“If rest be sweet at close of dayFor tired hands and tired feet,How good at last to rest for aye—If rest be sweet.”
“If rest be sweet at close of dayFor tired hands and tired feet,How good at last to rest for aye—If rest be sweet.”
“If rest be sweet at close of dayFor tired hands and tired feet,How good at last to rest for aye—If rest be sweet.”
The lying in state, as the poet grimly called it, was conducted exactly as he had conceived it. At first the lawyer had protested that to expect your honest English tradesman to bow the knee and kiss the hand of one of his debtors was out of the question.
“Take my word, friend,” said the poet, “when a tradesman is going to be paid a debt he had given up for lost, he will not be particular as to the manner in which he receives it. Indeed, he will be so thankful for it that it will be a natural impulse to fall upon hisknees.... And if they demur,” he added, laughing his half-boyish, half-wicked, and quite creepy laugh, “tell them that it is the fancy of a dying man.”
When the noon of Wednesday came, the poet lay in his great bed awaiting his creditors. There had only been a week since his talk with his lawyer, but even that good-natured sceptic had come to admit the truth of his client’s prediction. No one could look on that weary form stretched so straight and slim under the clothes, or upon that worn ivory face, so worn and yet so strangely smiling, without reading the unmistakable signs.
“Do you believe it now?” said the poet to his lawyer. “It is only a jest—you must not take it too seriously. It is only death. Don’t be unhappy, old friend. I wish I could make you know how good it feels—to be dying.”
Then a little soft-voiced clock chimed twelve times.
“Now for the fun....” said the poet,looking up to his friend, with his eyes filled with laughter.
It had been his whim to have his room draped in purple, and over his bed hung a great wreath of laurel still in flower. At one side of the large room was a table also covered in purple, on which were arranged twelve great pyramids of gold pieces, and on two other tables close by were two large bags of orange-coloured leather overflowing with silver.
As the clock chimed twelve, two footmen clad in a livery of dull-gold silk, with sprigs of laurel worked upon the collars of their coats, threw open the folding doors of the spacious room, and a crowd of awed and almost sepulchral English tradesmen entered in a hushed and timorous fashion. They were dressed appropriately, as for a funeral, and a few of them wore crape round their hats. They trod softly, like butlers, and were evidently a good deal overawed and indeed frightened.
And in truth it was a scene calculated to astonish. For as they entered, there facing them in the middle of the room lay Wasteneys,with his eyes closed and his hands crossed, and the great laurel wreath over his head; and to his right, at one side of the room, stood the table heaped with gold, which glittered still more brightly beneath the beams of twelve immense candlesticks. If anything could gleam brighter, it was the eyes of the creditors, whose expression was a mixture of gaping astonishment at the piled-up gold and hushed wonder at the white distinguished figure in the bed.
When they were seated on the gilded Empire chairs provided for them, a secretary clad in black rose from a seat by the dying man’s side and read a brief salutation, in which Pagan Wasteneys, a poet of the realm of England, desired upon his death-bed to thank in person those honourable mercers and general purveyors who had for so many years shown him so great a consideration in respect of certain moneys which he owed them, in exchange for certain necessities of existence—among which necessities luxuries, of course, were included. Mr. Wasteneys desired toadd that his delay to satisfy these obligations had come of no wilful neglect on his part, but had been occasioned by the many sorrows—not to speak of the many expenses—incident to the profession of a poet. He had invited them to meet him for the last time in this way that he might personally express his gratitude to them—at the same moment that he satisfied his indebtedness, with compound interest at five per cent.
As the secretary concluded with this eloquent peroration, Wasteneys opened his eyes for the first time, and raised his head from the pillow, with a weary attempt at a bow, and motioned with his hand toward the company—his hand thereafter lying white and fragile on the side of the bed. For a moment a smile flickered over his lips, but only his lawyer observed it, and, next moment, he was gravely prepared for the conclusion of the ceremony.
Presently a clerk dressed in a prim costume of the finest broadcloth rose and called out the name of Peter Allardyce, vintner—thenames of the creditors being called out in alphabetical order—at the same time naming the sum of £763.19.7 as due to him, inclusive of interest at five per cent. At the summons, a shy, ruddy man of country build rose from his chair, and being led by one of the footmen to the dying man’s side, bent down and kissed the frail hand on the coverlet. Wasteneys acknowledged the courtesy with a tired smile, and Mr. Allardyce was then conducted by the footman to the table piled with gold, where another clerk, also dressed in broadcloth, like his fellow, weighed out to him the amount of his debt, pouring the bright gold into a great bag of purple leather.
“William Dimmock,” once more cried out the first clerk, “livery-stable keeper, for carriage-hire, the sum of £378.10.3, inclusive of interest at five per cent.”
A lean, horsy little man thereon rose from his chair and went through the same ceremony as his predecessor, retiring also with a great bag of purple leather bursting with gold pieces.
And so the odd ceremony proceeded. It would be tedious to follow it through its details; though one may observe that of all the creditors that followed, the heaviest were Peter Markham, florist, and Jasper Dyce, jeweller, for flowers and gems lavished by the dying man on forgotten women.
When it was all over, and Wasteneys was left alone with his lawyer and his physician, he buried his face in the pillows, and laughed as if his heart would break—laughed indeed so violently that his physician had to warn him that such mirth was dangerous in his present state—unless, indeed, he wished to die of laughter.
“No, indeed,” said Wasteneys; “I have other farewells to make. But, O wasn’t it delicious! And think of it—like the village blacksmith, I owe not any man! What honest, kind fellows they were! I am so glad to have seen them before I die.”
“You must see no one else to-day,” said his physician, presently, “if you wish to make those other farewells.”
“I have still to-morrow and most of Friday. I shall go out, like Falstaff, ‘even at the turning of the tide,’”he said, laughing softly at himself, as he had done all his life, and repeating to himself the phrase that had romantically touched his fancy—“even at the turning of the tide!... even at the turning of the tide!”
“What am I dying of, doctor?” he said, presently.
“I can see no reason why you should be dying at all,” answered the physician, “unless it is pure whim.”
“Perhaps it is partly that,” said the poet, “but I think it is chiefly because—I have lived. To live longer would be mere repetition. I have just enjoyed the last new experience life had to give me—and I almost think it was the most wonderful of all. It was the last touch of romance needed to complete a romantic life—to have paid my debts! You are right. That was indeed enough excitement for one day. I will sleep now—the happiest man in the world.”
He had hardly finished speaking before he had fallen into one of those sudden deep sleeps that come and go fitfully with the dying. He lay on his back, his hands crossed, and a smile of infinite serenity and thankfulness on his face. Over his head hung the great laurel wreath, still in flower....
Still in flower!
“It is strange that he should choose so deliberately to die—for he has still a great future in store for him,” said the physician to himself as he went out, giving on his way certain instructions to the nurse-in-waiting.
The physician, like the majority of human beings, confounded the length of a man’s life with the success of it—as was, perhaps, peculiarly natural in a man whose business was the lengthening of human existence. To die before sixty was to him a form of failure, and he himself, already sixty-three, was still, with childish eagerness, pursuing certain prizes, professional and social, at which Wasteneys would indeed have smiled. He dreamed, for instance, of a knighthood.Now one of Wasteneys’s great fears had been that he should not be in a position to die before he was knighted. That had in some degree accounted for the fury of his production during the last two years. He would not indeed have disdained to have been made a lord, but that necessitated living so much longer, and writing so many more words—and really it was not worth it. He regarded his life as completed—at least to his own satisfaction. To take it up again would be to begin an entirely new career. Already, as rich men are said to go through two or three fortunes, Wasteneys had run through three careers. Three seemed enough. He had won all the prizes he cared for. The rest could only be humorous. So, “Good-bye, proud world; I’m going home!”
Next morning, when his toilet had been made for him by the beautiful nurse-in-waiting and his faithful man servant, Wasteneys received his physician and his lawyer; and then, as the little clock chimed the hour of noon, he said:
“It is time for me to begin my farewells.”
He made it evident that he wished to be alone, except for his own friend the lawyer. So, when the two were left together in the room, he turned to the lawyer and said:
“Dear friend, bring me the Beautiful Face ...” adding, “the key is here under my pillow.”
Taking the key, the lawyer unlocked an old cabinet in a shadowy corner of the room, and presently returned to the bedside, carrying in his hands a small urn of exquisite workmanship. Placing it on a low table near to the poet’s hand, the lawyer, who had been the confidant of the poet’s tragedy, made a sign of understanding, and left the room.
On the wall facing the end of the poet’s bed had hung for seven years the picture of a marvellously beautiful girl. She was so exceptional in her beauty that to attempt description of her would be futile. Suffice it that her face—framed in night-black hair, and tragically lit by enormous blackeyes—was chiefly remarkable for the nobility of its expression and for its sense of elemental power. It was a face full of silence—a dark flower of a face, so to say, rooted deep down in the mysterious strengths of nature. If one may use such an expression of a thing so delicate, she seemed like a rock of beauty, against which a whole world of men might dash their tribute hearts in vain. Other faces might seem more attractive, more formally beautiful, but to few faces had it been given to concentrate the cold imperialism of beauty as it was concentrated in this exquisite face.
This face was the real meaning of the poet’s life. The rest was mere badinage, screening a sad heart. This face was the real meaning of the poet’s gladness at his approaching death. This life held no more expectations for him—but the next? Who knows?—perhaps to-morrow night he would be with her in Paradise.
Looking long at the picture of the Beautiful Face, he turned—to the Beautiful Faceitself; for it had now been silver dust for four years. Drawing the urn to him, he read once more the name upon the little gold plate let into the bronze:
Meriel Wasteneys: Died March 16, 1900.
Meriel Wasteneys: Died March 16, 1900.
Meriel Wasteneys: Died March 16, 1900.
And underneath the name he read some lines inscribed in gold:
“O Beauty, art thou also dust?These silver ashes—can it beThat you, thus silting through my hand,Once made a madman out of me!”
“O Beauty, art thou also dust?These silver ashes—can it beThat you, thus silting through my hand,Once made a madman out of me!”
“O Beauty, art thou also dust?These silver ashes—can it beThat you, thus silting through my hand,Once made a madman out of me!”
“And a madman still,” he added, laughing sadly to himself.
Then raising the lid of the urn, he looked in. The white ash filled but half the little urn. Gently thrusting in his hand, he let the ashes sift through his long fingers over and over again, and as he did so he gazed at the Beautiful Face upon the wall....
After a while he replaced the lid upon the urn, and lay back with closed eyes—thinking of it all.
Presently the lawyer returned softly intothe room, and fancying him asleep, was about to leave again, but Wasteneys had heard him.
“Is that you?” he said. “Come to me. I have said good-bye. You know where my ashes are to lie.”
The lawyer assented, locking the urn once more in the cabinet, and bringing the key back again to Wasteneys. The little urn, as I have said, was as yet only half filled.
The two friends sat silent together for a long time, saying nothing, for there was nothing to say. Both knew all.
After a while the poet turned to his friend. “Will you ask Isabel, my wife, to come to me?” he said. And presently there entered the room a woman so fragilely beautiful that she seemed to be made of moonbeams. She was indeed, compared to the Beautiful Face on the wall, as the moon to the sun. That, alas! had been her place in the poet’s life. She had been the moon to the Beautiful Face. And yet, in his strange way, the poet had always loved her, deep down——
“Very deep down!” she used to say sometimes, with a sad smile.
As she came and sat beside him, he took her face tenderly in his hands, and looked and looked into her fairy blue eyes without a word. A curiously lined face it was for so young a woman—all beautiful silver lines filled with delicate refinements of thought and feeling. “Suffering,” said the ignorant world, attributing these silver lines to the unfaithfulness of the poet. Yet, as a matter of fact, Isabel’s face had been hardly less lined when she was twenty. The poet and the years together had barely added half a dozen lines. In fact, nature had seemed to intend, when making Isabel’s face, to show that beauty is something more than velvet skin and dreamy eyes and rounded contours; to prove that nothing is needed for the making of a beautiful face but—light. Isabel’s face, indeed, seemed made of light. The lines in it were like rays of brightness, and her eyes like deep springs of purest radiance.
There was, after all, something in Isabel’s face that the poet had seen only there, something “fairy” that he had never ceased loving better than anything else in the world. But Life had had its way with them. Strong currents beyond the control of either had torn them apart, brought them together again, and then again torn them apart. Still, they had never really lost faith in each other’s natures, and though an impertinent world had misunderstood their mutual forbearance, they had never misunderstood each other.
“Isabel!” said the poet, still holding her face like a star in his hands, “I am going to die, and I have called you to congratulate me—as I know so wise a girl will. For we both know, better than any one, that it is best.”
Isabel’s eyes filled with tears, and releasing her face from his hands, she buried it in the bedclothes. Presently mastering her feeling, she raised her head again, and looking with infinite pity into the poet’s eyes, she said:
“O my dear boy—cannot you be humanat last: just once before you die? I have always thought of you like some Undine, a beautiful, gentle, elemental being—lacking only a human soul. Indeed, sometimes I have thought of you as a god—sitting aloof from our little every day interests—but God knows I have loved you all the time, and you only shall I love in all my life....”
The poet once more took her face in his hands, and looking into her nereid eyes, he said: “Wife, dear wife—forgive the sorrow I have brought you. If there was any joy, remember that. Life is very difficult, very strange. It was all no fault of ours, not even mine. I see it now very clearly—now that I am dying. I see how wrong I have been—I see how right. I see how right you have been—I see how wrong. Let us forgive each other. Let us be in love again before I die. Give me your eyes. Let me kiss them once before I die....”
Then, a sudden thought taking him, “I wonder, dear,” he said, “if you can find my “Euripides.” There is a passage I am thinkingof in ‘The Alcestis.’ It would comfort me to hear it again....”
Presently his wife brought him the volume, and turning over the pages, the poet at last found the passage he was in search of.
“Yes! this is it,” he said:
“‘Now have I moored my bark of life in a happier haven than before, and so will own myself a happy man.’”
Then leaning back on his pillow, “Tell me Isabel,” he said, “why is there so mysterious a comfort in words?”
“Alas! dear, it is for you to tell me,” she said, stroking his hair; “you have loved words so well—and made so many beautiful words.”
“I know you think that I have loved nothing but words,” said the poet; “I wonder if it is true?... I think not.”
“I think you meant to love life as well,” she answered, kissing his brow gently.
She smoothed his hair a long while as they sat in silence together—the past rolling over them like a river.
Presently Wasteneys broke the silence. “I have walked in a vague course!” he said—“walked in a vague course!... if you will forgive,” he added, presently, “my quoting once more. A dying man should not quote. He is expected to say something original. Well, I will try to-morrow....”
Then there fell over him once more that ante-lethal drowsiness of death, and murmuring again, “I have walked in a vague course!” he fell asleep.
When she was sure he was asleep, his wife bent over him and kissed his lips.
“After all,” she said, “he has never grown up. He is a baby still—just a child, that is all....”
Wasteneys awoke after a little while, to find himself alone, save for the silent presence of his lawyer.
“I fell asleep,” he said, “foolishly enough—for I have little time to waste; and I shall soon have all the sleep I want....”
Then, after a pause, he added: “I wish to saygood-bye to my little girls. Will you have them brought to me?”
Presently there entered the room two beautiful children, one about twelve years old, and the other five. They came hand in hand, laughing, and ran across to their father’s bed, gleefully ignorant of the significance of the still room, and the purple hangings, and the white figure in the bed.
“Daddy! daddy!” they cried, climbing upon the bed. “What a time it is since we saw you!... Tell us a story right away.”
The father took the long brown-gold curls of the elder girl in his hands, and stroked the sunshine head of the little one. “Kiddies,” he said, after a while, “your daddy is going on a long journey. Will you think of him and love him while he is gone?”
“Where are you going, daddy?” asked the two young voices.
“O ever so far! It’s a country called ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon.’”
“O take us with you, daddy. It sounds such a lovely place.”
“I cannot take you with me, kiddies—but perhaps mother and you and I will meet there one of these days ... if we’re all very good!”
“I wish we could go with you now, daddy,” said the elder girl; and the younger, out of sheer reverence for her elder sister, repeated her.
“I wish we could go with you now, daddy,” she said.
“No,” said the father; “you must stay behind and look after Little Mother. She would be so lonely without you.”
The children, with the volatility of their age, accepted this explanation, and presently once more turned to their father with a demand for a story.
“No!” he said; “it is your turn to tell me a story. I am tired to-day. You, Pervenche, must say for me ‘The Three Kings,’ and you, Golla, must say ‘The White Bird.’ I haven’t heard you say them for quite along time. And each standing up in turn, like a corporal saluting his captain, Pervenche and Golla recited their little pieces; and as they recited, the tears rolled down their father’s cheeks.
“You are crying, daddy,” suddenly exclaimed the little one. “What are you crying for?”
The poet was crying because, among all the many human experiences he had missed, he had missed his children too.
Their nurse near at hand rescued him from the dilemma. “Daddy is tired,” she said; “bid him good-bye....”
And, wonderingly, the little creatures obeyed; but the tiny Golla, already a sturdy sceptic, kept asking, when they were once more in the nursery, “I wonder why daddy cried!”
When his little girls had gone, Wasteneys turned to his lawyer.
“What time is high tide to-day?”
He asked the question wearily, almost querulously; for, after all, he was seriously dying.
“I will look in the newspaper,” said the lawyer; and having looked, he answered, “At three minutes past four.”
“When will the tide turn?” asked the dying poet.
“It keeps at full for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and then begins to ebb.”
“That gives us from now about four hours,” said the poet. “Four hours. At the turning of the tide. Four hours ... and then!”
Wasteneys lay still after this, with his eyes closed.
Presently he roused himself. “I have one more farewell to make,” he said; “will you ask them to bring me my children?...”
“Your children?” The lawyer, good friend as he was, did not at first understand.
“Yes! My children. Please have them bring me my children.”
Wasteneys’s servant, happening to come into the room at the moment, beckoned the lawyer, and explained his master’s meaning.
“Yes!” answered the lawyer, soothingly,after this informatory pause, “they shall be brought to you.”
Then presently there entered two men servants carrying two high piles of books. Placing them on a table, they left the room, returning in a few moments with two more piles. Once more they went out and returned, their arms still laden with books.
Meanwhile a new life seemed suddenly to have animated the poet’s frame. His eyes shone, and he struggled to raise himself in the bed. The lawyer packed the pillows at his back, and he sat up.
“Put them at the end of the bed,” he said; “let me see them all, let me touch them....”
When his wish had been carried out, and the servants departed, he leaned over the books and stroked them affectionately again and again.
“So you are really mine—really my children,” he said.
“Did I really write them?” he said, presently, turning to his friend. “So many?”
“Yes! dear friend, you wrote them all,” answered the lawyer, too solemnised to jest; for he saw that it was close on the turning of the tide.
“How many are there?” asked Wasteneys, leaning back, already weary with the excitement.
“I will count them ...” said his friend, and presently announced that there were fifty-three volumes.
“Fifty-three!” exclaimed Wasteneys; “and how old am I?”
“Thirty-nine, next month,” said the lawyer.
“Next month!” said the poet.
Then he turned again to his friend.
“Read me a page here and there,” he said; “I will be my own critic. Even a critic at the point of death may be expected to tell the truth. Read to me that I may know before I die that something in all those fifty-three volumes may perhaps be worth while.”
“What shall I read?” asked the lawyer.
“Read me ‘What of the Darkness?’”
And the lawyer read:
“What of the Darkness? Is it very fair?Are there great calms, and find ye silence there?Like soft-shut lilies, all your faces glowWith some strange peace our faces never know,With some great faith our faces never dare,Dwells it in Darkness? Do ye find it there?“Is it a Bosom where tired heads may lie?Is it a Mouth to kiss our weeping dry?Is it a Hand to still the pulse’s leap?Is it a Voice that holds the runes of sleep?Day shows us not such comfort anywhere—Dwells it in Darkness? Do ye find it there?“Out of the day’s deceiving light we call—Day that shows man so great, and God so small,That hides the stars, and magnifies the grass—O is the Darkness too a lying glass?Or, undistracted, do ye find truth there?What of the Darkness? Is it very fair?”
“What of the Darkness? Is it very fair?Are there great calms, and find ye silence there?Like soft-shut lilies, all your faces glowWith some strange peace our faces never know,With some great faith our faces never dare,Dwells it in Darkness? Do ye find it there?“Is it a Bosom where tired heads may lie?Is it a Mouth to kiss our weeping dry?Is it a Hand to still the pulse’s leap?Is it a Voice that holds the runes of sleep?Day shows us not such comfort anywhere—Dwells it in Darkness? Do ye find it there?“Out of the day’s deceiving light we call—Day that shows man so great, and God so small,That hides the stars, and magnifies the grass—O is the Darkness too a lying glass?Or, undistracted, do ye find truth there?What of the Darkness? Is it very fair?”
“What of the Darkness? Is it very fair?Are there great calms, and find ye silence there?Like soft-shut lilies, all your faces glowWith some strange peace our faces never know,With some great faith our faces never dare,Dwells it in Darkness? Do ye find it there?
“Is it a Bosom where tired heads may lie?Is it a Mouth to kiss our weeping dry?Is it a Hand to still the pulse’s leap?Is it a Voice that holds the runes of sleep?Day shows us not such comfort anywhere—Dwells it in Darkness? Do ye find it there?
“Out of the day’s deceiving light we call—Day that shows man so great, and God so small,That hides the stars, and magnifies the grass—O is the Darkness too a lying glass?Or, undistracted, do ye find truth there?What of the Darkness? Is it very fair?”
“Are you quite sure that I wrote that?” Asked the poet. “Look carefully. Is it really my book?”
“It is, indeed. Printed when you were twenty.”
“I am so happy,” said the poet—“so happy to think I wrote that. Time itself cannot rob me of that.”
Very soon it was plainly to be seen that the poet was on the very border-line of life and death.
“Is there no one you would care to see?” asked the lawyer, gently.
“No, no one,” answered the poet.
“Not your physician?” asked the lawyer.
“O no, indeed,” answered the poet, with a flash of his odd smile. “Give him my love. But tell him that I want to die—not to be killed.”
“What time is it?” he asked, presently.
“Five minutes to four.”
The poet lay silent a while, and then he turned to his lawyer with the look of an old friendship. Indeed, his friendship for his lawyer, was, odd as it may sound, one of the realities of his unearthly life.
“Friend,” he said, “I am afraid it is almosttime for us also to say good-bye. God bless you—for all. Look after—them, won’t you?” and he waved his hand toward his wife’s quarters. “Good-bye....”
“But,” said his friend, “will you have no one with you?”
“Don’t you hear the turning of the tide?” answered the poet.
“No one?” reiterated the lawyer, agonised out of his professional demeanour.
“No one!” answered Wasteneys, rising commandingly in his bed, and sweeping his hand across the volumes at its foot—“No one—but my children!”
IT was said that a tragic disappointment accounted for young Lord Laleham’s curious passion for butterflies. Actually there was no such explanation, or, of course, any need of it; but pursuits out of the common naturally demand uncommon excuses—for the common mind; and it was evident to the watchful critics of Lord Laleham’s career that nothing short of a great sorrow could have driven him to so trivial a means of alleviation. According to others, this dainty passion—which might well have subjected him to the contempt of his fellows, had he not been able to give a somewhat formidable physical account of himself—was to be put down as due to one of those strains of freakishness liable to break out in old families. No one, of course, dreamed that Laleham could care for butterfly-hunting for its ownsake, except those entomologists for whom his collection was famous throughout the world, authoritative, classical; for Lord Laleham was one of the handsomest and richest of young English peers, and as difficult for match-making mothers to catch as one of his own butterflies—surely the last man in the world to seek the humble laurel of the lepidopterist.
And, indeed, it was true that butterflies were something more to Laleham than entomology. They were rather a poetic than a scientific passion. There was a strong vein of the mystic and poetic in his nature to which in some way, mysterious even to himself, these strange little painted things had from childhood appealed. As the smallest boy, he had proved himself a passionist of the solitudes of nature, by lone woodland truancies and long tramps through that gipsy wilderness, which England, with all its lawns and market-gardens and nurseries, has so remarkably preserved. And, from the first moment that he found himself alone, hushed andwatching and listening, and a little afraid, in the belt of mighty beeches that was perhaps the chief honour of his pedigree, there had seemed a spell, an enchantment, over these lonely leaves, these gnome-like shapes of mottled bole, and these twisted roots that seemed to have become so through some mysterious agonies of ancient torture—though indeed, to most folk there was nothing there but leaves and the famous Laleham covers.
He had never forgotten the day when that spell of exquisite silence and dappled sunshine—the whole woodland with its finger on its lip—had suddenly become embodied in a tiny shape of coloured velvet wings that came floating zig-zag up the dingle, swift as light, aery as a perfume, soft and silent as the figured carpet in some Eastern palace. With what awe he watched it, as at length it settled near him on a sunlit weed, with what a luxury of observation his eyes noted its sumptuous unearthly markings, and what an image of wonder and exquisite mystery it there and forever left upon his mind. In a moment itwas up and away upon its uncharted travel through the wood. Instinctively, he ran in pursuit. But it was too late. He had lost his first butterfly.
For Laleham, from that moment, all the beauty of the world, and the mystery and the elusiveness of it, were symbolised in a butterfly. From that moment it seemed to him that the success of life was—the catching of a certain butterfly.
He was now thirty years old and had caught many butterflies, caught them in every part of the world, and the adventures he had met with in the apparently insignificant chase, were they to be written, would fully justify the defence he sometimes made of what the world called his whimsical hobby. “You must not look upon my butterflies as trivial,” he would say. “The study of much smaller things has made modern science; and a butterfly may well lead you to the ends of the earth—and even lose you among the stars. You never know where it may take you.There is no hunting more full of exciting possibilities. If you dare follow a butterfly, you dare go anywhere; and no quarry will lead you into stranger places, or into such beautiful unexpected adventures.”
At thirty he was still unmarried. Life was still for him a lonely woodland, through which he chased the one butterfly he had never been able to capture. The butterflies of the world were in his marvellously arranged cabinets,—rainbow upon rainbow of classified wings—but one butterfly was not there. The butterfly, indeed, might possibly have been had by exchange with other collectors, though it was one so rare, and so beyond equivalent in any form, that the man who had been fortunate enough to come into possession of it seldom cared to part with it.
Besides, though occasionally Laleham had resorted to this means of supplying a missing species, it was a course he seldom took. Nearly every butterfly in his vast flower-garden of shimmering wings had been caught by his own hand. There was no country inthe world he had not visited in his determined dream of being, one might say, the Balzac of the butterfly; and it was only the commoner sort of butterfly he had occasionally obtained by exchange. The butterfly that was missing from his collection he made it a point of honour, and indeed, in course of time, a sort of superstition, to capture for himself. To the ordinary and non-entomological observer, untouched by Laleham’s mystic passion, there would seem little enough to account for his preoccupation in the quite insignificant object of it, a tiny blue butterfly, to ordinary eyes not differing from any other tiny blue butterfly, and in fact only to be known for what it was by a mystic marking almost imperceptible, hidden beneath its wings. Not even the collector himself could be sure of what he was pursuing, on account of the butterfly’s resemblance to another species comparatively common, exactly like, except for that hidden signature, that distinguishing hall-mark. If one were to depreciate the value of this illustrious insect, and say that itssole distinction was that of rarity, the collector would only smile, and could afford to, perhaps. Rarity! only rarity! Was not that enough! Had not mankind agreed, throughout recorded history, that rarity alone, unaccompanied by any other precious characteristic, is of all qualifications, the qualification of immortality; and is not rarity of all values the ideal value, a value not measurable by the eye, or any method of external judgment, a value of the soul. Besides, what are the highest prizes in any chase or contest whatsoever—a simple wreath of laurel, the antlers of a deer, objects in themselves only symbolically valuable. Why, therefore, should not the ambitious pursuing spirit of man stake its fortunes on a butterfly—for what could be more typical of its own wandering course and ever changing goal.
The Laleham butterfly, as it is now called, and as not seldom happens with other rare things in nature—this being, I may add, not the least of nature’s mysterious whims—hadnever been found except in one remote corner of England, a fenny country producing a hardly less rare variety of flowering rush on which its caterpillar alone could feed. It was a country of boundless marshy levels, and peaty solitudes, a country of herons, and long dark-eyed pools, which, flashing every few yards under the boundless sky, filled the loneliness with magic mirrors. For the gay it was a dreary land, but for those who have found “nought so sweet as melancholy” it was melancholy only as great music is melancholy, and its loneliness was that of some splendid raven-haired widow with her tragic gaze upon the sky. It was a thinly populated region, with here and there an inn and a few cottages taking shelter under the wing of some mouldering grange. It was, in short, one of the sad beautiful ends of the earth. Here it was, and here alone, that Laleham’s butterfly had chosen to dwell, to secret itself, indeed, as though in a place so remote it might hope to preserve its fragile aristocratic race from extinction. Yet, though itwas known to inhabit this solitude, not a dozen living people had ever seen it, and only two had caught it for many years; for there again it illustrated another mystery of nature, the persistent survival of a rare type, in such unchangeably small numbers as almost to risk extinction, as it were, for the purpose of aristocracy. For at least two hundred years, as long as it had been known at all, the Laleham butterfly had existed apparently in the same small family, only propagating itself sufficiently to keep its race and name upon the earth, and no more. It had not become rare by process of extinction, but because nature apparently had made few of it from the beginning. Happily this aristocratic law of nature is not only applied to butterflies. In fact one might justly say the same of the family that had dwelt in an old embattled house which had stood here sinking deeper and deeper into the solitude since the days of Richard II. Noctorum, the house was called, as was the cluster of cottages around it—a name appropriately dark andmysterious, like the cry of owls at night across the fen.
In this old house of Noctorum, which had been built by his ancestors and inhabited by Fantons ever since, lived studious old Sir Gilbert Fanton, Baronet, alone most of the year round with his gout and his books, and one beautiful daughter hardly yet a woman. A young wife, dead now many years, had left him with two sons, both soldiers, and therefore seldom at home, and one great-eyed little girl, who, far from finding the solitude of her life irksome, had taken kindly to it, and had more and more, year by year, seemed to embody the solemn beauty of her melancholy surroundings. Laleham had been a friend of young Christopher Fanton’s at Oxford, and had, several years before, come down to Noctorum with the young soldier in quest of the butterfly which was the legendary glory of the district.
Though Sir Gilbert was a much older man than himself, he had found in him a scholar with mystic tendencies similar to his own,and, when the sons had gone to the wars, Laleham continued to come down to visit the father, and incidentally to pursue the quest of his butterfly. Then he had taken a trip about the world, visiting the tropical haunts of his hobby, which had lasted so long that when again he returned to England it had been three years since he had visited his old friend. Besides, he had once more returned from his pilgrimage without that mystic butterfly which continued still to evade his persevering pursuit. In every part of the world he had sought it, but still, so far as he could hear, the one place in which it might be found was the marshes of Noctorum. So, thinking less of his quest than of his friend, he determined to run down and see what progress Sir Gilbert was making with his great book on the folk-lore of the fens—for fairies and hobgoblins were Sir Gilbert’s particular substitute for idleness. He found Sir Gilbert boyishly happy over his recent discovery of an indigenous and heretofore unrecorded variant of the story of Cupid and Psyche.
“Think of it!” exclaimed the old scholar, “here in this land of clods and pitchforks, uncouth in form indeed, but still the old dainty fancy, the old Greek fairy tale in homespun. Isn’t it strange how these frail shapes of story, frail as moonbeams, are still hardy enough to make their way from land to land, and take on the disguises of the peoples, rough or gentle, among which, like a thistledown, they happen to settle.”
“Yes!” answered Laleham smiling, “they are like the butterflies of the imagination—frail but indestructible.”
Sir Gilbert laughed at this reminder that there were other hobbies than his own.
“Forgive me,” he said, “I am afraid I am selfishly riding my own hobby; and in my Psyche, forgetting yours. Tell me about your Psyche.”
Laleham shook his head, and proceeded to tell of his varying fortune in foreign lands, and how he had come back with all the butterflies of the world, except the one butterfly.Sir Gilbert gave him the sympathy of a fellow collector.
“But surely,” he said, “you haven’t given up the chase—at your age.”
“Almost,” answered Laleham, “I am too old. The wildest enthusiasm—for butterflies—can hardly outlive thirty. I think I shall take up some serious study—like yours.”
Both the friends laughed, and Sir Gilbert said:
“But, seriously, I have heard of your butterfly having been seen within a mile or two from here no longer than a week ago. There were two fellows staying at the inn last month who called to see me, enthusiasts like yourself, and they were positive that they had seen it over by the Black Ditches—of course, you know the place. But they missed it, all the same.”
“The worst of the beast is,” said Laleham, “that you cannot be sure, so to say, that it is itself till you have it in your hand. The other brute is so like it.”
“Yet you were once sure enough, dear friend,” answered Sir Gilbert.
“True,” said Laleham sadly, “but who knows, I may have been wrong.”
“Anyhow, here you are,” said Sir Gilbert, “in the best season of the year. You never had a better opportunity. If you don’t catch your butterfly this time, you never will. This is your home, you know, and you know too that I shall treat you with no ceremony. You can go about your butterflies, and I shall go about my fairies, and if I seem to neglect you, Mariana will make up for me.”
Mariana entered at that moment, and stood by her father. When Laleham had last seen her hers were still those reluctant feet of maidenhood of which the great poet has sung. Now she was a woman; a very young woman, it is true, but a woman. That grave beauty of the melancholy fens, of which I have spoken as having “passed into her face,” was there now in a still more decided presence. Her hair was black as English hair seldom is,her skin was an exquisite olive, and her eyes were like those strange pools which flashed darkly in the evening light outside the library window. Her black eyelashes were so thick that you could not help thinking of them as rushes guarding the secrecies of the strange mirrors inside. And, not externally only did she seem the very embodiment of her surroundings, but her spirit seemed also to have absorbed their passionate silence. Perhaps no landscape says so little, and is yet so richly eloquent, as the elegiac landscape of a fen country. How beyond all speech is its silence, how beyond the shallow spectacular changes of showier natural effects is its solemn art of imperturbability. Mariana was strangely silent—but indeed not speechless. The lesson of the nature about her seemed to have entered into her whole being, the lesson that such silence must only be broken by very significant, very beautiful, words—as though silence were an exquisite unsullied sky only now and again to be interrupted by stars.
Laleham had observed her but little on his former visits, for, as I have said, she was hardly more than a child; and, besides, was it the cloud of his butterflies, or was it some other unforgotten face that veiled for him the faces of women, so that all these years he had passed unscathed through all the battalions of beautiful faces. Be that as it may, it was on the occasion of this visit that he saw the beauty of Mariana Fanton for the first time, and, as the days went by, he found that beauty making an even stronger appeal to his imagination, which, as always is the case with such natures as his, lay very near to his heart. As Sir Gilbert had ‘threatened,’ it was on Mariana that he had to rely for companionship on those days when he was not out alone with his net across the fens; for Sir Gilbert was so hard at work upon a paper for the Folk-Lore Society on his recent discovery that he could only spare his evenings for his friend. As his visit lengthened into weeks, the days he spent alone grew less, and the days he spent with Marianagrew more, and the butterfly remained uncaught. Sometimes Mariana would go hunting it with him, but oftener they would go out on long aimless walks together, saying little, but always coming nearer and nearer through that language of expressive silence which both had been born to speak and understand. When Mariana did speak, what a heavenly animation swept its sunlight over her face; but her silence, as someone has said of her, was like a sky full of stars.
Laleham’s stay at Noctorum was nearing its end. So far as his old friend was concerned, he could, of course, have stayed there forever.
“If I were you,” said Sir Gilbert, “I would not leave this place till I had caught it.”
“The continued presence of such a determined huntsman might frighten it from the district altogether,” answered Laleham. “I will use stratagem, let it rest in security a while, and come again.”
It was the hour after dinner when the friends usually smoked their pipes together,and Sir Gilbert was genuinely sorry to lose his friend, but the proofs of his pamphlet on Cupid and Psyche had just arrived by the evening post, and his fingers were itching to open them. Besides, Laleham was to be with them yet a day or two longer. Presently Sir Gilbert’s proofs became irresistible, and turning to his friend he said:
“Do you mind, old man, but I am just dying to look at these silly proofs of mine—pride of authorship, you know—suppose you look up Mariana—she is out there, I see, on the veranda—and talk astronomy to her for a few minutes. Then we can have a talk....”
“With all my heart,” said Laleham, laughing as he opened the door on to the starlit veranda, and left the old man to himself.
As Laleham took a chair by Mariana’s side, her recognition of his presence would have been imperceptible to anyone who did not understand her language of silence. Her eyes remained fixed on the stars, and he sat down near her without attempting even tojoin her reverie. He was well content to look at her and know that she was near. Presently, without turning her head, with her eyes still among the stars, she said in her curious deep sudden voice:
“You have not found your butterfly?”
“No.”
“Do you still hope to find it?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever seen it?”
“Yes.”
“How often?”
“Twice.”
“Twice!” she exclaimed, at length turning and looking at him. “Twice! and you lost it both times....”
Before he could answer, she raised her hand to the stars. “Look!” she said. “I sometimes think that the soul is like a butterfly, and that it goes from star to star, as a butterfly goes from flower to flower....” then, with another of her sudden, and often disconcerting, transitions, she turned again to Laleham:
“Will you tell me about those times you saw your butterfly?” she said.
“It is an odd story,” Laleham began, “and I am afraid you may think me superstitious. But you mustn’t think that it accounts for my butterflies, for I have loved them, for some unexplained reason, since I was a boy....”
“Perhaps,” he added, “some tastes are prophetic;” and then he went on. “The first time I saw it was one morning about eight years ago. I was hunting it among country similar to this, and suddenly it rose out of a bed of reeds. It was so near me that I made sure it was mine, so sure that I was in no haste to strike with my net, but watched it and studied it a while, was quite carelessly certain of it in fact ... and then, just as I held my net ready to capture it, away it went on the wind, not quite out of sight, but always keeping a coquettish distance, near enough to lure me on, far enough away to escape....”
“It rather served you right for being so sure, didn’t it?” said Mariana.
“You see I was only a young butterfly-hunter then,” said Laleham, “I have learnt wisdom since.”
“Go on,” prompted Mariana.
“Well, it led me on in this way for quite two hours, till we came to the end of the wild country, and suddenly dropped down into a small village. You will laugh at what follows, though it had its sad side for me. We had come on the village at the end where there stands the parish church....”
“I know the village,” said Mariana, absently, as if she were saying nothing. Laleham shot a troubled look at her, but continued.
“The churchyard was filled with a throng of people gaily dressed as for a wedding. What should my butterfly do but dash amongst them, and I after it, for it was too precious to lose. Soaring over the heads of the crowd, it dashed for shelter into the church, and I again after it, forgetting all but my butterfly—and there were two young people kneeling at the altar. Myabrupt entrance naturally made a sensation which brought me to myself, and, dropping on my knees in a pew, I watched my butterfly flicker up the aisle till it settled itself on the clasped hands of the kneeling bride. In surprise, she turned her head, and....”
“Well?”
“I saw her face.”
“And the butterfly?”
“Escaped by the belfry.”
“Quite a fairy tale,” said Mariana, after a pause. “Now tell me about the second time you saw your butterfly.”
“I hardly care to speak of it, Mariana—unless you care very much to hear.”
“Would you rather not speak of it?”
“I would speak of it to no one but you.”
“Do you wish to speak?”
“I do. Do you wish me to speak?”
“Yes, speak of it—to me,” said Mariana gently.
“It is a very short story, Mariana—almost the same, excepting the end; for, three years afterwards, once more my butterflyrose out of the reeds in almost exactly the same spot, and once more it coquetted with me for miles, and once more it dashed into that little churchyard ... but this time it did not vanish into the church, but went from grave to grave, as you say the soul perhaps wanders from star to star, and presently it stopped at one of the graves. I thought that now it was surely mine, and raised my net to strike, but, as I did so, I read a name upon a stone....”
In the darkness Mariana reached out her hand and took Laleham’s, and, after a silence, she said:
“I know the grave,” and, after another silence, she said:
“I have heard that she was very beautiful.”
Then the two sat on, saying no more in the starlight, and all the while, though neither knew of it till they returned to the library lamps, a little blue butterfly had been hiding in Mariana’s hair.
PERHAPS the dream which a man gives up hardest is that of his ideal home, the dream-house builded just as he and Love would build it to dwell in together—had he and Love the money!—the dream-house which in every sensitive particular would be the appropriate habitation of his spirit; in short his castle-in-Spain. Castles in Spain are not necessarily expensive. A cottage in Spain is just as good as a castle if you think so; and if you know the secret you can make a castle in Spain out of one-room-and-bath in a New York apartment house. I myself have never done it. I have never been happy enough for that.
No, I am afraid I should need money for my castle-in Spain. It would cost a fortune to build and many fortunes to run. For it would be a real castle, and real castles have always been expensive, even in feudal dayswhen labour was somewhat cheaper than it is now. I want no cloud-castle built of moonbeams and rainbows for me and Love to dwell in, but a real earth-castle like that of an old French troubadour, with walls 34 feet thick—to keep Love safe from other troubadours—a donjon 190 feet high and 100 feet in diameter, and other massive visible particulars. I see no reason why it should not be literally situated in Spain somewhere at the eastern end of the Pyrenees, but I confess a softness for Provence, perhaps on account of the name. A situation almost equally Spanish might be found for it there on a toppling crag, somewhere up among those strange rock villages of the Maritime Alps, filled with Moorish ghosts, in the nearness all chasms and parched shadows and the thirsty sun, in the distance forests of cork-oak, silhouettes of eucalyptus and cypress. Then olives and olives and the Mediterranean Sea.
I choose Provence because the situation of one’s castle-in-Spain is almost moreimportant than the castle itself. Environment and association count for so much in the matter of one’s dream-house. You may build the most wonderful castle-in-Spain, but it will go for nothing, seem indeed almost ridiculous, a parody, if you build it in some absurdly wrong place. No offence to Omaha, no offence to Liverpool, no offence to Glasgow—but the most beautiful castle-in-Spain would be wasted in any one of those animated capitals of industry. As the setting of a jewel is hardly less important than the jewel itself, so is the situation of one’s castle-in-Spain. Stonehenge or Westminster Abbey would be as much at home transported, numbered stone by stone, to Herald Square or Michigan Avenue—and American capital has dreamed some such dream—as one’s castle-in-Spain built in any one of those, or such, cities as I have mentioned.
As Keats has written: