, since compassion is garrulous, had not Pope's scratched hand
dismissed a display of emotion as not entirely in consonance with the rules of
the game.
"My dear, therein
you have signally honored me. There remains only to offer you my appreciation
of your benevolence toward a sickly monster, and to entreat for my late
intrusion--however unintentional--that forgiveness which you would not deny, I
think, to any other impertinent insect."
"Oh, but we have
no words to thank you, sir----!" Thus Hughes began.
"Then don't
attempt it, my good fellow. For phrase-spinning, as I can assure you, is the
most profitless of all pursuits." Whereupon Pope bowed low, wheeled,
walked away. Yes, he was wounded past sufferance; it seemed to him he must die
of it. Life was a farce, and Destiny an overseer who hiccoughed mandates. Well,
all that even Destiny could find to gloat over, he reflected, was the tranquil
figure of a smallish gentleman switching at the grass-blades with his cane as
he sauntered under darkening skies.
For a storm was coming
on, and the first big drops of it were splattering the terrace when Mr. Pope
entered Lord Harcourt's mansion.
Pope went straight to
his own rooms. As he came in there was a vivid flash of lightning, followed
instantaneously by a crashing, splitting noise, like that of universes ripped
asunder. He did not honor the high uproar with attention. This dwarf was not
afraid of anything except the commission of an error in taste.
Then, too, there were
letters for him, laid ready on the writing-table. Nothing of much importance he
found there.--Here, though, was a rather diverting letter from Eustace Budgell,
that poor fool, abjectly thanking Mr. Pope for his advice concerning how best
to answer the atrocious calumnies on Budgell then appearing in The Grub-Street
Journal,--and reposing, drolly enough, next the proof-sheets of an anonymous
letter Pope had prepared for the forthcoming issue of that publication, wherein
he sprightlily told how Budgell had poisoned Dr. Tindal, after forging his
will. For even if Budgell had not in point of fact been guilty of these
particular peccadilloes, he had quite certainly committed the crime of speaking
lightly of Mr. Pope, as "a little envious animal," some seven years
ago; and it was for this grave indiscretion that Pope was dexterously goading
the man into insanity, and eventually drove him to suicide. . . .
The storm made the room
dark and reading difficult. Still, this was an even more amusing letter, from
the all-powerful Duchess of Marlborough. In as civil terms as her sick rage
could muster, the frightened woman offered Mr. Pope £1,000 to suppress his
verbal portrait of her, in the character of Atossa, from his Moral Essays; and
Pope straightway decided to accept the bribe, and afterward to print his verses
unchanged. For the hag, as he reflected, very greatly needed to be taught that
in this world there was at least one person who did not quail before her
tantrums. There would be, moreover, even an elementary justice in thus robbing
her who had robbed England at large. And, besides, her name was Sarah. . . .
Pope lighted four
candles and set them before the long French mirror. He stood appraising his
many curious deformities while the storm raged. He stood sidelong, peering over
his left shoulder, in order to see the outline of his crooked back. Nowhere in
England, he reflected, was there a person more pitiable and more repellent
outwardly.
"And, oh, it would
be droll," Pope said, aloud, "if our exteriors were ever altogether
parodies. But time keeps a diary in our faces, and writes a monstrously plain
hand. Now, if you take the first letter of Mr. Alexander Pope's Christian name,
and the first and last letters of his surname, you have A. P. E.," Pope
quoted, genially. "I begin to think that Dennis was right. What
conceivable woman would not prefer a well-set man of five-and-twenty to such a
withered abortion? And what does it matter, after all, that a hunchback has
dared to desire a shapely brown-haired woman?"
Pope came more near to
the mirror. "Make answer, you who have dared to imagine that a goddess was
ever drawn to descend into womanhood except by kisses, brawn and a clean
heart."
Another peal of thunder
bellowed. The storm was growing furious. "Yet I have had a marvelous
dream. Now I awaken. I must go on in the old round. As long as my wits preserve
their agility I must be able to amuse, to flatter and, at need, to intimidate
the patrons of that ape in the mirror, so that they will not dare refuse me the
market-value of my antics. And Sarah Drew has declined an alliance such as this
in favor of a fresh-colored complexion and a pair of straight shoulders!"
Pope thought a while.
"And a clean heart! She bargained royally, giving love for nothing less
than love. The man is rustic, illiterate; he never heard of Aristotle, he would
be at a loss to distinguish between a trochee and a Titian, and if you
mentioned Boileau to him would probably imagine you were talking of cookery.
But he loves her. He would forfeit eternity to save her a toothache. And, chief
of all, she can make this robust baby happy, and she alone can make him happy.
And so, she gives, gives royally--she gives, God bless her!"
Rain, sullen rain, was
battering the window. "And you--you hunchback in the mirror, you maker of
neat rhymes--pray, what had you to offer? A coach-and-six, of course, and
pin-money and furbelows and in the end a mausoleum with unimpeachable Latin on
it! And--pate sur pate--an unswerving devotion which she would share on almost
equal terms with the Collected Works of Alexander Pope. And so she chose--chose
brawn and a clean heart."
The dwarf turned,
staggered, fell upon his bed. "God, make a man of me, make me a good brave
man. I loved her--oh, such as I am, You know that I loved her! You know that I
desire her happiness above all things. Ah, no, for You know that I do not at
bottom. I want to hurt, to wound all living creatures, because they know how to
be happy, and I do not know how. Ah, God, and why did You decree that I should
never be an obtuse and comely animal such as this John Hughes is? I am so tired
of being `the great Mr. Pope,' and I want only the common joys of life."
The hunchback wept. It
would be too curious to anatomize the writhings of his proud little spirit.
Now some one tapped
upon the door. It was John Gay. He was bidden to enter, and, complying, found
Mr. Pope yawning over the latest of Tonson's publications.
Gay's face was
singularly portentous. "My friend," Gay blurted out, "I bring
news which will horrify you. Believe me, I would never have mustered the pluck
to bring it did I not love you. I cannot let you hear it first in public and
unprepared, as, otherwise, you would have to do."
"Do I not know you
have the kindest heart in all the world? Why, so outrageous are your amiable
defects that they would be the public derision of your enemies if you had
any," Pope returned.
The other poet evinced
an awkward comminglement of consternation and pity. "It appears that when
this storm arose--why, Mistress Drew was with a young man of the
neighborhood--a John Hewet------" Gay was speaking with unaccustomed
rapidity.
"Hughes, I think,"
Pope interrupted, equably.
"Perhaps--I am not
sure. They sought shelter under a haycock. You will remember that first crash
of thunder, as if the heavens were in demolishment? My friend, the reapers who
had been laboring in the fields--who had been driven to such protection as the
trees or hedges afforded----"
"Get on!" a
shrill voice cried; "for God's love, man, get on!" Mr. Pope had
risen. This pallid shaken wisp was not in appearance the great Mr. Pope whose
ingenuity had enabled Homeric warriors to excel in the genteel.
"They first saw a
little smoke. . . . They found this Hughes with one arm about the neck of
Mistress Drew, and the other held over her face, as if to screen her from the
lightning. They were both"--and here Gay hesitated. "They were both
dead," he amended.
Pope turned abruptly.
Nakedness is of necessity uncouth, he held, whether it be the body or the soul
that is unveiled. Mr. Pope went toward a window which he opened, and he stood
thus looking out for a brief while.
"So she is
dead," he said. "It is very strange. So many rare felicities of curve
and color, so much of purity and kindliness and valor and mirth, extinguished
as one snuffs a candle! Well! I am sorry she is dead, for the child had a
talent for living and got such joy out of it. . . . Hers was a lovely happy
life, but it was sterile. Already nothing remains of her but dead flesh which
must be huddled out of sight. I shall not perish thus entirely, I believe. Men
will remember me. Truly a mighty foundation for pride! when the utmost I can
hope for is but to be read in one island, and to be thrown aside at the end of
one age. Indeed, I am not even sure of that much. I print, and print, and
print. And when I collect my verses into books, I am altogether uncertain whether
to took upon myself as a man building a monument, or burying the dead. It
sometimes seems to me that each publication is but a solemn funeral of many
wasted years. For I have given all to the verse-making. Granted that the
sacrifice avails to rescue my name from oblivion, what will it profit me when I
am dead and care no more for men's opinions than Sarah Drew cares now for what
I say of her? But then she never cared. She loved John Hughes. And she was
right."
He made an end of
speaking, still peering out of the window with considerate narrowed eyes.
The storm was over. In
the beech-tree opposite a wren was raising optimistic outcry. The sun had won
his way through a black-bellied shred of cloud; upon the terrace below, a
dripping Venus and a Perseus were glistening as with white fire. Past these,
drenched gardens, the natural wildness of which was judiciously restrained with
walks, ponds, grottoes, statuary and other rural elegancies, displayed the
intermingled brilliancies of diamonds and emeralds, and glittered as with
pearls and rubies where tempest-battered roses were reviving in assertiveness.
"I think the storm
is over," Mr. Pope remarked. "It is strange how violent are these
convulsions of nature. . . . But nature is a treacherous blowsy jade, who
respects nobody. A gentleman can but shrug under her onslaughts, and
henceforward civilly avoid them. It is a consolation to reflect that they pass
quickly."
He turned as in
defiance. "Yes, yes! It hurts. But I envy them. Yes, even I, that ugly spiteful
hornet of a man! `the great Mr. Pope,' who will be dining with the proudest
people in England within the hour and gloating over their deference! For they
presume to make a little free with God occasionally, John, but never with me.
And I envy these dead young fools. . . . You see, they loved each other, John.
I left them, not an hour ago, the happiest of living creatures. I looked back
once. I pretended to have dropped my handkerchief. I imagine they were talking
of their wedding-clothes, for this broad-shouldered Hughes was matching poppies
and field-flowers to her complexion. It was a scene out of Theocritus. I think
Heaven was so well pleased by the tableau that Heaven hastily resumed
possession of its enactors in order to prevent any after-happenings from
belittling that perfect instant."
"Egad, and
matrimony might easily have proved an anti-climax," Gay considered.
"Yes; oh, it is
only Love that is blind, and not the lover necessarily. I know. I suppose I
always knew at the bottom of my heart. This hamadryad was destined in the
outcome to dwindle into a village housewife, she would have taken a lively
interest in the number of eggs the hens were laying, she would even have
assured her children, precisely in the way her father spoke of John Hughes,
that young people ordinarily have foolish fancies which their rational elders
agree to disregard. But as it is, no Eastern queen--not Semele herself--left
earth more nobly--"
Pope broke off short.
He produced his notebook, which he never went without, and wrote frowningly,
with many erasures. "H'm, yes," he said; and he read aloud
"When Eastern lovers feed the funeral fire, On the same pile the
faithful fair expire; Here pitying heaven that virtue mutual found, And blasted
both that it might neither wound. Hearts so sincere the Almighty saw well
pleased, Sent His own lightning and the victims seized." Then Pope made a grimace. "No; the
analogy is trim enough, but the lines lack fervor. It is deplorable how much
easier it is to express any emotion other than that of which one is actually
conscious." Pope had torn the paper half-through before he reflected that
it would help to fill a printed page. He put it in his pocket. "But, come
now, I am writing to Lady Mary this afternoon. You know how she loves oddities.
Between us--with prose as the medium, of course, since verse should, after all,
confine itself to the commemoration of heroes and royal persons--I believe we
might make of this occurrence a neat and moving pastorelle--I should say,
pastoral, of course, but my wits are wool-gathering."
Mr. Gay had the kindest
heart in the universe. Yet he, also, had dreamed of the perfected phrase, so
worded that to alter a syllable of its wording would be little short of
sacrilege. Eyes kindling, he took up a pen. "Yes, yes, I understand. Egad,
it is an admirable subject. But, then, I don't believe I ever saw these
lovers----?"
"John was a
well-set man of about five-and-twenty," replied Mr. Pope; "and Sarah
was a brown woman of eighteen years, three months and fourteen days."
Then these two dipped
their pens and set about a moving composition, which has to-day its proper
rating among Mr. Pope's Complete Works.
"But that sense of
negation, of theoretic insecurity, which was in the air, conspiring with what
was of like tendency in himself, made of Lord UFFORD a central type of
disillusion. . . . He had been amiable because the general betise of humanity
did not in his opinion greatly matter, after all; and in reading these
`SATIRES' it is well-nigh painful to witness the blind and naked forces of
nature and circumstance surprising him in the uncontrollable movements of his
own so carefully guarded heart."
Why is a handsome wife adored By every coxcomb but her lord? From yonder
puppet-man inquire Who wisely hides his wood and wire; Shows Sheba's queen
completely dress'd And Solomon in royal vest; But view them litter'd on the
floor, Or strung on pegs behind the door, Punch is exactly of a piece With
Lorrain's duke, and prince of Greece. HORACE CALVERLEY.Petition to the Duke of
Ormskirk. In the early winter of 1761
the Earl of Bute, then Secretary of State, gave vent to an outburst of
unaccustomed profanity. Mr. Robert Calverley, who represented England at the
Court of St. Petersburg, had resigned his office without prelude or any word of
explanation. This infuriated Bute, since his pet scheme was to make peace with
Russia and thereby end the Continental War. Now all was to do again; the
minister raged, shrugged, furnished a new emissary with credentials, and marked
Calverley's name for punishment.
As much, indeed, was
written to Calverley by Lord Ufford, the poet, diarist, musician and virtuoso:
Our Scottish Mortimer,
it appears, is unwilling to have the map of Europe altered because Mr. Robert
Calverley has taken a whim to go into Italy. He is angrier than I have ever
known him to be. He swears that with a pen's flourish you have imperiled the
well-being of England, and raves in the same breath of the preferment he had
designed for you. Beware of him. For my own part, I shrug and acquiesce,
because I am familiar with your pranks. I merely venture to counsel that you do
not crown the Pelion of abuse, which our statesmen are heaping upon you, with
the Ossa of physical as well as political suicide. Hasten on your Italian
jaunt, for Umfraville, who is now with me at Carberry Hill, has publicly
declared that if you dare re-appear in England he will have you horsewhipped by
his footmen. In consequence, I would most earnestly advise---
Mr. Calverley read no
further, but came straightway into England. He had not been in England since
his elopement, three years before that spring, with the Marquis of Umfraville's
betrothed, Lord Radnor's daughter, whom Calverley had married at Calais. Mr.
Calverley and his wife were presently at Carberry Hill, Lord Ufford's home,
where, arriving about moon-rise, they found a ball in progress.
Their advent caused a
momentary check to merriment. The fiddlers ceased, because Lord Ufford had
signaled them. The fine guests paused in their stately dance. Lord Ufford, in a
richly figured suit, came hastily to Lady Honoria Calverley, his high heels
tapping audibly upon the floor, and with gallantry lifted her hand toward his
lips. Her husband he embraced, and the two men kissed each other, as was the
custom of the age. Chatter and laughter rose on every side as pert and merry as
the noises of a brook in springtime.
"I fear that as
Lord Umfraville's host," young Calverley at once began, "you cannot
with decorum convey to the ignoramus my opinion as to his ability to conjugate
the verb to dare."
"Why, but no! you
naturally demand a duel," the poet-earl returned. "It is very like
you. I lament your decision, but I will attempt to arrange the meeting for
to-morrow morning."
Lord Ufford smiled and
nodded to the musicians. He finished the dance to admiration, as this lean
dandified young man did everything--"assiduous to win each fool's
applause," as his own verses scornfully phrase it. Then Ufford went about
his errand of death and conversed for a long while with Umfraville.
Afterward Lord Ufford
beckoned to Calverley, who shrugged and returned Mr. Erwyn's snuff-box, which
Calverley had been admiring. He followed the earl into a side-room opening upon
the Venetian Chamber wherein the fete was. Ufford closed the door. You saw that
he had put away the exterior of mirth that hospitality demanded of him, and
perturbation showed in the lean countenance which was by ordinary so proud and
so amiably peevish.
"Robin, you have
performed many mad actions in your life!" he said; "but this return
into the three kingdoms out-Herods all! Did I not warn you against
Umfraville!"
"Why, certainly
you did," returned Mr. Calverley. "You informed me--which was your
duty as a friend--of this curmudgeon's boast that he would have me horsewhipped
if I dared venture into England. You will readily conceive that any gentleman
of self-respect cannot permit such farcical utterances to be delivered without
appending a gladiatorial epilogue. Well! what are the conditions of this
duel?"
"Oh, fool that I
have been!" cried Ufford, who was enabled now by virtue of their seclusion
to manifest his emotion. "I, who have known you all your life----!"
He paced the room.
Pleading music tinged the silence almost insensibly.
"Heh, Fate has an
imperial taste in humor!" the poet said. "Robin, we have been more
than brothers. And it is I, I, of all persons living, who have drawn you into
this imbroglio!"
"My danger is not
very apparent as yet," said Calverley, "if Umfraville controls his
sword no better than his tongue."
My lord of Ufford went
on: "There is no question of a duel. It is as well to spare you what Lord
Umfraville replied to my challenge. Let it suffice that we do not get sugar
from the snake. Besides, the man has his grievance. Robin, have you forgot that
necklace you and Pevensey took from Umfraville some three years ago--before you
went into Russia?"
Calverley laughed. The
question recalled an old hot-headed time when, exalted to a frolicsome zone by
the discovery of Lady Honoria Pomfret's love for him, he planned the famous
jest which he and the mad Earl of Pevensey perpetrated upon Umfraville. This
masquerade won quick applause. Persons of ton guffawed like ploughboys over the
discomfiture of an old hunks thus divertingly stripped of his bride, all his
betrothal gifts, and of the very clothes he wore. An anonymous scribbler had
detected in the occurrence a denouement suited to the stage and had constructed
a comedy around it, which, when produced by the Duke's company, had won acclaim
from hilarious auditors.
So Calverley laughed
heartily. "Gad, what a jest that was! This Umfraville comes to marry
Honoria. And highwaymen attack his coach! I would give £50 to have witnessed
this usurer's arrival at Denton Honor in his underclothes! and to have seen his
monkey-like grimaces when he learned that Honoria and I were already across the
Channel!"
"You robbed him,
though----"
"Indeed, for
beginners at peculation we did not do so badly. We robbed him and his valet of
everything in the coach, including their breeches. You do not mean that
Pevensey has detained the poor man's wedding trousers? If so, it is
unfortunate, because this loud-mouthed miser has need of them in order that he
may be handsomely interred."
"Lord Umfraville's
wedding-suit was stuffed with straw, hung on a pole and paraded through London
by Pevensey, March, Selwyn and some dozen other madcaps, while six musicians
marched before them. The clothes were thus conveyed to Umfraville's house. I
think none of us would have relished a joke like that were he the butt of
it."
Now the poet's lean
countenance was turned upon young Calverley, and as always, Ufford evoked that
nobility in Calverley which follies veiled but had not ever killed.
"Egad," said
Robert Calverley; "I grant you that all this was infamously done. I never
authorized it. I shall kill Pevensey. Indeed, I will do more," he added,
with a flourish. "For I will apologize to Umfraville, and this very night."
But Ufford was not
disposed to levity. "Let us come to the point," he sadly said.
"Pevensey returned everything except the necklace which Umfraville had
intended to be his bridal gift. Pevensey conceded the jest, in fine; and denied
all knowledge of any necklace."
It was an age of
accommodating morality. Calverley sketched a whistle, and showed no other trace
of astonishment.
"I see. The fool
confided in the spendthrift. My dear, I understand. In nature Pevensey gave the
gems to some nymph of Sadler's Wells or Covent Garden. For I was out of
England. And so he capped his knavery with insolence. It is an additional
reason why Pevensey should not live to scratch a gray head. It is, however, an
affront to me that Umfraville should have believed him. I doubt if I may overlook
that, Horace?"
"I question if he
did believe. But, then, what help had he? This Pevensey is an earl. His person
as a peer of England is inviolable. No statute touches him directly, because he
may not be confined except by the King's personal order. And it is tolerably
notorious that Pevensey is in Lord Bute's pay, and that our Scottish Mortimer,
to do him justice, does not permit his spies to be injured."
Now Mr. Calverley took
snuff. The music without was now more audible, and it had shifted to a merrier
tune.
"I think I
comprehend. Pevensey and I--whatever were our motives--have committed a
robbery. Pevensey, as the law runs, is safe. I, too, was safe as long as I kept
out of England. As matters stand, Lord Umfraville intends to press a charge of
theft against me. And I am in disgrace with Bute, who is quite content to beat
offenders with a crooked stick. This confluence of two-penny accidents is
annoying."
"It is worse than
you know," my lord of Ufford returned. He opened the door which led to the
Venetian Chamber. A surge of music, of laughter, and of many lights invaded the
room wherein they stood. "D'ye see those persons, just past Umfraville, so
inadequately disguised as gentlemen? They are from Bow Street. Lord Umfraville
intends to apprehend you here tonight."
"He has an eye for
the picturesque," drawled Calverley. "My tragedy, to do him justice,
could not be staged more strikingly. Those additional alcoves have improved the
room beyond belief. I must apologize for not having rendered my compliments a
trifle earlier."
Internally he
outstormed Termagaunt. It was infamous enough, in all conscience, to be
arrested, but to have half the world of fashion as witnessess of ones
discomfiture was perfectly intolerable. He recognized the excellent chance he
had of being the most prominent figure upon some scaffold before long, but that
contingency did not greatly trouble Calverley, as set against the certainty of
being made ridiculous within the next five minutes.
In consequence, he
frowned and rearranged the fall of his shirt-frill a whit the more becomingly.
"Yes, for hate
sharpens every faculty," the earl went on. "Even Umfraville
understands that you do not fear death. So he means to have you tried like any
common thief while all your quondam friends sit and snigger. And you will be
convicted----"
"Why, necessarily,
since I am not as Pevensey. Of course, I must confess I took the
necklace."
"And Pevensey must
stick to the tale that he knows nothing of any necklace. Dear Robin, this means
Newgate. Accident deals very hardly with us, Robin, for this means Tyburn
Hill."
"Yes; I suppose it
means my death," young Calverley assented. "Well! I have feasted with
the world and found its viands excellent. The banquet ended, I must not grumble
with my host because I find his choice of cordials not altogether to my
liking." Thus speaking, he was aware of nothing save that the fiddlers
were now about an air to which he had often danced with his dear wife.
"I have a trick
yet left to save our honor,----" Lord Ufford turned to a table where wine
and glasses were set ready. "I propose a toast. Let us drink--for the last
time--to the honor of the Calverleys."
"It is an
invitation I may not decorously refuse. And yet--it may be that I do not
understand you?"
My lord of Ufford
poured wine into two glasses. These glasses were from among the curios he
collected so industriously--tall, fragile things, of seventeenth century make,
very intricately cut with roses and thistles, and in the bottom of each glass a
three-penny piece was embedded. Lord Ufford took a tiny vial from his pocket and
emptied its contents into the glass which stood the nearer to Mr. Calverley.
"This is Florence
water. We dabblers in science are experimenting with it at Gresham College. A
taste of it means death--a painless, quick and honorable death. You will have
died of a heart seizure. Come, Robin, let us drink to the honor of the
Calverleys."
The poet-earl paused
for a little while. Now he was like some seer of supernal things.
"For look
you," said Lord Ufford, "we come of honorable blood. We two are
gentlemen. We have our code, and we may not infringe upon it. Our code does not
invariably square with reason, and I doubt if Scripture would afford a
dependable foundation. So be it! We have our code and we may not infringe upon
it. There have been many Calverleys who did not fear their God, but there was
never any one of them who did not fear dishonor. I am the head of no less proud
a house. As such, I counsel you to drink and die within the moment. It is not
possible a Calverley survive dishonor. Oh, God!" the poet cried, and his
voice broke; "and what is honor to this clamor within me! Robin, I love
you better than I do this talk of honor! For, Robin, I have loved you long! so
long that what we do to-night will always make life hideous to me!"
Calverley was not
unmoved, but he replied in the tone of daily intercourse. "It is
undoubtedly absurd to perish here, like some unreasonable adversary of the
Borgias. Your device is rather outrageously horrific, Horace, like a bit out of
your own romance--yes, egad, it is pre-eminently worthy of the author of The
Vassal of Spalatro. Still I can understand that it is preferable to having fat
and greasy fellows squander a shilling for the privilege of perching upon a box
while I am being hanged. And I think I shall accept your toast
"You will be
avenged," Ufford said, simply.
"My dear, as if I
ever questioned that! Of course, you will kill Pevensey first and Umfraville
afterward. Only I want to live. For I was meant to play a joyous role
wholeheartedly in the big comedy of life. So many people find the world a
dreary residence," Mr. Calverley sighed, "that it is really a pity
some one of these long-faced stolidities cannot die now instead of me. For I
have found life wonderful throughout."
The brows of Ufford
knit. "Would you consent to live as a transported felon? I have much
money. I need not tell you the last penny is at your disposal. It might be
possible to bribe. Indeed, Lord Bute is all-powerful to-day and he would
perhaps procure a pardon for you at my entreaty. He is so kind as to admire my
scribblings. . . Or you might live among your fellow-convicts somewhere over
sea for a while longer. I had not thought that such would be your
choice----" Here Ufford shrugged, restrained by courtesy. "Besides,
Lord Bute is greatly angered with you, because you have endangered his Russian
alliance. However, if you wish it, I will try----"
"Oh, for that
matter, I do not much fear Lord Bute, because I bring him the most welcome news
he has had in many a day. I may tell you since it will be public tomorrow. The
Tzaritza Elizabeth, our implacable enemy, died very suddenly three weeks ago.
Peter of Holstein-Gottrop reigns to-day in Russia, and I have made terms with
him. I came to tell Lord Bute the Cossack troops have been recalled from
Prussia. The war is at an end." Young Calverley meditated and gave his
customary boyish smile. "Yes, I discharged my Russian mission after
all--even after I had formally relinquished it--because I was so opportunely
aided by the accident of the Tzaritza's death. And Bute cares only for results.
So I would explain to him that I resigned my mission simply because in Russia
my wife could not have lived out another year----"
The earl exclaimed,
"Then Honoria is ill!" Mr. Calverley did not attend, but stood
looking out into the Venetian Chamber.
"See, Horace, she
is dancing with Anchester while I wait here so near to death. She dances well.
But Honoria does everything adorably. I cannot tell you--oh, not even you!--how
happy these three years have been with her. Eh, well! the gods are jealous of
such happiness. You will remember how her mother died? It appears that Honoria
is threatened with a slow consumption, and a death such as her mother's was.
She does not know. There was no need to frighten her. For although the rigors
of another Russian winter, as all physicians tell me, would inevitably prove
fatal to her, there is no reason why my dearest dear should not continue to
laugh just as she always does--for a long, bright and happy while in some warm
climate such as Italy's. In nature I resigned my appointment. I did not
consider England, or my own trivial future, or anything of that sort. I
considered only Honoria."
He gazed for many
moments upon the woman whom he loved. His speech took on an odd simplicity.
"Oh, yes, I think
that in the end Bute would procure a pardon for me. But not even Bute can
override the laws of England. I would have to be tried first, and have ballads
made concerning me, and be condemned, and so on. That would detain Honoria in
England, because she is sufficiently misguided to love me. I could never
persuade her to leave me with my life in peril. She could not possibly survive
an English winter." Here Calverley evinced unbridled mirth. "The
irony of events is magnificent. There is probably no question of hanging or
even of transportation. It is merely certain that if I venture from this room I
bring about Honoria's death as incontestably as if I strangled her with these
two hands. So I choose my own death in preference. It will grieve
Honoria----" His voice was not completely steady. "But she is young.
She will forget me, for she forgets easily, and she will be happy. I look to
you to see--even before you have killed Pevensey--that Honoria goes into Italy.
For she admires and loves you, almost as much as I do, Horace, and she will
readily be guided by you----"
He cried my lord of
Ufford's given name some two or three times, for young Calverley had turned,
and he had seen Ufford's face.
The earl moistened his
lips. "You are a fool," he said, with a thin voice. "Why do you
trouble me by being better than I? Or do you only posture for my benefit? Do
you deal honestly with me, Robert Calverley?--then swear it----" He
laughed here, very horribly. "Ah, no, when did you ever lie! You do not
lie--not you!"
He waited for a while.
"But I am otherwise. I dare to lie when the occasion promises. I have
desired Honoria since the first moment wherein I saw her. I may tell you now. I
think that you do not remember. We gathered cherries. I ate two of them which
had just lain upon her knee----"
His hands had clenched
each other, and his lips were drawn back so that you saw his exquisite teeth,
which were ground together. He stood thus for a little, silent.
Then Ufford began
again: "I planned all this. I plotted this with Umfraville. I wrote you
such a letter as would inevitably draw you to your death. I wished your death.
For Honoria would then be freed of you. I would condole with her. She is
readily comforted, impatient of sorrow, incapable of it, I dare say. She would
have married me. . . . Why must I tell you this? Oh, I am Fate's buffoon! For I
have won, I have won! and there is that in me which will not accept the stake I
cheated for."
"And you,"
said Calverley--"this thing is you!"
"A helpless
reptile now," said Ufford. "I have not the power to check Lord
Umfraville in his vengeance. You must be publicly disgraced, and must, I think,
be hanged even now when it will not benefit me at all. It may be I shall weep
for that some day! Or else Honoria must die, because an archangel could not
persuade her to desert you in your peril. For she loves you--loves you to the
full extent of her merry and shallow nature. Oh, I know that, as you will never
know it. I shall have killed Honoria! I shall not weep when Honoria dies.
Harkee, Robin! they are dancing yonder. It is odd to think that I shall never
dance again."
"Horace--!"
the younger man said, like a person of two minds. He seemed to choke. He gave a
frantic gesture. "Oh, I have loved you. I have loved nothing as I have
loved you."
"And yet you
chatter of your passion for Honoria!" Lord Ufford returned, with a snarl.
"I ask what proof is there of this?--Why, that you have surrendered your
well-being in this world through love of her. But I gave what is vital. I was
an honorable gentleman without any act in all my life for which I had need to
blush. I loved you as I loved no other being in the universe." He spread
his hands, which now twitched horribly. "You will never understand. It
does not matter. I desired Honoria. To-day through my desire of her, I am that
monstrous thing which you alone know me to be. I think I gave up much. Pro
honoria!" he chuckled. "The Latin halts, but, none the less, the jest
is excellent."
"You have given
more than I would dare to give," said Calverley. He shuddered.
"And to no
end!" cried Ufford. "Ah, fate, the devil and that code I mocked are
all in league to cheat me!"
Said Calverley:
"The man whom I loved most is dead. Oh, had the world been searched between
the sunrise and the sunsetting there had not been found his equal. And now,
poor fool, I know that there was never any man like this!"
"Nay, there was
such a man," the poet said, "in an old time which I almost forget.
To-day he is quite dead. There is only a poor wretch who has been faithless in
all things, who has not even served the devil faithfully."
"Why, then, you
lackey with a lackey's soul, attend to what I say. Can you make any terms with
Umfraville?"
"I can do
nothing," Ufford replied. "You have robbed him--as me--of what he
most desired. You have made him the laughing-stock of England. He does not
pardon any more than I would pardon."
"And as God lives
and reigns, I do not greatly blame him," said young Calverley. "This
man at least was wronged. Concerning you I do not speak, because of a false
dream I had once very long ago. Yet Umfraville was treated infamously. I dare
concede what I could not permit another man to say and live, now that I drink a
toast which I must drink alone. For I drink to the honor of the Calverleys. I
have not ever lied to any person in this world, and so I may not drink with
you."
"Oh, but you drink
because you know your death to be the one event which can insure her happiness,"
cried Ufford. "We are not much unlike. And I dare say it is only an
imaginary Honoria we love, after all. Yet, look, my fellow-Ixion! for to the
eye at least is she not perfect?"
The two men gazed for a
long while. Amid that coterie of exquisites, wherein allusion to whatever might
he ugly in the world was tacitly allowed to be unmentionable, Lady Honoria
glitteringly went about the moment's mirthful business with lovely ardor. You
saw now unmistakably that "Light Queen of Elfdom, dead Titania's heir"
of whom Ufford writes in the fourth Satire. Honoria's prettiness, rouged,
frail, and modishly enhanced, allured the eye from all less elfin brilliancies;
and as she laughed among so many other relishers of life her charms became the
more instant, just as a painting quickens in every tint when set in an
appropriate frame.
"There is no other
way," her husband said. He drank and toasted what was dearest in the
world, smiling to think how death came to him in that wine's familiar taste.
"I drink to the most lovely of created ladies! and to her happiness!"
He snapped the stem of
the glass and tossed it joyously aside.
"Assuredly, there
is no other way," said Ufford. "And armored by that knowledge, even I
may drink as honorable people do. Pro honoria!" Then this man also broke
his emptied glass.
"How long have I
to live?" said Calverley, and took snuff.
"Why, thirty
years, I think, unless you duel too immoderately," replied Lord
Ufford,--"since while you looked at Honoria I changed our glasses. No! no!
a thing done has an end. Besides, it is not unworthy of me. So go boldly to the
Earl of Bute and tell him all. You are my cousin and my successor. Yes, very
soon you, too, will be a peer of England and as safe from molestation as is
Lord Pevensey. I am the first to tender my congratulations. Now I make certain
that they are not premature."
The poet laughed at
this moment as a man may laugh in hell. He reeled. His lean face momentarily
contorted, and afterward the poet died.
"I am Lord
Ufford," said Calverley aloud. "The person of a peer is
inviolable----" He presently looked downward from rapt gazing at his wife.
Fresh from this
horrible half-hour, he faced a future so alluring as by its beauty to
intimidate him. Youth, love, long years of happiness, and (by this capricious
turn) now even opulence, were the ingredients of a captivating vista. And yet
he needs must pause a while to think of the dear comrade he had lost--of that
loved boy, his pattern in the time of their common youthfulness which gleamed
in memory as bright and misty as a legend, and of the perfect chevalier who had
been like a touchstone to Robert Calverley a bare half-hour ago. He knelt,
touched lightly the fallen jaw, and lightly kissed the cheek of this poor
wreckage; and was aware that the caress was given with more tenderness than
Robert Calverley had shown in the same act a bare half-hour ago.
Meanwhile the music of
a country dance urged the new Earl of Ufford to come and frolic where every one
was laughing; and to partake with gusto of the benefits which chance had
provided; and to be forthwith as merry as was decorous in a peer of England.
"But after
SHERIDAN had risen to a commanding position in the gay life of London, he
rather disliked to be known as a playwright or a poet, and preferred to be
regarded as a statesman and a man of fashion who `set the pace' in all pastimes
of the opulent and idle. Yet, whatever he really thought of his own writings,
and whether or not he did them, as Stevenson used to say, `just for fun,' the
fact remains that he was easily the most distinguished and brilliant dramatist
of an age which produced in SHERIDAN'S solemn vagaries one of its most
characteristic products."
Look on this form,--where humor, quaint and sly, Dimples the cheek, and
points the beaming eye; Where gay invention seems to boast its wiles In amorous
hint, and half-triumphant smiles. Look on her well--does she seem form'd to
teach? Should you expect to hear this lady preach? Is gray experience suited to
her youth? Do solemn sentiments become that mouth? Bid her be grave, those lips
should rebel prove To every theme that slanders mirth or love. RICHARD BRINSLEY
SHERIDAN. Second Prologue to The Rivals. The
devotion of Mr. Sheridan to the Dean of Winchester's daughter, Miss Esther Jane
Ogle--or "the irresistible Ogle," as she was toasted at the
Kit-cat--was now a circumstance to be assumed in the polite world of London. As
a result, when the parliamentarian followed her into Scotland, in the spring of
1795, people only shrugged.
"Because it proves
that misery loves company," was Mr. Fox's observation at Wattier's, hard
upon two in the morning. "Poor Sherry, as an inconsolable widower, must
naturally have some one to share his grief. He perfectly comprehends that no
one will lament the death of his wife more fervently than her successor."
In London Mr. Fox thus
worded his interpretation of the matter; and spoke, oddly enough, at the very
moment that in Edinburgh Mr. Sheridan returned to his lodgings in Abercromby
Place, deep in the reminiscences of a fortunate evening at cards. In
consequence, Mr. Sheridan entered the room so quietly that the young man who
was employed in turning over the contents of the top bureau-drawer was taken
unprepared.
But in the marauder's
nature, as far as resolution went, was little lacking. "Silence!" he
ordered, and with the mandate a pistol was leveled upon the representative for
the borough of Stafford. "One cry for help, and you perish like a dog. I
warn you that I am a desperate man."
"Now, even at a
hazard of discourtesy, I must make bold to question your statement," said
Mr. Sheridan, "although, indeed, it is not so much the recklessness as the
masculinity which I dare call into dispute."
He continued, in his
best parliamentary manner, a happy blending of reproach, omniscience and
pardon. "Only two months ago," said Mr. Sheridan, "I was so
fortunate as to encounter a lady who, alike through the attractions of her
person and the sprightliness of her conversation, convinced me I was on the
road to fall in love after the high fashion of a popular romance. I accordingly
make her a declaration. I am rejected. I besiege her with the customary
artillery of sonnets, bouquets, serenades, bonbons, theater-tickets and threats
of suicide. In fine, I contract the habit of proposing to Miss Ogle on every
Wednesday; and so strong is my infatuation that I follow her as far into the
north as Edinburgh in order to secure my eleventh rejection at half-past ten
last evening."
"I fail to understand,"
remarked the burglar, "how all this prolix account of your amours can
possibly concern me."
"You are at least
somewhat involved in the deplobable climax," Mr. Sheridan returned.
"For behold! at two in the morning I discover the object of my adoration
and the daughter of an estimable prelate, most calumniously clad and busily
employed in rumpling my supply of cravats. If ever any lover was thrust into a
more ambiguous position, madam, historians have touched on his dilemma with
marked reticence."
He saw--and he
admired--the flush which mounted to his visitor's brow. And then, "I must
concede that appearances are against me, Mr, Sheridan," the beautiful
intruder said. "And I hasten to protest that my presence in your
apartments at this hour is prompted by no unworthy motive. I merely came to
steal the famous diamond which you brought from London--the Honor of
Eiran."
"Incomparable
Esther Jane," ran Mr. Sheridan's answer, "that stone is now part of a
brooch which was this afternoon returned to my cousin's, the Earl of Eiran's,
hunting-lodge near Melrose. He intends the gem which you are vainly seeking
among my haberdashery to be the adornment of his promised bride in the ensuing
June. I confess to no overwhelming admiration as concerns this raucous if
meritorious young person; and will even concede that the thought of her
becoming my kinswoman rouses in me an inevitable distaste, no less attributable
to the discord of her features than to the source of her eligibility to
disfigure the peerage--that being her father's lucrative transactions in Pork,
which I find indigestible in any form."
"A truce to
paltering!" Miss Ogle cried. "That jewel was stolen from the temple
at Moorshedabad, by the Earl of Eiran's grandfather, during the confusion
necessarily attendant on the glorious battle of Plassy." She laid down the
pistol, and resumed in milder tones: "From an age-long existence as the
left eye of Ganesh it was thus converted into the loot of an invader. To
restore this diamond to its lawful, although no doubt polygamous and
inefficiently-attired proprietors is at this date impossible. But, oh! what
claim have you to its possession?"
"Why, none
whatever," said the parliamentarian; "and to contend as much would be
the apex of unreason. For this diamond belongs, of course, to my cousin the
Earl of Eiran----"
"As a thief's
legacy!" She spoke with signs of irritation.
"Eh, eh, you go too
fast! Eiran, to do him justice, is not a graduate in peculation. At worst, he
is only the sort of fool one's cousins ordinarily are."
The trousered lady
walked to and fro for a while, with the impatience of a caged lioness. "I
perceive I must go more deeply into matters," Miss Ogle remarked, and,
with that habitual gesture which he fondly recognized, brushed back a straying
lock of hair. "In any event," she continued, "you cannot with
reason deny that the world's wealth is inequitably distributed?"
"Madam," Mr.
Sheridan returned, "as a member of Parliament, I have necessarily made it
a rule never to understand political economy. It is as apt as not to prove you
are selling your vote to the wrong side of the House, and that hurts one's conscience."
"Ah, that is
because you are a man. Men are not practical. None of you has ever dared to
insist on his opinion about anything until he had secured the cowardly
corroboration of a fact or so to endorse him. It is a pity. Yet, since through
no fault of yours your sex is invariably misled by its hallucinations as to the
importance of being rational, I will refrain from logic and statistics. In a
word, I simply inform you that I am a member of the League of Philanthropic
Larcenists."
"I had not
previously heard of this organization," said Mr. Sheridan, and not without
suspecting his response to be a masterpiece in the inadequate.
"Our object is the
benefit of society at large," Miss Ogle explained; "and our obstacles
so far have been, in chief, the fetish of proprietary rights and the ubiquity
of the police."
And with that she
seated herself and told him of the league's inception by a handful of
reflective persons, admirers of Rousseau and converts to his tenets, who were
resolved to better the circumstances of the indigent. With amiable ardor Miss
Ogle explained how from the petit larcenies of charity-balls and personally
solicited subscriptions the league had mounted to an ampler field of
depredation; and through what means it now took toll from every form of wealth
unrighteously acquired. Divertingly she described her personal experiences in
the separation of usurers, thieves, financiers, hereditary noblemen, popular
authors, and other social parasites, from the ill-got profits of their
disreputable vocations. And her account of how, on the preceding Tuesday, she,
single-handed, had robbed Sir Alexander McRae--who then enjoyed a fortune and
an enviable reputation for philanthropy, thanks to the combination of glucose,
vitriol and other chemicals which he prepared under the humorous pretext of
manufacturing beer--wrung high encomiums from Mr. Sheridan.
"The proceeds of
these endeavors," Miss Ogle added, "are conscientiously devoted to
ameliorating the condition of meritorious paupers. I would be happy to submit
to you our annual report. Then you may judge for yourself how many families we
have snatched from the depths of poverty and habitual intoxication to the
comparative comfort of a vine-embowered cottage."
Mr. Sheridan replied:
"I have not ever known of any case where adoration needed an affidavit for
foundation. Oh, no, incomparable Esther Jane! I am not in a position to be
solaced by the reports of a corresponding secretary. I gave my heart long
since; to-night I fling my confidence into the bargain; and am resolved to
serve wholeheartedly the cause to which you are devoted. In consequence, I
venture to propose my name for membership in the enterprise you advocate and
indescribably adorn."
Miss Ogle was all one
blush, such was the fervor of his utterance. "But first you must win your
spurs, Mr. Sheridan. I confess you are not abhorrent to me," she hurried
on, "for you are the most fascinatingly hideous man I have ever seen; and
it was always the apprehension that you might look on burglary as an unmaidenly
avocation which has compelled me to discourage your addresses. Now all is
plain; and should you happen to distinguish yourself in robbery of the
criminally opulent, you will have, I believe, no reason to complain of a
twelfth refusal. I cannot modestly say more."
He laughed. "It is
a bargain. We will agree that I bereave some person of either stolen or
unearned property, say, to the value of £10,000----" And with his usual
carefulness in such matters, Mr. Sheridan entered the wager in his notebook.
She yielded him her
hand in token of assent. And he, depend upon it, kissed that velvet trifle
fondly.
"And now,"
said Mr. Sheridan, "to-morrow we will visit Bemerside and obtain
possession of that crystal which is in train to render me the happiest of men.
The task will be an easy one, as Eiran is now in England, and his servants for
the most part are my familiars."
"I agree to your
proposal," she answered. "But this diamond is my allotted quarry; and
any assistance you may render me in procuring it will not, of course, affect in
any way our bargain. On this point"--she spoke with a break of
laughter--"I am as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the
Nile."
"To quote an
author to his face," lamented Mr. Sheridan, "is bribery as gross as
it is efficacious. I must unwillingly consent to your exorbitant demands, for
you are, as always, the irresistible Ogle."
Miss Ogle bowed her
gratitude; and, declining Mr. Sheridan's escort, for fear of arousing gossip by
being seen upon the street with him at this late hour, preferred to avoid any
appearance of indecorum by climbing down the kitchen roof.
When she had gone, Mr.
Sheridan very gallantly attempted a set of verses. But the Muse was not to be
wooed to-night, and stayed obstinately coy.
Mr. Sheridan reflected,
rather forlornly, that he wrote nothing nowadays. There was, of course, his
great comedy, Affectation, his masterpiece which he meant to finish at one time
or another; yet, at the bottom of his heart, he knew that he would never finish
it. But, then, deuce take posterity! for to have written the best comedy, the
best farce, and the best burlesque as well, that England had ever known, was a
very prodigal wiping-out of every obligation toward posterity. Boys thought a
deal about posterity, as he remembered; but a sensible man would bear in mind
that all this world's delicacies--its merry diversions, its venison and old
wines, its handsomely-bound books and fiery-hearted jewels and sumptuous
clothings, all its lovely things that can be touched and handled, and more
especially its ear-tickling applause--were to be won, if ever, from one's
contemporaries. And people were generous toward social, rather than literary,
talents for the sensible reason that they derived more pleasure from an
agreeable companion at dinner than from having a rainy afternoon rendered
endurable by some book or another. So the parliamentarian sensibly went to bed.
Miss, Ogle during this
Scottish trip was accompanied by her father, the venerable Dean of Winchester.
The Dean, although in all things worthy of implicit confidence, was not next
day informed of the intended expedition, in deference to public opinion, which,
as Miss Ogle pointed out, regards a clergyman's participation in a technical
felony with disapproval.
Miss Ogle, therefore,
radiant in a becoming gown of pink lute-string, left Edinburgh the following
morning under cover of a subterfuge, and with Mr. Sheridan as her only escort.
He was at pains to adorn this role with so many happy touches of courtesy and
amiability that their confinement in the postchaise appeared to both of
incredible brevity.
When they had reached
Melrose another chaise was ordered to convey them to Bemerside; and pending its
forthcoming Mr. Sheridan and Miss Ogle strolled among the famous ruins of
Melrose Abbey. The parliamentarian had caused his hair to be exuberantly curled
that morning, and figured to advantage in a plum-colored coat and a saffron
waistcoat sprigged with forget-me-nots. He chatted entertainingly concerning
the Second Pointed style of architecture; translated many of the epitaphs; and
was abundant in interesting information as to Robert Bruce, and Michael Scott,
and the rencounter of Chevy Chase.
"Oh, but
observe," said Mr. Sheridan, more lately, "our only covering is the
dome of heaven. Yet in their time these aisles were populous, and here a score
of generations have besought what earth does not afford--now where the banners
of crusaders waved the ivy flutters, and there is no incense in this
consecrated house except the breath of the wild rose."
"The moral is an
old one," she returned. "Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures
wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams."
"You are a reader,
madam?" he observed, with some surprise; and he continued: "Indeed,
my thoughts were on another trail. I was considering that the demolishers of
this place--those English armies, those followers of John Knox--were actuated
by the highest and most laudable of motives. As a result we find the house of
Heaven converted into a dustheap."
"I believe you
attempt an apologue," she said, indignantly. "Upon my word, I think
you would insinuate that philanthropy, when forced to manifest itself through
embezzlement, is a less womanly employment than the darning of stockings!"
"Whom the cap fits----"
he answered, with a bow. "Indeed, incomparable Esther Jane, I had said
nothing whatever touching hosiery; and it was equally remote from my intentions
to set up as a milliner."
They lunched at
Bemerside, where Mr. Sheridan was cordially received by the steward, and a
well-chosen repast was placed at their disposal.
"Fergus," Mr.
Sheridan observed, as they chatted over their dessert concerning famous
gems--in which direction talk had been adroitly steered"--Fergus, since we
are on the topic, I would like to show Miss Ogle the Honor of Eiran."
The Honor of Eiran was accordingly
produced from a blue velvet case, and was properly admired. Then, when the
steward had been dismissed to fetch a rare liqueur, Mr. Sheridan laughed, and
tossed and caught the jewel, as though he handled a cricket-ball. It was the
size of a pigeon's egg, and was set among eight gems of lesser magnitude; and
in transit through the sunlight the trinket flashed and glittered with
diabolical beauty. The parliamentarian placed three bits of sugar in the velvet
case and handed the gem to his companion.
"The bulk is much
the same," he observed; "and whether the carbon be crystallized or
no, is the responsibility of stratigraphic geology. Fergus, perhaps, must go to
jail. That is unfortunate. But true philanthropy works toward the benefit of
the greatest number possible; and this resplendent pebble will pur chase you
innumerable pounds of tea and a warehouseful of blankets."
"But, Mr.
Sheridan," Miss Ogle cried, in horror, "to take this brooch would not
be honest!"
"Oh, as to
that----!" he shrugged.
"----because Lord
Eiran purchased all these lesser diamonds, and very possibly paid for
them."
Then Mr. Sheridan
reflected, stood abashed, and said: "Incomparable Esther Jane, I confess I
am only a man. You are entirely right. To purloin any of these little diamonds
would be an abominable action, whereas to make off with the only valuable one
is simply a stroke of retribution. I will, therefore, attempt to prise it out
with a nutpick."
Three constables came
suddenly into the room. "We hae been tauld this missy is a suspectit
thieving body," their leader cried. "Esther Jane Ogle, ye maun gae
with us i' the law's name. Ou ay, lass, ye ken weel eneugh wha robbit auld Sir
Aleexander McRae, sae dinna ye say naething tae your ain preejudice, lest ye
hae tae account for it a'."
Mr. Sheridan rose to
the occasion. "My exceedingly good friend, Angus Howden! I am unwilling to
concede that yeomen can excel in gentlemanly accomplishments, but it is only
charity to suppose all three of you as drunk as any duke that ever honored me
with his acquaintance." This he drawled, and appeared magisterially to
await an explanation.
"Hout, Mr.
Sheridan," commenced the leading representative of justice, "let that
flee stick i' the wa'-- ye dinna mean tae tell me, Sir, that ye are acquaintit
wi' this--ou ay, tae pleasure ye, I micht e'en say wi' this----"
"This lady,
probably?" Mr. Sheridan hazarded.
"'Tis an unco
thing," the constable declared, "but that wad be the word was amaist
at my tongue's tip."
"Why,
undoubtedly," Mr. Sheridan assented. "I rejoice that, being of French
extraction, and unconversant with your somewhat cryptic patois, the lady in
question is the less likely to have been sickened by your extravagances in the
way of misapprehension. I candidly confess such imbecility annoys me.
What!" he cried out, "what if I marry! is matrimony to be ranked with
arson? And what if my cousin, Eiran, affords me a hiding-place wherein to sneak
through our honeymoon after the cowardly fashion of all modern married couples!
Am I in consequence compelled to submit to the invasions of an intoxicated
constabulary?" His rage was terrific.
"Voila la seule
devise. Ils me connaissent, ils ont confidence dans moi. Si, taisez-vous! Si
non, vous serez arretee et mise dans la prison, comme une caractere
suspicieuse!" Mr. Sheridan exhorted Miss Ogle to this intent with more of
earnestness than linguistic perfection; and he rejoiced to see that instantly
she caught at her one chance of plausibly accounting for her presence at Bemerside,
and of effecting a rescue from this horrid situation.
"But I also spik
the English," she sprightlily announced. "I am appleed myself at to
learn its by heart. Certainly you look for a needle in a hay bundle, my
gentlemans. I am no stealer of the grand road, but the wife of Mistaire
Sheridan, and her presence will say to you the remains."
"You see!"
cried Mr. Sheridan, in modest triumph. "In short, I am a bridegroom
unwarrantably interrupted in his first tete-a-tete, I am responsible for this
lady and all her past and its appurtenances; and, in a phrase, for everything
except the course of conduct I will undoubtedly pursue should you be visible at
the conclusion of the next five minutes."
His emphasis was such
that the police withdrew with a concomitant of apologies.
"And now I claim
my bond," said Mr. Sheridan, when they were once again free from
intrusion. "For we two are in Scotland, where the common declaration of a
man and woman that they are married constitutes a marriage."
"Oh----!" she
exclaimed, and stood encrimsoned.
"Indeed, I must
confess that the day's work has been a trick throughout. The diamond was pawned
years ago. This trinket here is a copy in paste and worth perhaps some seven
shillings sixpence. And those fellows were not constables, but just my cousin
Eiran and two footmen in disguise. Nay, madam, you will learn with experience
that to display unfailing candor is not without exception the price of
happiness."
"But this, I
think, evades our bargain, Mr. Sheridan. For you were committed to pilfer
property to the value of £10,000----"
"And to fulfil the
obligation I have stolen your hand in marriage. What, madam! do you indeed
pretend that any person outside of Bedlam would value you at less? Believe me,
your perfections are of far more worth. All persons recognize that save
yourself, incomparable Esther Jane; and yet, so patent is the proof of my
contention, I dare to leave the verdict to your sense of justice."
Miss Ogle did not
speak. Her lashes fell as, with some ceremony, he led her to the long French
mirror which was in the breakfast room. "See now!" said Mr. Sheridan.
"You, who endanger life and fame in order to provide a mendicant with
gruel, tracts and blankets! You, who deny a sop to the one hunger which is
vital! Oh, madam, I am tempted glibly to compare your eyes to sapphires, and
your hair to thin-spun gold, and the color of your flesh to the
arbutus-flower--for that, as you can see, would be within the truth, and it
would please most women, and afterward they would not be so obdurate. But you
are not like other women," Mr. Sheridan observed, with admirable
dexterity. "And I aspire to you, the irresistible Ogle! you, who so
great-heartedly befriend the beggar! you, who with such industry contrive
alleviation for the discomforts of poverty. Eh, eh! what will you grant to any
beggar such as I? Will you deny a sop to the one hunger which is vital?"
He spoke with unaccustomed vigor, even in a sort of terror, because he knew
that he was speaking with sincerity.
"To the one hunger
which is vital!" he repeated. "Ah, where lies the secret which makes
one face the dearest in the world, and entrusts to one little hand a life's
happiness as a plaything? All Aristotle's learning could not unriddle the
mystery, and Samson's thews were impotent to break that spell. Love vanquishes
all. . . . You would remind me of some previous skirmishings with Venus's
unconquerable brat? Nay, madam, to the contrary, the fact that I have loved
many other women is my strongest plea for toleration. Were there nothing else,
it is indisputable we perform all actions better for having rehearsed them. No,
we do not of necessity perform them the more thoughtlessly as well; for,
indeed, I find that with experience a man becomes increasingly difficult to please
in affairs of the heart. The woman one loves then is granted that pre-eminence
not merely by virtue of having outshone any particular one of her predecessors;
oh, no! instead, her qualities have been compared with all the charms of all
her fair forerunners, and they have endured that stringent testing. The winning
of an often-bartered heart is in reality the only conquest which entitles a
woman to complacency, for she has received a real compliment; whereas to be
selected as the target of a lad's first declaration is a tribute of no more
value than a man's opinion upon vintages who has never tasted wine."
He took a turn about
the breakfast room, then came near to her. "I love you. Were there any way
to parade the circumstance and bedeck it with pleasing adornments of filed
phrases, tropes and far-fetched similes, I would not grudge you a deal of
verbal pageantry. But three words say all. I love you. There is no act in my
past life but appears trivial and strange to me, and to the man who performed
it I seem no more akin than to Mark Antony or Nebuchadnezzar. I love you. The
skies are bluer since you came, the beauty of this world we live in oppresses
me with a fearful joy, and in my heart there is always the thought of you and
such yearning as I may not word. For I love you."
"You--but you have
frightened me." Miss Ogle did not seem so terrified as to make any effort
to recede from him; and yet he saw that she was frightened in sober earnest.
Her face showed pale, and soft, and glad, and awed, and desirable above all
things; and it remained so near him as to engender riotous aspirations.
"I love you,"
he said again. You would never have suspected this man could speak, upon
occasion, fluently. "I think--I think that Heaven was prodigal when Heaven
made you. To think of you is as if I listened to an exalted music; and to be
with you is to understand that all imaginable sorrows are just the figments of
a dream which I had very long ago."
She laid one hand on
each of his shoulders, facing him. "Do not let me be too much afraid! I
have not ever been afraid before. Oh, everything is in a mist of gold, and I am
afraid of you, and of the big universe which I was born into, and I am
helpless, and I would have nothing changed! Only, I cannot believe I am worth £10,000,
and I do so want to be persuaded I am. It is a great pity," she sighed,
"that you who convicted Warren Hastings of stealing such enormous wealth
cannot be quite as eloquent to-day as you were in the Oudh speech, and convince
me his arraigner has been equally rapacious!"
"I mean to prove
as much--with time," said Mr. Sheridan. His breathing was yet perfunctory.
Miss Ogle murmured,
"And how long would you require?"
"Why, I intend,
with your permission, to devote the remainder of my existence to the task. Eh,
I concede that space too brief for any adequate discussion of the topic; but I
will try to be concise and very practical----"
She laughed. They were
content. "Try, then----" Miss Ogle said.
She was able to get no
farther in the sentence, for reasons which to particularize would be
indiscreet.
"Though--or,
rather, because--VANDERHOFFEN was a child of the French Revolution, and inherited
his social, political and religious--or, rather, anti-religious--views from the
French writers of the eighteenth century, England was not ready for him and the
unshackled individualism for which he at first contended. Recognizing this
fact, he turned to an order of writing begotten of the deepest popular needs
and addressed to the best intelligence of the great middle classes of the
community."
Now emperors bide their times' rebuff I would not be a king--enough Of
woe it is to love; The paths of power are steep and rough, And tempests reign
above. I would not climb the imperial throne; 'Tis built on ice which fortune's
sun Thaws in the height of noon. Then farewell, kings, that squeak `Ha' done!'
To time's full-throated tune. PAUL VANDERHOFFEN. Emma and Caroline. It is questionable if the announcement of the
death of their Crown Prince, Hilary, upon the verge of his accession to the
throne, aroused more than genteel regret among the inhabitants of
Saxe-Kesselberg. It is indisputable that in diplomatic circles news of this
horrible occurrence was indirectly conceded in 1803 to smack of a direct
intervention of Providence. For to consider all the havoc dead Prince
Fribble--such had been his sobriquet--would have created, Dei gratia, through
his pilotage of an important grand-duchy (with an area of no less than
eighty-nine square miles) was less discomfortable now prediction was an
academic matter.
And so the editors of
divers papers were the victims of a decorous anguish, court-mourning was
decreed, and that wreckage which passed for the mutilated body of Prince Hilary
was buried with every appropriate honor. Within the week most people had
forgotten him, for everybody was discussing the execution of the Duc d'Enghein.
And the aged unvenerable Grand-Duke of Saxe-Kesselberg died too in the same
March; and afterward his other grandson, Prince Augustus, reigned in the merry
old debauchee's stead.
Prince Hilary was
vastly pleased. His scheme for evading the tedious responsibilities of
sovereignty had been executed without a hitch; he was officially dead; and, on
the whole, standing bareheaded between a miller and laundress, he had found his
funeral ceremonies to be unimpeachably conducted. He assumed the name of Paul
Vanderhoffen, selected at random from the novel he was reading when his
postchaise conveyed him past the frontier of Saxe-Kesselberg. Freed, penniless,
and thoroughly content, he set about amusing himself--having a world to frisk
in--and incidentally about the furnishing of his new friend Paul Vanderhoffen
with life's necessaries.
It was a little more
than two years later that the good-natured Earl of Brudenel suggested to Lady
John Claridge that she could nowhere find a more eligible tutor for her son
than young Vanderhoffen.
"Hasn't a shilling,
ma'am, but one of the most popular men in London. His poetry book was
subscribed for by the Prince Regent and half the notables of the kingdom.
Capital company at a dinner-table--stutters, begad, like a
What-you-may-call-'em, and keeps everybody in a roar--and when he's had his
whack of claret, he sings his own songs to the piano, you know, and all that
sort of thing, and has quite put Tommy Moore's nose out of joint. Nobody knows
much about him, but that don't matter with these literary chaps, does it now?
Goes everywhere, ma'am--quite a favorite at Carlton House--a highly agreeable,
well-informed man, I can assure you--and probably hasn't a shilling to pay the
cabman. Deuced odd, ain't it? But Lord Lansdowne is trying to get him a
place--spoke to me about a tutorship, ma'am, in fact, just to keep Vanderhoffen
going, until some registrarship or other falls vacant. Now, I ain't clever and
that sort of thing, but I quite agree with Lansdowne that we practical men
ought to look out for these clever fellows--see that they don't starve in a
garret, like poor What's-his-name, don't you know?"
Lady Claridge sweetly
agreed with her future son-in-law. So it befell that shortly after this
conversation Paul Vanderhoffen came to Leamington Manor, and through an entire
summer goaded young Percival Claridge, then on the point of entering Cambridge,
but pedagogically branded as "deficient in mathematics," through many
elaborate combinations of x and y and cosines and hyperbolas.
Lady John Claridge,
mother to the pupil, approved of the new tutor. True, he talked much and
wildishly; but literary men had a name for eccentricity, and, besides, Lady
Claridge always dealt with the opinions of other people as matters of
illimitable unimportance. This baronet's lady, in short, was in these days
vouchsafing to the universe at large a fine and new benevolence, now that her
daughter was safely engaged to Lord Brudenel, who, whatever his other virtues,
was certainly a peer of England and very rich. It seems irrelevant, and yet for
the tale's sake is noteworthy, that any room which harbored Lady John Claridge
was through this fact converted into an absolute monarchy.
And so, by the favor of
Lady Claridge and destiny, the tutor stayed at Leamington Manor all summer.
There was nothing in
either the appearance or demeanor of the fiancee of Lord Brudenel's title and
superabundant wealth which any honest gentleman could, hand upon his heart,
describe as blatantly repulsive.
It may not be denied
the tutor noted this. In fine, he fell in love with Mildred Claridge after a
thorough-going fashion such as Prince Fribble would have found amusing. Prince
Fribble would have smiled, shrugged, drawled, "Eh, after all, the girl is
handsome and deplorably cold-blooded!" Paul Vanderhoffen said, "I am
not fit to live in the same world with her," and wrote many verses in the
prevailing Oriental style rich in allusions to roses, and bulbuls, and
gazelles, and peris, and minarets--which he sold rather profitably.
Meanwhile, far oversea,
the reigning Duke of Saxe-Kesselberg had been unwise enough to quarrel with his
Chancellor, Georges Desmarets, an invaluable man whose only faults were
dishonesty and a too intimate acquaintance with the circumstances of Prince
Hilary's demise. As fruit of this indiscretion, an inconsiderable tutor at
Leamington Manor--whom Lady John Claridge regarded as a sort of upper
servant-was talking with a visitor.
The tutor, it appeared,
preferred to talk with the former Chancellor of Saxe-Kesselberg in the middle
of an open field. The time was afternoon, the season September, and the west
was vaingloriously justifying the younger man's analogy of a gigantic Spanish
omelette. Meanwhile, the younger man declaimed in a high-pitched pleasant
voice, wherein there was, as always, the elusive suggestion of a stutter.
"I repeat to
you," the tutor observed, "that no consideration will ever make a
grand-duke of me excepting over my dead body. Why don't you recommend some not
quite obsolete vocation, such as making papyrus, or writing an interesting
novel, or teaching people how to dance a saraband? For after all, what is a
monarch nowadays--oh, even a monarch of the first class?" he argued, with
what came near being a squeak of indignation. "The poor man is a rather
pitiable and perfectly useless relic of barbarism, now that 1789 has opened our
eyes; and his main business in life is to ride in open carriages and bow to an
applauding public who are applauding at so much per head. He must expect to be
aspersed with calumny, and once in a while with bullets. He may at the utmost
aspire to introduce an innovation in evening dress,--the Prince Regent, for
instance, has invented a really very creditable shoe-buckle. Tradition
obligates him to devote his unofficial hours to sheer depravity----"
Paul Vanderhoffen
paused to meditate.
"Why, there you
are! another obstacle! I have in an inquiring spirit and without prejudice
sampled all the Seven Deadly Sins, and the common increment was an inability to
enjoy my breakfast. A grand-duke I take it, if he have any sense of the
responsibilities of his position, will piously remember the adage about the
voice of the people and hasten to be steeped in vice--and thus conform to every
popular notion concerning a grand-duke. Why, common intelligence demands that a
grand-duke should brazenly misbehave himself upon the more conspicuous
high-places of Chemosh! and personally, I have no talents such as would qualify
me for a life of cynical and brutal immorality. I lack the necessary aptitude,
I would not ever afford any spicy gossip concerning the Duke of
Saxe-Kesselberg, and the editors of the society papers would unanimously
conspire to dethrone me----"
Thus he argued, with
his high-pitched pleasant voice, wherein there was, as always, the elusive
suggestion of a stutter. And here the other interrupted.
"There is no need
of names, your highness." Georges Desmarets was diminutive, black-haired
and corpulent. He was of dapper appearance, point-device in everything, and he
reminded you of a perky robin.
The tutor flung out an
"Ouf! I must recall to you that, thank heaven, I am not anybody's highness
any longer. I am Paul Vanderhoffen."
"He says that he
is not Prince Fribble!"--the little man addressed the zenith--"as if
any other person ever succeeded in talking a half-hour without being betrayed
into at least one sensible remark. Oh, how do you manage without fail to be so
consistently and stupendously idiotic?"
"It is, like all
other desirable traits, either innate or else just unattainable," the
other answered. "I am so hopelessly light-minded that I cannot refrain
from being rational even in matters which concern me personally--and this, of
course, no normal being ever thinks of doing. I really cannot help it."
The Frenchman groaned
whole-heartedly.
"But we were
speaking--well, of foreign countries. Now, Paul Vanderhoffen has read that in
one of these countries there was once a prince who very narrowly escaped
figuring as a self-conscious absurdity, as an anachronism, as a life-long
prisoner of etiquette. However, with the assistance of his cousin--who,
incidentally, was also his heir--the prince most opportunely died. Oh, pedant
that you are! in any event he was interred. And so, the prince was gathered to
his fathers, and his cousin Augustus reigned in his stead. Until a certain
politician who had been privy to this pious fraud----" The tutor shrugged.
"How can I word it without seeming hypercritical?"
Georges Desmarets
stretched out appealing hands. "But, I protest, it was the
narrow-mindedness of that pernicious prig, your cousin--who firmly believes
himself to be an improved and augmented edition of the Four Evangelists----"
"Well, in any
event, the proverb was attested that birds of a feather make strange
bedfellows. There was a dispute concerning some petit larceny--some slight
discrepancy, we will imagine, since all this is pure romance, in the
politician's accounts----"
"Now you belie
me----" said the black-haired man, and warmly.
"Oh, Desmarets,
you are as vain as ever! Let us say, then, of grand larceny. In any event, the
politician was dismissed. And what, my dears, do you suppose this bold and bad
and unprincipled Machiavelli went and did? Why, he made straight for the father
of the princess the usurping duke was going to marry, and surprised everybody
by showing that, at a pinch, even this Guy Fawkes--who was stuffed with all
manner of guile and wickedness where youthful patriotism would ordinarily
incline to straw--was capable of telling the truth. And so the father broke off
the match. And the enamored, if usurping, duke wept bitterly and tore his hair
to such an extent he totally destroyed his best toupet. And privily the Guy
Fawkes came into the presence of the exiled duke and prated of a restoration to
ancestral dignities. And he was spurned by a certain highly intelligent person
who considered it both tedious and ridiculous to play at being emperor of a
backyard. And then--I really don't recall what happened. But there was a
general and unqualified deuce to pay with no pitch at a really satisfying
temperature."
The stouter man said
quietly: "It is a thrilling tale which you narrate. Only, I do recall what
happened then. The usurping duke was very much in earnest, desirous of
retaining his little kingdom, and particularly desirous of the woman whom he
loved. In consequence, he had Monsieur the Runaway obliterated while the latter
was talking nonsense----"
The tutor's brows had
mounted.
"I scorn to think
it even of anybody who is controlled in every action by a sense of duty,"
Georges Desmarets explained, "that Duke Augustus would cause you to be
murdered in your sleep."
"A hit!" The
younger man unsmilingly gesticulated like one who has been touched in
sword-play. "Behold now, as the populace in their blunt way would phrase
it, I am squelched."
"And so the
usurping duke was married and lived happily ever afterward." Georges
Desmarets continued: "I repeat to you there is only the choice between
declaring yourself and being--we will say, removed. Your cousin is deeply in
love with the Princess Sophia, and thanks to me, has now no chance of marrying
her until his title has been secured by your--removal. Do not deceive yourself.
High interests are involved. You are the grain of sand between big wheels. I
iterate that the footpad who attacked you last night was merely a prologue. I
happen to know your cousin has entrusted the affair to Heinrich Oben dorf, his
foster-brother, who, as you will remember, is not particularly squeamish."
Paul Vanderhoffen
thought a while. "Desmarets," he said at last, "it is no use. I
scorn your pribbles and your prabbles. I bargained with Augustus. I traded a
duchy for my personal liberty. Frankly, I would be sorry to connect a sharer of
my blood with the assault of yesterday. To be unpardonably candid, I have not
ever found that your assertion of an event quite proved it had gone through the
formality of occurring. And so I shall hold to my bargain."
"The night brings
counsel," Desmarets returned. "It hardly needs a night, I think, to
demonstrate that all I say is true."
And so they parted.
Having thus dismissed
such trifles as statecraft and the well-being of empires, Paul Vanderhoffen
turned toward consideration of the one really serious subject in the universe,
which was of course the bright, miraculous and incredible perfection of Mildred
Claridge.
"I wonder what you
think of me? I wonder if you ever think of me?" The thought careered like
a caged squirrel, now that he walked through autumn woods toward her home.
"I wish that you
were not so sensible. I wish your mother were not even more so. The woman reeks
with common-sense, and knows that to be common is to be unanswerable. I wish
that a dispute with her were not upon a par with remonstrance against an
earthquake."
He lighted a fresh
cheroot. "And so you are to marry the Brudenel title and bank account,
with this particular Heleigh thrown in as a dividend. And why not? the estate
is considerable; the man who encumbers it is sincere in his adoration of you;
and, chief of all, Lady John Claridge has decreed it. And your decision in any
matter has always lain between the claws of that steel-armored crocodile who, by
some miracle, is your mother. Oh, what a universe! were I of hasty temperament
I would cry out, Tut and go to!"
This was the moment
which the man hid in the thicket selected as most fit for intervention through
the assistance of a dueling pistol. Paul Vanderhoffen reeled, his face
bewilderment. His hands clutched toward the sky, as if in anguish he grasped at
some invisible support, and he coughed once or twice. It was rather horrible.
Then Vanderhoffen shivered as though he were very cold, and tottered and
collapsed in the parched roadway.
A slinking man whose
lips were gray and could not refrain from twitching came toward the limp heap.
"So----!" said the man. One of his hands went to the tutor's breast,
and in his left hand dangled a second dueling pistol. He had thrown away the
other after firing it.
"And so----!"
observed Paul Vanderhoffen. Afterward there was a momentary tussle. Now Paul
Vanderhoffen stood erect and flourished the loaded pistol. "If you go on
this way," he said, with some severity, "you will presently be
neither loved nor respected. There was a time, though, when you were an
excellent shot, Herr Heinrich Obendorf."
"I had my orders,
highness," said the other stolidly.
"Oh yes, of
course," Paul Vanderhoffen answered. "You had your orders--from
Augustus!" He seemed to think of something very far away. He smiled, with
quizzically narrowed eyes such as you may yet see in Raeburn's portrait of the
man. "I was remembering, oddly enough, that elm just back of the Canova Pavilion--as
it was twenty years ago. I managed to scramble up it, but Augustus could not
follow me because he had such short fat little legs. He was so proud of what I
had done that he insisted on telling everybody--and afterward we had oranges
for luncheon, I remember, and sucked them through bits of sugar. It is not fair
that you must always remember and always love that boy who played with you when
you were little--after he has grown up to be another person. Eh no! youth
passes, but all its memories of unimportant things remain with you and are less
kind than any self-respecting viper would be. Decidedly, it is not fair, and
some earnest-minded person ought to write to his morning paper about it. . . .
I think that is the reason I am being a sentimental fool," Paul Vanderhoffen
explained.
Then his teeth clicked.
"Get on, my man," he said. "Do not remain too near to me,
because there was a time when I loved your employer quite as much as you do.
This fact is urging me to dangerous ends. Yes, it is prompting me, even while I
talk with you, to give you a lesson in marksmanship, my inconveniently faithful
Heinrich."
He shrugged. He lighted
a cheroot with hands whose tremblings, he devoutly hoped, were not apparent,
for Prince Fribble had been ashamed to manifest a sincere emotion of any sort,
and Paul Vanderhoffen shared as yet this foible.
"Oh Brutus!
Ravaillac! Damiens!" he drawled. "O general compendium of misguided
aspirations! do be a duck and get along with you. And I would run as hard as I
could, if I were you, for it is war now, and you and I are not on the same
side."
Paul Vanderhoffen
paused a hundred yards or so from this to shake his head. "Come, come! I
have lost so much that I cannot afford to throw my good temper into the
bargain. To endure with a grave face this perfectly unreasonable universe
wherein destiny has locked me is undoubtedly meritorious; but to bustle about
it like a caged canary, and not ever to falter in your hilarity, is heroic. Let
us, by all means, not consider the obdurate if gilded barriers, but rather the
lettuce and the cuttle-bone. I have my choice between becoming a corpse or a
convict--a convict? ah, undoubtedly a convict, sentenced to serve out a
life-term in a cess-pool of castby superstitions."
He smiled now over Paul
Vanderhoffen's rage. "Since the situation is tragic, let us approach it in
an appropriate spirit of frivolity. My circumstances bully me. And I succumb to
irrationality, as rational persons invariably end by doing. But, oh, dear me!
oh, Osiris, Termagaunt, and Zeus! to think there are at least a dozen other
ne'er-do-wells alive who would prefer to make a mess of living as a grand-duke
rather than as a scribbler in Grub Street! Well, well! the jest is not of my
contriving, and the one concession a sane man will never yield the universe is
that of considering it seriously."
And he strode on,
resolved to be Prince Fribble to the last.
"Frivolity,"
he said, "is the smoked glass through which a civilized person views the
only world he has to live in. For, otherwise, he could not presume to look upon
such coruscations of insanity and remain unblinded."
This heartened him, as
a rounded phrase will do the best of us. But by-and-bye,
"Frivolity,"
he groaned, "is really the cheap mask incompetence claps on when haled
before a mirror."
And at Leamington Manor
he found her strolling upon the lawn. It was an ordered, lovely scene, steeped
now in the tranquillity of evening. Above, the stars were losing diffidence.
Below, and within arms' reach, Mildred Claridge was treading the same planet on
which he fidgeted and stuttered.
Something in his heart
snapped like a fiddle-string, and he was entirely aware of this circumstance.
As to her eyes, teeth, coloring, complexion, brows, height and hair, it is
needless to expatiate. The most painstaking inventory of these chattels would
necessarily be misleading, because the impression which they conveyed to him
was that of a bewildering, but not distasteful, transfiguration of the
universe, apt as a fanfare at the entrance of a queen.
But he would be Prince
Fribble to the last. And so, "Wait just a moment, please," he said,
"I want to harrow up your soul and freeze your blood."
Wherewith he suavely
told her everything about Paul Vanderhoffen's origin and the alternatives now
offered him, and she listened without comment.
"Ai! ai!"
young Vanderhoffen perorated; "the situation is complete. I have not the
least desire to be Grand-Duke of Saxe-Kesselberg. It is too abominably tedious.
But, if I do not join in with Desmarets, who has the guy-ropes of a restoration
well in hand, I must inevitably be--removed, as the knave phrases it. For as
long as I live, I will be an insuperable barrier between Augustus and his
Sophia. Otototoi!" he wailed, with a fine tone of tragedy, "the one
impossible achievement in my life has always been to convince anybody that it
was mine to dispose of as I elected!"
"Oh, man
proposes----" she began, cryptically. Then he deliberated, and sulkily
submitted: "But I may not even propose to abdicate. Augustus has put
himself upon sworn record as an eye-witness of my hideous death. And in
consequence I might keep on abdicating from now to the crack of doom, and the
only course left open to him would be to treat me as an impostor."
She replied, with
emphasis, "I think your cousin is a beast!"
"Ah, but the
madman is in love," he pleaded. "You should not judge poor
masculinity in such a state by any ordinary standards. Oh really, you don't
know the Princess Sophia. She is, in sober truth, the nicest person who was
ever born a princess. Why, she had actually made a mock of even that handicap,
for ordinarily it is as disastrous to feminine appearance as writing books.
And, oh, Lord! they will be marrying her to me, if Desmarets and I win
out." Thus he forlornly ended.
"The designing
minx!" Miss Claridge said, distinctly,
"Now, gracious
lady, do be just a cooing pigeon and grant that when men are in love they are
not any more encumbered by abstract notions about honor than if they had been
womanly from birth. Come, let's be lyrical and open-minded," he urged; and
he added, "No, either you are in love or else you are not in love. And
nothing else will matter either way. You see, if men and women had been
primarily designed to be rational creatures, there would be no explanation for
their being permitted to continue in existence," he lucidly explained.
"And to have grasped this fact is the pith of all wisdom."
"Oh, I am very
wise." A glint of laughter shone in her eyes. "I would claim to be
another Pythoness if only it did not sound so snaky and wriggling. So, from my
trident--or was it a Triton they used to stand on?--I announce that you and
your Augustus are worrying yourselves gray-headed over an idiotically simple
problem. Now, I disposed of it offhand when I said, `Man proposes.'"
He seemed to be aware
of some one who from a considerable distance was inquiring her reasons for this
statement.
"Because in
Saxe-Kesselberg, as in all other German states, when a prince of the reigning
house marries outside of the mediatized nobility he thereby forfeits his right
of succession. It has been done any number of times. Why, don't you see, Mr.
Vanderhoffen? Conceding you ever do such a thing, your cousin Augustus would
become at once the legal heir. So you must marry. It is the only way, I think,
to save you from regal incarceration and at the same time to reassure the
Prince of Lueminster--that creature's father--that you have not, and never can
have, any claim which would hold good in law. Then Duke Augustus could
peaceably espouse his Sophia and go on reigning--And, by the way, I have seen
her picture often, and if that is what you call beauty----" Miss Claridge
did not speak this last at least with any air of pointing out the self-evident.
And, "I
believe," he replied, "that all this is actually happening. I might
have known fate meant to glut her taste for irony."
"But don't you
see? You have only to marry anybody outside of the higher nobility--and just as
a makeshift----" She had drawn closer in the urgency of her desire to help
him. An infinite despair and mirth as well was kindled by her nearness. And the
man was insane and dimly knew as much.
And so, "I
see," he answered. "But, as it happens, I cannot marry any woman,
because I love a particular woman. At least, I suppose she isn't anything but
just a woman. That statement," he announced, "is a formal tribute
paid by what I call my intellect to what the vulgar call the probabilities. The
rest of me has no patience whatever with such idiotic blasphemy."
She said, "I think
I understand." And this surprised him, coming as it did from her whom he
had always supposed to be the fiancee of Lord Brudenel's title and
bank-account.
"And,
well!"--he waved his hands--"either as tutor or as grand-duke, this
woman is unattainable, because she has been far too carefully reared"--and
here he frenziedly thought of that terrible matron whom, as you know, he had
irreverently likened to a crocodile--"either to marry a pauper or to be
contented with a left-handed alliance. And I love her. And so"--he
shrugged--"there is positively nothing left to do save sit upon the ground
and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings."
She said, "Oh, and
you mean it! You are speaking the plain truth!" A change had come into her
lovely face which would have made him think it even lovelier had not that
contingency been beyond conception.
And Mildred Claridge
said, "It is not fair for dreamers such as you to let a woman know just
how he loves her. That is not wooing. It is bullying."
His lips were making a
variety of irrational noises. And he was near to her. Also he realized that he
had never known how close akin were fear and joy, so close the two could mingle
thus, and be quite undistinguishable. And then repentance smote him.
"I am
contemptible!" he groaned. "I had no right to trouble you with my
insanities. Indeed I had not ever meant to let you guess how mad I was. But
always I have evaded my responsibilities. So I remain Prince Fribble to the
last."
"Oh, but I knew, I
have always known." She held her eyes away from him. "And I wrote to
Lord Brudenel only yesterday releasing him from his engagement."
And now without
uncertainty or haste Paul Vanderhoffen touched her cheek and raised her face,
so that he saw it plainly in the rising twilight, and all its wealth of
tenderness newborn. And what he saw there frightened him.
For the girl loved him!
He felt himself to be, as most men do, a swindler when he comprehended this
preposterous fact; and, in addition, he thought of divers happenings, such as
shipwrecks, holocausts and earthquakes, which might conceivably have appalled
him, and understood that he would never in his life face any sense of terror as
huge as was this present sweet and illimitable awe.
And then he said,
"You know that what I hunger for is impossible. There are so many little
things, like common-sense, to be considered. For this is just a matter which
concerns you and Paul Vanderhoffen--a literary hack, a stuttering squeak-voiced
ne'er-do--well, with an acquired knack for scribbling verses that are
feeble-minded enough for Annuals and Keepsake Books, and so fetch him an
occasional guinea. For, my dear, the verses I write of my own accord are not
sufficiently genteel to be vended in Paternoster Row; they smack too
dangerously of human intelligence. So I am compelled, perforce, to scribble
such jingles as I am ashamed to read, because I must write something. . .
." Paul Vanderhoffen shrugged, and continued, in tones more animated:
"There will be no talk of any grand-duke. Instead, there will be columns
of denunciation and tittle-tattle in every newspaper--quite as if you, a
baronet's daughter, had run away with a footman. And you will very often think
wistfully of Lord Brudenel's fine house when your only title is--well, Princess
of Grub Street, and your realm is a garret. And for a while even to-morrow's
breakfast will be a problematical affair. It is true Lord Lansdowne has
promised me a registrarship in the Admiralty Court, and I do not think he will
fail me. But that will give us barely enough to live on--with strict economy,
which is a virtue that neither of us knows anything about. I beg you to
remember that--you who have been used to every luxury! you who really were
devised that you might stand beside an emperor and set tasks for him. In fine,
you know----"
And Mildred Claridge
said, "I know that, quite as I observed, man proposes--when he has been
sufficiently prodded by some one who, because she is an idiot--And that is why
I am not blushing--very much----"
"Your coloring is
not--repellent." His high-pitched pleasant voice, in spite of him, shook
now with more than its habitual suggestion of a stutter. "What have you
done to me, my dear?" he said. "Why can't I jest at this . . . as I
have always done at everything----?"
"Boy, boy!"
she said; "laughter is excellent. And wisdom too is excellent. Only I
think that you have laughed too much, and I have been too shrewd--But now I
know that it is better to be a princess in Grub Street than to figure at
Ranelagh as a good-hearted fool's latest purchase. For Lord Brudenel is really
very good-natured," she argued, "and I did like him, and mother was
so set upon it--and he was rich--and I honestly thought----"
"And now?" he
said.
"And now I
know," she answered happily.
They looked at each
other for a little while. Then he took her hand, prepared in turn for
self-denial.
"The Household
Review wants me to `do' a series on famous English bishops," he reported,
humbly. "I had meant to refuse, because it would all have to be dull
High-Church twaddle. And the English Gentleman wants some rather outrageous
lying done in defense of the Corn Laws. You would not despise me too
much--would you, Mildred?--if I undertook it now. I really have no choice. And
there is plenty of hackwork of that sort available to keep us going until more
solvent days, when I shall have opportunity to write something quite worthy of
you."
"For the present,
dear, it would be much more sensible, I think, to `do' the bishops and the Corn
Laws. You see, that kind of thing pays very well, and is read by the best
people; whereas poetry, of course--But you can always come back to the
verse-making, you know----"
"If you ever let
me," he said, with a flash of prescience. "And I don't believe you
mean to let me. You are your mother's daughter, after all! Nefarious woman, you
are planning, already, to make a responsible member of society out of me! and
you will do it, ruthlessly! Such is to be Prince Fribble's actual burial--in
his own private carriage, with a receipted tax-bill in his pocket!"
"What nonsense you
poets talk!" the girl observed. But to him, forebodingly, that familiar
statement seemed to lack present application.
"In JOHN CHARTERIS
appeared a man with an inborn sense of the supreme interest and the
overwhelming emotional and spiritual relevancy of human life as it is actually
and obscurely lived; a man with unmistakable creative impulses and
potentialities; a man who, had he lived in a more mature and less self-deluding
community--a community that did not so rigorously confine its interest in facts
to business, and limit its demands upon art to the supplying of
illusions--might humbly and patiently have schooled his gifts to the service of
his vision. . . . As it was, he accepted defeat and compromised half-heartedly
with commercialism."
And men unborn will read of Heloise, And Ruth, and Rosamond, and Semele,
When none remembers your name's melody Or rhymes your name, enregistered with
these. And will my name wake moods as amorous As that of Abelard or Launcelot
Arouses? be recalled when Pyramus And Tristram are unrhymed of and forgot?--
Time's laughter answers, who accords to us More gracious fields, wherein we
harvest--what? JOHN CHARTERIS.Torrismond's Envoi, in Ashtaroths Lackey. "Our distinguished alumnus," after
being duly presented as such, had with vivacity delivered much the usual sort
of Commencement Address. Yet John Charteris was in reality a trifle fagged.
The afternoon train had
been vexatiously late. The little novelist had found it tedious to interchange
inanities with the committee awaiting him at the Pullman steps. Nor had it
amused him to huddle into evening-dress, and hasten through a perfunctory
supper in order to reassure his audience at half-past eight precisely as to the
unmitigated delight of which he was now conscious.
Nevertheless, he
alluded with enthusiasm to the arena of life, to the dependence of America's
destiny upon the younger generation, to the enviable part King's College had
without exception played in history, and he depicted to Fairhaven the many
glories of Fairhaven--past, present and approaching--in superlatives that would
hardly have seemed inadequate if applied to Paradise. His oration, in short,
was of a piece with the amiable bombast that the college students and Fairhaven
at large were accustomed to applaud at every Finals--the sort of linguistic
debauch that John Charteris himself remembered to have applauded as an
undergraduate more years ago than he cared to acknowledge.
Pauline Romeyne had sat
beside him then--yonder, upon the fourth bench from the front, where now
another boy with painstakingly plastered hair was clapping hands. There was a
girl on the right of this boy, too. There naturally would be. Mr. Charteris as
he sat down was wondering if Pauline was within reach of his voice? and if she
were, what was her surname nowadays?
Then presently the
exercises were concluded, and the released auditors arose with an outwelling
noise of multitudinous chatter, of shuffling feet, of rustling programs. Many
of Mr. Charteris' audience, though, were contending against the general human
outflow and pushing toward the platform, for Fairhaven was proud of John
Charteris now that his colorful tales had risen, from the semi-oblivion of
being cherished merely by people who cared seriously for beautiful things, to
the distinction of being purchasable in railway stations; so that, in
consequence, Fairhaven wished both to congratulate him and to renew
acquaintanceship.
He, standing there,
alert and quizzical, found it odd to note how unfamiliar beaming faces climbed
out of the hurly-burly of retreating backs, to say, "Don't you remember
me? I'm so-and-so." These were the people whom he had lived among once,
and some of these had once been people whom he loved. Now there was hardly any
one whom at a glance he would have recognized.
Nobody guessed as much.
He was adjudged to be delightful, cordial, "and not a bit stuck-up, not
spoiled at all, you know." To appear this was the talisman with which he
banteringly encountered the universe.
But John Charteris, as
has been said, was in reality a trifle fagged. When everybody had removed to
the Gymnasium, where the dancing was to be, and he had been delightful there,
too, for a whole half-hour, he grasped with avidity at his first chance to slip
away, and did so under cover of a riotous two-step.
He went out upon the
Campus.
He found this lawn
untenanted, unless you chose to count the marble figure of Lord Penniston, made
aerial and fantastic by the moonlight, standing as it it were on guard over the
College. Mr. Charteris chose to count him. Whimsically, Mr. Charteris reflected
that this battered nobleman's was the one familiar face he had exhumed in all
Fairhaven. And what a deal of mirth and folly, too, the old fellow must have
witnessed during his two hundred and odd years of sentry-duty! On warm, clear
nights like this, in particular, when by ordinary there were only couples on
the Campus, each couple discreetly remote from any of the others. Then
Penniston would be aware of most portentous pauses (which a delectable and lazy
conference of leaves made eloquent) because of many unfinished sentences.
"Oh, you know what I mean, dear!" one would say as a last resort. And
she-why, bless her heart! of course, she always did. . . . Heigho, youth's was
a pleasant lunacy. . . .
Thus Charteris
reflected, growing drowsy. She said, "You spoke very well to-night. Is it
too late for congratulations?"
Turning, Mr. Charteris
remarked, "As you are perfectly aware, all that I vented was just a deal
of skimble-scamble stuff, a verbal syllabub of balderdash. No, upon reflection,
I think I should rather describe it as a conglomeration of piffle, patriotism
and pyrotechnics. Well, Madam Do-as-you-would-be-done-by, what would you have?
You must give people what they want."
It was characteristic
that he faced Pauline Romeyne--or was it still Romeyne? he wondered--precisely
as if it had been fifteen minutes, rather than as many years, since they had last
spoken together.
"Must one?"
she asked. "Oh, yes, I know you have always thought that, but I do not
quite see the necessity of it."
She sat upon the bench
beside Lord Penniston's square marble pedestal. "And all the while you
spoke I was thinking of those Saturday nights when your name was up for an
oration or a debate before the Eclectics, and you would stay away and pay the
fine rather than brave an audience."
"The tooth of
Time," he reminded her, "has since then written wrinkles on my azure
brow. The years slip away fugacious, and Time that brings forth her children
only to devour them grins most hellishly, for Time changes all things and
cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony,--and, therefore, why
shouldn't I have changed a trifle? You wouldn't have me put on exhibition as a
lusus naturae?"
"Oh, but I wish
you had not altered so entirely!" Pauline sighed.
"At least, you
haven't," he declared. "Of course, I would be compelled to say so,
anyhow. But in this happy instance courtesy and veracity come skipping
arm-in-arm from my elated lips." And, indeed, it seemed to him that
Pauline was marvelously little altered. "I wonder now," he said, and
cocked his head, "I wonder now whose wife I am talking to?"
"No, Jack, I never
married," she said quietly.
"It is selfish of
me," he said, in the same tone, "but I am glad of that."
And so they sat a
while, each thinking.
"I wonder,"
said Pauline, with that small plaintive voice which Charteris so poignantly
remembered, "whether it is always like this? Oh, do the Overlords of Life
and Death always provide some obstacle to prevent what all of us have known in
youth was possible from ever coming true?"
And again there was a
pause which a delectable and lazy conference of leaves made eloquent.
"I suppose it is
because they know that if it ever did come true, we would be gods like
them." The ordinary associates of John Charteris, most certainly, would
not have suspected him to be the speaker. "So they contrive the obstacle,
or else they send false dreams--out of the gates of horn--and make the path
smooth, very smooth, so that two dreamers may not be hindered on their way to
the divorce-courts."
"Yes, they are
jealous gods! oh, and ironical gods also! They grant the Dream, and chuckle
while they grant it, I think, because they know that later they will be
bringing their playthings face to face--each married, fat, inclined to
optimism, very careful of decorum, and perfectly indifferent to each other. And
then they get their fore-planned mirth, these Overlords of Life and Death. `We
gave you,' they chuckle, `the loveliest and greatest thing infinity contains.
And you bartered it because of a clerkship or a lying maxim or perhaps a
finger-ring.' I suppose that they must laugh a great deal."
"Eh, what? But
then you never married?" For masculinity in argument starts with the word
it has found distasteful.
"Why, no."
"Nor I." And
his tone implied that the two facts conjoined proved much.
"Miss
Willoughby----?" she inquired.
Now, how in heaven's
name, could a cloistered Fairhaven have surmised his intention of proposing on
the first convenient opportunity to handsome, well-to-do Anne Willoughby? He
shrugged his wonder off. "Oh, people will talk, you know. Let any man once
find a woman has a tongue in her head, and the stage-direction is always `Enter
Rumor, painted full of tongues.'"
Pauline did not appear
to have remarked his protest. "Yes,--in the end you will marry her. And
her money will help, just as you have contrived to make everything else help,
toward making John Charteris comfortable. She is not very clever, but she will
always worship you, and so you two will not prove uncongenial. That is your
real tragedy, if I could make you comprehend."
"So I am going to
develop into a pig," he said, with relish,--"a lovable, contented,
unambitious porcine, who is alike indifferent to the Tariff, the importance of
Equal Suffrage and the market-price of hams, for all that he really cares about
is to have his sty as comfortable as may be possible. That is exactly what I am
going to develop into,--now, isn't it?" And John Charteris, sitting, as
was his habitual fashion, with one foot tucked under him, laughed cheerily. Oh,
just to be alive (he thought) was ample cause for rejoicing! and how
deliciously her eyes, alert with slumbering fires, were peering through the
moon-made shadows of her brows!
"Well----!
something of the sort." Pauline was smiling, but restrainedly, and much as
a woman does in condoning the naughtiness of her child. "And, oh, if
only----"
"Why, precisely.
`If only!' quotha. Why, there you word the key-note, you touch the cornerstone,
you ruthlessly illuminate the mainspring, of an intractable unfeeling universe.
For instance, if only You were the Empress of Ayre and Skye, And I were Ahkond
of Kong, We could dine every day on apple-pie, And peddle potatoes, and sleep
in a sty, And people would say when we came to die, `They never did anything
wrong.' But, as it is, our epitaphs will probably be nothing of the sort. So
that there lurks, you see, much virtue in this `if only.'"
Impervious to nonsense,
she asked, "And have I not earned the right to lament that you are
changed?"
"I haven't robbed
more than six churches up to date," he grumbled. "What would you
have?"
The answer came,
downright, and, as he knew, entirely truthful: "I would have had you do
all that you might have done."
But he must needs
refine. "Why, no--you would have made me do it, wrung out the last drop.
You would have bullied me and shamed me into being all that I might have been.
I see that now." He spoke as if in wonder, with quickening speech.
"Pauline, I haven't been entirely not worth while. Oh, yes, I know! I know
I haven't written five-act tragedies which would be immortal, as you probably
expected me to do. My books are not quite the books I was to write when you and
I were young. But I have made at worst some neat, precise and joyous little
tales which prevaricate tenderly about the universe and veil the pettiness of
human nature with screens of verbal jewelwork. It is not the actual world they
tell about, but a vastly superior place where the Dream is realized and everything
which in youth we knew was possible comes true. It is a world we have all
glimpsed, just once, and have not ever entered, and have not ever forgotten. So
people like my little tales. . . . Do they induce delusions? Oh, well, you must
give people what they want, and literature is a vast bazaar where customers
come to purchase everything except mirrors."
She said soberly,
"You need not make a jest of it. It is not ridiculous that you write of
beautiful and joyous things because there was a time when living was really all
one wonderful adventure, and you remember it."
"But, oh, my dear,
my dear! such glum discussions are so sadly out-of-place on such a night as
this," he lamented. "For it is a night of pearl-like radiancies and
velvet shadows and delicate odors and big friendly stars that promise not to
gossip, whatever happens. It is a night that hungers, and all its
undistinguishable little sounds are voicing the night's hunger for masks and
mandolins, for rope-ladders and balconies and serenades. It is a night . . . a
night wherein I gratefully remember so many beautiful sad things that never
happened . . . to John Charteris, yet surely happened once upon a time to me .
. ."
"I think that I
know what it is to remember--better than you do, Jack. But what do you
remember?"
"In faith, my
dear, the most Bedlamitish occurrences! It is a night that breeds deplorable
insanities, I warn you. For I seem to remember how I sat somewhere, under a
peach-tree, in clear autumn weather, and was content; but the importance had
all gone out of things; and even you did not seem very important, hardly worth
lying to, as I spoke lightly of my wasted love for you, half in hatred,
and--yes, still half in adoration. For you were there, of course. And I
remember how I came to you, in a sinister and brightly lighted place, where a
horrible, staring frail old man lay dead at your feet; and you had murdered
him; and heaven did not care, and we were old, and all our lives seemed just to
end in futile tangle-work. And, again, I remember how we stood alone, with
visible death crawling lazily toward us, as a big sullen sea rose higher and
higher; and we little tinseled creatures waited, helpless, trapped and
yearning. . . . There is a boat in that picture; I suppose it was deeply laden
with pirates coming to slit our throats from ear to ear. I have forgotten that
part, but I remember the tiny spot of courtplaster just above your painted
lips. . . . Such are the jumbled pictures. They are bred of brain-fag, no
doubt; yet, whatever be their lineage," said Charteris, happily,
"they render glum discussion and platitudinous moralizing quite out of the
question. So, let's pretend, Pauline, that we are not a bit more worldly-wise
than those youngsters who are frisking yonder in the Gymnasium--for, upon my
word, I dispute if we have ever done anything to suggest that we are. Don't
let's be cowed a moment longer by those bits of paper with figures on them
which our too-credulous fellow-idiots consider to be the only almanacs. Let's
have back yesterday, let's tweak the nose of Time intrepidly." Then
Charteris caroled:
"For Yesterday! for Yesterday! I cry a reward for a Yesterday Now
lost or stolen or gone astray, With all the laughter of Yesterday!" "And how slight a loss was laughter,"
she murmured--still with the vague and gentle eyes of a day-dreamer--"as
set against all that we never earned in youth, and so will never earn."
He inadequately
answered "Bosh!" and later, "Do you remember----?" he
began.
"Yes, she
remembered that, it developed. And "Do you remember----?" she in turn
was asking later. It was to seem to him in retrospection that neither for the
next half-hour began a sentence without this formula. It was as if they sought
to use it as a master-word wherewith to reanimate the happinesses and sorrows
of their common past, and as if they found the charm was potent to awaken the
thin, powerless ghosts of emotions that were once despotic. For it was as if
frail shadows and half-caught echoes were all they could evoke, it seemed to
Charteris; and yet these shadows trooped with a wild grace, and the echoes
thrilled him with the sweet and piercing surprise of a bird's call at midnight
or of a bugle heard in prison.
Then twelve o'clock was
heralded by the College bell, and Pauline arose as though this equable
deep-throated interruption of the music's levity had been a signal. John
Charteris saw her clearly now; and she was beautiful.
"I must go. You
will not ever quite forget me, Jack. Such is my sorry comfort." It seemed
to Charteris that she smiled as in mockery, and yet it was a very tender sort
of derision. "Yes, you have made your books. You have done what you most
desired to do. You have got all from life that you have asked of life. Oh, yes,
you have got much from life. One prize, though, Jack, you missed."
He, too, had risen,
quiet and perfectly sure of himself. "I haven't missed it. For you love
me."
This widened her eyes.
"Did I not always love you, Jack? Yes, even when you went away forever,
and there were no letters, and the days were long. Yes, even knowing you, I
loved you, John Charteris."
"Oh, I was wrong,
all wrong," he cried; "and yet there is something to be said upon the
other side, as always. . . ." Now Charteris was still for a while. The
little man's chin was uplifted so that it was toward the stars he looked rather
than at Pauline Romeyne, and when he spoke he seemed to meditate aloud. "I
was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books--brave books that
would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them
for battered people, and re-awaken joy and magnanimity." Here he laughed,
a little ruefully. "No, I do not think I can explain this obsession to any
one who has never suffered from it. But I have never in my life permitted
anything to stand in the way of my fulfilling this desire to serve the Dream by
re-creating it for others with picked words, and that has cost me something.
Yes, the Dream is an exacting master. My books, such as they are, have been
made what they are at the dear price of never permitting myself to care
seriously for anything else. I might not dare to dissipate my energies by
taking any part in the drama I was attempting to re-write, because I must so
jealously conserve all the force that was in me for the perfection of my
lovelier version. That may not be the best way of making books, but it is the
only one that was possible for me. I had so little natural talent, you
see," said Charteris, wistfully, "and I was anxious to do so much
with it. So I had always to be careful. It has been rather lonely, my dear.
Now, looking back, it seems to me that the part I have played in all other
people's lives has been the role of a tourist who enters a cafe chantant, a
fortress, or a cathedral, with much the same forlorn sense of detachment, and
observes what there is to see that may be worth remembering, and takes a note
or two, perhaps, and then leaves the place forever. Yes, that is how I served
the Dream and that is how I got my books. They are very beautiful books, I
think, but they cost me fifteen years of human living and human intimacy, and
they are hardly worth so much."
He turned to her, and
his voice changed. "Oh, I was wrong, all wrong, and chance is kindlier
than I deserve. For I have wandered after unprofitable gods, like a man
blundering through a day of mist and fog, and I win home now in its golden
sunset. I have laughed very much, my dear, but I was never happy until
to-night. The Dream, as I now know, is not best served by making parodies of
it, and it does not greatly matter after all whether a book be an epic or a
directory. What really matters is that there is so much faith and love and
kindliness which we can share with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly,
simple, generous living we approach perfection in the highest and most lovely
of all arts. . . . But you, I think, have always comprehended this. My dear, if
I were worthy to kneel and kiss the dust you tread in I would do it. As it
happens, I am not worthy. Pauline, there was a time when you and I were young
together, when we aspired, when life passed as if it were to the measures of a
noble music--a heart-wringing, an obdurate, an intolerable music, it might be,
but always a lofty music. One strutted, no doubt--it was because one knew
oneself to be indomitable. Eh, it is true I have won all I asked of life, very
horribly true. All that I asked, poor fool! oh, I am weary of loneliness, and I
know now that all the phantoms I have raised are only colorless shadows which
belie the Dream, and they are hateful to me. I want just to recapture that old
time we know of, and we two alone. I want to know the Dream again,
Pauline,--the Dream which I had lost, had half forgotten, and have so pitifully
parodied. I want to know the Dream again, Pauline, and you alone can help
me."
"Oh, if I could!
if even I could now, my dear!" Pauline Romeyne left him upon a sudden,
crying this. And "So!" said Mr. Charteris.
He had been deeply
shaken and very much in earnest; but he was never the man to give for any
lengthy while too slack a rein to emotion; and so he now sat down upon the
bench and lighted a cigarette and smiled. Yet he fully recognized himself to be
the most enviable of men and an inhabitant of the most glorious world
imaginable--a world wherein he very assuredly meant to marry Pauline Romeyne
say, in the ensuing September. Yes, that would fit in well enough, although, of
course, he would have to cancel the engagement to lecture in Milwaukee. . . .
How lucky, too, it was that he had never actually committed himself with Anne
Willoughby! for while money was an excellent thing to have, how infinitely less
desirable it was to live perked up in golden sorrow than to feed flocks upon
the Grampian Hills, where Freedom from the mountain height cried, "I go on
forever, a prince can make a belted knight, and let who will be clever. . .
."
"--and besides,
you'll catch your death of cold," lamented Rudolph Musgrave, who was now
shaking Mr. Charteris' shoulder.
"Eh, what? Oh,
yes, I daresay I was napping," the other mumbled. He stood and stretched
himself luxuriously. "Well, anyhow, don't be such an unmitigated
grandmother. You see, I have a bit of rather important business to attend to.
Which way is Miss Romeyne?"
"Pauline Romeyne?
why, but she married old General Ashmeade, you know. She was the gray-haired
woman in purple who carried out her squalling brat when Taylor was introducing
you, if you remember. She told me, while the General was getting the horses
around, how sorry she was to miss your address, but they live three miles out,
and Mrs. Ashmeade is simply a slave to the children. . . . Why, what in the
world have you been dreaming about?"
"Eh, what? Oh,
yes, I daresay I was only napping," Mr. Charteris observed. He was aware
that within they were still playing a riotous two-step.
"Freres et matres,
vous qui cultivez"
PAUL VERVILLE. Hey, my masters, lords and brothers, ye that till the
fields of rhyme, Are ye deaf ye will not hearken to the clamor of your time?
Still ye blot and change and polish--vary, heighten and transpose-- Old
sonorous metres marching grandly to their tranquil close. Ye have toiled and ye
have fretted; ye attain perfected speech: Ye have nothing new to utter and but
platitudes to preach. And your rhymes are all of loving, as within the old days
when Love was lord of the ascendant in the horoscopes of men. Still ye make of
love the utmost end and scope of all your art; And, more blind than he you
write of, note not what a modest part Loving now may claim in living, when we
have scant time to spare, Who are plundering the sea-depths, taking tribute of
the air,-- Whilst the sun makes pictures for us; since to-day, for good or ill,
Earth and sky and sea are harnessed, and the lightnings work our will. Hey, my
masters, all these love-songs by dust-hidden mouths were sung That ye mimic and
re-echo with an artful-artless tongue,-- Sung by poets close to nature, free to
touch her garments' hem Whom to-day ye know not truly; for ye only copy them.
Them ye copy--copy always, with your backs turned to the sun, Caring not what
man is doing, noting that which man has done. We are talking over telephones,
as Shakespeare could not talk; We are riding out in motor-cars where Homer had
to walk; And pictures Dante labored on of mediaeval Hell The nearest
cinematograph paints quicker, and as well. But ye copy, copy always;--and ye
marvel when ye find This new beauty, that new meaning,--while a model stands
behind, Waiting, young and fair as ever, till some singer turn and trace
Something of the deathless wonder of life lived in any place. Hey, my masters,
turn from piddling to the turmoil and the strife! Cease from sonneting, my
brothers; let us fashion songs from life. Thus I wrote ere Percie passed me. .
. . Then did I epitomize All life's beauty in one poem, and make haste to
eulogize Quite the fairest thing life boasts of, for I wrote of Percie's eyes. EXPLICIT DECAS POETARUM