The yellow book, an illustrated quarterly. Vol. 3, October, 1894

By Henry Harland

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Title: The yellow book, an illustrated quarterly. Vol. 3, October, 1894

Editor: Henry Harland


        
Release date: March 1, 2026 [eBook #78082]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Ballantyne Press, 1894

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE YELLOW BOOK, AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY. VOL. 3, OCTOBER, 1894 ***




Transcriber’s note

Variable spelling and hyphenation have been retained. Minor punctuation
inconsistencies have been silently repaired. A list with the
corrections made can be found at the end of the book. Formatting and
special characters are indicated as follows:

  _italic_
  =bold=




  The Yellow Book
  An Illustrated Quarterly
  Volume III October 1894


  London: John Lane
  Boston: Copeland & Day




Contents


  Literature

  I. Women--Wives or Mothers           By A Woman    _Page_           11

  II. “Tell Me not Now”                William Watson                 19

  III. The Headswoman                  Kenneth Grahame                25

  IV. Credo                            Arthur Symons                  48

  V. White Magic                       Ella D’Arcy                    59

  VI. Fleurs de Feu                    José Maria de Hérédia,
                                       of the French Academy          69

  VII. Flowers of Fire, a Translation  Ellen M. Clerke                70

  VIII. When I am King                 Henry Harland                  71

  IX. To a Bunch of Lilac              Theo Marzials                  87

  X. Apple-Blossom in Brittany         Ernest Dowson                  93

  XI. To Salome at St. James’s         Theodore Wratislaw            110

  XII. Second Thoughts                 Arthur Moore                  112

  XIII. Twilight                       Olive Custance                134

  XIV. Tobacco Clouds                  Lionel Johnson                143

  XV. Reiselust                        Annie Macdonell               153

  XVI. To Every Man a Damsel or Two    C. S.                         155

  XVII. A Song and a Tale              Nora Hopper                   158

  XVIII. De Profundis                  S. Cornish Watkins            167

  XIX. A Study in Sentimentality       Hubert Crackanthorpe          175

  XX. George Meredith                  Morton Fullerton              210

  XXI. Jeanne-Marie                    Leila Macdonald               215

  XXII. Parson Herrick’s Muse          C. W. Dalmon                  241

  XXIII. A Note on George the Fourth   Max Beerbohm                  247

  XXIV. The Ballad of a Nun            John Davidson                 273


  Art

  I. Mantegna                            By Philip Broughton   _Page_  7

  II. From a Lithograph                  George Thomson               21

  III. Portrait of Himself             }
  IV. Lady Gold’s Escort               }
  V. The Wagnerites                    } Aubrey Beardsley             50
  VI. La Dame aux Camélias             }

  VII. From a Pastel                     Albert Foschter              89

  VIII. Collins’ Music Hall, Islington }
  IX. The Lion Comique                 } Walter Sickert              136
  X. Charley’s Aunt                    }

  XI. The Mirror                       }
  XII. Skirt-Dancing                   } P. Wilson Steer             169

  XIII. A Sunset                         William Hyde                211

  XIV. George the Fourth                 Max Beerbohm                243

  XV. Study of a Head                    An Unknown Artist           270




The Yellow Book

Volume III October, 1894




The Editor of THE YELLOW BOOK can in no case hold himself responsible
for rejected manuscripts; when, however, they are accompanied by
stamped addressed envelopes, every effort will be made to secure their
prompt return.




                            The Yellow Book
                        An Illustrated Quarterly
                        Volume III October, 1894


  [Illustration]

  London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, Vigo Street
  Boston: Copeland & Day
  Agents for the Colonies: Robt. A. Thompson & Co.




  BALLANTYNE PRESS
  LONDON & EDINBURGH




Mantegna

By Philip Broughton


[Illustration: ANDREAS. MANTEGNA. PAINTER. AND. ENGRAVER. OF PADVA.
1491-1506. ]




Women--Wives or Mothers

By a Woman


WE believe it to be well within the truth to say that most men
cherish, hidden away in an inner pocket of consciousness, their own
particular ideal of the perfect woman. Sole sovereign she of that
unseen kingdom, and crowned and sceptred she remains long after her
faithful subject has put aside the other playthings of his youth. The
fetish is from time to time regarded rapturously, though sorrowfully,
by its possessor, but it is never brought forth for public exhibition.
If to worship and adore were the beginning and end of the pastime, no
cavilling word need be said, for the power to worship is a great and
good gift, and, save in the fabulous region of politics, is nowadays
so rare an one, that when discovered in the actual world its steady
encouragement becomes a duty. But to this apparently innocent diversion
there is another side. Somewhat grave consequences are apt to follow,
and it is to this point of view that we wish to call attention.

When the woman uncreate becomes the measuring rod by which her
unconscious living rivals are judged, and are mostly found wanting,
then we are minded to lift up our voice and put in a plea for
fair-play. To the shrined deity are given by the acolothyst, not only
all the perfections of person demanded by a severely æsthetic sense,
but all the moral qualities as well. Every grace of every fair woman he
has ever met--the best attributes of his mother, his sister, and his
aunt--are freely hers. None of the slight blemishes which occasionally
tarnish the high lustre of virtue, none of the caprices to which
sirens are constitutionally liable, are permitted. Faultless wife
and faultless mother must she be, faithful lover and long-suffering
friend, or he will have none of her in his temple. Now, this is surely
a wholly unreasonable, an utterly extravagant demand on the part of
man, and if analysed carefully, will, we believe, be found to yield
egoism and gluttony in about equal parts. How, we venture to inquire,
would he meet a like claim, were it in turn presented to him? A witty
and light-hearted lady--a remnant yet remains, in spite of the advent
of the leaping, bounding, new womanhood--once startled a selected
audience by the general statement, “All men are widowers.” But even
if this generous utterance can be accepted as absolutely accurate, it
can hardly be taken as a proof of man’s fitness for both the important
rôles involved.

For our own part, we are convinced that, broadly speaking, the
exception only proving the rule--whatever that supporting phrase
may mean--woman, fresh from Nature’s moulding, is, so far as first
intention is concerned, a predestined wife or mother. She is not both,
though doubtless by constant endeavour, art and duty taking it turn
and turn about, the dual end may, with hardness, be attained unto.
For Nature is not economic. Far from her is the fatal utilitarian
spirit which too often prompts the improver man (or--dare we confess
it?--still more frequently woman) to attempt to make one object do the
work of two. From all such sorry makeshifts Nature, the great modeller
in clay, turns contemptuously away. Not long ago we read in a lady’s
journal of a ‘combination gown’ which by some cunning arrangement,
the secret whereof was only known to its lucky possessor, would do
alternate day and night duty with equal credit and despatch. We have no
desire to disparage the varied merits of this ingenious contrivance,
but at the best it must remain an unlovely hybrid thing. Probably it
knew this well, for gowns, too, have their feelings, and before now
have been seen to go limp in a twinkling, overcome by a sudden access
of despondency. Such a moment must certainly have come to the omnibus
garment referred to above, when it found itself breakfasting with a
severe and one-idea’d “tailor-made,” or, more cruel experience still,
dining skirt by skirt with a “mysterious miracle”--the latest label--in
gossamer and satin.

We dare to go even further, and to declare that every woman knows in
her heart--though never, never will she admit it to you--within which
fold she was intended to pass. Is it an exaggeration to say that many
a girl marries out of the superabundance of the maternal instinct,
though she may the while be absolutely ignorant of the motive power at
work? Believing herself to be wildly enamoured of the man of her (or
her parents’) choice, she is in reality only in love with the nursery
of an after-day. Of worship between husband and wife, as a factor in
the transaction, she knows nothing, or likely enough she imagines
it present when it is the sweet passion of pity, or the more subtle
patronage of bestowal, one or both, which are urging her forward into
marriage. Gratitude, none the less real because unrealised, towards
the man who thus enables her to fulfil her true destiny--the saving
of souls alive--has also its share in the complex energy. Well for
the husband of this wife if he allows himself gradually to occupy the
position of eldest and most important of her children, to whom indeed
a somewhat larger liberty is accorded, but from whom also more is
required. In return for this submission boundless will be the care
and devotion bestowed upon his upbringing day by day. He will be
foolish if he utters aloud, or even says in the silence of his heart,
that motherhood is good, but that wifehood was what he wanted. It
would be but a bootless kicking against the pricks. For he has chosen
the mother-woman, and it is beyond his power, or that of any other
specialist, to effect the fundamental change for which his soul may
long. It only remains for him to make the best of a very good bargain,
and one to which it is very probable his strict personal merits may
hardly have entitled him.

If such a marriage is childless, it may still be a very useful one.
Nature’s accommodations often verge on the miraculous. The unemployed
maternal instincts of the wife easily work themselves out in an
unlimited and universal auntdom. It must be confessed that bad blunders
are apt to ensue, but where the intentions are good, the pavement
should not be too closely scanned. In fiction these are the Dinahs, the
Romolas, the Dorotheas, the Mary Garths. Dear to the soul of the female
writer is the maternal type. With loving, if tiresome frequency, she
is presented to us again and yet again. In truth we sometimes grow a
little weary of her saintly monotony. But as it is given to few of us
to have the courage of our tastes, we bear with her, as we bear with
other not altogether pleasing appliances, presented to us by earnest
friends, with the assurance that they are for our good, or for our
education, or some other equally superfluous purpose.

With the male artist this female model is not nearly so popular. It
may be that he feels himself wholly unequal to cope with her countless
perfections. Certain it is that he makes but a sad muddle of it when
he tries. Witness Thackeray’s faded, bloodless Lady Esmond, as set
against his glowing wayward Trix--she, by the way, a beautifully-marked
specimen of the wife-woman--though whether it would be pure wisdom to
take her to wife must be left an open question. Still, we have in our
time loved her well, and some of us have found it hard to forgive the
black treachery done in bringing her back in her old age, a painted
and scolding harridan. For these, well-loved of the gods, should, in
fiction at least, die young.

Truth compels us to own regretfully that man in his self-indulgence
shrinks from both the giving and receiving of dull moments, whilst
woman, believing devoutly in their saving grace, is altruistic enough
to devote herself with enthusiasm to the task of their administration.
Now, dull moments are apt to lie hidden about the creases of the
severely classic robe, which, in the story-books at any rate, these
heroines always wear. We must all agree that during the last twenty
years this type, with its portentous accumulation of self-conscious
responsibility has increased alarmingly. To what is the increase to be
attributed? The too rapid growth of the female population stands out
plainly as prime cause. Legislators are athirst for things practical.
Is it beyond their power to devise some method of dealing with this
problem? The Chinese plan is painfully obvious, but only as a last
and despairful resource, when the wise men of Westminster sitting
on committees and commissions have failed, can it be mentioned for
adoption in Europe. We are, alas! Science-ridden, and are likely to
remain thus bridled and saddled for weary years to come. Every bush
and every bug grows its own specialist, and yet we, the patient, the
long-suffering public, are left to endure both the fogs that make
of London one murky pit, and the redundant female birth-rate which
threatens more revolutions than all the forces of the Anarchists in
active combination. Meanwhile these devotees of the abstract play about
with all sorts of trifles, masquerading as grave thinkers, hoping thus
to escape their certain judgment-day. The identification of criminals
by the variation of thumb-prints is a pretty conceit; so too is the
record of the influence of the moon on the tides, which, we are
informed, employs all to itself a whole and highly paid professor with
a yearly average of three pupils at Cambridge. But what are these save
mere fads, on a par with leapfrog and skittles, in the presence of the
momentous problems about and around us? Let these gentlemen jockeys
look to it. The hour is not far distant when public opinion shall
discover their uselessness and send them about their business.

In humbler ways, too, much might be done to stem the morbid activity
of the collective female conscience. Big sins lie at the doors of the
hosts of good men and women who turn out year by year tons of “books
for the young” to serve as nutriment for the hungry nestlings of
culpable, thoughtless parents. It is hard to overstate the pernicious
effect of this class of _motif_ literature. _Féerie_ in old or new
dress is the only nourishing food for the happy child who is to remain
happy. The little girl, aged seven, who lately wrote in her diary
before going to bed, “Of what _real_ use am I in the world?” had, it
is certain, been denied her Andersen, her Grimm, her Carroll, even
her Blue fairy book. Turned in to browse on “Ministering Children,”
“Agatha’s First Prayer,” and the fatal “Eric”--into how many editions
has this last well-meaning but poisonous romance not passed--the little
victim of parental stupidity is thus left with an organ damaged for
life by over-much stimulation at the start. This new massacre of the
innocents is of purely nineteenth-century growth. It dates from the era
of the awakened conscience, and is coincident with the formation of all
the societies for the regeneration of the human race.

_Per contra_, the wife-woman, though but seldom to be met with in the
multitudinous pages written by women, is the well-beloved, the chosen
of the male artist. Week-days and Sundays he paints her portrait.
Shakespeare returns to her again and again, as though it were hard
to part from her. Wicked Trix stands out as bold leader of one bad
band. Tess belongs to the family, though she is of another branch;
so does Cathy of Wuthering Heights, and Lyndall of the African Farm;
whilst latest and slightest scamp of the lot comes dancing Dodo of
Lambeth. Save in a strictly specialised sense, none of this class can
be said to contrive the greatest good of the greatest number. These
are the women to whom the nursery is at best but an interlude, and
at worst a real interruption of their life’s strongest interests.
They are not skilled in dealing with early teething troubles, nor
in the rival merits of Welsh and Saxony flannel stuffs. Their crass
ignorance of all this deep lore may, it is true, go far to kill off
superfluous offspring, but, unjust as it would appear, these are the
mothers who each succeeding year become more and more adored of their
sons. Fribblers though they be, they sweeten the world’s corners with
the perfume of their charm. And the bit of world’s work in which they
excel is the keeping alive the tradition of woman’s witchery. Who,
then, can deny them their plain uses? When Fate is kind and bestows the
fitting partner, the fires of their love never die down. They remain
lovers to the end. Their husbands need fear no rival, not even in the
person of their own superior son. When Fate is unkind and things go
crookedly, these are the women whose wreckage strews life’s high road,
and from whom their wiser sisters turn reprovingly away. For the good
woman who has to “work for her living,” and who pretends to enjoy the
healthful after-pains in her moral system, is rarely tolerant of the
existence of the _leichtsinnïge_ sister for whom, as to Elijah at the
brook, dainty morsels without labour are cheerfully provided by that
inconsequent raven, man. This lady goes gaily, wearing what she has not
spun, reaping where she has not sown. Sad reflections these for the
high-souled woman whose enlightened demand for justice turns in its
present day impotency to wrath and bitterness.

Wisdom and foresight are never the attributes of the wife-woman.
Charm, beguilement, fascination of sorts, form her poor equipment for
life’s selective struggle. These gifts cannot be said to promise, save
when the stars are in happiest conjunction, long life and useful days
for her intimates. Variations of the two types of Primitive Woman
may abound, but the broad distinction between them is clearly cut
and readily to be made out by the dullest groper after truth. We can
imagine a modern Daniel addressing (quite uselessly) a modern disciple
thus:

“Look to it now, O young man! that your feet go straight, and slip
not in search for the pearl that may be hid away for you. For she who
loveth you best may work you all evil, and she who loveth her own
soul’s travail best will hardly fail you in the days and the years. But
Love remaineth, and the way of return is not.”




“Tell me not Now”

By William Watson


    Tell me not now, if love for love
        Thou canst return,--
    Now while around us and above
        Day’s flambeaux burn.
    Not in clear noon, with speech as clear,
        Thy heart avow,
    For every gossip wind to hear;
        Tell me not now!

    Tell me not now the tidings sweet,
        The news divine;
    A little longer at thy feet
        Leave me to pine.
    I would not have the gadding bird
        Hear from his bough;
    Nay, though I famish for a word,
        Tell me not now!

    But when deep trances of delight
        All Nature seal;
    When round the world the arms of Night
        Caressing steal;
    When rose to dreaming rose says, “_Dear,
        Dearest_;” and when
    Heaven sighs her secret in Earth’s ear,--
        Ah, tell me then!




From a Lithograph

By George Thomson


[Illustration]




The Headswoman

By Kenneth Grahame


I

IT was a bland sunny morning of a mediæval May--an old-style May of
the most typical quality; and the Council of the little town of St.
Radegonde were assembled, as was their wont at that hour, in the
picturesque upper chamber of the Hotel de Ville, for the dispatch of
the usual municipal business. Though the date was early sixteenth
century, the members of this particular town-council possessed some
resemblance to those of similar assemblies in the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and even the nineteenth centuries, in a general absence of
any characteristic at all--unless a pervading hopeless insignificance
can be considered as such. All the character, indeed, in the room
seemed to be concentrated in the girl who stood before the table,
erect, yet at her ease, facing the members in general and Mr. Mayor in
particular; a delicate-handed, handsome girl of some eighteen summers,
whose tall, supple figure was well set off by the quiet, though
tasteful mourning in which she was clad.

“Well, gentlemen,” the Mayor was saying; “this little business appears
to be--er--quite in order, and it only remains for me to--er--review
the facts. You are aware that the town has lately had the misfortune
to lose its executioner--a gentleman who, I may say, performed the
duties of his office with neatness and dispatch, and gave the fullest
satisfaction to all with whom he--er--came in contact. But the
Council has already, in a vote of condolence, expressed its sense of
the--er--striking qualities of the deceased. You are doubtless also
aware that the office is hereditary, being secured to a particular
family in this town, so long as any one of its members is ready
and willing to take it up. The deed lies before me, and appears to
be--er--quite in order. It is true that on this occasion the Council
might have been called upon to consider and examine the title of the
claimant, the late lamented official having only left a daughter--she
who now stands before you; but I am happy to say that Jeanne--the young
lady in question--with what I am bound to call great good-feeling
on her part, has saved us all trouble in that respect, by formally
applying for the family post, with all its--er--duties, privileges,
and emoluments; and her application appears to be--er--quite in order.
There is therefore, under the circumstances, nothing left for us to do
but to declare the said applicant duly elected. I would wish, however,
before I--er--sit down, to make it quite clear to the--er--fair
petitioner, that if a laudable desire to save the Council trouble in
the matter has led her to a--er--hasty conclusion, it is quite open to
her to reconsider her position. Should she determine not to press her
claim, the succession to the post would then apparently devolve upon
her cousin Enguerrand, well known to you all as a practising advocate
in the courts of this town. Though the youth has not, I admit, up to
now proved a conspicuous success in the profession he has chosen,
still there is no reason why a bad lawyer should not make an excellent
executioner; and in view of the close friendship--may I even say
attachment?--existing between the cousins, it is possible that this
young lady may, in due course, practically enjoy the solid emoluments
of the position without the necessity of discharging its (to some
girls) uncongenial duties. And so, though not the rose herself, she
would still be--er--near the rose!” And the Mayor resumed his seat,
chuckling over his little pleasantry, which the keener wits of the
Council proceeded to explain at length to the more obtuse.

“Permit me, Mr. Mayor,” said the girl, quietly, “first to thank you
for what was evidently the outcome of a kindly though misdirected
feeling on your part; and then to set you right as to the grounds of
my application for the post to which you admit my hereditary claim.
As to my cousin, your conjecture as to the feeling between us is
greatly exaggerated; and I may further say at once, from my knowledge
of his character, that he is little qualified either to adorn or to
dignify an important position such as this. A man who has achieved
such indifferent success in a minor and less exacting walk of life,
is hardly likely to shine in an occupation demanding punctuality,
concentration, judgment--all the qualities, in fine, that go to make
a good business man. But this is beside the question. My motives,
gentlemen, in demanding what is my due, are simple and (I trust)
honest, and I desire that you should know them. It is my wish to be
dependent on no one. I am both willing and able to work, and I only
ask for what is the common right of humanity--admission to the labour
market. How many poor toiling women would simply jump at a chance
like this which fortune lays open to me! And shall I, from any false
deference to that conventional voice which proclaims this thing as
“nice,” and that thing as “not nice,” reject a handicraft which
promises me both artistic satisfaction and a competence? No, gentlemen;
my claim is a small one--only a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.
But I can accept nothing less, nor consent to forgo my rights, even for
any contingent remainder of possible cousinly favour!”

There was a touch of scorn in her fine contralto voice as she finished
speaking; the Mayor himself beamed approval. He was not wealthy, and
had a large family of daughters; so Jeanne’s sentiments seemed to him
entirely right and laudable.

“Well, gentlemen,” he began, briskly, “then all we’ve got to do, is
to----”

“Beg pardon, your worship,” put in Master Robinet, the tanner, who
had been sitting with a petrified, Bill-the-Lizard sort of expression
during the speechifying; “but are we to understand as how this here
young lady is going to be the public executioner?”

“Really, neighbour Robinet,” said the Mayor somewhat pettishly, “you’ve
got ears like the rest of us, I suppose; and you know the contents of
the deed; and you’ve had my assurance that it’s--er--quite in order;
and as it’s getting towards lunchtime----”

“But it’s unheard-of,” protested honest Robinet. “There hasn’t ever
been no such thing--leastways not as I’ve heard tell.”

“Well, well, well,” said the Mayor, “everything must have a beginning,
I suppose. Times are different now, you know. There’s the march of
intellect, and--er--all that sort of thing. We must advance with the
times--don’t you see, Robinet?--advance with the times!”

“Well I’m----” began the tanner.

But no one heard, on this occasion, the tanner’s opinion as to his
condition, physical or spiritual; for the clear contralto cut short his
obtestations.

“If there’s really nothing more to be said, Mr. Mayor,” she remarked,
“I need not trespass longer on your valuable time. I propose to take
up the duties of my office to-morrow morning, at the usual hour. The
salary will, I assume, be reckoned from the same date; and I shall make
the customary quarterly application for such additional emoluments
as may have accrued to me during that period. You see I am familiar
with the routine. Good morning, gentlemen!” And as she passed from
the Council chamber, her small head held erect, even the tanner felt
that she took with her a large portion of the May sunshine which was
condescending that morning to gild their deliberations.


II

One evening, a few weeks later, Jeanne was taking a stroll on the
ramparts of the town, a favourite and customary walk of hers when
business cares were over. The pleasant expanse of country that lay
spread beneath her--the rich sunset, the gleaming sinuous river, and
the noble old château that dominated both town and pasture from its
adjacent height--all served to stir and bring out in her those poetic
impulses which had lain dormant during the working day; while the cool
evening breeze smoothed out and obliterated any little jars or worries
which might have ensued during the practice of a profession in which
she was still something of a novice. This evening she felt fairly happy
and content. True, business was rather brisk, and her days had been
fully occupied; but this mattered little so long as her modest efforts
were appreciated, and she was now really beginning to feel that,
with practice, her work was creditably and artistically done. In a
satisfied, somewhat dreamy mood, she was drinking in the various sweet
influences of the evening, when she perceived her cousin approaching.

“Good evening, Enguerrand,” cried Jeanne pleasantly; she was thinking
that since she had begun to work for her living, she had hardly seen
him--and they used to be such good friends. Could anything have
occurred to offend him?

Enguerrand drew near somewhat moodily, but could not help relaxing his
expression at sight of her fair young face, set in its framework of
rich brown hair, wherein the sunset seemed to have tangled itself and
to cling, reluctant to leave it.

“Sit down, Enguerrand,” continued Jeanne, “and tell me what you’ve been
doing this long time. Been very busy, and winning forensic fame and
gold?”

“Well, not exactly,” said Enguerrand, moody once more. “The fact
is, there’s so much interest required nowadays at the courts, that
unassisted talent never gets a chance. And you, Jeanne?”

“Oh, I don’t complain,” answered Jeanne, lightly. “Of course it’s
fair-time just now, you know, and we’re always busy then. But work
will be lighter soon, and then I’ll get a day off, and we’ll have a
delightful ramble and picnic in the woods, as we used to do when we
were children. What fun we had in those old days, Enguerrand! Do you
remember when we were quite little tots, and used to play at executions
in the back-garden, and you were a bandit and a buccaneer, and all
sorts of dreadful things, and I used to chop off your head with a
paper-knife? How pleased dear father used to be!”

“Jeanne,” said Enguerrand, with some hesitation, “you’ve touched upon
the very subject that I came to speak to you about. Do you know, dear,
I can’t help feeling--it may be unreasonable, but still the feeling is
there--that the profession you have adopted is not quite--is just a
little----”

“Now, Enguerrand!” said Jeanne, an angry flash sparkling in her eyes.
She was a little touchy on this subject, the word she most affected to
despise being also the one she most dreaded--the adjective “unladylike.”

“Don’t misunderstand me, Jeanne,” went on Enguerrand, imploringly:
“You may naturally think that, because I should have succeeded to the
post, with its income and perquisites, had you relinquished your claim,
there is therefore some personal feeling in my remonstrances. Believe
me, it is not so. My own interests do not weigh with me for a moment.
It is on your own account, Jeanne, and yours alone, that I ask you
to consider whether the higher æsthetic qualities, which I know you
possess, may not become cramped and thwarted by ‘the trivial round,
the common task,’ which you have lightly undertaken. However laudable
a professional life may be, one always feels that with a delicate
organism such as woman, some of the bloom may possibly get rubbed off
the peach.”

“Well, Enguerrand,” said Jeanne, composing herself with an effort,
though her lips were set hard, “I will do you the justice to believe
that personal advantage does not influence you, and I will try to
reason calmly with you, and convince you that you are simply hide-bound
by old-world prejudice. Now, take yourself, for instance, who come here
to instruct me: what does _your_ profession amount to, when all’s said
and done? A mass of lies, quibbles, dodges, and tricks, that would
make any self-respecting executioner blush! And even with the dirty
weapons at your command, you make but a poor show of it. There was that
wretched fellow you defended only two days ago. (I was in court during
the trial--professional interest, you know.) Well, he had his regular
_alibi_ all ready, as clear as clear could be; only you must needs go
and mess and bungle the thing up, so that, as I expected all along, he
was passed on to me for treatment in due course. You may like to have
his opinion--that of a shrewd, though unlettered person. ‘It’s a real
pleasure, miss,’ he said, ‘to be handled by you. You _knows_ your work,
and you _does_ your work--though p’raps I ses it as shouldn’t. If that
blooming fool of a mouthpiece of mine’--he was referring to you, dear,
in your capacity of advocate--‘had known his business half as well as
you do yours, I shouldn’t a bin here now!’ And you know, Enguerrand, he
was perfectly right.”

“Well, perhaps he was,” admitted Enguerrand. “You see, I had been
working at a sonnet the night before, and I couldn’t get the rhymes
right, and they would keep coming into my head in court and mixing
themselves up with the _alibi_. But look here, Jeanne, when you saw I
was going off the track, you might have given me a friendly hint, you
know--for old times’ sake, if not for the prisoner’s!”

“I daresay,” replied Jeanne, calmly: “perhaps you’ll tell me why I
should sacrifice my interests because you’re unable to look after
yours. You forget that I receive a bonus, over and above my salary,
upon each exercise of my functions!”

“True,” said Enguerrand, gloomily: “I did forget that. I wish I had
your business aptitudes, Jeanne.”

“I daresay you do,” remarked Jeanne. “But you see, dear, how all your
arguments fall to the ground. You mistake a prepossession for a logical
base. Now if I had gone, like that Clairette you used to dangle after,
and been waiting-woman to some grand lady in a château--a thin-blooded
compound of drudge and sycophant--then, I suppose, you’d have been
perfectly satisfied. So feminine! So genteel!”

“She’s not a bad sort of girl, little Claire,” said Enguerrand,
reflectively (thereby angering Jeanne afresh): “but putting her
aside,--of course you could always beat me at argument, Jeanne; you’d
have made a much better lawyer than I. But you know, dear, how much I
care about you; and I did hope that on that account even a prejudice,
however unreasonable, might have some little weight. And I’m not alone,
let me tell you, in my views. There was a fellow in court only to-day,
who was saying that yours was only a _succès d’estime_, and that woman,
as a naturally talkative and hopelessly unpunctual animal, could never
be more than a clever amateur in the profession you have chosen.”

“That will do, Enguerrand,” said Jeanne, proudly; “it seems that when
argument fails, you can stoop so low as to insult me through my sex.
You men are all alike--steeped in brutish masculine prejudice. Now
go away, and don’t mention the subject to me again till you’re quite
reasonable and nice.”


III

Jeanne passed a somewhat restless night after her small scene with
her cousin, waking depressed and unrefreshed. Though she had carried
matters with so high a hand, and had scored so distinctly all around,
she had been more agitated than she had cared to show. She liked
Enguerrand; and more especially did she like his admiration for her;
and that chance allusion to Clairette contained possibilities that were
alarming. In embracing a professional career, she had never thought for
a moment that it could militate against that due share of admiration
to which, as a girl, she was justly entitled; and Enguerrand’s views
seemed this morning all the more narrow and inexcusable. She rose
languidly, and as soon as she was dressed sent off a little note to the
Mayor, saying that she had a nervous headache and felt out of sorts,
and begging to be excused from attendance on that day; and the missive
reached the Mayor just as he was taking his usual place at the head of
the Board.

“Dear, dear,” said the kind-hearted old man, as soon as he had read the
letter to his fellow-councilmen: “I’m very sorry. Poor girl! Here, one
of you fellows, just run round and tell the gaoler there won’t be any
business to-day. Jeanne’s seedy. It’s put off till to-morrow. And now,
gentlemen, the agenda----”

“Really, your worship,” exploded Robinet, “this is simply ridiculous!”

“Upon my word, Robinet,” said the Mayor, “I don’t know what’s the
matter with you. Here’s a poor girl unwell--and a more hardworking
girl isn’t in the town--and instead of sympathising with her, and
saying you’re sorry, you call it ridiculous! Suppose you had a headache
yourself! You wouldn’t like----”

“But it _is_ ridiculous,” maintained the tanner stoutly. “Who ever
heard of an executioner having a nervous headache? There’s no precedent
for it. And ‘out of sorts,’ too! Suppose the criminals said they were
out of sorts, and didn’t feel up to being executed?”

“Well, suppose they did,” replied the Mayor, “we’d try and meet
them halfway, I daresay. They’d have to be executed some time or
other, you know. Why on earth are you so captious about trifles? The
prisoners won’t mind, and _I_ don’t mind: nobody’s inconvenienced, and
everybody’s happy!”

“You’re right there, Mr. Mayor,” put in another councilman. “This
executing business used to give the town a lot of trouble and bother;
now it’s all as easy as kiss-your-hand. Instead of objecting, as
they used to do, and wanting to argue the point and kick up a row,
the fellows as is told off for execution come skipping along in the
morning, like a lot of lambs in Maytime. And then the fun there is on
the scaffold! The jokes, the back-answers, the repartees! And never
a word to shock a baby! Why, my little girl, as goes through the
market-place every morning--on her way to school, you know--she says to
me only yesterday, she says, ‘Why, father,’ she says, ‘it’s as good as
the play-actors,’ she says.”

“There again,” persisted Robinet, “I object to that too. They ought to
show a properer feeling. Playing at mummers is one thing, and being
executed is another, and people ought to keep ’em separate. In my
father’s time, that sort of thing wasn’t thought good taste, and I
don’t hold with new-fangled notions.”

“Well, really, neighbour,” said the Mayor, “I think you’re out of sorts
yourself to-day. You must have got out of bed the wrong side this
morning. As for a little joke, more or less, we all know a maiden loves
a merry jest when she’s certain of having the last word! But I’ll tell
you what I’ll do, if it’ll please you; I’ll go round and see Jeanne
myself on my way home, and tell her--quite nicely, you know--that
once in a way doesn’t matter, but that if she feels her health won’t
let her keep regular business hours, she mustn’t think of going on
with anything that’s bad for her. Like that, don’t you see? And now,
gentlemen, let’s read the minutes!”

Thus it came about that Jeanne took her usual walk that evening with a
ruffled brow and a swelling heart; and her little hand opened and shut
angrily as she paced the ramparts. She couldn’t stand being found fault
with. How could she help having a headache? Those clods of citizens
didn’t know what a highly-strung sensitive organisation was. Absorbed
in her reflections, she had taken several turns up and down the grassy
foot-way, before she became aware that she was not alone. A youth, of
richer dress and more elegant bearing than the general run of the
Radegundians, was leaning in an embrasure, watching the graceful figure
with evident interest.

“Something has vexed you, fair maiden?” he observed, coming forward
deferentially as soon as he perceived he was noticed; “and care sits
but awkwardly on that smooth young brow.”

“Nay, it is nothing, kind sir,” replied Jeanne; “we girls who work for
our living must not be too sensitive. My employers have been somewhat
exigent, that is all. I did wrong to take it to heart.”

“’Tis the way of the bloated capitalist,” rejoined the young man
lightly, as he turned to walk by her side. “They grind us, they grind
us; perhaps some day they will come under your hands in turn, and then
you can pay them out. And so you toil and spin, fair lily! And yet
methinks those delicate hands show little trace of labour?”

“You wrong me, indeed, sir,” replied Jeanne merrily. “These hands of
mine, that you are so good as to admire, do great execution!”

“I can well believe that your victims are numerous,” he replied; “may I
be permitted to rank myself among the latest of them?”

“I wish you a better fortune, kind sir,” answered Jeanne demurely.

“I can imagine no more delightful one,” he replied; “and where do you
ply your daily task, fair mistress? Not entirely out of sight and
access, I trust?”

“Nay, sir,” laughed Jeanne, “I work in the market-place most mornings,
and there is no charge for admission; and access is far from difficult.
Indeed, some complain--but that is no business of mine. And now I
must be wishing you a good evening. Nay”--for he would have detained
her--“it is not seemly for an unprotected maiden to tarry in converse
with a stranger at this hour. _Au revoir_, sir! If you should happen
to be in the market-place any morning”----And she tripped lightly
away. The youth, gazing after her retreating figure, confessed himself
strangely fascinated by this fair unknown, whose particular employment,
by the way, he had forgotten to ask; while Jeanne, as she sped
homewards, could not help reflecting that for style and distinction,
this new acquaintance threw into the shade all the Enguerrands and
others she had met hitherto--even in the course of business.


IV

The next morning was bright and breezy, and Jeanne was early at her
post, feeling quite a different girl. The busy little market-place
was full of colour and movement, and the gay patches of flowers and
fruit, the strings of fluttering kerchiefs, and the piles of red and
yellow pottery, formed an artistic setting to the quiet impressive
scaffold which they framed. Jeanne was in short sleeves, according to
the etiquette of her office, and her round graceful arms showed snowily
against her dark blue skirt and scarlet tight-fitting bodice. Her
assistant looked at her with admiration.

“Hope you’re better, miss,” he said respectfully. “It was just as
well you didn’t put yourself out to come yesterday; there was nothing
particular to do. Only one fellow, and he said _he_ didn’t care;
anything to oblige a lady!”

“Well, I wish he’d hurry up now, to oblige a lady,” said Jeanne,
swinging her axe carelessly to and fro: “ten minutes past the hour; I
shall have to talk to the Mayor about this.”

“It’s a pity there ain’t a better show this morning,” pursued the
assistant, as he leant over the rail of the scaffold and spat
meditatively into the busy throng below. “They do say as how the young
Seigneur arrived at the Château yesterday--him as has been finishing
his education in Paris, you know. He’s as likely as not to be in the
market-place to-day; and if he’s disappointed, he may go off to Paris
again, which would be a pity, seeing the Château’s been empty so long.
But he may go to Paris, or anywheres else he’s a mind to, he won’t see
better workmanship than in this here little town!”

“Well, my good Raoul,” said Jeanne, colouring slightly at the obvious
compliment, “quality, not quantity, is what we aim at here, you know.
If a Paris education has been properly assimilated by the Seigneur,
he will not fail to make all the necessary allowances. But see, the
prison-doors are opening at last!”

They both looked across the little square to the prison, which fronted
the scaffold; and sure enough, a small body of men, the Sheriff at
their head, was issuing from the building, conveying, or endeavouring
to convey, the tardy prisoner to the scaffold. That gentleman, however,
seemed to be in a different and less obliging frame of mind from that
of the previous day; and at every pace one or other of the guards was
shot violently into the middle of the square, propelled by a vigorous
kick or blow from the struggling captive. The crowd, unaccustomed of
late to such demonstrations of feeling, and resenting the prisoner’s
want of taste, hooted loudly; but it was not until that ingenious
mediæval arrangement known as _la marche aux crapauds_ had been brought
to bear on him, that the reluctant convict could be prevailed upon to
present himself before the young lady he had already so unwarrantably
detained.

Jeanne’s profession had both accustomed her to surprises and taught
her the futility of considering her clients as drawn from any one
particular class: yet she could hardly help feeling some astonishment
on recognising her new acquaintance of the previous evening. That, with
all his evident amiability of character, he should come to this end,
was not in itself a special subject for wonder; but that he should
have been conversing with her on the ramparts at the hour when--after
courteously excusing her attendance on the scaffold--he was cooling his
heels in prison for another day, seemed hardly to be accounted for,
at first sight. Jeanne, however, reflected that the reconciling of
apparent contradictions was not included in her official duties.

The Sheriff, wiping his heated brow, now read the formal _procès_
delivering over the prisoner to the executioner’s hands; “and a nice
job we’ve had to get him here,” he added on his own account. And the
young man, who had remained perfectly tractable since his arrival,
stepped forward and bowed politely.

“Now that we have been properly introduced,” said he courteously,
“allow me to apologise for any inconvenience you have been put to by my
delay. The fault was entirely mine, and these gentlemen are in no way
to blame. Had I known whom I was to have the pleasure of meeting, wings
could not have conveyed me swiftly enough.”

“Do not mention, I pray, the word inconvenience,” replied Jeanne with
that timid grace which so well became her: “I only trust that any
slight discomfort it may be my duty to cause you before we part, will
be as easily pardoned. And now--for the morning, alas! advances--any
little advice or assistance that I can offer is quite at your service;
for the situation is possibly new, and you may have had but little
experience.”

“Faith, none worth mentioning,” said the prisoner, gaily. “Treat me as
a raw beginner. Though our acquaintance has been but brief, I have the
utmost confidence in you.”

“Then, sir,” said Jeanne, blushing, “suppose I were to assist you in
removing this gay doublet, so as to give both of us more freedom and
less responsibility?”

“A perquisite of the office?” queried the prisoner with a smile, as he
slipped one arm out of the sleeve.

A flush came over Jeanne’s fair brow. “That was ungenerous,” she said.

“Nay, pardon me, sweet one,” said he, laughing: “’twas but a poor jest
of mine--in bad taste, I willingly admit.”

“I was sure you did not mean to hurt me,” she replied kindly, while
her fingers were busy in turning back the collar of his shirt. It was
composed, she noticed, of the finest point lace; and she could not
help a feeling of regret that some slight error--as must, from what
she knew, exist somewhere--should compel her to take a course so at
variance with her real feelings. Her only comfort was that the youth
himself seemed entirely satisfied with his situation. He hummed the
last air from Paris during her ministrations, and when she had quite
finished, kissed the pretty fingers with a metropolitan grace.

“And now, sir,” said Jeanne, “if you will kindly come this way: and
please to mind the step--so. Now, if you will have the goodness to
kneel here--nay, the sawdust is perfectly clean; you are my first
client this morning. On the other side of the block you will find a
nick, more or less adapted to the human chin, though a perfect fit
cannot of course be guaranteed in every case. So! Are you pretty
comfortable?”

“A bed of roses,” replied the prisoner. “And what a really admirable
view one gets of the valley and the river, from just this particular
point!”

“Charming, is it not?” replied Jeanne. “I’m so glad you do justice
to it. Some of your predecessors have really quite vexed me by their
inability to appreciate that view. It’s worth coming here to see it.
And now, to return to business for one moment,--would you prefer to
give the word yourself? Some people do; it’s a mere matter of taste. Or
will you leave yourself entirely in my hands?”

“Oh, in your fair hands,” replied her client, “which I beg you to
consider respectfully kissed once more by your faithful servant to
command.”

Jeanne, blushing rosily, stepped back a pace, moistening her palms
as she grasped her axe, when a puffing and blowing behind caused her
to turn her head, and she perceived the Mayor hastily ascending the
scaffold.

“Hold on a minute, Jeanne, my girl,” he gasped. “Don’t be in a hurry.
There’s been some little mistake.”

Jeanne drew herself up with dignity. “I’m afraid I don’t quite
understand you, Mr. Mayor,” she replied in freezing accents. “There’s
been no little mistake on my part that I’m aware of.”

“No, no, no,” said the Mayor, apologetically; “but on somebody else’s
there has. You see it happened in this way: this here young fellow was
going round the town last night; and he’d been dining, I should say,
and he was carrying on rather free. I will only say so much in your
presence, that he was carrying on decidedly free. So the town-guard
happened to come across him, and he was very high and very haughty, he
was, and wouldn’t give his name nor yet his address--as a gentleman
should, you know, when he’s been dining and carrying on free. So our
fellows just ran him in--and it took the pick of them all their time
to do it, too. Well, then, the other chap who was in prison--the
gentleman who obliged you yesterday, you know--what does he do but
slip out and run away in the middle of all the row and confusion; and
very inconsiderate and ungentlemanly it was of him to take advantage
of us in that mean way, just when we wanted a little sympathy and
forbearance. Well, the Sheriff comes this morning to fetch out his man
for execution, and he knows there’s only one man to execute, and he
sees there’s only one man in prison, and it all seems as simple as A B
C--he never was much of a mathematician, you know--so he fetches our
friend here along, quite gaily. And--and that’s how it came about, you
see; _hinc illæ lachrymæ_, as the Roman poet has it. So now I shall
just give this young fellow a good talking to, and discharge him with a
caution; and we shan’t require you any more to-day, Jeanne, my girl.”

“Now, look here, Mr. Mayor,” said Jeanne severely, “you utterly fail to
grasp the situation in its true light. All these little details may be
interesting in themselves, and doubtless the press will take note of
them; but they are entirely beside the point. With the muddleheadedness
of your officials (which I have frequently remarked upon) I have
nothing whatever to do. All I know is, that this young gentleman has
been formally handed over to me for execution, with all the necessary
legal requirements; and executed he has got to be. When my duty has
been performed, you are at liberty to re-open the case if you like; and
any ‘little mistake’ that may have occurred through your stupidity you
can then rectify at your leisure. Meantime, you’ve no _locus standi_
here at all; in fact, you’ve no business whatever lumbering up my
scaffold. So shut up and clear out.”

“Now, Jeanne, do be reasonable,” implored the Mayor. “You women are so
precise. You never will make any allowance for the necessary margin of
error in things.”

“If I were to allow the necessary margin for all _your_ errors, Mayor,”
replied Jeanne, coolly, “the edition would have to be a large-paper
one, and even then the text would stand a poor chance. And now, if
you don’t allow me the necessary margin to swing my axe, there may be
another ‘little mistake’----”

But at this point a hubbub arose at the foot of the scaffold, and
Jeanne, leaning over, perceived sundry tall fellows, clad in the livery
of the Seigneur, engaged in dispersing the municipal guard by the
agency of well-directed kicks, applied with heartiness and anatomical
knowledge. A moment later, there strode on to the scaffold, clad in
black velvet, and adorned with his gold chain of office, the stately
old seneschal of the Château, evidently in a towering passion.

“Now, mark my words, you miserable little bladder-o’-lard,” he roared
at the Mayor (whose bald head certainly shone provokingly in the
morning sun), “see if I don’t take this out of your skin presently!”
And he passed on to where the youth was still kneeling, apparently
quite absorbed in the view.

“My lord,” he said, firmly though respectfully, “your hair-brained
folly really passes all bounds. Have you entirely lost your head?”

“Faith, nearly,” said the young man, rising and stretching himself. “Is
that you, old Thibault? Ow, what a crick I’ve got in my neck! But that
view of the valley was really delightful!”

“Did you come here simply to admire the view, my lord?” inquired
Thibault severely.

“I came because my horse would come,” replied the young Seigneur
lightly: “that is, these gentlemen here were so pressing; they would
not hear of any refusal; and besides, they forgot to mention what my
attendance was required in such a hurry for. And when I got here,
Thibault, old fellow, and saw that divine creature--nay, a goddess,
_dea certé_--so graceful, so modest, so anxious to acquit herself with
credit----Well, you know my weakness; I never could bear to disappoint
a woman. She had evidently set her heart on taking my head; and as she
had my heart already----”

“I think, my lord,” said Thibault with some severity, “you had better
let me escort you back to the Château. This appears to be hardly a safe
place for light-headed and susceptible persons!”

Jeanne, as was natural, had the last word. “Understand me, Mr. Mayor,”
said she, “these proceedings are entirely irregular. I decline to
recognise them, and when the quarter expires I shall claim the usual
bonus!”


V

When, an hour or two later, an invitation arrived--courteously worded,
but significantly backed by an escort of half-a-dozen tall archers--for
both Jeanne and the Mayor to attend at the Château without delay,
Jeanne for her part received it with neither surprise nor reluctance.
She had felt it especially hard that the only two interviews fate had
granted her with the one man who had made some impression on her heart,
should be hampered, the one by considerations of propriety, the other
by the conflicting claims of her profession and its duties. On this
occasion, now, she would have an excellent chaperon in the Mayor; and
business being over for the day, they could meet and unbend on a common
social footing. The Mayor was not at all surprised either, considering
what had gone before; but he was exceedingly terrified, and sought some
consolation from Jeanne as they proceeded together to the Château.
That young lady’s remarks, however, could hardly be called exactly
comforting.

“I always thought you’d put your foot in it some day, Mayor,” she said.
“You are so hopelessly wanting in system and method. Really, under the
present happy-go-lucky police arrangements, I never know whom I may
not be called upon to execute. Between you and my cousin Enguerrand,
life is hardly safe in this town. And the worst of it is, that we other
officials on the staff have to share in the discredit.”

“What do you think they’ll do to me, Jeanne?” whimpered the Mayor,
perspiring freely.

“Can’t say, I’m sure,” pursued the candid Jeanne. “Of course, if it’s
anything in the _rack_ line of business, I shall have to superintend
the arrangements, and then you can feel sure you’re in capable hands.
But probably they’ll only fine you pretty smartly, give you a month
or two in the dungeons, and dismiss you from your post; and you will
hardly grudge any slight personal inconvenience resulting from an
arrangement so much to the advantage of the town.”

This was hardly reassuring, but the Mayor’s official reprimand of the
previous day still rankled in this unforgiving young person’s mind.

On their reaching the Château, the Mayor was conducted aside, to be
dealt with by Thibault; and from the sounds of agonised protestation
and lament which shortly reached Jeanne’s ears, it was evident that
he was having a _mauvais quart d’heure_. The young lady was shown
respectfully into a chamber apart, where she had hardly had time
to admire sufficiently the good taste of the furniture and the
magnificence of the tapestry with which the walls were hung, when the
Seigneur entered and welcomed her with a cordial grace that put her
entirely at her ease.

“Your punctuality puts me to shame, fair mistress,” he said,
“considering how unwarrantably I kept you waiting this morning, and how
I tested your patience by my ignorance and awkwardness.”

He had changed his dress, and the lace round his neck was even richer
than before. Jeanne had always considered one of the chief marks
of a well-bred man to be a fine disregard for the amount of his
washing-bill; and then with what good taste he referred to recent
events--putting himself in the wrong, as a gentleman should!

“Indeed, my lord,” she replied modestly, “I was only too anxious to
hear from your own lips that you bore me no ill-will for the part
forced on me by circumstances in our recent interview. Your lordship
has sufficient critical good sense, I feel sure, to distinguish between
the woman and the official.”

“True, Jeanne,” he replied, drawing nearer; “and while I shrink from
expressing, in their fulness, all the feelings that the woman inspires
in me, I have no hesitation--for I know it will give you pleasure--in
acquainting you with the entire artistic satisfaction with which I
watched you at your task!”

“But, indeed” said Jeanne, “you did not see me at my best. In fact,
I can’t help wishing--it’s ridiculous, I know, because the thing is
hardly practicable--but if I could only have carried my performance
quite through, and put the last finishing touches to it, you would not
have been judging me now by the mere ‘blocking-in’ of what promised to
be a masterpiece!”

“Yes, I wish it could have been arranged somehow,” said the Seigneur
reflectively; “but perhaps it’s better as it is. I am content to let
the artist remain for the present on trust, if I may only take over,
fully paid up, the woman I adore!”

Jeanne felt strangely weak. The official seemed oozing out at her
fingers and toes, while the woman’s heart beat even more distressingly.

“I have one little question to ask,” he murmured (his arm was about her
now). “Do I understand that you still claim your bonus?”

Jeanne felt like water in his strong embrace; but she nerved herself to
answer faintly but firmly: “Yes!”

“Then so do I,” he replied, as his lips met hers.

       *       *       *       *       *

Executions continued to occur in St. Radegonde; the Radegundians being
conservative and very human. But much of the innocent enjoyment that
formerly attended them departed after the fair Chatelaine had ceased
to officiate. Enguerrand, on succeeding to the post, wedded Clairette,
she being (he was heard to say) a more suitable match in mind and
temper than others of whom he would name no names. Rumour had it,
that he found his match and something over; while as for temper--and
mind (which she gave him in bits)----But the domestic trials of
high-placed officials have a right to be held sacred. The profession,
in spite of his best endeavours, languished nevertheless. Some said
that the scaffold lacked its old attraction for criminals of spirit;
others, more unkindly, that the headsman was the innocent cause, and
that Enguerrand was less fatal in his new sphere than formerly, when
practising in the criminal court as advocate for the defence.




Credo

By Arthur Symons


    EACH, in himself, his hour to be and cease
        Endures alone, yet few there be who dare
        Sole with himself his single burden bear,
    All the long day until the night’s release.

    Yet, ere the night fall, and the shadows close,
        This labour of himself is each man’s lot;
        All a man hath, yet living, is forgot,
    Himself he leaves behind him when he goes.

    If he have any valiancy within,
        If he have made his life his very own,
        If he have loved and laboured, and have known
    A strenuous virtue, and the joy of sin;

    Then, being dead, he has not lived in vain,
        For he has saved what most desire to lose,
        And he has chosen what the few must choose,
    Since life, once lived, returns no more again.

    For of our time we lose so large a part
        In serious trifles, and so oft let slip
        The wine of every moment at the lip
    Its moment, and the moment of the heart.

    We are awake so little on the earth,
        And we shall sleep so long, and rise so late,
        If there is any knocking at that gate
    Which is the gate of death, the gate of birth.




Four Drawings

By Aubrey Beardsley

    I. Portrait of Himself
   II. Lady Gold’s Escort
  III. The Wagnerites
   IV. La Dame aux Camélias


[Illustration: PAR LES DIEVX JVMEAVX TOVS LES MONSTRES NE SONT PAS EN
AFRIQVE.]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]




White Magic

By Ella D’Arcy


I SPENT one evening last summer with my friend Mauger, _pharmacien_
in the little town of Jacques-le-Port. He pronounces his name Major,
by-the-bye, it being a quaint custom of the Islands to write proper
names one way and speak them another, thus serving to bolster up that
old, old story of the German savant’s account of the difficulties of
the English language--“where you spell a man’s name Verulam,” says he
reproachfully, “and pronounce it Bacon.”

Mauger and I sat in the pleasant wood-panelled parlour behind the shop,
from whence all sorts of aromatic odours found their way in through the
closed door to mingle with the fragrance of figs, Ceylon tea, and hot
_gôches-à-beurre_, constituting the excellent meal spread before us.
The large old-fashioned windows were wide open, and I looked straight
out upon the harbour, filled with holiday yachts, and the wonderful
azure sea.

Over against the other islands, opposite, a gleam of white streaked
the water, white clouds hung motionless in the blue sky, and a tiny
boat with white sails passed out round Falla Point. A white butterfly
entered the room to flicker in gay uncertain curves above the cloth,
and a warm reflected light played over the slender rat-tailed forks
and spoons, and raised by a tone or two the colour of Mauger’s tanned
face and yellow beard. For, in spite of a sedentary profession, his
preferences lie with an out-of-door life, and he takes an afternoon off
whenever practicable, as he had done that day, to follow his favourite
pursuit over the golf-links at Les Landes.

While he had been deep in the mysteries of teeing and putting, with no
subtler problem to be solved than the judicious selection of mashie and
cleek, I had explored some of the curious cromlechs or _pouquelayes_
scattered over this part of the island, and my thoughts and speech
harked back irresistibly to the strange old religions and usages of the
past.

“Science is all very well in its way,” said I; “and of course it’s an
inestimable advantage to inhabit this so-called nineteenth century;
but the mediæval want of science was far more picturesque. The once
universal belief in charms and portents, in wandering saints, and
fighting fairies, must have lent an interest to life which these
prosaic days sadly lack. Madelon then would steal from her bed on
moonlight nights in May, and slip across the dewy grass with naked
feet, to seek the reflection of her future husband’s face in the first
running stream she passed; now, Miss Mary Jones puts on her bonnet and
steps round the corner, on no more romantic errand than the investment
of her month’s wages in the savings bank at two and a half per cent.”

Mauger laughed. “I wish she did anything half so prudent! That has not
been my experience of the Mary Joneses.”

“Well, anyhow,” I insisted, “the Board school has rationalised them.
It has pulled up the innate poetry of their nature to replace it by
decimal fractions.”

To which Mauger answered “Rot!” and offered me his cigarette-case.
After the first few silent whiffs, he went on as follows: “The innate
poetry of Woman! Confess now, there is no more unpoetic creature under
the sun. Offer her the sublimest poetry ever written and the _Daily
Telegraph’s_ latest article on fashions, or a good sound murder or
reliable divorce, and there’s no betting on her choice, for it’s a dead
certainty. Many men have a love of poetry, but I’m inclined to think
that a hundred women out of ninety-nine positively dislike it.”

Which struck me as true. “We’ll drop the poetry, then,” I answered;
“but my point remains, that if the girl of to-day has no superstitions,
the girl of to-morrow will have no beliefs. Teach her to sit down
thirteen to table, to spill the salt, and walk under a ladder with
equanimity, and you open the door for Spencer and Huxley, and--and all
the rest of it,” said I, coming to an impotent conclusion.

“Oh, if superstition were the salvation of woman--but you are thinking
of young ladies in London, I suppose? Here, in the Islands, I can
show you as much superstition as you please. I’m not sure that the
country-people in their heart of hearts don’t still worship the old
gods of the _pouquelayes_. You would not, of course, find any one to
own up to it, or to betray the least glimmer of an idea as to your
meaning, were you to question him, for ours is a shrewd folk, wearing
their orthodoxy bravely; but possibly the old beliefs are cherished
with the more ardour for not being openly avowed. Now you like bits
of actuality. I’ll give you one, and a proof, too, that the modern
maiden is still separated by many a fathom of salt sea-water from these
fortunate isles.

“Some time ago, on a market morning, a girl came into the shop, and
asked for some blood from a dragon. ‘Some what?’ said I, not catching
her words. ‘Well, just a little blood from a dragon,’ she answered very
tremulously, and blushing. She meant of course, ‘dragon’s blood,’ a
resinous powder, formerly much used in medicine, though out of fashion
now.

“She was a pretty young creature, with pink cheeks and dark eyes, and a
forlorn expression of countenance which didn’t seem at all to fit in
with her blooming health. Not from the town, or I should have known
her face; evidently come from one of the country parishes to sell her
butter and eggs. I was interested to discover what she wanted the
‘dragon’s blood’ for, and after a certain amount of hesitation she
told me. ‘They do say it’s good, sir, if anything should have happened
betwixt you an’ your young man.’ ‘Then you have a young man?’ said I.
‘Yes, sir.’ ‘And you’ve fallen out with him?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ And tears
rose to her eyes at the admission, while her mouth rounded with awe at
my amazing perspicacity. ‘And you mean to send him some dragon’s blood
as a love potion?’ ‘No, sir; you’ve got to mix it with water you’ve
fetched from the Three Sisters’ Well, and drink it yourself in nine
sips on nine nights running, and get into bed without once looking in
the glass, and then if you’ve done everything properly, and haven’t
made any mistake, he’ll come back to you, an’ love you twice as much
as before.’ ‘And la mère Todevinn (Tostevin) gave you that precious
recipe, and made you cross her hand with silver into the bargain,’ said
I severely; on which the tears began to flow outright.

“You know the old lady,” said Mauger, breaking off his narration, “who
lives in the curious stone house at the corner of the market-place? A
reputed witch who learned both black and white magic from her mother,
who was a daughter of Hélier Mouton, the famous sorcerer of Cakeuro.
I could tell you some funny stories relating to la Mère Todevinn, who
numbers more clients among the officers and fine ladies here than in
any other class; and very curious, too, is the history of that stone
house, with the Brancourt arms still sculptured on the side. You can
see them, if you turn down by the Water-gate. This old sinister-looking
building, or rather portion of a building, for more modern houses
have been built over the greater portion of the site, and now press
upon it from either hand, once belonged to one of the finest mansions
in the islands, but through a curse and a crime has been brought down
to its present condition; while the Brancourt family have long since
been utterly extinct. But all this isn’t the story of Elsie Mahy, which
turned out to be the name of my little customer.

“The Mahys are of the Vauvert parish, and Pierre Jean, the father of
this girl, began life as a day-labourer, took to tomato-growing on
borrowed capital, and now owns a dozen glass-houses of his own. Mrs.
Mahy does some dairy-farming on a minute scale, the profits of which
she and Miss Elsie share as pin-money. The young man who is courting
Elsie is a son of Toumes the builder. He probably had something to do
with the putting up of Mahy’s greenhouses, but anyhow, he has been
constantly over at Vauvert during the last six months, superintending
the alterations at de Câterelle’s place.

“Toumes, it would seem, is a devoted but imperious lover, and the
Persian and Median laws are as butter compared with the inflexibility
of his decisions. The little rift within the lute, which has
lately turned all the music to discord, occurred last Monday
week--bank-holiday, as you may remember. The Sunday school to which
Elsie belongs--and it’s a strange anomaly, isn’t it, that a girl going
to Sunday school should still have a rooted belief in white magic?--the
school was to go for an outing to Prawn Bay, and Toumes had arranged to
join his sweetheart at the starting-point. But he had made her promise
that if by any chance he should be delayed, she would not go with the
others, but would wait until he came to fetch her.

“Of course, it so happened that he was detained, and, equally of
course, Elsie, like a true woman, went off without him. She did all
she knew to make me believe she went quite against her own wishes,
that her companions forced her to go. The beautifully yielding nature
of a woman never comes out so conspicuously as when she is being
coerced into following her own secret desires. Anyhow, Toumes, arriving
some time later, found her gone. He followed on, and under ordinary
circumstances, I suppose, a sharp reprimand would have been considered
sufficient. Unfortunately, the young man arrived on the scene to find
his truant love deep in the frolics of kiss-in-the-ring. After tea in
the Câterelle Arms, the whole party had adjourned to a neighbouring
meadow, and were thus whiling away the time to the exhilarating strains
of a French horn and a concertina. Elsie was led into the centre of
the ring by various country bumpkins, and kissed beneath the eyes of
heaven, of her neighbours, and of her embittered swain.

“You may have been amongst us long enough to know that the Toumes family
are of a higher social grade than the Mahys, and I suppose the Misses
Toumes never in their lives stooped to anything so ungenteel as public
kiss-in-the-ring. It was not surprising, therefore, to hear that after
this incident ‘me an’ my young man had words,’ as Elsie put it.

“Note,” said Mauger, “the descriptive truth of this expression ‘having
words.’ Among the unlettered, lovers only do have words when vexed.
At other times they will sit holding hands throughout a long summer’s
afternoon, and not exchange two remarks an hour. Love seals their
tongue; anger alone unlooses it, and, naturally, when unloosened, it
runs on, from sheer want of practice, a great deal faster and farther
than they desire.

“So, life being thorny and youth being vain, they parted late that same
evening, with the understanding that they would meet no more; and to be
wroth with one we love worked its usual harrowing effects. Toumes took
to billiards and brandy, Elsie to tears and invocations of Beelzebub;
then came Mère Todevinn’s recipe, my own more powerful potion, and now
once more all is silence and balmy peace.”

“Do you mean to tell me you sold the child a charm, and didn’t
enlighten her as to its futility?”

“I sold her some bicarbonate of soda worth a couple of _doubles_,
and charged her five shillings for it into the bargain,” said Mauger
unblushingly. “A wrinkle I learned from once overhearing an old lady
I had treated for nothing expatiating to a crony, ‘Eh, but, my good,
my good! dat Mr. Major, I don’t t’ink much of him. He give away his
add-vice an’ his meddecines for nuddin. Dey not wort nuddin’ neider,
for sure.’ So I made Elsie hand me over five British shillings, and
gave her the powder, and told her to drink it with her meals. But
I threw in another prescription, which, if less important, must
nevertheless be punctiliously carried out, if the charm was to have any
effect. ‘The very next time,’ I told her, ‘that you meet your young man
in the street, walk straight up to him without looking to the right or
to the left, and hold out your hand, saying these words: “Please, I so
want to be friends again!” Then if you’ve been a good girl, have taken
the powder regularly, and not forgotten one of my directions, you’ll
find that all will come right.’

“Now, little as you may credit it,” said Mauger, smiling, “the charm
worked, for all that we live in the so-called nineteenth century. Elsie
came into the shop only yesterday to tell me the results, and to thank
me very prettily. ‘I shall always come to you now, sir,’ she was good
enough to say, ‘I mean, if anything was to go wrong again. You know
a great deal more than Mère Todevinn, I’m sure.’ ‘Yes, I’m a famous
sorcerer,’ said I, ‘but you had better not speak about the powder. You
are wise enough to see that it was just your own conduct in meeting
your young man rather more than halfway, that did the trick--eh?’ She
looked at me with eyes brimming over with wisdom. ‘You needn’t be
afraid, sir, I’ll not speak of it. Mère Todevinn always made me promise
to keep silence too. But of course I know it was the powder that worked
the charm.’

“And to that belief the dear creature will stick to the last day of her
life. Women are wonderful enigmas. Explain to them that tight-lacing
displaces all the internal organs, and show them diagrams to illustrate
your point, they smile sweetly, say, ‘Oh, how funny!’ and go out to buy
their new stays half an inch smaller than their old ones. But tell them
they must never pass a pin in the street for luck’s sake, if it lies
with its point towards them, and they will sedulously look for and pick
up every such confounded pin they see. Talk to a woman of the marvels
of science, and she turns a deaf ear, or refuses point-blank to believe
you; yet she is absolutely all ear for any old wife’s tale, drinks it
greedily in, and never loses hold of it for the rest of her days.”

“But does she?” said I; “that’s the point in dispute, and though your
story shows there’s still a commendable amount of superstition in the
Islands, I’m afraid if you were to come to London, you would not find
sufficient to cover a threepenny-piece.”

“Woman is woman all the world over,” said Mauger sententiously, “no
matter what mental garb happens to be in fashion at the time. _Grattez
la femme et vous trouvez la folle._ For see here: if I had said to
Mademoiselle Elsie, ‘Well, you were in the wrong; it’s your place to
take the first step towards reconciliation,’ she would have laughed in
my face, or flung out of the shop in a rage. But because I sold her a
little humbugging powder under the guise of a charm, she submitted
herself with the docility of a pet lambkin. No; one need never hope to
prevail through wisdom with a woman, and if I could have realised that
ten years ago, it would have been better for me.”

He fell silent, thinking of his past, which to me, who knew it, seemed
almost an excuse for his cynicism. I sought a change of idea. The
splendour of the pageant outside supplied me with one.

The sun had set; and all the eastern world of sky and water, stretching
before us, was steeped in the glories of the after-glow. The ripples
seemed painted in dabs of metallic gold upon a surface of polished
blue-grey steel. Over the islands opposite hung a far-reaching golden
cloud, with faint-drawn, up-curled edges, as though thinned out upon
the sky by some monster brush; and while I watched it, this cloud
changed from gold to rose-colour, and instantly the steel mirror of
the sea glowed rosy too, and was streaked and shaded with a wonderful
rosy-brown. As the colour grew momentarily more intense in the sky
above, so did the sea appear to pulse to a more vivid copperish-rose,
until at last it was like nothing so much as a sea of flowing fire.
And the cloud flamed fiery too, yet all the while its up-curled edges
rested in exquisite contrast upon a background of most cool cerulean
blue.

The little sailing-boat, which I had noticed an hour previously,
reappeared from behind the Point. The sail was lowered as it entered
the harbour, and the boatman took to his oars. I watched it creep over
the glittering water until it vanished beneath the window-sill. I
got up and went over to the window to hold it still in sight. It was
sculled by a young man in rosy shirt-sleeves, and opposite to him, in
the stern, sat a girl in a rosy gown.

So long as I had observed them, not one word had either spoken. In
silence they had crossed the harbour, in silence the sculler had
brought his craft alongside the landing-stage, and secured her to a
ring in the stones. Still silent, he helped his companion to step out
upon the quay.

“Here,” said I, to Mauger, “is a couple confirming your ‘silent’ theory
with a vengeance. We must suppose that much love has rendered them
absolutely dumb.”

He came, and leaned from the window too.

“It’s not _a_ couple, but _the_ couple,” said he; “and after all,
in spite of cheap jesting, there are some things more eloquent than
speech.” For at this instant, finding themselves alone upon the jetty,
the young man had taken the girl into his arms, and she had lifted a
frank responsive mouth to return his kiss.

Five minutes later the sea had faded into dull greys and sober browns,
starved white clouds moved dispiritedly over a vacant sky, and by
cricking the back of my neck I was able to follow Toumes’ black coat
and the white frock of Miss Elsie until they reached Poidevin’s
wine-vaults, and, turning up the Water-gate, were lost to view.




Fleurs de Feu

By José Maria de Hérédia of the French Academy


    BIEN des siècles depuis les siècles du Chaos,
    La flamme par torrents jaillit de ce cratère
    Et le panache igné du volcan solitaire
    Flamba encore plus haut que les Chimborazos.

    Nul bruit n’éveille plus la cime sans échos.
    Où la cendre pleuvait l’oiseau se désaltère;
    Le sol est immobile, et le sang de la Terre
    La lave, en se figeant, lui laissa le repos.

    Pourtant, suprême effort de l’antique incendie,
    A l’orle de la gueule à jamais refroidie,
    Éclatant a travers les rocs pulvérisés.

    Comme un coup de tonnerre au milieu du silence,
    Dans le poudroîement d’or du pollen qu’elle lance,
    S’épanouit la fleur des cactus embrasés.




Flowers of Fire

A Translation, by Ellen M. Clerke


    FOR ages since the age of Chaos passed,
    Flame shot in torrents from this crater pyre,
    And the red plume of the volcano’s ire
    Higher than Chimborazo’s crown was cast.

    No sound awakes the summit, voiceless, vast,
    The bird now sips where rained the ashes dire,
    The soil is moveless, and Earth’s blood on fire,
    The lava--hardening--gives it peace at last.

    But, crowning effort of the fires of old,
    Close by the gaping jaws, for ever cold,
    Gleaming ’mid rocks that crumble in the gloom,

    As with a thunderclap in hush profound,
    ’Mid golden dust of pollen hurled around,
    The burning cactus blazes into bloom.




When I am King

By Henry Harland

“_Qu’y faire, mon Dieu, qu’y faire?_”


I HAD wandered into a tangle of slummy streets, and began to think
it time to inquire my way back to the hotel; then, turning a corner,
I came out upon the quays. At one hand there was the open night,
with the dim forms of many ships, and stars hanging in a web of
masts and cordage; at the other, the garish illumination of a row of
public-houses: _Au Bonheur du Matelot_, _Café de la Marine_, _Brasserie
des Quatre Vents_, and so forth; rowdy-looking shops enough, designed
for the entertainment of the forecastle. But they seemed to promise
something in the nature of local colour; and I entered the _Brasserie
des Quatre Vents_.

It proved to be a _brasserie-à-femmes_; you were waited upon by ladies,
lavishly rouged and in regardless toilets, who would sit with you and
chat, and partake of refreshments at your expense. The front part of
the room was filled up with tables, where half a hundred customers,
talking at the top of their voices, raised a horrid din--sailors,
soldiers, a few who might be clerks or tradesmen, and an occasional
workman in his blouse. Beyond, there was a cleared space, reserved
for dancing, occupied by a dozen couples, clumsily toeing it; and
on a platform, at the far end, a man pounded a piano. All this in an
atmosphere hot as a furnace-blast, and poisonous with the fumes of gas,
the smells of bad tobacco, of musk, alcohol, and humanity.

The musician faced away from the company, so that only his shoulders
and the back of his grey head were visible, bent over his keyboard. It
was sad to see a grey head in that situation; and one wondered what
had brought it there, what story of vice or weakness or evil fortune.
Though his instrument was harsh, and he had to bang it violently to be
heard above the roar of conversation, the man played with a kind of
cleverness, and with certain fugitive suggestions of good style. He had
once studied an art, and had hopes and aspirations, who now, in his
age, was come to serve the revels of a set of drunken sailors, in a
disreputable tavern, where they danced with prostitutes. I don’t know
why, but from the first he drew my attention; and I left my handmaid to
count her charms neglected, while I sat and watched him, speculating
about him in a melancholy way, with a sort of vicarious shame.

But presently something happened to make me forget him--something of
his own doing. A dance had ended, and after a breathing spell he began
to play an interlude. It was an instance of how tunes, like perfumes,
have the power to wake sleeping memories. The tune he was playing now,
simple and dreamy like a lullaby, and strangely at variance with the
surroundings, whisked me off in a twinkling, far from the actual--ten,
fifteen years backwards--to my student life in Paris, and set me to
thinking, as I had not thought for many a long day, of my hero, friend,
and comrade, Edmund Pair; for it was a tune of Pair’s composition, a
melody he had written to a nursery rhyme, and used to sing a good deal,
half in fun, half in earnest, to his lady-love, Godelinette:

    “Lavender’s blue, diddle-diddle,
        Lavender’s green;
    When I am king, diddle-diddle,
        You shall be queen.”

It is certain he meant very seriously that if he ever came into his
kingdom Godelinette should be queen. The song had been printed, but, so
far as I knew, had never had much vogue; and it seemed an odd chance
that this evening, in a French seaport town where I was passing a
single night, I should stray by hazard into a sailors’ pothouse and
hear it again.

Edmund Pair lived in the Latin Quarter when I did, but he was no
longer a mere student. He had published a good many songs; articles
had been written about them in the newspapers; and at his rooms you
would meet the men who had “arrived”--actors, painters, musicians,
authors, and now and then a politician--who thus recognised him as more
or less one of themselves. Everybody liked him; everybody said, “He is
splendidly gifted; he will go far.” A few of us already addressed him,
half-playfully perhaps, as _cher maître_.

He was three or four years older than I--eight or nine and twenty
to my twenty-five--and I was still in the schools; but for all that
we were great chums. Quite apart from his special talent, he was a
remarkable man--amusing in talk, good-looking, generous, affectionate.
He had read; he had travelled; he had hob-and-nobbed with all sorts
and conditions of people. He had wit, imagination, humour, and a
voice that made whatever he said a cordial to the ear. For myself I
admired him, enjoyed him, loved him, with equal fervour; he had all of
my hero-worship and the lion’s share of my friendship; perhaps I was
vain as well as glad to be distinguished by his intimacy. We used to
spend two or three evenings a week together, at his place or at mine,
or over the table of a café, talking till the small hours--Elysian
sessions, at which we smoked more cigarettes and emptied more _bocks_
than I should care to count. On Sundays and holidays we would take
long walks arm-in-arm in the Bois, or, accompanied by Godelinette, go
to Viroflay or Fontainebleau, lunch in the open, bedeck our hats with
wildflowers, and romp like children. He was tall and slender, with dark
waving hair, a delicate aquiline profile, a clear brown skin, and grey
eyes, alert, intelligent, kindly. I fancy the Boulevard St. Michel,
flooded with sunshine, broken here and there by long crisp shadows;
trams and omnibuses toiling up the hill, tooting their horns; students
and _étudiantes_ sauntering gaily backwards and forwards on the
_trottoir_; an odour of asphalte, of caporal tobacco; myself one of the
multitude on the terrace of a café; and Edmund and Godelinette coming
to join me--he with his swinging stride, a gesture of salutation, a
laughing face; she in the freshest of bright-coloured spring toilets: I
fancy this, and it seems an adventure of the golden age. Then we would
drink our _apéritifs_, our Turin bitter, perhaps our absinthe, and go
off to dine together in the garden at Lavenue’s.

Godelinette was a child of the people, but Pair had done wonders by
way of civilising her. She had learned English, and prattled it with
an accent so quaint and sprightly as to give point to her otherwise
perhaps somewhat commonplace observations. She was fond of reading; she
could play a little; she was an excellent housewife, and generally a
very good-natured and quite presentable little person. She was Parisian
and adaptable. To meet her, you would never have suspected her origin;
you would have found it hard to believe that she had been the wife of a
drunken tailor, who used to beat her. One January night, four or five
years before, Pair had surprised this gentleman publicly pummelling
her in the Rue Gay-Lussac. He hastened to remonstrate; and the husband
went off, hiccoughing of his outraged rights, and calling the universe
to witness that he would have the law of the meddling stranger. Pair
picked the girl up (she was scarcely eighteen then, and had only been
married a sixmonth), he picked her up from where she had fallen, half
fainting, on the pavement, carried her to his lodgings, which were
at hand, and sent for a doctor. In his manuscript-littered study for
rather more than nine weeks she lay on a bed of fever, the consequence
of blows, exhaustion, and exposure. When she got well there was no
talk of her leaving. Pair couldn’t let her go back to her tailor; he
couldn’t turn her into the streets. Besides, during the months that he
had nursed her, he had somehow conceived a great tenderness for her;
it made his heart burn with grief and anger to think of what she had
suffered in the past, and he yearned to sustain and protect and comfort
her for the future. This perhaps was no more than natural; but, what
rather upset the calculations of his friends, she, towards whom he had
established himself in the relation of a benefactor, bore him, instead
of a grudge therefor, a passionate gratitude and affection. So, Pair
said, they were only waiting till her tailor should drink himself
to death, to get married; and meanwhile, he exacted for her all the
respect that would have been due to his wife; and everybody called her
by his name. She was a pretty little thing, very daintily formed, with
tiny hands and feet, and big gipsyish brown eyes; and very delicate,
very fragile--she looked as if anything might carry her off. Her name,
Godeleine, seeming much too grand and mediæval for so small and actual
a person, Pair had turned it into Godelinette.

We all said, “He is splendidly gifted; he will do great things.” He
had studied at Cambridge and at Leipsic before coming to Paris. He was
learned, enlightened, and extremely modern; he was a hard worker.
We said he would do great things; but I thought in those days, and
indeed I still think--and, what is more to the purpose, men who were
themselves musicians and composers, men whose names are known, were
before me in thinking--that he had already done great things, that the
songs he had already published were achievements. They seemed to us
original in conception, accomplished and felicitous in treatment; they
were full of melody and movement, full of harmonic surprises; they had
style and they had “go.” One would have imagined they must please at
once the cultivated and the general public. I could never understand
why they weren’t popular. They would be printed; they would be praised
at length, and under distinguished signatures, in the reviews; they
would enjoy an unusual success of approbation; but--they wouldn’t
_sell_, and they wouldn’t get themselves sung at concerts. If they
had been too good, if they had been over the heads of people--but
they weren’t. Plenty of work quite as good, quite as modern, yet no
whit more tuneful or interesting, was making its authors rich. We
couldn’t understand it, we had to conclude it was a fluke, a question
of chance, of accident. Pair was still a very young man; he must go on
knocking, and some day--to-morrow, next week, next year, but some day
certainly--the door of public favour would be opened to him. Meanwhile
his position was by no means an unenviable one, goodness knows. To have
your orbit in the art world of Paris, and to be recognised there as a
star; to be written about in the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_; to possess
the friendship of the masters, to know that they believe in you, to
hear them prophesy, “He will do great things”--all that is something,
even if your wares don’t “take on” in the market-place.

“It’s a good job, though, that I haven’t got to live by them,” Pair
said; and there indeed he touched a salient point. His people were
dead; his father had been a younger son; he had no money of his own.
But his father’s elder brother, a squire in Hampshire, made him rather
a liberal allowance, something like six hundred a year, I believe,
which was opulence in the Latin Quarter. Now, the squire had been
aware of Pair’s relation with Godelinette from its inception, and had
not disapproved. On his visits to Paris he had dined with them, given
them dinners, and treated her with the utmost complaisance. But when,
one fine morning, her tailor died, and my quixotic friend announced
his intention of marrying her, _dans les délais légaux_, the squire
protested. I think I read the whole correspondence, and I remember that
in the beginning the elder man took the tone of paradox and banter.
“Behave dishonourably, my dear fellow. I have winked at your mistress
heretofore, because boys will be boys; but it is the _man_ who marries.
And, anyhow, a woman is so much more interesting in a false position.”
But he soon became serious, presently furious, and, when the marriage
was an accomplished fact, cut off the funds.

“Never mind, my dear,” said Pair. “We will go to London and seek our
fortune. We will write the songs of the people, and let who will make
the laws. We will grow rich and famous, and

    ‘When I am king, diddle-diddle,
        You shall be queen!’”

So they went to London to seek their fortune, and--that was the last I
ever saw of them, nearly the last I heard. I had two letters from Pair,
written within a month of their hegira--gossipy, light-hearted letters,
describing the people they were meeting, reporting Godelinette’s quaint
observations upon England and English things, explaining his hopes,
his intentions, all very confidently--and then I had no more. I wrote
again, and still again, till, getting no answer, of course I ceased
to write. I was hurt and puzzled; but in the spring we should meet in
London, and could have it out. When the spring came, however, my plans
were altered: I had to go to America. I went by way of Havre, expecting
to stay six weeks, and was gone six years.

On my return to England I said to people, “You have a brilliant young
composer named Pair. Can you put me in the way of procuring his
address?” The fortune he had come to seek he would surely have found;
he would be a known man. But people looked blank, and declared they
had never heard of him. I applied to music-publishers--with the same
result. I wrote to his uncle in Hampshire; the squire did not reply.
When I reached Paris I inquired of our friends there; they were as
ignorant as I. “He must be dead,” I concluded. “If he had lived, it is
impossible we should not have heard of him.” And I wondered what had
become of Godelinette.

Then another eight or ten years passed, and now, in a water-side
public at Bordeaux, an obscure old pianist was playing Pair’s setting
of “Lavender’s blue,” and stirring a hundred bitter-sweet far-away
memories of my friend. It was as if fifteen years were erased from my
life. The face of Godelinette was palpable before me--pale, with its
sad little smile, its bright appealing eyes. Edmund might have been
smoking across the table--I could hear his voice, I could have put out
my hand and touched him. And all round me were the streets, the lights,
the smells, the busy youthful _va-et-vient_ of the Latin Quarter; and
in my heart the yearning, half joy and all despair and anguish, with
which we think of the old days when we were young, of how real and dear
they were, of how irrecoverable they are.

And then the music stopped, the Brasserie des Quatre Vents became a
glaring reality, and the painted female sipping _eau-de-vie_ at my
elbow remarked plaintively, “Tu n’es pas rigolo, toi. Vieux-tu faire
une valse?”

“I must speak to your musician,” I said. “Excuse me.”

He had played a bit of Pair’s music. It was one chance in a thousand,
but I wanted to ask him whether he could tell me anything about the
composer. So I penetrated to the bottom of the shop, and approached his
platform. He was bending over some sheets of music--making his next
selection, doubtless.

“I beg your pardon----” I began.

He turned towards me. You will not be surprised--I was looking into
Pair’s own face.

       *       *       *       *       *

You will not be surprised, but you will imagine what it was for me.
Oh, yes, I recognised him instantly; there could be no mistake. And he
recognised me, for he flushed, and winced, and started back.

I suppose for a little while we were both of us speechless, speechless
and motionless, while our hearts stopped beating. By-and-by I think
I said--something had to be said to break the situation--I think I
said, “It’s you, Edmund?” I remember he fumbled with a sheet of music,
and kept his eyes bent on it, and muttered something inarticulate.
Then there was another speechless, helpless suspension. He continued
to fumble his music, without looking up. At last I remember saying,
through a sort of sickness and giddiness, “Let us get out of
here--where we can talk.”

“I can’t leave yet. I’ve got another dance,” he answered.

“Well, I’ll wait,” said I.

I sat down near him and waited, trying to create some kind of order
out of the chaos in my mind, and half automatically watching and
considering him as he played his dance--Edmund Pair playing a dance
for prostitutes and drunken sailors. He was not greatly changed. There
were the same grey eyes, deep-set and wide apart, under the same broad
forehead; the same fine nose and chin, the same sensitive mouth. The
whole face was pretty much the same, only thinner perhaps, and with a
look of apathy, of inanimation, that was foreign to my recollection
of it. His hair had turned quite white, but otherwise he appeared no
older than his years. His figure, tall, slender, well-knit, retained
its vigour and its distinction. Though he wore a shabby brown Norfolk
jacket, and his beard was two days old, you could in no circumstances
have taken him for anything but a gentleman. I waited anxiously for the
time when we should be alone--anxiously, yet with a sort of terror.
I was burning to understand, and yet I shrunk from doing so. If to
conjecture even vaguely what experiences could have brought him to
this, what dark things suffered or done, had been melancholy when he
was a nameless old musician, now it was appalling, and I dreaded the
explanation that I longed to hear.

At last he struck his final chord, and rose from the piano. Then he
turned to me and said, composedly enough, “Well, I’m ready.” He,
apparently, had in some measure pulled himself together. In the street
he took my arm. “Let’s walk in this direction,” he said, leading off,
“towards the Christian quarter of the town.” And in a moment he went
on: “This has been an odd meeting. What brings you to Bordeaux?”

I explained that I was on my way to Biarritz, stopping for the night
between two trains.

“Then it’s all the more surprising that you should have stumbled into
the Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You’ve altered very slightly. The
world wags well with you? You look prosperous.”

I cried out some incoherent protest. Afterwards I said, “You know what
I want to hear. What does this mean?”

He laughed nervously. “Oh, the meaning’s clear enough. It speaks for
itself.”

“I don’t understand,” said I.

“I’m pianist to the Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You saw me in the
discharge of my duties.”

“I don’t understand,” I repeated helplessly.

“And yet the inference is plain. What could have brought a man to such
a pass save drink or evil courses?”

“Oh, don’t trifle,” I implored him.

“I’m not trifling. That’s the worst of it. For I don’t drink, and I’m
not conscious of having pursued any especially evil courses.”

“Well?” I questioned. “Well?”

“The fact of the matter simply is that I’m what they call a failure. I
never came off.”

“I don’t understand,” I repeated for a third time.

“No more do I, if you come to that. It’s the will of Heaven, I suppose.
Anyhow, it can’t puzzle you more than it puzzles me. It seems contrary
to the whole logic of circumstances, but it’s the fact.”

Thus far he had spoken listlessly, with a sort of bitter levity, an
affectation of indifference; but after a little silence his mood
appeared to change. His hand upon my arm tightened its grasp, and he
began to speak rapidly, feelingly.

“Do you realise that it is nearly fifteen years since we have seen each
other? The history of those fifteen years, so far as I am concerned,
has been the history of a single uninterrupted _déveine_--one
continuous run of ill-luck, against every probability of the game,
against every effort I could make to play my cards effectively. When I
started out, one might have thought, I had the best of chances. I had
studied hard; I worked hard. I surely had as much general intelligence,
as much special knowledge, as much apparent talent, as my competitors.
And the stuff I produced seemed good to you, to my friends, and not
wholly bad to me. It was musicianly, it was melodious, it was sincere;
the critics all praised it; but--it never took on! The public wouldn’t
have it. What did it lack? I don’t know. At last I couldn’t even get it
published--invisible ink! And I had a wife to support.”

He paused for a minute; then: “You see,” he said, “we made the mistake,
when we were young, of believing, against wise authority, that it _was_
in mortals to command success, that he could command it who deserved
it. We believed that the race would be to the swift, the battle to
the strong; that a man was responsible for his own destiny, that
he’d get what he merited. We believed that honest labour couldn’t go
unrewarded. An immense mistake. Success is an affair of temperament,
like faith, like love, like the colour of your hair. Oh, the old story
about industry, resolution, and no vices! I was industrious, I was
resolute, and I had no more than the common share of vices. But I had
the unsuccessful temperament; and here I am. If my motives had been
ignoble--but I can’t see that they were. I wanted to earn a decent
living; I wanted to justify my existence by doing something worthy of
the world’s acceptance. But the stars in their courses fought against
me. I have tried hard to convince myself that the music I wrote was
rubbish. It had its faults, no doubt. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t
epoch-making. But, as music goes nowadays, it was jolly good. It was a
jolly sight better than the average.”

“Oh, that is certain, that is certain,” I exclaimed, as he paused again.

“Well, anyhow, it didn’t sell, and at last I couldn’t even get it
published. So then I tried to find other work. I tried everything. I
tried to teach--harmony and the theory of composition. I couldn’t get
pupils. So few people want to study that sort of thing, and there were
good masters already in the place. If I had known how to play, indeed!
But I was never better than a fifth-rate executant; I had never gone in
for that; my ‘lay’ was composition. I couldn’t give piano lessons, I
couldn’t play in public--unless in a _gargotte_ like the hole we have
just left. Oh, I tried everything. I tried to get musical criticism to
do for the newspapers. Surely I was competent to do musical criticism.
But no--they wouldn’t employ me. I had ill luck, ill luck, ill
luck--nothing but ill luck, defeat, disappointment. Was it the will of
Heaven? I wondered what unforgivable sin I had committed to be punished
so. Do you know what it is like to work and pray and wait, day after
day, and watch day after day come and go and bring you nothing? Oh, I
tasted the whole heart-sickness of hope deferred; Giant Despair was my
constant bed-fellow.”

“But--with your connections----” I began.

“Oh, my connections!” he cried. “There was the rub, London is the
cruellest town in Europe. For sheer cold blood and heartlessness give
Londoners the palm. I had connections enough for the first month or so,
and then people found out things that didn’t concern them. They found
out some things that were true, and they imagined other things that
were false. They wouldn’t have my wife; they told the most infamous
lies about her; and I wouldn’t have _them_. Could I be civil to people
who insulted and slandered _her_? I had no connections in London,
except with the underworld. I got down to copying parts for theatrical
orchestras; and working twelve hours a day, earned about thirty
shillings a week.”

“You might have come back to Paris.”

“And fared worse. I couldn’t have earned thirty pence in Paris. Mind
you, the only trade I had learned was that of a musical composer; and
I couldn’t compose music that people would buy. I should have starved
as a copyist in Paris, where copyists are more numerous and worse paid.
Teach there? But to one competent master of harmony in London there are
ten in Paris. No; it was a hopeless case.”

“It is incomprehensible--incomprehensible,” said I.

“But wait--wait till you’ve heard the end. One would think I had had
enough--not so? One would think my cup of bitterness was full. No
fear! There was a stronger cup still a-brewing for me. When Fortune
takes a grudge against a man, she never lets up. She exacts the
uttermost farthing. I was pretty badly off, but I had one treasure
left--I had Godelinette. I used to think that she was my compensation.
I would say to myself, ‘A fellow can’t have all blessings. How can
you expect others, when you’ve got her?’ And I would accuse myself
of ingratitude for complaining of my unsuccess. Then she fell ill.
My God, how I watched over, prayed over her! It seemed impossible--I
could not believe--that she would be taken from me. Yet, Harry, do you
know what that poor child was thinking? Do you know what her dying
thoughts were--her wishes? Throughout her long painful illness she was
thinking that she was an obstacle in my way, a weight upon me; that if
it weren’t for her, I should get on, have friends, a position; that it
would be a good thing for me if she should die; and she was hoping in
her poor little heart that she wouldn’t get well! Oh, I know it, I knew
it--and you see me here alive. She let herself die for my sake--as if I
could care for anything without her! That’s what brought us here, to
France, to Bordeaux--her illness. The doctors said she must pass the
spring out of England, away from the March winds, in the South; and I
begged and borrowed money enough to take her. And we were on our way to
Arcachon; but when we reached Bordeaux she was too ill to continue the
journey, and--she died here.”

We walked on for some distance in silence, then he added: “That was
four years ago. You wonder why I live to tell you of it, why I haven’t
cut my throat. I don’t know whether it’s cowardice or conscientious
scruples. It seems rather inconsequent to say that I believe in a God,
doesn’t it?--that I believe one’s life is not one’s own to make an
end of? Anyhow, here I am, keeping body and soul together as musician
to a _brasserie-à-femmes_. I can’t go back to England, I can’t leave
Bordeaux--she’s buried here. I’ve hunted high and low for work, and
found it nowhere save in the _brasserie-à-femmes_. With that, and a
little copying now and then, I manage to pay my way.”

“But your uncle?” I asked.

“Do you think I would touch a penny of his money?” Pair retorted,
almost fiercely. “It was he who began it. My wife let herself die. It
was virtual suicide. It was he who created the situation that drove her
to it.”

“You are his heir, though, aren’t you?”

“No, the estates are not entailed.”

We had arrived at the door of my hotel. “Well, good-night and _bon
voyage_,” he said.

“You needn’t wish me _bon voyage_,” I answered. “Of course I’m not
leaving Bordeaux for the present.”

“Oh, yes, you are. You’re going on to Biarritz to-morrow morning, as
you intended.”

And herewith began a long and most painful struggle. I could persuade
him to accept no help of any sort from me. “What I can’t do for
myself,” he declared, “I’ll do without. My dear fellow, all that
you propose is contrary to the laws of Nature. One man can’t keep
another--it’s an impossible relation. And I won’t be kept; I won’t be
a burden. Besides, to tell you the truth, I’ve got past caring. The
situation you find me in seems terrible to you; to me it’s no worse
than another. You see, I’m hardened; I’ve got past caring.”

“At any rate,” I insisted, “I shan’t go on to Biarritz. I’ll spend my
holiday here, and we can see each other every day. What time shall we
meet to-morrow?”

“No, no, I can’t meet you again. Don’t ask me to; you mean it kindly, I
know, but you’re mistaken. It’s done me good to talk it all out to you,
but I can’t meet you again. I’ve got no heart for friendship, and--you
remind me too keenly of many things.”

“But if I come to the _brasserie_ to-morrow night?”

“Oh, if you do that, you’ll oblige me to throw up my employment there,
and hide from you. You must promise not to come again--you must respect
my wishes.”

“You’re cruel, you know.”

“Perhaps, perhaps. But I think I’m only reasonable. Anyhow, good-bye.”

He shook my hand hurriedly, and moved off. What could I do? I stood
looking after him till he had vanished in the night, with a miserable
baffled recognition of my helplessness to help him.




To a Bunch of Lilac

By Theo Marzials


“_Dis-moi la fleur, je te dirai la femme_”

    Is it the April springing,
    Or the bird in the breeze above?
    My throat is full of singing,
    My heart is full of love.

    O heart, are you not yet broken?
    O dream, so done with and dead,
    Is life’s one word not spoken,
    And the rede of it all not read?

    No hope in the whole world over!
    No hope in the infinite blue!
    Yet I sing and laugh out like a lover--
    Oh, who is it, April--who?

    And the glad young year is springing;
    And the birds, and the breeze above,
    And the shrill tree-tops, are singing--
    And I am singing--of love.

           *       *       *       *       *

    O beautiful lilac flowers,
    Oh, say, is it you, is it you
    The sun-struck, love-sick hours
    Go faint for murmuring through?

    O full of ineffable yearning,
    So balmy, mystical, deep,
    And faint beyond any discerning,
    Like far-off voices in sleep--

    I love you, O lilac, I love you!
    Till life goes swooning by,
    I breathe and enwreathe and enfold you,
    And long but to love, and die.




From a Pastel

By Albert Foschter


[Illustration]




Apple Blossom in Brittany

By Ernest Dowson


I

IT WAS the feast of the Assumption in Ploumariel, at the hottest part
of the afternoon. Benedict Campion, who had just assisted at vespers,
in the little dove-cotted church--like everything else in Ploumariel,
even vespers were said earlier than is the usage in towns--took up his
station in the market-place to watch the procession pass by. The head
of it was just then emerging into the Square: a long file of men from
the neighbouring villages, bare-headed and chaunting, followed the
crucifer. They were all clad in the picturesque garb of the Morbihan
peasantry, and were many of them imposing, quite noble figures with
their clear-cut Breton features, and their austere type of face.
After them a troop of young girls, with white veils over their heads,
carrying banners--children from the convent school of the Ursulines;
and then, two and two in motley assemblage (peasant women with their
white coifs walking with the wives and daughters of prosperous
_bourgeois_ in costumes more civilised but far less pictorial) half
the inhabitants of Ploumariel--all, indeed, who had not, with Campion,
preferred to be spectators, taking refuge from a broiling sun under the
grateful shadow of the chestnuts in the market-place. Last of all a
muster of clergy, four or five strong, a small choir of bullet-headed
boys, and the Curé of the parish himself, Monsieur Letêtre chaunting
from his book, who brought up the rear.

Campion, leaning against his chestnut tree, watched them defile. Once
a smile of recognition flashed across his face, which was answered
by a girl in the procession. She just glanced from her book, and the
smile with which she let her eyes rest upon him for a moment, before
she dropped them, did not seem to detract from her devotional air.
She was very young and slight--she might have been sixteen--and she
had a singularly pretty face; her white dress was very simple, and
her little straw hat, but both of these she wore with an air which at
once set her apart from her companions, with their provincial finery
and their rather commonplace charms. Campion’s eyes followed the
little figure until it was lost in the distance, disappearing with
the procession down a by-street on its return journey to the church.
And after they had all passed, the singing, the last verse of the
“Ave Maris Stella,” was borne across to him, through the still air,
the voices of children pleasantly predominating. He put on his hat
at last, and moved away; every now and then he exchanged a greeting
with somebody--the communal doctor, the mayor; while here and there a
woman explained him to her gossip in whispers as he passed, “It is the
Englishman of Mademoiselle Marie-Ursule--it is M. le Curé’s guest.”
It was to the dwelling of M. le Curé, indeed, that Campion now made
his way. Five minutes’ walk brought him to it; an unpretentious white
house, lying back in its large garden, away from the dusty road. It was
an untidy garden, rather useful than ornamental; a very little shade
was offered by one incongruous plane-tree, under which a wooden table
was placed and some chairs. After _déjeûner_, on those hot August days,
Campion and the Curé took their coffee here; and in the evening it was
here that they sat and talked while Mademoiselle Hortense, the Curé’s
sister, knitted, or appeared to knit, an interminable shawl; the young
girl, Marie-Ursule, placidly completing the quartet with her silent,
felicitous smile of a convent-bred child, which seemed sometimes, at
least to Campion, to be after all a finer mode of conversation. He
threw himself down now on the bench, wondering when his hosts would
have finished their devotions, and drew a book from his pocket as if
he would read. But he did not open it, but sat for a long time holding
it idly in his hand, and gazing out at the village, at the expanse
of dark pine-covered hills, and at the one trenchant object in the
foreground, the white façade of the convent of the Ursuline nuns. Once
and again he smiled, as though his thoughts, which had wandered a long
way, had fallen upon extraordinarily pleasant things. He was a man of
barely forty, though he looked slightly older than his age: his little,
peaked beard was grizzled, and a life spent in literature, and very
studiously, had given him the scholar’s premature stoop. He was not
handsome, but, when he smiled, his smile was so pleasant that people
credited him with good looks. It brought, moreover, such a light of
youth into his eyes, as to suggest that if his avocations had unjustly
aged his body, that had not been without its compensations--his soul
had remained remarkably young. Altogether, he looked shrewd, kindly
and successful, and he was all these things, while if there was also a
certain sadness in his eyes--lines of lassitude about his mouth--this
was an idiosyncracy of his temperament, and hardly justified by his
history, which had always been honourable and smooth. He was sitting in
the same calm and presumably agreeable reverie, when the garden gate
opened, and a girl--the young girl of the procession, fluttered towards
him.

“Are you quite alone?” she asked brightly, seating herself at his side.
“Has not Aunt Hortense come back?”

Campion shook his head, and she continued speaking in English, very
correctly, but with a slight accent, which gave to her pretty young
voice the last charm.

“I suppose she has gone to see _la mère Guémené_. She will not live
another night they say. Ah! what a pity,” she cried, clasping her
hands; “to die on the Assumption--that is hard.”

Campion smiled softly. “Dear child, when one’s time comes, when one is
old as that, the day does not matter much.” Then he went on: “But how
is it you are back; were you not going to your nuns?”

She hesitated a moment. “It is your last day, and I wanted to make tea
for you. You have had no tea this year. Do you think I have forgotten
how to make it, while you have been away, as I forget my English words?”

“It’s I who am forgetting such an English habit,” he protested. “But
run away and make it, if you like. I am sure it will be very good.”

She stood for a moment looking down at him, her fingers smoothing a
little bunch of palest blue ribbons on her white dress. In spite of her
youth, her brightness, the expression of her face in repose was serious
and thoughtful, full of unconscious wistfulness. This, together with
her placid manner, the manner of a child who has lived chiefly with old
people and quiet nuns, made her beauty to Campion a peculiarly touching
thing. Just then her eyes fell upon Campion’s wide-awake, lying on the
seat at his side, and travelled to his uncovered head. She uttered a
protesting cry: “Are you not afraid of a _coup de soleil_? See--you are
not fit to be a guardian if you can be so foolish as that. It is I who
have to look after you.” She took up the great grey hat and set it
daintily on his head; then with a little laugh she disappeared into the
house.

When Campion raised his head again, his eyes were smiling, and in the
light of a sudden flush which just died out of it, his face looked
almost young.


II

This girl, so foreign in her education and traditions, so foreign in
the grace of her movements, in everything except the shade of her dark
blue eyes, was the child of an English father; and she was Benedict
Campion’s ward. This relation, which many persons found incongruous,
had befallen naturally enough. Her father had been Campion’s oldest
and most familiar friend; and when Richard Heath’s romantic marriage
had isolated him from so many others, from his family and from his
native land, Campion’s attachment to him had, if possible, only been
increased. From his heart he had approved, had prophesied nothing but
good of an alliance, which certainly, while it lasted, had been an
wholly ideal relation. There had seemed no cloud on the horizon--and
yet less than two years had seen the end of it. The birth of the
child, Marie-Ursule, had been her mother’s death; and six months
later, Richard Heath, dying less from any defined malady than because
he lacked any longer the necessary motive to live, was laid by the
side of his wife. The helpless child remained, in the guardianship of
Hortense, her mother’s sister, and elder by some ten years, who had
already composed herself contentedly, as some women do, to the prospect
of perpetual spinsterhood, and the care of her brother’s house--an
ecclesiastic just appointed curé of Ploumariel. And here, ever since,
in this quiet corner of Brittany, in the tranquil custody of the
priest and his sister, Marie-Ursule had grown up.

Campion’s share in her guardianship had not been onerous, although
it was necessarily maintained; for the child had inherited, and what
small property would come to her was in England, and in English
funds. To Hortense Letêtre and her brother such responsibilities in
an alien land were not for a moment to be entertained. And gradually,
this connection, at first formal and impersonal, between Campion
and the Breton presbytery, had developed into an intimacy, into a
friendship singularly satisfying on both sides. Separate as their
interests seemed, those of the French country-priest, and of the
Englishman of letters, famous already in his own department, they
had, nevertheless, much community of feeling apart from their common
affection for a child. Now, for many years, he had been established in
their good graces, so that it had become an habit with him to spend
his holiday--it was often a very extended one--at Ploumariel; while to
the Letêtres, as well as to Marie-Ursule herself, this annual sojourn
of Campion’s had become the occasion of the year, the one event which
pleasantly relieved the monotony of life in this remote village; though
that, too, was a not unpleasant routine. Insensibly Campion had come
to find his chief pleasure in consideration of this child of an old
friend, whose gradual growth beneath influences which seemed to him
singularly exquisite and fine, he had watched so long; whose future,
now that her childhood, her schooldays at the convent had come to an
end, threatened to occupy him with an anxiety more intimate than any
which hitherto he had known. Marie-Ursule’s future! They had talked
much of it that summer, the priest and the Englishman, who accompanied
him in his long morning walks, through green lanes, and over white,
dusty roads, and past fields perfumed with the pungently pleasant
smell of the blood-red _sarrasin_, when he paid visits to the sick
who lived on the outskirts of his scattered parish. Campion became
aware then of an increasing difficulty in discussing this matter
impersonally, in the impartial manner becoming a guardian. Odd thrills
of jealousy stirred within him when he was asked to contemplate
Marie-Ursule’s possible suitors. And yet, it was with a very genuine
surprise, at least for the moment, that he met the Curé’s sudden
pressing home of a more personal contingency--he took this freedom
of an old friend with a shrewd twinkle in his eye, which suggested
that all along this had been chiefly in his mind. “_Mon bon ami_, why
should you not marry her yourself? That would please all of us so
much.” And he insisted, with kindly insistence, on the propriety of the
thing: dwelling on Campion’s established position, their long habit of
friendship, his own and his sister’s confidence and esteem, taking for
granted, with that sure insight which is the gift of many women and of
most priests, that on the ground of affection alone the justification
was too obvious to be pressed. And he finished with a smile, stopping
to take a pinch of snuff with a sigh of relief--the relief of a man who
has at least seasonably unburdened himself.

“Surely, _mon ami_, some such possibility must have been in your mind?”

Campion hesitated for a moment; then he proffered his hand, which
the other warmly grasped. “You read me aright,” he said slowly,
“only I hardly realised it before. Even now--no, how can I believe
it possible--that she should care for me. _Non sum dignus, non sum
dignus._ Consider her youth, her inexperience; the best part of my life
is behind me.”

But the Curé smiled reassuringly. “The best part is before you,
Campion; you have the heart of a boy. Do we not know you? And for the
child--rest tranquil there! I have the word of my sister, who is a
wise woman, that she is sincerely attached to you; not to speak of the
evidence of my own eyes. She will be seventeen shortly, then she can
speak for herself. And to whom else can we trust her?”

The shadow of these confidences hung over Campion when he next saw
Marie-Ursule, and troubled him vaguely during the remainder of his
visit, which this year, indeed, he considerably curtailed. Inevitably
he was thrown much with the young girl, and if daily the charm which
he found in her presence was sensibly increased, as he studied her
from a fresh point of view, he was none the less disquieted at the
part which he might be called upon to play. Diffident and scrupulous,
a shy man, knowing little of women; and at least by temperament, a sad
man, he trembled before felicity, as many at the palpable breath of
misfortune. And his difficulty was increased by the conviction, forced
upon him irresistibly, little as he could accuse himself of vanity,
that the decision rested with himself. Her liking for him was genuine
and deep, her confidence implicit. He had but to ask her and she would
place her hand in his and go forth with him, as trustfully as a child.
And when they came to celebrate her _fête_, Marie-Ursule’s seventeenth
birthday--it occurred a little before the Assumption--it was almost
disinterestedly that he had determined upon his course. At least
it was security which he could promise her, as a younger man might
not; a constant and single-minded kindness; a devotion not the less
valuable, because it was mature and reticent, lacking, perhaps, the
jealous ardours of youth. Nevertheless, he was going back to England
without having revealed himself; there should be no unseasonable
haste in the matter; he would give her another year. The Curé smiled
deprecatingly at the procrastination; but on this point Campion was
firm. And on this, his last evening, he spoke only of trivial things
to Marie-Ursule, as they sat presently over the tea--a mild and
flavourless beverage--which the young girl had prepared. Yet he noticed
later, after their early supper, when she strolled up with him to the
hill overlooking the village, a certain new shyness in her manner, a
shadow, half timid, half expectant in her clear eyes which permitted
him to believe that she was partly prepared. When they reached the
summit, stood clear of the pine trees by an ancient stone Calvary,
Ploumariel lay below them, very fair in the light of the setting sun;
and they stopped to rest themselves, to admire.

“Ploumariel is very beautiful,” said Campion after a while. “Ah!
Marie-Ursule, you are fortunate to be here.”

“Yes.” She accepted his statement simply, then suddenly: “You should
not go away.” He smiled, his eyes turning from the village in the
valley to rest upon her face; after all, she was the daintiest picture,
and Ploumariel with its tall slate roofs, its sleeping houses, her
appropriate frame.

“I shall come back, I shall come back,” he murmured. She had gathered a
bunch of ruddy heather as they walked, and her fingers played with it
now nervously. Campion stretched out his hand for it. She gave it him
without a word.

“I will take it with me to London,” he said; “I will have Morbihan in
my rooms.”

“It will remind you--make you think of us sometimes?”

For answer he could only touch her hand lightly with his lips. “Do
you think that was necessary?” And they resumed their homeward way
silently, although to both of them the air seemed heavy with unspoken
words.


III

When he was in London--and it was in London that for nine months out of
the twelve Benedict Campion was to be found--he lived in the Temple, at
the top of Hare Court, in the very same rooms in which he had installed
himself, years ago, when he gave up his Oxford fellowship, electing
to follow the profession of letters. Returning there from Ploumariel,
he resumed at once, easily, his old avocations. He had always been a
secluded man, living chiefly in books and in the past; but this year
he seemed less than ever inclined to knock at the hospitable doors
which were open to him. For in spite of his reserve, his diffidence,
Campion’s success might have been social, had he cared for it, and not
purely academic. His had come to be a name in letters, in the higher
paths of criticism; and he had made no enemies. To his success indeed,
gradual and quiet as this was, he had never grown quite accustomed,
contrasting the little he had actually achieved with all that he had
desired to do. His original work was of the slightest, and a book that
was in his head he had never found time to write. His name was known in
other ways, as a man of ripe knowledge, of impeccable taste; as a born
editor of choice reprints, of inaccessible classics: above all, as an
authority--the greatest, upon the literature and the life (its flavour
at once courtly, and mystical, had to him an unique charm) of the
seventeenth century. His heart was in that age, and from much lingering
over it, he had come to view modern life with a curious detachment, a
sense of remote hostility: Democracy, the Salvation Army, the novels
of M. Zola--he disliked them all impartially. A Catholic by long
inheritance, he held his religion for something more than an heirloom;
he exhaled it, like an intimate quality; his mind being essentially of
that kind to which a mystical view of things comes easiest.

This year passed with him much as any other of the last ten years had
passed; at least the routine of his daily existence admitted little
outward change. And yet inwardly, he was conscious of alteration, of a
certain quiet illumination which was a new thing to him.

Although at Ploumariel when the prospect of such a marriage had dawned
on him, his first impression had been one of strangeness, he could
reflect now that it was some such possibility as this which he had
always kept vaguely in view. He had prided himself upon few things more
than his patience; and now it appeared that this was to be rewarded;
he was glad that he had known how to wait. This girl, Marie-Ursule,
had an immense personal charm for him, but, beyond that, she was
representative--her traditions were exactly those which the ideal girl
of Campion’s imagination would possess. She was not only personally
adorable; she was also generically of the type which he admired. It
was possibly because this type was, after all, so rare, that looking
back, Campion in his middle age, could drag out of the recesses of his
memory no spectre to compete with her. She was his first love precisely
because the conditions, so choice and admirable, which rendered it
inevitable for him to love her, had never occurred before. And he could
watch the time of his probation gliding away with a pleased expectancy
which contained no alloy of impatience. An illumination--a quite
tranquil illumination: yes, it was under some such figure, without
heart-burning, or adolescent fever, that love as it came to Campion
was best expressed. Yet if this love was lucent rather than turbulent,
that it was also deep he could remind himself, when a letter from the
priest, while the spring was yet young, had sent him to Brittany, a
month or two before his accustomed time, with an anxiety that was not
solely due to bewilderment.

“_Our child is well, mon bon_,” so he wrote. “_Do not alarm yourself.
But it will be good for you to come, if it be only because of an idea
she has, that you may remove. An idea! Call it rather a fancy--at least
your coming will dispel it. Petites entêtées: I have no patience with
these mystical little girls._”

His musings on the phrase, with its interpretation varying to his
mood, lengthened his long sea-passage, and the interminable leagues
of railway which separated him from Pontivy, whence he had still
some twenty miles to travel by the _Courrier_, before he reached his
destination. But at Pontivy, the round, ruddy face of M. Letêtre
greeting him on the platform dispelled any serious misgiving. Outside
the post-office the familiar conveyance awaited them: its yellow
inscription “Pontivy-Ploumariel,” touched Campion electrically,
as did the cheery greeting of the driver, which was that of an
old friend. They shared the interior of the rusty trap--a fossil
among vehicles--they chanced to be the only travellers, and to the
accompaniment of jingling harness, and the clattering hoofs of the
brisk little Carhaix horses, M. Letêtre explained himself.

“A vocation, _mon Dieu_! if all the little girls who fancied themselves
with one, were to have their way, to whom would our poor France look
for children? They are good women, _nos Ursulines_, ah, yes; but
our Marie-Ursule is a good child, and blessed matrimony also is a
sacrament. You shall talk to her, my Campion. It is a little fancy,
you see, such as will come to young girls; a convent ague, but when
she sees you” ... He took snuff with emphasis, and flipped his broad
fingers suggestively. “_Craque!_ it is a betrothal, and a _trousseau_,
and not the habit of religion, that Mademoiselle is full of. You will
talk to her?”

Campion assented silently, absently, his eyes had wandered away, and
looked through the little square of window at the sad-coloured Breton
country, at the rows of tall poplars, which guarded the miles of dusty
road like sombre sentinels. And the priest with a reassured air pulled
out his breviary, and began to say his office in an imperceptible
undertone. After a while he crossed himself, shut the book, and
pillowing his head against the hot, shiny leather of the carriage,
sought repose; very soon his regular, stertorous breathing, assured his
companion that he was asleep. Campion closed his eyes also, not indeed
in search of slumber, though he was travel weary; rather the better to
isolate himself with the perplexity of his own thoughts. An indefinable
sadness invaded him, and he could envy the priest’s simple logic, which
gave such short shrift to obstacles that Campion, with his subtle
melancholy, which made life to him almost morbidly an affair of fine
shades and nice distinctions, might easily exaggerate.

Of the two, perhaps the priest had really the more secular mind, as
it certainly excelled Campion’s in that practical wisdom, or common
sense, which may be of more avail than subtlety in the mere economy
of life. And what to the Curé was a simple matter enough, the removal
of the idle fancy of a girl, might be to Campion, in his scrupulous
temper, and his overweening tenderness towards just those pieties and
renunciations which such a fancy implied, a task to be undertaken
hardly with relish, perhaps without any real conviction, deeply as his
personal wishes might be implicated in success. And the heart had gone
out of his journey long before a turn of the road brought them in sight
of Ploumariel.


IV

Up by the great, stone Calvary, where they had climbed nearly a
year before, Campion stood, his face deliberately averted, while
the young girl uttered her hesitating confidences; hesitating, yet
candid, with a candour which seemed to separate him from the child by
more than a measurable space of years, to set him with an appealing
trustfulness in the seat of judgment--for him, for her. They had
wandered there insensibly, through apple-orchards white with the
promise of a bountiful harvest, and up the pine-clad hill, talking of
little things--trifles to beguile their way--perhaps, in a sort of
vain procrastination. Once, Marie-Ursule had plucked a branch of the
snowy blossom, and he had playfully chided her that the cider would be
less by a _litre_ that year in Brittany. “But the blossom is so much
prettier,” she protested; “and there will be apples and apples--always
enough apples. But I like the blossom best--and it is so soon over.”

And then, emerging clear of the trees, with Ploumariel lying in its
quietude in the serene sunshine below them, a sudden strenuousness had
supervened, and the girl had unburdened herself, speaking tremulously,
quickly, in an undertone almost passionate; and Campion, perforce,
had listened.... A fancy? a whim? Yes, he reflected; to the normal,
entirely healthy mind, any choice of exceptional conditions, any
special self-consecration or withdrawal from the common lot of men
and women must draw down upon it some such reproach, seeming the mere
pedantry of inexperience. Yet, against his reason, and what he would
fain call his better judgment, something in his heart of hearts stirred
sympathetically with this notion of the girl. And it was no fixed
resolution, no deliberate justification which she pleaded. She was
soft, and pliable, and even her plea for renunciation contained pretty,
feminine inconsequences; and it touched Campion strangely. Argument
he could have met with argument; an ardent conviction he might have
assailed with pleading; but that note of appeal in her pathetic young
voice, for advice, for sympathy, disarmed him.

“Yet the world,” he protested at last, but half-heartedly, with
a sense of self-imposture: “the world, Marie-Ursule, it has its
disappointments; but there are compensations.”

“I am afraid, afraid,” she murmured.

Their eyes alike sought instinctively the Convent of the Ursulines,
white and sequestered in the valley--a visible symbol of security, of
peace, perhaps of happiness.

“Even there they have their bad days: do not doubt it.”

“But nothing happens,” she said simply; “one day is like another. They
can never be very sad, you know.”

They were silent for a time: the girl, shading her eyes with one small
white hand, continued to regard the convent; and Campion considered her
fondly.

“What can I say?” he exclaimed at last. “What would you put on me? Your
uncle--he is a priest--surely the most natural adviser--you know his
wishes.”

She shook her head. “With him it is different--I am one of his
family--he is not a priest for me. And he considers me a little
girl--and yet I am old enough to marry. Many young girls have had a
vocation before my age. Ah, help me, decide for me!” she pleaded; “you
are my _tuteur_.”

“And a very old friend, Marie-Ursule.” He smiled rather sadly. Last
year seemed so long ago, and the word, which he had almost spoken then,
was no longer seasonable. A note in his voice, inexplicable, might
have touched her. She took his hand impulsively, but he withdrew it
quickly, as though her touch had scalded him.

“You look very tired; you are not used to our Breton rambles in this
sun. See, I will run down to the cottage by the chapel and fetch you
some milk. Then you shall tell me.”

When he was alone the smile faded from his face and was succeeded
by a look of lassitude, as he sat himself beneath the shadow of the
Calvary to wrestle with his responsibility. Perhaps it was a vocation:
the phrase, sounding strangely on modern ears, to him, at least, was
no anachronism. Women of his race, from generation to generation, had
heard some such voice and had obeyed it. That it went unheeded now
was, perhaps, less a proof that it was silent, than that people had
grown hard and deaf, in a world that had deteriorated. Certainly the
convent had to him no vulgar, Protestant significance, to be combated
for its intrinsic barbarism; it suggested nothing cold nor narrow
nor mean, was veritably a gracious choice, a generous effort after
perfection. Then it was for his own sake, on an egoistic impulse,
that he should dissuade her? And it rested with him; he had no doubt
that he could mould her, even yet, to his purpose. The child! how he
loved her.... But would it ever be quite the same with them after
that morning? Or must there be henceforth a shadow between them; the
knowledge of something missed, of the lower end pursued, the higher
slighted? Yet, if she loved him? He let his head drop on his hands,
murmured aloud at the hard chance which made him at once judge and
advocate in his own cause. He was not conscious of praying, but his
mind fell into that condition of aching blankness which is, perhaps,
an extreme prayer. Presently he looked down again at Ploumariel, with
its coronal of faint smoke ascending in the perfectly still air, at
the white convent of the Dames Ursulines, which seemed to dominate and
protect it. How peaceful it was! And his thought wandered to London: to
its bustle and noise, its squalid streets, to his life there, to its
literary coteries, its politics, its society; vulgar and trivial and
sordid they all seemed from this point of vantage. That was the world
he had pleaded for, and it was into that he would bring the child....
And suddenly, with a strange reaction, he was seized with a sense of
the wisdom of her choice, its pictorial fitness, its benefit for both
of them. He felt at once and finally, that he acquiesced in it; that
any other ending to his love had been an impossible grossness, and
that to lose her in just that fashion was the only way in which he
could keep her always. And his acquiescence was without bitterness, and
attended only by that indefinable sadness which to a man of his temper
was but the last refinement of pleasure. He had renounced, but he had
triumphed; for it seemed to him that his renunciation would be an ægis
to him always against the sordid facts of life, a protest against the
vulgarity of instinct, the tyranny of institutions. And he thought of
the girl’s life, as it should be, with a tender appreciation--as of
something precious laid away in lavender. He looked up to find her
waiting before him with a basin half full of milk, warm still, fresh
from the cow; and she watched him in silence while he drank. Then their
eyes met, and she gave a little cry.

“You will help me? Ah, I see that you will! And you think I am right?”

“I think you are right, Marie-Ursule.”

“And you will persuade my uncle?”

“I will persuade him.”

She took his hand in silence, and they stood so for a minute, gravely
regarding each other. Then they prepared to descend.




To Salomé at St. James’s

By Theodore Wratislaw


    FLOWER of the ballet’s nightly mirth,
      Pleased with a trinket or a gown,
    Eternal as eternal earth
      You dance the centuries down.

    For you, my plaything, slight and light,
      Capricious, petulant and proud,
    With whom I sit and sup to-night
      Among the tawdry crowd,

    Are she whose swift and sandalled feet
      And postured girlish beauty won
    A pagan prize, for you unmeet,
      The head of Baptist John.

    And after ages, when you sit
      A princess less in birth than power,
    Freed from the theatre’s fume and heat
      To kill an idle hour,

    Here in the babbling room agleam
      With scarlet lips and naked arms
    And such rich jewels as beseem
      The painted damzel’s charms,

    Even now your tired and subtle face
      Bears record to the wondrous time
    When from your limbs’ lascivious grace
      Sprang forth your splendid crime.

    And though none deem it true, of those
      Who watch you in our banal age
    Like some stray fairy glide and pose
      Upon a London stage,

    Yet I to whom your frail caprice
      Turns for the moment ardent eyes
    Have seen the strength of love release
      Your sleeping memories.

    I too am servant to your glance,
      I too am bent beneath your sway,
    My wonder! My desire! who dance
      Men’s heads and hearts away.

    Sweet arbitress of love and death,
      Unchanging on time’s changing sands,
    You hold more lightly than a breath
      The world between your hands!




Second Thoughts

By Arthur Moore


I

AS the clock struck eight Sir Geoffrey Vincent cast aside the dull
society journal with which he had been beguiling the solitude of his
after-dinner coffee and cigar, and abandoned, with an alacrity eloquent
of long boredom, his possession of one of the capacious chairs which
invited repose in the dingy smoking-room of an old-fashioned club. It
had been reserved for him, after twenty monotonous years of almost
unbroken exile, spent, for the most part, amid the jungles and swamps
of Lower Burma, to realise that a friendless man, alone in the most
populous city of the world, may encounter among thousands of his peers
a desolation more supreme than the solitude of the most ultimate
wilderness; and he found himself wondering, a little savagely, why,
after all, he had expected his home-coming to be so different from the
reality that now confronted him. When he landed at Brindisi, a short
ten days ago, misgivings had already assailed him vaguely; the fact
that he was practically homeless, that, although not altogether bereft
of kith and kin, he had no family circle to welcome him as an addition
to its circumference, had made it inevitable that his rapid passage
across the Continent should be haunted by forebodings to which he had
not cared to assign a shape too definite; phantoms which he exorcised
hopefully, with a tacit reliance on a trick of falling on his feet
which had seldom failed his need. He consoled himself with the thought
that London was home, England was home; he would meet old comrades in
the streets perhaps, assuredly at his club, and such encounters would
be so much the more delightful if they were fortuitous, unexpected. The
plans which he had laid so carefully pacing the long deck of the P. and
O. boat in the starlight, or, more remotely, lying awake through the
hot night hours under a whining punkah in his lonely bungalow, had all
implied, however vaguely and impersonally, a certain companionship. He
was dimly conscious that he had cousins somewhere in the background; he
had long since lost touch with them, but he would look them up. He had
two nieces, still in their teens, the children of his only sister who
had died ten years ago; he had never seen them, but their photographs
were charming--they should be overwhelmed with such benefactions as
a bachelor uncle with a well-lined purse may pleasantly bestow. His
friends--the dim legion that was to rise about his path--should take
him to see Sarah Bernhardt (a mere name to him as yet) at the Gaiety,
to the new Gilbert and Sullivan opera at the Savoy; they should
enlighten him as to the latent merits of the pictures at Burlington
House; they should dine with him, shoot with him, be introduced to
his Indian falcons; in a word, he would keep open house, in town and
country too, for all good fellows and their pretty wives. It had even
occurred to him, as a possibility neither remote nor unattractive, that
he might himself one day possess a pretty wife to welcome them.

His sanguine expectations encountered their first rebuff when he found
the Piccadilly Club, which had figured so often in the dreams of its
exiled member, abandoned to a horde of workmen, a mere wilderness of
paint and whitewash; and it was with a touch of resentment that he
accepted the direction of an indifferent hall-porter to an unfamiliar
edifice in Pall Mall as its temporary substitute. Entering the
smoking-room, a little diffidently, on the evening of his arrival in
London, he found himself eyed, at first with faint curiosity, by two
or three of the men upon whom his gaze rested expectantly, but in no
case was this curiosity--prompted doubtless by that touch of the exotic
which sometimes clings to dwellers in the East--the precursor of the
kindly recognition, the surprised, incredulous greeting which he had
hoped for. After a few days he was simply ignored; his face, rather
stern, with its distinctive Indian tan through which the grey eyes
looked almost blue, his erect figure, and dark hair sparsely flecked
with a frosty white, had become familiar; he had visited his tailor,
and his garments no longer betrayed him to the curious by their fashion
of Rangoon.

The Blue-book, which he had been quick to interrogate, informed him
that his old friend Hibbert lived in Portman Square, and that the old
lady who was the guardian of his nieces had a house at Hampstead:
further inquiry at the addresses thus obtained left him baffled by the
intelligence that Colonel Hibbert was in Norway, his nieces at school
in Switzerland. Mackinnon, late of the Woods and Forests, whom he met
at Burlington House, raised his hopes for an instant by a greeting
which sounded precisely the note of cordiality that he yearned for,
only to dash them by expressing a hope that he should see more of his
old friend in the autumn; he was off to Southampton to join a friend’s
yacht on the morrow, and after his cruise he had designs on Scotland
and the grouse.

Sir Geoffrey, chained to the neighbourhood of London by legal
business, already too long deferred, connected with the succession
which had made him a rich man and brought him home, could only rebel
mutely against the ill-fortune which left him solitary at a time when
he most longed for fellowship, acknowledging the while, with a touch
of self-reproach, that the position which he resented was very largely
due to his own shortcomings; he had always figured as a lamentably
bad correspondent, and his inveterate aversion to letter-writing had
allowed the links of many old friendships to fall asunder, had operated
to leave such friends as were still in touch with him in ignorance of
his home-coming.

Now, as he paused in the hall of his club to light a cigarette before
passing out into the pleasant July twilight, he told himself that
for the present he had done with London; he would shake the dust of
the inhospitable city from off his feet, and go down to the place in
Wiltshire which was learning to call him master, to await better days
in company with his beloved falcons. He even found himself taking
comfort from this prospect while a hansom bore him swiftly to the Savoy
Theatre, and when he was safely ensconced in his stall he beguiled
the interval before the rising of the curtain--a period which his
impatience to escape from the club rather than any undue passion for
punctuality had made somewhat lengthy--by considering, speculatively,
the chances of society which the Willescombe neighbourhood seemed
to afford. He enjoyed the first act of the extravaganza with the
zest of a man to whom the work of the famous collaborators was an
entire novelty, his pleasure unalloyed by the fact, of which he was
blissfully unconscious, that one of the principal parts was played by
an understudy. His _ennui_ returning with the fall of the curtain,
he prepared to spend the entr’acte in contemplation of the people
who composed the house, rather than to incur the resentment of the
placid dowagers who were his neighbours, by passing and repassing,
like the majority of his fellow-men, in search of the distant haven
where cigarettes and drinks, obtained with difficulty, could be
hastily appreciated. More than once his wandering eyes returned to a
box next the stage on a dress-circle tier, and finally they rested
rather wistfully on its occupants, or, to be more accurate, on the
younger of the two ladies who were seated in front. It was not simply
because the girl was pretty, though her beauty, the flower-like charm
of a young Englishwoman fresh from the schoolroom, a fine example
of a type not particularly rare, would have furnished a sufficient
pretext: he was struck by a resemblance, a haunting reminiscence,
which at first exercised his curiosity, and ended by baffling and
tantalising him. There was something vaguely familiar, he thought, in
the manner of her smile, the inclination of her head as she turned
now and then to address a remark to her companion, the lady in grey,
whose face was hidden from him by the drapery at the side of the box.
When she laughed, furling a feathery fan, and throwing a bright glance
back at the gentleman whose white shirt-front was dimly visible in
the background, Sir Geoffrey felt himself on the verge of solving
his riddle, but at this point, while a name seemed to tremble on his
lips, the lights of the auditorium were lowered, and the rising of the
curtain on the fairyland of the second scene diverted his attention to
the stage. Later, when he had passed into the crowded lobby, and was
making his way slowly through a jungle of pretty dresses towards the
door, he recognised in front of him the amber-coloured hair and dainty,
pale-blue opera cloak of the damsel who had puzzled him. The two ladies
(her companion of the grey dress was close at hand) halted near the
door while their cavalier passed out in search of their carriage; the
elder lady turned, adjusting a cloud of soft lace about her shoulders,
and Sir Geoffrey was struck on the instant by a swift thrill. Here,
at last, was an old friend--that face could belong to no one else
than Margaret Addison. It was natural that her maiden name should
first occur to him, but he remembered, as he edged his way laboriously
towards her, that she had married just after he sailed for Burma; yes,
she had married that amiable scape-grace Dick Vandeleur, who had met
his death in the hunting-field nearly fifteen years ago.

As he drew near, Mrs. Vandeleur’s gaze fell upon him for a brief
instant; he thought that she had not recognised him, but before his
spirits had time to suffer any consequent depression, her eyes returned
to him, and as he smiled in answer to the surprise which he read in
them, he saw her face flush, and then grow a little pale, before a
responsive light of recognition dawned upon it. She took his hand
silently when he offered it, eyeing him with the same faint smile, an
expression in which welcome seemed to be gleaming through a cloud of
apprehension.

“I’m not a ghost,” he said, laughing; “I’m Geoffrey Vincent. Don’t be
ashamed of owning that you had quite forgotten me!”

“I knew you at once,” she said simply. “So you are home at last: you
must come and see me as soon as you can. This is my daughter Dorothy,
and here is my brother--of course you remember Philip?--coming to tell
us that the carriage is waiting. You will come, to-morrow--to prove
that you are not a ghost? We shall expect you.”


II

A fortnight later Sir Geoffrey was sitting in a punt, beguiling the
afternoon of a rainy day by luring unwary roach to their destruction
with a hair-line and pellets of paste, delicately kneaded by the
taper fingers of Miss Dorothy Vandeleur. He was the guest of Mrs.
Vandeleur’s brother, his school friend, Philip Addison the Q.C., and
Mrs. Vandeleur and her daughter were also staying at the delightful
old Elizabethan house which nestled, with such an air of immemorial
occupation, halfway down the wooded side of one of the Streatley hills,
its spotless lawn sloping steeply to the margin of the fairest river in
the world. Miss Vandeleur had enshrined herself among a pile of rugs
and cushions at the stern of the punt, where the roof of her uncle’s
boat-house afforded shelter from the persistent rain. She was arrayed
in the blue serge dear to the modern water-nymph; and at intervals
she relieved her feelings by shaking a small fist at the leaden vault
of sky. For the rest, her attention was divided impartially between
her novel, with which she did not seem to make much progress, her
fox-terrier Sancho, and the slowly decreasing lump of paste, artfully
compounded with cotton-wool for consistency, with which, as occasion
arose, she ministered to her companion’s predatory needs. The capture
of a fish was followed inevitably by a disarrangement of her nest
of cushions, and a pathetic petition for its instant release and
restoration to the element from which it had been untimely inveigled.
Occasionally, the rain varied the monotony of the dolorous drizzle by
a vehement and spirited downpour, lasting for some minutes, prompting
one of the occupants of the punt to remark, with misplaced confidence,
that it must clear up soon, after that. Then Sir Geoffrey would abandon
his rod, and beat a retreat to the stern of the punt; and during these
interludes, much desultory conversation ensued. Once, Miss Vandeleur
startled her companion by asking, suddenly, how it was that he seemed
so absurdly young?

“I hope I am not rude?” she added, “but really you do strike me as
almost the youngest person I know. You are much younger than Jack--Mr.
Wilgress--for instance, and it’s only about three years since he left
Eton.”

Sir Geoffrey smiled, wondering a little whether the girl was laughing
at him; for though a man of forty-seven, who has for twenty years
successfully resisted a trying climate, may consider himself as very
far from the burden of old age, it was conceivable that the views of a
maiden in her teens might be very different.

“It’s because I am having such a good time,” he hazarded. “You and your
mother are responsible, you know; before I met you at the Savoy, on
that memorable evening, I was feeling as blue as--as the sky ought to
be if it had any decency, and at least as old as the river. I suppose
it’s true that youth and good spirits are contagious.”

Dorothy gazed at him for a moment reflectively. “How lucky it was that
Uncle Philip took us to the theatre on that evening! It was just a
chance. And we might never have met you.”

“It was lucky for me!” declared the other simply. “But would you have
cared?”

“Of course!” said the girl promptly, but lowering her blue eyes. “You
see, I have never known a real live hero before. Do tell me about your
fight in the hill-fort, or how you caught the Dacoits! Uncle Philip
says that you ought to have had the V.C.”

Sir Geoffrey replied by a little disparaging murmur. “Oh, it was quite
a commonplace affair--all in the day’s work. Any one else would have
done the same.”

Dorothy settled herself back among her cushions resentfully, clasping
her hands, rather sunburned, across her knees.

“I should like to see them!” she declared contemptuously. “That’s just
what that Jack Wilgress said--at least he implied it. It is true, he
apologised afterwards. How I despise Oxford boys!”

“I thought he was a very good fellow,” said Sir Geoffrey,
diplomatically turning the subject from his own achievements. “I
suppose it might improve him to have something to do; but he strikes me
as a very good specimen of the ornamental young man.”

“Ornamental!” echoed Dorothy sarcastically. “It would do him good to
have to work for his living.”

“Poor beggar, he couldn’t help being born with a silver spoon in his
mouth--it isn’t his fault.”

“Spoon!” exclaimed Miss Vandeleur. “A whole dinner service I should
think. A soup-ladle at the very least. It’s quite big enough: perhaps
that accounts for it!”

The girl laughed, swaying back, with the grace of her years, against
her cushions; then, observing that her companion’s grave grey eyes were
fixed upon her, she grew suddenly demure, sighing with a little air of
penitence.

“I am very wicked to-day,” she confessed. “It’s the rain, I suppose,
and want of exercise. Do you ever feel like that, Sir Geoffrey? Do you
ever get into an omnibus and simply loathe and detest every single
person in it? Do you long to swear--real swears, like our army in
Flanders--at everybody you meet, just because it’s rainy or foggy, and
because they are all so ugly and horrid? I do, frequently.”

“I know, I know,” said the other sympathetically, while he reeled in
his line and deftly untied the tiny hook. “Only, the omnibus has not
figured very often in my case; it has generally been a hot court-house,
or a dusty dâk-bungalow full of commercial travellers. But I don’t feel
like that now, at all. I hope I am not responsible for your frame of
mind?”

“Oh,” protested Dorothy, “don’t make me feel such an abandoned wretch!
I should have been much worse if you had not been here. I should have
quarrelled with Uncle Phil, or been rude to my mother, or something
dreadful. I’m perfectly horrid to her sometimes. And as it is, I have
let her go up to town all alone--to see my dressmaker.”

Sir Geoffrey stood up and began to take his rod to pieces. “And are you
quite sure that you haven’t been ‘loathing and detesting’ me all the
afternoon?”

Dorothy picked up her novel and smoothed its leaves reflectively.

“I----But no. I won’t make you too conceited. Look, the sun is actually
coming out! Don’t you think we might take the Canadian up to the weir?
You really ought to be introduced to the big chub under the bridge.”

The rain had almost ceased, and when they had transferred themselves
into the dainty canoe, a few strokes of the paddle which Miss Vandeleur
wielded with such effective grace swept them out into a full flood
of delicate evening sunlight. The sky smiled blue through rapidly
increasing breaks in the clouds; the sunbeams, slanting from the west,
touched with pale gold the quivering trees, which seemed to lift
their wet branches and spread their leaves to court the warm caress.
A new radiance of colour crept into the landscape, as if it had been
a picture from which a smoky glass was withdrawn; the water grew very
still--this too was in the manner of a picture--with the peace of a
summer evening, brimming with an unbroken surface luminously from
bank to bank. Strange guttural cries of water-birds sounded from the
reed-beds; from the next reach came the rhythmic pulse of oars, faint
splashes, and the brisk rattle of row-locks; voices and laughter
floated down from the lock, travelling far beyond belief in the hushed
stillness of the evening. The wake of the light canoe trailed unbroken
to the shadows of the boathouse, and the wet paddle gleamed as it slid
through the water. Presently Dorothy stayed her hand.

“What an enchanting world it is!” she murmured, with wide eyes full of
the glamour of the setting sun. “Beautiful, beautiful----! How soon one
forgets the fogs, and rain, and cold! I feel as if I had lived in this
fairyland always.”

Her lips trembled a little as she spoke, and Sir Geoffrey found
something in the pathos of her youth which held him silent. When they
broke the spell of silence, their words were trivial, perhaps, but
the language was that of old friends, simple and direct. Sir Geoffrey
at least, for whom the charm of the occasion was a gift so rare that
he scarcely dared to desecrate it by mental criticism, was far from
welcoming the interruption which presently occurred, in the shape of
a youth, arrayed in immaculate flannels and the colours of a popular
rowing club, who hailed them cheerfully from a light skiff, resting on
his sculls and drifting alongside while he rolled a cigarette.


III

Dorothy sank down, rather wearily, in the low basket-chair which stood
near the open window of her mother’s bedroom--a tall French window,
with a wide balcony overrun by climbing roses, and a view of the river,
and waited for Mrs. Vandeleur to dismiss her maid. As she lay there,
adjusting absently the loose tresses of her hair, she could feel the
breath of the faint breeze as it wandered, gathering a light burden of
fragrance, through the dusky roses; she could see the river, dimly,
where the moonbeams touched its ripples, and once or twice the sound of
voices reached her from the distant smoking-room. The closing of the
door as the maid went out disturbed her reverie, and turning a little
in her chair she found her mother regarding her thoughtfully.

“No,” said Dorothy, swiftly interpreting her mother’s glance. “You
mustn’t send me away, my pretty little mother. I’ll promise not to
catch cold. I haven’t been able to talk to you all day.”

Mrs. Vandeleur half closed the window, and then seated herself with an
expression of resignation on the arm of her daughter’s chair. In the
dim light shed by the two candles on the dressing-table, one would have
thought them two sisters, plotting innocently the discomfiture of man.
The occasion did not prove so stimulating to conversation as might have
been expected. For a few minutes both were silent; Dorothy began to
hum an air from the Savoy opera, rather recklessly; she kicked off one
of her slippers, and it fell on the polished oak floor with a little
clatter.

“Little donkey!” murmured her mother sweetly. “So much for your
talking. I’m going to bed at once.” Then she added, carelessly, “Did
you see Jack to-day?”

The humming paused abruptly; then it went on for a second, and paused
again.

“Oh yes, the inevitable Mr. Wilgress was on the river, as usual. He
nearly ran us down in that idiotic skiff of his.”

Mrs. Vandeleur raised her eyebrows, gazing at her unconscious daughter
reflectively.

“You didn’t see him alone, then?” she inquired presently.

“Who? Mr. Wilgress? Ye-es, I think so. When we got back to the
boathouse he insisted on taking me out again in the canoe, to show me
the correct Indian stroke. Much he knows about it! That’s why I was so
late for dinner. Oh, please don’t talk about Mr. Wilgress.”

“Mr. Wilgress again?” murmured Mrs. Vandeleur. “I thought it always
used to be ‘Jack.’”

“Only, only by accident,” said the girl weakly. “And when he wasn’t
there.”

“Well, he isn’t here now. At least I hope not. You--you haven’t
quarrelled, have you Dolly?”

“No--yes. I don’t know. He--he asked me--oh, he was ridiculous. How I
hate boys--and jealousy.”

Mrs. Vandeleur shivered, then rose abruptly and closed the window
against which she leaned, gazing down at the formless mass of the
shrubs which cowered over their shadows on the lawn. Her mind, vaguely
troubled for some days past, and now keenly on the alert, travelled
swiftly back, bridging a space of nearly twenty years, to a scene
strangely like this, in which she and her mother had held the stage.
She too, a girl then of Dorothy’s eighteen years, had brought the
halting story of her doubts and scruples to her natural counsellor:
she could remember still how the instinct of reticence had struggled
with the yearning for sympathy, for the comfort of the confessional.
She could recall now and appreciate her mother’s tact and patient
questioning, her own perversity, the dumbness which seemed independent
of her own volition. A commonplace page of life. Two men at her
feet, and the girl unskilled to read her heart: one had spoken--that
was Dick Vandeleur, careless, brilliant, the heir to half a county;
the other--her old friend; she could not bear to think of him now.
Knowledge had come too late, and the light which made her wonder
scornfully at her blindness. And her mother--she of course had played
the worldly part; but her counsel had been honest, without bias: it
were cruel to blame her now. Loyal though she was, Margaret Vandeleur
had asked herself an hundred times, yielding to that love of threading
a labyrinth which rules most women, what would have been the story
of her life if she had steeled herself to stand or fall by her own
judgment, if she had refused to allow her mother to drop into the
wavering scale the words which had turned it, ever so slightly, in
favour of the richer man, the man whom she had married, whose name she
bore.

It seemed plain enough, to a woman’s keen vision--what sense so subtle,
yet so easily beguiled--that Dorothy’s choice was embarrassed, just
as her own had been. The girl and her two admirers--how the old story
repeated itself!--one, Jack Wilgress, the good-natured, good-looking
idler, whose devotion to the river threatened to make him amphibious,
and whose passion for scribbling verse bade fair to launch him adrift
among the cockle-shell fleet of Minor Poets; the other--Geoffrey
Vincent! To call upon Margaret Vandeleur to guide her daughter’s choice
between two men of whom Geoffrey Vincent was one--surely here was the
end and crown of Fate’s relentless irony. She felt herself blushing as
she pressed her forehead against the cool window-pane, put to shame
by the thoughts which the comparison suggested, which would not be
stifled. Right or wrong, at least her mother had been impartial: there
was a sting in this, a failure of her precedent. She sighed, concluding
mutely that silence was her only course; even if she would, she could
not follow in her mother’s footsteps--the girl must abide by her own
judgment.

When she turned, smiling faintly, the light of the flickering candles
fell upon her face, betraying a pallor which startled Dorothy from her
reverie. She sprang from her chair, reproaching her selfishness.

“You poor, tired, little mother,” she murmured penitently, with a hasty
kiss. “How could I be so cruel as to keep you up after your journey!
I’m a wretch, but I’m really going now. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” said her mother, caressing the vagrant coils of the
girl’s amber-coloured hair. “Don’t worry yourself; everything will come
right if--if you listen to your own heart.”

Dorothy’s answer was precluded by another kiss. “It’s so full of you
that it can’t be bothered to think of any one else,” she declared
plaintively, as she turned towards the door. Then she paused, fingering
nervously a little heap of books which lay upon a table. “He--he isn’t
so very old, you know,” she murmured softly before she made her escape.

When she was alone Mrs. Vandeleur sank into the chair which her
daughter had just quitted, nestling among the cushions and knitting
her brows in thought. The clock on the mantelpiece had struck twelve
before she rose, and then she paused for an instant in front of the
looking-glass, gazing into it half timidly before she extinguished
the candles. The face which she saw there was manifestly pretty, in
spite of the trouble which lurked in the tired eyes, and when she
turned away, a hovering smile was struggling with the depression at the
corners of the delicate, mobile lips.


IV

When Sir Geoffrey returned to Riverside, three days later, after a
brief sojourn in London, spent for the most part at the office of his
solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn, he found Mrs. Vandeleur presiding over
a solitary tea-table in a shady corner of the garden. A few chairs
sociably disposed under the gnarled walnut-tree, and a corresponding
number of empty tea-cups, suggested that her solitude had not been of
long duration, and this impression was confirmed when Mrs. Vandeleur
told her guest that if he had presented himself a short quarter of an
hour earlier he would have been welcomed in a manner more worthy of his
deserts.

Sir Geoffrey drew one of the low basket chairs up to the table,
protesting, as he accepted a cup of tea, that he could not have wished
for better fortune.

“This is very delightful,” he declared. “I don’t regret the tardiness
of my train in the least. The other charming people are on the river, I
suppose?”

Mrs. Vandeleur nodded. “Yes, the Patersons have just taken up their
quarters in that house-boat, which you must have noticed, near the
lock, and my brother and Dorothy have gone with Jack Wilgress and his
sisters to call upon them. You ought to have seen Daisy Wilgress; she
is very pretty.”

Sir Geoffrey smiled gravely, sipping his tea.

“If she is prettier than your daughter, Miss Wilgress must be very
dangerous. But I must see her with my own eyes before I believe that.”

“Oh, she is!” declared Mrs. Vandeleur, laughing lightly, but throwing a
quick glance at him. “Ask Philip; he is more wrapped up in her than he
has been in anything since his first brief.”

“Poor Philip!” said the other quietly, stooping to pick a fallen leaf
from the grass at his feet. “I--I have a fellow-feeling for him.”

“You know you may smoke if you want to,” interposed Mrs. Vandeleur,
rather hurriedly. “And perhaps--if you really won’t have any more
tea--you might like to go in pursuit of the other people; I don’t think
they have taken all the boats. But I daresay you are tired? London is
so fatiguing--and business.”

Sir Geoffrey smiled, his white teeth showing pleasantly against the tan
of his lean, good-humoured face.

“I _am_ rather tired, I believe,” he owned. “I have been spending a
great deal of time in my solicitor’s waiting-room, pretending to read
_The Times_. And I have been thinking--that is always fatiguing. If I
am not in your way, I should like to stay here.”

Mrs. Vandeleur professed her satisfaction by a polite little murmur,
leaning forward in her chair to marshal the scattered tea-cups on the
tray, while Sir Geoffrey watched her askance, rather timidly, with a
keen appreciation of the subtle charm of her personality; her face,
like a perfect cameo, or some rare pale flower, seeming to have gained
rather in beauty by the deliberate passage from youth; winning, just as
some pictures do, an added grace of refinement, a delicacy, which the
slight modification of contours served only to intensify.

“I told you just now that I had been thinking,” he said presently, when
she had resumed her task of embroidering initials in the corner of a
handkerchief: “would it surprise you if I said that I had been thinking
of you?”

Mrs. Vandeleur raised her eyebrows slightly, her gaze still intent upon
her patient needle.

“Perhaps it was natural that you should think of us,” she hazarded.

“But I meant you,” he continued; “you, the Margaret of the old days,
before I went away. For I used to call you ‘Margaret’ then. We were
great friends, you know.”

“I have always thought of you as a friend,” she said simply. “Yes, we
were great friends before--before you went away.”

“It doesn’t seem so long ago to me,” he declared, almost plaintively,
struck by something in the tone of her voice. Mrs. Vandeleur smiled
tolerantly, scrutinising her embroidery, with her head poised on one
side, a little after the manner of a bird.

“And now that I have found you again,” he added with intention,
dropping his eyes till they rested on the river, rippling past the
wooden landing-stage below in the sunshine, “I--I don’t want to lose
you, Margaret!”

Mrs. Vandeleur met this declaration with a smile, which was courteous
rather than cordial, merely acknowledging, as of right, the propriety
of the aspiration, treating it as quite conventional. The simplicity
of the gesture testified eloquently of the discipline of twenty years;
only a woman would have detected the shadow of apprehension in her
eyes, the trembling of the hands which seemed so placidly occupied.
Her mind was already anxiously on the alert, racing rapidly over the
now familiar ground which she had quartered of late so heedfully. For
her, his words were ominous; it was of Dorothy surely that he wished
to speak, and yet----! In the stress of expectation her thoughts took
strange flights, following vague clues fantastically. The inveterate
habit of retrospection carried her back, in spite of her scruples; her
honest desire to think singly of Dorothy, regarding the fortune of her
own life as irrevocably settled, impelled her irresistibly to call to
the stage of her imagination a scene which she had often set upon it, a
duologue, entirely fictive, which might, but for her perversity, have
been enacted--twenty years ago.

Sir Geoffrey rose, and stood leaning with one hand on the back of his
chair. This interruption--or perhaps it was the sound of oars and
voices which floated in growing volume from the river--served to recall
his companion to the present. The silence, of brief duration actually,
seemed intolerable. She must break it, and when she spoke it was to
name her daughter, aimlessly.

“Dorothy?” repeated Sir Geoffrey, as she paused. “She is
extraordinarily like you were before I went away. Not that you are
changed--it is delightful to come back and find you the same. It’s only
when she is with you that I can realise that there is a difference,
a----”

“I was never so good as Dorothy,” put in Mrs. Vandeleur quickly; “she
will never have the same reason to blame herself----I don’t think you
could imagine what she has been to me.”

“I think I can,” said Sir Geoffrey simply. Then he added, rather shyly:
“Really, we seem to be very good friends already: it’s very nice of
her--it would be so natural for her to--to resent the intrusion of an
old fellow like me.”

“You need not be afraid of that; she looks upon you as--as a friend
already.”

“Thank you!” murmured the other. “And you think she might grow to--to
like me, in time?”

Mrs. Vandeleur nodded mutely. Sir Geoffrey followed for a moment the
deliberate entry and re-entry of her needle, reflectively; then, as
his eyes wandered, he realised vaguely that a boat had reached the
landing-stage, and that people were there: he recognised young Wilgress
and Miss Vandeleur.

“You said just now that you always thought of me as a friend,” he
began. “I wonder----Oh! it’s no good,” he added quickly, with a nervous
movement of his hands, “I can’t make pretty speeches! After all, it’s
simple; why should I play the coward? I can take ‘no’ for answer, if
the worst comes to the worst, and----Margaret, I know it’s asking a
great deal, but--I want you to marry me.”

She cast a swift, startled glance at him, turning in her chair, and
then dropped her eyes, asking herself bewilderedly whether this
was still some fantasy. The words which he murmured now, pleading
incoherently with her silence, confirmed the hopes which, in spite of
her scrupulous devotion, refused to be gainsaid, thrusting themselves
shamelessly into the foreground of her troubled thoughts. An inward
voice, condemned by her wavering resolution as a whisper from the lips
of treachery, suggested plausibly that after all Dorothy might have
made a mistake; she repelled it fiercely, taking a savage pleasure in
her pain, accusing herself, with vehement blame, as one who would fain
stand in the way of her daughter’s happiness. Even if she had deserved
these fruits of late harvest which seemed to dangle within her grasp,
even if her right to garner them had not been forfeited long ago by
her folly of the past, how could she endure to figure as a rival,
triumphing in her own daughter’s discomfiture? Womanly pride and a
thousand scruples barred the way.

“I love you,” she heard him say again; “I believe I have always loved
you since----But you know how it was in the old days.”

“Don’t remind me of that!” she pleaded, almost fiercely; “I was--I
can’t bear to think of what I did! You ought not to forgive me; I don’t
deserve it.”

“Forgive?” he echoed, blankly.

“Oh, you are generous--but it is impossible, impossible; it is all a
mistake; let us forget it.”

“I don’t understand! Is it that--that you don’t care for me?”

Margaret gave a despairing little sigh, dropping her hands on the sides
of her chair.

“You don’t know,” she murmured. “It isn’t right. No--oh, it must be No!”

Sir Geoffrey echoed her sigh. As he watched her silently, the instinct
of long reticence making his forbearance natural, he saw a new
expression dawn into her troubled face. Her eyes were fixed intently
on the river; that they should be fixed was not strange, but there
was a light of interest in them which induced Sir Geoffrey, half
involuntarily, to bend his gaze in the same direction. He saw that
Dorothy had now disembarked, and was standing, a solitary figure,
close to the edge of the landing-stage. Something in her pose seemed
to imply that she was talking, and just at this moment she moved to
one side, revealing the head and shoulders of Jack Wilgress, which
overtopped the river-bank in such a manner as to suggest that he was
standing in the punt, of which the bamboo pole rose like a slender
mast above his head. The group was certainly pictorial: the silhouette
of Dorothy’s pretty figure telling well against the silvery river,
and the young man’s pose, too, lending itself to an effective bit of
composition; but Sir Geoffrey felt puzzled, and even a little hurt,
by the interest that Margaret displayed at a moment which he at least
had found sufficiently strenuous. He turned, stooping to pick up his
hat; then he paused, and was about to speak, when Mrs. Vandeleur
interrupted him, mutely, with a glance, followed swiftly by the return
of her eyes to the river. Acquiescing patiently, Sir Geoffrey perceived
that a change had occurred in the grouping of the two young people.
Wilgress had drawn nearer to the girl; his figure stood higher against
the watery background, apparently he had one foot on the step of the
landing-stage. Dorothy extended a hand, which he clasped and held
longer than one would have reckoned for in the ordinary farewell. The
girl shook her head; another movement, and the punt began to glide
reluctantly from the shore; then it turned slowly, swinging round and
heading down-stream. Dorothy raised one hand to the bosom of her dress,
and before she dropped it to her side threw something maladroitly
towards her departing companion. Wilgress caught the flower--it was
evidently a flower--making a dash which involved the loss of his
punt-pole; a ripple of laughter, and Dorothy, unconscious of the four
eyes which watched her from the shadows of the walnut tree, turned
slowly, and began to climb the grassy slope.

Mrs. Vandeleur’s eyelids drooped, and her lips, which had been parted
for an instant in a pensive smile, trembled a little; she sighed,
tapping the ground lightly with her foot, then sank back in her chair
and seemed lost in contemplation of the needlework that lay upon
her lap. Sir Geoffrey began to move away, but turned suddenly, and
stooping, took one of her hands reverently in his own, clasping it as
it lay upon the arm of her chair.

“Margaret,” he said, “forgive me; but must it be good-bye, after all
these years, or is there a chance for me?”

Mrs. Vandeleur’s reply was inaudible; but her hand, though it fluttered
for a moment, was not withdrawn.




Twilight

By Olive Custance

    Mother of the dews, dark eyelashed Twilight!
    Low-lidded Twilight o’er the valley’s brim.
                                                               MEREDITH.


    SPIRIT of Twilight, through your folded wings
      I catch a glimpse of your averted face,
    And rapturous on a sudden, my soul sings
      “Is not this common earth a holy place?”

    Spirit of Twilight, you are like a song
      That sleeps, and waits a singer, like a hymn
    That God finds lovely and keeps near Him long,
      Till it is choired by aureoled cherubim.

    Spirit of Twilight, in the golden gloom
      Of dreamland dim I sought you, and I found
    A woman sitting in a silent room
      Full of white flowers that moved and made no sound.

    These white flowers were the thoughts you bring to all,
      And the room’s name is Mystery where you sit,
    Woman whom we call Twilight, when night’s pall
      You lift across our Earth to cover it.




Three Pictures

By Walter Sickert


    I. Collins’s Music Hall, Islington
   II. The Lion Comique
  III. Charley’s Aunt


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[Illustration]

[Illustration]




Tobacco Clouds

By Lionel Johnson


CLOUD upon cloud: and, if I were to think that an image of life can lie
in wreathing, blue tobacco smoke, pleasant were the life so fancied.
Its fair changes in air, its gentle motions, its quiet dying out and
away at last, should symbolise something more than perfect idleness.
Cloud upon cloud: and I will think, as I have said: it is amusing to
think so.

It is that death, out and away upon the air, which charms me: charms
more than the manner of the blown red rose, full of dew at morning,
upon the grass at sunset. The clouds’ end, their death in air, fills
me with a very beauty of desire; it has no violence in it, and it is
almost invisible. Think of it! While the cloud lived, it was seemly
and various; and with a graceful change it passed away: the image of a
reasonable life is there, hanging among tobacco clouds. An image and
a test: an image, because elaborated by fancy: a true and appealing
image, and so, to my present way of life, a test.

That way is, to walk about the old city, with “a spirit in my feet,” as
Shelley and Catullus have it, of joyous aims and energies; and to speed
home to my solitary room over the steep High Street; in an arm-chair,
to read Milton and Lucretius, with others. There is nothing unworthy
in all this: there is open air, an ancient city, a lonely chamber,
perfect poets. Those should make up a passing life well: for death!
I can watch tobacco clouds, exploring the secret of their beautiful
conclusion. And, indeed, I think that already this life has something
of their manner, those wheeling clouds! It has their light touch upon
the world, and certainly their harmlessness. Early morning, when the
dew sparkles red; honey, and coffee, and eggs for a breakfast; the
quick, eager walk between the limes, through the Close of fine grass,
to the river fields; then the blithe return to my poets; all that,
together, comes to resemble the pleasant spheres of tobacco cloud; I
mean, the circling hours, in their passage, and in their change, have
something of a dreamy order and progression. Such little incidents!
Now, grey air and whistling leaves: now, a marketing crowd of country
folk round the Cross: and presently, clear candles; with Milton, in
rich Baskervile type, or Lucretius, in the exquisite print of early
Italy.

Such little incidents, in a world of battles and of plagues: of violent
death by sea and land! Yet this quiet life, too, has difficulties and
needs: its changes must be gone through with a ready pleasure and a
mind unhesitating. For, trivial though they be in aspect and amount,
yet the consecration of them, to be an holy discipline of experience,
is so much the greater an attempt: it is an art. Each thing, be it
man, or book, or place, should have its rights, when it encounters
me: each has its proper quality, its peculiar spirit, not to be
misinterpreted by me in carelessness, nor overlooked with impatience.
That is clear: but neither must I vaunt my just view of common life.
Meditation, at twilight, by the window looking toward the bare downs,
is very different from that anxious examination of motives, dear to
sedulous souls. My meditation is only still life: the clouds of smoke
go up, grey and blue; the earlier stars come out, above the sunset
and the melancholy downs; and deep, mournful bells ring slowly among
the valley trees. Then, if my day have been successful, what peace
follows, and how profound a charm! The little things of the day, sudden
glances of light upon grey stone, pleasant snatches of organ music
from the church, quaint rustic sights in some near village: they come
back upon me, gentle touches of happiness, airs of repose. And when
the mysteries come about me, the fearfulness of life, and the shadow
of night; then, have I not still the blue, grey clouds, _occultis de
rebus quo referam_? So I escape the tribulations of doubt, those gloomy
tribulations: and I live in the strength of dreams, which never doubt.

Is it all a delusion? But that is a foolish wonder: nothing is a
delusion, except the extremes of pleasure and of pain. Take what
you will of the world; its crowds, or its calms: there is nothing
altogether wrong to every one. Lucretius, upon his watch-tower, deny it
as he may, found some exultation and delight in the lamentable prospect
below: it filled him with a magnificent darkness of soul, a princely
compassion at heart. And Milton, in his evil days, felt himself to be
tragic and austere: he knew it, not as a proud boast, but as a proud
fact. No! life is never wrong, altogether, to every one: you and I, he
and she, priest and penitent, master and slave: one with another, we
compose a very glory of existence before the unseen Powers. Therefore,
I believe in my measured way of life; its careful felicities, fashioned
out of little things: to you, the change of Ministries, and the
accomplishment of conquests, bring their wealth of rich emotion: to
me, who am apart from the louder concerns of life, the flowering of
the limes, and the warm autumn rains, bring their pensive beauty and a
store of memories.

Is it I, am indolent? Is it you, are clamorous? Why should it be
either? Let us say, I am the lover of quiet things, and you are
enamoured of mighty events. Each, without undue absorption in his
taste, relishes the savour of a different experience.

But I think, I am no egoist: no melancholy spectator of things,
cultivating his intellect with old poetry, nourishing his senses upon
rural nature. There are times, when the swarms of men press hard
upon a solitary; he hears the noise of the streets, the heavy vans
of merchandise, the cry of the railway whistle: and in a moment, his
thoughts travel away, to London, to Liverpool; to great docks and to
great ships; and away, till he is watching the dissimilar bustle of
Eastern harbours, and hearing the discordant sounds of Chinese workmen.
The blue smoke curls and glides away, with blue pagodas, and snowy
almond bloom, and cherry flowers, circling and gleaming in it, like
a narcotic vision. O magic of tobacco! Dreams are there, and superb
images, and a somnolent paradise. Sometimes, the swarms of humanity
press wearily and hardly; with a cruel insistence, crushing out my
right to happiness. I think, rather I brood, upon the fingers that
deftly rolled the cigarette, upon the people in tobacco plantations,
upon all the various commerce involved in its history: how do they all
fare, those many workers? Strolling up and down, devouring my books
through their lettered backs; remembering the workers with leather,
paper, ink, who toiled at them, they frighten me from the peace.
What a full world it is! What endless activities there are! And, oh,
Nicomachean Ethics! how much conscious pleasure is in them all! Things,
mere tangible things, have a terrible power of education: of calling
out from the mind innumerable thoughts and sympathies. Like childish
catechisms and categories--_Whence have we sago?_--plain substances
introduce me to swarms of men, before unrealised. And they all lived
and died, and cared for their children, or not, and led reasonable
lives, or not: and, without any alternative, had casual thoughts and
constant passions. Did each one of them ever stop in his work, and
think that the world revolved about him alone; and all was his, and for
him? Most men may have thought so, and shivered a little afterwards;
and worked on steadily. Or did each one of them ever think that he
was always beset with companions, hordes of men and women, necessary
and inevitable? Then, he must have struggled a little in his mind, as
a man fights for air, and worked on steadily. It does not do: this
interrogation of mysteries, which are also facts. Nor am I called upon,
from without or from within, to write an Essay upon the Problem of
Economic Distribution. _Præsentia temnis!_ Nature says to me: it is the
stir of the world, and the great play of forces, that I am wailing,
to no end. Let the great life continue, and the sun shine upon bright
palaces; and geraniums, red geraniums, glow at the windows of dingy
courts; death and sorrow come upon both, and upon me. And on all sides
there is infinite tenderness; the invincible good-will, which says kind
and cheerful things to every one sometimes, by a friend’s mouth; the
humane pieties of the world, which make glad the _Civitas Dei_, and
make endurable the _Regnum Hominis_. I need not make myself miserable.

Full night at last; the dead of night, as dull folk have it; ignorant
persons, who know nothing of nocturnal beauty, of night’s lively magic.
It was a good thought, to come out of my lonely room, to look at the
cloisters by moonlight, and to wander round the Close, under the black
shadows of the buttresses, while the moon is white upon their strange
pinnacles. There is no noise, but only a silence, which seems very old;
old, as the grey monuments and the weathered arches. The wreathing,
blue tobacco clouds look thin and pale, like breath upon a dark frosty
night; they drift about these old precincts, with a kind of uncertainty
and discomfort; one would think, they wanted a rich Mediterranean
night, heavy odours of roses, and very fiery stars. Instead, they break
upon mouldering traceries, and doleful cherubs of the last century;
upon sunken headstones, and black oak doors with ironwork over them.
Perhaps the cigarette is southern and Latin, southern and Oriental,
after all; and I am a dreamer, out of place in this northern grey
antiquity. If it be so, I can taste the subtle pleasures of contrast:
and, dwelling upon the singular features of this old town, I can make
myself a place in it, as its conscious critic and adopted alien. There
is a curious apprehension of enjoyment, a genuine touch of luxury, in
this nocturnal visit to these old northern things! I consider, with
satisfaction, how the Stuart king, who spurned tobacco contumeliously,
put a devoted faith in witches, those northern daughters of the devil;
northern, and very different from the dames of Thessaly; from the
crones of Propertius, and of Horace, and of Apuleius the Golden. Who
knows, but I may hear strange voices in the near aisle before cockcrow?
By night, night in the north, happen cold and dismal things; and then,
what a night is this! Chilly stars, and wild, grey clouds, flying over
a misty moon.

At last, here comes a great and solemn sound; the commanding bells of
the cathedral tower, in their iron, midnight toll. Through the sombre
strokes, and striking into their long echoes, pierce the thin cries
of bats, that wheel in air, like lost creatures who hate themselves;
the uncanny flitter-mice! They trace superb, invisibles circles on the
night; crying out faintly and plaintively, with no sort of delight in
their voices: things of keen teeth, furry bodies, and skeleton wings
covered scantily in leather. The big moths, too: they blunder against
my face, and dash red trails of fire off my cigarette; so busily they
spin about the darkness. _Sadducismus triumphatus!_ Yes, truly: here
are little, white spirits awake and at some faery work; white, as
heather upon the Cornish cliffs is white, and all innocent, rare things
in heaven and earth. There is nothing dreadful, it seems, about this
night, and this place; no glorious fury of evil spirits, doing foul and
ugly things; only the quiet town asleep under a wild sky, and gentle
creatures of the night moving about ancient places. And the wind rises,
with a sound of the sea, murmuring over the earth and sighing away to
the sea: the trembling sea, beyond the downs, which steals into the
land by great creeks and glimmering channels; with swaying, taper masts
along them, and lantern lights upon black barges. Certainly, this is no
Lucretian night: not that tremendous

                    _Nox, et noctis signa severa
    Noctivagæque faces cæli, flammæque volantes._

Rather, it reminds me of the Miltonic night, which is peopled
alluringly with

                            “faery elves,
    Whose midnight revels by a forest side
    Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
    Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon
    Sits arbitress:”

a Miltonic night, and a Shakespearean dawn; for the white morning has
just peered along the horizon, white morning, with dusky flames behind
it; and the spirits, the visions, vanish away, “following darkness,
like a dream.”

The streets are very still, with that silence of sleeping cities,
which seems ready to start into confused cries; as though the Smiter
of the Firstborn were travelling through the households. There is the
Catholic chapel, in its Georgian, quaint humility; recalling an age of
beautiful, despised simplicity; the age of French emigrant old priests
and vicars-apostolic, who stood for the Supreme Pontiff, in grey wigs.
The sweet limes are swaying against its singular, umbered windows,
with their holy saints and prophets in last-century design; ruffled,
querulous persons looking very bluff and blown. I wonder, how it would
be inside; I suppose, night has a little weakened that lingering smell
of daily incense, which seems so immemorial and so sad. Wonderful grace
of the mighty Roman Church! This low square place, where the sanctuary
is poor and open, without any mystical touch of retirement and of
loftiness, has yet the unfailing charm, the venerable mystery, which
attend the footsteps of the Church; the same air of command, the same
look of pleading, fill this homely, comfortable shrine, which simple
country gentlemen set up for the ministrations of harassed priests, in
an age of no enthusiasm. I like to think that this quiet chapel, in the
obedience of Rome, in communion with that supreme apostolate, is always
open to me upon this winding little by-street; it fills me with perfect
memories, and it seems to bless me.

But here is a benediction of light! the quick sun, reddening half the
heavens, and rising gloriously. In the valley, clusters of elm rock and
swing with the breeze, quivering for joy: far away, the bare uplands
roll against the sunrise, calm and pastoral; _otia dia_ of the morning.
Surely the hours have gone well, and according to my preference; one
dying into another, as the tobacco clouds die. My meditations, too,
have been peaceful enough; and, though solitary, I have had fine
companions. What would the moral philosophers, those puzzled sages,
think of me? An harmless hedonist? An amateur in morals, who means
well, though meaning very little? Nay! let the moralist by profession
give, to whom he will, _sa musique, sa flamme_: to any practical
person, who is a wise shareholder and zealous vestryman. For myself,
my limited and dreamy self, I eschew these upright businesses; upright
memories and meditations please me more, and to live with as little
action as may be. Action: why do they talk of action? Match me, for
pure activity, one evening of my dreams, when life and death fill my
mind with their messengers, and the days of old come back to me. And
now, homewards, for a little sleep; that profound and rich slumber
at early dawn which is my choice delight. A sleep, bathed in musical
impressions, and filled with fresh dreams, all impossible and happy;
four hours, and five, and six perhaps: then the cathedral matin bell
will chime in with my fancies, and I shall wake harmoniously. I shall
feel infinitely cheerful, after the spirit of the _Compleat Angler_;
I shall remember that I was once at Ware, and at Amwell, those placid
haunts of Walton. A conviction of beauty, and contentment in life will
lay hold on me, more than commonly; it is probable that I shall read
_The Spectator_, and Addison, rather than Steele, at breakfast. And I
know which paper it will be: it will be about _Will Wimble_ coming up
to the house, with two or three hazel twigs in his hand, fresh cut in
_Sir Roger’s_ woods. Or, if I prove faithful to my great Lucretius:
the man, not the book, for I read him in the Giuntine: I will read
that marvellous _It ver et Venus_; that dancing masque of beauty. For
_L’Allegro_, I do not read that; it is read aloud to me by the morning,
with exquisite, bright cadences. After my honey from the flowers of a
very rustic farm, and my coffee, from some wonderful Eastern place;
and my eggs, marked by the careful housewife as she took them from her
henhouse, covered with stonecrop over its old tiles; after all these
delicates, now comes the first cigarette, pungent and exhilarating. As
the grey blue clouds go up, the ruddy sunlight glows through them,
straight as an arrow through the gold. Away they wander, out of the
window, flung back upon the air, against the roses, and disappear in
the buoyant morning.

My thoughts go with them, into the morning, into all the mornings over
the world. They travel through the lands, and across the seas, and are
everywhere at home, enjoying the presence of life. And past things,
old histories, are turned to pleasant recollections: a _pot-pourri_,
justly seasoned, and subtly scented; the evil humours and the monstrous
tyrannies pass away, and leave only the happiness and the peace.

Call me, my dear friend, what reproachful name you please; but, by
your leave, the world is better for my cheerfulness. True, should the
terrible issues come upon me, demanding high courage, and finding
but good temper, then give me your prayers, for I have my misdoubts.
Till then, let me cultivate my place in life, nurturing its comelier
flowers; taking the little things of time with a grateful relish and a
mind at rest. So hours and years pass into hours and years, gently, and
surely, and orderly; as these clouds, grey and blue clouds, of tobacco
smoke, pass up to the air, and away upon the wind; incense of a goodly
savour, cheering the thoughts of my heart, before passing away, to
disappear at last.




Reiselust

By Annie Macdonell


          NAY, Love, but stay thy blame;
          For if men have their claim,
          The day’s but theirs--
    Poor gift, the day of heat and cares!
    Thou hast the night, the calm cool night,
    When the soul’s garden blooms in sight,
    With roses tinted by the moon’s soft smile,
    On that far fringed horizon isle.
    The night, the long sweet night is thine,
    Then I awake, and find thee, soul of mine.

          Ah, rushing hours beneath the sun!
          Ah, fevered crying haste, have done!
          Yet let your coursing swifter run!
    Now let the still night fall.
    I hear the water lapping ’gainst the wall,
    I open wide my door unto the sea
    Whence Death, thy keeper, brings thee back to me.
    So mild he waits without, yet laughs at Life,
    That cannot give her hirelings such a wife.

          Day, have I not paid the toll?
          My body given the whole
          That will let pass my soul?
    The roses of the morn lie thick on my Love’s bier,
    And she is risen; she is no longer here.
    A star upon the stern she beckons me.
    Sweet Death, one dawn, let me go back with thee,
    Sweet Death, take me from out the noisy light
    Into thy night, thy comforting still night.

          Yea, soon, for my Love’s sake,
          Sweet Death my hand will take,
          And I shall not awake
    Till past the blooming isle.
    Then shall my eyelids quiver ’neath her smile,
    And I shall gaze, and from my Love’s clear eyes
    Shall learn her slow wide learning, and be wise,
    Shall learn the speech they speak across the sea:
    ’Tis a large language my Love speaks to me.

          Then far beyond to sail,
          And further further coasts to hail,
          And ventures shall not fail.
    And missionary dreams my Love and I
    We’ll hover mid the world’s troubled sky,
    And sleeping men to discontent shall tease,
    To venture further skies and wider seas.

          Have I not guessed the meaning of the dark?
          Thy hand, O Death! To-night let me embark.




“To Every Man a Damsel or Two”

By C. S.


HE wandered up the carpeted steps, rather afraid all the while of the
two tall men in uniform who opened the great doors wide to let him into
the soft warm light and babble of voices within. At the top he paused,
and slowly unbuttoned his overcoat, not knowing which way to turn; but
the crowd swept him up, and carried him round, until he found himself
leaning against a padded wall of plush, looking over a sea of heads at
the stage far beneath. He turned round, and stood watching the happy
crowd, which laughed, and talked, and nodded ceaselessly to itself.
Near him, on a sofa, with a table before her, was a woman spreading
herself out like some great beautiful butterfly on a bed of velvet
pansies. He stood admiring her half unconsciously for some time, and at
last, remembering that he was tired and sleepy, and seeing that there
was still plenty of room, he threaded his way across and sat down.

The butterfly began tossing a wonderful little brown satin shoe, and
tapping it against the leg of the table. Then the parasol slipped
across him, and fell to the ground. He hastened to pick it up, lifting
his hat as he did so. She seemed surprised, and glancing at a man
leaning against the wall, caught his eye, and they both laughed. He
blushed a good deal, and wondered what he had done wrong. She spread
herself out still further in his direction, and cast side glances at
him from under her Gainsborough.

“What were you laughing at just now?” he said impulsively.

“My dear boy, when?”

“With that man.”

“Which man?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, blushing again.

She looked up, and winked at the man leaning against the wall.

“Have I offended you by speaking to you?” he said, looking with much
concern into her eyes.

She put a little scented net of a handkerchief up to her mouth, and
went into uncontrollable fits of laughter.

“What a funny boy you are!” she gasped. “Do do it again.”

He looked at her in amazement, and moved a little further away.

“I’m going to tell the waiter to bring me a port--after that last bit
of business.”

“I don’t understand all this,” he said desperately: “I wish I had never
spoken to you; I wish I had never come in here at all.”

“You’re very rude all of a sudden. Now don’t be troublesome and say
you’re too broke to pay for drinks,” she added as the waiter put the
port down with great deliberation opposite her, and held out the empty
tray respectfully to him. He stared.

“Why don’t you pay, you cuckoo?”

Mechanically he put down a florin, and the waiter counted out the
change.

There was a pause. She fingered the stem of her wine-glass, taking
little sips, and watching him all the while.

“How often have you been here before?” she said, suddenly catching at
his sleeve. “You must tell me. I fancy I know your face: surely I’ve
met you before somewhere?”

“This is the first time I have ever been to a music-hall,” he said
doggedly.

She drank off her port directly.

“Come--come away at once. Yes, all right--I’m coming with you; so go
along.”

“But I’ve only just paid to come in,” he said hesitatingly.

“Never mind the paying,” and she stamped her little satin foot, “but
do as I tell you, and go.” And taking his arm, she led him through the
doors down to the steps, where the wind blew cold, and the gas jets
roared fitfully above.

“Go,” she said, pushing him out, “and never come here again; stick to
the theatres, you will like them best.” And she ran up the steps and
was gone.

He rushed after her. The two tall men in uniform stepped before the
doors.

“No re-admission, sir,” said one, bowing respectfully and touching his
cap.

“But that lady,” he said, bewildered, and looking from one to the other.

The men laughed, and one of them, shrugging his shoulders, pointed to
the box-office.

He turned, and walked down the steps. Was it all a dream? He glanced at
his coat. The flower in his buttonhole had gone.




A Song and a Tale

By Nora Hopper


I--Lament of the Last Leprechaun

    FOR the red shoon of the Shee,
    For the falling o’ the leaf,
    For the wind among the reeds,
              My grief!

    For the sorrow of the sea,
    For the song’s unquickened seeds,
    For the sleeping of the Shee,
              My grief!

    For dishonoured whitethorn-tree,
    For the runes that no man reads,
    Where the grey stones face the sea,
              My grief!

    Lissakeole, that used to be
    Filled with music night and noon,
    For their ancient revelry,
              My grief!

    For the empty fairy shoon,
    Hollow rath and yellow leaf;
    Hands unkissed to sun or moon:
              My grief--my grief!


II--Aonan-na-Righ

AONAN-NA-RIGH they called him in Tir Ailella[I.]--“Darling of the
King”--but it was in idle sport, for Cathal the Red hated the son of
his old age as men now have forgotten to hate; and once Aonan had
sprung from his sleep with a sharp skene thrust through his arm, that
had meant to drink his life-blood; and once again he had found himself
alone in the heart of the battle, and he had scarcely won out of the
press with his life--and with the standard of the Danish enemy. Thus it
was seen that neither did the Danish spears love the “King’s Darling”;
and the sennachies made a song of this, and it was chanted before the
King for the first time when he sat robed and crowned for the Beltane
feast, and Aonan stood at his left hand, pouring out honey-wine into
his father’s cup. And before he drank, Cathal the King stared hard at
the cup-bearer, and the red light that burned in his eyes was darkened
because of the likeness in Aonan’s face to his mother Acaill (dead and
buried long since), whom Cathal had loved better than his first wife
Eiver, who was a king’s daughter, and better than the Danish slave
Astrild, who bore him five sons, elder and better-loved than Aonan, for
all the base blood in their veins. And of these, two were dead in the
battle that had spared Aonan, and there were left to Cathal the King
only the Druid Coloman, and Toran the boaster, and Guthbinn of the
sweet voice, who as yet was too young to fight.

“Drink, Aonan-na-Righ,” shrilled Astrild from her seat at the King’s
left hand. “Drink: lest there be death in the cup.”

Aonan took up the golden cup, and gave her back smile for smile. “I
drink,” he said, “to my mother, Acaill of Orgiall.”

But the King snatched the cup from his fingers, and dashed it down on
the board, so that the yellow mead spilled and stained Astrild’s cloak;
but she did not dare complain, for there was the red light in Cathal’s
eyes that was wont to make the boldest afraid.

“Bring me another cup,” he said to one that stood near. “And now, will
none of ye do honour to the toast of Aonan-na-Righ? Bring ye also a cup
for the prince; and, Guthbinn, put your harp aside.”

So in silence they drank to the memory of Acaill of Orgiall, and
afterwards they sought to spin together the threads of their broken
mirth, but not easily, for Astrild, who was wont to be gayest, sat
pale, with her hand on the knife hidden in her breast; and the King sat
dumb and frowning, thinking, as Astrild knew, of dead Acaill: how he
had loved and hated her, and, having slain her father and brothers, and
brought her to Dunna Scaith a Golden Hostage wearing a golden chain,
he had wedded her for her beauty’s sake; and how until her child was
born she had never so much as smiled or frowned for him; and how, when
her babe lay in her arms, she sent for her husband, and said: “I thank
thee, Cathal, who hast set me free by means of this babe. I bless thee
for this last gift of thine, who for all thine other gifts have cursed
thee.” And Cathal remembered how he had held babe and mother to his
heart, and said: “Good to hear soft words from thy mouth at last, O
Acaill! Speak again to me, and softly.” But she had not answered, for
her first soft words to him were her last. And Astrild, watching him,
saw his face grow black and angry, and she smiled softly to herself,
and aloud she said:

“Oh, Guthbinn, sing again, and sing of thy brothers who fell
to-day--sing of Oscar, the swift in battle, and Uaithne, of the dark
eyes. And will my lord give leave that I, their mother, go to weep for
them in my own poor house where they were born?”

“No,” said Cathal. “I bought you and your tears, girl, with gold rings,
from Ocaill of Connaught. Sing to me now, and keep thy tears for
to-morrow.” So Astrild drove back her sorrow, and began to sing, while
her son Guthbinn plucked slow music from his harpstrings.

    “Earrach, Samhradh, Foghmhar, and Geimhridh,
        Are over all and done:
    And now the web forgets the weaver,
        And earth forgets the sun.
    I sowed no seed, and pulled no blossom,
        Ate not of the green corn:
    With empty hands and empty bosom,
        Behold, I stand forlorn.
    Windflower I sang, and Flower o’ Sorrow,
        Half-Summer, World’s Delight:
    I took no thought o’ the coming morrow,
        No care for the coming night.”

Guthbinn’s hand faltered on the harpstrings, and the singer stopped
swiftly: but King Cathal stayed the tears in her heart with an angry
word. “Have I had not always had my will? And it is not my will now
for you to weep.” So Astrild sat still, and she looked at her sons:
but Toran was busy boasting of the white neck and blue eyes of the new
slave-girl he had won, and Coloman was dreaming, as he sat with his
eyes on the stars that showed through the open door: and only Guthbinn
met her eyes and answered them, though he seemed to be busy with his
harp. And presently Cathal rose up, bidding all keep their seats and
finish out the feast, but Astrild and Aonan he bade follow him. And
so they went into the farthest chamber of the House of Shields, which
looked upon a deep ditch. Now the end of the chamber was a wall of
wattles, and here there was cut a door that led out on a high bank
which overlooked the ditch. And the King went out upon the bank, where
there was a chair placed ready for him, and Astrild sat at his knee,
and Aonan-na-Righ stood a little way off. And Cathal sat still for a
time, holding Astrild’s hand in his, and presently he said: “Who put
the death in the cup to-night, Astrild, thou or Guthbinn?” And Astrild
tried to draw her hand away and to rise, but he held her in her place,
and asked again, “Guthbinn, or thou?” until she answered him sullenly
as she knelt, “King, it was I.”

“Belike, Guthbinn’s hand did thy bidding,” he said, in laughing
fashion. “Was the death for me or for Aonan yonder, thou Red-Hair?”

And Astrild laughed as she answered, “For Aonan-na-Righ, my lord.” And
then she shrieked and sought to rise, for she saw death in the king’s
face as it bent over her.

“If thou hadst sought to slay thy master, Red-Hair, I might have
forgiven thee,” Cathal said; “but what had my son to do with thee, my
light-o’-love?”

“Give me a day,” Astrild said desperately, “and I will kill father and
son, and set the light-o’-love’s children on your throne, Cathal.”

“I doubt it not, my wild-cat, but I will not give ye the day:” Cathal
laughed. “Good courage, girl--and call thy Danish gods to aid, for
there is none other to help thee, now.”

“What will my lord do?” Aonan said quickly, as the Dane turned a white
face and flaming eyes to him. “Wouldst kill her?”

“Ay,” said Cathal the King. “But first she shall leave her beauty
behind her, lest she meet thy mother in the Land of Youth, and Acaill
be jealous.”

“Leave her beauty and breath, lord,” Aonan said, drawing nearer. “If my
mother Acaill lived she would not have her slain. My king, she pleased
thee once; put her from thee if she vexes thee now; but leave her life,
since something thou owest her.”

“She would have slain thee to-day, Aonan, and if I have dealt ill by
thee, I let no other deal thus. Yet if thou prayest me for thy life,
girl, for love of Acaill I will give it thee.”

And Cathal laughed, for he knew the Dane would not plead in that name.
Astrild laughed too. “Spare thy breath, son of Acaill,” she said
scornfully. “To-morrow the cord may be round thy neck, and thou be in
need of breath; now lord, the cord for mine----”

Cathal smiled grimly.

“Blackheart,” he said, “thou hast no lack of courage. Now up,” and he
loosened her hands, “and fly if thou wilt--swim the ditch, and get thee
to Drumcoll-choille--and Guthbinn shall die in thy stead. What! Thou
wouldst liefer die? Back then to yonder chamber, where my men will deal
with thee as I have ordered, and be as patient as in thee lies. A kiss
first, Red-Hair; and hearken from yonder chamber if thou wilt, while
Aonan sings a dirge for thee.”

She went; and presently there rang from within the chamber the shrill
scream of a woman’s agony, and Cathal laughed to see Aonan’s face turn
white. “She is not as patient as thou,” he said, “but she will learn.
Keep thou my word to her, Aonan; sing a dirge for her beauty a-dying.”

“I cannot sing,” Aonan-na-Righ said, shivering as there rose another
shriek. “Let them slay her, my lord, and have done.”

“My will runs otherwise,” said Cathal, smiling. “Sing, if thou lovest
thy life.”

“My lord knows that I do not,” Aonan answered; and Cathal smiled again.

“Belike not; but sing and lessen the Dane’s punishment. When the song
is finished she shall be released, and even tended well.”

So Aonan sang the song of the Dane-land over the water, and the Danes
that died in the Valley of Keening--which is now called Waterford; of
the white skin and red hair of Astrild; of her grace and daring; of the
sons that lay dead on the battle-place; of Coloman the dreamer that
read the stars; and of the beautiful boy whose breast was a nest of
nightingales. And then he sang--more softly--of the Isle of the Noble
where Acaill dwelt, and how she would have shadowed Astrild with her
pity if she had lived; and then he stopped singing and knelt before the
King, dumb for a moment with the passion of his pity, for from the open
door they could hear a woman moaning still.

“Lord,” he said, “make an end. My life for hers--if a life the King
must have; or my pain for hers--if the King must needs feed his ears
with cries.”

“Graciously spoken, and like Acaill’s son,” King Cathal said. “And
Astrild shall be set free. You within the chamber take the Dane to her
son the lord Coloman’s keeping; and thou, my son Aonan, tarry here till
I return. I may have a fancy to send thee with a message to thy mother
before dawn. Nay, but come with me, and we will go see Coloman, and ask
how his mother does. Give me thine arm to lean on; I am tired, Aonan,
I am old, and an end has come to my pleasure in slaying.... Coloman!”

They were in Coloman’s chamber now, and the Druid turned from
star-gazing to greet the King, with a new dark look in his gentle face.
“Coloman, how does thy mother do now? She had grown too bold in her
pride, but we did not slay her because of Aonan here. How works our
medicine that we designed to temper her beauty?”

“Well, lord. No man will kiss my mother’s beauty more.”

“Good: now she will turn her feet into ways of gentleness, perhaps.
Thou holdest me a grudge for this medicine o’ mine, my son Coloman?”

“Lord, she is my mother,” the Druid said, looking down.

“The scars will heal,” Cathal said; “but--Aonan here has only seen her
beautiful. Coloman, wouldst thou have him see her scarred and foul to
see?”

“No, lord,” the Druid said fiercely. Cathal laughed.

“Have a gift of me, then, O Coloman,” he said. “Spare him from sight of
a marred beauty, in what way thou canst. I give thee his eyes for thy
mother’s scars.”

The two young men looked at each other steadily: then Aonan spoke.
“Take the payment that the King offers thee, Coloman, without fear: a
debt is a debt.”

“And the debt is heavy.”

Coloman said hoarsely: “Lord, wilt thou go and leave Aonan-na-Righ to
me? And wilt thou send to me thy cunning men, Flathartach and Fadhar? I
must have help.”

“Aonan-na-Righ will not hinder thee, Coloman,” said the King,
mockingly. “He desires greatly to meet with his mother: and do thou
commend me also to the Lady Eivir, whom I wedded first, and who loved
me well.”

“Call me also to thy mother’s memory,” Toran the boaster cried
presently, when all was made ready, and Coloman bade draw the irons
from the brazier--“if thou goest so far, Darling of the King.”

“I will remember,” Aonan said: and then fire and flesh met.

       *       *       *       *       *

At the next Beltane feast Cathal the Red slept beside Acaill in the
burial-place of the kings at Brugh, and Guthbinn sat in the high seat,
Toran the boaster at his right hand. But Coloman the Druid stood on
the tower-top, reading the faces of the stars; and along the road that
wound its dusty way to the country of the Golden Hostages there toiled
two dark figures: a woman and a man. Now the woman was hooded and
masked, but under the grey hood the moonlight found a gleam of ruddy
hair; and the man she led by the hand and watched over as a mother
watches her son. Yet the woman was Danish Astrild, and the blind man
was Aonan-na-Righ.


FOOTNOTE:

[I.] Now Tirerrill, Co. Sligo.




“De Profundis”

By S. Cornish Watkins


    The hot white road winds on and on before,
      The hot white road fades into haze behind,
    With clinging dust each hedge is powdered o’er,
      The sun is high, no shelter can we find.
    A dusty bird upon a dusty spray
      Sings o’er and o’er a little dreary song,
    There is no rest, no rest, the livelong day,
      And we are weary, and the way is long.

    We know not whence we come, or whither wend,
      What goal may be to which our journey draws,
    Fate binds this burden on us, and the end
      We know not, care not, and we must not pause.
    A motley train we move. The young, the old,
      Women and men, with feeble steps or strong,
    Driven, like herded sheep, from fold to fold--
      Oh, we are weary, and the way is long.

    Vain whispers have we known, and hopes as vain;
      And one, he bore a banner with a cross,
    And spake wild words of comfort after pain,
      And future gain to balance present loss.
    But where he is we wot not. We have lost
      All hopes we had, all faiths or right or wrong,
    We have been shaken, shattered, tempest-tost,
      And we are weary, and the way is long.

    Yet still, within each bosom smoulders there
      Some little spark that might have been divine,
    Something that will not let us quite despair,
      Something we cannot, if we would, resign.
    Some day the spark may quicken and may guide,
      And fire the soul within us, dead so long,
    So may there be, when falls the eventide,
      A joyous ending to a grievous song.




Two Pictures

By P. Wilson Steer


   I. The Mirror
  II. Skirt Dancing


[Illustration]

[Illustration]




A Study in Sentimentality

By Hubert Crackanthorpe


A PHANTOM regiment of giant mist-pillars swept silently across the
valley; beaded drops loaded each tuft of coarse, dull-tinted grass; the
peat-hags gaped like black, dripping flesh-wounds in the earth’s side;
the distance suggested rectangular fields and wooded slopes--vague,
grey, phantasmagoric; and down over everything floated the damp of fine
rain.

Alec’s heavy tread crunched the turfed bridle-path rhythmically, and
from the stiff rim of his clerical hat the water dribbled on to his
shoulders.

It was a rugged, irregular, almost uncouth face, and now the features
were vacantly huddled in a set expression, obviously habitual. The
cheeks were hunched up, almost concealing the small eyes; a wet wisp
of hair straggled over the puckered forehead, and the ragged, fair
moustache was spangled by the rain.

At his approach the sheep scampered up the fell-side; then, stood
staring through the mist in anxious stupidity. And Alec, shaking the
water from his hat, strode forward with an almost imperceptible gleam
on his face. It was so that he liked the valley--all colourless and
blurred, with the sky close overhead, like a low, leaden ceiling.

By-and-by, a cluster of cottages loomed ahead--a choppy pool of black
slate roofs, wanly a-glimmer in the wet. As he entered the village, a
group of hard-featured men threw him a curt chorus of greetings, to
which he raised his stick in response, mechanically.

He mounted the hill. Three furnace-chimneys craned their thin necks
to grime the sky with a dribbling, smoky breath; high on a bank of
coal-dust, blurred silhouettes of trucks stood waiting in forlorn
strings; women, limp, with unkempt hair, and loose, bedraggled skirts,
stood round the doorways in gossiping groups.

“Which is Mrs. Matheson’s?” he stopped to ask.

“There--oop there, Mr. Burkett--by yon ash--where them childer’s
standin’,” they answered, all speaking together, eagerly. “Look ye!
that be Mrs. Matheson herself.”

Alec went up to the woman. His face clouded a little, and the puffs
from his pipe came briskly in rapid succession.

“Mrs. Matheson, I’ve only just heard----Tell me, how did it happen?” he
asked gently.

She was a stout, red-faced woman, and her eyes were all bloodshot with
much crying. She wiped them hastily with the corner of her apron before
answering.

“It was there, Mr. Burkett, by them rails. He was jest playin’ aboot
in t’ road wi’ Arnison’s childer. At half-past one, t’ grandmoother
stepped across to fetch me a jug o’ fresh water an’ she see’d him
settin’ in door there. Then--mabbee twenty minutes later--t’ rain coome
on an’ I thought to go to fetch him in. But I could’na see na sign of
him anywhere. We looked oop and doon, and thought, mabbee, he’d toddled
roond to t’ back. An’ then, all at once, Dan Arnison called to us that
he was leein’ in t’ water, doon in beck-pool. An’ Dan ran straight
doon, an’ carried him oop to me; but ’twas na use. He was quite cold
and drownded. An’ I went----” But the sobs, rising thickly, swallowed
the rest.

Alec put his hand on her shoulder soothingly.

“Ay, I know’d ye’d be grieved, Mr. Burkett. He was the bonniest boy in
all t’ parish.”

She lifted the apron to her eyes again, while he crossed to the
railings. The wood of the posts was splintered and worm-eaten, and the
lower rail was broken away. Below, the rock shelved down some fifteen
feet to the beck-pool, black and oily-looking.

“It’s a very dangerous place,” he said, half to himself.

“Ay, Mr. Burkett, you’re right,” interrupted a bent and wizened old
woman, tottering forward.

“This be grandmoother, Mr. Burkett,” Mrs. Matheson explained. “’Twas
grandmoother that see’d him last----”

“Ay, Mr. Burkett,” the old woman began in a high, tremulous treble.
“When I went fer to fill t’ jug fer Maggie he was a-settin’ on t’ steps
there playin with t’ kitten, an’ he called after me, ‘Nanny!’ quite
happy-like; but I took na notice, but jest went on fer t’ water. I
shawed Mr. Allison the broken rail last month, when he was gittin’ t’
rents, and I told him he ought to put it into repair, with all them
wee childer playin’ all daytime on t’ road. Didn’t I, Maggie?” Mrs.
Matheson assented incoherently. “An’ he was very civil-like, was Mr.
Allison, and he said he’d hev’ it seen to. It’s alus that way, Mr.
Burkett,” the old woman concluded, shaking her head wisely. “Folks wait
till some accident occurs, and then they think to bestir themselves.”

Alec turned to the mother, and touched her thick, nerveless hand.

“There, there, Mrs. Matheson, don’t take on so,” he said.

At his touch her sobbing suddenly ceased, and she let her apron fall.

“Will ye na coome inside, Mr. Burkett?” she asked.

And they all three went in together.

The little room had been scrubbed and tidied, and a number of chairs,
ranged round the table, blocked the floor.

“We’ve bin busy all marnin’, gitting’ things a bit smartened oop for t’
inquest. T’ coroner’s cooming at twelve,” the grandmother explained.

“Will ye coome oopstairs, Mr. Burkett--jest--jest to tak’ a look at
him?” Mrs. Matheson asked in a subdued voice.

Alec followed her, squeezing his burly frame up the narrow, creaking
staircase.

The child lay on the clean, white bed. A look of still serenity slept
on his pallid face. His tawny curls were smoothed back, and some
snowdrops were scattered over the coverlet. All was quite simple.

Mrs. Matheson stood in the doorway, struggling noisily with her sobs.

“It is God’s will,” Alec said quietly.

“He was turned four last week,” she blurted out. “Ye’ll excuse me, Mr.
Burkett, but I’m that overdone that I jest canna’ help myself,” and she
sank into a chair.

He knelt by the dead child’s side and prayed, while the slow rise and
fall of the mother’s sobs filled the room. When he rose his eyes were
all moist.

“God will help you, if you ask Him. His ways are secret. We cannot
understand His purpose. But have faith in Him. He has done it for the
best,” he said.

“Ay, I know, I know, Mr. Burkett. But ye see he was the youngest, and
that bonny----”

“Let me try to comfort you,” he said.

       *       *       *       *       *

When they came downstairs again, her face was calmer and her voice
steadier. The coroner, a dapper man with a bright-red tie, was taking
off his gloves and macintosh; the room was fast filling with silent
figures, and the old grandmother was hobbling to and fro with noisy,
excited importance.

“Will ye na’ stay for t’ inquest?”

Alec shook his head. “No, I can’t stop now. I have a School-board
meeting to go to. But I will come up this afternoon.”

“Thank’ee, Mr. Burkett, God bless thee,” said Mrs. Matheson.

He shook hands with the coroner, who was grumbling concerning the
weather; then strode out back down the valley.

Though long since he had grown familiar with the aspects of suffering,
that scene in the cottage, by reason of its very simplicity, had
affected him strangely. His heart was full of slow sorrow for the
woman’s trouble, and the image of the child, lying beautiful in its
death-sleep, passed and repassed in his mind.

By-and-bye, the moaning of the wind, the whirling of lost leaves, the
inky shingle-beds that stained the fell-sides, inclined his thoughts to
a listless brooding.

Life seemed dull, inevitable, draped in sombre, drifting shadows, like
the valley-head. Yet in all good he saw the hand of God, a mysterious,
invisible force, ever imperiously at work beneath the ravages of
suffering and of sin.

It was close upon six o’clock when he reached home. He was drenched to
the skin, and as he sat before the fire, dense clouds of steam rose
from his mud-stained boots and trousers.

“Now, Mr. Burkett, jest ye gang and tak off them things, while I make
yer tea. Ye’ll catch yer death one of these days--I know ye will. I
sometimes think ye haven’t more sense than a boy, traipsin’ about all
t’ day in t’ wet, and niver takin’ yer meals proper-like.”

A faint smile flickered across his face. He was used to his landlady’s
scoldings.

“A child was drowned yesterday in the beck up at Beda Cottages. I had
to go back there this afternoon to arrange about the funeral,” he
mumbled, half-apologetically.

Mrs. Parkin snorted defiantly, bustling round the table as she spread
the cloth. Presently she broke out again:

“An’ noo, ye set there lookin’ as white as a bogle. Why don’t ye go an’
git them wet clothes off. Ye’re fair wringin’.”

He obeyed; though the effort to rise was great. He felt curiously
cold: his teeth were clacking, and the warmth from the flames seemed
delicious.

In his bedroom a dizziness caught him, and it was a moment before he
could recognise the familiar objects. And he realised that he was ill,
and looked at himself in the glass with a dull, scared expression. He
struggled through his dressing however, and went back to his tea. But,
though he had eaten nothing since the morning, he had no appetite; so,
from sheer force of habit, he lit a pipe, wheeling his chair close to
the fire.

And, as the heat penetrated him, his thoughts spun aimlessly round the
day’s events, till these gradually drifted into the background of his
mind, as it were, and he and they seemed to have become altogether
detached. His forehead was burning, and a drowsy, delicious sense of
physical weakness was stealing over his limbs. He was going to be ill,
he remembered; and it was with vague relief that he looked forward to
the prospect of long days of monotonous inactivity, long days of repose
from the daily routine of fatigue. The details of each day’s work, the
accomplishment of which, before, had appeared so indispensable, now,
he felt in his lassitude, had faded to insignificance. Mrs. Parkin
was right: he had been overdoing himself; and with a clear conscience
he would take a forced holiday in bed. Things in the parish would get
along without him till the end of the week. There was only the drowned
child’s funeral, and, if he could not go, Milner, the neighbouring
vicar, would take it for him. His pipe slipped from his hand to the
hearthrug noiselessly, and his head sank forward....

He was dreaming of the old churchyard. The trees were rocking their
slim, bare arms; drip, drip, drip, the drops pattered on to the
tombstones, tight-huddled in the white, wet light of the moon; the
breath of the old churchyard tasted warm and moist, like the reek of
horses after a long journey.

The child’s funeral was finished. Mrs. Matheson had cried noisily into
her apron; the mourners were all gone now; and alone, he sat down
on the fresh-dug grave. By the moonlight he tried to decipher the
names carved on the slabs; but most of the letters had faded away,
and moss-cushions had hidden the rest. Then he found it--“George
Matheson, aged four years and five days,” and underneath were carved
Mrs. Matheson’s words: “He was the bonniest boy in all the parish.” He
sat on, with the dread of death upon him, the thought of that black
senselessness ahead, possessing him, so sudden, so near, so intimate,
that it seemed entirely strange to have lived on, forgetful of it.
By-and-bye, he saw her coming towards him--Ethel, like a figure from
a picture, wearing a white dress that trailed behind her, a red rose
pinned at the waist, and the old smile on her lips. And she came beside
him, and told him how her husband had gone away for ever, and he
understood at once that he and she were betrothed again, as it had been
five years ago. He tried to answer her, but somehow the words would not
come; and, as he was striving to frame them, there came a great crash.
A bough clattered down on the tombstones; and with a start he awoke.

A half-burned coal was smoking in the fender. He felt as if he had been
sleeping for many hours.

He fell to stupidly watching the red-heat, as it pulsed through
the caves of coal, to imagining himself climbing their ashen
mountain-ridges, across dark defiles, up the face of treacherous
precipices....

Hundreds of times, here, in this room, in this chair, before this
fire, he had sat smoking, picturing the old scenes to himself,
musing of Ethel Fulton (Ethel Winn she had been then; but, after
her marriage, he had forced himself to think of her as bearing her
husband’s name--that was a mortification from which he had derived
a sort of bitter satisfaction). But now, with the long accumulation
of his solitude--five years he had been vicar of Scarsdale--he had
grown so unconscious of self, so indifferent to the course of his own
existence, that every process of his mind had, from sheer lack of
external stimulation, stagnated, till, little by little, the growth
of mechanical habit had come to mould its shape and determine its
limitations. And hence, not for a moment had he ever realised the grip
that this habit of sentimental reminiscence had taken on him, nor the
grotesque extent of its futile repetition. Such was the fervour of his
attitude towards his single chapter of romance.

Five years ago, she and he had promised their lives to one another. And
the future had beckoned them onward, gaily, belittling every obstacle
in its suffusion of glad, alluring colour. He was poor: he had but
his curate’s stipend, and she was used to a regular routine of ease.
But he would have tended her wants, waiting on her, watching over
her, indefatigably; chastening all the best that was in him, that he
might lay it at her feet. And together, hand in hand, they would have
laboured in God’s service. At least so it seemed to him now.

Then had come an enforced separation; and later, after a prolonged,
unaccountable delay, a letter from her explaining, in trite, discursive
phrases, how it could never be--it was a mistake--she had not known her
own mind--now she could see things clearer--she hoped he would forgive
and forget her.

A wild determination to go at once to her, to plead with her, gripped
him; but for three days he was helpless, bound fast by parish duties.
And when at last he found himself free, he had already begun to
perceive the hopelessness of such an errand, and, with crushed and
dogged despair, to accept his fate as irrevocable.

In his boyhood--at the local grammar-school, where his ugliness
had made him the butt of his class, and later, at an insignificant
Oxford college, where, to spare his father, whose glebe was at the
time untenanted, he had set himself grimly to live on an impossibly
slender allowance--at every turn of his life, he had found himself
at a disadvantage with his fellows. Thus he had suffered much,
dumbly--meekly many would have said--without a sign of resentment,
or desire for retaliation. But all the while, in his tenacious,
long-suffering way, he was stubbornly inuring himself to an acceptance
of his own disqualifications. And so, once rudely awakened from his
dream of love, he wondered with heavy curiosity at his faith in its
glamorous reality, and, remembering the tenour of his life, suffered
bitterly like a man befooled by his own conceit.

Some months after the shattering of his romance, the rumour reached him
that James Fulton, a prosperous solicitor in the town, was courting
her. The thing was impossible, a piece of idle gossip, he reasoned with
himself. Before long, however, he heard it again, in a manner that left
no outlet for doubt.

It seemed utterly strange, unaccountable, that she, whose eager echoing
of all his own spiritual fervour and enthusiasm for the work of the
Church still rang in his ears, should have chosen a man, whose sole
talk had seemed to be of dogs and of horses, of guns and of game; a man
thick-minded, unthinking, self-complacent; a man whom he himself had
carelessly despised as devoid of any spark of spirituality.

And, at this moment, when the first smartings of bitter bewilderment
were upon him, the little living of Scarsdale fell vacant, and his
rector, perhaps not unmindful of his trouble, suggested that he should
apply for it.

The valley was desolate and full of sombre beauty; the parish,
sparsely-peopled but extensive; the life there would be monotonous,
almost grim, with long hours of lonely brooding. The living was offered
to him. He accepted it excitedly.

And there, busied with his new responsibilities, throwing himself into
the work with a suppressed, ascetic ardour, news of the outside world
reached him vaguely, as if from afar.

He read of her wedding in the local newspaper: later, a few trite
details of her surroundings; and then, nothing more.

But her figure remained still resplendent in his memory, and, as time
slipped by, grew into a sort of gleaming shrine, incarnating for him
all the beauty of womanhood. And gradually, this incarnation grew
detached, as it were, from her real personality, so that, when twice
a year he went back to spend Sunday with his old rector, to preach a
sermon in the parish church, he felt no shrinking dread lest he should
meet her. He had long ceased to bear any resentment against her, or to
doubt that she had done what was right. The part that had been his in
the little drama seemed altogether of lesser importance.

       *       *       *       *       *

All night he lay feverishly tossing, turning his pillow aglow with
heat, from side to side; anxiously reiterating whole incoherent
conversations and jumbled incidents.

At intervals, he was dimly conscious of the hiss of wind-swept leaves
outside, and of rain-gusts rattling the window-panes; and later, of
the sickly light of early morning streaking the ceiling with curious
patterns. By-and-bye, he dropped into a fitful sleep, and forgot the
stifling heat of his bed.

Then the room had grown half full of daylight, and Mrs. Parkin was
there, fidgetting with the curtains. She said something which he did
not hear, and he mumbled that he had slept badly, and that his head was
aching.

Some time later--how long he did not know--she appeared again, and
a man, whom he presently understood to be a doctor, and who put a
thermometer, the touch of which was deliciously cool, under his armpit,
and sat down at the table to write. Mrs. Parkin and he talked in
whispers at the foot of the bed: they went away; Mrs. Parkin brought
him a cup of beef-tea and some toast; and then he remembered only the
blurred memories of queer, unfinished dreams.

Consciousness seemed to return to him all of a sudden; and, when it was
come, he understood dimly that, somehow, the fatigue of long pain was
over, and he tasted the peaceful calm of utter lassitude.

He lay quite still, his gaze following Mrs. Parkin, as she moved to and
fro across the room, till it fell on a basket-full of grapes that stood
by the bedside. They were unfamiliar, inexplicable; they puzzled him;
and for awhile he feebly turned the matter over in his mind. Presently
she glanced at him, and he lifted his hand towards the basket.

“Would ye fancy a morsel o’ fruit noo? ’Twas Mrs. Fulton that sent
’em,” she said.

She held the basket towards him, and he lifted a bunch from it. They
were purple grapes, large and luscious-looking. Ethel had sent them.
How strange that was! For an instant he doubted if he were awake, and
clutched the pillow to make sure that it was real.

“Mrs. Fulton sent them?” he repeated.

“Ay, her coachman came yesterday in t’ forenoon to inquire how ye were
farin’, and left that fruit for ye. Ay, Mr. Burkett, but ye’ve had a
mighty quantity o’ callers. Most all t’ parish has been askin’ for
news o’ ye. An’ that poor woman from t’ factory cottages has been doon
forenoon and night.”

“How long have I been in bed?” he asked after a pause.

“Five days and five nights. Ye’ve bin nigh at death’s door, ravin’
and moanin’ like a madman. But, noo, I must’na keep ye chatterin’.
Ye should jest keep yeself quiet till t’ doctor coomes. He’ll be
mighty surprised to find ye so much improved, and in possession of yer
faculties.”

And she left him alone.

He lay staring at the grapes, while excitement quickened every pulse.
Ethel had sent them--they were from Ethel--Ethel had sent them--through
his brain, to and fro, boisterously, the thought danced. And then, he
started to review the past, dispassionately, critically, as if it were
another man’s; and soon, every detail, as he lingered on it, seemed
to disentangle itself, till it all achieved a curious simplification.
The five years at Scarsdale became all blurred: they resembled an
eventless waste-level, through which he had been mechanically trudging.
But the other day, it seemed, he was with her--he and she betrothed
to one another. A dozen scenes passed before his eyes: with a flush
of hot, intolerable shame, he saw himself, clumsy, uncouth, devoid of
personal charm, viewing her bluntly, selfishly through the cumbrous
medium of his own personality. And her attitude was clear too: the
glamour, woven of habitual, sentimental reminiscence, faded, as it
were, from her figure, and she appeared to him simply and beautifully
human; living, vibrating, frail. _Now_ he knew the meaning of that last
letter of hers--the promptings of each phrase; the outpourings of his
ideals, enthusiasms, aspirations--callow, blatant, crude, he named them
bitterly--had scared her: she had felt herself unequal to the strain
of the life he had offered her: in her loveable, womanish frailty, she
had grown to dread it; and he realised all that she had suffered before
she had brought herself to end it--the long struggles with doubt and
suspense. The veil that had clogged his view was lifted: he knew her
now: he could read the writing on her soul: he was securely equipped
for loving her; and now, she had passed out of his life, beyond recall.
In his blindness he had not recognised her, and had driven her away.

How came it that to-day, for the first time, all these things were made
clear?

The clock struck; and while he was listening to its fading note, the
door-handle clicked briskly, and the doctor walked in. He talked
cheerily of the crops damaged by the storm, and the sound of his voice
seemed to vibrate harshly through the room.

“There’s a heavy shower coming up,” he remarked. “By the way, you’re
quite alone here, Mr. Burkett, I believe. Have you no relatives whom
you would like to send for?”

“No--no one,” Alec answered. “Mrs. Parkin will look after me.”

“Yes--but you see,” and he came and sat down by the bedside, “I don’t
say there’s any immediate danger; but you’ve had a very near touch of
it. Now isn’t there any old friend?--you ought not to be alone like
this.” He spoke the last words with emphasis.

Alec shook his head. His gaze had fallen on the basket of grapes again:
he was incoherently musing of Ethel.

“Mind, I don’t say there’s any immediate danger,” he heard the man
repeating; “but I must tell you that you’re not altogether out of the
wood yet.”

He paused.

“You ought to be prepared for the worst, Mr. Burkett.”

The last phrase lingered in Alec’s mind; and slowly its meaning dawned
upon him.

“You mean I might die at any moment?” he asked.

“No, no--I don’t say that,” the other answered evasively. “But you see
the fever has left you very weak; and of course in such cases one can
never be quite sure----”

The rest did not reach Alec’s ears; he was only vaguely aware of the
murmur of the man’s voice.

Presently he perceived that he had risen.

“I will come back in the afternoon,” he was saying. “I’ll tell
Mrs.--Mrs. Parker to bring you in some breakfast.”

After the doctor had gone he dozed a little....

Then remembered the man’s words--“No immediate danger, but you must
be prepared for the worst.” The sense of it all flashed upon him: he
understood what the man had meant: that was the way doctors always told
such things he guessed. So the end was near.... He wondered, a little
curiously, if it would come before to-night, or to-morrow.... It was
near, quite near, he repeated to himself; and gradually, a peacefulness
permeated his whole being, and he was vaguely glad to be alone....

A little while, and he would be near God. He felt himself detached from
the world, and at peace with all men.

His life, as he regarded it trailing behind him, across the stretch
of past years, seemed inadequate, useless, pitiable almost; of his
own personality, as he now realised it, he was ashamed--petty
mortifications, groping efforts, a grotesque capacity for futile,
melancholy brooding--he rejoiced that he was to have done with it. The
end was near, quite near, he repeated once again.

Then, afterwards, would come rest--the infinite rest of the
Saviour’s tenderness, and the strange, wonderful expectation of the
mysterious life to come.... A glimpse of his own serenity, of his
own fearlessness, came to him; and he was moved by a quick flush of
gratitude towards God. He thought of the terror of the atheist’s
death--the world, a clod of dead matter blindly careering through
space; humanity, a casual, senseless growth, like the pullulating
insects on a rottening tree....

A little while, only a little while, and he would be near God. And,
softly, under his breath, he implored pardon for the countless
shortcomings of his service....

The German clock on the mantel-piece ticked with methodical fussiness:
the flames in the grate flickered lower and lower; and one by one
dropped, leaving dull-red cinders. Through the window, under the
half-drawn blind, was the sky, cold with the hard, white glare of the
winter sun, flashing above the bare, bony mountain-backs; and he called
to mind spots in the little, desolate parish, which, with a grim,
clinging love, he had come to regard as his own for always. Who would
come after him, live in this house of his, officiate in the square,
grey-walled church, move and work in God’s service among the people?...

And, while he lay drowsily musing on the unfinished dream, a muffled
murmur of women’s voices reached his ears. By an intuition, akin
perhaps to animal instinct, he knew all at once that it was she,
talking with Mrs. Parkin down in the room below. Prompted by a rush of
imperious impulse he raised himself on his elbow to listen.

There was a rustling of skirts in the passage and the sound of the
voices grew clearer.

“Good day, ma’am, and thank ye very kindly, I’m sure,” Mrs. Parkin was
saying.

No reply came, though he was straining every nerve to catch it.... At
last, subdued, but altogether distinct, _her_ voice:

“You’re sure there’s nothing else I can send?”

The door of his room was ajar. He dug his nails into the panel-edge,
and tried to swing it open. But he could scarcely move it, and in a
moment she would be gone.

Suddenly he heard his own voice--loud and queer it sounded:

“Ethel--Ethel.”

Hurried steps mounted the stairs, and Mrs. Parkin’s white cap and
spectacled face appeared.

“What be t’ matter, Mr. Burkett?” she asked breathlessly.

“Stop her--tell her.”

“Dearie, dearie me, he’s off wanderin’ agin.”

“No, no; I’m all right--tell--ask Mrs. Fulton if she would come up to
see me?”

“There, there, Mr. Burkett, don’t ye excite yeself. Ye’re not fit to
see any one, ye know that. Lie ye doon agin, or ye’ll be catchin’ yer
death o’ cauld.”

“Ask her to come, please--just for a minute.”

“For Heaven’s sake lie doon. Ye’ll be workin’ yeself into a fever next.
There, there, I’ll ask her for ye, though I’ve na notion what t’ doctor
’ud say.”

She drew down the blind and retired, closing the door quietly behind
her.

The next thing he saw was Ethel standing by his bedside.

He lay watching her without speaking. She wore a red dress trimmed
with fur; a gold bracelet was round her gloved wrist, and a veil
half-hid her features.

Presently he perceived that she was very white, that her mouth was
twitching, and that her eyes were full of tears.

“Alec--I’m so sorry you’re so ill.... Are you in pain?”

He shook his head absently. Her veil and the fur on her cloak looked
odd, he thought, in the half-light of the room.

“You will be better soon: the worst is over.”

“No,” he answered, with a dreary smile. “I am going to die.”

She burst into sobs.

“No, no, Alec.... You must not think that.”

He stretched his arm over the coverlet towards her, and felt the soft
pressure of her gloved hand.

“Forgive me, Ethel, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pain you. But it is so;
the doctor told me this morning.”

She sat down by the bedside, still crying, pressing her handkerchief to
her eyes.

“Ethel, how strange it seems. Do you know I haven’t seen you since I
left Cockermouth?” The words came deliberately, for his mind had grown
quite calm. “How the time has flown!”

Her grasp on his hand tightened, but she made no answer.

“It was very kind of you to come all this way, Ethel, to see me. Will
you stay a little and let me talk to you? It’s more than five years
since we’ve talked together, you know,” and he smiled faintly. “Don’t
cry so, Ethel, dear. I did not mean to make you cry. There’s no cause
to cry, dear; you’ve made me so happy.”

“My poor, poor Alec,” she sobbed.

“You’d almost forgotten the old days, perhaps,” he continued dreamily,
talking half to himself; “for it’s a long while ago now. But to me it
seems as if it had all just happened. You see I’ve been vegetating
rather, here in this lonely, little place.... Don’t go on crying, Ethel
dear ... let me tell you about things a little. There’s no harm in it
now, because you know I’m----”

“Oh! don’t--don’t say that. You’ll get better. I know you will.”

“No, Ethel, I sha’n’t. Something within me tells me that my course
is done. Besides, I don’t want to get better. I’m so happy.... Stay
a little with me, Ethel.... I wanted to explain.... I was stupid,
selfish, in the old days----”

“It was I--I who----” she protested through her tears.

“No, you were quite right to write me that letter. I’ve thought that
almost from the first.... I’m sure of it,” he added, as if convincing
himself definitely. “It could never be ... it was my fault.... I
was stupid and boorish and wrapped up in myself. I did not try to
understand your nature.... I didn’t understand anything about women....
I never had a sister.... I took for granted that you were always
thinking and feeling just as I was. I never tried to understand you,
Ethel.... I was not fit to be entrusted with you.”

“Alec, Alec, it is not true. You were too good, too noble-hearted.
I felt you were far above me. Beside you I felt I was silly and
frivolous. Your standards about everything seemed so high----”

But he interrupted, unheeding her:

“You don’t know, Ethel, how happy you’ve made me.... I have thought
of you every day. In the evenings, I used to sit alone, remembering
you and all the happy days we had together, and the remembrance of
them has been a great joy to me. I used to go over them all, again and
again. The day that we all went to Morecambe, and that walk along the
seashore, when the tide caught us, and I carried you across the water
... the time that we went to those ruins, and you wore the primroses I
picked for you. And I used to read over all your letters, and remember
all the things you used to say. Downstairs, under the writing-table,
there is a black, tin cash-box--the key is on my bunch--Mrs. Parkin
will give it you. It’s where I’ve kept everything that has reminded
me of you, all this time. Will you take it back with you?... You
don’t know how you’ve helped me all these years--I wanted to tell you
that.... When I was in difficulties, I used to wonder how you would
have liked me to act.... When I was lonely and low-spirited, I used to
tell myself that you were happy.” He paused for breath, and his voice
died slowly in the stillness of the room. “You were quite right,” he
murmured almost inaudibly, “I see it all quite clearly now.”

She was bending over him, and was framing his face in her two hands.

“Say I was wrong,” she pleaded passionately. “Say I was wicked, wrong.
I loved you, Alec.... I was promised to you. I should have been so
happy with you, dear.... Alec, my Alec, do not die.... God will not
let you die.... He cannot be so cruel.... Come back, Alec.... I love
you.... Do you hear, my Alec? I love you.... Ethel loves you.... Before
God I love you.... I was promised to you.... I broke my word.... I
loved you all the time, but I did not know it.... Forgive me, my Alec
... forgive me.... I shall love you always.”

He passed his fingers over her forehead tentatively, as if he were in
darkness.

“Ethel, every day, every hour, all these years, you have been with me.
And now I am going away. Kiss me--just once--just once. There can be no
wrong in it now.”

She tore her veil from her face: their lips met, and her head rested a
moment, sobbing on his shoulder.

“Hush! don’t cry, Ethel dear, don’t cry. You have made me so glad....
And you will remember to take the box.... And you will think of me
sometimes.... And I shall pray God to make you happy, and I shall wait
for you, Ethel, and be with you in thought, and if you have trouble,
you will know that I shall be sorrowing with you. Isn’t it so, dear?...
Now, good-bye, dear one--good-bye. May God watch over you.”

She had moved away. She came back again, however, and kissed his
forehead reverently. But he was not aware of her return, for his mind
had begun to wander.

She brushed past Mrs. Parkin in the passage, bidding her an incoherent
good-bye: she was instinctively impatient to escape to the protection
of familiar surroundings. Inside the house, she felt helpless, dizzy:
the melodrama of the whole scene had stunned her senses, and pity for
him was rushing through her in waves of pulsing emotion.

As she passed the various landmarks, which she had noted on her outward
journey--a group of Scotch firs, a roofless cattle-shed, a pile of
felled trees--each seemed to wear an altered aspect. With what a
strange suddenness it had all happened! Yesterday the groom had brought
back word that he was in delirium, and had told her of the loneliness
of the house. It had seemed so sad, his lying ill, all alone: the
thought had preyed on her conscience, till she had started to drive
out there to inquire if there were anything she could do to help him.
Now, every corner round which the cart swung, lengthened the stretch of
road that separated her from that tragic scene in his room.... Perhaps
it was not right for her to drive home and leave him? But she couldn’t
bear to stay: it was all so dreadful. Besides, she assured herself,
she could do no good. There was the doctor, and that old woman who
nursed him--they would see to everything.... Poor, poor Alec--alone in
that grey-walled cottage, pitched at the far end of this long, bleak
valley--the half-darkened room--his wasted, feverish face--and his
_knowing_ that he could not live--it all came back to her vividly,
and she shivered as if with cold. Death seemed hideous, awful, almost
wicked in the cruelty of its ruthlessness. And the homeward drive
loomed ahead, interminably--for two hours she would have to wait with
the dreadful, flaring remembrance of it all--two hours--for the horse
was tired, and it was thirteen miles, a man by the roadside had told
her....

He was noble-hearted, saint-like.... Her pity for him welled up
once more, and she convinced herself that she could have loved him,
worshipped him, been worthy of him as a husband--and now he lay dying.
He had revealed his whole nature to her, it seemed. No one had ever
understood, as she did now, what a fine character he was in reality.
Her cheeks grew hot with indignation and shame, as she remembered
how she had heard people laugh at him behind his back, refer to him
mockingly as the ‘love-sick curate.’ And all this while--for five whole
years--he had gone on caring for her--thinking of her each day, reading
her letters, recalling the things she used to say--yes, those were his
very words. Before, she had never suspected that it was in his nature
to take it so horribly tragically; yet, somehow, directly he had fixed
his eyes on her in that excited way, she had half-guessed it....

The horse’s trot slackened to a walk, and the wheels crunched over a
bed of newly-strewn stones.... She was considering how much of what had
happened she could relate to Jim. Oh! the awfulness of his _knowing
beforehand_ like that! She had kissed him; she had told him that she
cared for him; she hadn’t been able to help doing that. There was
no harm in it; she had made him happier--he had said so himself....
But Jim wouldn’t understand: he would be angry with her for having
gone, perhaps. He wouldn’t see that she couldn’t have done anything
else. No, she couldn’t bear to tell him: besides, it seemed somehow
like treachery to Alec.... Oh! it must be awful to _know beforehand_
like that!... The doctor should never have told him. It was horrible,
cruel.... In the past how she had been to blame--she saw that now:
thoughtless, selfish, altogether beneath him.

It was like a chapter in a novel. His loving her silently all these
years, and telling her about it on his deathbed. At the thought of it
she thrilled with subtle pride: it illuminated the whole ordinariness
of her life. The next moment the train of her own thoughts shamed her.
Poor, poor Alec.... And to reinforce her pity, she recalled the tragic
setting of the scene.

That woman--his landlady--could she have heard anything, she wondered
with a twinge of dread? No, the door was shut, and his voice had been
very low.

The horse turned on to the main road, and pricking his ears, quickened
his pace.

She would remember him always. Every day, she would think of him, as
he had asked her to do--she would never forget to do that. And, if she
were in trouble, or difficulty, she would turn her thoughts towards
him, just as he had told her he used to do. She would try to become
better--more religious--for his sake. She would read her Bible each
morning, as she knew had been his habit. These little things were all
she could do now. Her attitude in the future she would make worthy of
his in the past.... He would become the secret guiding-star of her
life: _it_ would be her hidden chapter of romance....

The box--that box which he had asked her to take. She had promised, and
she had forgotten it. How could she get it? It was too late to turn
back now. Jim would be waiting for her. She would only just be in time
for dinner as it was.... How could she get it? If she wrote to his
landlady, and asked her to send it--it was under the writing-table in
the sitting-room he had said.... She _must_ get it, somehow....

It was dark before she reached home. Jim was angry with her for being
late, and for having driven all the way without a servant. She paid
no heed to his upbraiding; but told him shortly that Alec was still
in great danger. He muttered some perfunctory expression of regret,
and went off to the stables to order a bran-mash for the horse. His
insensibility to the importance of the tragedy she had been witnessing,
exasperated her: she felt bitterly mortified that he could not divine
all that she had been suffering.

       *       *       *       *       *

The last of the winter months went, and life in the valley swept its
sluggish course onwards. The bleak, spring winds rollicked, hooting
from hill to hill. The cattle waited for evening, huddled under the
walls of untrimmed stone; and before the fireside, in every farmhouse,
new-born lambs lay helplessly bleating. On Sundays the men would loaf
in churlish groups about the church door, jerk curt greetings at one
another, and ask for news of Parson Burkett. It was a curate from
Cockermouth who took the services in his stead--one of the new-fangled
sort; a young gentleman from London way, who mouthed his words like
a girl, carried company manners, and had a sight of strange clerical
practices.

Alec was slowly recovering. The fever had altogether left him: a
straw-coloured beard now covered his chin, and his cheeks were grown
hollow and peaky-looking. But by the hay-harvest, the doctor reckoned,
he would be as strong as ever again--so it was commonly reported.

Mrs. Parkin declared that the illness had done him a world o’ good.
“It’s rested his mind like, and kept him from frettin’. He was alus
ower given to studyin’ on his own thoughts, till he got dazed like and
took na notice o’ things. An’ noo,” she would conclude, “ye should jest
see him, smilin’ as free as a child.”

So, day after day, floated vaguely by, and to Alec the calm of their
unbroken regularity was delicious. He was content to lie still for
hours, thinking of nothing, remembering nothing, tasting the torpor of
dreamy contemplation; watching through the window the slow drifting
of the shadows; listening to the cackling of geese, and the plaintive
bleating of sheep....

By-and-bye, with returning strength, his senses quickened, and
grew sensitive to every passing impression. To eat with elaborate
deliberation his invalid meals; to watch the myriad specks of gold
dancing across a bar of sunlight--these were sources of keen, exciting
delight. But in the foreground of his mind, transfiguring with its
glamour every trivial thought, flashed the memory of Ethel’s visit. He
lived through the whole scene again and again, picturing her veiled
figure as it had stood by the bedside, wrapped in the red, fur cloak;
and her protesting words, her passionate tears, seemed to form a
mystic, indissoluble bond between them, that brightened all the future
with rainbow colours.

God had given him back to her. Whether circumstances brought them
together frequently, or whether they were forced to live their lives
almost wholly apart, would, he told himself, matter but little. Their
spiritual communion would remain unbroken. Indeed, the prospect of
such separations, proving, as it did to him, the sureness of the bond
between them, almost elated him. There would be unquestioning trust
between them, and, though the world had separated them, the best that
was in him belonged to her. When at length they met, there would be no
need for insistance on common points of feeling, for repeated handling
of past threads, as was customary with ordinary friendships. Since each
could read the other’s heart, that sure intuition born of chastened,
spiritual love would be theirs. If trouble came to her, he would be
there to sacrifice all at a moment’s bidding, after the fashion of the
knights of old. Because she knew him, she would have faith in him. To
do her service would be his greatest joy.

At first the immobile, isolated hours of his convalescence made all
these things appear simple and inevitable, like the events of a great
dream. As time went on, however, he grew to chafe against his long
confinement, to weary of his weakness, and of the familiar sight of
every object in the room; and in the mornings, when Mrs. Parkin brought
him his breakfast, he found himself longing for a letter from her--some
brief word of joy that he was recovering. He yearned for some material
object, the touch of which would recall her to him, as if a particle of
her personality had impregnated the atoms.

Sometimes, he would force himself into believing that she would
appear again, drive out to learn the progress of his recovery....
After luncheon she would leave home ... about half-past one, probably
... soon after three, he would see her.... Now, she was nearing the
cross-roads ... now climbing the hill past Longrigg’s farm ... she
would have to walk the horse there ... now, crossing the old bridge. He
would lie watching the clock; and when the suspense grew intolerable,
to cheat it, he would bury his head in the pillow to count up to a
thousand, before glancing at the hands again. So would slip by the
hour of her arrival; still, he would struggle to delude himself with
all manner of excuses for her--she had been delayed--she had missed
the turning, and had been compelled to retrace her steps. And, when at
length the twilight had come, he would start to assure himself that it
was to be to-morrow, and sink into a fitful dozing, recounting waking
dreams of her, subtly intoxicating....

       *       *       *       *       *

In April came a foretaste of summer, and, for an hour or two every
day, he was able to hobble downstairs. He perceived the box at once,
lying in its accustomed place, and concluded that on learning that
he was out of danger, she had sent it back to him. The sight of it
cheered him with indefinable hope: it seemed to signify a fresh token
of her faith in him: it had travelled with her back to Cockermouth on
that wonderful day which had brought them together; and now, in his
eyes, it was invested with a new preciousness. He unlocked it, and,
somehow, to discover that its contents had not been disturbed, was a
keen disappointment. He longed for proof that she had been curious to
look into it, that she had thus been able to realise how he had prized
every tiny object that had been consecrated for him by her. Then it
flashed across him that she herself might have brought the box back,
and fearing to disturb him, had gone home again without asking to see
him. All that evening he brooded over this supposition; yet shrank
from putting any question to Mrs. Parkin. But the following morning,
a sudden impulse overcame his repugnance; and the next moment he had
learned the truth. Untouched, unmoved, the box had remained all the
while--she had never taken it--she had forgotten it. And depression
swept through him; for it seemed that his ideal had tottered.

His prolonged isolation and his physical lassitude had quickened his
emotions to an abnormal sensibility, and had led him to a constant
fingering, as it were, of his successive sentimental phases. And
these, since they constituted his sole diversion, he had unconsciously
come to regard as of supreme importance. The cumbersome, complex
details of life in the outside world had assumed the simplification of
an indistinct background: in his vision of her figure he had perceived
no perspective.

But now the grain of doubt was sown: it germinated insidiously; and
soon, the whole complexion of his attitude towards her was transformed.
All at once he saw a whole network of unforeseen obstacles, besetting
each detail of the prospect he had been planning. Swarming uncertainty
fastened on him at every turn; till at last, goaded to desperation,
he stripped the gilding from the accumulated fabric of his idealised
future.

And then his passion for her flamed up--ardent, unreasoning, human.
After all, he loved as other men loved--that was the truth: the rest
was mere calfish meandering. Stubbornly he vindicated to himself his
right to love her.... He was a man--a creature of flesh and blood, and
every fibre within him was crying out for her--for the sight of her
face; the sound of her voice; the clasp of her hand. Body and soul he
loved her; body and soul he yearned for her.... She had come back to
him--she was his again--with passionate tears she had told him that she
loved him. To fight for her, he was ready to abandon all else. At the
world’s laws he jibed bitterly; before God they were man and wife.

The knowledge that it lay in his power to make her his for life,
to bind her to him irrevocably, brought him intoxicating relief.
Henceforward he would live on, but for that end. Existence without her
would be dreary, unbearable. He would resign his living and leave the
church. Together they would go away, abroad: he would find some work to
do in the great cities of Australia.... She was another man’s wife--but
the sin would be his--_his_, not hers--God would so judge it; and
for her sake he would suffer the punishment. Besides, he told himself
exultantly, the sin was it not already committed? “Whosoever looketh on
a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her already in
his heart.”

He would go to her, say to her simply that he was come for her. It
should be done openly, honestly in the full light of day. New strength
and deep-rooted confidence glowed within him. The wretched vacillation
of his former self was put away like an old garment. Once more he sent
her words of love sounding in his ears--the words that had made them
man and wife before God. And on, the train of his thoughts whirled:
visions of a hundred scenes flitted before his eyes--he and she
together as man and wife, in a new home across the seas, where the past
was all forgotten, and the present was redolent of the sure joy of
perfect love....

       *       *       *       *       *

He was growing steadily stronger. Pacing the floor of his room, or
the gravel-path before the house, when the sun was shining, each day
he would methodically measure the progress of his strength. He hinted
of a long sea voyage to the doctor: the man declared that it would be
madness to start before ten days had elapsed. Ten days--the stretch
of time seemed absurd, intolerable. But a quantity of small matters
relating to the parish remained to be set in order: he had determined
to leave no confusion behind him. So he mapped out a daily task for
himself: thus he could already begin to work for her; thus each day’s
accomplishment would bring him doubly nearer to her. The curate, who
had been taking his duty, came once or twice at his request to help
him; for he was jealously nursing his small stock of strength. He
broke the news of his approaching departure to Mrs. Parkin, and asked
her to accept the greater portion of his furniture, as an inadequate
token of his gratitude towards her for all she had done for him. The
good creature wept copiously, pestered him with questions concerning
his destination, and begged him to give her news of him in the future.
Next he sent for a dealer from Cockermouth to buy the remainder, and
disputed with him the price of each object tenaciously.

One afternoon his former rector appeared, and with tremulous cordiality
wished him God-speed, assuming that the sea voyage was the result of
doctor’s advice. And it was when the old man was gone, and he was
alone again, that, for the first time, with a spasm of pain, he caught
a glimpse of the deception he was practising. But some irresistible
force within him urged him forward--he was powerless--to look back was
impossible now--there was more yet to be done--he must go on--there was
no time to stop to think. So to deaden the rising conscience-pangs, he
fiercely reminded himself that now, but five days more separated her
from him. He sat down to write to his bishop and resign his living,
struggling with ambiguous, formal phrases, impetuously attributing to
his physical weakness his inability to frame them.

The letter at length finished, instinctively dreading fresh gnawings of
uneasiness, he forced himself feverishly into thinking of plans for the
future, busying his mind with time-tables, searching for particulars of
steamers, turning over the leaves of his bank-book. All the money which
his father had left to him had remained untouched: for three years they
could live comfortably on the capital; meanwhile he would have found
some work.

At last, when, with the growing twilight, the hills outside were
hurriedly darkening, he sank back wearily in his chair. And all at once
he perceived with dismay that nothing remained for him to do, nothing
with which he could occupy his mind. For the moment he was alone with
himself, and looking backwards, realisation of the eager facility
with which he had successively severed each link, and the rapidity
with which he had set himself drifting towards a future, impenetrable
with mysterious uncertainty, stole over him. He had done it all, he
told himself, deliberately, unaided; bewildered, he tried to bring
himself face to face with his former self, to survey himself as he
had been before the fever--that afternoon when he had gone up to Beda
Cottages--plodding indifferently through life in the joyless, walled-in
valley, which, he now understood, had in a measure reflected the spirit
of his own listless broodings. Scared remorse seized him. The prospect
of departure, now that it was close at hand, frightened him; left him
aching as with the burden of dead weight, so that, for a while, he
remained inert, dully acquiescing in his accumulating disquietude.

Then, in desperation, he invoked her figure, imagining a dozen
incoherent versions of the coming scene--the tense words of greeting,
his passionate pleading, her impulsive yielding, and the acknowledgment
of her trust in him....

By-and-bye, Mrs. Parkin brought him his dinner. He chatted to her with
apparent unconcern, jested regarding his appetite; for a curious calm,
the lucidity evoked by suppressed elation, pervaded him.

But through the night he tossed restlessly, waking in the darkness to
find himself throbbing with triumphant exhilaration; each time striking
matches to examine the face of his watch, and beginning afresh to
calculate the hours that separated him from the moment that was to bind
them together--the irrevocable starting towards the future years.

       *       *       *       *       *

She stood in the bow-window of her drawing-room, arranging some cut
flowers in slender pink and blue vases, striped with enamel of
imitation gold. Behind her, the room, uncomfortably ornamental,
repeated the three notes of colour--gilt paper shavings filling the
grate; gilt-legged chairs and tables; stiff, shiny, pink chintzes
encasing the furniture; on the wall a blue-patterned paper, all
speckled with stars of gold.

Outside, the little lawn, bathed in the fresh morning sunlight, glowed
a luscious green, and the trim flower-beds swelled with heightened
colours. A white fox-terrier came waddling along the garden path: she
lifted the animal inside the window, stroking his sleek sides with an
effusive demonstration of affection. Would Jim remember to be home in
good time, she was idly wondering; she had forgotten to remind him
before he went to his office, that to-night she was to sing at a local
concert.

Suddenly, she caught sight of a man’s figure crossing the lawn. For an
instant she thought it was an old clerk, whom Jim sometimes employed
to carry messages. Then she saw that it was Alec--coming straight
towards her. Her first impulse was to escape from him; but noticing
that his gaze was fixed on the ground, she retreated behind an angle
of the window, and stood watching him.... Poor Alec! He was going away
on a sea-voyage for his health, so Jim had heard it said in the town;
and she formed a hasty resolve to be very kind to the poor fellow. Yet
her vanity felt a prick of pique, as she noticed that his gait was
grown more gaunt, more ungainly than ever; and she resented that his
haggard face, his stubbly beard, which, when he lay ill, had signified
tense tragedy, should now seem simply uncouth. Still, she awaited his
appearance excitedly; anticipating a renewed proof of his touching,
dog-like devotion to her, and with a fresh thrill of unconscious
gratitude to him for having supplied that scene to which she could look
back with secret, sentimental pride.

The maid let him into the room. As he advanced towards her, she saw
him brush his forehead with his hand impatiently, as if to rid his
brain of an importunate thought. He took her outstretched hand: the
forced cheeriness of her phrase of greeting died away, as she felt his
gaze searching her face.

“Let us sit down,” he said abruptly.

“I’m all right again, now,” he began with a brisk, level laugh; and it
occurred to her that perhaps the illness had affected his mind.

“I’m so glad of that,” she stammered in reply; “so very glad.... And
you’re going away, aren’t you, for a long sea voyage? That will do you
ever so much good----”

But before she had finished speaking, he was kneeling on the carpet
before her, pouring out incoherent phrases. Bewildered, she gazed at
him, only noticing the clumsy breadth of his shoulders.

“Listen to me, Ethel, listen,” he was saying. “Everything is
ready--I’ve given it all up--my living--the Church. I can’t bear it any
longer--life without you, I mean.... You are everything to me--I only
want you--I care for nothing else now. I am going away to Australia.
You will come with me, Ethel--you said you loved me.... We love one
another--come with me--let us start life afresh. I can’t go on living
without you ... I thought it would be easy for you to come; I see now
that perhaps it’s difficult. You have your home: I see that.... But
have trust in me--I will make it up to you. Together we will start
afresh--make a new home--a new life. I will give you every moment; I
will be your slave.... Listen to me, Ethel; let us go away. Everything
is ready--I’ve got money--I’ve arranged everything. We can go up to
London to-morrow. The steamer starts on Thursday.”

The sound of his voice ceased. She was staring at the door, filled with
dread lest it should open, and the maid should see him kneeling on the
carpet.

“Don’t,” she exclaimed, grasping his coat. “Get up, quick.”

He rose, awkwardly she thought, and stood before her.

“We were so happy together once, dear--do you remember--in the first
days, when you promised yourself to me? And now I know that in your
heart you still care for me. You said so. Say you will come--say you
will trust me--you will start to-morrow. If you can’t come so soon
I will wait, wait till you can come,” he added, and she felt the
trembling touch of his hands on hers, and his breath beating on her
face.

“Don’t, please,” and she pushed back his hands. “Some one might see.”

“What does it matter, my darling? We are going to belong to one another
for always. I am going to wait for you, darling--to be your slave--to
give up every moment of my life to you.... It’s the thought of you
that’s made me live, dear.... You brought me back to life, that day you
came.... I’ve thought of nothing but you since. I’ve been arranging it
all----”

“It’s impossible,” she interrupted.

“No, dear, it’s not impossible,” he pleaded.

“You’ve resigned your living--left the Church?” she asked incredulously.

“Yes, everything,” he answered proudly.

“And all because you cared so for me?”

“I can’t begin to live again without you. I would suffer eternal
punishment gladly to win you.... You will trust yourself to me darling;
say you will trust me.”

“Of course, Alec, I trust you. But you’ve no right to----”

“Oh! because you’re married, and it’s a sin, and I’m a clergyman. But
I’m a man first. And for you I’ve given it all up--everything. You
don’t understand my love for you.”

“Yes, yes, I do,” she answered quickly, alarmed by the earnestness of
his passion, yet remembering vaguely that she had read of such things
in books.

“You will come to-morrow, darling--you will have trust in me?”

“You are mad, Alec. You don’t know what you are saying. It would be
absurd.”

“It’s because you don’t understand how I love you, that you say that,”
he broke out fiercely. “You can’t understand--you can’t understand.

“Yes, I can,” she protested, instinctively eager to vie with his
display of emotion.

“Then say you will come--promise it, promise it,” he cried; and his
features were all distorted by suspense.

But at this climax of his insistance, she lost consciousness of her own
attitude. She seemed suddenly to see all that clumsiness which had made
her refuse him before.

“It’s altogether ridiculous,” she answered shortly.

He recoiled from her: he seemed to stiffen a little all over; and she
felt rising impatience at his grotesque denseness in persisting.

“You say it’s altogether ridiculous?” he repeated after her slowly.

“Yes, of course it’s ridiculous,” she repeated with uneasy emphasis.
“I’m very sorry you should mind--feel it so--but it isn’t my fault.”

“Why did you say then that before God you loved me, when you came that
day?” he burst out with concentrated bitterness.

“Because I thought you were dying.” The bald statement of the truth
sprang to her lips--a spontaneous, irresistible betrayal.

“I see--I see,” he muttered. His hands clenched till the knuckles
showed white.

“I’m very sorry,” she added lamely. Her tone was gentler, for his dumb
suffering moved her sensibilities. In her agitation, the crudity of her
avowal had slipped her notice.

“That’s no use,” he answered wearily.

“Alec, don’t be angry with me. Can’t we be friends? Don’t you see
yourself now that it was mad, absurd?” she argued, eager to reinstate
herself in his eyes. Then, as he made no answer, “Let us be friends,
Alec, and you will go back to Scarsdale, when you are well and strong.
You will give up nothing for my sake. I should not wish that, you know,
Alec.”

“Yes,” he assented mechanically, “I shall go back.”

“I shall always think of this morning,” she continued, growing
sentimentally remorseful as the sensation of rising relief pervaded
her. “And you will soon forget all about it,” she added, with a
cheeriness of tone that rang false; and paused, awaiting his answer.

“And I shall forget all about it,” he repeated after her.

To mask her disappointment, she assumed a silly, nervous gaiety.

“And I shall keep it quite secret that you were so naughty as to ask me
to run away with you. I sha’n’t even tell Jim.”

He nodded stupidly.

With a thin, empty smile on her face, she was debating how best to part
with him, when, of a sudden, he rose, and, without a word, walked out
of the room.

He strode away across the lawn, and, as she watched his retreating
figure, she felt for him a shallow compassion, not unmingled with
contempt.




George Meredith

By Morton Fullerton


    DEEPEST and keenest of our time who pace
        The variant by-paths of the uncertain heart
        In undiscerned mysterious ways apart,
    Thou huntest on the Assyrian monster’s trace:
    That sweeping-pinioned Thing--with human face,
        Poor Man, with wings hoof-weighted lest they start
        To try the breeze above this human mart,
    In heights pre-occupied of a god-like race.

    Among the stammering sophists of the age
        Thy words are absolute, thy vision true;
    No hand but thine is found to fit the gage
        The Titan, Shakespeare, to a whole world threw.
    Till thou hadst boldly to his challenge sprung,
    No rival had he in our English tongue.




A Sunset

By William Hyde


[Illustration]




Jeanne-Marie

By Leila Macdonald


I

JEANNE-MARIE lived alone in the white cottage at the far end of the
village street.

It was a long narrow street of tall houses, stretching each side of
the white shining road, for two hundred yards or more. A street that
was cool and shadeful even in the shadeless summer days, when the sun
burned most hotly, when the broad roads dazzled between their avenues
of plane-tree and poplar, and the mountains disappeared from the
horizon in the blue haze of heat.

From her little garden Jeanne-Marie liked to look at the mountains each
morning, and, when for two or three days following they were not to be
seen, she would shake her head reproachfully, as at the failing of old
friends.

“My boys, Jeanne-Marie is only thirty-seven,” Bourdet the innkeeper
said to his companions, as they sat, one May afternoon, smoking under
the chestnut-trees in front of the café. They all looked up as he
spoke, and watched Jeanne-Marie, as she walked slowly past them to her
cottage.

“Bourdet has been paying court,” said Leguillon, the fat, red-faced
butcher, with a chuckle, as he puffed at his long pipe. “You see, he
is anxious we should think her of an age suitable, before he tells us
the betrothals are arranged.”

“For my part I should give many congratulations,” said the village
postman and tobacconist, gruffly. “Jeanne-Marie is worth any of our
girls of the village, with their bright dresses and silly giggles.”

Bourdet laughed. “You shall come to the wedding, my friends,” he said,
with a wink and a nod of the head to the retreating figure; “and since
our friend Minaud there finds the girls so distasteful, he shall wait
till our babies are old enough, and be betrothed to one of them.”

The postmaster laughed with the rest. “But seriously,” he said,
“Bourdet will pardon me if I tell him our Jeanne-Marie is a good deal
past the thirties.”

Laurent, the good-looking young farmer, who stood leaning against the
tree round which their chairs were gathered, answered him gravely.
“Wait, _beau-père_, till you see her on Sunday coming from Mass on M.
Bourdet’s arm; the cap that hides the grey knot of hair at the back of
the head is neat and bright--oh! so bright--pink or blue for choice,
and if M. Bourdet chances to compliment the colour of the stockings--he
is gay, you know, always--the yellow face turns rosy and all the
wrinkles go.” And laughing maliciously at Bourdet, the young fellow
turned away homewards.

Bourdet looked grave. “’Tis your son-in-law that speaks like that,
Minaud,” he said, “otherwise I would say that in my day the young
fellows found it better to amuse themselves with the young girls than
to mock at the old ones.”

“You are right, my friend,” said Minaud. “’Tis the regiment that taught
Laurent this, and many other things. But it is a good boy, though with
a sharp tongue. To these young ones it seems all foolishness to be an
old girl.”

And the others nodded agreement.

So they sat, chatting, and drawing at their long pipes, while the
afternoon sun gleamed on the little gardens and on the closed green
shutters of the houses; and the slow, large oxen lumbered through the
village street, their yoked heads pressed well down, and their tails
flicking unceasingly at the swarm of flies.

Jeanne-Marie stood in her garden, blinking thoughtfully at the flowers,
while she shaded her eyes with her hand. On her bare head the sparse
brown hair was parted severely and neatly to each side, and the deep
southern eyes looked steadily out of the tanned and wrinkled face.
Her light cotton bodice fell away from the thin lines of her neck and
shoulders, and her sabots clicked harshly as she moved about the garden.

“At least the good God has given me a fine crab-apple bloom this year,”
Jeanne-Marie said, as she looked at the masses of rich blossom. On the
wall the monthly roses were flowering thickly, and the Guelder roses
bent their heads under the weight of their heavy bunches. “In six days
I shall have the peonies, and the white rose-bush in the corner is
coming soon,” said Jeanne-Marie contentedly.


II

It was four and a half years ago that Jeanne-Marie had come to the
white cottage next to the mill, with the communal school opposite. Till
that autumn day, when a pair of stout oxen had brought her goods to the
door, she had lived with her brother, who was _métayer_ to M. François,
the owner of the big villa a quarter of a mile beyond the village.
Her father had been _métayer_; and when he died, his son Firman--a
fine-looking young man, not long home from his service--had taken
his place. So the change at the _métairie_ had very little affected
Jeanne-Marie.

But she missed her father sorely every day at mid-day, when she
remembered that there was one less to cook for; that the tall, straight
old figure would not come in at the door, and that the black pudding
might remain uncooked for all Firman’s noticing; and Jeanne-Marie would
put the bouillon by the fire, and sit down and cry softly to herself.

They were very kind to her at the villa, and at night, when Firman
was at the café, she would take the stockings and the linen and darn
them in the kitchen, while she listened to the servants’ talk, and
suppressed her _patois_ as much as possible, for they were from the
North, and would not understand.

Two years after her father’s death, Jeanne-Marie began to notice that
Firman went no more to the café in the evening, and had always his
shirt clean, and his best black smocked cape for the market in the town
on Mondays, and for Mass on Sundays.

“It astonishes me,” she had said, when she was helping M.
François’ cook that day the château-folk had come to _déjeûner_,
unexpectedly--for Jeanne-Marie’s cooking was very good
indeed--“because, you understand, that is not his way at all. Now, if
it were Paul Puyoo or the young André, it would be quite ordinary; but
with Firman, I doubt with him it is a different thing.”

And Anna had nodded her black head sagely over the _omelette aux
fines herbes_ as she answered; “Jeanne-Marie, Firman wishes to marry;
Jeanne-Marie, for my own part, I say it’s that little fat blue-eyed
Suzanne from the _métairie_ on the hill.”


III

Suzanne looked very pretty the day she came home to Mr. François’
_métairie_, leaning on her husband’s arm; but Jeanne-Marie was not
there to see; she was sitting in the large chair in the kitchen of the
white cottage, and she was sobbing with her head in her hands. “And
indeed the blessed Virgin herself must have thought me crazy, to see me
sitting sobbing there, with the house in confusion, and not a thing to
cook with in the kitchen,” she said, shamefacedly, to Marthe Legrand
from the mill, when she came in, later, to help her. “You should have
remained,” Marthe answered, nodding at her pityingly. “You should have
remained, Jeanne-Marie; the old house is the old house, and the good
God never meant the wedding of the young ones to drive away the old
ones from the door.”

Jeanne-Marie drew in her breath at the words “old ones.” “But the book
says I am only thirty-four!” she told herself; and that night she
looked in the old Mass-book, to be sure if it could be true; and there
was the date set down very clearly, in the handwriting of Dubois, her
father’s oldest friend; for Jeanne-Marie’s father himself could neither
read nor write--he was, as he said with pride, of the old school,
“that kissed our sweethearts, and found that better than writing them
long scribbles on white paper, as the young ones do now; and thought
a chat with a friend on Sundays and holidays worth more than sitting
cramped up, reading the murders and the adulteries in the newspapers.”
So it was Dubois who wrote down the children’s births in the old Mass
book. Yes, there they were. Catherine first of all; poor Catherine,
who was so bright and pretty, and died that rainy winter when she was
just twelve years old. Then “Jeanne-Marie, née le 28 Novembre 1854,
à minuit,” and added, in the same handwriting, “On nous raconte qu’à
cette heure-la nous étions en train de gagner une grande bataille en
Russie! Que ça lui porte bonheur!” Eight years later: “Jacques Firman,
né le 12 Février à midi.” It all came back to Jeanne-Marie as she
read; that scene of his birth, when she was just eight years old. She
was sitting alone in the kitchen, crying, for they had told her her
mother was very ill, and had been ill all the night, and just as the
big clock was striking twelve she heard the voice of the neighbour
who had spent the night there, calling to her: “Jeanne-Marie, viens
vite, ta mère veut te voir”; and she had gone, timid and hesitating,
into the darkened room. The first thing she noticed was the large fire
blazing on the open hearth--she had never known her father and mother
have a fire before--and she wondered much whether it was being too cold
that had made her mother ill, as it had little Catherine. She looked
towards the bed and saw her mother lying there, her eyes closed, and
very pale--so pale that Jeanne-Marie was frightened and ran towards her
father; but he was smiling where he stood by the bed, and the child was
reassured. She saw him stoop and kiss his wife on the forehead, and
call her his “bonne petite femme,” and taking Jeanne-Marie by the hand
he showed her the _sage-femme_--the _sage-femme_ who had come the night
before to make her mother well--sitting near the fire with a white
bundle in her arms, and thanked the good God aloud that he had sent him
a fine boy at last. Old Dubois had come in gently, his béret in his
hand, as Jeanne-Marie’s father was speaking, and turning to the bed had
reiterated emphatically, “Tu as bien fait, chère dame, tu as bien fait.”

Jeanne-Marie sat silently going over it all in her mind. “Té,” she
murmured, “how quickly they all go; the father, the mother, old
Dubois, even Jeanne the _voisine_, is gone. I alone am left, and the
good God knows if there will be any to cry for me when my turn comes
to go.” She shut the old Mass-book, and put it carefully back on the
shelf, and she went to the old looking-glass and the tanned wrinkled
face met its reflection very calmly and patiently. “I think it was the
hard work in the fields when I was young,” she said; “certainly Marthe
was right. It is the face of an old woman, a face more worn than hers,
though she is beyond forty and has borne so many children.”


IV

Firman had urged his sister to stay on at the _métairie_ after his
marriage. “You should not go, it is not natural,” he said one evening
a few weeks before his wedding, while they were piling the small wood
in the shed. “The old house will not be the old house without you.
Suzanne wishes it also. _Parbleu!_ Is it the custom for the fathers
to turn their sons out, when they marry? Then, why should I let the
old sister go, now my time for marrying has come? Suzanne is a good
girl and pretty; and has never even looked at any young fellow in the
village--for I, as you know, am particular, and I like not the manners
in some villages, where a girl’s modesty is counted nothing--but blood
is worth the most, _ma foi_, as the old father used to say; and badly
must he think of me to see the old sister making room even for the
little Suzanne.”

But Jeanne-Marie shook her head. “I cannot well explain it, Firman,”
she said. “It’s not that your Suzanne comes unwelcome to me--no, the
good God knows it’s not that--but it would be so strange. I should
see the old mother’s shadow, at the table where you sat, and in the
bed where you lay. I might get foolish, and angry, Firman. So let me
go, and, when the little ones come, I shall be their grandmother, and
Suzanne will forgive me.”

That was four and a half years ago, and it was a very lonely four and
a half years at the white cottage. Even the cooking, when it was for
herself alone, became uninteresting, and the zest went out of it.
Jeanne-Marie, in her loneliness, hungered for the animal life that had
unconsciously formed a great part of her existence at the _métairie_.
Every springtime she would sit, sometimes for hours, in her garden,
watching the flocks of callow geese, as they wandered along the road in
front of the mill, pecking at the ground as they went, and uttering all
the time their little plaintive cries, that soothed her with its echo
of the old home. When the boys in their bérets, with their long poles
and their loud cries of “guà, guà,” drove the cows and the oxen home
from the fields at sunset, Jeanne-Marie would come out of her cottage,
and watch the patient, sleek beasts, as they dawdled along. And she
would think longingly of the evenings at the _métairie_, when she never
missed going out to see the oxen, as they lay contentedly on their
prickly bedding, moving their heavy jaws slowly up and down, too lazy
even to look up as she entered.

Firman loved his oxen, for they were well trained and strong, and did
good work; but Jeanne-Marie would have laughed in those days, had she
been told she loved the animals of the farm. “I remember,” she said to
Marthe of the mill one day, “how I said to the old father years ago:
‘When the children of M. François came to the _métairie_, it is--“Oh,
Jeanne-Marie, you will not kill that pretty little grey hen with the
feathered legs,” and “Oh! Jeanne-Marie, you must not drown so many
kittens this time”: but I say to them always: “My children, the rich
have their toys and have the time and money to make toys of their
animals; but to us poor folk they are the useful creatures God has
given us for food and work, and they are not playthings.”’ So I said
then; but now, ah, now Marthe, it is different. Do you remember how old
Dubois for ever quarrelled with young Baptiste, but when they wrote
from the regiment to tell him the boy was dead of fever, during the
great manœuvres, do you remember how the old father mourned, and lay
on his bed for a whole day, fasting? So it always is, Marthe. The cow
butts the calf with her horns, but when the calf is gone, the mother
moans for it all the day.”

Firman was too busy with his farm and his new family ties to come
much to see his sister, or to notice how rarely she came up to the
_métairie_ now. For Suzanne had never forgiven, and that was why
Jeanne-Marie walked up so seldom to M. François’s _métairie_.

Did not all the village say that it was Suzanne’s doing that Firman’s
sister left the farm on his marriage? That Suzanne’s jealousy had
driven Jeanne-Marie away? And when this came to the ears of Firman’s
wife, and the old folks shook their heads in her presence over the
strange doings of young couples now-a-days, the relief that the dreaded
division of supremacy with her husband’s sister was spared her, was
lost in anger against Jeanne-Marie, as the cause of this village
scandal. The jealousy that she had always felt for the “chère sœur,”
whom Firman loved and respected, leapt up within her. “People say he
loves his sister, and that it is I who part them; they shall see--yes,
they shall see.”

And bit by bit, with all a woman’s subtle diplomacy, she drew her
husband away from his sister’s affection, until in a year or two their
close intimacy had weakened to a gradually slackening friendship.

At night-time, when Firman’s passionate southern nature lay under the
thrall of his wife’s beauty, she would whisper to him in her soft
_patois_, “Love me well, my husband, for I have only you to love;
others are jealous of my happiness, and even Jeanne-Marie is envious of
your wife, and of the babe that is to come.”

And the hot Spanish blood, that his mother had given him, would leap to
Firman’s face as he took her in his arms, and swore that all he loved,
loved her; and those who angered her, he cared not for.

In the first year of their marriage, when Jeanne-Marie came almost
every day, Suzanne would show her with pride all the changes and
alterations in the old house. “See here, my sister,” she said to her
one day, only six months after the wedding, when she was taking her
over the house, “this room that was yours, we have dismantled for the
time; did it not seem a pity to keep an unused room all furnished, for
the sun to tarnish, and the damp to spoil?” And Jeanne-Marie, as she
looked round on the bare walls and the empty corners of the little
room, where she and Catherine had slept together in the old days,
answered quietly, “Quite true, Suzanne, quite true; it would be a great
pity.”

That night when she and Marthe sat together in the kitchen she told her
of the incident.

“But, Jeanne-Marie,” Marthe interrupted eagerly, “how was it you had
left your furniture there, since it was yours?”

“How was it? But because little Catherine had slept in the old bed, and
sat in the old chairs, and how could I take them away from the room?”

“Better that than let Suzanne break them up for firewood,” Marthe
replied shortly.

When little Henri was born, a year after the marriage, Suzanne would
not let Jeanne-Marie be at the _métairie_, and she sent Firman down
beforehand to tell her that she feared the excitement of her presence.
Jeanne-Marie knew she was disliked and distrusted; but this blow fell
very heavily: though she raised her head proudly and looked her brother
full in the face when he stammered out his wife’s wishes.

“For the sake of our name, and what they will say in the village, I am
sorry for this,” she said; and Firman went without a word.

But when he was gone Jeanne-Marie’s pride broke down, and in the
darkness of the evening she gathered her shawl round her, and crept up
to the _métairie_ door.

Hour after hour she sat there, not heeding the cold or the damp, her
head buried in her hands, her body rocked backwards and forwards. “I
pray for Firman’s child,” she muttered without ceasing. “O dear Virgin!
O blessed Virgin! I pray for my brother’s child.” And when at length
an infant’s feeble cry pierced through the darkness, Jeanne-Marie rose
and tottered home, saying to herself contentedly, “The good God himself
tells me that all is well.”

Perhaps the pangs of maternity quickened the capabilities for
compassion in Suzanne’s peasant mind. She sent for Jeanne-Marie two
days later, and watched her with silent wonder, but without a sneer, as
she knelt weeping and trembling before the small new bundle of humanity.

From that day little Henri was the idol of Jeanne-Marie’s heart. All
the sane instincts of wifehood and motherhood, shut up irrevocably
within the prison of her maiden life, found vent in her devotion to
her brother’s child. The natural impulses, so long denied freedom, of
whose existence and force she was not even aware, avenged their long
suppression in this worship of Firman’s boy.

To watch the growth of the childish being, the unveiling of his
physical comeliness, and the gradual awakening of his perceptions,
became the interest and fascination of her life. Every morning at
eleven o’clock, when the cottage showed within the open door all white
and shining after her energetic scrubbings, she would put on a clean
bodice, and a fresh pink handkerchief for the little coil of hair at
the back of her head, and sit ready and impatient, knitting away the
time, till one o’clock struck, and she could start for the farm.

She would always arrive at the same hour, when the _métairie_ dinner
was finished, and Suzanne’s fretful complaints: “Jeanne-Marie, you are
so proud, you will not come for the dinner or stay for the supper,” met
only a smile and a deprecating shake of the head.

On her arrival, if Suzanne were in a good temper, she would surrender
Henri to her, and Jeanne-Marie’s hour of heaven reached her. If it were
cold, she would sit in the kitchen, crooning snatches of old tunes, or
chattering soft nothings in _patois_ to the sleeping child. If fine,
she would wander round the garden with him in her arms, sometimes as
far as the road, where a chance passer’s exclamation of “Oh, le beau
bébé!” would flush her face with pleasure.

If Suzanne’s temper chanced to be ruffled, if Firman had displeased
her, or if the fitful jealousy that sprang up at times against her
_belle-sœur_, happened to be roused, she would insist that little Henri
was tired, and must not be moved; and Jeanne-Marie would sit for hours
sadly watching the cot, in which the child lay, not daring to touch him
or comfort him, even when he moaned and moved his arms restlessly in
his sleep.

So her life went on till Henri was about a year old, when Suzanne’s
gradually increasing exasperation reached an ungovernable pitch. To
her jealous imagination it had seemed for some time that the boy clung
more to her sister than to her, and one day things reached a climax.

Jeanne-Marie had arrived with a toy bought for three sous from a
travelling pedlar, and the child had screamed, and cried, because his
mother, alleging that he was tired, refused to allow Jeanne-Marie to
take him or show him the toy. The boy screamed louder and louder, and
Jeanne-Marie sat, silent and troubled, in her corner. Even Firman,
who was yoking his oxen in the yard, came in hurriedly, hearing the
noise, and finding nothing wrong, pleaded with his wife. “Mais, voyons,
Suzanne,” he began, persuasively, “if le petit wants to see his toy, la
tante may show it him, n’est ce pas?” And Suzanne, unable to bear it
any longer, almost threw her child into Jeanne-Marie’s lap, bursting
out, “Take him, then, and draw my baby’s love from me, as you please.
I want no child who hates his mother.” And sobbing loudly, she rushed
out. Firman followed her, his handsome face puckered with perplexity,
and Jeanne-Marie and the baby were left alone. She bent low down over
the deep Spanish eyes that were so like her own, and, while her tears
dropped on his face, she held him to her feverishly. “Adieu,” she
whispered, “adieu, petit Henri. La tante must not come to see him any
more, and Henri must be a good boy and love his mother.” And with one
long look at the child’s eyes fixed on her so wonderingly, Jeanne-Marie
rose softly and left the farm.

From that day started the great conflict between her love and her
pride. Though, to her simple nature, the jealousy of a woman who seemed
to her to have in abundance everything that made life worth living,
was utterly incomprehensible, she said to herself over and over as she
went home, that such a scene as that should never happen again. And as
she lay in her narrow bed that night, and made her resolution for the
future, she seemed to feel the very fibres of her heart break within
her.

Firman came down next day to beg his sister to behave as if nothing had
happened. “You are pale and your face is all drawn, _chère sœur_,” he
told her reproachfully; “but you must not take the things like that. If
poor Suzanne were herself and well, she would never have spoken as she
did.” But Jeanne-Marie smiled at him.

“If I am pale, Firman, it is not for worrying over Suzanne. Tell her
from me, I have been selfish all this time. I will not be so again.
When she can spare the little Henri, she shall send him to play here
with me, by Anna.” Anna was Suzanne’s sixteen-year-old sister, who
lived almost entirely at the _métairie_ since her sister’s marriage.
“And every Sunday afternoon I will come up, and will sit with him in
the garden as I used to do. Tell this to Suzanne, with my love.”

And Firman told her; and mingled with the relief that Suzanne felt,
that the face and figure which had become like a nightmare to her
strained nerves, would appear only once a week at the farm, was
gratitude that her sister had taken things so well. “Anna shall take
him every other day,” she observed to Firman, “she shall see I am
not jealous; it was the pain that took me suddenly yesterday, while
you were speaking. For that matter, in the afternoon there is always
much for me to do, and little Henri can very well go with Anna to the
cottage.”

And no doubt she meant to keep her promise, but she was occupied mind
and body with other things. The second baby would be born in a month,
and in the afternoons, when she sat, languid and tired, she liked to
have her sister Anna by her, and Henri playing by her side.

And after little Catherine was born, there was much for Anna to do.
“I could not well spare her if I would,” Suzanne would say to herself;
“what with two babies and me so long in getting on my feet this time.”

And Jeanne-Marie put on the clean white bodice every day before her
dinner, and sat in the little garden with her eyes fixed on the turning
in the white road that led to M. François’s _métairie_, but it was not
more than one day a week that Anna would come in sight, with little
Henri in her arms. The other days Jeanne-Marie would sit, shading her
eyes and watching, till long after the hour when she could expect them
to appear.

At first, after the quarrel, she had believed in Suzanne’s reiterated
assurances that “Anna would come every other day or so,” and many were
the wasted afternoons of disappointment that she courted in her little
garden. Sometimes she would rise to her feet, and a sudden impulse to
go up to the farm, not a mile away, if only to kiss _le petit_ and come
home again, laid hold of her; but the memory of Suzanne’s cold looks of
surprise, and the “Is anything wrong, Jeanne-Marie?” that would meet
her, was sufficient to force her into her chair again with a little
hopeless sigh. “When the calf is gone, the mother mourns for it all
the day,” Marthe said grimly, when she surprised her one day watching
the white turning. But Jeanne-Marie answered her miserably: “Ah, but I
never butt at my calf, and they have taken it from me all the same.”

There was great rejoicing in the cottage the day that Anna’s white
blouse and large green umbrella came in sight, and the three sat in
the kitchen together: Anna eating smilingly the cakes and biscuits
that grateful Jeanne-Marie made specially for her, and Henri crawling
happily on the floor. “He said ‘Maman’ to Suzanne yesterday,” Anna
would announce, as Jeanne-Marie hurried to meet her at the gate; or,
“Firman says he heard him say ‘Menou,’ when the white cat ran across
the yard this morning.” And many were the attempts to induce Henri to
make these utterances again. “Je t’aime, je t’aime,” Jeanne-Marie would
murmur to him, as she kissed him again and again, and the little boy
would look up at her with his dark eyes, and smile encouragingly.

All too quickly the time would go, and all too soon would come Anna’s
glance at the clock, and the dreaded words: “Suzanne will make herself
angry; we must go.”

And as Jeanne-Marie watched them disappear along the white road, the
clouds of her loneliness would gather round her again.

The Sunday afternoons at the farm were looked forward to through all
the week. There was little Catherine to admire, and in the summer days
there was the orchard, where Henri loved to play, and where he and his
aunt would sit together all the afternoon. If Suzanne were in a good
temper, she would bring Catherine out in her arms, and the children
would tumble about together in the long grass.

And so the time wore on, and as Henri grew in mind and body, and was
able to prattle and run about the fields, Jeanne-Marie hungered for him
with a love more absorbing than ever.

Two years had passed since Catherine’s birth, and for the last year
Anna would often bring her, when she came down to Jeanne-Marie’s
cottage. The one day a week had dropped gradually to every ten days;
it was sometimes only every fortnight that one or both children would
appear, and the days that little Henri came were marked white days on
the simple calendar of Jeanne-Marie’s heart.


V

Now, as Jeanne-Marie stood in her garden this hot May afternoon, and
shaded her eyes, as she gazed at the broad white road, her face was
troubled, and there was a drawn line of apprehension round the corners
of her mouth. For lately Suzanne’s jealous temper had flamed up again,
and this alert jealousy boded evil days for Jeanne-Marie.

Several times within the last two months, little Henri--now going on
for four years old--had come toddling down to the cottage by himself,
to his aunt’s unbounded amazement and delight. “Maman is at market,”
he explained with dignity the first time, in answer to the wondering
queries. “Papa yoked the oxen to the big cart after dinner, and they
went; Anna is talking all the afternoon to Pierre Puyoo in the road;
and Henri was alone. So Henri came; Henri loves his aunt, and would
like some biscuits.” Great was the content of that hour in the cottage,
when Jeanne-Marie sat in the big arm-chair, and the boy prattled and
ate his biscuits on her knee. Anna’s hard young smile, that scorned
emotion, was always a _gêne_ to this harmony of old and young; also,
there was no need to glance anxiously at the clock; for the oxen take
two hours to get home from the market, and who leaves the town till
late in the afternoon? “Anna will miss _le petit_,” Jeanne-Marie
suggested the first time; but he answered proudly: “She will think _le
petit_ takes care of the geese in the meadow; do I not have charge of
all the geese many afternoons? And when I am six years old, papa has
promised I may guard the cows, and bring them home to milk at sundown,
as André Puyoo and Georges Vidal do, each day. Also, why cannot Henri
come to see _la tante_ when he likes?”

But nevertheless, the second and third occasions of these happy visits,
always on market-days, Jeanne-Marie became uneasy. Did Suzanne know
of the boy’s absences? Were those fitful jealousies she now displayed
almost every Sunday, the result of her knowledge? And if she did
not know, would there not be a burst of rage when she heard? Should
Jeanne-Marie risk this joy by telling her of its existence, and
asking her permission for its continuance? How well the hard tones of
Suzanne’s voice, framing each plausible objection, came to her mind,
as she thought. No, she could not do it. Let the child come, and go on
coming every market-day, for as long as he could. She would say no word
to encourage his keeping it secret from his mother; he would tell her
one day, if he had not told her already, and then, if anger there was,
surely the simple words, “May not your child visit his aunt alone?”
must bring peace again.

So Jeanne-Marie reasoned away her fears. But now, as she stood in her
garden, her lips were trembling with anxiety.

Last Sunday she had been too ill to go up to the farm. A sudden
agonising breathlessness, together with great dizziness, had forced
her to bed, and Marthe’s boy had gone up with the message. But neither
that day nor the next, which was market-day, nor any following day,
had Suzanne, or Anna, or little Henri come to see her. And to-day was
Saturday. And she realised wearily that to-morrow she could not get to
the farm; she felt too ill and feeble. “My heart aches,” she said to
Marthe each day, “my heart aches.”

The afternoon waned slowly, and the little group at the café increased
in numbers, as the men sauntered through the village at sundown. The
women stood at their doors, laughing and chatting with one another.
M. le Curé passed down the street, smiling at the children. From the
meadows came the cows and oxen, driven slowly along, their bells
beating low harmonies as they went. The festive air of evening after
a hot day touched all the tiny town. And Jeanne-Marie stood in her
garden, waiting.

Suddenly, while she watched, her heart bounded within her, and a spasm
of sudden pain drove the colour from her face, for she recognised
the figure that was passing from the white turning into the broad
road. Suzanne--Suzanne, who had not been near her cottage for a
year--Suzanne, alone. She pressed her two hands under her left breast,
and moved forward to the gate. She felt now she had known it for long.
All the suspense of many days had given way to a dull certainty: little
Henri was ill, was dying perhaps, and Suzanne had come with the news.

Jeanne-Marie had her hand on the latch to let her through; but she
stood outside the gate, and said hoarsely, “I will not come in.” Her
face was flushed, there was no cap over her coil of brown hair, and
she had on the dark dress she never wore except at the farm. All this
Jeanne-Marie noticed mechanically, while that suffocating hurry at her
heart seemed to eat away her energy and her power of speech.

But Suzanne was going to speak. The colour flamed into her face, and
her teeth ground together, as if to force down the violence of her
feeling, and then she spoke: “Jeanne-Marie, you have done your work
well. We knew you loved our boy. You were careful always to show us
how far greater was your love for him than ours. And as you could not
well turn him against me before my eyes, you waited--_ma foi_, how well
you did it!--you waited till I was well away, and then, you taught
him to sneak down to see you, and sneak home again before my return.
_Mon Dieu!_ it was a worthy son to us you wished to make of him. But
it could not be, Jeanne-Marie. Your good God, you love so well, would
not have it and so;”--there came a sob in her voice that she choked
down, and Jeanne-Marie’s face went a shade greyer as she listened--“it
happened that I was long at the market last week, and you, knowing this
would be so, because it was a big market, brought him home late, when
the fever was springing from the marshes--it was Marguerite Vallée saw
him and came and told me--and now these four days he has lain with
fever, and the officier de santé tells us there grows something in his
throat that may kill him in four days.”

The hard tones left her voice in the last phrase. A shadow of the love
she persuaded herself she felt for Henri sprang up, and choked her
anger. She forgot Jeanne-Marie for the moment, and saw only the little
figure tossing with fever and delirium, and pity for her own sorrow
filled her eyes with tears. She was surprised at the calm cruelty of
her own words. Looking up curiously to see how her sister would take
it, she started, for Jeanne-Marie’s face seemed suddenly to have grown
old and grey. She was struggling breathlessly to speak, and when her
voice came, it sounded far off, and weak like the voice of a sick child:

“You know well that in your anger you have lied to me. Henri may be
ill--and dying; it is not I who have made him so. You shall listen
to me now, though I will not keep you here long; for the hand that
struck my mother suddenly through the heart, struck me while you were
speaking. You have kept me all these days in suspense, and now you have
given the blow. Be satisfied, Suzanne.”

She paused, and the sound of her heavy breathing struck Suzanne’s
frightened senses like the knell of a doom.

“Listen to me. Henri came to me of his own will, and never did I
persuade him or suggest to him to come. Never did he go home later
than four o’clock; there was nothing done in secret; neither I, nor
any in the village, thought it a crime he came to visit me. Often I
have seen him keeping the geese in the long grass of the meadows at
six, at seven o’clock. Seek the fever there--not on the village road
before the sunset. As the good God hears me, never have I stood between
that boy and his mother. Gradually you took from me every privilege
my affection knew; but I said nothing. Ah, I loved him dearly; I was
content to wait. But all that is over. If God grants me life--but He is
good, and I think He knows my suffering all these years--I swear before
Him your house shall be to me a house of strangers, Henri the child of
strangers, and my brother’s face unknown to me. Never shall my father’s
daughter hear again what I have heard from you to-day. All these years
you have played upon my heart. You have watched the suffering; you have
known how each word seemed so innocent, but stabbed so deep. You have
seen your child wind himself round my heart, and every day, every hour,
you have struggled to pluck him from me. Now, I tell you I tear your
children from my heart; you have killed not only my body, but my love.
Go, and leave me for ever, or by my father, I will curse you where you
stand.”

She tottered forward, and with one horrified look at the agony of her
menacing face, Suzanne turned and ran.

And Jeanne-Marie fell all her length on the garden soil.


VI

The miller’s boy saw her there, when he came past a few minutes later,
and not daring to touch her, ran to the mill for help. Marthe and her
husband came immediately and carried her into the cottage. At first,
they thought she was dead, her face was so grey and sunken; but she
came to herself, as they laid her on the bed, and shook her head
faintly when Marthe suggested fetching the officier de santé.

As soon as she could speak she whispered: “No, Marthe, it is the
illness of the heart that killed my mother. The doctor told her she
might have lived to be old, with much care, and if no great trouble
or excitement had come to her; but, you see, I was much troubled just
now, and so it has come earlier. Do not send for any doctor; he could
but call it by the long name they called it when my mother died, and
trouble one with vain touches and questions.”

So Marthe helped her to undress, and to get to bed quickly. The
breathlessness and the pain had gone for a time, though she was very
feeble, and could scarcely stand on her feet. But it was the grey look
of her face that frightened Marthe, and her strained quietness. No
questions could get out of her the story of the afternoon.

“Suzanne came to tell me little Henri was ill,” was all she would say;
but Marthe only shook her head, and made her own deductions.

Jeanne-Marie would not hear of her staying with her for the night, and
leaving her young children alone, and so it was settled the miller’s
boy should sleep below in the kitchen, and if Jeanne-Marie felt ill in
the night, she would call to him, and he would fetch Marthe immediately.

Also, Marthe promised to call at the house of M. le Curé on her way
home. He would be out late, since he had started only an hour ago to
take the Host to old Goupé, who lay dying four kilometres away; but she
would leave a message, and certainly, when he returned, however late,
he would come round. It was nine o’clock before Marthe would leave, and
even then she stopped reluctantly at the door, with a last look at the
thin figure propped up on her pillows. “Let me stay, Jeanne-Marie,” she
said; “you are so pale, and yet your eyes burn. I do not like to think
of the long night and you sitting here.”

“It is easier than when I lie down, which brings the breathlessness.
Do not worry yourself, Marthe, I shall sleep perhaps, and if I need
anything, I have but to call to Jean below. Good-night, and thank you,
Marthe.”

The little house was very quiet. Jean had been asleep on his chair this
hour past, and not a sound came from the slumbering village. There was
no blind to the window of the bedroom, and Jeanne-Marie watched the
moon, as it escaped slowly from the unwilling clouds, and threw its
light on to the foot of the narrow bed.

For a long while she lay there, without moving, while through all her
troubled, confused thoughts ran like an under-current the dull pain
that wrenched at her heart. It seemed to take the coherency from her
thinking, and to be the one unquiet factor in the calm that had come
over her. She was surprised, herself, at this strange fatigue that had
swept away even her suffering. She thought of little Henri and his
illness without a pang. He seemed, like some far-off person she had
read about, or heard of, long ago.

She thought to herself, vaguely, that she must be dying, since she
seemed to have lost all feeling.

Bit by bit, various little scenes between her and Henri came to her
mind, with an extraordinary vividness. He was sitting on her knee in
the cottage, and his clear child’s voice rang like a bell in the silent
room--so clearly, that Jeanne-Marie started, and wondered if she were
light-headed or had been dreaming. Then the voice faded away, and she
saw the cool, high grass of the orchard, and there was Henri laughing
at her, and rolling among the flowers. How cool and fresh it looked;
and Henri was asking her to come and play: “Tante Jeanne-Marie, viens
jouer avec ton petit. Tante Jeanne-Marie, tante Jeanne-Marie!” She must
throw herself on the grass with him--on the cool, waving grass. And she
bent forward with outstretched arms; but the movement brought her to
herself, and as she lay back on her pillows, suddenly the reality of
suffering rushed back upon her, with the agonising sense of separation
and of loss. Little Henri was dying; was dead perhaps; never to hear
his voice, or feel his warm little arms round her neck. She could do
nothing for him; he must die without her. “Tante Jeanne-Marie! Tante
Jeanne-Marie!” Was he calling her, from his feverish little bed? If
he called, she must go to him, she could not lie here, this suffering
was choking her. She must have air, and space to breathe in; this room
was suffocating her. She must go to Henri. With a desperate effort she
struggled to her feet, and stood supporting herself by the bed-post.
The moon, that had hidden itself in the clouds, struggled out, the
long, old-fashioned glass hanging on the wall opposite the bed became
one streak of light, and Jeanne-Marie, gazing at herself, met the
reflection of her own face, and knew that no power on earth could make
her reach the farm where little Henri lay.

She stood, as if spell-bound, marking the sunken look of the eyes, the
grey-blue colour of the cheeks, the face that was the face of an old
woman.

A sudden, fierce revolt against her starved life swept through her at
the sight, and conquered even the physical pain raging at her heart.
Still struggling for breath, she threw up her arms and tore the cotton
nightgown from her shoulders, and stood there beating her breast with
her hands.

“Oh, good God! good God! see here what I am. How old and shrunken
before my time! Cursed be these breasts, that no child has ever
suckled; cursed be this withered body, that no man has ever embraced. I
could have loved, and lived long, and been made beautiful by happiness.
Ah, why am I accursed? I die, unloved and neglected by my own people.
No children’s tears, no husband to close my eyes; old, worn out, before
my time. A woman only in name--not wife, not mother. Despised and
hideous before God and men--God and men.”

Her voice died away in a moan, her head fell forward on her breast,
and she stumbled against the bed. For a long time she lay crouched
there, insensible from mere exhaustion, until, just as the clocks were
striking midnight, the door opened gently, and Marthe and M. le Curé
came in. Jean, awakened by the sounds overhead, had run quickly for
Marthe, and coming back together, they had met M. le Curé on his way.

They raised her gently, and laid her on the bed, and finding she still
breathed, Marthe ran to fetch brandy, and the Curé knelt by the bed in
prayer.

Presently, the eyes opened quietly, and M. le Curé saw her lips move.
He bent over her, and whispered: “You are troubled, Jeanne-Marie; you
wish for the absolution?”

But her voice came back to her, and she said clearly: “To die unloved,
unmourned; a woman, but no wife; no mother.”

She closed her eyes again. There were noises singing in her head,
louder and louder; but the pain at her heart had ceased. She was
conscious only of a great loneliness, as if a curtain had risen, and
shut her off from the room; and again the words came, whispered from
her lips: “A woman, accursed and wasted; no mother and no wife.”

But some one was speaking, speaking so loudly that the sounds in her
head seemed to die away. She opened her eyes, and saw M. le Curé,
where he knelt, with his eyes shining on her lace, and heard his
voice saying: “And God said, ‘Blessed be the virgins above all women;
give unto them the holy places; let them be exalted and praised by My
church, before all men, and before Me. Worthy are they to sit at My
feet--worthy are they above all women.’”

A smile of infinite happiness and of supreme relief lit up
Jeanne-Marie’s face.

“Above all women,” she whispered: “above all women.”

And Jeanne-Marie bowed her head, and died.




Parson Herrick’s Muse

By C. W. Dalmon


    THE parson dubs us, in our cups,
    “A tipsy, good-for-nothing crew!”
    It matters not--it may be false;
    It matters not--it may be true.
    But here’s to parson Herrick’s Muse!
    Drink to it, dear old comrades, please!
    And, prithee, for my tombstone choose
    A verse from his “Hesperides.”

    The parson’s rich, but we are poor;
    And we are wrong, but he is right--
    Who knows how much his cellar holds,
    Or how he goes to bed at night?
    But here’s to parson Herrick’s Muse!
    Drink to it, dear old comrades, please!
    And, prithee, for my tombstone choose
    A verse from his “Hesperides.”

    The landlord shall our parson be;
    The tavern-door our churchyard gate;
    And we will fill the landlord’s till
    Before we fill the parson’s plate!
    But here’s to parson Herrick’s Muse!
    Drink to it, dear old comrades, please!
    And, prithee, for my tombstone choose
    A verse from his “Hesperides.”




George the Fourth

By Max Beerbohm


[Illustration]




A Note on George the Fourth

By Max Beerbohm


THEY say that when King George was dying, a special form of prayer
for his recovery, composed by one of the Archbishops, was read aloud
to him, and that his Majesty, after saying Amen “thrice, with great
fervour,” begged that his thanks might be conveyed to its author.
To the student of royalty in modern times there is something rather
suggestive in this incident. I like to think of the drug-scented room
at Windsor, and of the King, livid and immobile among his pillows,
waiting, in superstitious awe, for the near moment when he must stand,
a spirit, in the presence of a perpetual King. I like to think of
him following the futile prayer with eyes and lips, and then, custom
resurgent in him and a touch of pride that, so long as the blood moved
ever so little in his veins, he was still a king, expressing a desire
that the dutiful feeling and admirable taste of the Prelate should
receive a suitable acknowledgment. It would have been impossible
for a real monarch like George, even after the gout had turned his
thoughts heavenward, really to abase himself before his Maker. But
he could, so to say, treat with him, as he might have treated with a
fellow-sovereign, long after diplomacy was quite useless. How strange
it must be to be a king! How delicate and difficult a task it is to
judge him! So far as I know, no fair attempt has been made to form
an estimate of George the Fourth. The hundred and one eulogies and
lampoons, published irresponsibly during and immediately after his
reign, are not worth a wooden hoop in Hades. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has
published a history of George’s reign, in which he has so artistically
subordinated his own personality to his subject, that I can scarcely
find from beginning to end of the two bulky volumes a single opinion
expressed, a single idea, a single deduction from the admirably
arranged facts. All that most of us know of George is from Thackeray’s
brilliant denunciation. Now, I yield to few in my admiration of
Thackeray’s powers. He had a charming style. We never find him
searching for the _mot juste_ as for a needle in a bottle of hay. Could
he have looked through a certain window by the river at Croisset, or
in the quadrangle at Brasenose, how he would have laughed! He blew on
his pipe, and words came tripping round him, like children, like pretty
little children who are perfectly drilled for the dance, or came, did
he will it, treading in their precedence, like kings, gloomily. And I
think it is to the credit of the reading mob that, by reason of his
beautiful style, all that he said was taken for the truth, without
questioning. But truth after all is eternal, and style transient, and
now that Thackeray’s style is becoming, if I may say so, a trifle
1860, it may not be amiss that we should inquire whether his estimate
of George is in substance and fact worth anything at all. It seems
to me that, as in his novels, so in his history of the four Georges,
Thackeray made no attempt at psychology. He dealt simply with types.
One George he insisted upon regarding as a buffoon, another as a yokel.
The Fourth George he chose to hold up for reprobation as a drunken,
vapid cad. Every action, every phase of his life that went to disprove
this view, he either suppressed or distorted utterly. “History,”
he would seem to have chuckled, “has nothing to do with the First
Gentleman. But I will give him a niche in Natural History. He shall
be king of the Beasts.” He made no allowance for the extraordinary
conditions under which any monarch finds himself, none for the
unfortunate circumstances by which George was from the first hampered.
He judged him as he judged Barnes Newcome and all the scoundrels he
created. Moreover, he judged him by the moral standard of the Victorian
Age. In fact he applied to his subject the wrong method in the wrong
manner, and at the wrong time. And yet every one has taken him at his
word. I feel that my essay may be scouted as a paradox; but I hope that
many may recognise that I am not, out of mere boredom, endeavouring to
stop my ears against popular platitude, but rather, in a spirit of real
earnestness, to point out to the mob how it has been cruel to George. I
do not despair of success. I think I shall make converts. For the mob
is notoriously fickle, and so occasionally cheers the truth.

None, at all events, will deny that England to-day stands otherwise
than she stood a hundred and thirty-two years ago, when George was
born. We to-day are living a decadent life. All the while that we are
prating of progress, we are really so deteriorate! There is nothing but
feebleness in us. Our youths who spend their days in trying to build
up their constitutions by sport or athletics, and their evenings in
undermining them with poisonous and dyed drinks, our daughters who are
ever searching for some new quack remedy for new imaginary megrim, what
strength is there in them? We have our societies for the prevention
of this and the promotion of that and the propagation of the other,
because there are no individuals among us. Our sexes are already nearly
assimilate. Real women are becoming nearly as rare as real ladies, and
it is only at the music halls that we are privileged to see strong
men. We are born into a poor, weak age. We are not strong enough to be
wicked, and the Nonconformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

But this was not so in the days when George was walking by his tutor’s
side in the gardens of Kew or of Windsor. London must have been a
splendid place in those days--full of life and colour and wrong and
revelry. There was no absurd press nor vestry to see that everything
should be neatly ordered, nor to protect the poor at the expense of the
rich. Every man had to shift for himself and, in consequence, men were,
as Mr. Clement Scott would say, manly, and women, as Mr. Clement Scott
would say, womanly. A young man of wealth and family in that period
found open to him a vista of such license as had been unknown to any
since the barbatuli of the Roman Empire. To spend the early morning
with his valet, gradually assuming the rich apparel that was not then
tabooed by a false sumptuary standard; to saunter round to White’s for
ale and tittle-tattle and the making of wagers; to attend a “drunken
déjeûner” in honour of “la très belle Rosaline” or the Strappini; to
drive a friend out into the country in his pretty curricle, “followed
by two well-dressed and well-mounted grooms, of singular elegance
certainly,” and stop at every tavern on the road to curse the host
for not keeping better ale and a wench of more charm; to reach St.
James’ in time for a random toilet and so off to dinner. Which of _our_
dandies could survive a day of pleasures such as this? Which would be
ready, dinner done, to scamper off again to Ranelagh and dance and skip
and sup in the rotunda there? Yet the youth of this period would not
dream of going to bed before he had looked in at White’s or Crockford’s
for a few hours’ faro.

This was the kind of life that young George found opened to him, when,
in his nineteenth year, he at length was given an establishment of
his own in Buckingham House. How his young eyes must have sparkled,
and with what glad gasps must he have taken the air of freedom into
his lungs. Rumour had long been busy with the confounded surveillance
under which his childhood had been passed. A paper of the time says
significantly that “the Prince of Wales, with a spirit which does him
honour, has three times requested a change in that system.” For a long
time King George had postponed permission for his son to appear at any
balls, and the year before had only given it, lest he should offend
the Spanish Minister, who begged it as a personal favour. I know few
pictures more pathetic than that of George, then an overgrown boy of
fourteen, tearing the childish frill from around his neck and crying
to one of the royal servants, “See how they treat me!” Childhood has
always seemed to me the tragic period of life--to be subject to the
most odious espionage at the one age when you never dream of doing
wrong, to be deceived by your parents, thwarted of your smallest wish,
oppressed by the terrors of manhood and of the world to come, and to
believe, as you are told, that childhood is the only happiness known:
all this is quite terrible. And all Royal children, of whom I have
read, particularly George, seem to have passed through greater trials
in childhood than do the children of any other class. Mr. Fitzgerald,
hazarding for once an opinion, thinks that “the stupid, odious, German,
sergeant-system of discipline that had been so rigorously applied,
was, in fact, responsible for the blemishes of the young Prince’s
character.” Even Thackeray, in his essay upon George III., asks what
wonder that the son, finding himself free at last, should have plunged,
without looking, into the vortex of dissipation. In Torrens’s “Life
of Lord Melbourne” we learn that Lord Essex, riding one day with the
King, met the young prince wearing a wig, and that the culprit, being
sternly reprimanded by his father, replied that he had “been ordered
by his doctor to wear a wig, for he was subject to cold.” Whereupon
the King, whether to vent the aversion he already felt for his son or
in complacence at the satisfactory result of his discipline, turned
to Lord Essex and remarked, “A lie is ever ready when it is wanted.”
George never lost this early-engrained habit of lies. It is to George’s
childish fear of his guardians that we must trace that extraordinary
power of bamboozling his courtiers, his ministry and his mistresses
that distinguished him through his long life. It is characteristic
of the man that he should himself have bitterly deplored his own
untruthfulness. When, in after years, he was consulting Lady Spencer
upon the choice of a governess for his child he made this remarkable
speech, “Above all, she must be taught the truth. You know that I don’t
speak the truth and my brothers don’t, and I find it a great defect,
from which I would have my daughter free. _We have been brought up
badly, the Queen having taught us to equivocate._” You may laugh at
the picture of the little chubby, curly-heeded fellows learning to
equivocate at their mother’s knee, but you must remember that the
wisest master of ethics himself, in his theory of ἕξεις ἀποδείκτικαι,
similarly raised virtues, such as telling the truth, to the level of
regular accomplishments, and before you judge poor George harshly, in
his entanglements of lying, remember the cruelly unwise education he
had undergone.

However much we may deplore this exaggerated tyranny, by reason of its
evil effect upon his moral nature, we cannot but feel glad that it
existed, to afford a piquant contrast to the life awaiting him. Had he
passed through the callow dissipations of Eton and Oxford, like other
young men of his age, he would assuredly have lacked much of that
splendid pent vigour with which he rushed headlong into London life. He
was so young and so handsome, and so strong, that can we wonder if all
the women fell at his feet? “The graces of his person,” says one whom
he honoured by an intrigue, “the irresistible sweetness of his smile,
the tenderness of his melodious, yet manly voice, will be remembered by
me till every vision of this changing scene are forgotten. The polished
and fascinating ingenuousness of his manners contributed not a little
to enliven our promenade. He sang with exquisite taste, and the tones
of his voice, breaking on the silence of the night, have often appeared
to my entranced senses like more than mortal melody.” But besides his
graces of person, he had a most delightful wit, he was a scholar who
could bandy quotations with Fox or Sheridan; and, like the young men
of to-day, he knew all about Art. He spoke French, Italian, and German
perfectly, and Crossdill had taught him the violoncello. At first, as
was right for one of his age, he cared more for the pleasures of the
table and of the ring, for cards and love. He was wont to go down to
Ranelagh surrounded by a retinue of bruisers--rapscallions, such as
used to follow Clodius through the streets of Rome, and he loved to
join in the scuffles like any commoner. He learnt to box from Angelo,
and was considered by some to be a fine performer. On one occasion,
too, at an _exposition d’escrime_, he handled the foils against the
_maître_, and “was highly complimented upon his graceful postures.”
In fact, in spite of his accomplishments, he seems to have been a
thoroughly manly young fellow. He was just the kind of figure-head
Society had long been in need of. A certain lack of tone had crept
into the amusements of the _haut monde_, and this was doubtless due
to the lack of an acknowledged leader. The King was not yet mad, but
he was always bucolic, and socially out of the question. So at the
coming of his son Society broke into a gallop. Balls and masquerades
were given in his honour night after night. Good Samaritans must have
approved when they found that at these entertainments great ladies
and courtesans brushed beautiful shoulders in utmost familiarity, but
those who delighted in the high charm of society doubtless shook their
heads. We need not, however, find it a flaw in George’s social bearing
that he did not check this kind of freedom. At the first, as a young
man full of life, of course he took everything as it came, joyfully. No
one knew better than he did, in later life, that there is a time for
laughing with great ladies and a time for laughing with courtesans. But
as yet it was not possible for him to exert influence. How great that
influence became I will indicate later on.

I like to think of him as he was at this period, charging about,
in pursuit of pleasure, like a young bull. The splendid taste for
building had not yet come to him. His father would not hear of him
patronising the turf. But already he was implected with a passion for
dress, and seems to have erred somewhat on the side of dressing up,
as is the way of young men. It is fearful to think of him, as Cyrus
Redding saw him, “arrayed in deep-brown velvet, silver embroidered,
with cut-steel buttons, and a gold net thrown over all.” Before that
“gold net thrown over all,” all the mistakes of his after-life seem to
me to grow almost insignificant. Time, however, toned his too florid
sense of costume, and we should at any rate be thankful that his
imagination never deserted him. All the delightful munditiæ that we
find in the contemporary “fashion-plates for gentlemen” can be traced
to George himself. His were the much-approved “quadruple stock of
great dimension,” the “cocked grey-beaver,” the pantaloons of mauve
silk “negligently crinkled” and any number of other little pomps and
foibles of the kind. As he grew older and was obliged to abandon many
of his more vigorous pastimes, he grew more and more enamoured of
the pleasures of the wardrobe. He would spend hours, it is said, in
designing coats for his friends and liveries for his servants, and even
uniforms. Nor did he ever make the mistake of giving away outmoded
clothes to his valets, but kept them to form what must have been the
finest collection of clothes that has been seen in modern times. With a
sentimentality that is characteristic of him he would often, as he sat,
crippled by gout, in his room at Windsor, direct his servant to bring
him this or that coat, which he had worn ten or twenty or thirty years
before, and, when it was brought to him, spend much time in laughing or
sobbing over the memories that lay in its folds. It is pleasant to know
that George, during his long and various life, never forgot a coat,
however long ago worn, however seldom.

But in the early days of which I speak he had not yet touched that
self-conscious note which, in manner and mode of life, as well as in
costume, he was to touch later. He was too violently enamoured of all
around him to think very deeply of himself. But he had already realised
the tragedy of the voluptuary, which is, after a little time, not that
he must go on living, but that he cannot live in two places at once.
We have, at this end of the century, tempered this tragedy by the
perfection of railways, and it is possible for that splendid exemplar
of the delectable life, our good Prince, whom Heaven bless, to waken to
the sound of the Braemar bagpipes, while the music of Mdlle. Guilbert’s
latest song, cooed over the footlights of the Concerts Parisiens,
still rings in his ears. But in the time of our Prince’s illustrious
great-uncle there were not railways; and we find George perpetually
driving, for wagers, to Brighton and back (he had already acquired
that taste for Brighton which was one of his most loveable qualities)
in incredibly short periods of time. The rustics who lived along the
road were well accustomed to the sight of a high, tremulous phaeton,
flashing past them, and the crimson face of the young prince bending
over the horses. There is something absurd in representing George as,
even before he came of age, a hardened and cynical profligate, an
Elagabalus in trousers. His blood flowed fast enough through his veins.
All his escapades were those of a healthful young man of the time. Need
we blame him if he sought, every day, to live faster and more fully?

In a brief essay like this, I cannot attempt to write, as I hope one
day to do, in any detail a history of George’s career, during the time
when he was successively Prince of Wales and Regent and King. Merely
is it my wish at present to examine some of the principal accusations
that have been brought against him, and to point out in what ways he
has been harshly and hastily judged. Perhaps the greatest indignation
against him was, and is to this day, felt by reason of his treatment
of his two wives, Mrs. Fitzherbert and Queen Caroline. There are some
scandals that never grow old, and I think the story of George’s married
life is one of them. I can feel it. It has vitality. Often have I
wondered whether the blood with which the young Prince’s shirt was
covered when Mrs. Fitzherbert first was induced to visit him at Carlton
House, was merely red paint, or if, in a frenzy of love, he had truly
gashed himself with a razor. Certain it is that his passion for the
virtuous and obdurate lady was a very real one. Lord Holland describes
how the Prince used to visit Mrs. Fox, and there indulge in “the most
extravagant expressions and actions--rolling on the floor, striking
his forehead, tearing his hair, falling into hysterics, and swearing
that he would abandon the country, forego the crown, &c.” He was indeed
still a child, for royalties, not being ever brought into contact with
the realities of life, remain young longer than most people. He had a
truly royal lack of self-control, and was unable to bear the idea of
being thwarted in any wish. Every day he sent off couriers to Holland,
whither Mrs. Fitzherbert had retreated, imploring her to return to him,
offering her formal marriage. At length, as we know, she yielded to his
importunity and returned. It is difficult indeed to realise exactly
what was Mrs. Fitzherbert’s feeling in the matter. The marriage must
be, as she knew, illegal, and would lead, as Charles James Fox pointed
out in his powerful letter to the Prince, to endless and intricate
difficulties. For the present she could only live with him as his
mistress. If, when he reached the legal age of twenty-five, he were to
apply to Parliament for permission to marry her, how could permission
be given, when she had been living with him irregularly? Doubtless, she
was flattered by the attentions of the Heir to the Throne, but, had
she really returned his passion, she would surely have preferred “any
other species of connection with His Royal Highness to one leading to
so much misery and mischief.” Really to understand her marriage, one
must look at the portraits of her that are extant. That beautiful and
silly face explains much. One can well fancy such a lady being pleased
to live after the performance of a mock-ceremony with a prince for whom
she felt no passion. Her view of the matter can only have been social,
for, in the eyes of the Church, she could only live with the Prince as
his mistress. Society, however, once satisfied that a ceremony of some
kind had been enacted, never regarded her as anything but his wife.
The day after Fox, inspired by the Prince, had formally denied that
any ceremony had taken place, “the knocker of her door,” to quote her
own complacent phrase, “was never still.” The Duchesses of Portland,
Devonshire, and Cumberland were among her visitors.

Now, much pop-limbo has been talked about the Prince’s denial of
the marriage. I grant that it was highly improper to marry Mrs.
Fitzherbert at all. But George was always weak and wayward, and he
did, in his great passion, marry her. That he should afterwards deny
it officially seems to me to have been utterly inevitable. His denial
did her not the faintest damage, as I have pointed out. It was, so to
speak, an official quibble, rendered necessary by the circumstances
of the case. Not to have denied the marriage in the House of Commons
would have meant ruin to both of them. As months passed, more serious
difficulties awaited the unhappily wedded pair. The story of the
Prince’s great debts and desperation need not be repeated. It was
clear that there was but one way of getting his head above water, and
that was to yield to his father’s wishes and contract a real marriage
with a foreign princess. Fate was dogging his footsteps relentlessly.
Placed as he was, George could not but offer to marry, as his father
willed. It is well, also, to remember that George was not ruthlessly
and suddenly turning his shoulder upon Mrs. Fitzherbert. For some time
before the British plenipotentiary went to fetch him a bride from over
the waters, his name had been associated with that of the beautiful and
unscrupulous Countess of Jersey.

Poor George! Half-married to a woman whom he no longer worshipped,
compelled to marry a woman whom he was to hate at first sight! Surely
we should not judge a prince harshly. “Princess Caroline very _gauche_
at cards,” “Princess Caroline very _missish_ at supper,” are among
the entries made in his diary by Lord Malmesbury while he was at the
little German Court. I can conceive no scene more tragic than that of
her presentation to the Prince, as related by the same nobleman. “I,
accordingly to the established etiquette,” so he writes, “introduced
the Princess Caroline to him. She, very properly, in consequence of
my saying it was the right mode of proceeding, attempted to kneel to
him. He raised her gracefully enough, and embraced her, said barely
one word, turned round, retired to a distant part of the apartment,
and, calling to me, said: ‘Harris, I am not well: pray get me a glass
of brandy.’” At dinner that evening, in the presence of her betrothed,
the Princess was “flippant, rattling, affecting wit.” Poor George, I
say again! Deportment was his ruling passion, and his bride did not
know how to behave. Vulgarity--hard, implacable, German vulgarity--was
in everything she did to the very day of her death. The marriage was
solemnised on Wednesday, April 8th, 1795, and the royal bridegroom was
drunk.

So soon as they were separated, George became implected with a morbid
hatred for his wife, that was hardly in accord with his light and
variant nature, and shows how bitterly he had been mortified by his
marriage of necessity. It is sad that so much of his life should have
been wasted in futile strainings after divorce. Yet we can scarcely
blame him for seizing upon every scrap of scandal that was whispered of
his wife. Besides his not unnatural wish to be free, it was derogatory
to the dignity of a Prince and a Regent that his wife should be living
an eccentric life at Blackheath with a family of singers named Sapio.
Indeed, Caroline’s conduct during this time was as indiscreet as ever.
Wherever she went she made ribald jokes about her husband, “in such a
voice that all, by-standing, might hear.” “After dinner,” writes one
of her servants, “Her Royal Highness made a wax figure as usual, and
gave it an amiable pair of large horns; then took three pins out of her
garment and stuck them through and through, and put the figure to roast
and melt at the fire. What a silly piece of spite! Yet it is impossible
not to laugh when one sees it done.” Imagine the feelings of the First
Gentleman in Europe when such pranks were whispered to him!

For my own part, I fancy Caroline was innocent of any infidelity to
her unhappy husband. But that is neither here nor there. Her behaviour
was certainly not above suspicion. It fully justified him in trying to
establish a case for her divorce. When, at length, she went abroad,
her vagaries were such that the whole of her English suite left her,
and we hear of her travelling about the Holy Land attended by another
family, named Bergami. When her husband succeeded to the throne, and
her name was struck out of the liturgy, she despatched expostulations
in absurd English to Lord Liverpool. Receiving no answer, she decided
to return and claim her right to be crowned Queen of England. Whatever
the unhappy lady did, she always was ridiculous. One cannot but
smile as one reads of her posting along the French roads in a yellow
travelling-chariot drawn by cart-horses, with a retinue that included
an alderman, a reclaimed lady-in-waiting, an Italian Count, the eldest
son of the alderman, and “a fine little female child, about three years
old, whom her Majesty, in conformity with her benevolent practices
on former occasions, had adopted.” The breakdown of her impeachment,
and her acceptance of an income, formed a fitting anti-climax to the
terrible absurdities of her position. She died from the effects of a
chill caught when she was trying vainly to force a way to her husband’s
coronation. Unhappy woman! Our sympathy for her is not misplaced. Fate
wrote her a most tremendous tragedy, and she played it in tights. Let
us pity her, but not forget to pity her husband, the King, also. It is
another common accusation against George that he was an undutiful and
unfeeling son. If this was so, it is certain that not all the blame
is to be laid upon him alone. There is more than one anecdote which
shows that King George disliked his eldest son, and took no trouble
to conceal his dislike, long before the boy had been freed from his
tutors. It was the coldness of his father and the petty restrictions
he loved to enforce that first drove George to seek the companionship
of such men as the Duke of Cumberland and the Duc d’Orléans, each of
whom were quick to inflame his impressionable mind to angry resentment.
Yet when Margaret Nicholson attempted the life of the King, the Prince
immediately posted off from Brighton that he might wait upon his father
at Windsor--a graceful act of piety that was rewarded by his father’s
refusal to see him. Hated by the Queen, who at this time did all she
could to keep her husband and his son apart, surrounded by intriguers,
who did all they could to set him against his father, George seems to
have behaved with great discretion. In the years that follow, I can
conceive no position more difficult than that in which he found himself
every time his father relapsed into lunacy. That he should have by
every means opposed those who through jealousy stood between him and
the regency was only natural. It cannot be said that at any time did he
show anxiety to rule, so long as there was any immediate chance of the
King’s recovery. On the contrary, all impartial seers of that chaotic
Court agreed that the Prince bore himself throughout the intrigues,
wherein he himself was bound to be, in a notably filial way.

There are many things that I regret in the career of George IV., and
what I most of all regret is the part that he played in the politics
of the period. Englishmen to-day have at length decided that royalty
shall not set foot in the political arena. I do not despair that some
day we shall place politics upon a sound commercial basis, as they
have already done in America and France, or leave them entirely in the
hands of the police, as they do in Russia. It is horrible to think
that under our existing _régime_ all the men of noblest blood and
highest intellect should waste their time in the sordid atmosphere
of the House of Commons, listening for hours to nonentities talking
nonsense, or searching enormous volumes to prove that somebody said
something some years ago that does not quite tally with something he
said the other day, or standing tremulous before the whips in the
lobbies and the scorpions in the constituencies. In the political
machine are crushed and lost all our best men. That Mr. Gladstone did
not choose to be a cardinal is a blow under which the Roman Catholic
Church still staggers. In Mr. Chamberlain Scotland Yard missed its
smartest detective. What a fine voluptuary might Lord Rosebery have
been! It is a platitude that the country is ruled best by the permanent
officials, and I look forward to the time when Mr. Keir Hardie shall
hang his cap in the hall of No. 10 Downing Street, and a Conservative
working man shall lead her Majesty’s Opposition. In the lifetime of
George, politics were not a whit finer than they are to-day. I feel
a genuine indignation that he should have wasted so much of tissue
in mean intrigues about ministries and bills. That he should have
been fascinated by that splendid fellow, Fox, is quite right. That he
should have thrown himself with all his heart into the storm of the
Westminster election is most natural. But it is inverideed sad to find
him, long after he had reached man’s estate, indulging in back-stair
intrigues with Whigs and Tories. It is, of course, absurd to charge
him with deserting his first friends, the Whigs. His love and fidelity
were given, not to the Whigs, but to the men who led them. Even after
the death of Fox, he did, in misplaced piety, do all he could for Fox’s
party. What wonder that, when he found he was ignored by the Ministry
that owed its existence to him, he turned his back upon that sombre
couple, the “Lords G. and G.,” whom he had always hated, and went
over to the Tories? Among the Tories he hoped to find men who would
faithfully perform their duties and leave him leisure to live his own
beautiful life. I regret immensely that his part in politics did not
cease here. The state of the country and of his own finances, and also,
I fear, a certain love that he had imbibed for political manipulation,
prevented him from standing aside. How useless was all the finesse he
displayed in the long-drawn question of Catholic Emancipation! How
lamentable his terror of Lord Wellesley’s rude dragooning! And is
there not something pitiable in the thought of the Regent at a time
of ministerial complications lying prone on his bed with a sprained
ankle, and taking, as was whispered, in one day as many as seven
hundred drops of laudanum? Some said he took these doses to deaden the
pain. But others, and among them his brother Cumberland, declared that
the sprain was all a sham. I hope it was. The thought of a voluptuary
in pain is very terrible. In any case, I cannot but feel angry, for
George’s own sake and that of his kingdom, that he found it impossible
to keep further aloof from the wearisome troubles of political
life. His wretched indecision of character made him an easy prey to
unscrupulous ministers, while his extraordinary diplomatic powers and
almost extravagant tact made them, in their turn, an easy prey to
him. In these two processes much of his genius was uselessly spent. I
must confess that he did not quite realise where his duties ended. He
wished always to do too much. If you read his repeated appeals to his
father that he might be permitted to serve actively in the British army
against the French, you will acknowledge that it was through no fault
of his own that he did not fight. It touches me to think that in his
declining years he actually thought that he had led one of the charges
at Waterloo. He would often describe the whole scene as it appeared
to him at that supreme moment, and refer to the Duke of Wellington,
saying, “Was it not so, Duke?” “I have often heard you say so, your
Majesty,” the old soldier would reply, grimly. I am not sure that the
old soldier was at Waterloo himself. In a room full of people he once
referred to the battle as having been won upon the playing-fields of
Eton. This was certainly a most unfortunate slip, seeing that all
historians are agreed that it was fought on a certain field situate a
few miles from Brussels.

In one of his letters to the King, craving for a military appointment,
George urges that, whilst his next brother, the Duke of York, commanded
the army, and the younger branches of the family were either generals
or lieutenant-generals, he, who was Prince of Wales, remained colonel
of dragoons. And herein, could he have known it, lay the right limiting
of his life. As royalty was and is constituted, it is for the younger
sons to take an active part in the services, whilst the eldest son is
left as the ruler of Society. Thousands and thousands of guineas were
given by the nation that the Prince of Wales, the Regent, the King,
might be, in the best sense of the word, ornamental. It is not for
us, at this moment, to consider whether Royalty, as a wholly Pagan
institution, is not out of place in a community of Christians. It is
enough that we should inquire whether the god whom our grandfathers
set up and worshipped and crowned with offerings, gave grace to his
worshippers.

That George was a moral man, in our modern sense, I do not for one
moment pretend. When he died there were found in one of his cabinets
more than a hundred locks of women’s hair. Some of these were still
plastered with powder and pomatum, others were mere little golden
curls, such as grow low down upon a girl’s neck, others were streaked
with grey. The whole of this collection subsequently passed into the
hands of Adam, the famous Scotch henchman of the Regent, and in his
family, now resident in Glasgow, it is treasured as an heirloom. I
myself have been privileged to look at all these locks of hair, and I
have seen a _clairvoyante_ take them one by one, and, pinching them
between her lithe fingers, tell of the love that each symbolised. I
have heard her tell of long rides by night, of a boudoir hung with
grass-green satin, and of a tryst at Windsor; of one, the wife of a
hussar at York, whose little lap-dog used to bark angrily whenever
the Regent came near his mistress; of a milk-maid who, in her great
simpleness, thought that her child would one day be king of England;
of an arch-duchess with blue eyes, and a silly little flautist from
Portugal; of women that were wantons and fought for his favour, great
ladies that he loved dearly, girls that gave themselves to him humbly.
If we lay all pleasures at the feet of our prince, we can scarcely
hope he will remain virtuous. Indeed, we do not wish our prince to be
an exemplar of godliness, but a perfect type of happiness. It may be
foolish of us to insist upon apolaustic happiness, but that is the kind
of happiness that we can ourselves, most of us, best understand, and so
we offer it to our ideal. In Royalty we find our Bacchus, our Venus.

Certainly George was, in the practical sense of the word, a fine king.
His wonderful physique, his wealth, his brilliant talents, he gave them
all without stint to Society. His development from the time when, at
Madame Cornely’s, he gallivanted with rips and demireps, to the time
when he sat, a stout and solitary old king, fishing in the artificial
pond at Windsor, was beautifully ordered. During his life he indulged
himself to the full in all the delights that life could offer him.
That he should have, in his old age, suddenly abandoned his career
of vigorous enjoyment is, I confess, rather surprising. The royal
voluptuary generally remains young to the last. No one ever tires of
pleasure. It is the pursuit of pleasure, the trouble to grasp it, that
makes us old. Only the soldiers who enter Capua with wounded feet leave
it demoralised. And yet George, who never had to wait or fight for a
pleasure, most certainly broke up long before his death. I can but
attribute this to the constant persecution to which he was subjected by
duns and ministers, parents and wives.

Not that I regret the manner in which he spent his last years. On the
contrary, I think it was exceedingly cosy. I like to think of the King,
at Windsor, lying a-bed all the morning in his darkened room, with
all the newspapers scattered over his quilt, and a little decanter of
the favourite cherry-brandy within easy reach. I like to think of him
sitting by his fire in the afternoon and hearing his ministers asking
for him at the door and piling another log upon the fire, as he hears
them sent away by his servant. After all, he had lived his life; he had
lived more fully than any other man.

And it is right that we should remember him first as a voluptuary.
Only let us note that his nature never became, as do the natures of
most voluptuaries, corroded by a cruel indifference to the happiness
of others. When all the town was agog for the _fête_ to be given by
the Regent in honour of the French King, Sheridan sent a forged card
of invitation to Romeo Coates, the half-witted dandy, who used at this
time to walk about in absurd ribbons and buckles, and was the butt of
all the streetsters. When the poor fellow arrived at the entrance of
Carlton House, proud as a peacock, he was greeted with a tremendous
cheer from the by-standing mob, but when he came to the lacqueys he
was told that his card was a hoax, and was sent about his business.
The tears were rolling down his cheeks as he shambled back into the
street. The Regent heard later in the evening of this sorry joke,
and next day despatched a kindly-worded message, in which he prayed
that Mr. Coates would not refuse to come and “view the decorations,
nevertheless.” Though he does not appear to have treated his inferiors
with that extreme servility that is now in vogue, George was beloved
by the whole of his household, and many are the little tales that are
told to illustrate the kindliness and consideration he showed to his
valets and his jockeys and his stable-boys. That from time to time
he dropped certain of his favourites is no cause for blaming him.
Remember that a Great Personage, like a great genius, is dangerous to
his fellow-creatures. The favourites of Royalty live in an intoxicant
atmosphere. They become unaccountable for their behaviour. Either
they get beyond themselves, and, like Brummel, forget that the King,
their friend, is also their master; or they outrun the constable, and
go bankrupt, or cheat at cards in order to keep up their position, or
do some other foolish thing that makes it impossible for the King to
favour them more. Remember, too, that old friends are generally the
refuge of unsociable persons, and how great must be the temptation
besetting the head of Society to form fresh friendships, when all the
cleverest and most charming persons in the land are standing ready,
like supers at the wings, to come on and please him. At Carlton House
there was a constant succession of wits. Minds were preserved for the
Prince of Wales, as coverts are preserved for him to-day. For him
Sheridan would say his best bon-mot, and Theodore Hook contrive his
most practical jokes, his swiftest chansonette. And Fox would talk, as
only he could, of Liberty and of Patriotism, and Byron would look more
than ever like Isidore de Lara as he recited his own bad verses, and
Sir Walter Scott would “pour out with an endless generosity his store
of old-world learning, kindness, and humour.” Of such men George was a
splendid patron. He did not merely sit in his chair, gaping princely
at their wit and their wisdom, but quoted with the scholars, and
argued with the statesmen, and jested with the wits. Doctor Burney, an
impartial observer, says that he was amazed by the knowledge of music
that the Regent displayed in a half-hour’s discussion over the wine.
Croker says that “the Prince and Scott were the two most brilliant
story-tellers, in their several ways, he had ever happened to meet.
Both exerted themselves, and it was hard to say which shone the most.”
The Prince seems indeed to have been a fine conversationalist, with a
wide range of knowledge and great humour. We, who have come at length
to look upon stupidity as one of the most sacred prerogatives of
Royalty, can scarcely realise that, if George’s birth had been never
so humble, he would have been known to us as a fine scholar and wit or
as a connoisseur of the arts. It is pleasing to think of his love for
the Flemish school of painting, for Wilkie and Sir Thomas Lawrence. The
splendid portraits of foreign potentates that hang in the Banqueting
Room at Windsor bear witness to his sense of the canvas. In his later
years he exerted himself strenuously in raising the tone of the drama.
His love of the classics never left him. We know he was fond of quoting
those incomparable poets, Homer, at great length, and that he was
prominent in the “papyrus-craze.” Indeed, he inspired Society with
a love of something more than mere pleasure, a love of the “humaner
delights.” He was a giver of tone. The bluff, disgusting ways of the
Tom and Jerry period gave way to those florid graces that are still
called Georgian.

A pity that George’s predecessor was not a man, like the Prince
Consort, of strong chastening influence! Then might the bright
flamboyance which George gave to Society have made his reign more
beautiful than any other--a real renaissance. But he found London a
wild city of taverns and cock-pits, and the grace which in the course
of years he gave to his subjects never really entered into them. The
cock-pits were gilded and the taverns painted with colour, but the
heart of the city was vulgar, even as before. The simulation of higher
things did indeed give the note of a very interesting period, but how
shallow that simulation was, and how merely it was due to George’s own
influence, we may see in the light of what happened after his death.
The good that he had done died with him. The refinement he had laid
upon vulgarity fell away, like enamel from withered cheeks. It was only
George himself who had made the sham endure. The Victorian Era came
soon, and the angels rushed in and drove the nymphs away and hung the
land with reps.

I have often wondered whether it was with a feeling that his influence
would be no more than life-long, that George allowed Carlton House,
that dear structure, the very work of his life and symbol of his being,
to be rased. I wish that Carlton House were still standing. I wish we
could still walk through those corridors, whose walls were “crusted
with ormolu,” and parquet-floors were “so glossy that, were Narcissus
to come down from heaven, he would, I maintain, need no other mirror
for his _beauté_.” I wish that we could see the pier-glasses and the
girandoles and the twisted sofas, the fauns foisted upon the ceiling
and the rident goddesses along the wall. These things would make
George’s memory dearer to us, help us to a fuller knowledge of him.
I am glad that the Pavilion still stands here in Brighton. Its trite
lawns and cheeky minarets have taught me much. As I write this essay,
I can see them from my window. Last night I sat there in a crowd of
vulgar people, whilst a band played us tunes. Once I fancied I saw the
shade of a swaying figure and of a wine-red face.




Study of a Head

By an Unknown Artist


[Illustration]




A Ballad of a Nun

By John Davidson


    FROM Eastertide to Eastertide
      For ten long years her patient knees
    Engraved the stones--the fittest bride
      Of Christ in all the diocese.

    She conquered every earthly lust;
      The abbess loved her more and more;
    And, as a mark of perfect trust,
      Made her the keeper of the door.

    High on a hill the convent hung
      Across a duchy looking down,
    Where everlasting mountains flung
      Their shadows over tower and town.

    The jewels of their lofty snows
      In constellations flashed at night;
    Above their crests the moon arose;
      The deep earth shuddered with delight.

    Long ere she left her cloudy bed,
      Still dreaming in the orient land,
    On many a mountain’s happy head
      Dawn lightly laid her rosy hand.

    The adventurous sun took Heaven by storm;
      Clouds scattered largesses of rain;
    The sounding cities rich and warm,
      Smouldered and glittered in the plain.

    Sometimes it was a wandering wind,
      Sometimes the fragrance of the pine,
    Sometimes the thought how others sinned,
      That turned her sweet blood into wine.

    Sometimes she heard a serenade
      Complaining sweetly far away:
    She said, “A young man woos a maid”;
      And dreamt of love till break of day.

    Then would she ply her knotted scourge
      Until she swooned; but evermore
    She had the same red sin to purge,
      Poor, passionate keeper of the door!

    For still night’s starry scroll unfurled,
      And still the day came like a flood:
    It was the greatness of the world
      That made her long to use her blood.

    In winter-time when Lent drew nigh,
      And hill and plain were wrapped in snow,
    She watched beneath the frosty sky
      The nearest city nightly glow.

    Like peals of airy bells outworn
      Faint laughter died above her head
    In gusts of broken music borne:
      “They keep the Carnival,” she said.

    Her hungry heart devoured the town:
      “Heaven save me by a miracle!
    Unless God sends an angel down,
      Thither I go though it were Hell.”

    She dug her nails deep in her breast,
      Sobbed, shrieked, and straight withdrew the bar:
    A fledgling flying from the nest,
      A pale moth rushing to a star.

    Fillet and veil in strips she tore;
      Her golden tresses floated wide;
    The ring and bracelet that she wore
      As Christ’s betrothed, she cast aside.

    “Life’s dearest meaning I shall probe;
      Lo! I shall taste of love at last!
    Away!” She doffed her outer robe,
      And sent it sailing down the blast.

    Her body seemed to warm the wind;
      With bleeding feet o’er ice she ran:
    “I leave the righteous God behind;
      I go to worship sinful man.”

    She reached the sounding city’s gate;
      No question did the warder ask:
    He passed her in: “Welcome, wild mate!”
      He thought her some fantastic mask.

    Half-naked through the town she went;
      Each footstep left a bloody mark;
    Crowds followed her with looks intent;
      Her bright eyes made the torches dark.

    Alone and watching in the street
      There stood a grave youth nobly dressed;
    To him she knelt and kissed his feet;
      Her face her great desire confessed.

    Straight to his house the nun he led:
      “Strange lady, what would you with me?
    “Your love, your love, sweet lord,” she said
      “I bring you my virginity.”

    He healed her bosom with a kiss;
      She gave him all her passion’s hoard;
    And sobbed and murmured ever, “This
      Is life’s great meaning, dear, my lord.

    “I care not for my broken vow,
      Though God should come in thunder soon
    I am sister to the mountains now,
      And sister to the sun and moon.”

    Through all the towns of Belmarie,
      She made a progress like a queen.
    “She is,” they said, “whate’er she be,
      The strangest woman ever seen.

    “From fairyland she must have come,
      Or else she is a mermaiden.”
    Some said she was a ghoul, and some
      A heathen goddess born again.

    But soon her fire to ashes burned;
      Her beauty changed to haggardness;
    Her golden hair to silver turned;
      The hour came of her last caress.

    At midnight from her lonely bed
      She rose, and said: “I have had my will.”
    The old ragged robe she donned, and fled
      Back to the convent on the hill.

    Half-naked as she went before,
      She hurried to the city wall,
    Unnoticed in the rush and roar
      And splendour of the Carnival.

    No question did the warder ask:
      Her ragged robe, her shrunken limb,
    Her dreadful eyes! “It is no mask;
      It is a she-wolf, gaunt and grim!”

    She ran across the icy plain;
      Her worn blood curdled in the blast;
    Each footstep left a crimson stain;
      The white-faced moon looked on aghast.

    She said between her chattering jaws,
      “Deep peace is mine, I cease to strive;
    Oh, comfortable convent laws,
      That bury foolish nuns alive!

    “A trowel for my passing-bell,
      A little bed within the wall,
    A coverlet of stones; how well
      I there shall keep the Carnival!”

    Like tired bells chiming in their sleep,
      The wind faint peals of laughter bore;
    She stopped her ears and climbed the steep,
      And thundered at the convent door.

    It opened straight: she entered in,
      And at the wardress’ feet fell prone:
    “I come to purge away my sin,
      Bury me, close me up in stone.”

    The wardress raised her tenderly;
      She touched her wet and fast-shut eyes;
    “Look, sister; sister, look at me;
      Look; can you see through my disguise?”

    She looked and saw her own sad face,
      And trembled, wondering, “Who art thou?”
    “God sent me down to fill your place:
      I am the Virgin Mary now.”

    And with the word, God’s mother shone;
      The wanderer whispered, “Mary, hail!”
    The vision helped her to put on
      Bracelet and fillet, ring and veil.

    “You are sister to the mountains now,
      And sister to the day and night;
    Sister to God;” and on the brow
      She kissed her thrice, and left her sight.

    While dreaming in her cloudy bed,
      Far in the crimson orient land,
    On many a mountain’s happy head
      Dawn lightly laid her rosy hand.




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Index to Publishers’ Announcements


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_BY GORDON STABLES, C.M., M.D., R.N._

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=OUR FRIEND THE DOG.= Sixth Edition. Enlarged and thoroughly Revised
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=HUMOROUS PIECES.= A Collection of Original Recitations in Prose and
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=DEAN’S FAIRY BOOK.=

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excellent illustrations by able artists.


  LONDON: DEAN & SON, LIMITED, 160A FLEET STREET, E.C.
  _Publishers of Dean’s Plays for Young Actors._




Corrections

The first line indicates the original, the second the correction.

p. 27

But I can accept nothing less, nor consent to forgo my rights, even or
any contingent remainder of possible cousinly favour!

But I can accept nothing less, nor consent to forgo my rights, even for
any contingent remainder of possible cousinly favour!

p. 31

  I will do you the justice to belive
  I will do you the justice to believe

p. 83

  I wondered what unforgiveable sin
  I wondered what unforgivable sin

p. 118

  her daughter were also staying at the delighful old Elizabethan house
  her daughter were also staying at the delightful old Elizabethan house



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