So imagine me seated in a grassy corner, with my knapsack open on the ground and my petticoat and silk stockings spread out in front of me,—an odd picture, to be sure, for any passer by to come upon. I suppose I could have passed for a pedlar, but undoubtedly it would have been very embarrassing. However, as it happened, I remained undisturbed, and was able to examine my purchases at leisure. I had never seen a petticoat so near before,—at all events I had never given one such close attention. What delicious dainty things they are! How essentially womanly—as I hope no one would call a pair of trousers essentially manly.
How pretty it looked spread out on the grass in front of me! How soft! how wondrously dainty the finish of every little seam! And the lace! It almost tempts one to change one's sex to wear such things. There was a time indeed, and not so long ago, when brave men wore garments no less dainty.
Rupert's Cavaliers were every bit as particular about their lace collars and frills as the lady whose pretty limbs once warmed this cambric.
But where is the name? Ah! here it is! What sweet writing! "Sylvia Joy, No. 6."
Sylvia Joy! What a perfectly enchanting name! and as I repeated it enthusiastically, it seemed to have a certain familiarity for my ear,—as though it were the name of some famous beauty or some popular actress,—yet the exact association eluded me, and obviously it was better it should remain a name of mystery. Sylvia Joy! Who could have hoped for such a pretty name! Indeed, to tell the truth, I had dreaded to find a "Mary Jones" or an "Ann Williams"—but Sylvia Joy! The name was a romance in itself. I already felt myself falling in love with its unseen owner. With such a petticoat and such a name, Sylvia herself could not be otherwise than delightful too. Already, you see, I was calling her by her Christian name! And the more I thought of her, the stronger grew the conviction—which has no doubt already forced itself upon the romantic reader—that we were born for each other.
But who is Sylvia, who is she? and likewise where is Sylvia, where is she? Obviously they were questions not to be answered off-hand. Was not my future—at all events my immediate future—to be spent in answering them?
Indeed, curiously enough, my recent haste to have them answered had suddenly died down. A sort of matrimonial security possessed me. I felt as I imagine a husband may feel on a solitary holiday—if there are husbands unnatural enough to go holidaying without their wives—pleasantly conscious of a home tucked somewhere beneath the distant sunset, yet in no precipitate hurry to return there before the appointed day.
In fact, a chill tremor went through me as I realised that, to all intent, I was at length respectably settled down, with quite a considerable retrospect of happy married life. To come to a decision is always to bring something to an end. And, with something of a pang, resolutely stifled, I realised for a moment the true blessedness of the single state I was so soon to leave behind. At all events, a little golden fragment of bachelorhood remained. There was yet a fertile strip of time wherein to sow my last handful of the wild oats of youth. So festina lente, my destined Sylvia, festina lente!
As I once more shouldered my pack and went my way, the character of the country side began to change, and, from a semi-pastoral heathiness and furziness, took on a wildness of aspect, which if indeed melodramatic was melodrama carried to the point of genius.
It was a scene for which the nineteenth century has no worthy use. It finds ignoble occupation as a gaping-ground for the vacuous tourist,—somewhat as Heine might have imagined Pan carrying the gentleman's luggage from the coach to the hotel. It suffers teetotal picnic-parties to encamp amid its savage hollows, and it humbly allows itself to be painted by the worst artists. Like a lion in a menagerie, it is a survival of the extinct chaos entrapped and exhibited amid the smug parks and well-rolled downs of England.
I came upon it by a winding ledge of road, which clung to the bare side of the hill like the battlements of some huge castle. Some two hundred feet below, a brawling upland stream stood for the moat, and for the enemy there was on the opposite side of the valley a great green company of trees, settled like a cloud slope upon slope, making all haste to cross the river and ascend the heights where I stood. Some intrepid larches waved green pennons in the very midst of the turbulent water, here and there a veteran lay with his many-summered head abased in the rocky course of the stream, and here was a young foolhardy beech that had climbed within a dozen yards of the rampart. All was wild and solitary, and one might have declared it a scene untrodden by the foot of man, but for the telegraph posts and small piles of broken "macadam" at punctual intervals, and the ginger-beer bottles and paper bags of local confectioners that lent an air of civilisation to the road.
It was a place to quote Alastor in, and nothing but a bad memory prevented my affrighting the oaks and rills with declamation. As it was, I could only recall the lines
"The Poet wandering on, through ArabieAnd Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,And o'er the aerial mountains which pour downIndus and Oxus from their icy caves—"
and that other passage beginning
"At length upon the lone Chorasmian shoreHe paused—"
This last I mouthed, loving the taste of its thunder; mouthed thrice, as though it were an incantation,—and, indeed, from what immediately followed, it might reasonably have seemed so.
"At length upon the lone Chorasmian shoreHe paused—"
I mouthed for the fourth time. And lo! advancing to me eagerly along the causeway seemed the very sprite of Alastor himself! There was a star upon his forehead, and around his young face there glowed an aureole of gold and roses—to speak figuratively, for the star upon his brow was hope, and the gold and roses encircling his head, a miniature rainbow, were youth and health. His longish golden hair had no doubt its share in the effect, as likewise the soft yellow silk tie that fluttered like a flame in the speed of his going. His blue eyes were tragically fresh and clear,—as though they had as yet been little used. There were little wings of haste upon his feet, and he came straight to me, with the air of the Angel Gabriel about to make his divine announcement. For a moment I thought that he was an apparition of prophecy charged to announce the maiden of the Lord for whom I was seeking. However, his brief flushed question was not of these things. He desired first to ask the time of day, and next—here, after a bump to the earth, one's thoughts ballooned again heavenwards—"had I seen a green copy of Shelley lying anywhere along the road?"
Nothing so good had happened to me, I replied—but I believed that I had seen a copy of Alastor! For a moment my meaning was lost on him; then he flushed and smiled, thanked me and was off again, saying that he must find his Shelley, as he wouldn't lose it for the world!
He had presently disappeared as suddenly as he had come, but he had left me a companion, a radiant reverberant name; and for some little space the name of Shelley clashed silvery music among the hills.
Its seven letters seemed to hang right across the clouds like the Seven Stars, an apocalyptic constellation, a veritable sky sign; and again the name was an angel standing with a silver trumpet, and again it was a song. The heavens opened, and across the blue rift it hung in a glory of celestial fire, while from behind and above the clouds came a warbling as of innumerable larks.
How strange was this miracle of fame, I pondered, this strange apotheosis by which a mere private name becomes a public symbol! Shelley was once a private person whose name had no more universal meaning than my own, and so were Byron and Cromwell and Shakespeare; yet now their names are facts as stubborn as the Rocky Mountains, or the National Gallery, or the circulation of the blood. From their original inch or so of private handwriting they have spread and spread out across the world, and now whole generations of men find intellectual accommodation within them,—drinking fountains and other public institutions are erected upon them; yea, Carlyle has become a Chelsea swimming-bath, and "Highland Mary" is sold for whiskey, while Mr. Gladstone is to be met everywhere in the form of a bag.
Does Mr. Gladstone, I wonder, instruct his valet "to pack his Gladstone"? How strange it must seem! Try it yourself some day and its effect on your servant. Ask him, for example, to "pack your ——" and see how he'll stare.
Coming nearer and nearer to earth, I wondered if Colonel Boycott ever uses the word "boycott," and how strange it must have seemed to the late MacAdam to walk for miles and miles upon his own name, like a carpet spread out before him.
Then I once more rebounded heavenwards, at the vision of the eager dreamy lad whose question had set going all this odd clockwork of association. He wouldn't lose his Shelley for the world! How like twenty! And how many things that he wouldn't lose for the world will he have to give up before he is thirty, I reflected sententiously,—give up at last, maybe, with a stony indifference, as men on a sinking ship take no thought of the gold and specie in the hold.
And then, all of a sudden, a little way up the ferny grassy hillside, I caught sight of the end of a book half hidden among the ferns. I climbed up to it. Of course it was that very green Shelley which the young stranger wouldn't lose for the world.
Picking up the book, I opened it involuntarily at the titlepage, and then—I resisted a great temptation! I shut it again. A little flowery plot of girl's handwriting had caught my eye, and a girl's pretty name. When Love and Beauty meet, it is hard not to play the eavesdropper, and it was easy to guess that Love and Beauty met upon that page. St. Anthony had no harder fight with the ladies he was unpolite enough to call demons, than I in resisting the temptation to take another look at that pen-and-ink love making. Now, as I look back, I think it was sheer priggishness to resist so human and yet so reverent an impulse. There is nothing sacred from reverence, and love's lovers have a right to regard themselves as the confidants of lovers, whenever they may chance to surprise either them or their letters.
While I was still hesitating, and wondering how I could get the book conveyed to its romantic owner, suddenly a figure turned the corner of the road, and there was Alastor coming back again. I slipped the book, in distracted search for which he was evidently still engaged, under the ferns, and, leisurely lighting a pipe, prepared to tease him. He was presently within hail, and, looking up, caught sight of me.
"Have you found your Shelley yet?" I called down to him, as he stood a moment in the road.
He shook his head. No! But he meant to find it, if he had to hunt every square foot of the valley inch by inch.
Wouldn't any other book do, I asked him. Would he take a Boccaccio, or a "Golden Ass," or a "Tom Jones," in exchange?—for of such consisted my knapsack library. He laughed a negative, and it seemed a shame to tease him.
"It is not so much the book itself," he said.
"But the giver?" I suggested.
"Of course," he blushingly replied.
"Well, suppose I have found it?" I continued.
"You don't mean it—"
"But suppose I have—I'm only supposing—will you give me the pleasure of your company at dinner at the next inn and tell me its story?"
"Indeed I will, gladly," he replied.
"Well, then," I said, "catch, for here it is!"
The joy with which he recovered it was pretty to behold, and the eagerness with which he ran through the leaves, to see that the violets and the primroses and a spray of meadowsweet, young love's bookmarkers, were all in their right places, touched my heart.
He could not thank me enough; and as we stepped out to the inn, some three or four miles on the road, I elicited something of his story.
He was a clerk in a city office, he said, but his dreams were not commercial. His one dream was to be a great poet, or a great writer of some sort, and this was one of his holidays. As I looked at his sensitive young face, unmarred by pleasure and unscathed by sorrow, bathed daily, I surmised, in the may-dew of high philosophies—ah, so high! washed from within by a constant radiancy of pure thoughts, and from without by a constant basking in the shine of every beautiful and noble and tender thing,—I thought it not unlikely that he might fulfil his dream.
But, alas! as he talked on, with lighted face and chin in the air, how cruelly I realised how little I had fulfilled mine.
And how hard it was to talk to him, without crushing some flower of his fancy or casting doubt upon his dreams. Oh, the gulf between twenty and thirty! I had never quite comprehended it before. And how inexpressibly sad it was to hear him prattling on of the ideal life, of socialism, of Walt Whitman and what not,—all the dear old quackeries,—while I was already settling down comfortably to a conservative middle age. He had no hope that had not long been my despair, no aversion that I had not accepted among the more or less comfortable conditions of the universe. He was all for nature and liberty, whereas I had now come to realise the charm of the artificial, and the social value of constraint.
"Young man," I cried in my heart, "what shall I do to inherit Eternal Youth?"
The gulf between us was further revealed when, at length coming to our inn, we sat down to dinner. To me it seemed the most natural thing in the world to call for the wine-list and consult his choice of wine; but, will you believe me, he asked to be allowed to drink water! And when he quoted the dear old stock nonsense out of Thoreau about being able to get intoxicated on a glass of water, I could have laughed and cried at the same time.
"Happy Boy!" I cried, "still able to turn water into wine by the divine power of your youth"; and then, turning to the waiter, I ordered a bottle of No. 37.
"Wine is the only youth granted to middle age," I continued,—"in vino juventus, one might say; and may you, my dear young friend, long remain so proudly independent of that great Elixir—though I confess that I have met no few young men under thirty who have been excellent critics of the wine-list."
As the water warmed him, he began to expand into further confidence, and then he told me the story of his Shelley, if a story it can be called. For, of course, it was simple enough, and the reader has long since guessed that the reason why he wouldn't lose his Shelley for the world was the usual simple reason.
I listened to his rhapsodies of HER and HER and HER with an aching heart. How good it was to be young! No wonder men had so desperately sought the secret of Eternal Youth! Who would not be young for ever, for such dreams and such an appetite?
Here of course was the very heaven-sent confidant for such an enterprise as mine. I told him all about my whim, just for the pleasure of watching his face light up with youth's generous worship of all such fantastic nonsense. You should have seen his enthusiasm and heard all the things he said. Why, to encounter such a whimsical fellow as myself in this unimaginative age was like meeting a fairy prince, or coming unexpectedly upon Don Quixote attacking the windmill. I offered him the post of Sancho Panza; and indeed what would he not give, he said, to leave all and follow me! But then I reminded him that he had already found his Golden Girl.
"Of course, I forgot," he said, with I'm afraid something of a sigh. For you see he was barely twenty, and to have met your ideal so early in life is apt to rob the remainder of the journey of something of its zest.
I asked him to give me his idea of what the Blessed Maid should be, to which he replied, with a smile, that he could not do better than describe Her, which he did for the sixth time. It was, as I had foreseen, the picture of a Saint, a Goddess, a Dream, very lovely and pure and touching; but it was not a woman, and it was a woman I was in search of, with all her imperfections on her head. I suppose no boy of twenty really loves a WOMEN, but loves only his etherealised extract of woman, entirely free from earthy adulteration. I noticed the words "pure" and "natural" in constant use by my young friend. Some lines went through my head, but I forbore to quote them:—
Alas I your so called purityIs merely immaturity,And woman's nature plays its partSincerely but in woman's art.
But I couldn't resist asking him, out of sheer waggery, whether he didn't think a touch of powder, and even, very judiciously applied, a touch of rouge, was an improvement to woman. His answer went to my heart.
"Paint—a WOMAN!" he exclaimed.
It was as though you had said—paint an angel!
I could bear no more of it. The gulf yawned shiveringly wide at remarks like that; so, with the privilege of an elder, I declared it time for bed, and yawned off to my room.
Next morning we bade good-bye, and went our several ways. As we parted, he handed me a letter which I was not to open till I was well on my journey. We waved good-bye to each other till the turnings of the road made parting final, and then, sitting down by the roadside, I opened the letter. It proved to be not a letter, but a poem, which he had evidently written after I had left him for bed. It was entitled, with twenty's love for a tag of Latin, Ad Puellam Auream, and it ran thus:—
The Golden Girl in every placeHides and reveals her lovely face;Her neither skill nor strength may find—'T is only loving moves her mind.If but a pretty face you seek,You'll find one any day or week;But if you look with deeper eyes,And seek her lovely, pure, and wise,Then must you wear the pilgrim's shoonFor many a weary, wandering moon.
Only the pure in heart may seeThat lily of all purity,Only in clean unsullied thoughtThe image of her face is caught,And only he her love may holdWho buys her with the spirit's gold.
Thus only shall you find your pearl,O seeker of the Golden Girl!She trod but now the grassy way,A vision of eternal May.
The devil take his impudence! "Only the pure in heart," "clean, unsullied thought." How like the cheek of twenty! And all the same how true! Dear lad, how true! Certainly, the child is father to the man. Dirige nos! O sage of the Golden Twenties!
As I meditatively folded up the pretty bit of writing, I made a resolution; but it was one of such importance that not only is another chapter needed to do it honour, but it may well inaugurate another book of this strange uneventful history.
Yes, I said to myself, the lad is quite right; I will follow his advice. I'm afraid I was in danger of developing into a sad cynic, with a taste for the humour of this world. What should have been a lofty high-souled pilgrimage, only less transcendental than that of the Holy Grail itself, has so far failed, no doubt, because I have undertaken it too much in the wanton spirit of a troubadour.
I will grow young and serious again. Yes, why not? I will take a vow of Youth. One's age is entirely a matter of the imagination. From this moment I am no longer thirty. Thirty falls from me like a hideous dream. My back straightens again at the thought; my silvering hair blackens once more; my eyes, a few moments ago lacklustre and sunken, grow bright and full again, and the whites are clear as the finest porcelain. Veni, veni, Mephistophile! your Faust is young again,—young, young, and, with a boy's heart, open once more to all the influences of the mighty world.
I bring down my stick upon the ground with a mighty ring of resolution, and the miracle is done. Who would take me for thirty now? From this moment I abjure pessimism and cynicism in all their forms, put from my mind all considerations of the complexities of human life, unravel all by a triumphant optimism which no statistics can abash or criticism dishearten. I likewise undertake to divest myself entirely of any sense of humour that may have developed within me during the baneful experiences of the last ten years, and, in short, will consent for the future to be nothing that is not perfectly perfect and pure. These, I take it, are the fundamental conditions of being young again.
And as for the Quest, it shall forthwith be undertaken in an entirely serious and high-minded spirit. From this moment I am on the look-out for a really transcendental attachment. No "bright-eyed bar-maids," however "refined," need apply. Ladies who are prodigal of their white petticoats are no longer fit company for me. Indeed I shall no longer look upon a petticoat, unless I am able first entirely to spiritualise it. It must first be disinfected of every earthly thought.
Yes, I am once more a young man, sound in wind and limb, with not a tooth or an illusion lost, my mind tabula rasa, my heart to be had for the asking. Oh, come, ye merry, merry maidens! The fairy prince is on the fairy road.
Incipit vita nuova!
So in the lovely rapture of a new-born resolution—and is there any rapture like it?—nature has no more intoxicating illusion than that of turning over a new leaf, or beginning a new life from to-day—I sprang along the road with a carolling heart; quite forgetting that Apuleius and Fielding and Boccaccio were still in my knapsack—not to speak of the petticoat.
Apuleius and Fielding and Boccaccio, bad companions for a petticoat, I'm afraid, bad companions too for so young a man as I had now become. However, as I say, I had for the time forgotten that pagan company, or, in my puritanic zeal, I might have thrown them all to be washed clean in the upland stream, whose pure waters one might fancy were fragrant from their sunny day among the ferns and the heather, fragrant to the eye, indeed, if one may so speak, with the shaken meal of the meadowsweet. This stream had been the good angel of my thoughts all the day, keeping them ever moving and ever fresh, cleansing and burnishing them, quite an open-air laundry of the mind.
We were both making for the same little town, it appeared, and as the sun was setting we reached it together. I entered the town over the bridge, and the stream under it, washing the walls of the high-piled, many-gabled old inn where I proposed to pass the night. I should hear it still rippling on with its gentle harpsichord tinkle, as I stretched myself down among the cool lavendered sheets, and little by little let slip the multifarious world.
The inn windows beamed cheerily, a home of ruddy rest. Having ordered my dinner and found my room, I threw down my knapsack and then came out again to smoke an ante-prandial pipe, listen to the evensong of the stream, and think great thoughts. The stream was still there, and singing the same sweet old song. You could hear it long after it was out of sight, in the gathering darkness, like an old nurse humming lullabies in the twilight.
The dinner was good, the wine was old, and oh! the rest was sweet! Nothing fills one with so exquisite a weariness as a day spent in good resolutions and great thoughts. There is something perilously sensuous in the relaxation of one's muscles, both of mind and body, after a day thus well spent.
Lighting up my pipe once more, and drawing to the fire, I suddenly realised a sense of loneliness. Of course, I was lonely for a book,—Apuleius or Fielding or Boccaccio!
An hour ago they had seemed dangerous companions for so lofty a mood; but now, under the gentle influences of dinner, the mood had not indeed changed—but mellowed. So to say, we would split the difference between the ideal and the human, and be, say, twenty-five.
It was in this genial attitude of mind that I strode up the quaint circular staircase to fetch Fielding from my room, and, shade of Tom Jones! what should be leaving my room, as I advanced to enter it, but—well, it's no use, resolutions are all very well, but facts are facts, especially when they're natural, and here was I face to face with the most natural little natural fact, and withal the most charming and merry-eyed, that—well, in short, as I came to enter my room I was confronted by the roundest, ruddiest little chambermaid ever created for the trial of mortal frailty.
And the worst of it was that her merry eye was in partnership with a merry tongue. Indeed, for some unexplained reason, she was bubbling over with congested laughter, the reason for which mere embarrassment set one inquiring. At last, between little gushes of laughter which shook her plump shoulders in a way that aroused wistful memories of Hebe, she archly asked me, with mock solemnity, if I should need a lady's maid.
"Certainly," I replied with inane promptitude, for I had no notion of her drift; but then she ran off in a scurry of laughter, and still puzzled I turned into my room, TO FIND, neatly hung over the end of the bed, nothing less than the dainty petticoat and silk stockings of Sylvia Joy.
You can imagine the colour of my cheeks at the discovery. No doubt I was already the laughing-stock of the whole inn. What folly! What a young vixen! Oh, what's to be done? Pay my bill and sneak off at once to the next town; but how pass through the grinning line of boots, and waiter, and chambermaid, and ironically respectful landlord and landlady, in the hall...
But while I thus deliberated, something soft pressed in at the door; and, making a sudden dart, I had the little baggage who had brought about my dilemma a prisoner in my arms.
I stayed some days at this charming old inn, for Amaryllis—oh, yes, you may be sure her name was Amaryllis—had not betrayed me; and indeed she may have some share in my retrospect of the inn as one of the most delightful which I encountered anywhere in my journeying. Would you like to know its name? Well, I know it as The Singing Stream. If you can find it under that name, you are welcome. And should you chance to be put into bedroom No. 26, you can think of me, and how I used to lie awake, listening to the stream rippling beneath the window, with its gentle harpsichord tinkle, and little by little letting slip the multifarious world.
And if anything about this chapter should seem to contradict the high ideals of the chapter preceding it, I can only say that, though the episode should not rigidly fulfil the conditions of the transcendental, nothing could have been more characteristic of that early youth to which I had vowed myself. Indeed, I congratulated myself, as I looked my last at the sign of The Singing Stream, that this had been quite in my early manner.
Though I had said good-bye to the inn, the stream and I did not part company at the inn-door, but continued for the best part of a morning to be fellow-travellers. Indeed, having led me to one pleasant adventure, its purpose, I afterwards realised, was to lead me to another, and then to go about its own bright business.
I don't think either of us had much idea where we were or whither we were bound. Our guiding principle seemed to be to get as much sunshine as possible, and to find the easiest road. We avoided dull sandy levels and hard rocky places, with the same instinctive dexterity. We gloomed together through dark dingles, and came out on sunny reaches with the same gilded magnificence. There are days when every stream is Pactolus and every man is Croesus, and thanks to that first and greatest of all alchemists, the sun, the morning I write of was a morning when to breathe was gold and to see was silver. And to breathe and see was all one asked. It was the first of May, and the world shone like a great illuminated letter with which that father of artists, the sun, was making splendid his missal of the seasons.
The month of May was ever his tour de force. Each year he has strained and stimulated his art to surpass himself, seeking ever a finer and a brighter gold, a more celestial azure. Never had his gold been so golden, his azure so dazzlingly clear and deep as on this particular May morning; while his fancy simply ran riot in the marginal decorations of woodland and spinney, quaint embroidered flowers and copses full of exquisitely painted and wonderfully trained birds of song. It was indeed a day for nature to be proud of. So seductive was the sunshine that even the shy trout leapt at noonday, eager apparently to change his silver for gold.
O silver fish in the silver stream,O golden fish in the golden gleam,Tell me, tell me, tell me true,Shall I find my girl if I follow you?
I suppose the reader never makes nonsense rhymes from sheer gladness of heart,—nursery doggerel to keep time with the rippling of the stream, or the dancing of the sun, or the beating of his heart; the gibberish of delight. As I hummed this nonsense, a trout at least three pounds in weight, whom you would know again anywhere, leapt a yard out of the water, and I took it, in my absurd, sun-soaked heart, as a good omen, as though he had said, "Follow and see."
I had no will but to follow, no desire but to see. All the same, though I affected to take him seriously, I had little suspicion how much that trout was to mean to me,—yes, within the course of a very few moments. Indeed, I had hardly strolled on for another quarter of a mile, when I was suddenly aroused from wool-gathering by his loud cries for help. Looking up, I saw him flashing desperately in mid-air, a lovely foot of writhing silver. In another second he was swung through the sunlight, and laid out breathing hard in a death-bed of buttercups and daisies.
There was not a moment to be lost, if I were to repay the debt of gratitude which in a flash I had seen that I owed him.
"Madam," I said, breathlessly springing forward, as a heavenly being was coldly tearing the hook from the gills of the unlucky trout, "though I am a stranger, will you do me a great favour? It is a matter of life or death..."
She looked up at me with some surprise, but with a fine fearless glance, and almost immediately said, "Certainly, what can I do?"
"Spare the life of that trout—"
"It is a singular request," she replied, "and one," she smiled, "self-sacrificing indeed for an angler to grant, for he weighs at least three pounds. However, since he seems a friend of yours, here goes—" And with the gladdest, most grateful sound in the world, the happy smack of a fish back home again in the water, after an appalling three minutes spent on land, that prophetic trout was once more an active unit in God's populous universe.
"Now that's good of you," I said, with thankful eyes, "and shows a kind heart."
"And kind hearts, they say, are more than coronets," she replied merrily, indulging in that derisive quotation which seems to be the final reward of the greatest poets.
For a moment there was a silence, during which I confess to wondering what I should say next. However, she supplied my place.
"But of course," she said, "you owe it to me, after this touching display of humanitarianism, to entertain me with your reason for interposing between me and my just trout. Was it one of those wonderful talking fishes out of the Arabian Nights, or are you merely an angler yourself, and did you begrudge such a record catch to a girl?"
"I see," I replied, "that you will understand me. That trout was, so to speak, out of the Arabian Nights. Only five minutes ago it was a May-day madness of mine to think that he leaped out of the water and gave me a highly important message. So I begged his life from a mere fancy. It was just a whim, which I trust you will excuse."
"A whim! So you are a follower of the great god Whim," she replied, with somewhat of an eager interest in her voice. "How nice it is to meet a fellow-worshipper!"
"Do women ever have whims?" I respectfully asked.
"I don't know about other women," she replied. "Indeed, I'm afraid I'm unnatural enough to take no interest in them at all. But, as for me,—well, what nonsense! Tell me some more about the trout. What was the wonderful message he seemed to give you? Or perhaps I oughtn't to ask?"
"I'm afraid," I said, "it would hardly translate into anything approaching common-sense."
"Did I ask for common-sense?" she retorted. It was true, she hadn't. But then I couldn't, with any respect for her, tell her the trout's message, or, with any respect for myself, recall those atrocious doggerel lines. In my dilemma, I caught sight of a pretty book lying near her fishing-basket, and diverted the talk by venturing to ask its name.
"'T is of Aucassin and Nicolete," she replied, with something in her voice which seemed to imply that the tender old story would be familiar to me. My memory served me for once gallantly.
I answered by humming half to myself the lines from the prologue,—
"Sweet the song, the story sweet,There is no man hearkens it,No man living 'neath the sun,So outwearied, so foredone,Sick and woful, worn and sad,But is healed, but is glad'T is so sweet."
"How charming of you to know it!" she laughed. "You are the only man in this county, or the next, or the next, who knows it, I'm sure."
"Are the women of the county more familiar with it?" I replied.
"But tell me about the trout," she once more persisted.
At the same moment, however, there came from a little distance the musical tinkle of a bell that sounded like silver, a fairy-like and almost startling sound.
"It is my lunch," she explained. "I'm a worshipper of the great god Whim too, and close by here I have a little summer-house, full of books and fishing-lines and other childishness, where, when my whim is to be lonely, I come and play at solitude. If you'll be content with rustic fare, and promise to be amusing, it would be very pleasant if you'd join me."
O! most prophetic and agreeable trout! Was it not like the old fairy tales, the you-help-us and we'll-help-you of Psyche and the ants?
It had been the idlest whim for me to save the life of that poor trout. There was no real pity in it. For two pins, I had been just as ready to cut it open, to see if by chance it carried in its belly the golden ring wherewith I was to wed the Golden—
However, such is the gratitude of nature to man, that this little thoughtless act of kindness had brought me face to face with—was it the Golden Girl?
But I have all this time left the reader without any formal descriptive introduction to this whimsical young lady angler. Not without reason, for, like any really charming personality, she was very difficult to picture. Paint a woman! as our young friend Alastor said.
Faces that fall into types you can describe, or at all events label in such a way that the reader can identify them; but those faces that consist mainly of spiritual effect and physical bloom, that change with everything they look upon, the light in which ebbs and flows with every changing tide of the soul,—these you have to love to know, and to worship to portray.
Now the face of Nicolete, as I learnt in time to call her, was just soul and bloom, perhaps mainly bloom. I never noticed whether she had any other features except her eyes. I suppose she had a nose; a little lace pocket-handkerchief I have by me at the moment is almost too small to be evidence on that important point.
As I walked by her side that May morning, I was only conscious of her voice and her exquisite girlhood; for though she talked with the APLOMB of a woman of the world, a passionate candour and simple ardour in her manner would have betrayed her, had her face not plainly declared her the incarnation of twenty. But if she were twenty years young, she was equally twenty years OLD; and twenty years old, in some respects, is the greatest age attained to by man or woman. In this she rather differed from Alastor, of whom otherwise she was the female counterpart. Her talk, and something rather in her voice than her talk, soon revealed her as a curious mixture of youth and age, of dreamer and desillusionee.
One soon realised that she was too young, was hoping too much from life, to spend one's days with. Yet she had just sufficiently that touch of languor which puts one at one's ease, though indeed it was rather the languor of waiting for what was going to happen than the weariness of experience gone by. She was weary, not because of the past, but because the fairy theatre of life still kept its curtain down, and forced her to play over and over again the impatient overture of her dreams.
I have no doubt that it was largely nervousness that kept the mysterious playwright so long fumbling behind the scenes, for it was obvious that it would be no ordinary sort of play, no every-day domestic drama, that would satisfy this young lady, to whom life had given, by way of prologue, the inestimable blessing of wealth, and the privilege, as a matter of course, of choosing as she would among the grooms (that is, the bride-grooms) of the romantic British aristocracy.
She had made youth's common mistake of beginning life with books, which can only be used without danger by those who are in a position to test their statements. Youth naturally believes everything that is told it, especially in books.
Now, books are simply professional liars about life, and the books that are best worth reading are those which lie the most beautifully. Yet, in fairness, we must add that they are liars, not with intent to mislead, but merely with the tenderest purpose to console. They are the good Samaritans that find us robbed of all our dreams by the roadside of life, bleeding and weeping and desolate; and such is their skill and wealth and goodness of heart, that they not only heal up our wounds, but restore to us the lost property of our dreams, on one condition,—that we never travel with them again in the daylight.
A library is a better world, built by the brains and hearts of poets and dreamers, as a refuge from the real world outside; and in it alone is to be found the land of milk and honey which it promises.
"Milk and honey" would have been an appropriate inscription for the delicious little library which parents who, I surmised, doted on Nicolete in vain, had allowed her to build in a wild woodland corner of her ancestral park, half a mile away from the great house, where, for all its corridors and galleries, she could never feel, at all events, spiritually alone. All that was most sugared and musical and generally delusive in the old library of her fathers had been brought out to this little woodland library, and to that nucleus of old leather-bound poets and romancers, long since dead, yet as alive and singing on their shelves as any bird on the sunny boughs outside, my young lady's private purse had added all that was most sugared and musical and generally delusive in the vellum bound Japanese-paper literature of our own luxurious day. Nor were poets and romancers from over sea—in their seeming simple paper covers, but with, oh, such complicated and subtle insides!—absent from the court which Nicolete held here in the greenwood. Never was such a nest of singing-birds. All day long, to the ear of the spirit, there was in this little library a sound of harping and singing and the telling of tales,—songs and tales of a world that never was, yet shall ever be. Here day by day Nicolete fed her young soul on the nightingale's-tongues of literature, and put down her book only to listen to the nightingale's-tongues outside. Yea, sun, moon, and stars were all in the conspiracy to lie to her of the loveliness of the world and the good intentions of life. And now, thus unexpectedly, I found myself joining the nefarious conspiracy. Ah, well! was I not twenty myself, and full of dreams!