O little girl, here’s a little boyWill love you till Judgment day—
O little girl, here’s a little boyWill love you till Judgment day—
O little girl, here’s a little boyWill love you till Judgment day—
whatever you may say, you meant them pretty badly, Sid,” she added, turning upon him eyes whose recent mirth was replaced by a questioning gravity.
“Of course I meant them at the time, or thought I meant them. Besides, poetry always exaggerates,” answered Sid, writhing with explanation.
“No, Sid, don’t belittle your old feelings. That doesn’t help. Rather the reverse,” and then once more she repeated the lines musingly as if to herself. Then she turned to Sid with a sudden decision of manner, as if her mind was made up.
“Sid, that was a very deep feeling. How do you know that it is not still alive?”
Sid made the usual despairing protestations. Rosamund regarded them but little.
“I wonder,” she continued, “if you really know your own mind. I wonder. You think you love me now, but then you thought you loved her then—till Judgment Day. Sid! Now see, I’m going to tell you my idea....”
Sid looked at her expectantly, waiting with anxious eyes. Then, with something of a return to her gayer manner, she went on:
“You remember what we were saying just now about your cage. Well, I’m going to let you out for a month or two.”
She waved aside a remonstrant ejaculation from Sid.
“Yes! and you are to spend the last breath of freedom in finding out if there is still any truth left in these old impassioned statements. That is, you will go to Myrtilla, and see if you still want to drink of that ‘little starlit spring,’ and you will go to Meriel and see, well ... about Judgment Day! And, while you are on pilgrimage, there are one ortwo other ‘muses’ it might be well to make quite sure about.”
Sid interrupted with impatient incredulity, not believing her serious. But the more he expostulated, the firmer she became.
“I declare, the idea grows on me!” she said. “I wonder it never occurred to me before. Now that it has, I must insist on your carrying it out—for my sake. When I think of your nature, in the light of all this printed experience, I should not really feel safe otherwise. Of course, your cage is strong, I know. So long as I care to keep the key, your escape is impossible. But then, I should not like to find some day in the future, that, secure as you were, you were in secret pining to be off after some little starlit spring on the other side of the bars. So, Sid, I’m sorry, but you must pack up right away, and go on pilgrimage.”
In vain Sid protested that it was preposterous, that he was incapable of seriously undertaking any such fanciful absurdity. Rosamund remained obdurate. She wouldnever marry him, she said, till he had subjected himself to the proposed ordeal.
“Besides, if you refuse,” she continued, “I shall always feel that you were afraid of it, secretly afraid that the temptations of it would be too strong for your faith.”
To this Sid made a singularly blundering retort, which he tried in vain to take back as he uttered it, to the effect that, however certain one was of one’s love, there was no sense in playing with fire. This settled the matter.
“Fire!” laughed Rosamund mercilessly—he admitted the danger then!
After that there was no argument—and this is the explanation of Sid Norton’s sudden departure for Europe.
Say what you will, the test was a little unfair. So Sid Norton said to himself, as he paced the moonlit deck in mid-ocean, and strove to analyse his feelings toward the situation in which Rosamund’s whim had placed him. He thought of the lady of oldtime who had thrown her glove into the arena. Of course, no lover could decline such a challenge ... but he hastily dismissed the image as unfortunate, for he was not allowed to admit the existence of the lions. To recognise any possibility of danger in his present so-called ordeal was in itself an unfaithfulness. To admit that there was any element of an ordeal in his fantastic adventure was to fail right away. To confess any temptation in the circumstances was a sufficient backsliding. And yet would any man in a like situation, dealing honestly with his own thoughts, declare confidently that there was no danger here to a true love? The answer of theory and idealism would of course be that there could evidently be none. The words “true love” imply that, and a certain old writer has disparaged “a fugitive and cloistered virtue” that shrinks from taking the open field against temptation. Which is all very beautiful, but another saying as to the relation of discretion to valour comes nearer to the truth of a human nature, which,with the best will in the world, is apt to be sorely tripped up in the very moment of its strength by some half-forgotten weakness.
Sid Norton’s love for Rosamund Lowther was no less real and deep than he deemed it. She was for him the divine event toward which his whole life had deviously moved. To lose her love would be loss irremediable. She was that final joy and enchantment which he had pursued from face to face, yet found only at last in hers. She was the fairy tale of life come true. He had no wish, no hope, no aim, beyond her. With his meeting her life had at last seriously begun. Its future success was to be the making perfect this love which she had brought him. This was the serious truth about Sid Norton; it represented the serious responsible self which had at length asserted its domination over the warring minor selves that had preceded it—the self he seriously wished to go on being. But alas! in this multiple being called man those minor selves, though conquered and perhaps mortally wounded, areapt to die hard, and occasionally one of them, in a last dying flash of vitality, will gain the upper hand, and, in some fleeting but fatal moment, tragically belie the self that is real and lasting. Sid, who was learned in his own psychology, knew himself, or rather him-selves, too well to be vaingloriously confident that no such disastrous aberration on the part of one or other of his dead or dying selves might not in some unguarded moment betray him. He did not, of course, seriously fear it, and it seemed impossible indeed, as out there on the midnight ocean he lifted up his eyes to the moon, as though she were the silver spirit of his love.
Still, like a wise soldier, he prayed hard that night not to be led into temptation.
In this spirit of discreet valour, he had, on embarking, after making a survey of his fellow-passengers, congratulated himself on the singular unseductiveness of the array feminine. As in the days of Odysseus, the siren remains one of the most dreaded dangers of those that go down to the sea in ships, andSid’s previous crossings had not been uneventful in this respect.
On coming on deck rather late next forenoon, Sid was immediately aware, before he traced his impression to its cause, of a subtle attractive change in the human atmosphere—just, as in early spring, suddenly, one morning, we come out into the air, and know, before we have seen them, that there are flowers in the garden. So poor Sid’s terribly sensitive instinct warned him immediately of the unexpected presence of a beautiful woman. Casting his eyes along the prosaic line of deck chair mummies, he saw that his instinct had not been at fault. A beautiful woman had blossomed there in the night. With the vividness of almond stars among the bare boughs, she shone among the other passengers, an apparition of fragrance, all dew and danger. One of the chairs had remained vacant up till this morning. It was the chair next to Sid’s own, and it was with a quick thrill in which pleasure was quaintly blended with alarm, that he realised that itwas in this chair that the apparition was sitting.
“So it is,” sighed Sid, with an inward smile, “that heaven leads us not into temptation.”
He did not seat himself at once, but walked the deck several turns, partly to reconnoitre the fair enemy, and partly with the heroic resolve of seeking out the deck steward and having his chair removed to a less perilous position. This extreme measure, however, struck him as both eccentric as well as cowardly, and the reconnaissance finally decided the matter. After all, the voyage so far had been dull enough, and his love for Rosamund surely called for no such fanatical self-denial.
So presently he found himself seated by the side of the apparition, pleasantly enveloped in a delicate exhalation of violets, and luxuriously conscious of the proximity of a beautiful, breathing woman. For a while the first conventional reserves protected him. He took up his book and appeared absorbed in it. She, too, was reading. Oneof those modern novels sufficiently artistic and emotionally speculative to arouse one’s interest in the personality of its reader, and to afford a ready freemasonry of communication between strangers not unwilling to make each other’s acquaintance.
After a brief preoccupation with literature, both readers lost interest in their books at the same moment, and both, with a bored sigh, allowed them to decline upon their steamer-rug knees, with an artfully synchronised sympathy. Then their eyes met, and two of a kind recognised each other and smiled. Nature had created them fully equipped flirts. They only needed to look at each other to know it; and, straightway, headlong, with the good excuse of marine ennui upon them, they followed the law of their natures—Sid, however, with a strong brake on, a restraint, which, with the comprehension of sorceresses, his companion felt and interpreted, and inwardly resolved to overcome.
“Strange, how everything is a bore at sea!even the most interesting book,” said the siren.
“Even the sea,” assented Sid.
“Have you really the courage to say that you think the sea ridiculously overrated?”
Sid had.
“I love courage,” she answered, looking at him in a laughing, challenging way.
“You necessitate it,” was the answer, according to the eternal formula; and so the sea began to be less of a bore, and continued being less and less so each succeeding day, till the last evening of the voyage had come.
They were nearing the sad shores of the shamrock, and they had escaped from the after-dinner promenade, and had made themselves cosey near the bow of the ship, in some nook of windlass and sailing tackle close to the bulwark, where they could watch the phosphorescent spume of the ship’s course, and speak of it, if necessary.
So far, though not entirely satisfied with himself, Sid had combined faithfulness with flirtation in a blending so adroit that the acheof his conscience was just bearable; and, he told himself, that Rosamund, of all women, would be the last to withhold her admiration from so brilliant a feat of sentimental tight-rope walking. Any student of thears amatoriaknows how fine is the line between faithfulness and unfaithfulness, finer far than a hair from the beloved’s head; and Sid had the right to congratulate himself with his deft-footed adhesion to that moonbeam of a path. The siren was too expert herself in such perilous experiment not to have observed and admired Sid’s achievement, and, naturally, she was piqued by it to a special effort of conquest this last evening. Not, of course, that she really cared for Sid, any more than he cared for her. It was merely two flirts making a trial of strength, the old eternal duel between man and woman; but, for once, the man had most to lose—and that Sid kept reiterating to himself: for this momentary diversion he might lose Rosamund, lose his whole life, and the meaning of it—for this!
The siren, who had not known him for three days without knowing all about him, estimated accurately with what she had to contend. For the woman flirt there is no incentive like—Another Woman! It was not this quite attractive man whose scalp she was after. It was the woman to whom he was so ridiculously constant that she burned to humiliate.
Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way. I said that the line is fine, and often, to sincere observers, the adherence to it has a somewhat technical value. Was it casuistry or simplicity in Sid that made him feel that his faith was still intact so long as he had not actually—kissed the siren? We live in a legal, concrete world, a world that judges us by our definite completed actions rather than by our feelings, or our cunningly restricted evasions of the penalty. A kiss—whatever the motive—is a concrete decisive act. A kiss is evidence. The desire to kiss, however powerful, is not. Now Sid had not yet kissed the siren. According to anyexternal tribunal, Sid was still faithful to his Rosamund.
This unkissed kiss, so to say, was the key of the castle; at all events from the siren’s point of view. Sid’s heart, to tell the truth, ached with a sincerer standard; but, at all events, be its value what it might, this unkissed kiss was the redoubt on which he had hoisted his colours, to fly or fall. And it was to be no easy fight, he realised, as the siren nestled herself into a comfortable position in that sheltered nook of windlass and sailing-tackle, and phosphorescence and gold-dust stars, and the importunate surge of the sea.
He braced himself with the thought of Rosamund as with a prayer. He crossed himself with the remembrance of his last look as they had parted. It may sound laughable that anyone should arm himself so cap-à-pie against a kiss, yet the stakes in any contest are represented by some apparently trivial symbol. A kiss was the symbol here; and the siren, at all events, did not under-rate its symbolic value. She fought for it asthough it had been the cross of the Legion of Honour, fought with all the delicate skill of an artist, and she laughed softly now and again as she came near winning, winning—the kiss that belonged to another woman.
She was terribly beautiful was the siren, terribly everything that a seductive woman can be. The atmosphere about her was a dreamy whirlpool, of which the vortex was her lips, and Sid felt himself being drawn closer and closer to that vortex. How he longed to throw up his arms and drown—but, instead, suddenly, brusquely, rudely, he sprang up.
“I won’t,” he cried abruptly, and left her.
It was not gracefully done, but it was the only way he could do it. Victories are seldom graceful. In the thick of battle it is occasionally necessary to be impolite. Suddenly Sid had seen, as it were, luridly embodied the moment he had told himself might some day come—the moment of temptation. Here was he face to face with it at last, one of those terrible moments oftrial which divide the past from the future, and challenge us to decide then and there, once and for all, what we really mean about ourselves; one of those moments that cannot be postponed, but must be met and fought just how and when they come; and, as Sid realised all the moment meant, those perfumed alluring lips so dangerously near to his filled him with a veritable terror, and his heart almost stopped beating with dread of succumbing. Poor Sid, he had been so accustomed to take such kisses as they came with a light heart; but now suddenly, as in a lightning flash, he seemed to see the meaning of those mysterious standards by which the faith of men and women has been immemorially judged, a meaning he had never suspected before; and he saw, too, the divine beauty of them; and the vivid revelations thus made to him, not a moment too soon, had given him that strength to cry out “I won’t,” and tear himself away.
As with a burning heart, he arraigned himself before himself in the solitude of hisstateroom, it seemed at first that his victory had been but a poor one, a victory only in name. He had desired to kiss the siren—it was impossible to deny that; and surely the very wish to do so was unfaithfulness; and the only reason that had restrained him—was it not the fear of losing Rosamund? No, it was more than that, and with the realisation that it was really more than that—a real aspiration, however feeble, toward the better way of loving, a repugnance for the old way, and a genuine preference, very young and tender indeed as yet, for a finer ideal—he grew a little comforted. Yes, it had been a victory, a greater one than it had seemed. He had not really wanted to kiss the siren, after all, in spite of compromising appearances—not really deep down. It was only an old habit of the surface that had momentarily got the better of him! And, though it may sound like casuistry, it was not so. Poor boy, it might not have seemed a brilliant victory to the looker-on. But flirtation is a habit that dies hard, and, till he had knownRosamund, the mere idea of faithfulness to a woman had never remotely entered into his mind. This passage with the siren, however, had proved him so far on the road to regeneration as to have developed an actual preference for being faithful! He was himself surprised at the feeling, and it filled him with a certain awe, made him almost a little frightened, though curiously happy. Did he really love one woman like that at last? Just one woman, out of all the women in the world? Yes, just one woman. It was a wonderful feeling.
The temptation of the siren had been the gross one of the senses. The finer and subtler trial had yet to come. Rosamund had so far compromised with her original decree as to consent to limit Sid’s ordeal to one out of his nine muses. She would be content, she said, with his seeing Meriel, she, whom you may remember he was to love till Judgment Day; for Rosamund was right in thinking that, of all Sid’s previous feelings, his lovefor Meriel had been most serious. Indeed, it had been a feeling apart from all others, and it had always shone wistfully in Sid’s memory as a lost sacred thing that had come into his life too early, before his heart had been ready for it. A magic gift of loving it had been, but he had taken it carelessly with the rest, and realised all it had been only when it was far away. He recalled looks out of Meriel’s eyes which told him long after that she had known he was not ready for the love she could give him, and, unconsciously, the occasional thought of this old shortcoming of his had prepared him for—Rosamund, of whom Meriel came to seem in his mind a beautiful prophecy. Thus old love dies that new may live, or rather lives on in giving its life to the new. Certainly, Sid could never have loved Rosamund more had he not loved Meriel so much.
Yet, what if it should prove that Rosamund in her turn had only been developing him toward repossession of his old dream! Love moves in a mysterious way. Howstrange if this interval of experience had been meant to bring him back, at last worthy of them, to Meriel’s arms at last. He could not deny that his love for Rosamund had been haunted sometimes by moonlit memories of Meriel’s face, though he could with equal truth say that the new love was greater than the old one, because of its inclusion of stable human elements which his fairy dream of Meriel had lacked. Meriel had been a dream-woman, but hardly a human woman; but Rosamund was both. Yet, almost without his knowing it, there had been lurking in the background of his consciousness a vague curiosity—it was hardly more—as to what it would seem like to see Meriel again; what her face would seem like, how her voice would sound. He did not for a moment fear the result, yet he sometimes felt that he would like to try the experiment; but all these feelings had been of the very shadowiest, hardly rippling the surface of consciousness; so when Rosamund had suddenly made her odd proposal, they had seemed phantomnothings indeed compared with the aching reality of a month’s exile from her side.
All that had been Meriel had passed into Sid’s love for Rosamund. Meriel herself could only be a ghost, however beautifully visible and audible, a fair house of dreams from which the dreams had departed. Yet, for all that, it was not without some agitation that Sid found himself at length in the quaint little seaside town, whence a ferryboat would take him to a village across the bay, high over which Meriel and her mother lived, looking over the sea. Her ghost began to grow more and more luminous with memories, as a pale moon fills with silver as the night deepens. He stood on the deck of the little boat, and as it drew near to the landing-place he could see clearly on the hillside the old white house with its trellises and its terraced gardens descending the hill. He could see plainly the little bower where one summer evening they had sat together, and she had suddenly put her hand in his and said, “My life is in your hands.”
His heart beat fast as his memories crowded in upon him, and it made him almost frightened to think that in a few short moments he would really be looking at her again. He felt as though he were about to see someone who had been dead a long time, and had come to life again startlingly, as in dreams. Then there suddenly floated over the water from the village music very mournful and sweet, and he could see a long line of dark figures moving slowly up the tortuous village street. At the first strains of the music a great foreboding had swept through Sid’s heart. What if Meriel were dead, and, as in a fairy tale, he had come to meet her—carried through the streets to the tomb. The idea pleased his fancy, with its picturesque pathos; but no! that music was not for Meriel. It was a soldier’s death music, yet its solemn valedictory chords seemed to Sid’s ears to be playing the requiem of a great passion, fitly ushering him with their voluptuous melancholy to the grave of his beautiful love.
He took his way thoughtfully up throughthe climbing village, but there was a subdued excitement in his face which Rosamund might have construed as an undue eagerness to face his coming ordeal. At last he turned the well-known corner of the lane, and there was the house, facing the aery infinite of the sea. How poignantly familiar it all was; yet, why instantly did something tell him, something blank about the expression of the very windows, that—Meriel was not there.
Her mother met him as he turned into the garden, but Meriel was not there. She had been married—yesterday.
That is what the music had meant.
“So ‘Judgment Day’ is married!” said Rosamund, when Sid had once more returned to his cage to report himself. “It’s too bad of her,” she continued, “for she has quite spoiled my little plan. My test has been no test at all.”
“It was all I needed,” answered Sid. He was thinking of the siren, about whom, likea wise lover, he had kept silence. Too much confession is a dangerous weakness, and we are usually the best judges of our own actions. The siren had been but the process of an experiment. All that concerned Rosamund was the result.
“I wish I could have seen you, Sid, when you heard about ‘Judgment Day.’ I’d give anything to know what you really felt; but, of course, you’ll never tell me.”
Sid smiled, but said nothing.
“Weren’t you disgusted with her for daring to do it without your consent? The bare idea of a woman who had loved you daring to have any new life on her own account! I am sure you had pictured her spending her days looking dreamily over the sea—waiting for your return. I know you had.”
As a matter of fact Sid had, and his feelings on hearing of Meriel’s marriage had been exceedingly mixed. It was perhaps as well that Rosamund had no record of them.
“Won’t you tell me what you reallyfelt—just for fun? You can be honest, I shan’t mind.”
But Sid was too wise to be honest. He knew where these heart-to-heart confessions, just for fun, were apt to lead.
“I had no feelings. My one thought from beginning to end was to get back to my cage—and never go out of it again.”
“You were relieved then? You had been a little frightened, eh? Yes, you know you had, and you were glad to be let off the ordeal—now, weren’t you?”
Sid certainly had been, but he steadily refused to be drawn. And then Rosamund suddenly changed her tactics.
“But you haven’t asked anything about me during your retrospective pilgrimage!” she said.
“You!” exclaimed Sid, a look of peculiarly masculine surprise coming into his face.
“O yes, me! I suppose you imagined me during your absence sitting here,à la‘Judgment Day’, docilely awaiting your return.”
“What do you mean, Rosamund?” asked Sid, anxiously.
“I mean that you seem to forget that I, too, had made previous engagements for Judgment Day. When you were off pilgrimaging in the past—what was to hinder me from doing the same?”
“O Rosamund, you didn’t.”
“Didn’t I! I’d often wondered what it would be like to kiss Jack Meriden again, so your being away on your own affairs gave me a good opportunity.”
“You kissed him!” exclaimed Sid, in angry astonishment, all his masculine proprietorship in his face.
“Why not!” she answered, nodding her head affirmatively.
“You—kissed—him,” Sid repeated, grasping her wrists fiercely.
Rosamund shook herself free, with mocking laughter.
“Ah! there talks the man—the lord of creation. The man is to be allowed to go off and flirt with whom he pleases, but thewoman, O no! While the man is engaged in these pleasing diversions, she must sit at home faithfully darning his socks. No, sir! I did kiss Jack Meriden, and it was a very nice kiss, too.”
“You did,” repeated Sid slowly, in an anguish of jealousy.
“You must remember, Sid,” she answered mockingly, “what a serious affair it was between us—quite a Judgment-Day affair. Those old memories die hard, as you, of all people, should know.”
“I only know that you—kissed—Jack—Meriden,” repeated Sid, rising to his feet; “and that I am going.”
He strode savagely across the lawn, making as if to leave the garden. Rosamund let him go some distance, and then called him back.
“Why should I come back?” he asked, sulkily.
“I want to tell you something,” she said in a caressing voice.
He came back to her side, and stood there.
“Well, what is it?” he asked stiffly.
“You must sit down. I can’t tell you that way.”
Sid sat down, with non-committal aloofness. She put her arm around his rigid shoulders, and whispered.
“You are the greatest goose that ever lived. I never kissed Jack Meriden. I love you—not as a man loves, but as a woman loves.”
“I love you the same way,” answered Sid, the storm-clouds suddenly swept from his face, “there is only one way of—loving. The other thing needs another name.”
And, with that, Rosamund snapped to the door of his cage forever.
WHENEVER I ought to be working especially hard at my desk in the middle of the woodland, where I have built myself a little log house for my books, and my pictures and my pen—because the household down at the bottom of the hill does not want a man indoors writing all day when there are all kinds of important domestic operations afoot, which, when he is there, have to be done softly, with hushed voices and muffled tread, lest the serenity of the great brain with the pen be ruffled—whenever, I say, I ought to be working especially hard up there in the wood, among the pines and the bracken and the dancing leaves and the whistle of birds that seem to call, “What a sin it is to be working on such a day!” there often comes a tiny figure and looks in at the window with three-year-old baby eyes, and watches themysterious person there at the desk, with, for all her affected innocent look, a definite purpose of seduction in her baby heart. I know too well what she is up to. It is a day all aromatic sunshine, and she wants us to play truant together, hunting butterflies and wild flowers, instead of having to behave properly with nurse, and sitting there at that stupid desk.
She knows perfectly well that she is doing the sweet forbidden thing, for her mother has impressed upon her again and again, with much solemnity, that she must on no account interrupt father when he is busy—on masterpieces. Eva has always listened with an air of enigmatic innocence on her little broad indomitable face. Her blue eyes have worn a look of what I might call stubborn obedience, and then—Well, I am sorry to say that on the first opportunity, when nurse’s back is turned, she has made off as fast as her sturdy little legs will carry her, up among the secrecies of the fern, till at last she has arrived at my window—ababy Eve, offering me the wild apple of idleness and sunshine.
I pretend not to see, I bow my head more sternly over my task in profound absorption; but Eva is not to be taken in by such cheap devices. She knows that she has only to stand long enough at the window—cleverly making no sign, not tapping or calling, but just silently there—for me to give in, and, throwing down my pen, catch her in my arms and carry her up to the gorse-lit moorland that spreads its boundless horizon at the top of our little wood.
The sun has been calling me all day, and the leaves have been whispering invitations upon the pane; but I have found it comparatively easy to resist them. The eternal temptation of the birds calling and calling me away I have steeled my heart to resist also. But Eva! No, I cannot resist her. So, after a sham fight of a few moments, she and I are on our way up the woods as fast as we can, for fear nurse or mother may catch sight of us before we really escape.
But for one particular day, of which at the moment I am thinking, I am afraid I cannot lay the blame on her. No, it was all my fault. I believe that that day she had meant to be a really good girl. I must take the blame of luring her from her arduous duties with her dolls. And yet I cannot blame myself very sincerely; for the forenoon had been so full of sunshine and wafting perfume that I could not have regarded myself as a human being had I stayed at my desk, merely writing, while the sun was shining and the birds singing and the wild-rose opening its dewy heart to the sky.
Deliberately I had decided that I would not work, and strolled up through the green, sun-ascending perfumes to the gorse and heather at the top of the pine wood. As I emerged into the broad, brooding sunshine, a swift rustle stirred in the underbrush, and a zigzag of silver flashed away from my feet, threshing its way, with sinuous, sinister beauty, to shelter in an old bank hard by. Ihad disturbed an adder taking his noonday sun bath.
Snakes are hardly more common in England than they are said to be in the island of Saint Patrick. When occasionally surprised, they startle one with something like the thrill of an apparition, something of the fear and fascination of the supernatural. They seem to belong to the beautiful wicked side of nature, that at once repels and ensnares. Though I had lived much in the country, I had not previously seen three snakes in my life; so this fleeing, flashing adder was quite an event in my morning’s walk, and my first thought was: If only Eva were here to see it too!
Presently the adder himself gave me my opportunity, by gliding into a hole in the bank, from which there was no outlet except by the way he had entered. I could see him sitting there coiled in the darkness, with his vicious head erect, ready, tiny worm, after all, as he was, to fight the whole big world. He sat there and watched me, unmoving;and then, noticing a big stone that lay near, I closed with it the door of his little cave, and made his imprisonment safe with earth. Then I went down the wood again to bring Eva. I caught sight of her through the garden hedge, sitting on the grass playing with alphabetical bricks. Nurse sat a short way off sewing.
Nurse is such an old friend of ours and so clothed with vice-maternal authority that I am almost as much afraid of her in regard to Eva’s and my truancies as I am of Eva’s mother. Men rightly enough, by natural law, are allowed little to say in the rearing of their own babies, and, however much the master of the house you may deem yourself, your authority stops with the good woman who guards your child. There is something sacred about a nurse—a mother nurse, I mean; not a nursemaid—which it would be profanity, even impertinence, for a mere father to disregard. When the mother is not there, the nurse is the mother, and her word is law.
Realising this, I could not dare openly to cross the lawn and take Eva away with me, as though I had every right to do so. Had I dared to do that, I should have been speedily humiliated by that mysterious authority which is said to rock the cradle and to rule the world. In other words, nurse and I would have had a spirited fight, in which I would have been speedily worsted.
Therefore, I lay in ambush a while behind the hedge of flowering laurel, wondering how to catch Eva’s attention. Presently I found a simple way. Within reach of my hand grew a red rose bush, weighted with fat, heavy roses. One of these I plucked, and threw it with a dexterity on which I prided myself right into Eva’s lap. If there is one thing I love about her, it is the calm way she takes surprises. She looked silently at the rose a moment, then with her strong, quiet eyes gazed around to see where it could have come from. As she did that, I gently shook the rose-bush. She watched it shaking a moment, and then caught sight of me.Even then she kept her presence of mind; but an indefinable twinkle in her eyes, momentarily illuminating her little imperturbable baby face, telegraphed to me that she had understood.
Fortunately for us, nurse was not only deep in her sewing, but deep in some old memories, so that she did not miss Eva till we were both safe together on the woodland side of the garden hedge. Once safe there, we made haste to cover as fast as possible, and, when we had reached one of our secret hiding places in a little hollow of fern surrounded by birches, I set Eva down and told her to wait there and play with the sunbeams, while I ran back down the hill for something which, it had just occurred to me, might make us a little more fun in our truancy. This was nothing more wonderful than a wide-mouthed glass jar, once poignant with pickles, which surreptitiously I procured from the cook with fear and trembling, and the purpose of which will soon appear. Returning up the wood, I found Eva contemplating the red rose I hadthrown to her with a quite philosophical absorption.
“Daddy,” she said, “why are some roses red and some white?”
It was the ancient unanswerable question of the mystery of colour. Who is there that has answered or can answer it? A mother might have done better, but what could a mere father do but temporise?
“I will tell you, Eva,” I said, “when you can tell me why sister’s hair is black and yours is golden.”
This sibylline answer, I was relieved to find, made a profound impression upon Eva, and as we continued up the wood she was evidently pondering it in the unfathomable deeps of her baby brain. Her meditation, however, soon gave place to curiosity and questioning about everything that grew or sang or moved in the wood. Every child is a naturalist, and the great charm of naturalists is that they always remain children, never losing their sense of wonder at the little elusive things that run and hop and chirp inthe grass, or float flower-like upon the air. The naturalist has come nearer to the secret of eternal youth—which is mainly eternal enthusiasm—than any poet, and he who at fifty still pursues a rare species with unabated ardour need never fear old age.
I can make no pretense of being a learned naturalist, and the names of many a bird and flower I love often escape me—as one often forgets the name of some charming acquaintance, whom none the less one is delighted to meet again. I am content to go up the wood in entire ignorance of the Latin and even English names of the various presences that fill it with leafage and perfume and song; but Eva is of a different temper. She is an exact scientist, and insists on knowing the name and the how and the why of every leaf and flower and insect that crosses our path. She even expects me to know what the birds are saying, as though I were the old Virgilian Asylas, who talked the language of birds as easily as some old scholar can read Latin; or Melapus:
With love exceeding a simple love of the thingsThat glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck;Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wingsFrom branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck.
With love exceeding a simple love of the thingsThat glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck;Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wingsFrom branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck.
With love exceeding a simple love of the thingsThat glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck;Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wingsFrom branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck.
When I am a little indefinite in my explanations, she gives me a look which makes me tremble for her continued belief in my omniscience; and so, when for the third time she asked me what a certain bird was saying, I felt that I must do something to retain her respect. So I extemporised.
“This is what he is saying,” I answered: “Be quick—Be quick—Be quick—Quick! Be quick!... Sweet!—Sweet!—Sweet!... Sweet-i-ki!—Sweet-i-ki!—Sweet-i-ki!... Chuck-chuck!—Twe-ey—Twe-ey—Twe-ey!”
This translation seemed entirely satisfactory to Eva, and she made me repeat it several times, so that with her rapacious baby memory she might get it by heart.She presently disconcerted me, however, by asking me to tell her what that other bird on the bough there was saying.
“It doesn’t sound the same as the other,” she said, or meant in more babylike words. (The realism of baby talk I am obliged to leave to greater writers.)
“It means just the same, though,” I said. “All the birds are saying the same thing, only they say it in different languages.”
I must explain that Eva has been somewhat of a traveller, and realises that you can ask for the same thing in English, French, or Italian. Therefore, the explanation seemed to bring her some, though I could see not entire, conviction.
However, I was saved further embarrassment by our arriving at our scene of operations. Really I don’t know which of us was more quietly excited as we stood in front of the bank where the angry little prisoner churned his venom in the darkness. Eva, who had been given an illustrated natural history for a present the Christmas before,was evidently expecting a boa constrictor—that, or a beautiful serpent, such as a luridly pictured Bible sent her by a pious aunt had taught her to associate with the garden of Eden.
With almost as much caution as though Eva’s imaginations were likely to be realised, and some winged dragon snorting flame was ready to leap out upon us, I removed the stone and peered into the tiny dungeon, Eva standing at my side, her blue eyes serious with expectancy. Yes, my prisoner was still there! Apparently he had not moved since I had shut him in, and his small wicked eyes gleamed at me with concentrated hate out of the darkness. He showed no disposition to escape, so there was no difficulty in my using my glass pickle jar, as I had proposed to myself when I stole with it from the kitchen.
Placing its broad mouth in the entrance to the little cave, I banked it securely round with earth; Eva, meanwhile, an admiring, mystified spectator. Thus the adder had no choice but to stay where he was or toremove into the glass jar, the hospitality of which, however, he showed no disposition to accept. He still sat on, mystic, unmoving, making no sign. Eva and I watched him a long while in silence, and then at length, his immobility growing monotonous, I cut a stout twig from a neighbouring bush, and, pushing it through the soft earth at the side of the jar, poked him gently with it. Even then he would not stir, but his black tongue went in and out of his tiny jaws like black lightning. There was something quite pathetic in his miniature fury at this indignity being put upon him.
“My! but he is cross! Isn’t he, Daddy?” exclaimed Eva, peering with me at the angry little creature. Presently he moved farther into the darkness, away from the tormenting twig, but, as it could still reach him there, his patience at last became exhausted, and suddenly he had uncoiled himself and was gliding, with all the grace of his evil beauty, into the glass jar.
Eva gave a little scream of delight andclapped her hands. “O isn’t he pretty?” she cried. “Let me take hold of him.” Snakes were evidently among the multitude of things of which Eva knows no fear. However, as Eva is not Saint Paul—though in my heart I had a feeling that her courageous innocence would have protected her—I had to deny her that indulgence; one of the few I ever denied her, for I know of few with which she is not strong enough to be intrusted—though that, I suppose, is a father’s point of view.
As we went down the wood with our captive securely shut in his glass cage, I explained to Eva why it was just as well not to hold snakes in your hand, and when we reached my log hut I illustrated my explanation by the old familiar method. Cutting a forked stick from a tree hard by, I set the jar down on the grass, and when the adder, believing that freedom had come at last, began to glide through the loophole I had made for him, I pinned him down to the earth at the back of his wicked head. In vainhe lashed his body like a silver whip with rage; and while I thus held him I took my penknife and forced open his cruel mouth, so that Eva could see his evil forked tongue. Then we let him go back into his bottle, and dropped green leaves down to him, so that he might feel comfortable, and looked about for beetles and such small insects as we thought might appeal to his appetite and console him for his captivity. But these attentions he received with sullen indifference. Whether it was that he was too angry to eat, or that we had made a mistake in his diet, our limited knowledge of natural history did not enable us to decide.
Nor were we left much more time to consider; for, suddenly as we knelt together side by side on the grass, our eyes intent on our captive, and the alarmed scrambling of the various small insects tumbling over each other to get out of his way, we heard a voice behind us.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?” the voice said.
Eva and I looked at each other. It was her mother’s voice. We were caught! In our hearts we were not in the least ashamed; but we bent our heads in mock penitence, pretending that we were afraid to look up.
“Really I don’t know which is the biggest baby,” the voice continued, with direct personal application to myself.
Then Eva and I took courage and looked up into the bluebell eyes above us, and all three of us broke into laughter.
“It’s all very well to laugh,” said Eva’s mother, with a sudden affectation of severity, mindful of the necessity of impressing Eva, “but this is a very demoralising little girl. Haven’t I told you, Eva, that you were not to disturb father at his work?”
Eva was a brick and didn’t give me away. She kept a set little face of respectful rebellion, imperturbable, unapologetic. She wasn’t going to betray me.
“Really it was not her fault,” I said shamefacedly; “it was all mine. Punish me, ifyou must; but not her.” And then we laughed again.
“What are you going to do with this poor beast here?” asked Eva’s mother, pointing to the glass jar. “Let him go, I suppose,” I said.
I saw Eva’s eyes light up for a moment. There was just one last bit of fun left before she must return to the humdrum of the nursery.
So then we took the lid from the jar, and presently the adder, sniffing the air, stole cautiously out on the grass, and then at length, realising that he was really at liberty, flashed his way from our sight into the underbrush, with the joy of all natural things at being free once more—a bird released from his cage, or a happy fish thrown back into the stream. The beetles and the various other bugs seemed no less to appreciate their freedom.
Alas! it was poor Eva’s turn to go back into captivity. Mine too, for my desk gloomed there inside. We gave each othera parting look, as her mother took her off down the wood. So two exiles condemned to Siberia might exchange glances of sympathy. But all the same we had had a good time, and we both knew that, in spite of all law and authority, we intended to have many more up there in the woodland, Eva and I.
THE dream has come to an end, and I have just received a letter asking for a return of the dream documents. In other words, Miranda has written asking me to send back her letters. She is going to be married soon. Incidentally, so am I.
Our dream came to an end quite a while ago. But it was a very long and beautiful dream—dreams seldom last so long—and I did hope that Miranda would allow me to keep its beautiful records. But no! I have to send all that brilliant writing back again; all the fancy and wit and tenderness which make such a living history of a fairy tale.
Perhaps Miranda wants to read the fairy tale over again, and is not satisfied with my poor records of it. That may be the reason why she wants those letters back. It can hardly be any common reason, such asactuates common lovers when they make a like demand. She knows how I reverence the memory of our dream, and I think she is almost as proud to have dreamed it as I am.
We are not bitter or jealous toward each other, but, on the contrary, each of us is glad that the other is so happy with—some one else. Such sorrow as remains to us is the abstract, wistful sorrow which natures, such as ours—and O Miranda, how alike we were!—feel at the passing of any beautiful thing. The pathos of “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth”....
Ah! Miranda, how can we confidently complete that solemn sentence, when so seemingly everlasting a thing as our love has passed away? If that is gone, can there really be anything in the universe that endureth forever!
I suppose that it is the humiliated sense of this transitoriness of what had seemed an immortal feeling that makes men and women who have loved and lost each other, as Miranda and I, return those letters, whichhave thus come to seem the ludicrously earnest records of an illusion.
The two people feel that they have been tricked into these solemn utterances of the heart, as if Life had been playing a game with them, which they, unsuspecting, had taken seriously. They feel a little silly, as one does when some jocular friend, as we say, takes us in with some mock-serious story. We sit, attentive and eager, while he talks, and believe every word, and then suddenly the stealing smile upon his face tells us that we have been fooled. So we sit and listen to Love telling his old tale, as if he had never told it before, with such lit young eyes and such irresistible persuasion; and then, suddenly—there comes the smile stealing over his face, and we look at each other and know that we have been fooled.
This is not my view of the matter, but I conceive that it is the view of those who, like Miranda, wish to obliterate the records of an old dream. For my part, the fact of a feeling passing away is nothing against the realityof that feeling. All feelings must sooner or later pass away: