ONCE-UPON-A-TIME

“.... the treesThat whisper round a temple become soonDear as the temple’s self.”

One indeed might add that without the trees there is no temple. I use trees here as symbolic of environment, but, literally speaking, it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of trees to one’s castle-in-Spain. Ancient trees have always brought distinction to their possessors. It is the old park and the avenues—the setting—that give many an English house its imposing significance. To cut down the trees would be like shaving the head of a beautiful woman.

So my castle-in-Spain must be almost lost amid miles of mysterious trees, surrounded on every side by haunted forests, the home of wood-demons and the wild boar and the hunting horn and the bearded robber and the maiden in distress; and, like lanes of silver trumpets, six avenues of lime-trees shall sweep up to its six drawbridges in the air.

Of course my castle would be fortified against a world which would naturally wish to rob me of my happiness. It would be armed to the teeth with quick-firing guns of the latest pattern, and these would bemanned by Japanese gunners of the quaintest size and shape. I may say—in parenthesis—that my valets would not be Japanese, but English. Each nation has its own special gift to give us, and England still remains famous for its valets. I should need volumes in folio adequately to describe my castle-in-Spain, and at least three of them would be needed to tell about my garden. Ah, what a garden there would be in my castle-in-Spain! Perhaps, aside from other fancies which I should expect to indulge, there would only be three on which I would really set my heart:

(1) A garden.(2) A library.(3) A private chapel.

I should not hope, nor even could I wish, to be original in my garden; for man’s early desire of gardens had developed into a learned convoluted art even before Solomon wrote:

“A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. My plants are an orchard of pomegranate, with pleasant fruits;camphire, with spikenard, spikenard with saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices: A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon. Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.”

My garden would, first of all, be made of dew; next of grass, and then of very old trees. Oak-trees, poplars and beeches, would dominate my garden; and, as for the other trees, they would all be trees of veritablylivinggreen—chestnuts and sycamores and willows. There would be no so-calledever-greens in my garden, trees that are ever-green because they are never-green—except one: the only ever-green tree in my garden would be the laurel. Nothing but freshness and sap and leafage of transparent emerald would be trees in my garden; and the flowers of my garden would be all spring and summer: snowdrop, crocus and daffodil; violet, rose and honeysuckle. There would be no autumn in my garden. September with its paper flowers, chrysanthemum and dahlia,and all its knife-scented funereal blooms, must not walk in my garden; nor shall the white feet of winter tread down my shining lawns.

Here are but, so to say, the first principles of my garden. As I said, it would take volumes in folio adequately to tell about my garden. But this much further I may say: that among the many divisions and sub-divisions of my garden, there would be three. First there would be my star-garden. In this would be planted flowers that bloom only under the influence of the stars; flowers that open at the setting of the moon, and close with the rising of the morning star. For these flowers I should build a high hanging garden, dizzily thrust up into the morning sky, on the summit of some cloud-encircled turret of my castle. The flowers in this garden would be whiter than snow and purer than my first love.

Then there would be my sun-garden. In this would be planted the warm-breathed, earth-coloured flowers, the yellow and scarlet flowers, the purple and saffron, the orange and crimson, all the hot and savage flowers of the sun.

And, again, there would be my moon-garden, a subterranean realm of pale leaves and ghostly flowers, a dim garden of excavated terraces descending beneath the dungeoned foundations of my castle, irrigated from its green-mantled moat, and fed through slanting shafts of hollowed stone—with the surreptitious light of the moon.

I should allow but few birds in my garden. The eagle should nest, if it would, on some crag-like corner of my battlements, and the hawk would be welcome to soar and swoop about my towers. But I would have no nightingales in my gardens, those birds of make-believe melodious song, those posturing troubadours of the air. Only the simple sincere-throated birds should sing in my garden: the thrush and the black-bird and the robin; the starling with his simple-minded whistle, the curlew with his lost broken-hearted call; and, at twilight, the nightjar should make his rugged music amid the fern. And the swallow and the sparrow should be made welcome in every corner ofmy dominions. Generally, I should encourage the quiet birds, the working, building, fighting birds, the birds that sing no more than is necessary, or natural.

Everywhere in my garden shall be heard the sound of running water, brooks making their way unseen under secret boughs, and fountains whispering to themselves on solitary lawns. There shall be such a rustle of fresh boughs in my garden, and such a ripple of streams, that you shall hardly be able to tell whether the leaves or the brooks are talking. Also there shall be pools hidden away in sanctuaries of the garden, pools sacred with water-lilies, and visited only of the dragon-fly and the lonely bee.

And there shall be other ponds in my garden, green mossy ponds as old as the foundations of my castle, fish-ponds, the ancestral home of monastic carp, strange ancient fish with wise ugly faces, and gold collars round their necks, telling how some old king caught them and threw them back again into the pond two hundred years ago.

My library would, first of all, be vast and multitudinous, a mysterious collection of books without beginning and without end, a romantic infinitude of learning and fragrance of old leather. It should go uncatalogued as the wilderness. No human index in the form of a librarian should tame it into prim classification. It should grow wild as the virgin forest, and unlooked-for adventures of the soul should lie in ambush in every alcove and lonely backwater of its haunted shelves. No less than a thousand rooms, big and little, winding in and out, wandering here and there, would be needed to contain it. There are many book-lovers who will hardly understand this Gargantuan passion for a huge library. A small and sensitively chosen collection of books is their ideal. For me, however, a few books are no more a library than a few trees are a forest, or a few gallons of water an ocean. A library is the firmament of the soul, and each particular star gains in significance from being a shining unit in all that celestial mystery.

While I should aim to have a library coextensive with the mental history of humanity, from the clay books of Babylon to the latest French novel, the learned rooms I should oftenest loiter in would be those rainbowed with the gold and purple of monkish manuscripts, the rooms mysterious with grimoires and herbals and ancient treatises on the occult sciences, the rooms of black-letter and the types of Aldus and those other first printers through whose magic Virgil and Catullus and Horace rose again from the grave. And I would have my library built with innumerable secret chambers and sliding panels and hidden passages—so that, whenever it was my desire, I could shut myself up with a favourite author for a week at a time, and domestic search for me be quite in vain.

My chapel will need few words. It would be merely a crucifix, silence, and sunlight.

I said that there would be no librarian in my library, similarly there would be no gardener in my garden, no priest in mychapel. The places of the soul need no custodians. The worshippers are the priests.

Of course, I should expect to indulge many an idle fancy and picturesque whim in my castle-in-Spain but they would take too long to tell of. Here I have but set down what I conceive to be the reasonable necessities of a dream. I have said nothing, for example, of my treasure-caves beneath the castle, vaults lit by enormous carbuncles, and filled with countless coffers of bronze, overflowing with ancient coins and precious stones. Nor have I spoken of my paradise of butterflies, a great enclosed garden where I would rear all the flower-winged things that, like illuminated letters or the painted souls of Japanese girls, flit and flicker through the sunlit world. Nor have I told of my palace of serpents, where python and cobra and all the ringed, gliding, spangled creatures that hiss and sting should coil about tropical trees, and sleep their mysterious sleep, or fall down like lightning on their paralysed prey. Then, too, I might tell of my great aquarium where,at ease in my luxurious diving-bell, I would lie all day watching iridescent fishes all flounced and frilled with rainbows, and slow-moving elemental shapes that brood eternally at the bottom of the sea.

A hundred other such fancies I shall hope to indulge in my castle-in-Spain, and one more I must not forget, for no castle would be complete without it—the oubliette. Into that I would fling all my sorrows and cares, and all—unwelcome visitors.

WHEN I was a child there grew at the back of my father’s house a deep wood. It may not have been so vast in extent as it seemed to me; but to my childish imagination it seemed boundless, endless, dark and dense, and infinitely mysterious. It frightened me, yet the fear was full of fascination. Delicious was the thrill with which sometimes in my lonely rambles I would venture a few steps further within its haunted recesses than I was wont to have courage for. As a rule, I restricted my explorations to its sunlit margins, and, so soon as I found myself among the shadows, would fly back with a beating heart into the sun.

Never, said I to my childish heart, had the foot of man penetrated into these solitudes, on which lay so deep a spell of beautiful terror; and, so far back as I can remember,this wood was the wonderland which I peopled with all the fancies of a child’s imagination. All the heroes and heroines of my nursery-books lived somewhere in my wood. It was the scene of all their adventures, and, like a stage, was capable of supplying an ever-varyingmise-en-scéne. Sometimes when the moon was up I thought of it as peopled by fairies, and was certain that, if only the hardihood were mine to dare its fantastic shadows, I should surely come upon a fairy revel in full swing. When in the daytime I came upon rings of toadstools with their quaint kobold hats, I knew that they were trolls who took that form during the day, and that if only I were to hide behind a tree and wait for night, I would see them suddenly, at the first touch of the wand of the moon, waken up as if nothing had happened, and once more set their merry wheels a-spinning. But then there was the old witch with the red hood to fear, and the ogre with the six heads, not to speak of the wolves and bears and various other wild beaststhat roamed the woods after dark. Not only wolves—but were-wolves too!

As I grew older, I grew braver, and, persuading myself that I was one of those who bore a charmed life, I found courage to push my explorations further and further into the interior. Thus I became the discoverer of glades and dingles exquisitely lonely with sunshine and haunted flowers, brooding solitudes of silent fern, hidden springs brimming up through the hushed moss, and little rivers dripping from rock to rock in the stillness, like the sound of falling pearls.

But the spell over the wood was above all the spell of beauty, the spell of a breathless enchantment, a spell so deep that the wild-rose growing there seemed other than the wild-rose that grew outside, seemed indeed enchanted, and the very blackberries growing on the great cages of bramble, humming with bees and flickering with butterflies, seemed a magic fruit—which I ate with a beautiful fear that I should be changed into a milk-white fawn, or suddenly find myselfa little silver fish in the stream yonder, with the Princess’s lost wedding ring in my inside.

The Princess! Why was it that almost from the first I associated the wood with a beautiful princess? I seemed always to be expecting her at some turning of the green pathways, riding upon a white palfrey. Of course, she would be riding upon a white palfrey. Or, perhaps I should come upon her suddenly in one of the sunny openings of the wood, combing her black hair with a golden comb. Or, perhaps she was dead, and this wild-rose was growing up out of her pure wild heart. I made up many stories about her, but this was the story that took strongest hold of my fancy—that she had lost her way in the wood, and at last, worn out with weariness and hunger, had lain her down and died—just here where this rose-bush had drawn its fragrance from her last sweet breath, and its bloom from her fading cheek. I used to sit for hours by the rose-bush, and picture her lying beneath with her eyes closedand a gold crown upon her head, and at morning when the roses were filled with dew, I would say to myself: “O the beautiful Princess! She has been weeping in the night.” And then I would drink her tears out of the little pearl cups of the rose; but I was careful never to mar the tender petals, lest the Princess should feel the pain of it down in the aromatic mould.

One day, however, my fancy took another turn, and I said to myself that perchance if I were to pluck one of her roses, the Princess would wake from her enchanted sleep, and stand before me with her strange death-sleepy eyes, and ask me the way back to her lost castle. So one morning when the roses were more than usually drenched with the tears of the Princess, I took heart and plucked the most beautiful rose, saying as I plucked it: “Arise, little Princess and I will take you back to your castle.” Then I waited, and presently I seemed to hear a sigh of happiness, like a spring zephyr, just behind me. I turned, and there stood a maidenwith black hair, and eyes the colour of which I could not rightly discern, because they seemed filled with moonlight.

“Are you the Princess?” I asked.

“Yes!” she answered, “I am the Princess, and my name is Once-Upon-a-Time.”

“Beautiful Princess,” I said, “may I take you back to your castle?”

“Are you sure you know the way, little man?” she said, “for I have been asleep so long that I have quite forgotten it.”

“O yes!” I answered eagerly, though really I was far from sure—but I knew that I had friends in the wood on whom I could rely, if by chance I took the wrong turning. So, “O yes!” I answered, “I have in my wanderings passed by your castle many a time. It stands high among the rocks in the middle of the wood, so high among the summer clouds that it makes one dizzy to look up at it, with its donjons and keeps and draw-bridges and battlements, glittering with men-at-arms, and here and there, blowing loose among the stone towers, the bright hairof some beautiful waiting-woman, watching the dark avenues of the woods for the returning huntsmen, and one loved face among the merry horns. All around the castle grow the oldest trees of the wood, very close and dark, and seeming to touch the sky; and thereabout are grim rocks, and hollow caves haunted by dragons and many another evil thing. In one of these a giant lives, so terrible that the bravest knights have gone up against him—only to leave their bones to whiten at the mouth of his cave. And by the castle walls runs an enchanted river, in which live beautiful water-witches, that sing in the moonlight, and draw the lonely home-returning knight down into their watery bowers. In the castle itself is one tower loftier than all the rest, with windows on every side, through which you can see, as in a magic glass, the whole wide earth, with its cities and its roads and all its hidden places. And there, all day long, sits an aged wizard listening to the world, and weaving his spells——”

“Yes!” said the Princess, perhaps a little impatient at my long description. “That is my castle. But are you quite sure that you know the way?”

At that moment there came and perched upon a bough close by one of those friends, on whom, as I said, I was relying to help me out if I should lose my way. It was a Blue-Bird, with which I had become well-acquainted in my rambles in the wood.

“Wait a moment, Princess,” I said. “To make quite sure, I will consult this friend of mine here.”

Now I must explain that the Blue-Bird, being himself a singer, it is necessary to address him in song. Plain prose he is quite unable to understand. So, if I had said: “Blue-Bird, please tell me the way to the Castle of Princess Once-Upon-a-Time,” he would have shaken his head like a deaf man. Therefore, I spoke to him in this fashion instead; or, rather, I should say that this is the grown-up meaning of what I sang—for the actual song I have forgotten:

O Blue-Bird, sing the hidden wayTo Once-Upon-a-Time;We know you cannot speak in prose,So answer us in rhyme.Blue-Bird of Dreams, alone you knowThe way the dream-folk take,O tell us the right way to go,Before, Blue-Bird, we wake.Dreamers, we seek the way of dreams—O you that know so wellEach twist and turning of the way,Blue-Bird, will you not tell?Blue-Bird, if aught that we possessHas any worth to you,O take it, Blue-Bird, here it is,But tell us what to do.The way of dreams, the wonder-way,Wonder and winding streams,Blue-Bird, two dreamers ask of youTo point the way of dreams.The way is dangerous, we know,And much beset with dread;But then, it is the only way,Blue-Bird, we care to tread.For this we know: no fact or fearOf the dream-world we seekCan be so terrible to usAs those that, week by week,Day in, day out, bleach and benumbThe sacred self sincere,The death domestic who hath facedHath faced the whole of fear.We are so fearful we may loseThe thrill and scent of things,Forget the way to smell a flower,Hear a bird when it sings.O Blue-Bird, sing us on our wayBeyond the world that seems—Two dreamers who have lost their way—Back to the world of dreams.

O Blue-Bird, sing the hidden wayTo Once-Upon-a-Time;We know you cannot speak in prose,So answer us in rhyme.

Blue-Bird of Dreams, alone you knowThe way the dream-folk take,O tell us the right way to go,Before, Blue-Bird, we wake.

Dreamers, we seek the way of dreams—O you that know so wellEach twist and turning of the way,Blue-Bird, will you not tell?

Blue-Bird, if aught that we possessHas any worth to you,O take it, Blue-Bird, here it is,But tell us what to do.

The way of dreams, the wonder-way,Wonder and winding streams,Blue-Bird, two dreamers ask of youTo point the way of dreams.

The way is dangerous, we know,And much beset with dread;But then, it is the only way,Blue-Bird, we care to tread.

For this we know: no fact or fearOf the dream-world we seekCan be so terrible to usAs those that, week by week,Day in, day out, bleach and benumbThe sacred self sincere,The death domestic who hath facedHath faced the whole of fear.

We are so fearful we may loseThe thrill and scent of things,Forget the way to smell a flower,Hear a bird when it sings.

O Blue-Bird, sing us on our wayBeyond the world that seems—Two dreamers who have lost their way—Back to the world of dreams.

To this the Blue-Bird made answer in a song, which, as before, I translate into grown-up language:

The way of dreams—the Blue-Bird sang—Is never hard to find,So soon as you have really leftThe grown-up world behind.So soon as you have come to seeThat what the others callRealities, for such as you,Are never real at all;So soon as you have ceased to careWhat others say or do,And understand that they are they,And you—thank God!—are you.Then is your foot upon the path,Your journey well begun,And safe the road for you to tread,Moonlight, or morning sun.Pence of this world you shall not take,Yea! no provision heed;A wild-rose gathered in the woodWill buy you all you need.Hungry, the birds shall bring you food,The bees their honey bring;And, thirsty, you the crystal drinkOf an immortal spring.For sleep, behold how deep and softWith moss the earth is spread,And all the trees of all the worldShall curtain round your bed.Enchanted journey! that beginsNowhere and nowhere ends,Seeking an ever-changing goal,Nowhither winds and wends.For destination yonder flower,For business yonder bird,Aught better worth the travelling toI never saw or heard.O long dream-travel of the soul!First the green earth to tread—And still yon other starry trackTo travel when you’re dead.

The way of dreams—the Blue-Bird sang—Is never hard to find,So soon as you have really leftThe grown-up world behind.

So soon as you have come to seeThat what the others callRealities, for such as you,Are never real at all;

So soon as you have ceased to careWhat others say or do,And understand that they are they,And you—thank God!—are you.

Then is your foot upon the path,Your journey well begun,And safe the road for you to tread,Moonlight, or morning sun.

Pence of this world you shall not take,Yea! no provision heed;A wild-rose gathered in the woodWill buy you all you need.

Hungry, the birds shall bring you food,The bees their honey bring;And, thirsty, you the crystal drinkOf an immortal spring.

For sleep, behold how deep and softWith moss the earth is spread,And all the trees of all the worldShall curtain round your bed.

Enchanted journey! that beginsNowhere and nowhere ends,Seeking an ever-changing goal,Nowhither winds and wends.

For destination yonder flower,For business yonder bird,Aught better worth the travelling toI never saw or heard.

O long dream-travel of the soul!First the green earth to tread—And still yon other starry trackTo travel when you’re dead.

With directions so explicit, it was next to impossible to miss the way. So, with little hesitation, Princess Once-Upon-a-Time and I stepped out through the old wood on the way to her castle. As we went along, she told me many things that I have never forgotten, for all of them have come true; but it is necessary for the reader to be reminded that I was still quite a boy, little more than a child, and was, therefore, too inexperienced to give the proper value to what she told me. This speech of hers particularly has remained with me. She said it as we were nearing the end of our walk together, and the turrets of her castle were coming in sight.

“This is not the last time we shall meet,” she said, “indeed, we shall meet many times. In a sense we shall be always meeting, though you may not recognise me; for you are one of those who are born my subjects. You are one of those for whom there is no Present, no Future. Your life will always be lived as a dream of What-Might-Have-Been, or What-Once-Was. Your happinesswill always be—once-upon-a-time! You are of those who are foredoomed to love the shadow of joy, and the dream of love. Nothing real will ever happen to you—for the reason that your experience will be forever haunted by the more beautiful things that might have happened, or once-upon-a-time did happen to more fortunate men. No beauty will ever seem beautiful enough—for your eyes will be always upon Helen of Troy, or Cleopatra of Egypt. However bright your fortune, the will-o’-the-wisp of a brighter fortune will continually flicker before you. Your dream can never be fulfilled—because it is so entirely a dream. All your days you shall be possessed of old stories, and forgotten fancies, and you shall love only the face you shall never find.”

And, as she ended, Princess Once-Upon-a-Time bade me farewell, for by this we had come to the gate of her castle.

I went back home through the wood, with her eyes in my heart, and her words talking to-and-fro in my brain. Twice I lost myway, but the friends on whom I relied did not forsake me. Once it was a beautiful little snake that zig-zagged in front of me till we came to the right turning. And once it was a chipmunk that seemed to know everything. By the time I came to the home-end of the wood, the stars were rising, and the little creatures of the night were creaking and whirring about me. The windows of home were shining with lamps—welcome beacons, no doubt you will say—and yet, strange as it may sound, I was rather sorry to come upon them so easily. They seemed so safe and comfortable—bed at nine and oatmeal porridge in the morning. I knew that so soon as I lifted the latch all mystery was at an end. Even the punishment that would surely fall upon me for my truancy was quite unmysterious—almost as familiar as my porridge. Bed and porridge—and those voices in the wood! O anti-climax of a wonderful day. How truly had the Princess spoken. What was home to me—with its trimmed lamps, and its quiet carpets andits regular hours; what was home compared with those night-voices and the rising moon.

Still, being hungry, I chose the kitchen door, and by a friendly domestic was smuggled away to bed—with a stomach full of pleasant dreams.

Such was my first meeting with Once-Upon-a-Time.

Next time I met her my boyhood was gone by, and my fancy was no longer occupied with the nursery-stories of which the Blue-Bird had sung. Giants and dragons were receding from my imagination, and my fancy, I must confess, was beginning to take a more sentimental turn. The wood still remained my wonderland, but the wonders I sought there were of a different, if scarcely less dangerous, character. By this I had exchanged my nursery-books for the Mort D’Arthur and Spenser and Shakespeare and such like romantic literature; and my head was, therefore, full of the beautiful ladies and noble lovers of old time. I fearthere is no denying that I had by this become quite bookish, and you could scarcely have encountered me in the wood or elsewhere, without some poet or some old playbook under my arm. Ah, how happy were those long summer mornings when I would lie upon a green bank, absorbed in some honeyed tale of lovers dead and gone, with the green boughs above sunnily silhouetted on the page. And, just as when a boy the wood had been the scene of all my old nursery-stories, so still it served me as the stage for all my romantic heroes and heroines. It was by turns every wood mentioned in my poets. Of course, it was, first and foremost the Forest of Arden; and one particular glade presided over by a giant oak was easily identified by me as the green courtroom of the banished Duke. As for Jacques, I felt myself his very brother, and replenished the woodland streams with sentimental tears, with no less enjoyment of my own melancholy than he. Rosalind, of course, I was expecting to meet with every moment,and did not fail to inscribe the tree-trunks with sundry rhymes which I hoped might catch her eye. Of these I may have a story to tell later. When the wood was in darker moods, when it wore its tragic mask of thunder and lightning, or put on some sinister witchery of twilight, I would say that Macbeth was on his way to meet the weird sisters. Sometimes, it was “a wood near Athens,” or at others, remembering my Keats, it was that “forest on the shores of Crete,” where Lycius met the snake-woman Lamia. The wood, indeed, was filled with memories of Keats, and if any one in the world knew where the lover of Isabella had been buried by her murderous brothers, surely it was I. I too had discovered the hollow oak where Merlin lay entranced; and many a night, hidden behind the bole of some gigantic beech, had watched Selene bend in a bright crescent above her sleeping shepherd lad.

But it is time I told you of my second meeting with Once-Upon-a-Time. I waslying in a bower of wild-roses which I had purposely trained to resemble the bower in which Nicolete slept the night when she fled from the castle of Beaucaire, as we have all read in the delectable history of the loves of Aucassin and Nicolete. It was the golden end of afternoon, and the shadows were still made half of gold. I was lying face down over my book, when suddenly I seemed aware of a new presence near me—as one is conscious that a bird had alighted on a bough close by, or a flower newly opened. Being accustomed to such companions, I did not look up. I was too deep in the loves of my book folk, and too anxious to finish the long euphuistic chapter before the setting sun should warn me of dinner-time. But presently a low laugh sounded behind me, and the sweetest of voices said:

“Young sir, you are very selfish with that great book there”—I may say that it was a folioArcadiaof Sir Philip Sidney—“it is so big that I am sure that there is room for two pairs of eyes—”

“Come read with me,” said I, looking up and blushing.

“Nay, I am no Francesca,” she answered; “I would not interrupt your reading, young Paolo.”

“But I am tired of reading,” I said, closing the old book.

“The sun will soon be gone,” she answered. “Had you not better finish your chapter?”

“I would rather finish it by moonlight,” I answered, looking into her eyes.

“You are a saucy stripling,” she said. “I should not be surprised if you wrote these lines I just found on yonder tree.”

“What lines?” I asked; for the trees, to tell the truth, were tattooed with my verses.

“These,” she answered.

“O these!” I said, laughing.

“Read them to me,” she said.

“But they are so long,” I hesitated, “no less than a chant-royal—a Prayer to the Queen of Love, in five long verses, and anenvoi! Are you quite sure you can support so much verse at one sitting—”

“I have not lived at the Court of King Renée for nothing,” she replied, laughing.

“The Court of King Renée!” I exclaimed, looking at her in amazement. “You have really lived there? How wonderful! Tell me about it.”

“Indeed, I have!” she answered, with a mocking expression that seemed strangely at variance with her romantic privileges. “O yes! No doubt it is a wonderful place for you ballad-making gentlemen. There you can strum and hum all day to your heart’s content, and your poor bored mistresses must listen to all your magniloquent nonsense, without a yawn—besides being quite sure that you don’t mean a single word of it. Yes! No woman can live at the Court of King Renée unless she is prepared for poetry morning, noon and night—Yes! and far into the middle of the night—and even, when at last you have fallen asleep again, after being awakened by some long-winded serenade, you are barely off, when,with the first break of dawn, comes another fool beneath your window with his lute and his falsetto singing you an ‘aubade!’ An aubade, indeed! And you at last so beautifully asleep. As you would have your lady love you, dear youth—never sing her an aubade!”

“I marvel that, with such a distaste for song-craft,” I said, “that you should bid me read you a chant-royal, a form so much longer than the aubade——”

“O that is different! It is not made use of to wake beautiful ladies from their sleep at unreasonable hours, but reminds one of dreamy old orchards in summer afternoons, and the drowsy bees and the flitting butterflies, and the sea a flickering riband of blue in the distance. It is like the murmur of a beautiful voice talking low to a beautiful lady in the still summer afternoon. The sound of the voice is soothing, and one pays no heed to the words. Besides,” she ended, laughing, “I like the poet, and that makes a great difference——”

At this I bent low and kissed her hand, and without further parley began to read:

O mighty Queen, our Lady of the fire,The light, the music, and the honey, allBlent in one power, one passionate desireMan calleth Love—‘Sweet Love,’ the blessed call—I come a sad-eyed suppliant to thy knee,If thou hast pity, pity grant to me;If thou hast bounty, here a heart I bringFor all that bounty thirst and hungering;O Lady, save thy grace, there is no wayFor me, I know, but lonely sorrowing—Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!I lay in darkness, face down in the mire,And prayed that darkness might become my pall;The rabble rout roared round me like some quireOf filthy animals primordial;My heart seemed like a toad eternallyPrisoned in stone, ugly and sad as he;Sweet sunlight seemed a dream, a mythic thing,And life some beldam’s dotard gossiping:Then Lady, I bethought me of thy sway,And hoped again, rose up this prayer to wing—Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!Lady, I bear no high resounding lyreTo hymn thy glory, and thy foes appalWith thunderous splendour of my rhythmic ire;A little lute I lightly touch, and smallMy skill thereon: yet, Lady, if it beI ever woke ear-winning melody,Twas for thy praise I sought the throbbing string,Thy praise alone—for all my worshippingIs at thy shrine, thou knowest, day by day;Then shall it be in vain my plaint to sing?Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!Yea! Why of all men should this sorrow direUnto thy servant bitterly befall?For, Lady, thou dost know I ne’er did tireOf thy sweet sacraments and ritual;In morning meadows I have knelt to thee,In noontide woodlands hearkened hushedlyThy heart’s warm beat in sacred slumbering,And in the spaces of the night heart ringThy voice in answer to the spheral lay:Nowneath thy throne my suppliant life I fling—Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!I ask no maid for all men to admire,Mere body’s beauty bath in me no thrall,And noble birth, and sumptuous attire,Are gauds I crave not—yet shall have withal,With a sweet difference, in my heart’s own She,Whom words speak not, but eyes know when they see,Beauty beyond all glass’s mirroring,And dream and glory hers for garmenting;Her birth—O Lady, wilt thou say me nay?—Of thine own womb, of thine own nurturing—Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!ENVOISweet Queen who sittest at the heart of spring,My life is thine, barren or blossoming;Tis thine to flush it gold or leave it grey:And so unto thy garment’s hem I cling—Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray.

I lay in darkness, face down in the mire,And prayed that darkness might become my pall;The rabble rout roared round me like some quireOf filthy animals primordial;My heart seemed like a toad eternallyPrisoned in stone, ugly and sad as he;Sweet sunlight seemed a dream, a mythic thing,And life some beldam’s dotard gossiping:Then Lady, I bethought me of thy sway,And hoped again, rose up this prayer to wing—Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!

Lady, I bear no high resounding lyreTo hymn thy glory, and thy foes appalWith thunderous splendour of my rhythmic ire;A little lute I lightly touch, and smallMy skill thereon: yet, Lady, if it beI ever woke ear-winning melody,Twas for thy praise I sought the throbbing string,Thy praise alone—for all my worshippingIs at thy shrine, thou knowest, day by day;Then shall it be in vain my plaint to sing?Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!

Yea! Why of all men should this sorrow direUnto thy servant bitterly befall?For, Lady, thou dost know I ne’er did tireOf thy sweet sacraments and ritual;In morning meadows I have knelt to thee,In noontide woodlands hearkened hushedlyThy heart’s warm beat in sacred slumbering,And in the spaces of the night heart ringThy voice in answer to the spheral lay:Nowneath thy throne my suppliant life I fling—Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!

I ask no maid for all men to admire,Mere body’s beauty bath in me no thrall,And noble birth, and sumptuous attire,Are gauds I crave not—yet shall have withal,With a sweet difference, in my heart’s own She,Whom words speak not, but eyes know when they see,Beauty beyond all glass’s mirroring,And dream and glory hers for garmenting;Her birth—O Lady, wilt thou say me nay?—Of thine own womb, of thine own nurturing—Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!

ENVOI

Sweet Queen who sittest at the heart of spring,My life is thine, barren or blossoming;Tis thine to flush it gold or leave it grey:And so unto thy garment’s hem I cling—Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray.

“I wonder,” I said after a little while, when she had praised my verses, and I sat by her side holding her hands and looking into her strange far-away eyes, “I wonder if you are the answer to my prayer—for so soon as I looked upon you, I gave you all my love, and, if you cannot give me yours in return, my heart will break—”

She shook her head sadly, and her eyesseemed to grow still more far-away, but she made no answer more, for all my entreaties, till at last the day had gone, and the moon was rising through the wood—and she still sitting by my side like a spirit in the spectral light. Once I seemed to hear her moan in the silence, and a shiver passed through her body. Then she turned her eyes upon me—they seemed like wells brimming with stars:

“I love you,” she said, “but we can never be each other’s. My name is Once-Upon-a-Time.”

At this I threw myself at her feet face down in the grass and wept bitterly, and I felt her hand soothingly laid upon my hair, and heard her voice softly bidding me be comforted. And for a long time it was so with us, till methinks I must have fallen asleep of the sweet soothing of her hand on my hair, and the murmur of her sweet voice—for, when I raised my head from the grass, the place was empty and the dawn was stealing with feet of pearl through the wood.

The dawn!

“She feared,” I cried, bitterly, “she feared that I might sing her my aubade!”

But this, of course, was only the lip-cynicism of my sad young heart, stricken with the arrows of that haunted beauty.

Once-Upon-a-Time! Thus had the Princess met me again as she had said, and often as I grew up to be a man, and walked but seldom in that old wood of dreams, her words would come back to me: “You are of those who are foredoomed to love the shadow of joy, and the dream of love. Your happiness will always be—Once-Upon-a Time.” For, as I walked the ways of the world, I saw that my old wood had only been a dream picture of the real world outside, and that the real world itself, in which my manhood was now called on to play its part, was no less a dream of beauty and terror, of love and death, of good and evil, than my old wood itself; and, like my old wood, it seemed haunted for me by the face of a Princess—some dear, desired face of woman lost amid these drifting faces, as inmy boyhood it had been lost among the leaves of the wood. Beautiful faces, beautiful faces, drifting by in the crowded streets—but never my face among all the faces. Hints of my face, even glimpses perhaps—sometimes almost the certainty that it is she yonder—but a sudden turn of the head, and alas! It is not she! Yet a day did come at last, when the mob of unmeaning faces seemed suddenly to open, as the clouds fall away right and left before the moon; or as in a wilderness of leaves without a blossom, one should come upon the breathless beauty of some lonely flower.

Yes! It was my face at last.

We looked at each other but for a moment in the street, which her beauty had suddenly made silent for me as the desert—but for a moment, yet Eternity must be like that look we gave each other.

Then, though she spoke no audible word, my heart heard her say:

“Look in my face; my name is Might-Have-Been; I am also called No-More, Too-Late, Farewell.”

On one of her beautiful fingers my sad eyes had caught the glimmer of a small gold band—and, once more as we passed away from each other, my bitter heart mocked at its own bitterness, and remembering my boyish fairy-tales, I said to myself:

“The Princess has found her wedding ring!”

And that was my last meeting with Princess Once-Upon-a-Time.

MARGARET had seen her five sisters one by one leave the family nest to set up little nests of their own. Her brother, the eldest child of a family of seven, had left the old home almost beyond memory and settled in London. Now and again he made a flying visit to the small provincial town of his birth, and sometimes he sent two little daughters to represent him—for he was already a widowed man and relied occasionally on the old roof-tree to replace the lost mother. Margaret had seen what sympathetic spectators called her “fate” slowly approaching for some time—particularly when, five years ago, she had broken off her engagement with a worthless boy. She had loved him deeply, and, had she loved him less, a refined girl in the provinces does not find it easy toreplace a discarded suitor—for the choice of young men is not excessive. Her sisters had been more fortunate, and so, as I have said, one by one they left their father’s door in bridal veils. But Margaret stayed on, and at length, as had been foreseen, became the sole nurse of a beautiful old invalid mother, a kind of lay sister in the nunnery of home.

She came of a beautiful family. In all the big family of seven there was not one without some kind of good looks. Two of her sisters were acknowledged beauties, and there were those who considered Margaret the most beautiful of all. It was all the harder, such sympathizers said, that her youth should thus fade over an invalid’s couch, the bloom of her complexion be rubbed out by arduous vigils, and the lines prematurely etched in her skin by the strain of a self-denial proper, no doubt, to homely girls and professional nurses, but peculiarly wanton and wasteful in the case of a girl so beautiful as Margaret.

There are, alas! a considerable numberof women predestined by their lack of personal attractiveness for the humbler tasks of life. Instinctively we associate them with household work, nursing, and the general drudgery of existence. One never dreams of their having a life of their own. They have no accomplishments, nor any of the feminine charms. Women to whom an offer of marriage would seem as terrifying as a comet, they belong to the neutrals of the human hive, and are, practically speaking, only a little higher than the paid domestic. Indeed, perhaps, their one distinction is that they receive no wages.

Now for so attractive a girl as Margaret to be merged in so dreary, undistinguished, a class was manifestly preposterous. It was a stupid misapplication of human material. A plainer face and a more homespun fibre would have served the purpose equally well.

Margaret was by no means so much a saint of self-sacrifice as not to have realised her situation, with natural human pangs.Youth only comes once—especially to a woman; and

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