Title: The Certain Hour

Author: James Branch Cabell

Language: English

THE CERTAIN HOUR

(Dizain des Poëtes)

By

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

"Criticism, whatever may be its

pretensions, never does more than to

define the impression which is made upon

it at a certain moment by a work wherein

the writer himself noted the impression

of the world which he received at a

certain hour."

NEW YORK

ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY

1916

Copyright, 1916, by Robert M. McBride & Co.

Copyright, 1915, by McBride, Nast & Co.

Copyright, 1914, by the Sewanee Review Quarterly

Copyright, 1913, by John Adams Thayer Corporation

Copyright, 1912, by Argonaut Publishing Company

Copyright, 1911, by Red Book Corporation

Copyright, 1909, by Harper and Brothers

TO

ROBERT GAMBLE CABELL II

In Dedication of The Certain Hour

    Sad hours and glad hours,
and all hours, pass over;

One thing unshaken stays:

Life, that hath Death for spouse, hath Chance for lover;

Whereby decays

    Each thing save one
thing:—mid this strife diurnal

Of hourly change begot,

Love that is God-born, bides as God eternal,

And changes not;—

    Nor means a tinseled dream
pursuing lovers

Find altered by-and-bye,

When, with possession, time anon discovers

Trapped dreams must die,—

    For he that visions God, of
mankind gathers

One manlike trait alone,

And reverently imputes to Him a father's

Love for his son.

CONTENTS

"Ballad
of the Double-Soul"

AUCTORIAL
INDUCTION

BELHS
CAVALIERS

BALTHAZAR'S
DAUGHTER

JUDITH'S
CREED

CONCERNING
CORINNA

OLIVIA'S
POTTAGE

A
BROWN WOMAN

PRO
HONORIA

THE
IRRESISTIBLE OGLE

A
PRINCESS OF GRUB STREET

THE
LADY OF ALL OUR DREAMS

"Ballad
of Plagiary"

BALLAD OF THE DOUBLE-SOUL

"Les Dieux, qui trop aiment ses faceties
cruelles"—PAUL VERVILLE.

In the beginning the Gods made man, and fashioned
the sky and the sea,

And the earth's fair face for man's dwelling-place, and

    this was the Gods' decree:—

"Lo, We have given to man five wits: he discerneth
folly and sin;

He is swift to deride all the world outside, and blind

    to the world within:

"So that man may make sport and amuse Us, in
battling

    for phrases or pelf,

Now that each may know what forebodeth woe to his

    neighbor, and not to himself."

Yet some have the Gods forgotten,—or is it that
subtler mirth

The Gods extort of a certain sort of folk that cumber the earth?

For this is the song of the double-soul,
distortedly two in one,—

Of the wearied eyes that still behold the fruit ere the seed be
sown,

And derive affright for the nearing night from the light

    of the noontide sun.

For one that with hope in the morning set forth, and
knew never a fear,

They have linked with another whom omens bother; and

    he whispers in one's ear.

And one is fain to be climbing where only angels
have trod,

But is fettered and tied to another's side who fears that

    it might look odd.

And one would worship a woman whom all perfections
dower,

But the other smiles at transparent wiles; and he quotes

    from Schopenhauer.

Thus two by two we wrangle and blunder about the
earth,

And that body we share we may not spare; but the Gods

have need of mirth.

So this is the song of the double-soul,
distortedly two in one.—

Of the wearied eyes that still behold the fruit ere the seed be
sown,

And derive affright for the nearing night from the light

    of the noontide sun.

AUCTORIAL INDUCTION

"These questions, so long as they remain
with the Muses, may very well be unaccompanied with severity, for where
there is no other end of contemplation and inquiry but that of pastime
alone, the understanding is not oppressed; but after the Muses have
given over their riddles to Sphinx,—that is, to practise, which urges
and impels to action, choice and determination,—then it is that they
become torturing, severe and trying."

From the dawn of the day to the dusk he toiled,

Shaping fanciful playthings, with tireless hands,—

Useless trumpery toys; and, with vaulting heart,

Gave them unto all peoples, who mocked at him,

Trampled on them, and soiled them, and went their way.

Then he toiled from the morn to the dusk again,

Gave his gimcracks to peoples who mocked at him,

Trampled on them, deriding, and went their way.

Thus he labors, and loudly they jeer at him;—

That is, when they remember he still exists.

Who, you ask, is this fellow?—What
matter names?

He is only a scribbler who is content.



FELIX KENNASTON.—The Toy-Maker.

AUCTORIAL INDUCTION

WHICH (AFTER SOME BRIEF DISCOURSE OF FIRES AND
FRYING-PANS) ELUCIDATES THE INEXPEDIENCY OF PUBLISHING THIS BOOK, AS
WELL AS THE NECESSITY OF WRITING IT: AND THENCE PASSES TO A MODEST
DEFENSE OF MORE VITAL THEMES.

The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the
saying runs, old as the hills—and as immortal. Questionless, there was
many a serviceable brick wasted in Nineveh because finicky persons must
needs be deleting here and there a phrase in favor of its cuneatic
synonym; and it is not improbable that when the outworn sun expires in
clinkers its final ray will gild such zealots tinkering with their
"style." Some few there must be in every age and every land of whom life
claims nothing very insistently save that they write perfectly of
beautiful happenings.

Yet, that the work of a man of letters is almost always a
congenial product of his day and environment, is a contention as lacking
in novelty as it is in the need of any upholding here. Nor is the
rationality of that axiom far to seek; for a man of genuine literary
genius, since he possesses a temperament whose susceptibilities are of
wider area than those of any other, is inevitably of all people the one
most variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he, in
consequence, who of all people most faithfully and compactly exhibits
the impress of his times and his times' tendencies, not merely in his
writings—where it conceivably might be just predetermined
affectation—but in his personality.

Such being the assumption upon which this volume is builded, it
appears only equitable for the architect frankly to indicate his
cornerstone. Hereinafter you have an attempt to depict a special
temperament—one in essence "literary"—as very variously molded by
diverse eras and as responding in proportion with its ability to the
demands of a certain hour.

In proportion with its ability, be it repeated, since its ability
is singularly hampered. For, apart from any ticklish temporal
considerations, be it remembered, life is always claiming of this
temperament's possessor that he write perfectly of beautiful happenings.

To disregard this vital longing, and flatly to stifle the innate
striving toward artistic creation, is to become (as with Wycherley and
Sheridan) a man who waives, however laughingly, his sole apology for
existence. The proceeding is paltry enough, in all conscience; and yet,
upon the other side, there is much positive danger in giving to the
instinct a loose rein. For in that event the familiar circumstances of
sedate and wholesome living cannot but seem, like paintings viewed too
near, to lose in gusto and winsomeness. Desire, perhaps a craving
hunger, awakens for the impossible. No emotion, whatever be its
sincerity, is endured without a side-glance toward its capabilities for
being written about. The world, in short, inclines to appear an ill-lit
mine, wherein one quarries gingerly amidst an abiding loneliness (as
with Pope and Ufford and Sire Raimbaut)—and wherein one very often is
allured into unsavory alleys (as with Herrick and Alessandro de
Medici)—in search of that raw material which loving labor will
transshape into comeliness.

Such, if it be allowed to shift the metaphor, are the treacherous
by-paths of that admirably policed highway whereon the well-groomed and
well-bitted Pegasi of Vanderhoffen and Charteris (in his later manner)
trot stolidly and safely toward oblivion. And the result of wandering
afield is of necessity a tragedy, in that the deviator's life, if not as
an artist's quite certainly as a human being's, must in the outcome be
adjudged a failure.

Hereinafter, then, you have an attempt to depict a special
temperament—one in essence "literary"—as very variously molded by
diverse eras and as responding in proportion with its ability to the
demands of a certain hour.

II

And this much said, it is permissible to hope, at least, that
here and there some reader may be found not wholly blind to this book's
goal, whatever be his opinion as to this book's success in reaching it.
Yet many honest souls there be among us average-novel-readers in whose
eyes this volume must rest content to figure as a collection of short
stories having naught in common beyond the feature that each deals with
the affaires du coeur of a poet.

Such must always be the book's interpretation by mental
indolence. The fact is incontestable; and this fact in itself may be
taken as sufficient to establish the inexpediency of publishing The
Certain Hour. For that "people will not buy a volume of short stories"
is notorious to all publishers. To offset the axiom there are no doubt
incongruous phenomena—ranging from the continued popularity of the Bible
to the present general esteem of Mr. Kipling, and embracing the rather
unaccountable vogue of "O. Henry";—but, none the less, the superstition
has its force.

Here intervenes the multifariousness of man, pointed out
somewhere by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, which enables the individual to be
at once a vegetarian, a golfer, a vestryman, a blond, a mammal, a
Democrat, and an immortal spirit. As a rational person, one may
debonairly consider The Certain Hour possesses as large license
to look like a volume of short stories as, say, a backgammon-board has
to its customary guise of a two-volume history; but as an
average-novel-reader, one must vote otherwise. As an
average-novel-reader, one must condemn the very book which, as a
seasoned scribbler, one was moved to write through long consideration of
the drama already suggested—that immemorial drama of the desire to write
perfectly of beautiful happenings, and the obscure martyrdom to which
this desire solicits its possessor.

Now, clearly, the struggle of a special temperament with a fixed
force does not forthwith begin another story when the locale of combat
shifts. The case is, rather, as when—with certainly an intervening
change of apparel—Pompey fights Caesar at both Dyrrachium and Pharsalus,
or as when General Grant successively encounters General Lee at the
Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor and Appomattox. The combatants
remain unchanged, the question at issue is the same, the tragedy has
continuity. And even so, from the time of Sire Raimbaut to that of John
Charteris has a special temperament heart-hungrily confronted an ageless
problem: at what cost now, in this fleet hour of my vigor, may one write
perfectly of beautiful happenings?

Thus logic urges, with pathetic futility, inasmuch as we
average-novel-readers are profoundly indifferent to both logic and good
writing. And always the fact remains that to the mentally indolent this
book may well seem a volume of disconnected short stories. All of us
being more or less mentally indolent, this possibility constitutes a
dire fault.

Three other damning objections will readily obtrude themselves: The
Certain Hour deals with past epochs—beginning before the introduction of
dinner-forks, and ending at that remote quaint period when people used
to waltz and two-step—dead eras in which we average-novel-readers are
not interested; The Certain Hour assumes an appreciable amount of
culture and information on its purchaser's part, which we
average-novel-readers either lack or, else, are unaccustomed to employ
in connection with reading for pastime; and—in our eyes the crowning
misdemeanor—The Certain Hour is not "vital."

Having thus candidly confessed these faults committed as the
writer of this book, it is still possible in human multifariousness to
consider their enormity, not merely in this book, but in fictional
reading-matter at large, as viewed by an average-novel-reader—by a
representative of that potent class whose preferences dictate the nature
and main trend of modern American literature. And to do this, it may be,
throws no unsalutary sidelight upon the still-existent problem: at what
cost, now, may one attempt to write perfectly of beautiful happenings?

III

Indisputably the most striking defect of this modern American
literature is the fact that the production of anything at all resembling
literature is scarcely anywhere apparent. Innumerable printing-presses,
instead, are turning out a vast quantity of reading-matter, the candidly
recognized purpose of which is to kill time, and which—it has been
asserted, though perhaps too sweepingly—ought not to be vended over
book-counters, but rather in drugstores along with the other narcotics.

It is begging the question to protest that the class of people
who a generation ago read nothing now at least read novels, and to
regard this as a change for the better. By similar logic it would be
more wholesome to breakfast off laudanum than to omit the meal entirely.
The nineteenth century, in fact, by making education popular, has
produced in America the curious spectacle of a reading-public with
essentially nonliterary tastes. Formerly, better books were published,
because they were intended for persons who turned to reading through a
natural bent of mind; whereas the modern American novel of commerce is
addressed to us average people who read, when we read at all, in
violation of every innate instinct.

Such grounds as yet exist for hopefulness on the part of those
who cordially care for belles lettres are to be found elsewhere
than in the crowded market-places of fiction, where genuine intelligence
panders on all sides to ignorance and indolence. The phrase may seem to
have no very civil ring; but reflection will assure the fair-minded that
two indispensable requisites nowadays of a pecuniarily successful novel
are, really, that it make no demand upon the reader's imagination, and
that it rigorously refrain from assuming its reader to possess any
particular information on any subject whatever. The author who writes
over the head of the public is the most dangerous enemy of his
publisher—and the most insidious as well, because so many publishers are
in private life interested in literary matters, and would readily permit
this personal foible to influence the exercise of their vocation were it
possible to do so upon the preferable side of bankruptcy.

But publishers, among innumerable other conditions, must weigh
the fact that no novel which does not deal with modern times is ever
really popular among the serious-minded. It is difficult to imagine a
tale whose action developed under the rule of the Caesars or the
Merovingians being treated as more than a literary hors d'oeuvre.
We purchasers of "vital" novels know nothing about the period, beyond a
hazy association of it with the restrictions of the schoolroom; our
sluggish imaginations instinctively rebel against the exertion of
forming any notion of such a period; and all the human nature that
exists even in serious-minded persons is stirred up to resentment
against the book's author for presuming to know more than a potential
patron. The book, in fine, simply irritates the serious-minded person;
and she—for it is only women who willingly brave the terrors of
department-stores, where most of our new books are bought nowadays—quite
naturally puts it aside in favor of some keen and daring study of
American life that is warranted to grip the reader. So, modernity of
scene is everywhere necessitated as an essential qualification for a
book's discussion at the literary evenings of the local woman's club;
and modernity of scene, of course, is almost always fatal to the
permanent worth of fictitious narrative.

It may seem banal here to recall the truism that first-class art
never reproduces its surroundings; but such banality is often justified
by our human proneness to shuffle over the fact that many truisms are
true. And this one is pre-eminently indisputable: that what mankind has
generally agreed to accept as first-class art in any of the varied forms
of fictitious narrative has never been a truthful reproduction of the
artist's era. Indeed, in the higher walks of fiction art has never
reproduced anything, but has always dealt with the facts and laws of
life as so much crude material which must be transmuted into comeliness.
When Shakespeare pronounced his celebrated dictum about art's holding
the mirror up to nature, he was no doubt alluding to the circumstance
that a mirror reverses everything which it reflects.

Nourishment for much wildish speculation, in fact, can be got by
considering what the world's literature would be, had its authors
restricted themselves, as do we Americans so sedulously—and
unavoidably—to writing of contemporaneous happenings. In fiction-making
no author of the first class since Homer's infancy has ever in his
happier efforts concerned himself at all with the great "problems" of
his particular day; and among geniuses of the second rank you will find
such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are distorted into
enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broad humor of a Dickens
or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such cases as the latter two
writers, however, we have an otherwise competent artist handicapped by a
personality so marked that, whatever he may nominally write about, the
result is, above all else, an exposure of the writer's idiosyncrasies.
Then, too, the laws of any locale wherein Mr. Pickwick achieves a
competence in business, or of a society wherein Vautrin becomes chief of
police, are upon the face of it extra-mundane. It suffices that, as a
general rule, in fiction-making the true artist finds an ample, if
restricted, field wherein the proper functions of the preacher, or the
ventriloquist, or the photographer, or of the public prosecutor, are
exercised with equal lack of grace.

Besides, in dealing with contemporary life a novelist is goaded
into too many pusillanimous concessions to plausibility. He no longer
moves with the gait of omnipotence. It was very different in the palmy
days when Dumas was free to play at ducks and drakes with history, and
Victor Hugo to reconstruct the whole system of English government, and
Scott to compel the sun to set in the east, whenever such minor changes
caused to flow more smoothly the progress of the tale these giants had
in hand. These freedoms are not tolerated in American noveldom, and only
a few futile "high-brows" sigh in vain for Thackeray's "happy harmless
Fableland, where these things are." The majority of us are deep in
"vital" novels. Nor is the reason far to seek.

IV

One hears a great deal nowadays concerning "vital" books. Their
authors have been widely praised on very various grounds. Oddly enough,
however, the writers of these books have rarely been commended for the
really praiseworthy charity evinced therein toward that large
long-suffering class loosely describable as the average-novel-reader.

Yet, in connection with this fact, it is worthy of more than
passing note that no great while ago the New York Times'
carefully selected committee, in picking out the hundred best books
published during a particular year, declared as to novels—"a 'best'
book, in our opinion, is one that raises an important question, or
recurs to a vital theme and pronounces upon it what in some sense is a
last word." Now this definition is not likely ever to receive more
praise than it deserves. Cavilers may, of course, complain that actually
to write the last word on any subject is a feat reserved for the
Recording Angel's unique performance on judgment Day. Even setting that
objection aside, it is undeniable that no work of fiction published of
late in America corresponds quite so accurately to the terms of this
definition as do the multiplication tables. Yet the multiplication
tables are not without their claims to applause as examples of
straightforward narrative. It is, also, at least permissible to consider
that therein the numeral five, say, where it figures as protagonist,
unfolds under the stress of its varying adventures as opulent a
development of real human nature as does, through similar ups-and-downs,
the Reverend John Hodder in The Inside of the Cup. It is equally
allowable to find the less simple evolution of the digit seven more
sympathetic, upon the whole, than those of Undine Spragg in The
Custom of the Country. But, even so, this definition of what may now,
authoritatively, be ranked as a "best novel" is an honest and noteworthy
severance from misleading literary associations such as have too long
befogged our notions about reading-matter. It points with emphasis
toward the altruistic obligations of tale-tellers to be "vital."

For we average-novel-readers—we average people, in a word—are
now, as always, rather pathetically hungry for "vital" themes, such
themes as appeal directly to our everyday observation and prejudices.
Did the decision rest with us all novelists would be put under bond to
confine themselves forevermore to themes like these.

As touches the appeal to everyday observation, it is an old
story, at least coeval with Mr. Crummles' not uncelebrated pumps and
tubs, if not with the grapes of Zeuxis, how unfailingly in art we
delight to recognize the familiar. A novel whose scene of action is
explicit will always interest the people of that locality, whatever the
book's other pretensions to consideration. Given simultaneously a
photograph of Murillo's rendering of The Virgin Crowned Queen of
Heaven and a photograph of a governor's installation in our State
capital, there is no one of us but will quite naturally look at the
latter first, in order to see if in it some familiar countenance be
recognizable. And thus, upon a larger scale, the twentieth century is,
pre-eminently, interested in the twentieth century.

It is all very well to describe our average-novel-readers'
dislike of Romanticism as "the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face
in a glass." It is even within the scope of human dunderheadedness again
to point out here that the supreme artists in literature have precisely
this in common, and this alone, that in their masterworks they have
avoided the "vital" themes of their day with such circumspection as
lesser folk reserve for the smallpox. The answer, of course, in either
case, is that the "vital" novel, the novel which peculiarly appeals to
us average-novel-readers, has nothing to do with literature. There is
between these two no more intelligent connection than links the paint
Mr. Sargent puts on canvas and the paint Mr. Dockstader puts on his
face.

Literature is made up of the re-readable books, the books which
it is possible—for the people so constituted as to care for that sort of
thing—to read again and yet again with pleasure. Therefore, in
literature a book's subject is of astonishingly minor importance, and
its style nearly everything: whereas in books intended to be read for
pastime, and forthwith to be consigned at random to the wastebasket or
to the inmates of some charitable institute, the theme is of paramount
importance, and ought to be a serious one. The modern novelist owes it
to his public to select a "vital" theme which in itself will fix the
reader's attention by reason of its familiarity in the reader's everyday
life.

Thus, a lady with whose more candid opinions the writer of this
is more frequently favored nowadays than of old, formerly confessed to
having only one set rule when it came to investment in new
reading-matter—always to buy the Williamsons' last book. Her reason was
the perfectly sensible one that the Williamsons' plots used invariably
to pivot upon motor-trips, and she is an ardent automobilist. Since, as
of late, the Williamsons have seen fit to exercise their typewriter upon
other topics, they have as a matter of course lost her patronage.

This principle of selection, when you come to appraise it sanely,
is the sole intelligent method of dealing with reading-matter. It seems
here expedient again to state the peculiar problem that we
average-novel-readers have of necessity set the modern novelist—namely,
that his books must in the main appeal to people who read for pastime,
to people who read books only under protest and only when they have no
other employment for that particular half-hour.

Now, reading for pastime is immensely simplified when the book's
theme is some familiar matter of the reader's workaday life, because at
outset the reader is spared considerable mental effort. The motorist
above referred to, and indeed any average-novel-reader, can without
exertion conceive of the Williamsons' people in their automobiles.
Contrariwise, were these fictitious characters embarked in palankeens or
droshkies or jinrikishas, more or less intellectual exercise would be
necessitated on the reader's part to form a notion of the conveyance.
And we average-novel-readers do not open a book with the intention of
making a mental effort. The author has no right to expect of us an act
so unhabitual, we very poignantly feel. Our prejudices he is freely
chartered to stir up—if, lucky rogue, he can!—but he ought with
deliberation to recognize that it is precisely in order to avoid mental
effort that we purchase, or borrow, his book, and afterward discuss it.

Hence arises our heartfelt gratitude toward such novels as deal
with "vital" themes, with the questions we average-novel-readers
confront or make talk about in those happier hours of our existence
wherein we are not reduced to reading. Thus, a tale, for example,
dealing either with "feminism" or "white slavery" as the handiest
makeshift of spinsterdom—or with the divorce habit and plutocratic
iniquity in general, or with the probable benefits of converting
clergymen to Christianity, or with how much more than she knows a
desirable mother will tell her children—finds the book's tentative
explorer, just now, amply equipped with prejudices, whether acquired by
second thought or second hand, concerning the book's topic. As
endurability goes, reading the book rises forthwith almost to the level
of an afternoon-call where there is gossip about the neighbors and
Germany's future. We average-novel-readers may not, in either case,
agree with the opinions advanced; but at least our prejudices are
aroused, and we are interested.

And these "vital" themes awake our prejudices at the cost of a
minimum—if not always, as when Miss Corelli guides us, with a positively
negligible— tasking of our mental faculties. For such exemption we
average-novel-readers cannot but be properly grateful. Nay, more than
this: provided the novelist contrive to rouse our prejudices, it matters
with us not at all whether afterward they be soothed or harrowed. To
implicate our prejudices somehow, to raise in us a partizanship in the
tale's progress, is our sole request. Whether this consummation be
brought about through an arraignment of some social condition which we
personally either advocate or reprehend—the attitude weighs little—or
whether this interest be purchased with placidly driveling preachments
of generally "uplifting" tendencies—vaguely titillating that vague
intention which exists in us all of becoming immaculate as soon as it is
perfectly convenient—the personal prejudices of us average-novel-readers
are not lightly lulled again to sleep.

In fact, the jealousy of any human prejudice against hinted
encroachment may safely be depended upon to spur us through an
astonishing number of pages—for all that it has of late been complained
among us, with some show of extenuation, that our original intent in
beginning certain of the recent "vital" novels was to kill time, rather
than eternity. And so, we average-novel-readers plod on jealously to the
end, whether we advance (to cite examples already somewhat of yesterday)
under the leadership of Mr. Upton Sinclair aspersing the integrity of
modern sausages and millionaires, or of Mr. Hall Caine saying about
Roman Catholics what ordinary people would hesitate to impute to their
relatives by marriage—or whether we be more suavely allured onward by
Mrs. Florence Barclay, or Mr. Sydnor Harrison, with ingenuous
indorsements of the New Testament and the inherent womanliness of women.

The "vital" theme, then, let it be repeated, has two inestimable
advantages which should commend it to all novelists: first, it spares us
average-novel-readers any preliminary orientation, and thereby mitigates
the mental exertion of reading; and secondly, it appeals to our
prejudices, which we naturally prefer to exercise, and are accustomed to
exercise, rather than our mental or idealistic faculties. The novelist
who conscientiously bears these two facts in mind is reasonably sure of
his reward, not merely in pecuniary form, but in those higher fields
wherein he harvests his chosen public's honest gratitude and affection.

For we average-novel-readers are quite frequently reduced by
circumstances to self-entrustment to the resources of the novelist, as
to those of the dentist. Our latter-day conditions, as we cannot but
recognize, necessitate the employment of both artists upon occasion. And
with both, we average-novel-readers, we average people, are most
grateful when they make the process of resorting to them as easy and
unirritating as may be possible.

V

So much for the plea of us average-novel-readers; and our plea,
we think, is rational. We are "in the market" for a specified article;
and human ingenuity, co-operating with human nature, will inevitably
insure the manufacture of that article as long as any general demand for
it endures.

Meanwhile, it is small cause for grief that the purchaser of
American novels prefers Central Park to any "wood near Athens," and is
more at home in the Tenderloin than in Camelot. People whose tastes
happen to be literary are entirely too prone to too much long-faced
prattle about literature, which, when all is said, is never a
controlling factor in anybody's life. The automobile and the telephone,
the accomplishments of Mr. Edison and Mr. Burbank, and it would be
permissible to add of Mr. Rockefeller, influence nowadays, in one
fashion or another, every moment of every living American's existence;
whereas had America produced, instead, a second Milton or a Dante, it
would at most have caused a few of us to spend a few spare evenings
rather differently.

Besides, we know—even we average-novel-readers—that America is in
fact producing her enduring literature day by day, although, as rarely
fails to be the case, those who are contemporaneous with the makers of
this literature cannot with any certainty point them out. To voice a
hoary truism, time alone is the test of "vitality." In our present flood
of books, as in any other flood, it is the froth and scum which shows
most prominently. And the possession of "vitality," here as elsewhere,
postulates that its possessor must ultimately perish.

Nay, by the time these printed pages are first read as printed
pages, allusion to those modern authors whom these pages cite—the
pre-eminent literary personages of that hour wherein these pages were
written—will inevitably have come to savor somewhat of antiquity: so
that sundry references herein to the "vital" books now most in vogue
will rouse much that vague shrugging recollection as wakens, say, at a
mention of Dorothy Vernon or Three Weeks or Beverly
of Graustark. And while at first glance it might seem expedient—in
revising the last proof-sheets of these pages—somewhat to "freshen them
up" by substituting, for the books herein referred to, the "vital" and
more widely talked-of novels of the summer of 1916, the task would be
but wasted labor; since even these fascinating chronicles, one
comprehends forlornly, must needs be equally obsolete by the time these
proof-sheets have been made into a volume. With malice aforethought,
therefore, the books and authors named herein stay those which all of
three years back our reviewers and advertising pages, with perfect
gravity, acclaimed as of enduring importance. For the quaintness of that
opinion, nowadays, may profitably round the moral that there is really
nothing whereto one may fittingly compare a successful contribution to
"vital" reading-matter, as touches evanescence.

And this is as it should be. Tout passe.—L'art robust seul
a l'éternité, precisely as Gautier points out, with bracing
common-sense; and it is excellent thus to comprehend that to-day, as
always, only through exercise of the auctorial virtues of distinction
and clarity, of beauty and symmetry, of tenderness and truth and
urbanity, may a man in reason attempt to insure his books against
oblivion's voracity.

Yet the desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as
the saying runs, old as the hills—and as immortal. Questionless, there
was many a serviceable brick wasted in Nineveh because finicky persons
must needs be deleting here and there a phrase in favor of its cuneatic
synonym; and it is not improbable that when the outworn sun expires in
clinkers its final ray will gild such zealots tinkering with their
"style." This, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter. Some few
there must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothing
very insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful happenings.
And even we average-novel-readers know it is such folk who are to-day
making in America that portion of our literature which may hope for
permanency.

Dumbarton Grange

    1914-1916

BELHS CAVALIERS

"For this RAIMBAUT DE VAQUIERAS lived at a
time when prolonged habits of extra-mundane contemplation, combined with
the decay of real knowledge, were apt to volatilize the thoughts and
aspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, and to lend
a false air of mysticism to love.… It is as if the intellect and the
will had become used to moving paralytically among visions, dreams, and
mystic terrors, weighed down with torpor."

Fair friend, since that hour I took leave of thee

I have not slept nor stirred from off my knee,

But prayed alway to God, S. Mary's Son,

To give me back my true companion;

        And soon it will be
Dawn.

Fair friend, at parting, thy behest to me

Was that all sloth I should eschew and flee,

And keep good Watch until the Night was done:

Now must my Song and Service pass for none?

        For soon it will be
Dawn.



RAIMBAUT DE VAQUIERAS.—Aubade, from F. York Powell's version.

BELHS CAVALIERS

You may read elsewhere of the long feud that was between
Guillaume de Baux, afterward Prince of Orange, and his kinsman Raimbaut
de Vaquieras. They were not reconciled until their youth was dead. Then,
when Messire Raimbaut returned from battling against the Turks and the
Bulgarians, in the 1,210th year from man's salvation, the Archbishop of
Rheims made peace between the two cousins; and, attended by Makrisi, a
converted Saracen who had followed the knight's fortunes for well nigh a
quarter of a century, the Sire de Vaquieras rode homeward.

Many slain men were scattered along the highway when he came
again into Venaissin, in April, after an absence of thirty years. The
crows whom his passing disturbed were too sluggish for long flights and
many of them did not heed him at all. Guillaume de Baux was now
undisputed master of these parts, although, as this host of mute, hacked
and partially devoured witnesses attested, the contest had been dubious
for a while: but now Lovain of the Great-Tooth, Prince Guillaume's last
competitor, was captured; the forces of Lovain were scattered; and of
Lovain's lieutenants only Mahi de Vernoil was unsubdued.

Prince Guillaume laughed a little when he told his kinsman of the
posture of affairs, as more loudly did Guillaume's gross son, Sire
Philibert. But Madona Biatritz did not laugh. She was the widow of
Guillaume's dead brother—Prince Conrat, whom Guillaume succeeded—and it
was in her honor that Raimbaut had made those songs which won him
eminence as a practitioner of the Gay Science.

Biatritz said, "It is a long while since we two met."

He that had been her lover all his life said, "Yes."

She was no longer the most beautiful of women, no longer his
be-hymned Belhs Cavaliers—you may read elsewhere how he came to call her
that in all his canzons—but only a fine and gracious stranger. It was
uniformly gray, that soft and plentiful hair, where once such gold had
flamed as dizzied him to think of even now; there was no crimson in
these thinner lips; and candor would have found her eyes less wonderful
than those Raimbaut had dreamed of very often among an alien and hostile
people. But he lamented nothing, and to him she was as ever Heaven's
most splendid miracle.

"Yes," said this old Raimbaut,—"and even to-day we have not
reclaimed the Sepulcher as yet. Oh, I doubt if we shall ever win it, now
that your brother and my most dear lord is dead." Both thought a while
of Boniface de Montferrat, their playmate once, who yesterday was King
of Thessalonica and now was so much Macedonian dust.

She said: "This week the Prince sent envoys to my nephew.… And so
you have come home again——" Color had surged into her time-worn face,
and as she thought of things done long ago this woman's eyes were like
the eyes of his young Biatritz. She said: "You never married?"

He answered: "No, I have left love alone. For Love prefers to
take rather than to give; against a single happy hour he balances a
hundred miseries, and he appraises one pleasure to be worth a thousand
pangs. Pardieu, let this immortal usurer contrive as may seem well to
him, for I desire no more of his bounty or of his penalties."

"No, we wish earnestly for nothing, either good or bad," said
Dona Biatritz—"we who have done with loving."

They sat in silence, musing over ancient happenings, and not
looking at each other, until the Prince came with his guests, who seemed
to laugh too heartily.

Guillaume's frail arm was about his kinsman, and Guillaume
chuckled over jests and by-words that had been between the cousins as
children. Raimbaut found them no food for laughter now. Guillaume told
all of Raimbaut's oath of fealty, and of how these two were friends and
their unnatural feud was forgotten. "For we grow old,—eh, maker of
songs?" he said; "and it is time we made our peace with Heaven, since we
are not long for this world."

"Yes," said the knight; "oh yes, we both grow old." He thought of
another April evening, so long ago, when this Guillaume de Baux had
stabbed him in a hedged field near Calais, and had left him under a
hawthorn bush for dead; and Raimbaut wondered that there was no anger in
his heart. "We are friends now," he said. Biatritz, whom these two had
loved, and whose vanished beauty had been the spur of their long enmity,
sat close to them, and hardly seemed to listen.

Thus the evening passed and every one was merry, because the
Prince had overcome Lovain of the Great-Tooth, and was to punish the
upstart on the morrow. But Raimbaut de Vaquieras, a spent fellow, a
derelict, barren of aim now that the Holy Wars were over, sat in this
unfamiliar place—where when he was young he had laughed as a cock
crows!—and thought how at the last he had crept home to die as a
dependent on his cousin's bounty.

Thus the evening passed, and at its end Makrisi followed the
troubadour to his regranted fief of Vaquieras. This was a chill and
brilliant night, swayed by a frozen moon so powerful that no stars
showed in the unclouded heavens, and everywhere the bogs were curdled
with thin ice. An obdurate wind swept like a knife-blade across a world
which even in its spring seemed very old.

"This night is bleak and evil," Makrisi said. He rode a coffin's
length behind his master. "It is like Prince Guillaume, I think. What
man will sorrow when dawn comes?"

Raimbaut de Vaquieras replied: "Always dawn comes at last,
Makrisi."

"It comes the more quickly, messire, when it is prompted."

The troubadour only smiled at words which seemed so meaningless.
He did not smile when later in the night Makrisi brought Mahi de
Vernoil, disguised as a mendicant friar. This outlaw pleaded with Sire
Raimbaut to head the tatters of Lovain's army, and showed Raimbaut how
easy it would be to wrest Venaissin from Prince Guillaume. "We cannot
save Lovain," de Vemoil said, "for Guillaume has him fast. But Venaissin
is very proud of you, my tres beau sire. Ho, maker of world-famous
songs! stout champion of the faith! my men and I will now make you
Prince of Orange in place of the fiend who rules us. You may then at
your convenience wed Madona Biatritz, that most amiable lady whom you
have loved so long. And by the Cross! you may do this before the week is
out."

The old knight answered: "It is true that I have always served
Madona Biatritz, who is of matchless worth. I might not, therefore,
presume to call myself any longer her servant were my honor stained in
any particular. Oh no, Messire de Vernoil, an oath is an oath. I have
this day sworn fealty to Guillaume de Baux."

Then after other talk Raimbaut dismissed the fierce-eyed little
man. The freebooter growled curses as he went. On a sudden he whistled,
like a person considering, and he began to chuckle.

Raimbaut said, more lately: "Zoraida left no wholesome legacy in
you, Makrisi." This Zoraida was a woman the knight had known in
Constantinople—a comely outlander who had killed herself because of Sire
Raimbaut's highflown avoidance of all womankind except the mistress of
his youth.

"Nay, save only in loving you too well, messire, was Zoraida a
wise woman, notably.… But this is outworn talk, the prattle of Cain's
babyhood. As matters were, you did not love Zoraida. So Zoraida died.
Such is the custom in my country."

"You trouble me, Makrisi. Your eyes are like blown coals.… Yet
you have served me long and faithfully. You know that mine was ever the
vocation of dealing honorably in battle among emperors, and of spreading
broadcast the rumor of my valor, and of achieving good by my sword's
labors. I have lived by warfare. Long, long ago, since I derived no
benefit from love, I cried farewell to it."

"Ay," said Makrisi. "Love makes a demi-god of all—just for an
hour. Such hours as follow we devote to the concoction of
sleeping-draughts." He laughed, and very harshly.

And Raimbaut did not sleep that night because this life of ours
seemed such a piece of tangle-work as he had not the skill to unravel.
So he devoted the wakeful hours to composition of a planh, lamenting
vanished youth and that Biatritz whom the years had stolen.

Then on the ensuing morning, after some talk about the new
campaign, Prince Guillaume de Baux leaned back in his high chair and
said, abruptly:

"In perfect candor, you puzzle your liege-lord. For you loathe me
and you still worship my sister-in-law, an unattainable princess. In
these two particulars you display such wisdom as would inevitably prompt
you to make an end of me. Yet, what the devil! you, the time-battered
vagabond, decline happiness and a kingdom to boot because of yesterday's
mummery in the cathedral! because of a mere promise given! Yes, I have
my spies in every rat-hole. I am aware that my barons hate me, and hate
Philibert almost as bitterly,—and that, in fine, a majority of my barons
would prefer to see you Prince in my unstable place, on account of your
praiseworthy molestations of heathenry. Oh, yes, I understand my barons
perfectly. I flatter myself I understand everybody in Venaissin save
you."

Raimbaut answered: "You and I are not alike."

"No, praise each and every Saint!" said the Prince of Orange,
heartily. "And yet, I am not sure——" He rose, for his sight had failed
him so that he could not distinctly see you except when he spoke with
head thrown back, as though he looked at you over a wall. "For instance,
do you understand that I hold Biatritz here as a prisoner, because her
dower-lands are necessary to me, and that I intend to marry her as soon
as Pope Innocent grants me a dispensation?"

"All Venaissin knows that. Yes, you have always gained everything
which you desired in this world, Guillaume. Yet it was at a price, I
think."

"I am no haggler.… But you have never comprehended me, not even
in the old days when we loved each other. For instance, do you
understand—slave of a spoken word!—what it must mean to me to know that
at this hour to-morrow there will be alive in Venaissin no person whom I
hate?"

Messire de Vaquieras reflected. His was never a rapid mind. "Why,
no, I do not know anything about hatred," he said, at last. "I think I
never hated any person."

Guillaume de Baux gave a half-frantic gesture. "Now, Heaven send
you troubadours a clearer understanding of what sort of world we live
in——!" He broke off short and growled, "And yet—sometimes I envy you,
Raimbaut!"

They rode then into the Square of St. Michel to witness the death
of Lovain. Guillaume took with him his two new mistresses and all his
by-blows, each magnificently clothed, as if they rode to a festival.
Afterward, before the doors of Lovain's burning house, a rope was
fastened under Lovain's armpits, and he was gently lowered into a pot of
boiling oil. His feet cooked first, and then the flesh of his legs, and
so on upward, while Lovain screamed. Guillaume in a loose robe of green
powdered with innumerable silver crescents, sat watching, under a canopy
woven very long ago in Tarshish, and cunningly embroidered with the
figures of peacocks and apes and men with eagles' heads. His hands
caressed each other meditatively.

It was on the afternoon of this day, the last of April, that Sire
Raimbaut came upon Madona Biatritz about a strange employment in the
Ladies' Court. There was then a well in the midst of this enclosure,
with a granite ledge around it carven with lilies; and upon this she
leaned, looking down into the water. In her lap was a rope of pearls,
which one by one she unthreaded and dropped into the well.

Clear and warm the weather was. Without, forests were quickening,
branch by branch, as though a green flame smoldered from one bough to
another. Violets peeped about the roots of trees, and all the world was
young again. But here was only stone beneath their feet; and about them
showed the high walls and the lead-sheathed towers and the parapets and
the sunk windows of Guillaume's chateau. There was no color anywhere
save gray; and Raimbaut and Biatritz were aging people now. It seemed to
him that they were the wraiths of those persons who had loved each other
at Montferrat; and that the walls about them and the leaden devils who
grinned from every waterspout and all those dark and narrow windows were
only part of some magic picture, such as a sorceress may momentarily
summon out of smoke-wreaths, as he had seen Zoraida do very long ago.

This woman might have been a wraith in verity, for she was
clothed throughout in white, save for the ponderous gold girdle about
her middle. A white gorget framed the face which was so pinched and
shrewd and strange; and she peered into the well, smiling craftily.

"I was thinking death was like this well," said Biatritz, without
any cessation of her singular employment—"so dark that we may see
nothing clearly save one faint gleam which shows us, or which seems to
show us, where rest is. Yes, yes, this is that chaplet which you won in
the tournament at Montferrat when we were young. Pearls are the symbol
of tears, we read. But we had no time for reading then, no time for
anything except to be quite happy.… You saw this morning's work.
Raimbaut, were Satan to go mad he would be such a fiend as this
Guillaume de Baux who is our master!"

"Ay, the man is as cruel as my old opponent, Mourzoufle," Sire
Raimbaut answered, with a patient shrug. "It is a great mystery why such
persons should win all which they desire of this world. We can but
recognize that it is for some sufficient reason." Then he talked with
her concerning the aforementioned infamous emperor of the East, against
whom the old knight had fought, and of Enrico Dandolo and of King
Boniface, dead brother to Madona Biatritz, and of much remote,
outlandish adventuring oversea. Of Zoraida he did not speak. And
Biatritz, in turn, told him of that one child which she had borne her
husband, Prince Conrat—a son who died in infancy; and she spoke of this
dead baby, who living would have been their monarch, with a sweet
quietude that wrung the old knight's heart.

Thus these spent people sat and talked for a long while, the talk
veering anywhither just as chance directed. Blurred gusts of song and
laughter would come to them at times from the hall where Guillaume de
Baux drank with his courtiers, and these would break the tranquil flow
of speech. Then, unvexedly, the gentle voice of the speaker, were it his
or hers, would resume.

She said: "They laugh. We are not merry."

"No," he replied; "I am not often merry. There was a time when
love and its service kept me in continuous joy, as waters invest a fish.
I woke from a high dream.… And then, but for the fear of seeming
cowardly, I would have extinguished my life as men blow out a candle.
Vanity preserved me, sheer vanity!" He shrugged, spreading his hard lean
hands. "Belhs Cavaliers, I grudged my enemies the pleasure of seeing me
forgetful of valor and noble enterprises. And so, since then, I have
served Heaven, in default of you."

"I would not have it otherwise," she said, half as in wonder; "I
would not have you be quite sane like other men. And I believe," she
added—still with her wise smile—"you have derived a deal of comfort, off
and on, from being heart-broken."

He replied gravely: "A man may always, if he will but take the
pains, be tolerably content and rise in worth, and yet dispense with
love. He has only to guard himself against baseness, and concentrate his
powers on doing right. Thus, therefore, when fortune failed me, I
persisted in acting to the best of my ability. Though I had lost my
lands and my loved lady, I must hold fast to my own worth. Without a
lady and without acreage, it was yet in my power to live a cleanly and
honorable life; and I did not wish to make two evils out of one."

"Assuredly, I would not have you be quite sane like other men,"
she repeated. "It would seem that you have somehow blundered through
long years, preserving always the ignorance of a child, and the
blindness of a child. I cannot understand how this is possible; nor can
I keep from smiling at your high-flown notions; and yet,—I envy you,
Raimbaut."

Thus the afternoon passed, and the rule of Prince Guillaume was
made secure. His supper was worthily appointed, for Guillaume loved
color and music and beauty of every kind, and was on this, the day of
his triumph, in a prodigal humor. Many lackeys in scarlet brought in the
first course, to the sound of exultant drums and pipes, with a blast of
trumpets and a waving of banners, so that all hearts were uplifted, and
Guillaume jested with harsh laughter.

But Raimbaut de Vaquieras was not mirthful, for he was
remembering a boy whom he had known of very long ago. He was swayed by
an odd fancy, as the men sat over their wine, and jongleurs sang and
performed tricks for their diversion, that this boy, so frank and
excellent, as yet existed somewhere; and that the Raimbaut who moved
these shriveled hands before him, on the table there, was only a sad
dream of what had never been. It troubled him, too, to see how grossly
these soldiers ate, for, as a person of refinement, an associate of
monarchs, Sire Raimbaut when the dishes were passed picked up his meats
between the index- and the middle-finger of his left hand, and esteemed
it infamous manners to dip any other fingers into the gravy.

Guillaume had left the Warriors' Hall. Philibert was drunk, and
half the men-at-arms were snoring among the rushes, when at the height
of their festivity Makrisi came. He plucked his master by the sleeve.

A swarthy, bearded Angevin was singing. His song was one of old
Sire Raimbaut's famous canzons in honor of Belhs Cavaliers. The knave
was singing blithely:

Pus mos Belhs Cavaliers grazitz

E joys m'es lunhatz e faiditz,

Don no m' venra jamais conortz;

Fer qu'ees mayer l'ira e plus fortz—

The Saracen had said nothing. He showed a jeweled dagger, and the
knight arose and followed him out of that uproarious hall. Raimbaut was
bitterly perturbed, though he did not know for what reason, as Makrisi
led him through dark corridors to the dull-gleaming arras of Prince
Guillaume's apartments. In this corridor was an iron lamp swung from the
ceiling, and now, as this lamp swayed slightly and burned low, the tiny
flame leaped clear of the wick and was extinguished, and darkness rose
about them.

Raimbaut said: "What do you want of me? Whose blood is on that
knife?"

"Have you forgotten it is Walburga's Eve?" Makrisi said. Raimbaut
did not regret he could not see his servant's countenance. "Time was we
named it otherwise and praised another woman than a Saxon wench, but let
the new name stand. It is Walburga's Eve, that little, little hour of
evil! and all over the world surges the full tide of hell's desire, and
mischief is a-making now, apace, apace, apace. People moan in their
sleep, and many pillows are pricked by needles that have sewed a shroud.
Cry Eman hetan now, messire! for there are those to-night who
find the big cathedrals of your red-roofed Christian towns no more
imposing than so many pimples on a butler's chin, because they ride so
high, so very high, in this brave moonlight. Full-tide, full-tide!"
Makrisi said, and his voice jangled like a bell as he drew aside the
curtain so that the old knight saw into the room beyond.

It was a place of many lights, which, when thus suddenly
disclosed, blinded him at first. Then Raimbaut perceived Guillaume lying
a-sprawl across an oaken chest. The Prince had fallen backward and lay
in this posture, glaring at the intruders with horrible eyes which did
not move and would not ever move again. His breast was crimson, for some
one had stabbed him. A woman stood above the corpse and lighted yet
another candle while Raimbaut de Vaquieras waited motionless. A hand
meant only to bestow caresses brushed a lock of hair from this woman's
eyes while he waited. The movements of this hand were not uncertain, but
only quivered somewhat, as a taut wire shivers in the wind, while
Raimbaut de Vaquieras waited motionless.

"I must have lights, I must have a host of candles to assure me
past any questioning that he is dead. The man is of deep cunning. I
think he is not dead even now." Lightly Biatritz touched the Prince's
breast. "Strange, that this wicked heart should be so tranquil when
there is murder here to make it glad! Nay, very certainly this Guillaume
de Baux will rise and laugh in his old fashion before he speaks, and
then I shall be afraid. But I am not afraid as yet. I am afraid of
nothing save the dark, for one cannot be merry in the dark."

Raimbaut said: "This is Belhs Cavaliers whom I have loved my
whole life through. Therefore I do not doubt. Pardieu, I do not even
doubt, who know she is of matchless worth."

"Wherein have I done wrong, Raimbaut?" She came to him with
fluttering hands. "Why, but look you, the man had laid an ambuscade in
the marsh and he meant to kill you there to-night as you rode for
Vaquieras. He told me of it, told me how it was for that end alone he
lured you into Venaissin——" Again she brushed the hair back from her
forehead. "Raimbaut, I spoke of God and knightly honor, and the man
laughed. No, I think it was a fiend who sat so long beside the window
yonder, whence one may see the marsh. There were no candles in the room.
The moonlight was upon his evil face, and I could think of nothing, of
nothing that has been since Adam's time, except our youth, Raimbaut. And
he smiled fixedly, like a white image, because my misery amused him.
Only, when I tried to go to you to warn you, he leaped up stiffly,
making a mewing noise. He caught me by the throat so that I could not
scream. Then while we struggled in the moonlight your Makrisi came and
stabbed him——"

"Nay, I but fetched this knife, messire." Makrisi seemed to love
that bloodied knife.

Biatritz proudly said: "The man lies, Raimbaut."

"What need to tell me that, Belhs Cavaliers?"

And the Saracen shrugged. "It is very true I lie," he said. "As
among friends, I may confess I killed the Prince. But for the rest, take
notice both of you, I mean to lie intrepidly."

Raimbaut remembered how his mother had given each of two lads an
apple, and he had clamored for Guillaume's, as children do, and
Guillaume had changed with him. It was a trivial happening to remember
after fifty years; but Guillaume was dead, and this hacked flesh was
Raimbaut's flesh in part, and the thought of Raimbaut would never
trouble Guillaume de Baux any more. In addition there was a fire of
juniper wood and frankincense upon the hearth, and the room smelt too
cloyingly of be-drugging sweetness. Then on the walls were tapestries
which depicted Merlin's Dream, so that everywhere recoiling women smiled
with bold eyes; and here their wantonness seemed out of place.

"Listen," Makrisi was saying; "listen, for the hour strikes. At
last, at last!" he cried, with a shrill whine of malice.

Raimbaut said, dully: "Oh, I do not understand——"

"And yet Zoraida loved you once! loved you as people love where I
was born!" The Saracen's voice had altered. His speech was like the
rustle of papers. "You did not love Zoraida. And so it came about that
upon Walburga's Eve, at midnight, Zoraida hanged herself beside your
doorway. Thus we love where I was born.… And I, I cut the rope—with my
left hand. I had my other arm about that frozen thing which yesterday
had been Zoraida, you understand, so that it might not fall. And in the
act a tear dropped from that dead woman's cheek and wetted my forehead.
Ice is not so cold as was that tear.… Ho, that tear did not fall upon my
forehead but on my heart, because I loved that dancing-girl, Zoraida, as
you do this princess here. I think you will understand," Makrisi said,
calmly as one who states a maxim.

The Sire de Vaquieras replied, in the same tone: "I understand.
You have contrived my death?"

"Ey, messire, would that be adequate? I could have managed that
any hour within the last score of years. Oh no! for I have studied you
carefully. Oh no! instead, I have contrived this plight. For the Prince
of Orange is manifestly murdered. Who killed him?—why, Madona Biatritz,
and none other, for I will swear to it. I, I will swear to it, who saw
it done. Afterward both you and I must be questioned upon the rack, as
possibly concerned in the affair, and whether innocent or guilty we must
die very horribly. Such is the gentle custom of your Christian country
when a prince is murdered. That is not the point of the jest, however.
For first Sire Philibert will put this woman to the Question by Water,
until she confesses her confederates, until she confesses that every
baron whom Philibert distrusts was one of them. Oh yes, assuredly they
will thrust a hollow cane into the mouth of your Biatritz, and they will
pour water a little by a little through this cane, until she confesses
what they desire. Ha, Philibert will see to this confession! And through
this woman's torment he will rid himself of every dangerous foe he has
in Venaissin. You must stand by and wait your turn. You must stand by,
in fetters, and see this done—you, you, my master!—you, who love this
woman as I loved that dead Zoraida who was not fair enough to please
you!"

Raimbaut, trapped, impotent, cried out: "This is not possible——"
And for all that, he knew the Saracen to be foretelling the inevitable.

Makrisi went on, quietly: "After the Question men will parade
her, naked to the middle, through all Orange, until they reach the
Marketplace, where will be four horses. One of these horses they will
harness to each arm and leg of your Biatritz. Then they will beat these
horses. These will be strong horses. They will each run in a different
direction."

This infamy also was certain. Raimbaut foresaw what he must do.
He clutched the dagger which Makrisi fondled. "Belhs Cavaliers, this
fellow speaks the truth. Look now, the moon is old—is it not strange to
know it will outlive us?"

And Biatritz came close to Sire Raimbaut and said: "I understand.
If I leave this room alive it will purchase a hideous suffering for my
poor body, it will bring about the ruin of many brave and innocent
chevaliers. I know. I would perforce confess all that the masked men
bade me. I know, for in Prince Conrat's time I have seen persons who had
been put to the Question——" She shuddered; and she re-began, without any
agitation: "Give me the knife, Raimbaut."

"Pardieu! but I may not obey you for this once," he answered,
"since we are informed by those in holy orders that all such as lay
violent hands upon themselves must suffer eternally." Then, kneeling, he
cried, in an extremity of adoration: "Oh, I have served you all my life.
You may not now deny me this last service. And while I talk they dig
your grave! O blind men, making the new grave, take heed lest that grave
be too narrow, for already my heart is breaking in my body. I have drunk
too deep of sorrow. And yet I may not fail you, now that honor and mercy
and my love for you demand I kill you before I also die—in such a
fashion as this fellow speaks of."

She did not dispute this. How could she when it was an axiom in
all Courts of Love that Heaven held dominion in a lover's heart only as
an underling of the man's mistress?

And so she said, with a fond smile: "It is your demonstrable
privilege. I would not grant it, dear, were my weak hands as clean as
yours. Oh, but it is long you have loved me, and it is faithfully you
have served Heaven, and my heart too is breaking in my body now that
your service ends!"

And he demanded, wearily: "When we were boy and girl together
what had we said if any one had told us this would be the end?"

"We would have laughed. It is a long while since those children
laughed at Montferrat.… Not yet, not yet!" she said. "Ah, pity me, tried
champion, for even now I am almost afraid to die."

She leaned against the window yonder, shuddering, staring into
the night. Dawn had purged the east of stars. Day was at hand, the day
whose noon she might not hope to witness. She noted this incuriously.
Then Biatritz came to him, very strangely proud, and yet all tenderness.

"See, now, Raimbaut! because I have loved you as I have loved
nothing else in life, I will not be unworthy of your love. Strike and
have done."

Raimbaut de Vaquieras raised an already bloodied dagger. As
emotion goes, he was bankrupt. He had no longer any dread of hell,
because he thought that, a little later, nothing its shrewdest overseer
could plan would have the power to vex him. She, waiting, smiled.
Makrisi, seated, stretched his legs, put fingertips together with the
air of an attendant amateur. This was better than he had hoped. In such
a posture they heard a bustle of armored men, and when all turned, saw
how a sword protruded through the arras.

"Come out, Guillaume!" people were shouting. "Unkennel, dog! Out,
out, and die!" To such a heralding Mahi de Vernoil came into the room
with mincing steps such as the man affected in an hour of peril. He
first saw what a grisly burden the chest sustained. "Now, by the Face!"
he cried, "if he that cheated me of quieting this filth should prove to
be of gentle birth I will demand of him a duel to the death!" The
curtains were ripped from their hangings as he spoke, and behind him the
candlelight was reflected by the armor of many followers.

Then de Vernoil perceived Raimbaut de Vaquieras, and the spruce
little man bowed ceremoniously. All were still. Composedly, like a
lieutenant before his captain, Mahi narrated how these hunted remnants
of Lovain's army had, as a last cast, that night invaded the chateau,
and had found, thanks to the festival, its men-at-arms in uniform and
inefficient drunkenness. "My tres beau sire," Messire de Vernoil ended,
"will you or nill you, Venaissin is yours this morning. My knaves have
slain Philibert and his bewildered fellow-tipplers with less effort than
is needed to drown as many kittens."

And his followers cried, as upon a signal: "Hail, Prince of
Orange!"

It was so like the wonder-working of a dream—this sudden and
heroic uproar—that old Raimbaut de Vaquieras stood reeling, near to
intimacy with fear for the first time. He waited thus, with both hands
pressed before his eyes. He waited thus for a long while, because he was
not used to find chance dealing kindlily with him. Later he saw that
Makrisi had vanished in the tumult, and that many people awaited his
speaking.

The lord of Venaissin began: "You have done me a great service,
Messire de Vemoil. As recompense, I give you what I may. I freely yield
you all my right in Venaissin. Oh no, kingcraft is not for me. I daily
see and hear of battles won, cities beleaguered, high towers overthrown,
and ancient citadels and new walls leveled with the dust. I have
conversed with many kings, the directors of these events, and they were
not happy people. Yes, yes, I have witnessed divers happenings, for I am
old.… I have found nothing which can serve me in place of honor."

He turned to Dona Biatritz. It was as if they were alone. "Belhs
Cavaliers," he said, "I had sworn fealty to this Guillaume. He violated
his obligations; but that did not free me of mine. An oath is an oath. I
was, and am to-day, sworn to support his cause, and to profit in any
fashion by its overthrow would be an abominable action. Nay, more, were
any of his adherents alive it would be my manifest duty to join them
against our preserver, Messire de Vernoil. This necessity is very
happily spared me. I cannot, though, in honor hold any fief under the
supplanter of my liege-lord. I must, therefore, relinquish Vaquieras and
take eternal leave of Venaissin. I will not lose the right to call
myself your servant!" he cried out—"and that which is noblest in the
world must be served fittingly. And so, Belhs Cavaliers, let us touch
palms and bid farewell, and never in this life speak face to face of
trivial happenings which we two alone remember. For naked of lands and
gear I came to you—a prince's daughter—very long ago, and as nakedly I
now depart, so that I may retain the right to say, 'All my life long I
served my love of her according to my abilities, wholeheartedly and with
clean hands.'"

"Yes, yes! you must depart from Venaissin," said Dona Biatritz. A
capable woman, she had no sympathy with his exquisite points of honor,
and yet loved him all the more because of what seemed to her his
surpassing folly. She smiled, somewhat as mothers do in humoring an
unreasonable boy. "We will go to my nephew's court at Montferrat," she
said. "He will willingly provide for his old aunt and her husband. And
you may still make verses—at Montferrat, where we lived verses, once,
Raimbaut."

Now they gazed full upon each other. Thus they stayed,
transfigured, neither seeming old. Each had forgotten that unhappiness
existed anywhere in the whole world. The armored, blood-stained men
about them were of no more importance than were those wantons in the
tapestry. Without, dawn throbbed in heaven. Without, innumerable birds
were raising that glad, piercing, hurried morning-song which very
anciently caused Adam's primal waking, to behold his mate.

BALTHAZAR'S DAUGHTER

Taste your own poinson

"A curious preference for the artificial
should be mentioned as characteristic of ALESSANDRO DE MEDICI'S poetry.
For his century was anything but artless; the great commonplaces that
form the main stock of human thought were no longer in their first
flush, and he addressed a people no longer childish.… Unquestionably his
fancies were fantastic, anti-natural, bordering on hallucination, and
they betray a desire for impossible novelty; but it is allowable to
prefer them to the sickly simplicity of those so-called poems that
embroider with old faded wools upon the canvas of worn-out truisms,
trite, trivial and idiotically sentimental patterns."

Let me have dames and damsels richly clad

    To feed and tend my mirth,

Singing by day and night to make me glad;

Let me have fruitful gardens of great girth

    Fill'd with the strife of birds,

With water-springs, and beasts that house i' the earth.

Let me seem Solomon for lore of words,

Samson for strength, for beauty Absalom.

    Knights as my serfs be
given;

And as I will, let music go and come;

Till, when I will, I will to enter Heaven.



ALESSANDRO DE MEDICI.—Madrigal, from D. G. Rossetti's version.

Youth Poison

BALTHAZAR'S DAUGHTER

Graciosa was Balthazar's youngest child, a white, slim girl with
violet eyes and strange pale hair which had the color and glitter of
stardust. "Some day at court," her father often thought complacently,
"she, too, will make a good match." He was a necessitous lord, a
smiling, supple man who had already marketed two daughters to his
advantage. But Graciosa's time was not yet mature in the year of grace
1533, for the girl was not quite sixteen. So Graciosa remained in
Balthazar's big cheerless house and was tutored in all needful
accomplishments. She was proficient in the making of preserves and
unguents, could play the harpsichord and the virginals acceptably, could
embroider an altarcloth to admiration, and, in spite of a trivial
lameness in walking, could dance a coranto or a saraband against any
woman between two seas.

Now to the north of Balthazar's home stood a tall forest,
overhanging both the highway and the river whose windings the highway
followed. Graciosa was very often to be encountered upon the outskirts
of these woods. She loved the forest, whose tranquillity bred dreams,
but was already a woman in so far that she found it more interesting to
watch the highway. Sometimes it would be deserted save for small purple
butterflies which fluttered about as if in continuous indecision, and
rarely ascended more than a foot above the ground. But people passed at
intervals—as now a page, who was a notably fine fellow, clothed in
ash-colored gray, with slashed, puffed sleeves, and having a heron's
feather in his cap; or a Franciscan with his gown tucked up so that you
saw how the veins on his naked feet stood out like the carvings on a
vase; or a farmer leading a calf; or a gentleman in a mantle of
squirrel's fur riding beside a wonderful proud lady, whose tiny hat was
embroidered with pearls. It was all very interesting to watch, it was
like turning over the leaves of a book written in an unknown tongue and
guessing what the pictures meant, because these people were intent upon
their private avocations, in which you had no part, and you would never
see them any more.

Then destiny took a hand in the affair and Guido came. He reined
his gray horse at the sight of her sitting by the wayside and
deferentially inquired how far it might be to the nearest inn. Graciosa
told him. He thanked her and rode on. That was all, but the appraising
glance of this sedate and handsome burgher obscurely troubled the girl
afterward.

Next day he came again. He was a jewel-merchant, he told her, and
he thought it within the stretch of possibility that my lord Balthazar's
daughter might wish to purchase some of his wares. She viewed them with
admiration, chaffered thriftily, and finally bought a topaz, dug from
Mount Zabarca, Guido assured her, which rendered its wearer immune to
terrors of any kind.

Very often afterward these two met on the outskirts of the forest
as Guido rode between the coast and the hill-country about his vocation.
Sometimes he laughingly offered her a bargain, on other days he paused
to exhibit a notable gem which he had procured for this or that wealthy
amateur. Count Eglamore, the young Duke's favorite yonder at court,
bought most of them, it seemed. "The nobles complain against this
upstart Eglamore very bitterly," said Guido, "but we merchants have no
quarrel with him. He buys too lavishly."

"I trust I shall not see Count Eglamore when I go to court," said
Graciosa, meditatively; "and, indeed, by that time, my father assures
me, some honest gentleman will have contrived to cut the throat of this
abominable Eglamore." Her father's people, it should be premised, had
been at bitter feud with the favorite ever since he detected and
punished the conspiracy of the Marquis of Cibo, their kinsman. Then
Graciosa continued: "Nevertheless, I shall see many beautiful sights
when I am taken to court.… And the Duke, too, you tell me, is an amateur
of gems."

"Eh, madonna, I wish that you could see his jewels," cried Guido,
growing fervent; and he lovingly catalogued a host of lapidary marvels.

"I hope that I shall see these wonderful jewels when I go to
court," said Graciosa wistfully.

"Duke Alessandro," he returned, his dark eyes strangely mirthful,
"is, as I take it, a catholic lover of beauty in all its forms. So he
will show you his gems, very assuredly, and, worse still, he will make
verses in your honor. For it is a preposterous feature of Duke
Alessandro's character that he is always making songs."

"Oh, and such strange songs as they are, too, Guido. Who does not
know them?"

"I am not the best possible judge of his verses' merit," Guido
estimated, drily. "But I shall never understand how any singer at all
came to be locked in such a prison. I fancy that at times the paradox
puzzles even Duke Alessandro."

"And is he as handsome as people report?"

Then Guido laughed a little. "Tastes differ, of course. But I
think your father will assure you, madonna, that no duke possessing such
a zealous tax-collector as Count Eglamore was ever in his lifetime
considered of repulsive person."

"And is he young?"

"Why, as to that, he is about of an age with me, and in
consequence old enough to be far more sensible than either of us is ever
likely to be," said Guido; and began to talk of other matters.

But presently Graciosa was questioning him again as to the court,
whither she was to go next year and enslave a marquis, or, at worst, an
opulent baron. Her thoughts turned toward the court's predominating
figure. "Tell me of Eglamore, Guido."

"Madonna, some say that Eglamore was a brewer's son. Others—and
your father's kinsmen in particular—insist that he was begot by a devil
in person, just as Merlin was, and Plato the philosopher, and puissant
Alexander. Nobody knows anything about his origin." Guido was sitting
upon the ground, his open pack between his knees. Between the thumb and
forefinger of each hand he held caressingly a string of pearls which he
inspected as he talked. "Nobody," he idly said, "nobody is very eager to
discuss Count Eglamore's origin now that Eglamore has become
indispensable to Duke Alessandro. Yes, it is thanks to Eglamore that the
Duke has ample leisure and needful privacy for the pursuit of
recreations which are reputed to be curious."

"I do not understand you, Guido." Graciosa was all wonder.

"It is perhaps as well," the merchant said, a trifle sadly. Then
Guido shrugged. "To be brief, madonna, business annoys the Duke. He
finds in this Eglamore an industrious person who affixes seals, draughts
proclamations, makes treaties, musters armies, devises pageants, and
collects revenues, upon the whole, quite as efficiently as Alessandro
would be capable of doing these things. So Alessandro makes verses and
amuses himself as his inclinations prompt, and Alessandro's people are
none the worse off on account of it."

"Heigho, I foresee that I shall never fall in love with the
Duke," Graciosa declared. "It is unbefitting and it is a little cowardly
for a prince to shirk the duties of his station. Now, if I were Duke I
would grant my father a pension, and have Eglamore hanged, and purchase
a new gown of silvery green, in which I would be ravishingly beautiful,
and afterward— Why, what would you do if you were Duke, Messer Guido?"

"What would I do if I were Duke?" he echoed. "What would I do if
I were a great lord instead of a tradesman? I think you know the answer,
madonna."

"Oh, you would make me your duchess, of course. That is quite
understood," said Graciosa, with the lightest of laughs. "But I was
speaking seriously, Guido."

Guido at that considered her intently for a half-minute. His
countenance was of portentous gravity, but in his eyes she seemed to
detect a lurking impishness.

"And it is not a serious matter that a peddler of crystals should
have dared to love a nobleman's daughter? You are perfectly right. That
I worship you is an affair which does not concern any person save myself
in any way whatsoever, although I think that knowledge of the fact would
put your father to the trouble of sharpening his dagger.… Indeed, I am
not certain that I worship you, for in order to adore wholeheartedly,
the idolater must believe his idol to be perfect. Now, your nails are of
an ugly shape, like that of little fans; your mouth is too large; and I
have long ago perceived that you are a trifle lame in spite of your
constant care to conceal the fact. I do not admire these faults, for
faults they are undoubtedly. Then, too, I know you are vain and
self-seeking, and look forward contentedly to the time when your father
will transfer his ownership of such physical attractions as heaven gave
you to that nobleman who offers the highest price for them. It is true
you have no choice in the matter, but you will participate in a
monstrous bargain, and I would prefer to have you exhibit distaste for
it." And with that he returned composedly to inspection of his pearls.

"And to what end, Guido?" It was the first time Graciosa had
completely waived the reticence of a superior caste. You saw that the
child's parted lips were tremulous, and you divined her childish fits of
dreading that glittering, inevitable court-life shared with an
unimaginable husband.

But Guido only grumbled whimsically. "I am afraid that men do not
always love according to the strict laws of logic. I desire your
happiness above all things; yet to see you so abysmally untroubled by
anything that troubles me is another matter."

"But I am not untroubled, Guido——" she began swiftly. Graciosa
broke off in speech, shrugged, flashed a smile at him. "For I cannot
fathom you, Ser Guido, and that troubles me. Yes, I am very fond of you,
and yet I do not trust you. You tell me you love me greatly. It pleases
me to have you say this. You perceive I am very candid this morning,
Messer Guido. Yes, it pleases me, and I know that for the sake of seeing
me you daily endanger your life, for if my father heard of our meetings
he would have you killed. You would not incur such hare-brained risks
unless you cared very greatly; and yet, somehow, I do not believe it is
altogether for me you care."

Then Guido was in train to protest an all-mastering and entirely
candid devotion, but he was interrupted.

"Most women have these awkward intuitions," spoke a melodious
voice, and turning, Graciosa met the eyes of the intruder. This
magnificent young man had a proud and bloodless face which contrasted
sharply with his painted lips and cheeks. In the contour of his
protruding mouth showed plainly his negroid ancestry. His scanty beard,
as well as his frizzled hair, was the color of dead grass. He was
sumptuously clothed in white satin worked with silver, and around his
cap was a gold chain hung with diamonds. Now he handed his fringed
riding-gloves to Guido to hold.

"Yes, madonna, I suspect that Eglamore here cares greatly for the
fact that you are Lord Balthazar's daughter, and cousin to the late
Marquis of Cibo. For Cibo has many kinsmen at court who still resent the
circumstance that the matching of his wits against Eglamore's earned for
Cibo a deplorably public demise. So they conspire against Eglamore with
vexatious industry, as an upstart, as a nobody thrust over people of
proven descent, and Eglamore goes about in hourly apprehension of a
knife-thrust. If he could make a match with you, though, your
father—thrifty man!—would be easily appeased. Your cousins, those proud,
grumbling Castel-Franchi, Strossi and Valori, would not prove
over-obdurate toward a kinsman who, whatever his past indiscretions, has
so many pensions and offices at his disposal. Yes, honor would permit a
truce, and Eglamore could bind them to his interests within ten days,
and be rid of the necessity of sleeping in chain armor.… Have I not
unraveled the scheme correctly, Eglamore?"

"Your highness was never lacking in penetration," replied the
other in a dull voice. He stood motionless, holding the gloves, his
shoulders a little bowed as if under some physical load. His eyes were
fixed upon the ground. He divined the change in Graciosa's face and did
not care to see it.

"And so you are Count Eglamore," said Graciosa in a sort of
whisper. "That is very strange. I had thought you were my friend, Guido.
But I forget. I must not call you Guido any longer." She gave a little
shiver here. He stayed motionless and did not look at her. "I have often
wondered what manner of man you were. So it was you—whose hand I touched
just now—you who poisoned Duke Cosmo, you who had the good cardinal
assassinated, you who betrayed the brave lord of Faenza! Oh, yes, they
openly accuse you of every imaginable crime—this patient Eglamore, this
reptile who has crept into his power through filthy passages. It is very
strange you should be capable of so much wickedness, for to me you seem
only a sullen lackey."

He winced and raised his eyes at this. His face remained
expressionless. He knew these accusations at least to be demonstrable
lies, for as it happened he had never found his advancement to hinge
upon the commission of the crimes named. But even so, the past was a
cemetery he did not care to have revivified.

"And it was you who detected the Marquis of Cibo's conspiracy.
Tebaldeo was my cousin, Count Eglamore, and I loved him. We were reared
together. We used to play here in these woods, and I remember how
Tebaldeo once fetched me a wren's nest from that maple yonder. I stood
just here. I was weeping because I was afraid he would fall. If he had
fallen and been killed, it would have been the luckier for him,"
Graciosa sighed. "They say that he conspired. I do not know. I only know
that by your orders, Count Eglamore, my playmate Tebaldeo was fastened
upon a Saint Andrew's cross and his arms and legs were each broken in
two places with an iron bar. Then your servants took Tebaldeo, still
living, and laid him upon a carriage-wheel which was hung upon a pivot.
The upper edge of this wheel was cut with very fine teeth like those of
a saw, so that his agony might be complete. Tebaldeo's poor mangled legs
were folded beneath his body so that his heels touched the back of his
head, they tell me. In such a posture he died very slowly while the
wheel turned very slowly there in the sunlit market-place, and flies
buzzed greedily about him, and the shopkeepers took holiday in order to
watch Tebaldeo die—the same Tebaldeo who once fetched me a wren's nest
from yonder maple."

Eglamore spoke now. "I gave orders for the Marquis of Cibo's
execution. I did not devise the manner of his death. The punishment for
Cibo's crime was long ago fixed by our laws. Cibo plotted to kill the
Duke. Cibo confessed as much."

But the girl waved this aside. "And then you plan this
masquerade. You plan to make me care for you so greatly that even when I
know you to be Count Eglamore I must still care for you. You plan to
marry me, so as to placate Tebaldeo's kinsmen, so as to bind them to
your interests. It was a fine bold stroke of policy, I know, to use me
as a stepping-stone to safety—but was it fair to me?" Her voice rose now
a little. She seemed to plead with him. "Look you, Count Eglamore, I was
a child only yesterday. I have never loved any man. But you have loved
many women, I know, and long experience has taught you many ways of
moving a woman's heart. Oh, was it fair, was it worth while, to match
your skill against my ignorance? Think how unhappy I would be if even
now I loved you, and how I would loathe myself.… But I am getting angry
over nothing. Nothing has happened except that I have dreamed in idle
moments of a brave and comely lover who held his head so high that all
other women envied me, and now I have awakened."

Meanwhile, it was with tears in his eyes that the young man in
white had listened to her quiet talk, for you could nowhere have found a
nature more readily sensitive than his to all the beauty and wonder
which life, as if it were haphazardly, produces every day. He pitied
this betrayed child quite ineffably, because in her sorrow she was so
pretty.

So he spoke consolingly. "Fie, Donna Graciosa, you must not be
too harsh with Eglamore. It is his nature to scheme, and he weaves his
plots as inevitably as the spider does her web. Believe me, it is wiser
to forget the rascal—as I do—until there is need of him; and I think you
will have no more need to consider Eglamore's trickeries, for you are
very beautiful, Graciosa."

He had drawn closer to the girl, and he brought a cloying odor of
frangipani, bergamot and vervain. His nostrils quivered, his face had
taken on an odd pinched look, for all that he smiled as over some occult
jest. Graciosa was a little frightened by his bearing, which was both
furtive and predatory.

"Oh, do not be offended, for I have some rights to say what I
desire in these parts. For, Dei gratia, I am the overlord of
these parts, Graciosa—a neglected prince who wondered over the frequent
absences of his chief counselor and secretly set spies upon him.
Eglamore here will attest as much. Or if you cannot believe poor
Eglamore any longer, I shall have other witnesses within the half-hour.
Oh, yes, they are to meet me here at noon—some twenty crop-haired
stalwart cut-throats. They will come riding upon beautiful broad-chested
horses covered with red velvet trappings that are hung with little
silver bells which jingle delightfully. They will come very soon, and
then we will ride back to court."

Duke Alessandro touched his big painted mouth with his forefinger
as if in fantastic mimicry of a man imparting a confidence.

"I think that I shall take you with me, Graciosa, for you are
very beautiful. You are as slim as a lily and more white, and your eyes
are two purple mirrors in each of which I see a tiny image of Duke
Alessandro. The woman I loved yesterday was a big splendid wench with
cheeks like apples. It is not desirable that women should be so large.
All women should be little creatures that fear you. They should have
thin, plaintive voices, and in shrinking from you be as slight to the
touch as a cobweb. It is not possible to love a woman ardently unless
you comprehend how easy it would be to murder her."

"God, God!" said Count Eglamore, very softly, for he was familiar
with the look which had now come into Duke Alessandro's face. Indeed,
all persons about court were quick to notice this odd pinched look, like
that of a traveler nipped at by frosts, and people at court became
obsequious within the instant in dealing with the fortunate woman who
had aroused this look, Count Eglamore remembered.

And the girl did not speak at all, but stood motionless, staring
in bewildered, pitiable, childlike fashion, and the color had ebbed from
her countenance.

Alessandro was frankly pleased. "You fear me, do you not,
Graciosa? See, now, when I touch your hand it is soft and cold as a
serpent's skin, and you shudder. I am very tired of women who love me,
of all women with bold, hungry eyes. To you my touch will always be a
martyrdom, you will always loathe me, and therefore I shall not weary of
you for a long while. Come, Graciosa. Your father shall have all the
wealth and state that even his greedy imaginings can devise, so long as
you can contrive to loathe me. We will find you a suitable husband. You
shall have flattery and titles, gold and fine glass, soft stuffs and
superb palaces such as are your beauty's due henceforward."

He glanced at the peddler's pack, and shrugged. "So Eglamore has
been wooing you with jewels! You must see mine, dear Graciosa. It is not
merely an affair of possessing, as some emperors do, all the four kinds
of sapphires, the twelve kinds of emeralds, the three kinds of rubies,
and many extraordinary pearls, diamonds, cymophanes, beryls, green
peridots, tyanos, sandrastra, and fiery cinnamon-stones"—he enumerated
them with the tender voice of their lover—"for the value of these may at
least be estimated. Oh, no, I have in my possession gems which have not
their fellows in any other collection, gems which have not even a name
and the value of which is incalculable—strange jewels that were shot
from inaccessible mountain peaks by means of slings, jewels engendered
by the thunder, jewels taken from the heart of the Arabian deer, jewels
cut from the brain of a toad and the eyes of serpents, and even jewels
that are authentically known to have fallen from the moon. We will
select the rarest, and have a pair of slippers encrusted with them, in
which you shall dance for me."

"Highness," cried Eglamore, with anger and terror at odds in his
breast, "Highness, I love this girl!"

"Ah, then you cannot ever be her husband," Duke Alessandro
returned. "You would have suited otherwise. No, no, we must seek out
some other person of discretion. It will all be very amusing, for I
think that she is now quite innocent, as pure as the high angels are.
See, Eglamore, she cannot speak, she stays still as a lark that has been
taken in a snare. It will be very marvelous to make her as I am.…" He
meditated, as, obscurely aware of opposition, his shoulders twitched
fretfully, and momentarily his eyes lightened like the glare of a cannon
through its smoke. "You made a beast of me, some long-faced people say.
Beware lest the beast turn and rend you."

Count Eglamore plucked aimlessly at his chin. Then he laughed as
a dog yelps. He dropped the gloves which he had held till this,
deliberately, as if the act were a rite. His shoulders straightened and
purpose seemed to flow into the man. "No," he said quietly, "I will not
have it. It was not altogether I who made a brain-sick beast of you, my
prince; but even so, I have never been too nice to profit by your vices.
I have taken my thrifty toll of abomination, I have stood by
contentedly, not urging you on, yet never trying to stay you, as you
waded deeper and ever deeper into the filth of your debaucheries,
because meanwhile you left me so much power. Yes, in some part it is my
own handiwork which is my ruin. I accept it. Nevertheless, you shall not
harm this child."

"I venture to remind you, Eglamore, that I am still the master of
this duchy." Alessandro was languidly amused, and had begun to regard
his adversary with real curiosity.

"Oh, yes, but that is nothing to me. At court you are the master.
At court I have seen mothers raise the veil from their daughters' faces,
with smiles that were more loathsome than the grimaces of a fiend,
because you happened to be passing. But here in these woods, your
highness, I see only the woman I love and the man who has insulted her."

"This is very admirable fooling," the Duke considered. "So all
the world is changed and Pandarus is transformed into Hector? These are
sonorous words, Eglamore, but with what deeds do you propose to back
them?"

"By killing you, your highness."

"So!" said the Duke. "The farce ascends in interest." He drew
with a flourish, with actual animation, for sottish, debauched and
power-crazed as this man was, he came of a race to whom danger was a
cordial. "Very luckily a sword forms part of your disguise, so let us
amuse ourselves. It is always diverting to kill, and if by any chance
you kill me I shall at least be rid of the intolerable knowledge that
to-morrow will be just like to-day." The Duke descended blithely into
the level road and placed himself on guard.

Then both men silently went about the business in hand. Both were
oddly calm, almost as if preoccupied by some more important matter to be
settled later. The two swords clashed, gleamed rigidly for an instant,
and then their rapid interplay, so far as vision went, melted into a
flickering snarl of silver, for the sun was high and each man's shadow
was huddled under him. Then Eglamore thrust savagely and in the act trod
the edge of a puddle, and fell ignominiously prostrate. His sword was
wrenched ten feet from him, for the Duke had parried skilfully. Eglamore
lay thus at Alessandro's mercy.

"Well, well!" the Duke cried petulantly, "and am I to be kept
waiting forever? You were a thought quicker in obeying my caprices
yesterday. Get up, you muddy lout, and let us kill each other with some
pretension of adroitness."

Eglamore rose, and, sobbing, caught up his sword and rushed
toward the Duke in an agony of shame and rage. His attack now was that
of a frenzied animal, quite careless of defense and desirous only of
murder. Twice the Duke wounded him, but it was Alessandro who drew
backward, composedly hindering the brutal onslaught he was powerless to
check. Then Eglamore ran him through the chest and gave vent to a
strangled, growling cry as Alessandro fell. Eglamore wrenched his sword
free and grasped it by the blade so that he might stab the Duke again
and again. He meant to hack the abominable flesh, to slash and mutilate
that haughty mask of infamy, but Graciosa clutched his weapon by the
hilt.

The girl panted, and her breath came thick. "He gave you your
life."

Eglamore looked up. She leaned now upon his shoulder, her face
brushing his as he knelt over the unconscious Duke; and Eglamore found
that at her dear touch all passion had gone out of him.

"Madonna," he said equably, "the Duke is not yet dead. It is
impossible to let him live. You may think he voiced only a caprice just
now. I think so too, but I know the man, and I know that all this
madman's whims are ruthless and irresistible. Living, Duke Alessandro's
appetites are merely whetted by opposition, so much so that he finds no
pleasures sufficiently piquant unless they have God's interdiction as a
sauce. Living, he will make of you his plaything, and a little later his
broken, soiled and castby plaything. It is therefore necessary that I
kill Duke Alessandro."

She parted from him, and he too rose to his feet.

"And afterward," she said quietly, "and afterward you must die
just as Tebaldeo died."

"That is the law, madonna. But whether Alessandro enters hell
to-day or later, I am a lost man."

"Oh, that is very true," she said. "A moment since you were Count
Eglamore, whom every person feared. Now there is not a beggar in the
kingdom who would change lots with you, for you are a friendless and
hunted man in peril of dreadful death. But even so, you are not
penniless, Count Eglamore, for these jewels here which formed part of
your masquerade are of great value, and there is a world outside. The
frontier is not two miles distant. You have only to escape into the
hill-country beyond the forest, and you need not kill Duke Alessandro
after all. I would have you go hence with hands as clean as possible."

"Perhaps I might escape." He found it quaint to note how calm she
was and how tranquilly his own thoughts ran. "But first the Duke must
die, because I dare not leave you to his mercy."

"How does that matter?" she returned. "You know very well that my
father intends to market me as best suits his interests. Here I am so
much merchandise. The Duke is as free as any other man to cry a
bargain." He would have spoken in protest, but Graciosa interrupted
wearily: "Oh, yes, it is to this end only that we daughters of Duke
Alessandro's vassals are nurtured, just as you told me—eh, how long
ago!—that such physical attractions as heaven accords us may be
marketed. And I do not see how a wedding can in any way ennoble the
transaction by causing it to profane a holy sacrament. Ah, no,
Balthazar's daughter was near attaining all that she had been taught to
desire, for a purchaser came and he bid lavishly. You know very well
that my father would have been delighted. But you must need upset the
bargain. 'No, I will not have it!' Count Eglamore must cry. It cost you
very highly to speak those words. I think it would have puzzled my
father to hear those words at which so many fertile lands, stout
castles, well-timbered woodlands, herds of cattle, gilded coaches,
liveries and curious tapestries, fine clothing and spiced foods, all
vanished like a puff of smoke. Ah, yes, my father would have thought you
mad."

"I had no choice," he said, and waved a little gesture of
impotence. He spoke as with difficulty, almost wearily. "I love you. It
is a theme on which I do not embroider. So long as I had thought to use
you as an instrument I could woo fluently enough. To-day I saw that you
were frightened and helpless—oh, quite helpless. And something changed
in me. I knew for the first time that I loved you and that I was not
clean as you are clean. What it was of passion and horror, of despair
and adoration and yearning, which struggled in my being then I cannot
tell you. It spurred me to such action as I took,—but it has robbed me
of sugared eloquence, it has left me chary of speech. It is necessary
that I climb very high because of my love for you, and upon the heights
there is silence."

And Graciosa meditated. "Here I am so much merchandise. Heigho,
since I cannot help it, since bought and sold I must be, one day or
another, at least I will go at a noble price. Yet I do not think I am
quite worth the value of these castles and lands and other things which
you gave up because of me, so that it will be necessary to make up the
difference, dear, by loving you very much."

And at that he touched her chin, gently and masterfully, for
Graciosa would have averted her face, and it seemed to Eglamore that he
could never have his fill of gazing on the radiant, shamed tenderness of
Graciosa's face. "Oh, my girl!" he whispered. "Oh, my wonderful,
worshiped, merry girl, whom God has fashioned with such loving care! you
who had only scorn to give me when I was a kingdom's master! and would
you go with me now that I am friendless and homeless?"

"But I shall always have a friend," she answered—"a friend who
showed me what Balthazar's daughter was and what love is. And I am vain
enough to believe I shall not ever be very far from home so long as I am
near to my friend's heart."

A mortal man could not but take her in his arms.

"Farewell, Duke Alessandro!" then said Eglamore; "farewell, poor
clay so plastic the least touch remodels you! I had a part in shaping
you so bestial; our age, too, had a part—our bright and cruel day,
wherein you were set too high. Yet for me it would perhaps have proved
as easy to have made a learned recluse of you, Alessandro, or a
bloodless saint, if to do that had been as patently profitable. For you
and all your kind are so much putty in the hands of circumspect fellows
such as I. But I stood by and let our poisoned age conform that putty
into the shape of a crazed beast, because it took that form as readily
as any other, and in taking it, best served my selfish ends. Now I must
pay for that sorry shaping, just as, I think, you too must pay some day.
And so, I cry farewell with loathing, but with compassion also!"

Then these two turned toward the hills, leaving Duke Alessandro
where he lay in the road, a very lamentable figure in much bloodied
finery. They turned toward the hills, and entered a forest whose
ordering was time's contemporary, and where there was no grandeur save
that of the trees.

But upon the summit of the nearest hill they paused and looked
over a restless welter of foliage that glittered in the sun, far down
into the highway. It bustled like an unroofed ant-hill, for the road was
alive with men who seemed from this distance very small. Duke
Alessandro's attendants had found him and were clustered in a hubbub
about their reviving master. Dwarfish Lorenzino de Medici was the most
solicitous among them.

Beyond was the broad river, seen as a ribbon of silver now, and
on its remoter bank the leaded roofs of a strong fortress glistened like
a child's new toy. Tilled fields showed here and there, no larger in
appearance than so many outspread handkerchiefs. Far down in the east a
small black smudge upon the pearl-colored and vaporous horizon was all
they could discern of a walled city filled with factories for the
working of hemp and furs and alum and silk and bitumen.

"It is a very rich and lovely land," said Eglamore—"this kingdom
which a half-hour since lay in the hollow of my hand." He viewed it for
a while, and not without pensiveness. Then he took Graciosa's hand and
looked into her face, and he laughed joyously.

JUDITH'S CREED

"It does not appear that the age thought his
works worthy of posterity, nor that this great poet himself levied any
ideal tribute on future times, or had any further prospect than of
present popularity and present profit. So careless was he, indeed, of
fame, that, when he retired to ease and plenty, while he was yet little
declined into the vale of years, and before he could be disgusted with
fatigue or disabled by infirmity, he desired only that in this rural
quiet he who had so long mazed his imagination by following phantoms
might at last be cured of his delirious ecstasies, and as a hermit might
estimate the transactions of the world."

Go Work!

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,

And what strength I have's my own,

Which is most faint.

               Now
I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so, that it assaults

Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon'd be,

Let your indulgence set me free.



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.—Epilogue to The Tempest.

He was hoping, while his fingers drummed in unison with the beat
of his verse, that this last play at least would rouse enthusiasm in the
pit. The welcome given its immediate predecessors had undeniably been
tepid. A memorandum at his elbow of the receipts at the Globe for the
last quarter showed this with disastrous bluntness; and, after all, in
1609 a shareholder in a theater, when writing dramas for production
there, was ordinarily subject to more claims than those of his ideals.

He sat in a neglected garden whose growth was in reversion to
primal habits. The season was September, the sky a uniform and temperate
blue. A peachtree, laden past its strength with fruitage, made about him
with its boughs a sort of tent. The grass around his writing-table was
largely hidden by long, crinkled peach leaves—some brown and others gray
as yet—and was dotted with a host of brightly-colored peaches. Fidgeting
bees and flies were excavating the decayed spots in this wasting fruit,
from which emanated a vinous odor. The bees hummed drowsily, their
industry facilitating idleness in others. It was curious—he meditated,
his thoughts straying from "an uninhabited island"—how these insects
alternated in color between brown velvet and silver, as they blundered
about a flickering tessellation of amber and dark green… in search of
rottenness.…

He frowned. Here was an arid forenoon as imagination went. A
seasoned plagiarist by this, he opened a book which lay upon the table
among several others and duly found the chapter entitled Of the
Cannibals.

"So, so!" he said aloud. "'It is a nation,' would I answer Plato,
'that has no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters——'" And with that
he sat about reshaping Montaigne's conceptions of Utopia into verse. He
wrote—while his left hand held the book flat—as orderly as any
county-clerk might do in the recordance of a deed of sale.

Midcourse in larceny, he looked up from writing. He saw a tall,
dark lady who was regarding him half-sorrowfully and half as in the
grasp of some occult amusement. He said nothing. He released the
telltale book. His eyebrows lifted, banteringly. He rose.

He found it characteristic of her that she went silently to the
table and compared the printed page with what he had just written. "So
nowadays you have turned pickpocket? My poet, you have altered."

He said: "Why, yes. When you broke off our friendship, I paid you
the expensive compliment of falling very ill. They thought that I would
die. They tell me even to-day I did not die. I almost question it." He
shrugged. "And to-day I must continue to write plays, because I never
learned any other trade. And so, at need, I pilfer." The topic did not
seem much to concern him.

"Eh, and such plays!" the woman cried. "My poet, there was a time
when you created men and women as glibly as Heaven does. Now you make
sugar-candy dolls."

"The last comedies were not all I could have wished," he
assented. "In fact, I got only some L30 clear profit."

"There speaks the little tradesman I most hated of all persons
living!" the woman sighed. Now, as in impatience, she thrust back her
traveling-hood and stood bare-headed.

Then she stayed silent,—tall, extraordinarily pallid, and with
dark, steady eyes. Their gaze by ordinary troubled you, as seeming to
hint some knowledge to your belittlement. The playmaker remembered that.
Now he, a reputable householder, was wondering what would be the upshot
of this intrusion. His visitor, as he was perfectly aware, had little
patience with such moments of life as could not be made dramatic.… He
was recollecting many trifles, now his mind ran upon old times.… No, no,
reflection assured him, to call her beautiful would be, and must always
have been, an exaggeration; but to deny the exotic and somewhat sinister
charm of her, even to-day, would be an absurdity.

She said, abruptly: "I do not think I ever loved you as women
love men. You were too anxious to associate with fine folk, too eager to
secure a patron—yes, and to get your profit of him—and you were always
ill-at-ease among us. Our youth is so long past, and we two are so
altered that we, I think, may speak of its happenings now without any
bitterness. I hated those sordid, petty traits. I raged at your
incessant pretensions to gentility because I knew you to be so much more
than a gentleman. Oh, it infuriated me—how long ago it was!—to see you
cringing to the Court blockheads, and running their errands, and
smirkingly pocketing their money, and wheedling them into helping the
new play to success. You complained I treated you like a lackey; it was
not unnatural when of your own freewill you played the lackey so
assiduously."

He laughed. He had anatomized himself too frequently and with too
much dispassion to overlook whatever tang of snobbishness might be in
him; and, moreover, the charge thus tendered became in reality the
speaker's apology, and hurt nobody's self-esteem.

"Faith, I do not say you are altogether in the wrong," he
assented. "They could be very useful to me—Pembroke, and Southampton,
and those others—and so I endeavored to render my intimacy acceptable.
It was my business as a poet to make my play as near perfect as I could;
and this attended to, common-sense demanded of the theater-manager that
he derive as much money as was possible from its representation. What
would you have? The man of letters, like the carpenter or the
blacksmith, must live by the vending of his productions, not by the
eating of them." The woman waved this aside.

She paced the grass in meditation, the peach leaves brushing her
proud head—caressingly, it seemed to him. Later she came nearer in a
brand-new mood. She smiled now, and her voice was musical and thrilled
with wonder. "But what a poet Heaven had locked inside this little
parasite! It used to puzzle me." She laughed, and ever so lightly. "Eh,
and did you never understand why by preference I talked with you at
evening from my balcony? It was because I could forget you then
entirely. There was only a voice in the dark. There was a sorcerer at
whose bidding words trooped like a conclave of emperors, and now sang
like a bevy of linnets. And wit and fancy and high aspirations and my
love—because I knew then that your love for me was splendid and
divine—these also were my sorcerer's potent allies. I understood then
how glad and awed were those fabulous Greekish queens when a god wooed
them. Yes, then I understood. How long ago it seems!"

"Yes, yes," he sighed. "In that full-blooded season was Guenevere
a lass, I think, and Charlemagne was not yet in breeches."

"And when there was a new play enacted I was glad. For it was our
play that you and I had polished the last line of yesterday, and all
these people wept and laughed because of what we had done. And I was
proud——" The lady shrugged impatiently. "Proud, did I say? and glad?
That attests how woefully I fall short of you, my poet. You would have
found some magic phrase to make that ancient glory articulate, I know.
Yet,—did I ever love you? I do not know that. I only know I sometimes
fear you robbed me of the power of loving any other man."

He raised one hand in deprecation. "I must remind you," he cried,
whimsically, "that a burnt child dreads even to talk of fire."

Her response was a friendly nod. She came yet nearer. "What," she
demanded, and her smile was elfish, "what if I had lied to you? What if
I were hideously tired of my husband, that bluff, stolid captain? What
if I wanted you to plead with me as in the old time?"

He said: "Until now you were only a woman. Oh, and now, my dear,
you are again that resistless gipsy who so merrily beguiled me to the
very heart of loss. You are Love. You are Youth. You are Comprehension.
You are all that I have had, and lost, and vainly hunger for. Here in
this abominable village, there is no one who understands—not even those
who are more dear to me than you are. I know. I only spoil good paper
which might otherwise be profitably used to wrap herrings in, they
think. They give me ink and a pen just as they would give toys to a
child who squalled for them too obstinately. And Poesy is a thrifty
oracle with no words to waste upon the deaf, however loudly her
interpreter cry out to her. Oh, I have hungered for you, my proud, dark
lady!" the playmaker said.

Afterward they stood quite silent. She was not unmoved by his
outcry; and for this very reason was obscurely vexed by the reflection
that it would be the essay of a braver man to remedy, rather than to
lament, his circumstances. And then the moment's rapture failed him.

"I am a sorry fool," he said; and lightly he ran on: "You are a
skilful witch. Yet you have raised the ghost of an old madness to no
purpose. You seek a master-poet? You will find none here. Perhaps I was
one once. But most of us are poets of one sort or another when we love.
Do you not understand? To-day I do not love you any more than I do
Hecuba. Is it not strange that I should tell you this and not be moved
at all? Is it not laughable that we should stand here at the last, two
feet apart as things physical go, and be as profoundly severed as if an
ocean tumbled between us?"

He fell to walking to and fro, his hands behind his back. She
waited, used as she was to his unstable temperament, a trifle puzzled.
Presently he spoke:

"There was a time when a master-poet was needed. He was
found—nay,—rather made. Fate hastily caught up a man not very different
from the run of men—one with a taste for stringing phrases and with a
comedy or so to his discredit. Fate merely bid him love a headstrong
child newly released from the nursery."

"We know her well enough," she said. "The girl was faithless, and
tyrannous, and proud, and coquettish, and unworthy, and false, and
inconstant. She was black as hell and dark as night in both her person
and her living. You were not niggardly of vituperation."

And he grimaced. "Faith," he replied, "but sonnets are a more
natural form of expression than affidavits, and they are made effective
by compliance with different rules. I find no flagrant fault with you
to-day. You were a child of seventeen, the darling of a noble house, and
an actor—yes, and not even a pre-eminent actor—a gross, poor posturing
vagabond, just twice your age, presumed to love you. What child would
not amuse herself with such engaging toys? Vivacity and prettiness and
cruelty are the ordinary attributes of kittenhood. So you amused
yourself. And I submitted with clear eyes, because I could not help it.
Yes, I who am by nature not disposed to underestimate my personal
importance—I submitted, because your mockery was more desirable than the
adoration of any other woman. And all this helped to make a master-poet
of me. Eh, why not, when such monstrous passions spoke through me—as if
some implacable god elected to play godlike music on a mountebank's
lute? And I made admirable plays. Why not, when there was no tragedy
more poignant than mine?—and where in any comedy was any figure one-half
so ludicrous as mine? Ah, yes, Fate gained her ends, as always."

He was a paunchy, inconsiderable little man. By ordinary his
elongated features and high, bald forehead loaned him an aspect of
serene and axiom-based wisdom, much as we see him in his portraits; but
now his countenance was flushed and mobile. Odd passions played about
it, as when on a sullen night in August summer lightnings flicker and
merge.

His voice had found another cadence. "But Fate was not entirely
ruthless. Fate bade the child become a woman, and so grow tired of all
her childhood's playthings. This was after a long while, as we estimate
happenings.… I suffered then. Yes, I went down to the doors of death, as
people say, in my long illness. But that crude, corporal fever had a
providential thievishness; and not content with stripping me of health
and strength,—not satisfied with pilfering inventiveness and any strong
hunger to create—why, that insatiable fever even robbed me of my
insanity. I lived. I was only a broken instrument flung by because the
god had wearied of playing. I would give forth no more heart-wringing
music, for the musician had departed. And I still lived—I, the stout
little tradesman whom you loathed. Yes, that tradesman scrambled through
these evils, somehow, and came out still able to word adequately all
such imaginings as could be devised by his natural abilities. But he
transmitted no more heart-wringing music."

She said, "You lie!"

He said, "I thank Heaven daily that I do not." He spoke the
truth. She knew it, and her heart was all rebellion.

Indefatigable birds sang through the following hush. A wholesome
and temperate breeze caressed these silent people. Bees that would die
to-morrow hummed about them tirelessly.

Then the poet said: "I loved you; and you did not love me. It is
the most commonplace of tragedies, the heart of every man alive has been
wounded in this identical fashion. A master-poet is only that wounded
man—among so many other bleeding folk—who perversely augments his agony,
and utilizes his wound as an inkwell. Presently time scars over the cut
for him, as time does for all the others. He does not suffer any longer.
No, and such relief is a clear gain; but none the less, he must
henceforward write with ordinary ink such as the lawyers use."

"I should have been the man," the woman cried. "Had I been sure
of fame, could I have known those raptures when you used to gabble
immortal phrases like a stammering infant, I would have paid the price
without all this whimpering."

"Faith, and I think you would have," he assented. "There is the
difference. At bottom I am a creature of the most moderate aspirations,
as you always complained; and for my part, Fate must in reason demand
her applause of posterity rather than of me. For I regret the unlived
life that I was meant for—the comfortable level life of little
happenings which all my schoolfellows have passed through in a stolid
drove. I was equipped to live that life with relish, and that life only;
and it was denied me. It was demolished in order that a book or two be
made out of its wreckage."

She said, with half-shut eyes: "There is a woman at the root of
all this." And how he laughed!

"Did I not say you were a witch? Why, most assuredly there is."

He motioned with his left hand. Some hundred yards away a young
man, who was carrying two logs toward New Place, had paused to rest. A
girl was with him. Now laughingly she was pretending to assist the
porter in lifting his burden. It was a quaintly pretty vignette, as
framed by the peach leaves, because those two young people were so merry
and so candidly in love. A symbolist might have wrung pathos out of the
girl's desire to aid, as set against her fond inadequacy; and the
attendant playwright made note of it.

"Well, well!" he said: "Young Quiney is a so-so choice, since
women must necessarily condescend to intermarrying with men. But he is
far from worthy of her. Tell me, now, was there ever a rarer piece of
beauty?"

"The wench is not ill-favored," was the dark lady's
unenthusiastic answer. "So!—but who is she?"

He replied: "She is my daughter. Yonder you see my latter muse
for whose dear sake I spin romances. I do not mean that she takes any
lively interest in them. That is not to be expected, since she cannot
read or write. Ask her about the poet we were discussing, and I very
much fear Judith will bluntly inform you she cannot tell a B from a
bull's foot. But one must have a muse of some sort or another; and so I
write about the world now as Judith sees it. My Judith finds this world
an eminently pleasant place. It is full of laughter and kindliness—for
could Herod be unkind to her?—and it is largely populated by ardent
young fellows who are intended chiefly to be twisted about your fingers;
and it is illuminated by sunlight whose real purpose is to show how
pretty your hair is. And if affairs go badly for a while, and you have
done nothing very wrong—why, of course, Heaven will soon straighten
matters satisfactorily. For nothing that happens to us can possibly be
anything except a benefit, because God orders all happenings, and God
loves us. There you have Judith's creed; and upon my word, I believe
there is a great deal to be said for it."

"And this is you," she cried—"you who wrote of Troilus and
Timon!"

"I lived all that," he replied—"I lived it, and so for a long
while I believed in the existence of wickedness. To-day I have lost many
illusions, madam, and that ranks among them. I never knew a wicked
person. I question if anybody ever did. Undoubtedly short-sighted people
exist who have floundered into ill-doing; but it proves always to have
been on account of either cowardice or folly, and never because of
malevolence; and, in consequence, their sorry pickle should demand
commiseration far more loudly than our blame. In short, I find humanity
to be both a weaker and a better-meaning race than I had suspected. And
so, I make what you call 'sugar-candy dolls,' because I very potently
believe that all of us are sweet at heart. Oh no! men lack an innate
aptitude for sinning; and at worst, we frenziedly attempt our
misdemeanors just as a sheep retaliates on its pursuers. This much, at
least, has Judith taught me."

The woman murmured: "Eh, you are luckier than I. I had a son. He
was borne of my anguish, he was fed and tended by me, and he was
dependent on me in all things." She said, with a half-sob, "My poet, he
was so little and so helpless! Now he is dead."

"My dear, my dear!" he cried, and he took both her hands. "I also
had a son. He would have been a man by this."

They stood thus for a while. And then he smiled.

"I ask your pardon. I had forgotten that you hate to touch my
hands. I know—they are too moist and flabby. I always knew that you
thought that. Well! Hamnet died. I grieved. That is a trivial thing to
say. But you also have seen your own flesh lying in a coffin so small
that even my soft hands could lift it. So you will comprehend. To-day I
find that the roughest winds abate with time. Hatred and self-seeking
and mischance and, above all, the frailties innate in us—these buffet us
for a while, and we are puzzled, and we demand of God, as Job did, why
is this permitted? And then as the hair dwindles, the wit grows."

"Oh, yes, with age we take a slackening hold upon events; we let
all happenings go by more lightly; and we even concede the universe not
to be under any actual bond to be intelligible. Yes, that is true. But
is it gain, my poet? for I had thought it to be loss."

"With age we gain the priceless certainty that sorrow and
injustice are ephemeral. Solvitur ambulando, my dear. I have attested
this merely by living long enough. I, like any other man of my years,
have in my day known more or less every grief which the world breeds;
and each maddened me in turn, as each was duly salved by time; so that
to-day their ravages vex me no more than do the bee-stings I got when I
was an urchin. To-day I grant the world to be composed of muck and
sunshine intermingled; but, upon the whole, I find the sunshine more
pleasant to look at, and—greedily, because my time for sightseeing is
not very long—I stare at it. And I hold Judith's creed to be the best of
all imaginable creeds—that if we do nothing very wrong, all human
imbroglios, in some irrational and quite incomprehensible fashion, will
be straightened to our satisfaction. Meanwhile, you also voice a tonic
truth—this universe of ours, and, reverently speaking, the Maker of this
universe as well, is under no actual bond to be intelligible in dealing
with us." He laughed at this season and fell into a lighter tone. "Do I
preach like a little conventicle-attending tradesman? Faith, you must
remember that when I talk gravely Judith listens as if it were an oracle
discoursing. For Judith loves me as the wisest and the best of men. I
protest her adoration frightens me. What if she were to find me out?"

"I loved what was divine in you," the woman answered.

"Oddly enough, that is the perfect truth! And when what was
divine in me had burned a sufficiency of incense to your vanity, your
vanity's owner drove off in a fine coach and left me to die in a garret.
Then Judith came. Then Judith nursed and tended and caressed me—and
Judith only in all the world!—as once you did that boy you spoke of. Ah,
madam, and does not sorrow sometimes lie awake o' nights in the low
cradle of that child? and sometimes walk with you by day and clasp your
hand—much as his tiny hand did once, so trustingly, so like the
clutching of a vine—and beg you never to be friends with anything save
sorrow? And do you wholeheartedly love those other women's boys— who did
not die? Yes, I remember. Judith, too, remembered. I was her father, for
all that I had forsaken my family to dance Jack-pudding attendance on a
fine Court lady. So Judith came. And Judith, who sees in play-writing
just a very uncertain way of making money—Judith, who cannot tell a B
from a bull's foot,—why, Judith, madam, did not ask, but gave, what was
divine."

"You are unfair," she cried. "Oh, you are cruel, you juggle
words, make knives of them.… You" and she spoke as with difficulty—"you
have no right to know just how I loved my boy! You should be either man
or woman!"

He said pensively: "Yes, I am cruel. But you had mirth and beauty
once, and I had only love and a vocabulary. Who then more flagrantly
abused the gifts God gave? And why should I not be cruel to you, who
made a master-poet of me for your recreation? Lord, what a deal of
ruined life it takes to make a little art! Yes, yes, I know. Under old
oaks lovers will mouth my verses, and the acorns are not yet shaped from
which those oaks will spring. My adoration and your perfidy, all that I
have suffered, all that I have failed in even, has gone toward the
building of an enduring monument. All these will be immortal, because
youth is immortal, and youth delights in demanding explanations of
infinity. And only to this end I have suffered and have catalogued the
ravings of a perverse disease which has robbed my life of all the normal
privileges of life as flame shrivels hair from the arm—that young fools
such as I was once might be pleased to murder my rhetoric, and
scribblers parody me in their fictions, and schoolboys guess at the date
of my death!" This he said with more than ordinary animation; and then
he shook his head. "There is a leaven," he said—"there is a leaven even
in your smuggest and most inconsiderable tradesman."

She answered, with a wistful smile: "I, too, regret my poet. And
just now you are more like him——"

"Faith, but he was really a poet—or, at least, at times——?"

"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive
this powerful rhyme——'"

"Dear, dear!" he said, in petulant vexation; "how horribly
emotion botches verse. That clash of sibilants is both harsh and
ungrammatical. Shall should be changed to will." And at
that the woman sighed, because, in common with all persons who never
essayed creative verbal composition, she was quite certain perdurable
writing must spring from a surcharged heart, rather than from a
rearrangement of phrases. And so,

"Very unfeignedly I regret my poet," she said, "my poet, who was
unhappy and unreasonable, because I was not always wise or kind, or even
just. And I did not know until to-day how much I loved my poet.… Yes, I
know now I loved him. I must go now. I would I had not come."

Then, standing face to face, he cried, "Eh, madam, and what if I
also have lied to you—in part? Our work is done; what more is there to
say?"

"Nothing," she answered—"nothing. Not even for you, who are a
master-smith of words to-day and nothing more."

"I?" he replied. "Do you so little emulate a higher example that
even for a moment you consider me?"

She did not answer.

When she had gone, the playmaker sat for a long while in
meditation; and then smilingly he took up his pen. He was bound for "an
uninhabited island" where all disasters ended in a happy climax.

"So, so!" he was declaiming, later on: "We, too, are kin
To dreams and visions; and our little life Is gilded by such faint and
cloud-wrapped suns—Only, that needs a homelier touch. Rather, let us
say, We are such stuff As dreams are made on—Oh, good, good!—Now
to pad out the line.… In any event, the Bermudas are a seasonable topic.
Now here, instead of thickly-templed India, suppose we write the
still-vexed Bermoothes—Good, good! It fits in well enough.…"

And so in clerkly fashion he sat about the accomplishment of his
stint of labor in time for dinner. A competent workman is not
disastrously upset by interruption; and, indeed, he found the notion of
surprising Judith with an unlooked-for trinket or so to be at first a
very efficacious spur to composition.

And presently the strong joy of creating kindled in him, and
phrase flowed abreast with thought, and the playmaker wrote fluently and
surely to an accompaniment of contented ejaculations. He regretted
nothing, he would not now have laid aside his pen to take up a scepter.
For surely—he would have said—to live untroubled, and weave beautiful
and winsome dreams is the most desirable of human fates. But he did not
consciously think of this, because he was midcourse in the evoking of a
mimic tempest which, having purged its victims of unkindliness and
error, aimed (in the end) only to sink into an amiable calm.

CONCERNING CORINNA

"Dr. Herrick told me that, in common with
all the Enlightened or Illuminated Brothers, of which prying sect the
age breeds so many, he trusted the great lines of Nature, not in the
whole, but in part, as they believed Nature was in certain senses not
true, and a betrayer, and that she was not wholly the benevolent power
to endow, as accorded with the prevailing deceived notion of the vulgar.
But he wished not to discuss more particularly than thus, as he had
drawn up to himself a certain frontier of reticence; and so fell to
petting a great black pig, of which he made an unseemly companion, and
to talking idly."

A Gyges ring they bear about them still,

To be, and not, seen when and where they will;

They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes
fall,

They fall like dew, and make no noise at all:

So silently they one to th' other come

As colors steal into the pear or plum;

And air-like, leave no pression to be seen

Where'er they met, or parting place has been.



ROBERT HERRICK.—My Lovers how They Come and Part.

CONCERNING CORINNA

The matter hinges entirely upon whether or not Robert Herrick was
insane. Sir Thomas Browne always preferred to think that he was; whereas
Philip Borsdale perversely considered the answer to be optional.
Perversely, Sir Thomas protested, because he said that to believe in
Herrick's sanity was not conducive to your own.

This much is certain: the old clergyman, a man of few friends and
no intimates, enjoyed in Devon, thanks to his time-hallowed reputation
for singularity, a certain immunity. In and about Dean Prior, for
instance, it was conceded in 1674 that it was unusual for a divine of
the Church of England to make a black pig—and a pig of peculiarly
diabolical ugliness, at that—his ordinary associate; but Dean Prior had
come long ago to accept the grisly brute as a concomitant of Dr.
Herrick's presence almost as inevitable as his shadow. It was no crime
to be fond of dumb animals, not even of one so inordinately
unprepossessing; and you allowed for eccentricities, in any event, in
dealing with a poet.

For Totnes, Buckfastleigh, Dean Prior—all that part of Devon, in
fact—complacently basked in the reflected glory of Robert Herrick.
People came from a long distance, now that the Parliamentary Wars were
over, in order just to see the writer of the Hesperides and the Noble
Numbers. And such enthusiasts found in Robert Herrick a hideous dreamy
man, who, without ever perpetrating any actual discourtesy, always
managed to dismiss them, somehow, with a sense of having been rebuffed.

Sir Thomas Browne, that ardent amateur of the curious, came into
Devon, however, without the risk of incurring any such fate, inasmuch as
the knight traveled westward simply to discuss with Master Philip
Borsdale the recent doings of Cardinal Alioneri. Now, Philip Borsdale,
as Sir Thomas knew, had been employed by Herrick in various transactions
here irrelevant. In consequence, Sir Thomas Browne was not greatly
surprised when, on his arrival at Buckfastleigh, Borsdale's body-servant
told him that Master Borsdale had left instructions for Sir Thomas to
follow him to Dean Prior. Browne complied, because his business with
Borsdale was of importance.

Philip Borsdale was lounging in Dr. Herrick's chair, intent upon
a lengthy manuscript, alone and to all appearances quite at home. The
state of the room Sir Thomas found extraordinary; but he had graver
matters to discuss; and he explained the results of his mission without
extraneous comment.

"Yes, you have managed it to admiration," said Philip Borsdale,
when the knight had made an end. Borsdale leaned back and laughed,
purringly, for the outcome of this affair of the Cardinal and the Wax
Image meant much to him from a pecuniary standpoint. "Yet it is odd a
prince of any church which has done so much toward the discomfiture of
sorcery should have entertained such ideas. It is also odd to note the
series of coincidences which appears to have attended this Alioneri's
practises."

"I noticed that," said Sir Thomas. After a while he said: "You
think, then, that they must have been coincidences?"

"MUST is a word which intelligent people do not outwear by too
constant usage."

And "Oh——?" said the knight, and said that alone, because he was
familiar with the sparkle now in Borsdale's eyes, and knew it heralded
an adventure for an amateur of the curious.

"I am not committing myself, mark you, Sir Thomas, to any
statement whatever, beyond the observation that these coincidences were
noticeable. I add, with superficial irrelevance, that Dr. Herrick
disappeared last night."

"I am not surprised," said Sir Thomas, drily. "No possible antics
would astonish me on the part of that unvenerable madman. When I was
last in Totnes, he broke down in the midst of a sermon, and flung the
manuscript of it at his congregation, and cursed them roundly for not
paying closer attention. Such was never my ideal of absolute decorum in
the pulpit. Moreover, it is unusual for a minister of the Church of
England to be accompanied everywhere by a pig with whom he discusses the
affairs of the parish precisely as if the pig were a human being."

"The pig—he whimsically called the pig Corinna, sir, in honor of
that imaginary mistress to whom he addressed so many verses—why, the pig
also has disappeared. Oh, but of course that at least is simply a
coincidence.… I grant you it was an uncanny beast. And I grant you that
Dr. Herrick was a dubious ornament to his calling. Of that I am doubly
certain to-day," said Borsdale, and he waved his hand comprehensively,
"in view of the state in which—you see—he left this room. Yes, he was
quietly writing here at eleven o'clock last night when old Prudence
Baldwin, his housekeeper, last saw him. Afterward Dr. Herrick appears to
have diverted himself by taking away the mats and chalking geometrical
designs upon the floor, as well as by burning some sort of incense in
this brasier."

"But such avocations, Philip, are not necessarily indicative of
sanity. No, it is not, upon the whole, an inevitable manner for an
elderly parson to while away an evening."

"Oh, but that was only a part, sir. He also left the clothes he
was wearing—in a rather peculiarly constructed heap, as you can see.
Among them, by the way, I found this flattened and corroded bullet. That
puzzled me. I think I understand it now." Thus Borsdale, as he
composedly smoked his churchwarden. "In short, the whole affair is as
mysterious——"

Here Sir Thomas raised his hand. "Spare me the simile. I detect a
vista of curious perils such as infinitely outshines verbal brilliancy.
You need my aid in some insane attempt." He considered. He said: "So!
you have been retained?"

"I have been asked to help him. Of course I did not know of what
he meant to try. In short, Dr. Herrick left this manuscript, as well as
certain instructions for me. The last are—well! unusual."

"Ah, yes! You hearten me. I have long had my suspicions as to
this Herrick, though.… And what are we to do?"

"I really cannot inform you, sir. I doubt if I could explain in
any workaday English even what we will attempt to do," said Philip
Borsdale. "I do say this: You believe the business which we have
settled, involving as it does the lives of thousands of men and women,
to be of importance. I swear to you that, as set against what we will
essay, all we have done is trivial. As pitted against the business we
will attempt to-night, our previous achievements are suggestive of the
evolutions of two sand-fleas beside the ocean. The prize at which this
adventure aims is so stupendous that I cannot name it."

"Oh, but you must, Philip. I am no more afraid of the local
constabulary than I am of the local notions as to what respectability
entails. I may confess, however, that I am afraid of wagering against
unknown odds."

Borsdale reflected. Then he said, with deliberation: "Dr.
Herrick's was, when you come to think of it, an unusual life. He is—or
perhaps I ought to say he was—upward of eighty-three. He has lived here
for over a half-century, and during that time he has never attempted to
make either a friend or an enemy. He was—indifferent, let us say.
Talking to Dr. Herrick was, somehow, like talking to a man in a fog.…
Meanwhile, he wrote his verses to imaginary women—to Corinna and Julia,
to Myrha, Electra and Perilla—those lovely, shadow women who never, in
so far as we know, had any real existence——"

Sir Thomas smiled. "Of course. They are mere figments of the
poet, pegs to hang rhymes on. And yet—let us go on. I know that Herrick
never willingly so much as spoke with a woman."

"Not in so far as we know, I said." And Borsdale paused. "Then,
too, he wrote such dainty, merry poems about the fairies. Yes, it was
all of fifty years ago that Dr. Herrick first appeared in print with his
Description of the King and Queen of the Fairies. The thought
seems always to have haunted him."

The knight's face changed, a little by a little. "I have long
been an amateur of the curious," he said, strangely quiet. "I do not
think that anything you may say will surprise me inordinately."

"He had found in every country in the world traditions of a race
who were human—yet more than human. That is the most exact fashion in
which I can express his beginnings. On every side he found the notion of
a race who can impinge on mortal life and partake of it—but always
without exercising the last reach of their endowments. Oh, the tradition
exists everywhere, whether you call these occasional interlopers fauns,
fairies, gnomes, ondines, incubi, or demons. They could, according to
these fables, temporarily restrict themselves into our life, just as a
swimmer may elect to use only one arm—or, a more fitting comparison,
become apparent to our human senses in the fashion of a cube which can
obtrude only one of its six surfaces into a plane. You follow me, of
course, sir?—to the triangles and circles and hexagons this cube would
seem to be an ordinary square. Conceiving such a race to exist, we might
talk with them, might jostle them in the streets, might even intermarry
with them, sir—and always see in them only human beings, and solely
because of our senses' limitations."

"I comprehend. These are exactly the speculations that would
appeal to an unbalanced mind—is that not your thought, Philip?"

"Why, there is nothing particularly insane, Sir Thomas, in
desiring to explore in fields beyond those which our senses make
perceptible. It is very certain these fields exist; and the question of
their extent I take to be both interesting and important."

Then Sir Thomas said: "Like any other rational man, I have
occasionally thought of this endeavor at which you hint. We exist—you
and I and all the others—in what we glibly call the universe. All that
we know of it is through what we entitle our five senses, which, when
provoked to action, will cause a chemical change in a few ounces of
spongy matter packed in our skulls. There are no grounds for believing
that this particular method of communication is adequate, or even that
the agents which produce it are veracious. Meanwhile, we are in touch
with what exists through our five senses only. It may be that they lie
to us. There is, at least, no reason for assuming them to be
infallible."

"But reflection plows a deeper furrow, Sir Thomas. Even in the
exercise of any one of these five senses it is certain that we are
excelled by what we vaingloriously call the lower forms of life. A dog
has powers of scent we cannot reach to, birds hear the crawling of a
worm, insects distinguish those rays in the spectrum which lie beyond
violet and red, and are invisible to us; and snails and fish and
ants—perhaps all other living creatures, indeed—have senses which man
does not share at all, and has no name for. Granted that we human beings
alone possess the power of reasoning, the fact remains that we
invariably start with false premises, and always pass our judgments when
biased at the best by incomplete reports of everything in the universe,
and very possibly by reports which lie flat-footedly."

You saw that Browne was troubled. Now he rose. "Nothing will come
of this. I do not touch upon the desirability of conquering those fields
at which we dare only to hint. No, I am not afraid. I dare assist you in
doing anything Dr. Herrick asks, because I know that nothing will come
of such endeavors. Much is permitted us—'but of the fruit of the tree
which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, to us who are no
more than human, Ye shall not eat of it.'"

"Yet Dr. Herrick, as many other men have done, thought otherwise.
I, too, will venture a quotation. 'Didst thou never see a lark in a
cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf
of grass, and the heavens o'er our heads, like her looking-glass, only
gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.' Many
years ago that lamentation was familiar. What wonder, then, that Dr.
Herrick should have dared to repeat it yesterday? And what wonder if he
tried to free the prisoner?"

"Such freedom is forbidden," Sir Thomas stubbornly replied. "I
have long known that Herrick was formerly in correspondence with John
Heydon, and Robert Flood, and others of the Illuminated, as they call
themselves. There are many of this sect in England, as we all know; and
we hear much silly chatter of Elixirs and Philosopher's Stones in
connection with them. But I happen to know somewhat of their real aims
and tenets. I do not care to know any more than I do. If it be true that
all of which man is conscious is just a portion of a curtain, and that
the actual universe in nothing resembles our notion of it, I am willing
to believe this curtain was placed there for some righteous and wise
reason. They tell me the curtain may be lifted. Whether this be true or
no, I must for my own sanity's sake insist it can never be lifted."

"But what if it were not forbidden? For Dr. Herrick asserts he
has already demonstrated that."

Sir Thomas interrupted, with odd quickness. "True, we must bear
it in mind the man never married—Did he, by any chance, possess a
crystal of Venice glass three inches square?"

And Borsdale gaped. "I found it with his manuscript. But he said
nothing of it.… How could you guess?"

Sir Thomas reflectively scraped the edge of the glass with his
finger-nail. "You would be none the happier for knowing, Philip. Yes,
that is a blood-stain here. I see. And Herrick, so far as we know, had
never in his life loved any woman. He is the only poet in history who
never demonstrably loved any woman. I think you had better read me his
manuscript, Philip."

This Philip Borsdale did.

Then Sir Thomas said, as quiet epilogue: "This, if it be true,
would explain much as to that lovely land of eternal spring and
daffodils and friendly girls, of which his verses make us free. It would
even explain Corinna and Herrick's rapt living without any human ties.
For all poets since the time of AEschylus, who could not write until he
was too drunken to walk, have been most readily seduced by whatever
stimulus most tended to heighten their imaginings; so that for the sake
of a song's perfection they have freely resorted to divers artificial
inspirations, and very often without evincing any undue squeamishness.…
I spoke of AEschylus. I am sorry, Philip, that you are not familiar with
ancient Greek life. There is so much I could tell you of, in that event,
of the quaint cult of Kore, or Pherephatta, and of the swine of
Eubouleus, and of certain ambiguous maidens, whom those old Grecians
fabled—oh, very ignorantly fabled, my lad, of course—to rule in a more
quietly lit and more tranquil world than we blunder about. I think I
could explain much which now seems mysterious—yes, and the daffodils,
also, that Herrick wrote of so constantly. But it is better not to talk
of these sinister delusions of heathenry." Sir Thomas shrugged. "For my
reward would be to have you think me mad. I prefer to iterate the
verdict of all logical people, and formally to register my opinion that
Robert Herrick was indisputably a lunatic."

Borsdale did not seem perturbed. "I think the record of his
experiments is true, in any event. You will concede that their results
were startling? And what if his deductions be the truth? what if our
limited senses have reported to us so very little of the universe, and
even that little untruthfully?" He laughed and drummed impatiently upon
the table. "At least, he tells us that the boy returned. I fervently
believe that in this matter Dr. Herrick was capable of any crime except
falsehood. Oh, no I depend on it, he also will return."

"You imagine Herrick will break down the door between this world
and that other inconceivable world which all of us have dreamed of! To
me, my lad, it seems as if this Herrick aimed dangerously near to
repetition of the Primal Sin, for all that he handles it like a problem
in mechanical mathematics. The poet writes as if he were instructing a
dame's school as to the advisability of becoming omnipotent."

"Well, well! I am not defending Dr. Herrick in anything save his
desire to know the truth. In this respect at least, he has proven
himself to be both admirable and fearless. And at worst, he only strives
to do what Jacob did at Peniel," said Philip Borsdale, lightly. "The
patriarch, as I recall, was blessed for acting as he did. The legend is
not irrelevant, I think."

They passed into the adjoining room.

Thus the two men came into a high-ceiled apartment, cylindrical
in shape, with plastered walls painted green everywhere save for the
quaint embellishment of a large oval, wherein a woman, having an eagle's
beak, grasped in one hand a serpent and in the other a knife. Sir Thomas
Browne seemed to recognize this curious design, and gave an ominous nod.

Borsdale said: "You see Dr. Herrick had prepared everything. And
much of what we are about to do is merely symbolical, of course. Most
people undervalue symbols. They do not seem to understand that there
could never have been any conceivable need of inventing a periphrasis
for what did not exist."

Sir Thomas Browne regarded Borsdale for a while intently. Then
the knight gave his habitual shrugging gesture. "You are braver than I,
Philip, because you are more ignorant than I. I have been too long an
amateur of the curious. Sometimes in over-credulous moments I have
almost believed that in sober verity there are reasoning beings who are
not human—beings that for their own dark purposes seek union with us.
Indeed, I went into Pomerania once to talk with John Dietrick of Ramdin.
He told me one of those relations whose truth we dread, a tale which I
did not dare, I tell you candidly, even to discuss in my Vulgar
Errors. Then there is Helgi Thorison's history, and that of Leonard of
Basle also. Oh, there are more recorded stories of this nature than you
dream of, Philip. We have only the choice between believing that all
these men were madmen, and believing that ordinary human life is led by
a drugged animal who drowses through a purblind existence among merciful
veils. And these female creatures—these Corinnas, Perillas, Myrhas, and
Electras—can it be possible that they are always striving, for their own
strange ends, to rouse the sleeping animal and break the kindly
veils?—and are they permitted to use such amiable enticements as Herrick
describes? Oh, no, all this is just a madman's dream, dear lad, and we
must not dare to consider it seriously, lest we become no more sane than
he."

"But you will aid me?" Borsdale said.

"Yes, I will aid you, Philip, for in Herrick's case I take it
that the mischief is consummated already; and we, I think, risk nothing
worse than death. But you will need another knife a little later—a knife
that will be clean."

"I had forgotten." Borsdale withdrew, and presently returned with
a bone-handled knife. And then he made a light. "Are you quite ready,
sir?"

Sir Thomas Browne, that aging amateur of the curious, could not
resist a laugh.

And then they sat about proceedings of which, for obvious
reasons, the details are best left unrecorded. It was not an
unconscionable while before they seemed to be aware of unusual
phenomena. But as Sir Thomas always pointed out, in subsequent
discussions, these were quite possibly the fruitage of excited
imagination.

"Now, Philip!—now, give me the knife!" cried Sir Thomas Browne.
He knew for the first time, despite many previous mischancy happenings,
what real terror was.

The room was thick with blinding smoke by this, so that Borsdale
could see nothing save his co-partner in this adventure. Both men were
shaken by what had occurred before. Borsdale incuriously perceived that
old Sir Thomas rose, tense as a cat about to pounce, and that he caught
the unstained knife from Borsdale's hand, and flung it like a javelin
into the vapor which encompassed them. This gesture stirred the smoke so
that Borsdale could see the knife quiver and fall, and note the tiny
triangle of unbared plaster it had cut in the painted woman's breast.
Within the same instant he had perceived a naked man who staggered.

"Iz adu kronyeshnago——!" The intruder's thin, shrill wail
was that of a frightened child. The man strode forward, choked, seemed
to grope his way. His face was not good to look at. Horror gripped and
tore at every member of the cadaverous old body, as a high wind tugs at
a flag. The two witnesses of Herrick's agony did not stir during the
instant wherein the frenzied man stooped, moving stiffly like an
ill-made toy, and took up the knife.

"Oh, yes, I knew what he was about to do," said Sir Thomas Browne
afterward, in his quiet fashion. "I did not try to stop him. If Herrick
had been my dearest friend, I would not have interfered. I had seen his
face, you comprehend. Yes, it was kinder to let him die. It was curious,
though, as he stood there hacking his chest, how at each stab he
deliberately twisted the knife. I suppose the pain distracted his mind
from what he was remembering. I should have forewarned Borsdale of this
possible outcome at the very first, I suppose. But, then, which one of
us is always wise?"

So this adventure came to nothing. For its significance, if any,
hinged upon Robert Herrick's sanity, which was at best a disputable
quantity. Grant him insane, and the whole business, as Sir Thomas was at
large pains to point out, dwindles at once into the irresponsible
vagaries of a madman.

"And all the while, for what we know, he had been hiding
somewhere in the house. We never searched it. Oh, yes, there is no doubt
he was insane," said Sir Thomas, comfortably.

"Faith! what he moaned was gibberish, of course——"

"Oddly enough, his words were intelligible. They meant in Russian
'Out of the lowest hell.'"

"But, why, in God's name, Russian?"

"I am sure I do not know," Sir Thomas replied; and he did not
appear at all to regret his ignorance.

But Borsdale meditated, disappointedly. "Oh, yes, the outcome is
ambiguous, Sir Thomas, in every way. I think we may safely take it as a
warning, in any event, that this world of ours, whatever its
deficiencies, was meant to be inhabited by men and women only."

"Now I," was Sir Thomas's verdict, "prefer to take it as a
warning that insane people ought to be restrained."

"Ah, well, insanity is only one of the many forms of being
abnormal. Yes, I think it proves that all abnormal people ought to be
restrained. Perhaps it proves that they are very potently restrained,"
said Philip Borsdale, perversely.

Perversely, Sir Thomas always steadfastly protested, because he
said that to believe in Herrick's sanity was not conducive to your own.

So Sir Thomas shrugged, and went toward the open window. Without
the road was a dazzling gray under the noon sun, for the sky was
cloudless. The ordered trees were rustling pleasantly, very brave in
their autumnal liveries. Under a maple across the way some seven
laborers were joking lazily as they ate their dinner. A wagon lumbered
by, the driver whistling. In front of the house a woman had stopped to
rearrange the pink cap of the baby she was carrying. The child had just
reached up fat and uncertain little arms to kiss her. Nothing that
Browne saw was out of ordinary, kindly human life.

"Well, after all," said Sir Thomas, upon a sudden, "for one, I
think it is an endurable world, just as it stands."

And Borsdale looked up from a letter he had been reading. It was
from a woman who has no concern with this tale, and its contents were of
no importance to any one save Borsdale.

"Now, do you know," said Philip Borsdale, "I am beginning to
think you the most sensible man of my acquaintance! Oh, yes, beyond
doubt it is an endurable sun-nurtured world—just as it stands. It makes
it doubly odd that Dr. Herrick should have chosen always to

'Write of groves, and twilights, and to sing

The court of Mab, and of the Fairy King,

And write of Hell.'"

Sir Thomas touched his arm, protestingly. "Ah, but you have
forgotten what follows, Philip—

'I sing, and ever shall,

Of Heaven,—and hope to have it after all.'"

"Well! I cry Amen," said Borsdale. "But I wish I could forget the
old man's face."

"Oh, and I also," Sir Thomas said. "And I cry Amen with far more
heartiness, my lad, because I, too, once dreamed of—of Corinna, shall we
say?"

OLIVIA'S POTTAGE

"Mr. Wycherley was naturally modest until
King Charles' court, that late disgrace to our times, corrupted him. He
then gave himself up to all sorts of extravagances and to the wildest
frolics that a wanton wit could devise.… Never was so much ill-nature in
a pen as in his, joined with so much good nature as was in himself, even
to excess; for he was bountiful, even to run himself into difficulties,
and charitable even to a fault. It was not that he was free from the
failings of humanity, but he had the tenderness of it, too, which made
everybody excuse whom everybody loved; and even the asperity of his
verses seems to have been forgiven."

I the Plain Dealer am to act to-day.



*****



Now, you shrewd judges, who the boxes sway,

Leading the ladies' hearts and sense astray,

And for their sakes, see all and hear no play;

Correct your cravats, foretops, lock behind:

The dress and breeding of the play ne'er mind;

For the coarse dauber of the coming scenes

To follow life and nature only means,

Displays you as you are, makes his fine woman

A mercenary jilt and true to no man,

Shows men of wit and pleasure of the age

Are as dull rogues as ever cumber'd stage.



WILLIAM WYCHERLEY.—Prologue to The Plain Dealer.

OLIVIA'S POTTAGE

It was in the May of 1680 that Mr. William Wycherley went into
the country to marry the famed heiress, Mistress Araminta Vining, as he
had previously settled with her father, and found her to his vast relief
a very personable girl. She had in consequence a host of admirers,
pre-eminent among whom was young Robert Minifie of Milanor. Mr.
Wycherley, a noted stickler for etiquette, decorously made bold to
question Mr. Minifie's taste in a dispute concerning waistcoats. A duel
was decorously arranged and these two met upon the narrow beach of
Teviot Bay.

Theirs was a spirited encounter, lasting for ten energetic
minutes. Then Wycherley pinked Mr. Minifie in the shoulder, just as the
dramatist, a favorite pupil of Gerard's, had planned to do; and the four
gentlemen parted with every imaginable courtesy, since the wounded man
and the two seconds were to return by boat to Mr. Minifie's house at
Milanor.

More lately Wycherley walked in the direction of Ouseley Manor,
whistling Love's a Toy. Honor was satisfied, and, happily, as he
reflected, at no expense of life. He was a kindly hearted fop, and more
than once had killed his man with perfectly sincere regret. But in
putting on his coat—it was the black camlet coat with silver buttons—he
had overlooked his sleevelinks; and he did not recognize, for
twenty-four eventful hours, the full importance of his carelessness.

In the heart of Figgis Wood, the incomparable Countess of
Drogheda, aunt to Mr. Wycherley's betrothed, and a noted leader of
fashion, had presently paused at sight of him—laughing a little—and with
one tiny hand had made as though to thrust back the staghound which
accompanied her. "Your humble servant, Mr. Swashbuckler," she said; and
then: "But oh! you have not hurt the lad?" she demanded, with a tincture
of anxiety.

"Nay, after a short but brilliant engagement," Wycherley
returned, "Mr. Minifie was very harmlessly perforated; and in
consequence I look to be married on Thursday, after all."

"Let me die but Cupid never meets with anything save
inhospitality in this gross world!" cried Lady Drogheda. "For the boy is
heels over head in love with Araminta,—oh, a second Almanzor! And my
niece does not precisely hate him either, let me tell you, William, for
all your month's assault of essences and perfumed gloves and apricot
paste and other small artillery of courtship. La, my dear, was it only a
month ago we settled your future over a couple of Naples biscuit and a
bottle of Rhenish?" She walked beside him now, and the progress of these
exquisites was leisurely. There were many trees at hand so huge as to
necessitate a considerable detour.

"Egad, it is a month and three days over," Wycherley retorted,
"since you suggested your respected brother-in-law was ready to pay my
debts in full, upon condition I retaliated by making your adorable niece
Mistress Wycherley. Well, I stand to-day indebted to him for an advance
of L1500 and am no more afraid of bailiffs. We have performed a very
creditable stroke of business; and the day after to-morrow you will have
fairly earned your L500 for arranging the marriage. Faith, and in
earnest of this, I already begin to view you through appropriate lenses
as undoubtedly the most desirable aunt in the universe."

Nor was there any unconscionable stretching of the phrase.
Through the quiet forest, untouched as yet by any fidgeting culture, and
much as it was when John Lackland wooed Hawisa under, its venerable
oaks, old even then, the little widow moved like a light flame. She was
clothed throughout in scarlet, after her high-hearted style of dress,
and carried a tall staff of ebony; and the gold head of it was farther
from the dead leaves than was her mischievous countenance. The big
staghound lounged beside her. She pleased the eye, at least, did this
heartless, merry and selfish Olivia, whom Wycherley had so ruthlessly
depicted in his Plain Dealer. To the last detail Wycherley found
her, as he phrased it, "mignonne et piquante," and he told her
so.

Lady Drogheda observed, "Fiddle-de-dee!" Lady Drogheda continued:
"Yes, I am a fool, of course, but then I still remember Bessington, and
the boy that went mad there——"

"Because of a surfeit of those dreams 'such as the poets know
when they are young.' Sweet chuck, beat not the bones of the buried;
when he breathed he was a likely lad," Mr. Wycherley declared, with
signal gravity.

"Oh, la, la!" she flouted him. "Well, in any event you were the
first gentleman in England to wear a neckcloth of Flanders lace."

"And you were the first person of quality to eat cheesecakes in
Spring Garden," he not half so mirthfully retorted. "So we have not
entirely failed in life, it may be, after all."

She made of him a quite irrelevant demand: "D'ye fancy Esau was
contented, William?"

"I fancy he was fond of pottage, madam; and that, as I remember,
he got his pottage. Come, now, a tangible bowl of pottage, piping hot,
is not to be despised in such a hazardous world as ours is."

She was silent for a lengthy while. "Lord, Lord, how musty all
that brave, sweet nonsense seems!" she said, and almost sighed. "Eh,
well! le vin est tiré, et il faut le boire."

"My adorable aunt! Let us put it a thought less dumpishly; and
render thanks because our pottage smokes upon the table, and we are
blessed with excellent appetites."

"So that in a month we will be back again in the playhouses and
Hyde Park and Mulberry Garden, or nodding to each other in the New
Exchange,—you with your debts paid, and I with my L500——?" She paused to
pat the staghound's head. "Lord Remon came this afternoon," said Lady
Drogheda, and with averted eyes.

"I do not approve of Remon," he announced. "Nay, madam, even a
Siren ought to spare her kin and show some mercy toward the more
stagnant-blooded fish."

And Lady Drogheda shrugged. "He is very wealthy, and I am
lamentably poor. One must not seek noon at fourteen o'clock or clamor
for better bread than was ever made from wheat."

Mr. Wycherley laughed, after a pregnant silence.

"By heavens, madam, you are in the right! So I shall walk no more
in Figgis Wood, for its old magic breeds too many day-dreams. Besides,
we have been serious for half-an-hour. Now, then, let us discuss
theology, dear aunt, or millinery, or metaphysics, or the King's new
statue at Windsor, or, if you will, the last Spring Garden scandal. Or
let us count the leaves upon this tree; and afterward I will enumerate
my reasons for believing yonder crescent moon to be the paring of the
Angel Gabriel's left thumb-nail."

She was a woman of eloquent silences when there was any need of
them; and thus the fop and the coquette traversed the remainder of that
solemn wood without any further speech. Modish people would have
esteemed them unwontedly glum.

Wycherley discovered in a while the absence of his sleeve-links,
and was properly vexed by the loss of these not unhandsome trinkets, the
gifts of Lady Castlemaine in the old days when Mr. Wycherley was the
King's successful rival for her favors. But Wycherley knew the tide
filled Teviot Bay and wondering fishes were at liberty to muzzle the
toys, by this, and merely shrugged at his mishap, midcourse in toilet.

Mr. Wycherley, upon mature deliberation, wore the green suit with
yellow ribbons, since there was a ball that night in honor of his
nearing marriage, and a confluence of gentry to attend it. Miss Vining
and he walked through a minuet to some applause; the two were heartily
acclaimed a striking couple, and congratulations beat about their ears
as thick as sugar-plums in a carnival. And at nine you might have found
the handsome dramatist alone upon the East Terrace of Ouseley, pacing to
and fro in the moonlight, and complacently reflecting upon his quite
indisputable and, past doubt, unmerited good fortune.

There was never any night in June which nature planned the more
adroitly. Soft and warm and windless, lit by a vainglorious moon and
every star that ever shone, the beauty of this world caressed and
heartened its beholder like a gallant music. Our universe, Mr. Wycherley
conceded willingly, was excellent and kindly, and the Arbiter of it too
generous; for here was he, the wastrel, like the third prince at the end
of a fairy-tale, the master of a handsome wife, and a fine house and
fortune. Somewhere, he knew, young Minifie, with his arm in a sling, was
pleading with Mistress Araminta for the last time; and this reflection
did not greatly trouble Mr. Wycherley, since incommunicably it tickled
his vanity. He was chuckling when he came to the open window.

Within a woman was singing, to the tinkling accompaniment of a
spinet, for the delectation of Lord Remon. She was not uncomely, and the
hard, lean, stingy countenance of the attendant nobleman was almost
genial. Wycherley understood with a great rending shock, as though the
thought were novel, that Olivia, Lady Drogheda, designed to marry this
man, who grinned within finger's reach—or, rather, to ally herself with
Remon's inordinate wealth,—and without any heralding a brutal rage and
hatred of all created things possessed the involuntary eavesdropper.

She looked up into Remon's face and, laughing with such bright
and elfin mirth as never any other woman showed, thought Wycherley, she
broke into another song. She would have spared Mr. Wycherley that had
she but known him to be within earshot.… Oh, it was only Lady Drogheda
who sang, he knew,—the seasoned gamester and coquette, the veteran of
London and of Cheltenham,—but the woman had no right to charm this
haggler with a voice that was not hers. For it was the voice of another
Olivia, who was not a fine and urban lady, and who lived nowhere any
longer; it was the voice of a soft-handed, tender, jeering girl, whom he
alone remembered; and a sick, illimitable rage grilled in each vein of
him as liltingly she sang, for Remon, the old and foolish song which
Wycherley had made in her praise very long ago, and of which he might
not ever forget the most trivial word.

Men, even beaux, are strangely constituted; and so it needed only
this—the sudden stark brute jealousy of one male animal for another.
That was the clumsy hand which now unlocked the dyke; and like a flood,
tall and resistless, came the recollection of their far-off past and of
its least dear trifle, of all the aspirations and absurdities and
splendors of their common youth, and found him in its path, a painted
fellow, a spendthrift king of the mode, a most notable authority upon
the set of a peruke, a penniless, spent connoisseur of stockings,
essences and cosmetics.

He got but little rest this night.

There were too many plaintive memories which tediously plucked
him back, with feeble and innumerable hands, as often as he trod upon
the threshold of sleep. Then too, there were so many dreams,
half-waking, and not only of Olivia Chichele, naive and frank in divers
rural circumstances, but rather of Olivia, Lady Drogheda, that perfect
piece of artifice; of how exquisite she was! how swift and volatile in
every movement! how airily indomitable, and how mendacious to the tips
of her polished finger-nails! and how she always seemed to flit about
this world as joyously, alertly, and as colorfully as some ornate and
tiny bird of the tropics!

But presently parochial birds were wrangling underneath the
dramatist's window, while he tossed and assured himself that he was
sleepier than any saint who ever snored in Ephesus; and presently one
hand of Moncrieff was drawing the bed-curtains, while the other
carefully balanced a mug of shaving-water.

Wycherley did not see her all that morning, for Lady Drogheda was
fatigued, or so a lackey informed him, and as yet kept her chamber. His
Araminta he found deplorably sullen. So the dramatist devoted the better
part of this day to a refitting of his wedding-suit, just come from
London; for Moncrieff, an invaluable man, had adjudged the pockets to be
placed too high; and, be the punishment deserved or no, Mr. Wycherley
had never heard that any victim of law appeared the more admirable upon
his scaffold for being slovenly in his attire.

Thus it was as late as five in the afternoon that, wearing the
peach-colored suit trimmed with scarlet ribbon, and a new French beaver,
the exquisite came upon Lady Drogheda walking in the gardens with only
an appropriate peacock for company. She was so beautiful and brilliant
and so little—so like a famous gem too suddenly disclosed, and therefore
oddly disparate in all these qualities, that his decorous pleasant voice
might quite permissibly have shaken a trifle (as indeed it did), when
Mr. Wycherley implored Lady Drogheda to walk with him to Teviot Bay, on
the off-chance of recovering his sleeve-links.

And there they did find one of the trinkets, but the tide had
swept away the other, or else the sand had buried it. So they rested
there upon the rocks, after an unavailing search, and talked of many
trifles, amid surroundings oddly incongruous.

For this Teviot Bay is a primeval place, a deep-cut, narrow notch
in the tip of Carnrick, and is walled by cliffs so high and so
precipitous that they exclude a view of anything except the ocean. The
bay opens due west; and its white barriers were now developing a violet
tinge, for this was on a sullen afternoon, and the sea was ruffled by
spiteful gusts. Wycherley could find no color anywhere save in this
glowing, tiny and exquisite woman; and everywhere was a gigantic peace,
vexed only when high overhead a sea-fowl jeered at these modish persons,
as he flapped toward an impregnable nest.

"And by this hour to-morrow," thought Mr. Wycherley, "I shall be
chained to that good, strapping, wholesome Juno of a girl!"

So he fell presently into a silence, staring at the vacant west,
which was like a huge and sickly pearl, not thinking of anything at all,
but longing poignantly for something which was very beautiful and
strange and quite unattainable, with precisely that anguish he had
sometimes known in awaking from a dream of which he could remember
nothing save its piercing loveliness.

"And thus ends the last day of our bachelorhood!" said Lady
Drogheda, upon a sudden. "You have played long enough—La, William, you
have led the fashion for ten years, you have written four merry
comedies, and you have laughed as much as any man alive, but you have
pulled down all that nature raised in you, I think. Was it worth while?"

"Faith, but nature's monuments are no longer the last cry in
architecture," he replied; "and I believe that The Plain Dealer
and The Country Wife will hold their own."

"And you wrote them when you were just a boy! Ah, yes, you might
have been our English Moliere, my dear. And, instead, you have elected
to become an authority upon cravats and waistcoats."

"Eh, madam"—he smiled—"there was a time when I too was foolishly
intent to divert the leisure hours of posterity. But reflection assured
me that posterity had, thus far, done very little to place me under that
or any other obligation. Ah, no! Youth, health and—though I say it—a
modicum of intelligence are loaned to most of us for a while, and for a
terribly brief while. They are but loans, and Time is waiting greedily
to snatch them from us. For the perturbed usurer knows that he is
lending us, perforce, three priceless possessions, and that till our
lease runs out we are free to dispose of them as we elect. Now, had I
jealously devoted my allotment of these treasures toward securing for my
impressions of the universe a place in yet unprinted libraries, I would
have made an investment from which I could not possibly have derived any
pleasure, and which would have been to other people of rather dubious
benefit. In consequence, I chose a wiser and devouter course."

This statement Lady Drogheda afforded the commentary of a
grimace.

"Why, look you," Wycherley philosophized, "have you never thought
what a vast deal of loving and painstaking labor must have gone to make
the world we inhabit so beautiful and so complete? For it was not enough
to evolve and set a glaring sun in heaven, to marshal the big stars
about the summer sky, but even in the least frequented meadow every
butterfly must have his pinions jeweled, very carefully, and every
lovely blade of grass be fashioned separately. The hand that yesterday
arranged the Himalayas found time to glaze the wings of a midge! Now,
most of us could design a striking Flood, or even a Last judgment, since
the canvas is so big and the colors used so virulent; but to paint a
snuff-box perfectly you must love the labor for its own sake, and pursue
it without even an underthought of the performance's ultimate
appraisement. People do not often consider the simple fact that it is
enough to bait, and quite superfluous to veneer, a trap; indeed, those
generally acclaimed the best of persons insist this world is but an
antechamber, full of gins and pitfalls, which must be scurried through
with shut eyes. And the more fools they, as all we poets know! for to
enjoy a sunset, or a glass of wine, or even to admire the charms of a
handsome woman, is to render the Artificer of all at least the tribute
of appreciation."

But she said, in a sharp voice: "William, William——!" And he saw
that there was no beach now in Teviot Bay except the dwindling crescent
at its farthest indentation on which they sat.

Yet his watch, on consultation, recorded only five o'clock; and
presently Mr. Wycherley laughed, not very loudly. The two had risen, and
her face was a tiny snowdrift where every touch of rouge and
grease-pencils showed crudely.

"Look now," said Wycherley, "upon what trifles our lives hinge!
Last night I heard you singing, and the song brought back so many things
done long ago, and made me so unhappy that—ridiculous conclusion!—I
forgot to wind my watch. Well! the tide is buffeting at either side of
Carnrick; within the hour this place will be submerged; and, in a
phrase, we are as dead as Hannibal or Hector."

She said, very quiet: "Could you not gain the mainland if you
stripped and swam for it?"

"Why, possibly," the beau conceded. "Meanwhile you would have
drowned. Faith, we had as well make the best of it."

Little Lady Drogheda touched his sleeve, and her hand (as the man
noted) did not shake at all, nor did her delicious piping voice shake
either. "You cannot save me. I know it. I am not frightened. I bid you
save yourself."

"Permit me to assist you to that ledge of rock," Mr. Wycherley
answered, "which is a trifle higher than the beach; and I pray you,
Olivia, do not mar the dignity of these last passages by talking
nonsense."

For he had spied a ledge, not inaccessible, some four feet higher
than the sands, and it offered them at least a respite. And within the
moment they had secured this niggardly concession, intent to die, as
Wycherley observed, like hurt mice upon a pantry-shelf. The business
smacked of disproportion, he considered, although too well-bred to say
as much; for here was a big ruthless league betwixt earth and sea, and
with no loftier end than to crush a fop and a coquette, whose speedier
extinction had been dear at the expense of a shilling's worth of
arsenic!

Then the sun came out, to peep at these trapped, comely people,
and doubtless to get appropriate mirth at the spectacle. He hung low
against the misty sky, a clearly-rounded orb that did not dazzle, but
merely shone with the cold glitter of new snow upon a fair December day;
and for the rest, the rocks, and watery heavens, and all these
treacherous and lapping waves, were very like a crude draught of the
world, dashed off conceivably upon the day before creation.

These arbiters of social London did not speak at all; and the
bleak waters crowded toward them as in a fretful dispute of precedence.

Then the woman said: "Last night Lord Remon asked me to marry
him, and I declined the honor. For this place is too like
Bessington—and, I think, the past month has changed everything——"

"I thought you had forgotten Bessington," he said, "long, long
ago."

"I did not ever quite forget—Oh, the garish years," she wailed,
"since then! And how I hated you, William—and yet liked you,
too,—because you were never the boy that I remembered, and people would
not let you be! And how I hated them—the huzzies! For I had to see you
almost every day, and it was never you I saw—Ah, William, come back for
just a little, little while, and be an honest boy for just the moment
that we are dying, and not an elegant fine gentleman!"

"Nay, my dear," the dramatist composedly answered, "an hour of
naked candor is at hand. Life is a masquerade where Death, it would
appear, is master of the ceremonies. Now he sounds his whistle; and we
who went about the world so long as harlequins must unmask, and for all
time put aside our abhorrence of the disheveled. For in sober verity,
this is Death who comes, Olivia,—though I had thought that at his advent
one would be afraid."

Yet apprehension of this gross and unavoidable adventure, so soon
to be endured, thrilled him, and none too lightly. It seemed unfair that
death should draw near thus sensibly, with never a twinge or ache to
herald its arrival. Why, there were fifty years of life in this fine,
nimble body but for any contretemps like that of the deplorable present!
Thus his meditations stumbled.

"Oh, William," Lady Drogheda bewailed, "it is all so big—the
incurious west, and the sea, and these rocks that were old in Noah's
youth,—and we are so little——!"

"Yes," he returned, and took her hand, because their feet were
wetted now; "the trap and its small prey are not commensurate. The stage
is set for a Homeric death-scene, and we two profane an over-ambitious
background. For who are we that Heaven should have rived the world
before time was, to trap us, and should make of the old sea a
fowling-net?" Their eyes encountered, and he said, with a strange gush
of manliness: "Yet Heaven is kind. I am bound even in honor now to marry
Mistress Araminta; and you would marry Remon in the end, Olivia,—ah,
yes! for we are merely moths, my dear, and luxury is a disastrously
brilliant lamp. But here are only you and I and the master of all
ceremony. And yet—I would we were a little worthier, Olivia!"

"You have written four merry comedies and you were the first
gentleman in England to wear a neckcloth of Flanders lace," she
answered, and her smile was sadder than weeping.

"And you were the first person of quality to eat cheese-cakes in
Spring Garden. There you have our epitaphs, if we in truth have earned
an epitaph who have not ever lived."

"No, we have only laughed—Laugh now, for the last time, and
hearten me, my handsome William! And yet could I but come to God," the
woman said, with a new voice, "and make it clear to Him just how it all
fell out, and beg for one more chance! How heartily I would pray then!"

"And I would cry Amen to all that prayer must of necessity
contain," he answered. "Oh!" said Wycherley, "just for applause and
bodily comfort and the envy of innumerable other fools we two have
bartered a great heritage! I think our corner of the world will lament
us for as much as a week; but I fear lest Heaven may not condescend to
set apart the needful time wherein to frame a suitable chastisement for
such poor imbeciles. Olivia, I have loved you all my life, and I have
been faithful neither to you nor to myself! I love you so that I am not
afraid even now, since you are here, and so entirely that I have
forgotten how to plead my cause convincingly. And I have had practice,
let me tell you.… !" Then he shook his head and smiled. "But candor is
not à la mode. See, now, to what outmoded and bucolic frenzies
nature brings even us at last."

She answered only, as she motioned seaward, "Look!"

And what Mr. Wycherley saw was a substantial boat rowed by four
of Mr. Minifie's attendants; and in the bow of the vessel sat that
wounded gentleman himself, regarding Wycherley and Lady Drogheda with
some disfavor; and beside the younger man was Mistress Araminta Vining.

It was a perturbed Minifie who broke the silence. "This is very
awkward," he said, "because Araminta and I are eloping. We mean to be
married this same night at Milanor. And deuce take it, Mr. Wycherley! I
can't leave you there to drown, any more than in the circumstances I can
ask you to make one of the party."

"Mr. Wycherley," said his companion, with far more asperity, "the
vanity and obduracy of a cruel father have forced me to the adoption of
this desperate measure. Toward yourself I entertain no ill-feeling, nor
indeed any sentiment at all except the most profound contempt. My aunt
will, of course, accompany us; for yourself, you will do as you please;
but in any event I solemnly protest that I spurn your odious
pretensions, release myself hereby from an enforced and hideous
obligation, and in a phrase would not marry you in order to be Queen of
England."

"Miss Vining, I had hitherto admired you," the beau replied, with
fervor, "but now esteem is changed to adoration."

Then he turned to his Olivia. "Madam, you will pardon the awkward
but unavoidable publicity of my proceeding. I am a ruined man. I owe
your brother-in-law some L1500, and, oddly enough, I mean to pay him. I
must sell Jephcot and Skene Minor, but while life lasts I shall keep
Bessington and all its memories. Meanwhile there is a clergyman waiting
at Milanor. So marry me to-night, Olivia; and we will go back to
Bessington to-morrow."

"To Bessington——!" she said. It was as though she spoke of
something very sacred. Then very musically Lady Drogheda laughed, and to
the eye she was all flippancy. "La, William, I can't bury myself in the
country until the end of time," she said, "and make interminable
custards," she added, "and superintend the poultry," she said, "and for
recreation play short whist with the vicar."

And it seemed to Mr. Wycherley that he had gone divinely mad.
"Don't lie to me, Olivia. You are thinking there are yet a host of
heiresses who would be glad to be a famous beau's wife at however dear a
cost. But don't lie to me. Don't even try to seem the airy and bedizened
woman I have known so long. All that is over now. Death tapped us on the
shoulder, and, if only for a moment, the masks were dropped. And life is
changed now, oh, everything is changed! Then, come, my dear! let us be
wise and very honest. Let us concede it is still possible for me to find
another heiress, and for you to marry Remon; let us grant it the only
outcome of our common-sense! and for all that, laugh, and fling away the
pottage, and be more wise than reason."

She irresolutely said: "I cannot. Matters are altered now. It
would be madness——"

"It would undoubtedly be madness," Mr. Wycherley assented. "But
then I am so tired of being rational! Oh, Olivia," this former arbiter
of taste absurdly babbled, "if I lose you now it is forever! and there
is no health in me save when I am with you. Then alone I wish to do
praiseworthy things, to be all which the boy we know of should have
grown to.… See how profoundly shameless I am become when, with such an
audience, I take refuge in the pitiful base argument of my own weakness!
But, my dear, I want you so that nothing else in the world means
anything to me. I want you! and all my life I have wanted you."

"Boy, boy——!" she answered, and her fine hands had come to
Wycherley, as white birds flutter homeward. But even then she had to
deliberate the matter—since the habits of many years are not put aside
like outworn gloves,—and for innumerable centuries, it seemed to him,
her foot tapped on that wetted ledge.

Presently her lashes lifted. "I suppose it would be lacking in
reverence to keep a clergyman waiting longer than was absolutely
necessary?" she hazarded.

A BROWN WOMAN

"A critical age called for symmetry, and
exquisite finish had to be studied as much as nobility of thought.… POPE
aimed to take first place as a writer of polished verse. Any knowledge
he gained of the world, or any suggestion that came to him from his
intercourse with society, was utilized to accomplish his main purpose.
To put his thoughts into choice language was not enough. Each idea had
to be put in its neatest and most epigrammatic form."

Why did I write? what sin to me unknown

Dipt me in ink, my parents', or my own?

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.

The muse but served to ease some friend, not wife,

To help me through this long disease, my life.



******



Who shames a scribbler? break one cobweb through,

He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew;

Destroy his fib or sophistry in vain,

The creature's at his foolish work again,

Throned in the centre of his thin designs,

Proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines!



ALEXANDER POPE.—Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.

A BROWN WOMAN

"But I must be hurrying home now," the girl said, "for it is high
time I were back in the hayfields."

"Fair shepherdess," he implored, "for heaven's sake, let us not
cut short the pastorelle thus abruptly."

"And what manner of beast may that be, pray?"

"'Tis a conventional form of verse, my dear, which we at present
strikingly illustrate. The plan of a pastorelle is simplicity's
self: a gentleman, which I may fairly claim to be, in some fair rural
scene—such as this—comes suddenly upon a rustic maiden of surpassing
beauty. He naturally falls in love with her, and they say all manner of
fine things to each other."

She considered him for a while before speaking. It thrilled him
to see the odd tenderness that was in her face. "You always think of
saying and writing fine things, do you not, sir?"

"My dear," he answered, gravely, "I believe that I was
undoubtedly guilty of such folly until you came. I wish I could make you
understand how your coming has changed everything."

"You can tell me some other time," the girl gaily declared, and
was about to leave him.

His hand detained her very gently. "Faith, but I fear not, for
already my old hallucinations seem to me incredible. Why, yesterday I
thought it the most desirable of human lots to be a great poet"—the
gentleman laughed in self-mockery. "I positively did. I labored every
day toward becoming one. I lived among books, esteemed that I was doing
something of genuine importance as I gravely tinkered with alliteration
and metaphor and antithesis and judicious paraphrases of the ancients. I
put up with life solely because it afforded material for versification;
and, in reality, believed the destruction of Troy was providentially
ordained lest Homer lack subject matter for an epic. And as for loving,
I thought people fell in love in order to exchange witty rhymes."

His hand detained her, very gently.… Indeed, it seemed to him he
could never tire of noting her excellencies. Perhaps it was that
splendid light poise of her head he chiefly loved; he thought so at
least, just now. Or was it the wonder of her walk, which made all other
women he had ever known appear to mince and hobble, like rusty toys?
Something there was assuredly about this slim brown girl which recalled
an untamed and harmless woodland creature; and it was that, he knew,
which most poignantly moved him, even though he could not name it.
Perhaps it was her bright kind eyes, which seemed to mirror the
tranquillity of forests.…

"You gentry are always talking of love," she marveled.

"Oh," he said, with acerbity, "oh, I don't doubt that any number
of beef-gorging squires and leering, long-legged Oxford dandies——" He
broke off here, and laughed contemptuously. "Well, you are beautiful,
and they have eyes as keen as mine. And I do not blame you, my dear, for
believing my designs to be no more commendable than theirs—no, not at
all."

But his mood was spoiled, and his tetchy vanity hurt, by the
thought of stout well-set fellows having wooed this girl; and he
permitted her to go without protest.

Yet he sat alone for a while upon the fallen tree-trunk, humming
a contented little tune. Never in his life had he been happier. He did
not venture to suppose that any creature so adorable could love such a
sickly hunchback, such a gargoyle of a man, as he was; but that Sarah
was fond of him, he knew. There would be no trouble in arranging with
her father for their marriage, most certainly; and he meant to attend to
that matter this very morning, and within ten minutes. So Mr. Alexander
Pope was meanwhile arranging in his mind a suitable wording for his
declaration of marital aspirations.

Thus John Gay found him presently and roused him from
phrase-spinning. "And what shall we do this morning, Alexander?" Gay was
always demanding, like a spoiled child, to be amused.

Pope told him what his own plans were, speaking quite simply, but
with his countenance radiant. Gay took off his hat and wiped his
forehead, for the day was warm. He did not say anything at all.

"Well——?" Mr. Pope asked, after a pause.

Mr. Gay was dubious. "I had never thought that you would marry,"
he said. "And—why, hang it, Alexander! to grow enamored of a milkmaid is
well enough for the hero of a poem, but in a poet it hints at
injudicious composition."

Mr. Pope gesticulated with thin hands and seemed upon the verge
of eloquence. Then he spoke unanswerably. "But I love her," he said.

John Gay's reply was a subdued whistle. He, in common with the
other guests of Lord Harcourt, at Nuneham Courtney, had wondered what
would be the outcome of Mr. Alexander Pope's intimacy with Sarah Drew. A
month earlier the poet had sprained his ankle upon Amshot Heath, and
this young woman had found him lying there, entirely helpless, as she
returned from her evening milking. Being hale of person, she had managed
to get the little hunchback to her home unaided. And since then Pope had
often been seen with her.

This much was common knowledge. That Mr. Pope proposed to marry
the heroine of his misadventure afforded a fair mark for raillery, no
doubt, but Gay, in common with the run of educated England in 1718, did
not aspire to be facetious at Pope's expense. The luxury was too costly.
Offend the dwarf in any fashion, and were you the proudest duke at Court
or the most inconsiderable rhymester in Petticoat Lane, it made no
difference; there was no crime too heinous for "the great Mr. Pope's"
next verses to charge you with, and, worst of all, there was no misdoing
so out of character that his adroit malignancy could not make it seem
plausible.

Now, after another pause, Pope said, "I must be going now. Will
you not wish me luck?"

"Why, Alexander—why, hang it!" was Mr. Gay's observation, "I
believe that you are human after all, and not just a book in breeches."

He thereby voiced a commentary patently uncalled-for, as Mr. Pope
afterward reflected. Mr. Pope was then treading toward the home of old
Frederick Drew. It was a gray morning in late July.

"I love her," Pope had said. The fact was undeniable; yet an
expression of it necessarily halts. Pope knew, as every man must do who
dares conserve his energies to annotate the drama of life rather than
play a part in it, the nature of that loneliness which this conservation
breeds. Such persons may hope to win a posthumous esteem in the library,
but it is at the bleak cost of making life a wistful transaction with
foreigners. In such enforced aloofness Sarah Drew had come to
him—strong, beautiful, young, good and vital, all that he was not—and
had serenely befriended "the great Mr. Pope," whom she viewed as a queer
decrepit little gentleman of whom within a week she was unfeignedly
fond.

"I love her," Pope had said. Eh, yes, no doubt; and what, he
fiercely demanded of himself, was he—a crippled scribbler, a bungling
artisan of phrases—that he should dare to love this splendid and
deep-bosomed goddess? Something of youth awoke, possessing him—something
of that high ardor which, as he cloudily remembered now, had once
controlled a boy who dreamed in Windsor Forest and with the lightest of
hearts planned to achieve the impossible. For what is more difficult of
attainment than to achieve the perfected phrase, so worded that to alter
a syllable of its wording would be little short of sacrilege?

"What whimwhams!" decreed the great Mr. Pope, aloud.
"Verse-making is at best only the affair of idle men who write in their
closets and of idle men who read there. And as for him who polishes
phrases, whatever be his fate in poetry, it is ten to one but he must
give up all the reasonable aims of life for it."

No, he would have no more of loneliness. Henceforward Alexander
Pope would be human—like the others. To write perfectly was much; but it
was not everything. Living was capable of furnishing even more than the
raw material of a couplet. It might, for instance, yield content.

For instance, if you loved, and married, and begot, and died,
with the seriousness of a person who believes he is performing an action
of real importance, and conceded that the perfection of any art, whether
it be that of verse-making or of rope-dancing, is at best a by-product
of life's conduct; at worst, you probably would not be lonely. No; you
would be at one with all other fat-witted people, and there was no
greater blessing conceivable.

Pope muttered, and produced his notebook, and wrote tentatively.

Wrote Mr. Pope:

The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find)

Is not to act or think beyond mankind;

No powers of body or of soul to share

But what his nature and his state can bear.

"His state!" yes, undeniably, two sibilants collided here. "His
wit?"—no, that would be flat-footed awkwardness in the management of
your vowel-sounds; the lengthened "a" was almost requisite.… Pope was
fretting over the imbroglio when he absent-mindedly glanced up to
perceive that his Sarah, not irrevocably offended, was being embraced by
a certain John Hughes—who was a stalwart, florid personable individual,
no doubt, but, after all, only an unlettered farmer.

The dwarf gave a hard, wringing motion of his hands. The
diamond-Lord Bolingbroke's gift—which ornamented Pope's left hand cut
into the flesh of his little finger, so cruel was the gesture; and this
little finger was bleeding as Pope tripped forward, smiling. A gentleman
does not incommode the public by obtruding the ugliness of a personal
wound.

"Do I intrude?" he queried. "Ah, well! I also have dwelt in
Arcadia." It was bitter to comprehend that he had never done so.

The lovers were visibly annoyed; yet, if an interruption of their
pleasant commerce was decreed to be, it could not possibly have sprung,
as they soon found, from a more sympathetic source.

These were not subtle persons. Pope had the truth from them
within ten minutes. They loved each other; but John Hughes was
penniless, and old Frederick Drew was, in consequence, obdurate.

"And, besides, he thinks you mean to marry her!" said John
Hughes.

"My dear man, he pardonably forgets that the utmost reach of my
designs in common reason would be to have her as my kept mistress for a
month or two," drawled Mr. Pope. "As concerns yourself, my good fellow,
the case is somewhat different. Why, it is a veritable romance—an affair
of Daphne and Corydon—although, to be unpardonably candid, the plot of
your romance, my young Arcadians, is not the most original conceivable.
I think that the denouement need not baffle our imaginations."

The dwarf went toward Sarah Drew. The chary sunlight had found
the gold in her hair, and its glint was brightly visible to him. "My
dear—" he said. His thin long fingers touched her capable hand. It was a
sort of caress—half-timid. "My dear, I owe my life to you. My body is at
most a flimsy abortion such as a night's exposure would have made more
tranquil than it is just now. Yes, it was you who found a caricature of
the sort of man that Mr. Hughes here is, disabled, helpless, and—for
reasons which doubtless seemed to you sufficient—contrived that this
unsightly parody continue in existence. I am not lovable, my dear. I am
only a hunchback, as you can see. My aspirations and my sickly
imaginings merit only the derision of a candid clean-souled being such
as you are." His finger-tips touched the back of her hand again. "I
think there was never a maker of enduring verse who did not at one
period or another long to exchange an assured immortality for a sturdier
pair of shoulders. I think—I think that I am prone to speak at random,"
Pope said, with his half-drowsy smile. "Yet, none the less, an honest
man, as our kinsmen in Adam average, is bound to pay his equitable
debts."

She said, "I do not understand."

"I have perpetrated certain jingles," Pope returned. "I had not
comprehended until to-day they are the only children I shall leave
behind me. Eh, and what would you make of them, my dear, could ingenuity
contrive a torture dire enough to force you into reading them!…
Misguided people have paid me for contriving these jingles. So that I
have money enough to buy you from your father just as I would purchase
one of his heifers. Yes, at the very least I have money, and I have
earned it. I will send your big-thewed adorer—I believe that Hughes is
the name?—L500 of it this afternoon. That sum, I gather, will be
sufficient to remove your father's objection to your marriage with Mr.
Hughes."

Pope could not but admire himself tremendously. Moreover, in such
matters no woman is blind. Tears came into Sarah's huge brown eyes. This
tenderhearted girl was not thinking of John Hughes now. Pope noted the
fact with the pettiest exultation. "Oh, you—you are good." Sarah Drew
spoke as with difficulty.

"No adjective, my dear, was ever applied with less
discrimination. It is merely that you have rendered no inconsiderable
service to posterity, and merit a reward."

"Oh, and indeed, indeed, I was always fond of you——" The girl
sobbed this.

She would have added more, no doubt, since compassion is
garrulous, had not Pope's scratched hand dismissed a display of emotion
as not entirely in consonance with the rules of the game.

"My dear, therein you have signally honored me. There remains
only to offer you my appreciation of your benevolence toward a sickly
monster, and to entreat for my late intrusion—however unintentional—that
forgiveness which you would not deny, I think, to any other impertinent
insect."

"Oh, but we have no words to thank you, sir——!" Thus Hughes
began.

"Then don't attempt it, my good fellow. For phrase-spinning, as I
can assure you, is the most profitless of all pursuits." Whereupon Pope
bowed low, wheeled, walked away. Yes, he was wounded past sufferance; it
seemed to him he must die of it. Life was a farce, and Destiny an
overseer who hiccoughed mandates. Well, all that even Destiny could find
to gloat over, he reflected, was the tranquil figure of a smallish
gentleman switching at the grass-blades with his cane as he sauntered
under darkening skies.

For a storm was coming on, and the first big drops of it were
splattering the terrace when Mr. Pope entered Lord Harcourt's mansion.

Pope went straight to his own rooms. As he came in there was a
vivid flash of lightning, followed instantaneously by a crashing,
splitting noise, like that of universes ripped asunder. He did not honor
the high uproar with attention. This dwarf was not afraid of anything
except the commission of an error in taste.

Then, too, there were letters for him, laid ready on the
writing-table. Nothing of much importance he found there.—Here, though,
was a rather diverting letter from Eustace Budgell, that poor fool,
abjectly thanking Mr. Pope for his advice concerning how best to answer
the atrocious calumnies on Budgell then appearing in The
Grub-Street Journal,—and reposing, drolly enough, next the proof-sheets
of an anonymous letter Pope had prepared for the forthcoming issue of
that publication, wherein he sprightlily told how Budgell had poisoned
Dr. Tindal, after forging his will. For even if Budgell had not in point
of fact been guilty of these particular peccadilloes, he had quite
certainly committed the crime of speaking lightly of Mr. Pope, as "a
little envious animal," some seven years ago; and it was for this grave
indiscretion that Pope was dexterously goading the man into insanity,
and eventually drove him to suicide.…

The storm made the room dark and reading difficult. Still, this
was an even more amusing letter, from the all-powerful Duchess of
Marlborough. In as civil terms as her sick rage could muster, the
frightened woman offered Mr. Pope L1,000 to suppress his verbal portrait
of her, in the character of Atossa, from his Moral Essays; and
Pope straightway decided to accept the bribe, and afterward to print his
verses unchanged. For the hag, as he reflected, very greatly needed to
be taught that in this world there was at least one person who did not
quail before her tantrums. There would be, moreover, even an elementary
justice in thus robbing her who had robbed England at large. And,
besides, her name was Sarah.…

Pope lighted four candles and set them before the long French
mirror. He stood appraising his many curious deformities while the storm
raged. He stood sidelong, peering over his left shoulder, in order to
see the outline of his crooked back. Nowhere in England, he reflected,
was there a person more pitiable and more repellent outwardly.

"And, oh, it would be droll," Pope said, aloud, "if our exteriors
were ever altogether parodies. But time keeps a diary in our faces, and
writes a monstrously plain hand. Now, if you take the first letter of
Mr. Alexander Pope's Christian name, and the first and last letters of
his surname, you have A. P. E.," Pope quoted, genially. "I begin to
think that Dennis was right. What conceivable woman would not prefer a
well-set man of five-and-twenty to such a withered abortion? And what
does it matter, after all, that a hunchback has dared to desire a
shapely brown-haired woman?"

Pope came more near to the mirror. "Make answer, you who have
dared to imagine that a goddess was ever drawn to descend into womanhood
except by kisses, brawn and a clean heart."

Another peal of thunder bellowed. The storm was growing furious.
"Yet I have had a marvelous dream. Now I awaken. I must go on in the old
round. As long as my wits preserve their agility I must be able to
amuse, to flatter and, at need, to intimidate the patrons of that ape in
the mirror, so that they will not dare refuse me the market-value of my
antics. And Sarah Drew has declined an alliance such as this in favor of
a fresh-colored complexion and a pair of straight shoulders!"

Pope thought a while. "And a clean heart! She bargained royally,
giving love for nothing less than love. The man is rustic, illiterate;
he never heard of Aristotle, he would be at a loss to distinguish
between a trochee and a Titian, and if you mentioned Boileau to him
would probably imagine you were talking of cookery. But he loves her. He
would forfeit eternity to save her a toothache. And, chief of all, she
can make this robust baby happy, and she alone can make him happy. And
so, she gives, gives royally—she gives, God bless her!"

Rain, sullen rain, was battering the window. "And you—you
hunchback in the mirror, you maker of neat rhymes—pray, what had you to
offer? A coach-and-six, of course, and pin-money and furbelows and in
the end a mausoleum with unimpeachable Latin on it! And—paté sur
paté—an unswerving devotion which she would share on almost equal terms
with the Collected Works of Alexander Pope. And so she chose—chose brawn
and a clean heart."

The dwarf turned, staggered, fell upon his bed. "God, make a man
of me, make me a good brave man. I loved her—oh, such as I am, You know
that I loved her! You know that I desire her happiness above all things.
Ah, no, for You know that I do not at bottom. I want to hurt, to wound
all living creatures, because they know how to be happy, and I do not
know how. Ah, God, and why did You decree that I should never be an
obtuse and comely animal such as this John Hughes is? I am so tired of
being 'the great Mr. Pope,' and I want only the common joys of life."

The hunchback wept. It would be too curious to anatomize the
writhings of his proud little spirit.

Now some one tapped upon the door. It was John Gay. He was bidden
to enter, and, complying, found Mr. Pope yawning over the latest of
Tonson's publications.

Gay's face was singularly portentous. "My friend," Gay blurted
out, "I bring news which will horrify you. Believe me, I would never
have mustered the pluck to bring it did I not love you. I cannot let you
hear it first in public and unprepared, as, otherwise, you would have to
do."

"Do I not know you have the kindest heart in all the world? Why,
so outrageous are your amiable defects that they would be the public
derision of your enemies if you had any," Pope returned.

The other poet evinced an awkward comminglement of consternation
and pity. "It appears that when this storm arose—why, Mistress Drew was
with a young man of the neighborhood—a John Hewet——" Gay was speaking
with unaccustomed rapidity.

"Hughes, I think," Pope interrupted, equably.

"Perhaps—I am not sure. They sought shelter under a haycock. You
will remember that first crash of thunder, as if the heavens were in
demolishment? My friend, the reapers who had been laboring in the
fields—who had been driven to such protection as the trees or hedges
afforded——"

"Get on!" a shrill voice cried; "for God's love, man, get on!"
Mr. Pope had risen. This pallid shaken wisp was not in appearance the
great Mr. Pope whose ingenuity had enabled Homeric warriors to excel in
the genteel.

"They first saw a little smoke.… They found this Hughes with one
arm about the neck of Mistress Drew, and the other held over her face,
as if to screen her from the lightning. They were both"—and here Gay
hesitated. "They were both dead," he amended.

Pope turned abruptly. Nakedness is of necessity uncouth, he held,
whether it be the body or the soul that is unveiled. Mr. Pope went
toward a window which he opened, and he stood thus looking out for a
brief while.

"So she is dead," he said. "It is very strange. So many rare
felicities of curve and color, so much of purity and kindliness and
valor and mirth, extinguished as one snuffs a candle! Well! I am sorry
she is dead, for the child had a talent for living and got such joy out
of it.… Hers was a lovely happy life, but it was sterile. Already
nothing remains of her but dead flesh which must be huddled out of
sight. I shall not perish thus entirely, I believe. Men will remember
me. Truly a mighty foundation for pride! when the utmost I can hope for
is but to be read in one island, and to be thrown aside at the end of
one age. Indeed, I am not even sure of that much. I print, and print,
and print. And when I collect my verses into books, I am altogether
uncertain whether to took upon myself as a man building a monument, or
burying the dead. It sometimes seems to me that each publication is but
a solemn funeral of many wasted years. For I have given all to the
verse-making. Granted that the sacrifice avails to rescue my name from
oblivion, what will it profit me when I am dead and care no more for
men's opinions than Sarah Drew cares now for what I say of her? But then
she never cared. She loved John Hughes. And she was right."

He made an end of speaking, still peering out of the window with
considerate narrowed eyes.

The storm was over. In the beech-tree opposite a wren was raising
optimistic outcry. The sun had won his way through a black-bellied shred
of cloud; upon the terrace below, a dripping Venus and a Perseus were
glistening as with white fire. Past these, drenched gardens, the natural
wildness of which was judiciously restrained with walks, ponds,
grottoes, statuary and other rural elegancies, displayed the
intermingled brilliancies of diamonds and emeralds, and glittered as
with pearls and rubies where tempest-battered roses were reviving in
assertiveness.

"I think the storm is over," Mr. Pope remarked. "It is strange
how violent are these convulsions of nature.… But nature is a
treacherous blowsy jade, who respects nobody. A gentleman can but shrug
under her onslaughts, and henceforward civilly avoid them. It is a
consolation to reflect that they pass quickly."

He turned as in defiance. "Yes, yes! It hurts. But I envy them.
Yes, even I, that ugly spiteful hornet of a man! 'the great Mr. Pope,'
who will be dining with the proudest people in England within the hour
and gloating over their deference! For they presume to make a little
free with God occasionally, John, but never with me. And I envy
these dead young fools.… You see, they loved each other, John. I left
them, not an hour ago, the happiest of living creatures. I looked back
once. I pretended to have dropped my handkerchief. I imagine they were
talking of their wedding-clothes, for this broad-shouldered Hughes was
matching poppies and field-flowers to her complexion. It was a scene out
of Theocritus. I think Heaven was so well pleased by the tableau that
Heaven hastily resumed possession of its enactors in order to prevent
any after-happenings from belittling that perfect instant."

"Egad, and matrimony might easily have proved an anti-climax,"
Gay considered.

"Yes; oh, it is only Love that is blind, and not the lover
necessarily. I know. I suppose I always knew at the bottom of my heart.
This hamadryad was destined in the outcome to dwindle into a village
housewife, she would have taken a lively interest in the number of eggs
the hens were laying, she would even have assured her children,
precisely in the way her father spoke of John Hughes, that young people
ordinarily have foolish fancies which their rational elders agree to
disregard. But as it is, no Eastern queen—not Semele herself—left earth
more nobly—"

Pope broke off short. He produced his notebook, which he never
went without, and wrote frowningly, with many erasures. "H'm, yes," he
said; and he read aloud:

"When Eastern lovers feed the funeral fire,

On the same pile the faithful fair expire;

Here pitying heaven that virtue mutual found,

And blasted both that it might neither wound.

Hearts so sincere the Almighty saw well pleased,

Sent His own lightning and the victims seized."

Then Pope made a grimace. "No; the analogy is trim enough, but
the lines lack fervor. It is deplorable how much easier it is to express
any emotion other than that of which one is actually conscious." Pope
had torn the paper half-through before he reflected that it would help
to fill a printed page. He put it in his pocket. "But, come now, I am
writing to Lady Mary this afternoon. You know how she loves oddities.
Between us—with prose as the medium, of course, since verse should,
after all, confine itself to the commemoration of heroes and royal
persons—I believe we might make of this occurrence a neat and moving pastorelle—I
should say, pastoral, of course, but my wits are wool-gathering."

Mr. Gay had the kindest heart in the universe. Yet he, also, had
dreamed of the perfected phrase, so worded that to alter a syllable of
its wording would be little short of sacrilege. Eyes kindling, he took
up a pen. "Yes, yes, I understand. Egad, it is an admirable subject.
But, then, I don't believe I ever saw these lovers——?"

"John was a well-set man of about five-and-twenty," replied Mr.
Pope; "and Sarah was a brown woman of eighteen years, three months and
fourteen days."

Then these two dipped their pens and set about a moving
composition, which has to-day its proper rating among Mr. Pope's
Complete Works.

PRO HONORIA

"But that sense of negation, of theoretic
insecurity, which was in the air, conspiring with what was of like
tendency in himself, made of Lord UFFORD a central type of disillusion.…
He had been amiable because the general betise of humanity did not in
his opinion greatly matter, after all; and in reading these 'SATIRES' it
is well-nigh painful to witness the blind and naked forces of nature and
circumstance surprising him in the uncontrollable movements of his own
so carefully guarded heart."

Why is a handsome wife adored

By every coxcomb but her lord?

From yonder puppet-man inquire

Who wisely hides his wood and wire;

Shows Sheba's queen completely dress'd

And Solomon in royal vest;

But view them litter'd on the floor,

Or strung on pegs behind the door,

Punch is exactly of a piece

With Lorrain's duke, and prince of Greece.



HORACE CALVERLEY.—Petition to the Duke of Ormskirk.

PRO HONORIA

In the early winter of 1761 the Earl of Bute, then Secretary of
State, gave vent to an outburst of unaccustomed profanity. Mr. Robert
Calverley, who represented England at the Court of St. Petersburg, had
resigned his office without prelude or any word of explanation. This
infuriated Bute, since his pet scheme was to make peace with Russia and
thereby end the Continental War. Now all was to do again; the minister
raged, shrugged, furnished a new emissary with credentials, and marked
Calverley's name for punishment.

As much, indeed, was written to Calverley by Lord Ufford, the
poet, diarist, musician and virtuoso:

Our Scottish Mortimer, it appears, is unwilling to have the map
of Europe altered because Mr. Robert Calverley has taken a whim to go
into Italy. He is angrier than I have ever known him to be. He swears
that with a pen's flourish you have imperiled the well-being of England,
and raves in the same breath of the preferment he had designed for you.
Beware of him. For my own part, I shrug and acquiesce, because I am
familiar with your pranks. I merely venture to counsel that you do not
crown the Pelion of abuse, which our statesmen are heaping upon you,
with the Ossa of physical as well as political suicide. Hasten on your
Italian jaunt, for Umfraville, who is now with me at Carberry Hill, has
publicly declared that if you dare re-appear in England he will have you
horsewhipped by his footmen. In consequence, I would most earnestly
advise——

Mr. Calverley read no further, but came straightway into England.
He had not been in England since his elopement, three years before that
spring, with the Marquis of Umfraville's betrothed, Lord Radnor's
daughter, whom Calverley had married at Calais. Mr. Calverley and his
wife were presently at Carberry Hill, Lord Ufford's home, where,
arriving about moon-rise, they found a ball in progress.

Their advent caused a momentary check to merriment. The fiddlers
ceased, because Lord Ufford had signaled them. The fine guests paused in
their stately dance. Lord Ufford, in a richly figured suit, came hastily
to Lady Honoria Calverley, his high heels tapping audibly upon the
floor, and with gallantry lifted her hand toward his lips. Her husband
he embraced, and the two men kissed each other, as was the custom of the
age. Chatter and laughter rose on every side as pert and merry as the
noises of a brook in springtime.

"I fear that as Lord Umfraville's host," young Calverley at once
began, "you cannot with decorum convey to the ignoramus my opinion as to
his ability to conjugate the verb to dare."

"Why, but no! you naturally demand a duel," the poet-earl
returned. "It is very like you. I lament your decision, but I will
attempt to arrange the meeting for to-morrow morning."

Lord Ufford smiled and nodded to the musicians. He finished the
dance to admiration, as this lean dandified young man did
everything—"assiduous to win each fool's applause," as his own verses
scornfully phrase it. Then Ufford went about his errand of death and
conversed for a long while with Umfraville.

Afterward Lord Ufford beckoned to Calverley, who shrugged and
returned Mr. Erwyn's snuff-box, which Calverley had been admiring. He
followed the earl into a side-room opening upon the Venetian Chamber
wherein the fete was. Ufford closed the door. You saw that he had put
away the exterior of mirth that hospitality demanded of him, and
perturbation showed in the lean countenance which was by ordinary so
proud and so amiably peevish.

"Robin, you have performed many mad actions in your life!" he
said; "but this return into the three kingdoms out-Herods all! Did I not
warn you against Umfraville!"

"Why, certainly you did," returned Mr. Calverley. "You informed
me—which was your duty as a friend—of this curmudgeon's boast that he
would have me horsewhipped if I dared venture into England. You will
readily conceive that any gentleman of self-respect cannot permit such
farcical utterances to be delivered without appending a gladiatorial
epilogue. Well! what are the conditions of this duel?"

"Oh, fool that I have been!" cried Ufford, who was enabled now by
virtue of their seclusion to manifest his emotion. "I, who have known
you all your life——!"

He paced the room. Pleading music tinged the silence almost
insensibly.

"Heh, Fate has an imperial taste in humor!" the poet said.
"Robin, we have been more than brothers. And it is I, I, of all persons
living, who have drawn you into this imbroglio!"

"My danger is not very apparent as yet," said Calverley, "if
Umfraville controls his sword no better than his tongue."

My lord of Ufford went on: "There is no question of a duel. It is
as well to spare you what Lord Umfraville replied to my challenge. Let
it suffice that we do not get sugar from the snake. Besides, the man has
his grievance. Robin, have you forgot that necklace you and Pevensey
took from Umfraville some three years ago—before you went into Russia?"

Calverley laughed. The question recalled an old hot-headed time
when, exalted to a frolicsome zone by the discovery of Lady Honoria
Pomfret's love for him, he planned the famous jest which he and the mad
Earl of Pevensey perpetrated upon Umfraville. This masquerade won quick
applause. Persons of ton guffawed like ploughboys over the discomfiture
of an old hunks thus divertingly stripped of his bride, all his
betrothal gifts, and of the very clothes he wore. An anonymous scribbler
had detected in the occurrence a denouement suited to the stage and had
constructed a comedy around it, which, when produced by the Duke's
company, had won acclaim from hilarious auditors.

So Calverley laughed heartily. "Gad, what a jest that was! This
Umfraville comes to marry Honoria. And highwaymen attack his coach! I
would give L50 to have witnessed this usurer's arrival at Denton Honor
in his underclothes! and to have seen his monkey-like grimaces when he
learned that Honoria and I were already across the Channel!"

"You robbed him, though——"

"Indeed, for beginners at peculation we did not do so badly. We
robbed him and his valet of everything in the coach, including their
breeches. You do not mean that Pevensey has detained the poor man's
wedding trousers? If so, it is unfortunate, because this loud-mouthed
miser has need of them in order that he may be handsomely interred."

"Lord Umfraville's wedding-suit was stuffed with straw, hung on a
pole and paraded through London by Pevensey, March, Selwyn and some
dozen other madcaps, while six musicians marched before them. The
clothes were thus conveyed to Umfraville's house. I think none of us
would have relished a joke like that were he the butt of it."

Now the poet's lean countenance was turned upon young Calverley,
and as always, Ufford evoked that nobility in Calverley which follies
veiled but had not ever killed.

"Egad," said Robert Calverley; "I grant you that all this was
infamously done. I never authorized it. I shall kill Pevensey. Indeed, I
will do more," he added, with a flourish. "For I will apologize to
Umfraville, and this very night."

But Ufford was not disposed to levity. "Let us come to the
point," he sadly said. "Pevensey returned everything except the necklace
which Umfraville had intended to be his bridal gift. Pevensey conceded
the jest, in fine; and denied all knowledge of any necklace."

It was an age of accommodating morality. Calverley sketched a
whistle, and showed no other trace of astonishment.

"I see. The fool confided in the spendthrift. My dear, I
understand. In nature Pevensey gave the gems to some nymph of Sadler's
Wells or Covent Garden. For I was out of England. And so he capped his
knavery with insolence. It is an additional reason why Pevensey should
not live to scratch a gray head. It is, however, an affront to me that
Umfraville should have believed him. I doubt if I may overlook that,
Horace?"

"I question if he did believe. But, then, what help had he? This
Pevensey is an earl. His person as a peer of England is inviolable. No
statute touches him directly, because he may not be confined except by
the King's personal order. And it is tolerably notorious that Pevensey
is in Lord Bute's pay, and that our Scottish Mortimer, to do him
justice, does not permit his spies to be injured."

Now Mr. Calverley took snuff. The music without was now more
audible, and it had shifted to a merrier tune.

"I think I comprehend. Pevensey and I—whatever were our
motives—have committed a robbery. Pevensey, as the law runs, is safe. I,
too, was safe as long as I kept out of England. As matters stand, Lord
Umfraville intends to press a charge of theft against me. And I am in
disgrace with Bute, who is quite content to beat offenders with a
crooked stick. This confluence of two-penny accidents is annoying."

"It is worse than you know," my lord of Ufford returned. He
opened the door which led to the Venetian Chamber. A surge of music, of
laughter, and of many lights invaded the room wherein they stood. "D'ye
see those persons, just past Umfraville, so inadequately disguised as
gentlemen? They are from Bow Street. Lord Umfraville intends to
apprehend you here to-night."

"He has an eye for the picturesque," drawled Calverley. "My
tragedy, to do him justice, could not be staged more strikingly. Those
additional alcoves have improved the room beyond belief. I must
apologize for not having rendered my compliments a trifle earlier."

Internally he outstormed Termagaunt. It was infamous enough, in
all conscience, to be arrested, but to have half the world of fashion as
witnessess of ones discomfiture was perfectly intolerable. He recognized
the excellent chance he had of being the most prominent figure upon some
scaffold before long, but that contingency did not greatly trouble
Calverley, as set against the certainty of being made ridiculous within
the next five minutes.

In consequence, he frowned and rearranged the fall of his
shirt-frill a whit the more becomingly.

"Yes, for hate sharpens every faculty," the earl went on. "Even
Umfraville understands that you do not fear death. So he means to have
you tried like any common thief while all your quondam friends sit and
snigger. And you will be convicted——"

"Why, necessarily, since I am not as Pevensey. Of course, I must
confess I took the necklace."

"And Pevensey must stick to the tale that he knows nothing of any
necklace. Dear Robin, this means Newgate. Accident deals very hardly
with us, Robin, for this means Tyburn Hill."

"Yes; I suppose it means my death," young Calverley assented.
"Well! I have feasted with the world and found its viands excellent. The
banquet ended, I must not grumble with my host because I find his choice
of cordials not altogether to my liking." Thus speaking, he was aware of
nothing save that the fiddlers were now about an air to which he had
often danced with his dear wife.

"I have a trick yet left to save our honor,——" Lord Ufford turned
to a table where wine and glasses were set ready. "I propose a toast.
Let us drink—for the last time—to the honor of the Calverleys."

"It is an invitation I may not decorously refuse. And yet—it may
be that I do not understand you?"

My lord of Ufford poured wine into two glasses. These glasses
were from among the curios he collected so industriously—tall, fragile
things, of seventeenth century make, very intricately cut with roses and
thistles, and in the bottom of each glass a three-penny piece was
embedded. Lord Ufford took a tiny vial from his pocket and emptied its
contents into the glass which stood the nearer to Mr. Calverley.

"This is Florence water. We dabblers in science are experimenting
with it at Gresham College. A taste of it means death—a painless, quick
and honorable death. You will have died of a heart seizure. Come, Robin,
let us drink to the honor of the Calverleys."

The poet-earl paused for a little while. Now he was like some
seer of supernal things.

"For look you," said Lord Ufford, "we come of honorable blood. We
two are gentlemen. We have our code, and we may not infringe upon it.
Our code does not invariably square with reason, and I doubt if
Scripture would afford a dependable foundation. So be it! We have our
code and we may not infringe upon it. There have been many Calverleys
who did not fear their God, but there was never any one of them who did
not fear dishonor. I am the head of no less proud a house. As such, I
counsel you to drink and die within the moment. It is not possible a
Calverley survive dishonor. Oh, God!" the poet cried, and his voice
broke; "and what is honor to this clamor within me! Robin, I love you
better than I do this talk of honor! For, Robin, I have loved you long!
so long that what we do to-night will always make life hideous to me!"

Calverley was not unmoved, but he replied in the tone of daily
intercourse. "It is undoubtedly absurd to perish here, like some
unreasonable adversary of the Borgias. Your device is rather
outrageously horrific, Horace, like a bit out of your own romance—yes,
egad, it is pre-eminently worthy of the author of The Vassal of
Spalatro. Still I can understand that it is preferable to having fat and
greasy fellows squander a shilling for the privilege of perching upon a
box while I am being hanged. And I think I shall accept your toast—

"You will be avenged," Ufford said, simply.

"My dear, as if I ever questioned that! Of course, you will kill
Pevensey first and Umfraville afterward. Only I want to live. For I was
meant to play a joyous role wholeheartedly in the big comedy of life. So
many people find the world a dreary residence," Mr. Calverley sighed,
"that it is really a pity some one of these long-faced stolidities
cannot die now instead of me. For I have found life wonderful
throughout."

The brows of Ufford knit. "Would you consent to live as a
transported felon? I have much money. I need not tell you the last penny
is at your disposal. It might be possible to bribe. Indeed, Lord Bute is
all-powerful to-day and he would perhaps procure a pardon for you at my
entreaty. He is so kind as to admire my scribblings… Or you might live
among your fellow-convicts somewhere over sea for a while longer. I had
not thought that such would be your choice——" Here Ufford shrugged,
restrained by courtesy. "Besides, Lord Bute is greatly angered with you,
because you have endangered his Russian alliance. However, if you wish
it, I will try——"

"Oh, for that matter, I do not much fear Lord Bute, because I
bring him the most welcome news he has had in many a day. I may tell you
since it will be public to-morrow. The Tzaritza Elizabeth, our
implacable enemy, died very suddenly three weeks ago. Peter of
Holstein-Gottrop reigns to-day in Russia, and I have made terms with
him. I came to tell Lord Bute the Cossack troops have been recalled from
Prussia. The war is at an end." Young Calverley meditated and gave his
customary boyish smile. "Yes, I discharged my Russian mission after
all—even after I had formally relinquished it—because I was so
opportunely aided by the accident of the Tzaritza's death. And Bute
cares only for results. So I would explain to him that I resigned my
mission simply because in Russia my wife could not have lived out
another year——"

The earl exclaimed, "Then Honoria is ill!" Mr. Calverley did not
attend, but stood looking out into the Venetian Chamber.

"See, Horace, she is dancing with Anchester while I wait here so
near to death. She dances well. But Honoria does everything adorably. I
cannot tell you—oh, not even you!—how happy these three years have been
with her. Eh, well! the gods are jealous of such happiness. You will
remember how her mother died? It appears that Honoria is threatened with
a slow consumption, and a death such as her mother's was. She does not
know. There was no need to frighten her. For although the rigors of
another Russian winter, as all physicians tell me, would inevitably
prove fatal to her, there is no reason why my dearest dear should not
continue to laugh just as she always does—for a long, bright and happy
while in some warm climate such as Italy's. In nature I resigned my
appointment. I did not consider England, or my own trivial future, or
anything of that sort. I considered only Honoria."

He gazed for many moments upon the woman whom he loved. His
speech took on an odd simplicity.

"Oh, yes, I think that in the end Bute would procure a pardon for
me. But not even Bute can override the laws of England. I would have to
be tried first, and have ballads made concerning me, and be condemned,
and so on. That would detain Honoria in England, because she is
sufficiently misguided to love me. I could never persuade her to leave
me with my life in peril. She could not possibly survive an English
winter." Here Calverley evinced unbridled mirth. "The irony of events is
magnificent. There is probably no question of hanging or even of
transportation. It is merely certain that if I venture from this room I
bring about Honoria's death as incontestably as if I strangled her with
these two hands. So I choose my own death in preference. It will grieve
Honoria——" His voice was not completely steady. "But she is young. She
will forget me, for she forgets easily, and she will be happy. I look to
you to see—even before you have killed Pevensey—that Honoria goes into
Italy. For she admires and loves you, almost as much as I do, Horace,
and she will readily be guided by you——"

He cried my lord of Ufford's given name some two or three times,
for young Calverley had turned, and he had seen Ufford's face.

The earl moistened his lips. "You are a fool," he said, with a
thin voice. "Why do you trouble me by being better than I? Or do you
only posture for my benefit? Do you deal honestly with me, Robert
Calverley?—then swear it——" He laughed here, very horribly. "Ah, no,
when did you ever lie! You do not lie—not you!"

He waited for a while. "But I am otherwise. I dare to lie when
the occasion promises. I have desired Honoria since the first moment
wherein I saw her. I may tell you now. I think that you do not remember.
We gathered cherries. I ate two of them which had just lain upon her
knee——"

His hands had clenched each other, and his lips were drawn back
so that you saw his exquisite teeth, which were ground together. He
stood thus for a little, silent.

Then Ufford began again: "I planned all this. I plotted this with
Umfraville. I wrote you such a letter as would inevitably draw you to
your death. I wished your death. For Honoria would then be freed of you.
I would condole with her. She is readily comforted, impatient of sorrow,
incapable of it, I dare say. She would have married me.… Why must I tell
you this? Oh, I am Fate's buffoon! For I have won, I have won! and there
is that in me which will not accept the stake I cheated for."

"And you," said Calverley—"this thing is you!"

"A helpless reptile now," said Ufford. "I have not the power to
check Lord Umfraville in his vengeance. You must be publicly disgraced,
and must, I think, be hanged even now when it will not benefit me at
all. It may be I shall weep for that some day! Or else Honoria must die,
because an archangel could not persuade her to desert you in your peril.
For she loves you—loves you to the full extent of her merry and shallow
nature. Oh, I know that, as you will never know it. I shall have killed
Honoria! I shall not weep when Honoria dies. Harkee, Robin! they are
dancing yonder. It is odd to think that I shall never dance again."

"Horace—!" the younger man said, like a person of two minds. He
seemed to choke. He gave a frantic gesture. "Oh, I have loved you. I
have loved nothing as I have loved you."

"And yet you chatter of your passion for Honoria!" Lord Ufford
returned, with a snarl. "I ask what proof is there of this?—Why, that
you have surrendered your well-being in this world through love of her.
But I gave what is vital. I was an honorable gentleman without any act
in all my life for which I had need to blush. I loved you as I loved no
other being in the universe." He spread his hands, which now twitched
horribly. "You will never understand. It does not matter. I desired
Honoria. To-day through my desire of her, I am that monstrous thing
which you alone know me to be. I think I gave up much. Pro
honoria!" he chuckled. "The Latin halts, but, none the less, the jest is
excellent."

"You have given more than I would dare to give," said Calverley.
He shuddered.

"And to no end!" cried Ufford. "Ah, fate, the devil and that code
I mocked are all in league to cheat me!"

Said Calverley: "The man whom I loved most is dead. Oh, had the
world been searched between the sunrise and the sunsetting there had not
been found his equal. And now, poor fool, I know that there was never
any man like this!"

"Nay, there was such a man," the poet said, "in an old time which
I almost forget. To-day he is quite dead. There is only a poor wretch
who has been faithless in all things, who has not even served the devil
faithfully."

"Why, then, you lackey with a lackey's soul, attend to what I
say. Can you make any terms with Umfraville?"

"I can do nothing," Ufford replied. "You have robbed him—as me—of
what he most desired. You have made him the laughing-stock of England.
He does not pardon any more than I would pardon."

"And as God lives and reigns, I do not greatly blame him," said
young Calverley. "This man at least was wronged. Concerning you I do not
speak, because of a false dream I had once very long ago. Yet Umfraville
was treated infamously. I dare concede what I could not permit another
man to say and live, now that I drink a toast which I must drink alone.
For I drink to the honor of the Calverleys. I have not ever lied to any
person in this world, and so I may not drink with you."

"Oh, but you drink because you know your death to be the one
event which can insure her happiness," cried Ufford. "We are not much
unlike. And I dare say it is only an imaginary Honoria we love, after
all. Yet, look, my fellow-Ixion! for to the eye at least is she not
perfect?"

The two men gazed for a long while. Amid that coterie of
exquisites, wherein allusion to whatever might be ugly in the world was
tacitly allowed to be unmentionable, Lady Honoria glitteringly went
about the moment's mirthful business with lovely ardor. You saw now
unmistakably that "Light Queen of Elfdom, dead Titania's heir" of whom
Ufford writes in the fourth Satire. Honoria's prettiness, rouged, frail,
and modishly enhanced, allured the eye from all less elfin brilliancies;
and as she laughed among so many other relishers of life her charms
became the more instant, just as a painting quickens in every tint when
set in an appropriate frame.

"There is no other way," her husband said. He drank and toasted
what was dearest in the world, smiling to think how death came to him in
that wine's familiar taste. "I drink to the most lovely of created
ladies! and to her happiness!"

He snapped the stem of the glass and tossed it joyously aside.

"Assuredly, there is no other way," said Ufford. "And armored by
that knowledge, even I may drink as honorable people do. Pro honoria!"
Then this man also broke his emptied glass.

"How long have I to live?" said Calverley, and took snuff.

"Why, thirty years, I think, unless you duel too immoderately,"
replied Lord Ufford,—"since while you looked at Honoria I changed our
glasses. No! no! a thing done has an end. Besides, it is not unworthy of
me. So go boldly to the Earl of Bute and tell him all. You are my cousin
and my successor. Yes, very soon you, too, will be a peer of England and
as safe from molestation as is Lord Pevensey. I am the first to tender
my congratulations. Now I make certain that they are not premature."

The poet laughed at this moment as a man may laugh in hell. He
reeled. His lean face momentarily contorted, and afterward the poet
died.

"I am Lord Ufford," said Calverley aloud. "The person of a peer
is inviolable——" He presently looked downward from rapt gazing at his
wife.

Fresh from this horrible half-hour, he faced a future so alluring
as by its beauty to intimidate him. Youth, love, long years of
happiness, and (by this capricious turn) now even opulence, were the
ingredients of a captivating vista. And yet he needs must pause a while
to think of the dear comrade he had lost—of that loved boy, his pattern
in the time of their common youthfulness which gleamed in memory as
bright and misty as a legend, and of the perfect chevalier who had been
like a touchstone to Robert Calverley a bare half-hour ago. He knelt,
touched lightly the fallen jaw, and lightly kissed the cheek of this
poor wreckage; and was aware that the caress was given with more
tenderness than Robert Calverley had shown in the same act a bare
half-hour ago.

Meanwhile the music of a country dance urged the new Earl of
Ufford to come and frolic where every one was laughing; and to partake
with gusto of the benefits which chance had provided; and to be
forthwith as merry as was decorous in a peer of England.

THE IRRESISTIBLE OGLE

"But after SHERIDAN had risen to a
commanding position in the gay life of London, he rather disliked to be
known as a playwright or a poet, and preferred to be regarded as a
statesman and a man of fashion who 'set the pace' in all pastimes of the
opulent and idle. Yet, whatever he really thought of his own writings,
and whether or not he did them, as Stevenson used to say, 'just for
fun,' the fact remains that he was easily the most distinguished and
brilliant dramatist of an age which produced in SHERIDAN'S solemn
vagaries one of its most characteristic products."

Look on this form,—where humor, quaint and sly,

Dimples the cheek, and points the beaming eye;

Where gay invention seems to boast its wiles

In amorous hint, and half-triumphant smiles.

Look on her well—does she seem form'd to teach?

Should you expect to hear this lady preach?

Is gray experience suited to her youth?

Do solemn sentiments become that mouth?

Bid her be grave, those lips should rebel prove

To every theme that slanders mirth or love.



RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN.—Second Prologue to The Rivals.

THE IRRESISTIBLE OGLE

The devotion of Mr. Sheridan to the Dean of Winchester's
daughter, Miss Esther Jane Ogle—or "the irresistible Ogle," as she was
toasted at the Kit-cat—was now a circumstance to be assumed in the
polite world of London. As a result, when the parliamentarian followed
her into Scotland, in the spring of 1795, people only shrugged.

"Because it proves that misery loves company," was Mr. Fox's
observation at Wattier's, hard upon two in the morning. "Poor Sherry, as
an inconsolable widower, must naturally have some one to share his
grief. He perfectly comprehends that no one will lament the death of his
wife more fervently than her successor."

In London Mr. Fox thus worded his interpretation of the matter;
and spoke, oddly enough, at the very moment that in Edinburgh Mr.
Sheridan returned to his lodgings in Abercromby Place, deep in the
reminiscences of a fortunate evening at cards. In consequence, Mr.
Sheridan entered the room so quietly that the young man who was employed
in turning over the contents of the top bureau-drawer was taken
unprepared.

But in the marauder's nature, as far as resolution went, was
little lacking. "Silence!" he ordered, and with the mandate a pistol was
leveled upon the representative for the borough of Stafford. "One cry
for help, and you perish like a dog. I warn you that I am a desperate
man."

"Now, even at a hazard of discourtesy, I must make bold to
question your statement," said Mr. Sheridan, "although, indeed, it is
not so much the recklessness as the masculinity which I dare call into
dispute."

He continued, in his best parliamentary manner, a happy blending
of reproach, omniscience and pardon. "Only two months ago," said Mr.
Sheridan, "I was so fortunate as to encounter a lady who, alike through
the attractions of her person and the sprightliness of her conversation,
convinced me I was on the road to fall in love after the high fashion of
a popular romance. I accordingly make her a declaration. I am rejected.
I besiege her with the customary artillery of sonnets, bouquets,
serenades, bonbons, theater-tickets and threats of suicide. In fine, I
contract the habit of proposing to Miss Ogle on every Wednesday; and so
strong is my infatuation that I follow her as far into the north as
Edinburgh in order to secure my eleventh rejection at half-past ten last
evening."

"I fail to understand," remarked the burglar, "how all this
prolix account of your amours can possibly concern me."

"You are at least somewhat involved in the deplorable climax,"
Mr. Sheridan returned. "For behold! at two in the morning I discover the
object of my adoration and the daughter of an estimable prelate, most
calumniously clad and busily employed in rumpling my supply of cravats.
If ever any lover was thrust into a more ambiguous position, madam,
historians have touched on his dilemma with marked reticence."

He saw—and he admired—the flush which mounted to his visitor's
brow. And then, "I must concede that appearances are against me, Mr.
Sheridan," the beautiful intruder said. "And I hasten to protest that my
presence in your apartments at this hour is prompted by no unworthy
motive. I merely came to steal the famous diamond which you brought from
London—the Honor of Eiran."

"Incomparable Esther Jane," ran Mr. Sheridan's answer, "that
stone is now part of a brooch which was this afternoon returned to my
cousin's, the Earl of Eiran's, hunting-lodge near Melrose. He intends
the gem which you are vainly seeking among my haberdashery to be the
adornment of his promised bride in the ensuing June. I confess to no
overwhelming admiration as concerns this raucous if meritorious young
person; and will even concede that the thought of her becoming my
kinswoman rouses in me an inevitable distaste, no less attributable to
the discord of her features than to the source of her eligibility to
disfigure the peerage—that being her father's lucrative transactions in
Pork, which I find indigestible in any form."

"A truce to paltering!" Miss Ogle cried. "That jewel was stolen
from the temple at Moorshedabad, by the Earl of Eiran's grandfather,
during the confusion necessarily attendant on the glorious battle of
Plassy." She laid down the pistol, and resumed in milder tones: "From an
age-long existence as the left eye of Ganesh it was thus converted into
the loot of an invader. To restore this diamond to its lawful, although
no doubt polygamous and inefficiently-attired proprietors is at this
date impossible. But, oh! what claim have you to its possession?"

"Why, none whatever," said the parliamentarian; "and to contend
as much would be the apex of unreason. For this diamond belongs, of
course, to my cousin the Earl of Eiran——"

"As a thief's legacy!" She spoke with signs of irritation.

"Eh, eh, you go too fast! Eiran, to do him justice, is not a
graduate in peculation. At worst, he is only the sort of fool one's
cousins ordinarily are."

The trousered lady walked to and fro for a while, with the
impatience of a caged lioness. "I perceive I must go more deeply into
matters," Miss Ogle remarked, and, with that habitual gesture which he
fondly recognized, brushed back a straying lock of hair. "In any event,"
she continued, "you cannot with reason deny that the world's wealth is
inequitably distributed?"

"Madam," Mr. Sheridan returned, "as a member of Parliament, I
have necessarily made it a rule never to understand political economy.
It is as apt as not to prove you are selling your vote to the wrong side
of the House, and that hurts one's conscience."

"Ah, that is because you are a man. Men are not practical. None
of you has ever dared to insist on his opinion about anything until he
had secured the cowardly corroboration of a fact or so to endorse him.
It is a pity. Yet, since through no fault of yours your sex is
invariably misled by its hallucinations as to the importance of being
rational, I will refrain from logic and statistics. In a word, I simply
inform you that I am a member of the League of Philanthropic
Larcenists."

"I had not previously heard of this organization," said Mr.
Sheridan, and not without suspecting his response to be a masterpiece in
the inadequate.

"Our object is the benefit of society at large," Miss Ogle
explained; "and our obstacles so far have been, in chief, the fetish of
proprietary rights and the ubiquity of the police."

And with that she seated herself and told him of the league's
inception by a handful of reflective persons, admirers of Rousseau and
converts to his tenets, who were resolved to better the circumstances of
the indigent. With amiable ardor Miss Ogle explained how from the petit
larcenies of charity-balls and personally solicited subscriptions the
league had mounted to an ampler field of depredation; and through what
means it now took toll from every form of wealth unrighteously acquired.
Divertingly she described her personal experiences in the separation of
usurers, thieves, financiers, hereditary noblemen, popular authors, and
other social parasites, from the ill-got profits of their disreputable
vocations. And her account of how, on the preceding Tuesday, she,
single-handed, had robbed Sir Alexander McRae—who then enjoyed a fortune
and an enviable reputation for philanthropy, thanks to the combination
of glucose, vitriol and other chemicals which he prepared under the
humorous pretext of manufacturing beer—wrung high encomiums from Mr.
Sheridan.

"The proceeds of these endeavors," Miss Ogle added, "are
conscientiously devoted to ameliorating the condition of meritorious
paupers. I would be happy to submit to you our annual report. Then you
may judge for yourself how many families we have snatched from the
depths of poverty and habitual intoxication to the comparative comfort
of a vine-embowered cottage."

Mr. Sheridan replied: "I have not ever known of any case where
adoration needed an affidavit for foundation. Oh, no, incomparable
Esther Jane! I am not in a position to be solaced by the reports of a
corresponding secretary. I gave my heart long since; to-night I fling my
confidence into the bargain; and am resolved to serve wholeheartedly the
cause to which you are devoted. In consequence, I venture to propose my
name for membership in the enterprise you advocate and indescribably
adorn."

Miss Ogle was all one blush, such was the fervor of his
utterance. "But first you must win your spurs, Mr. Sheridan. I confess
you are not abhorrent to me," she hurried on, "for you are the most
fascinatingly hideous man I have ever seen; and it was always the
apprehension that you might look on burglary as an unmaidenly avocation
which has compelled me to discourage your addresses. Now all is plain;
and should you happen to distinguish yourself in robbery of the
criminally opulent, you will have, I believe, no reason to complain of a
twelfth refusal. I cannot modestly say more."

He laughed. "It is a bargain. We will agree that I bereave some
person of either stolen or unearned property, say, to the value of
L10,000——" And with his usual carefulness in such matters, Mr. Sheridan
entered the wager in his notebook.

She yielded him her hand in token of assent. And he, depend upon
it, kissed that velvet trifle fondly.

"And now," said Mr. Sheridan, "to-morrow we will visit Bemerside
and obtain possession of that crystal which is in train to render me the
happiest of men. The task will be an easy one, as Eiran is now in
England, and his servants for the most part are my familiars."

"I agree to your proposal," she answered. "But this diamond is my
allotted quarry; and any assistance you may render me in procuring it
will not, of course, affect in any way our bargain. On this point"—she
spoke with a break of laughter—"I am as headstrong as an allegory on the
banks of the Nile."

"To quote an author to his face," lamented Mr. Sheridan, "is
bribery as gross as it is efficacious. I must unwillingly consent to
your exorbitant demands, for you are, as always, the irresistible Ogle."

Miss Ogle bowed her gratitude; and, declining Mr. Sheridan's
escort, for fear of arousing gossip by being seen upon the street with
him at this late hour, preferred to avoid any appearance of indecorum by
climbing down the kitchen roof.

When she had gone, Mr. Sheridan very gallantly attempted a set of
verses. But the Muse was not to be wooed to-night, and stayed
obstinately coy.

Mr. Sheridan reflected, rather forlornly, that he wrote nothing
nowadays. There was, of course, his great comedy, Affectation,
his masterpiece which he meant to finish at one time or another; yet, at
the bottom of his heart, he knew that he would never finish it. But,
then, deuce take posterity! for to have written the best comedy, the
best farce, and the best burlesque as well, that England had ever known,
was a very prodigal wiping-out of every obligation toward posterity.
Boys thought a deal about posterity, as he remembered; but a sensible
man would bear in mind that all this world's delicacies—its merry
diversions, its venison and old wines, its handsomely-bound books and
fiery-hearted jewels and sumptuous clothings, all its lovely things that
can be touched and handled, and more especially its ear-tickling
applause—were to be won, if ever, from one's contemporaries. And people
were generous toward social, rather than literary, talents for the
sensible reason that they derived more pleasure from an agreeable
companion at dinner than from having a rainy afternoon rendered
endurable by some book or another. So the parliamentarian sensibly went
to bed.

Miss Ogle during this Scottish trip was accompanied by her
father, the venerable Dean of Winchester. The Dean, although in all
things worthy of implicit confidence, was not next day informed of the
intended expedition, in deference to public opinion, which, as Miss Ogle
pointed out, regards a clergyman's participation in a technical felony
with disapproval.

Miss Ogle, therefore, radiant in a becoming gown of pink
lute-string, left Edinburgh the following morning under cover of a
subterfuge, and with Mr. Sheridan as her only escort. He was at pains to
adorn this role with so many happy touches of courtesy and amiability
that their confinement in the postchaise appeared to both of incredible
brevity.

When they had reached Melrose another chaise was ordered to
convey them to Bemerside; and pending its forthcoming Mr. Sheridan and
Miss Ogle strolled among the famous ruins of Melrose Abbey. The
parliamentarian had caused his hair to be exuberantly curled that
morning, and figured to advantage in a plum-colored coat and a saffron
waistcoat sprigged with forget-me-nots. He chatted entertainingly
concerning the Second Pointed style of architecture; translated many of
the epitaphs; and was abundant in interesting information as to Robert
Bruce, and Michael Scott, and the rencounter of Chevy Chase.

"Oh, but observe," said Mr. Sheridan, more lately, "our only
covering is the dome of heaven. Yet in their time these aisles were
populous, and here a score of generations have besought what earth does
not afford—now where the banners of crusaders waved the ivy flutters,
and there is no incense in this consecrated house except the breath of
the wild rose."

"The moral is an old one," she returned. "Mummy is become
merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams."

"You are a reader, madam?" he observed, with some surprise; and
he continued: "Indeed, my thoughts were on another trail. I was
considering that the demolishers of this place—those English armies,
those followers of John Knox—were actuated by the highest and most
laudable of motives. As a result we find the house of Heaven converted
into a dustheap."

"I believe you attempt an apologue," she said, indignantly. "Upon
my word, I think you would insinuate that philanthropy, when forced to
manifest itself through embezzlement, is a less womanly employment than
the darning of stockings!"

"Whom the cap fits——" he answered, with a bow. "Indeed,
incomparable Esther Jane, I had said nothing whatever touching hosiery;
and it was equally remote from my intentions to set up as a milliner."

They lunched at Bemerside, where Mr. Sheridan was cordially
received by the steward, and a well-chosen repast was placed at their
disposal.

"Fergus," Mr. Sheridan observed, as they chatted over their
dessert concerning famous gems—in which direction talk had been adroitly
steered"—Fergus, since we are on the topic, I would like to show Miss
Ogle the Honor of Eiran."

The Honor of Eiran was accordingly produced from a blue velvet
case, and was properly admired. Then, when the steward had been
dismissed to fetch a rare liqueur, Mr. Sheridan laughed, and tossed and
caught the jewel, as though he handled a cricket-ball. It was the size
of a pigeon's egg, and was set among eight gems of lesser magnitude; and
in transit through the sunlight the trinket flashed and glittered with
diabolical beauty. The parliamentarian placed three bits of sugar in the
velvet case and handed the gem to his companion.

"The bulk is much the same," he observed; "and whether the carbon
be crystallized or no, is the responsibility of stratigraphic geology.
Fergus, perhaps, must go to jail. That is unfortunate. But true
philanthropy works toward the benefit of the greatest number possible;
and this resplendent pebble will purchase you innumerable pounds of tea
and a warehouseful of blankets."

"But, Mr. Sheridan," Miss Ogle cried, in horror, "to take this
brooch would not be honest!"

"Oh, as to that——!" he shrugged.

"——because Lord Eiran purchased all these lesser diamonds, and
very possibly paid for them."

Then Mr. Sheridan reflected, stood abashed, and said:
"Incomparable Esther Jane, I confess I am only a man. You are entirely
right. To purloin any of these little diamonds would be an abominable
action, whereas to make off with the only valuable one is simply a
stroke of retribution. I will, therefore, attempt to prise it out with a
nutpick."

Three constables came suddenly into the room. "We hae been tauld
this missy is a suspectit thieving body," their leader cried. "Esther
Jane Ogle, ye maun gae with us i' the law's name. Ou ay, lass, ye ken
weel eneugh wha robbit auld Sir Aleexander McRae, sae dinna ye say
naething tae your ain preejudice, lest ye hae tae account for it a'."

Mr. Sheridan rose to the occasion. "My exceedingly good friend,
Angus Howden! I am unwilling to concede that yeomen can excel in
gentlemanly accomplishments, but it is only charity to suppose all three
of you as drunk as any duke that ever honored me with his acquaintance."
This he drawled, and appeared magisterially to await an explanation.

"Hout, Mr. Sheridan," commenced the leading representative of
justice, "let that flee stick i' the wa'—e dinna mean tae tell me, Sir,
that ye are acquaintit wi' this—ou ay, tae pleasure ye, I micht e'en say
wi' this——"

"This lady, probably?" Mr. Sheridan hazarded.

"'Tis an unco thing," the constable declared, "but that wad be
the word was amaist at my tongue's tip."

"Why, undoubtedly," Mr. Sheridan assented. "I rejoice that, being
of French extraction, and unconversant with your somewhat cryptic
patois, the lady in question is the less likely to have been sickened by
your extravagances in the way of misapprehension. I candidly confess
such imbecility annoys me. What!" he cried out, "what if I marry! is
matrimony to be ranked with arson? And what if my cousin, Eiran, affords
me a hiding-place wherein to sneak through our honeymoon after the
cowardly fashion of all modern married couples! Am I in consequence
compelled to submit to the invasions of an intoxicated constabulary?"
His rage was terrific.

"Voilà la seule devise. Ils me connaissent, ils ont
confidence dans moi. Si, taisez-vous! Si non, vous serez arretée et mise
dans la prison, comme une caractère suspicieuse!" Mr. Sheridan exhorted
Miss Ogle to this intent with more of earnestness than linguistic
perfection; and he rejoiced to see that instantly she caught at her one
chance of plausibly accounting for her presence at Bemerside, and of
effecting a rescue from this horrid situation.

"But I also spik the English," she sprightlily announced. "I am
appleed myself at to learn its by heart. Certainly you look for a needle
in a hay bundle, my gentlemans. I am no stealer of the grand road, but
the wife of Mistaire Sheridan, and her presence will say to you the
remains."

"You see!" cried Mr. Sheridan, in modest triumph. "In short, I am
a bridegroom unwarrantably interrupted in his first tête-à-tête,
I am responsible for this lady and all her past and its appurtenances;
and, in a phrase, for everything except the course of conduct I will
undoubtedly pursue should you be visible at the conclusion of the next
five minutes."

His emphasis was such that the police withdrew with a concomitant
of apologies.

"And now I claim my bond," said Mr. Sheridan, when they were once
again free from intrusion. "For we two are in Scotland, where the common
declaration of a man and woman that they are married constitutes a
marriage."

"Oh——!" she exclaimed, and stood encrimsoned.

"Indeed, I must confess that the day's work has been a trick
throughout. The diamond was pawned years ago. This trinket here is a
copy in paste and worth perhaps some seven shillings sixpence. And those
fellows were not constables, but just my cousin Eiran and two footmen in
disguise. Nay, madam, you will learn with experience that to display
unfailing candor is not without exception the price of happiness."

"But this, I think, evades our bargain, Mr. Sheridan. For you
were committed to pilfer property to the value of L10,000——"

"And to fulfil the obligation I have stolen your hand in
marriage. What, madam! do you indeed pretend that any person outside of
Bedlam would value you at less? Believe me, your perfections are of far
more worth. All persons recognize that save yourself, incomparable
Esther Jane; and yet, so patent is the proof of my contention, I dare to
leave the verdict to your sense of justice."

Miss Ogle did not speak. Her lashes fell as, with some ceremony,
he led her to the long French mirror which was in the breakfast room.
"See now!" said Mr. Sheridan. "You, who endanger life and fame in order
to provide a mendicant with gruel, tracts and blankets! You, who deny a
sop to the one hunger which is vital! Oh, madam, I am tempted glibly to
compare your eyes to sapphires, and your hair to thin-spun gold, and the
color of your flesh to the arbutus-flower—for that, as you can see,
would be within the truth, and it would please most women, and afterward
they would not be so obdurate. But you are not like other women," Mr.
Sheridan observed, with admirable dexterity. "And I aspire to you, the
irresistible Ogle! you, who so great-heartedly befriend the beggar! you,
who with such industry contrive alleviation for the discomforts of
poverty. Eh, eh! what will you grant to any beggar such as I? Will you
deny a sop to the one hunger which is vital?" He spoke with unaccustomed
vigor, even in a sort of terror, because he knew that he was speaking
with sincerity.

"To the one hunger which is vital!" he repeated. "Ah, where lies
the secret which makes one face the dearest in the world, and entrusts
to one little hand a life's happiness as a plaything? All Aristotle's
learning could not unriddle the mystery, and Samson's thews were
impotent to break that spell. Love vanquishes all.… You would remind me
of some previous skirmishings with Venus's unconquerable brat? Nay,
madam, to the contrary, the fact that I have loved many other women is
my strongest plea for toleration. Were there nothing else, it is
indisputable we perform all actions better for having rehearsed them.
No, we do not of necessity perform them the more thoughtlessly as well;
for, indeed, I find that with experience a man becomes increasingly
difficult to please in affairs of the heart. The woman one loves then is
granted that pre-eminence not merely by virtue of having outshone any
particular one of her predecessors; oh, no! instead, her qualities have
been compared with all the charms of all her fair forerunners, and they
have endured that stringent testing. The winning of an often-bartered
heart is in reality the only conquest which entitles a woman to
complacency, for she has received a real compliment; whereas to be
selected as the target of a lad's first declaration is a tribute of no
more value than a man's opinion upon vintages who has never tasted
wine."

He took a turn about the breakfast room, then came near to her.
"I love you. Were there any way to parade the circumstance and bedeck it
with pleasing adornments of filed phrases, tropes and far-fetched
similes, I would not grudge you a deal of verbal pageantry. But three
words say all. I love you. There is no act in my past life but appears
trivial and strange to me, and to the man who performed it I seem no
more akin than to Mark Antony or Nebuchadnezzar. I love you. The skies
are bluer since you came, the beauty of this world we live in oppresses
me with a fearful joy, and in my heart there is always the thought of
you and such yearning as I may not word. For I love you."

"You—but you have frightened me." Miss Ogle did not seem so
terrified as to make any effort to recede from him; and yet he saw that
she was frightened in sober earnest. Her face showed pale, and soft, and
glad, and awed, and desirable above all things; and it remained so near
him as to engender riotous aspirations.

"I love you," he said again. You would never have suspected this
man could speak, upon occasion, fluently. "I think—I think that Heaven
was prodigal when Heaven made you. To think of you is as if I listened
to an exalted music; and to be with you is to understand that all
imaginable sorrows are just the figments of a dream which I had very
long ago."

She laid one hand on each of his shoulders, facing him. "Do not
let me be too much afraid! I have not ever been afraid before. Oh,
everything is in a mist of gold, and I am afraid of you, and of the big
universe which I was born into, and I am helpless, and I would have
nothing changed! Only, I cannot believe I am worth L10,000, and I do so
want to be persuaded I am. It is a great pity," she sighed, "that you
who convicted Warren Hastings of stealing such enormous wealth cannot be
quite as eloquent to-day as you were in the Oudh speech, and convince me
his arraigner has been equally rapacious!"

"I mean to prove as much—with time," said Mr. Sheridan. His
breathing was yet perfunctory.

Miss Ogle murmured, "And how long would you require?"

"Why, I intend, with your permission, to devote the remainder of
my existence to the task. Eh, I concede that space too brief for any
adequate discussion of the topic; but I will try to be concise and very
practical——"

She laughed. They were content. "Try, then——" Miss Ogle said.

She was able to get no farther in the sentence, for reasons which
to particularize would be indiscreet.

A PRINCESS OF GRUB STREET

"Though—or, rather, because—VANDERHOFFEN was
a child of the French Revolution, and inherited his social, political
and religious—or, rather, anti-religious—views from the French writers
of the eighteenth century, England was not ready for him and the
unshackled individualism for which he at first contended. Recognizing
this fact, he turned to an order of writing begotten of the deepest
popular needs and addressed to the best intelligence of the great middle
classes of the community."

Now emperors bide their times' rebuff

I would not be a king—enough

        Of woe it is to love;

The paths of power are steep and rough,

        And tempests reign
above.

I would not climb the imperial throne;

'Tis built on ice which fortune's sun

        Thaws in the height of
noon.

Then farewell, kings, that squeak 'Ha' done!'

        To time's full-throated
tune.



PAUL VANDERHOFFEN.—Emma and Caroline.

A PRINCESS OF GRUB STREET

It is questionable if the announcement of the death of their
Crown Prince, Hilary, upon the verge of his accession to the throne,
aroused more than genteel regret among the inhabitants of
Saxe-Kesselberg. It is indisputable that in diplomatic circles news of
this horrible occurrence was indirectly conceded in 1803 to smack of a
direct intervention of Providence. For to consider all the havoc dead
Prince Fribble—such had been his sobriquet—would have created, Dei
gratia, through his pilotage of an important grand-duchy (with an area
of no less than eighty-nine square miles) was less discomfortable now
prediction was an academic matter.

And so the editors of divers papers were the victims of a
decorous anguish, court-mourning was decreed, and that wreckage which
passed for the mutilated body of Prince Hilary was buried with every
appropriate honor. Within the week most people had forgotten him, for
everybody was discussing the execution of the Duc d'Enghein. And the
aged unvenerable Grand-Duke of Saxe-Kesselberg died too in the same
March; and afterward his other grandson, Prince Augustus, reigned in the
merry old debauchee's stead.

Prince Hilary was vastly pleased. His scheme for evading the
tedious responsibilities of sovereignty had been executed without a
hitch; he was officially dead; and, on the whole, standing bareheaded
between a miller and laundress, he had found his funeral ceremonies to
be unimpeachably conducted. He assumed the name of Paul Vanderhoffen,
selected at random from the novel he was reading when his postchaise
conveyed him past the frontier of Saxe-Kesselberg. Freed, penniless, and
thoroughly content, he set about amusing himself—having a world to frisk
in—and incidentally about the furnishing of his new friend Paul
Vanderhoffen with life's necessaries.

It was a little more than two years later that the good-natured
Earl of Brudenel suggested to Lady John Claridge that she could nowhere
find a more eligible tutor for her son than young Vanderhoffen.

"Hasn't a shilling, ma'am, but one of the most popular men in
London. His poetry book was subscribed for by the Prince Regent and half
the notables of the kingdom. Capital company at a dinner-table—stutters,
begad, like a What-you-may-call-'em, and keeps everybody in a roar—and
when he's had his whack of claret, he sings his own songs to the piano,
you know, and all that sort of thing, and has quite put Tommy Moore's
nose out of joint. Nobody knows much about him, but that don't matter
with these literary chaps, does it now? Goes everywhere, ma'am—quite a
favorite at Carlton House—a highly agreeable, well-informed man, I can
assure you—and probably hasn't a shilling to pay the cabman. Deuced odd,
ain't it? But Lord Lansdowne is trying to get him a place—spoke to me
about a tutorship, ma'am, in fact, just to keep Vanderhoffen going,
until some registrarship or other falls vacant. Now, I ain't clever and
that sort of thing, but I quite agree with Lansdowne that we practical
men ought to look out for these clever fellows—see that they don't
starve in a garret, like poor What's-his-name, don't you know?"

Lady Claridge sweetly agreed with her future son-in-law. So it
befell that shortly after this conversation Paul Vanderhoffen came to
Leamington Manor, and through an entire summer goaded young Percival
Claridge, then on the point of entering Cambridge, but pedagogically
branded as "deficient in mathematics," through many elaborate
combinations of x and y and cosines and hyperbolas.

Lady John Claridge, mother to the pupil, approved of the new
tutor. True, he talked much and wildishly; but literary men had a name
for eccentricity, and, besides, Lady Claridge always dealt with the
opinions of other people as matters of illimitable unimportance. This
baronet's lady, in short, was in these days vouchsafing to the universe
at large a fine and new benevolence, now that her daughter was safely
engaged to Lord Brudenel, who, whatever his other virtues, was certainly
a peer of England and very rich. It seems irrelevant, and yet for the
tale's sake is noteworthy, that any room which harbored Lady John
Claridge was through this fact converted into an absolute monarchy.

And so, by the favor of Lady Claridge and destiny, the tutor
stayed at Leamington Manor all summer.

There was nothing in either the appearance or demeanor of the
fiancee of Lord Brudenel's title and superabundant wealth which any
honest gentleman could, hand upon his heart, describe as blatantly
repulsive.

It may not be denied the tutor noted this. In fine, he fell in
love with Mildred Claridge after a thorough-going fashion such as Prince
Fribble would have found amusing. Prince Fribble would have smiled,
shrugged, drawled, "Eh, after all, the girl is handsome and deplorably
cold-blooded!" Paul Vanderhoffen said, "I am not fit to live in the same
world with her," and wrote many verses in the prevailing Oriental style
rich in allusions to roses, and bulbuls, and gazelles, and peris, and
minarets—which he sold rather profitably.

Meanwhile, far oversea, the reigning Duke of Saxe-Kesselberg had
been unwise enough to quarrel with his Chancellor, Georges Desmarets, an
invaluable man whose only faults were dishonesty and a too intimate
acquaintance with the circumstances of Prince Hilary's demise. As fruit
of this indiscretion, an inconsiderable tutor at Leamington Manor—whom
Lady John Claridge regarded as a sort of upper servant was talking with
a visitor.

The tutor, it appeared, preferred to talk with the former
Chancellor of Saxe-Kesselberg in the middle of an open field. The time
was afternoon, the season September, and the west was vaingloriously
justifying the younger man's analogy of a gigantic Spanish omelette.
Meanwhile, the younger man declaimed in a high-pitched pleasant voice,
wherein there was, as always, the elusive suggestion of a stutter.

"I repeat to you," the tutor observed, "that no consideration
will ever make a grand-duke of me excepting over my dead body. Why don't
you recommend some not quite obsolete vocation, such as making papyrus,
or writing an interesting novel, or teaching people how to dance a
saraband? For after all, what is a monarch nowadays—oh, even a monarch
of the first class?" he argued, with what came near being a squeak of
indignation. "The poor man is a rather pitiable and perfectly useless
relic of barbarism, now that 1789 has opened our eyes; and his main
business in life is to ride in open carriages and bow to an applauding
public who are applauding at so much per head. He must expect to be
aspersed with calumny, and once in a while with bullets. He may at the
utmost aspire to introduce an innovation in evening dress,—the Prince
Regent, for instance, has invented a really very creditable shoe-buckle.
Tradition obligates him to devote his unofficial hours to sheer
depravity——"

Paul Vanderhoffen paused to meditate.

"Why, there you are! another obstacle! I have in an inquiring
spirit and without prejudice sampled all the Seven Deadly Sins, and the
common increment was an inability to enjoy my breakfast. A grand-duke I
take it, if he have any sense of the responsibilities of his position,
will piously remember the adage about the voice of the people and hasten
to be steeped in vice—and thus conform to every popular notion
concerning a grand-duke. Why, common intelligence demands that a
grand-duke should brazenly misbehave himself upon the more conspicuous
high-places of Chemosh! and personally, I have no talents such as would
qualify me for a life of cynical and brutal immorality. I lack the
necessary aptitude, I would not ever afford any spicy gossip concerning
the Duke of Saxe-Kesselberg, and the editors of the society papers would
unanimously conspire to dethrone me——"

Thus he argued, with his high-pitched pleasant voice, wherein
there was, as always, the elusive suggestion of a stutter. And here the
other interrupted.

"There is no need of names, your highness." Georges Desmarets was
diminutive, black-haired and corpulent. He was of dapper appearance,
point-device in everything, and he reminded you of a perky robin.

The tutor flung out an "Ouf! I must recall to you that, thank
heaven, I am not anybody's highness any longer. I am Paul Vanderhoffen."

"He says that he is not Prince Fribble!"—the little man addressed
the zenith—"as if any other person ever succeeded in talking a half-hour
without being betrayed into at least one sensible remark. Oh, how do you
manage without fail to be so consistently and stupendously idiotic?"

"It is, like all other desirable traits, either innate or else
just unattainable," the other answered. "I am so hopelessly light-minded
that I cannot refrain from being rational even in matters which concern
me personally—and this, of course, no normal being ever thinks of doing.
I really cannot help it."

The Frenchman groaned whole-heartedly.

"But we were speaking—well, of foreign countries. Now, Paul
Vanderhoffen has read that in one of these countries there was once a
prince who very narrowly escaped figuring as a self-conscious absurdity,
as an anachronism, as a life-long prisoner of etiquette. However, with
the assistance of his cousin—who, incidentally, was also his heir—the
prince most opportunely died. Oh, pedant that you are! in any event he
was interred. And so, the prince was gathered to his fathers, and his
cousin Augustus reigned in his stead. Until a certain politician who had
been privy to this pious fraud——" The tutor shrugged. "How can I word it
without seeming hypercritical?"

Georges Desmarets stretched out appealing hands. "But, I protest,
it was the narrow-mindedness of that pernicious prig, your cousin—who
firmly believes himself to be an improved and augmented edition of the
Four Evangelists——"

"Well, in any event, the proverb was attested that birds of a
feather make strange bedfellows. There was a dispute concerning some
petit larceny—some slight discrepancy, we will imagine, since all this
is pure romance, in the politician's accounts——"

"Now you belie me——" said the black-haired man, and warmly.

"Oh, Desmarets, you are as vain as ever! Let us say, then, of
grand larceny. In any event, the politician was dismissed. And what, my
dears, do you suppose this bold and bad and unprincipled Machiavelli
went and did? Why, he made straight for the father of the princess the
usurping duke was going to marry, and surprised everybody by showing
that, at a pinch, even this Guy Fawkes—who was stuffed with all manner
of guile and wickedness where youthful patriotism would ordinarily
incline to straw—was capable of telling the truth. And so the father
broke off the match. And the enamored, if usurping, duke wept bitterly
and tore his hair to such an extent he totally destroyed his best
toupet. And privily the Guy Fawkes came into the presence of the exiled
duke and prated of a restoration to ancestral dignities. And he was
spurned by a certain highly intelligent person who considered it both
tedious and ridiculous to play at being emperor of a backyard. And
then—I really don't recall what happened. But there was a general and
unqualified deuce to pay with no pitch at a really satisfying
temperature."

The stouter man said quietly: "It is a thrilling tale which you
narrate. Only, I do recall what happened then. The usurping duke was
very much in earnest, desirous of retaining his little kingdom, and
particularly desirous of the woman whom he loved. In consequence, he had
Monsieur the Runaway obliterated while the latter was talking
nonsense——"

The tutor's brows had mounted.

"I scorn to think it even of anybody who is controlled in every
action by a sense of duty," Georges Desmarets explained, "that Duke
Augustus would cause you to be murdered in your sleep."

"A hit!" The younger man unsmilingly gesticulated like one who
has been touched in sword-play. "Behold now, as the populace in their
blunt way would phrase it, I am squelched."

"And so the usurping duke was married and lived happily ever
afterward." Georges Desmarets continued: "I repeat to you there is only
the choice between declaring yourself and being—we will say, removed.
Your cousin is deeply in love with the Princess Sophia, and thanks to
me, has now no chance of marrying her until his title has been secured
by your—removal. Do not deceive yourself. High interests are involved.
You are the grain of sand between big wheels. I iterate that the footpad
who attacked you last night was merely a prologue. I happen to know your
cousin has entrusted the affair to Heinrich Obendorf, his
foster-brother, who, as you will remember, is not particularly
squeamish."

Paul Vanderhoffen thought a while. "Desmarets," he said at last,
"it is no use. I scorn your pribbles and your prabbles. I bargained with
Augustus. I traded a duchy for my personal liberty. Frankly, I would be
sorry to connect a sharer of my blood with the assault of yesterday. To
be unpardonably candid, I have not ever found that your assertion of an
event quite proved it had gone through the formality of occurring. And
so I shall hold to my bargain."

"The night brings counsel," Desmarets returned. "It hardly needs
a night, I think, to demonstrate that all I say is true."

And so they parted.

Having thus dismissed such trifles as statecraft and the
well-being of empires, Paul Vanderhoffen turned toward consideration of
the one really serious subject in the universe, which was of course the
bright, miraculous and incredible perfection of Mildred Claridge.

"I wonder what you think of me? I wonder if you ever think of
me?" The thought careered like a caged squirrel, now that he walked
through autumn woods toward her home.

"I wish that you were not so sensible. I wish your mother were
not even more so. The woman reeks with common-sense, and knows that to
be common is to be unanswerable. I wish that a dispute with her were not
upon a par with remonstrance against an earthquake."

He lighted a fresh cheroot. "And so you are to marry the Brudenel
title and bank account, with this particular Heleigh thrown in as a
dividend. And why not? the estate is considerable; the man who encumbers
it is sincere in his adoration of you; and, chief of all, Lady John
Claridge has decreed it. And your decision in any matter has always lain
between the claws of that steel-armored crocodile who, by some miracle,
is your mother. Oh, what a universe! were I of hasty temperament I would
cry out, TUT AND GO TO!"

This was the moment which the man hid in the thicket selected as
most fit for intervention through the assistance of a dueling pistol.
Paul Vanderhoffen reeled, his face bewilderment. His hands clutched
toward the sky, as if in anguish he grasped at some invisible support,
and he coughed once or twice. It was rather horrible. Then Vanderhoffen
shivered as though he were very cold, and tottered and collapsed in the
parched roadway.

A slinking man whose lips were gray and could not refrain from
twitching came toward the limp heap. "So——!" said the man. One of his
hands went to the tutor's breast, and in his left hand dangled a second
dueling pistol. He had thrown away the other after firing it.

"And so——!" observed Paul Vanderhoffen. Afterward there was a
momentary tussle. Now Paul Vanderhoffen stood erect and flourished the
loaded pistol. "If you go on this way," he said, with some severity,
"you will presently be neither loved nor respected. There was a time,
though, when you were an excellent shot, Herr Heinrich Obendorf."

"I had my orders, highness," said the other stolidly.

"Oh yes, of course," Paul Vanderhoffen answered. "You had your
orders—from Augustus!" He seemed to think of something very far away. He
smiled, with quizzically narrowed eyes such as you may yet see in
Raeburn's portrait of the man. "I was remembering, oddly enough, that
elm just back of the Canova Pavilion—as it was twenty years ago. I
managed to scramble up it, but Augustus could not follow me because he
had such short fat little legs. He was so proud of what I had done that
he insisted on telling everybody—and afterward we had oranges for
luncheon, I remember, and sucked them through bits of sugar. It is not
fair that you must always remember and always love that boy who played
with you when you were little—after he has grown up to be another
person. Eh no! youth passes, but all its memories of unimportant things
remain with you and are less kind than any self-respecting viper would
be. Decidedly, it is not fair, and some earnest-minded person ought to
write to his morning paper about it.… I think that is the reason I am
being a sentimental fool," Paul Vanderhoffen explained.

Then his teeth clicked. "Get on, my man," he said. "Do not remain
too near to me, because there was a time when I loved your employer
quite as much as you do. This fact is urging me to dangerous ends. Yes,
it is prompting me, even while I talk with you, to give you a lesson in
marksmanship, my inconveniently faithful Heinrich."

He shrugged. He lighted a cheroot with hands whose tremblings, he
devoutly hoped, were not apparent, for Prince Fribble had been ashamed
to manifest a sincere emotion of any sort, and Paul Vanderhoffen shared
as yet this foible.

"Oh Brutus! Ravaillac! Damiens!" he drawled. "O general
compendium of misguided aspirations! do be a duck and get along with
you. And I would run as hard as I could, if I were you, for it is war
now, and you and I are not on the same side."

Paul Vanderhoffen paused a hundred yards or so from this to shake
his head. "Come, come! I have lost so much that I cannot afford to throw
my good temper into the bargain. To endure with a grave face this
perfectly unreasonable universe wherein destiny has locked me is
undoubtedly meritorious; but to bustle about it like a caged canary, and
not ever to falter in your hilarity, is heroic. Let us, by all means,
not consider the obdurate if gilded barriers, but rather the lettuce and
the cuttle-bone. I have my choice between becoming a corpse or a
convict—a convict? ah, undoubtedly a convict, sentenced to serve out a
life-term in a cess-pool of castby superstitions."

He smiled now over Paul Vanderhoffen's rage. "Since the situation
is tragic, let us approach it in an appropriate spirit of frivolity. My
circumstances bully me. And I succumb to irrationality, as rational
persons invariably end by doing. But, oh, dear me! oh, Osiris,
Termagaunt, and Zeus! to think there are at least a dozen other
ne'er-do-wells alive who would prefer to make a mess of living as a
grand-duke rather than as a scribbler in Grub Street! Well, well! the
jest is not of my contriving, and the one concession a sane man will
never yield the universe is that of considering it seriously."

And he strode on, resolved to be Prince Fribble to the last.

"Frivolity," he said, "is the smoked glass through which a
civilized person views the only world he has to live in. For, otherwise,
he could not presume to look upon such coruscations of insanity and
remain unblinded."

This heartened him, as a rounded phrase will do the best of us.
But by-and-bye,

"Frivolity," he groaned, "is really the cheap mask incompetence
claps on when haled before a mirror."

And at Leamington Manor he found her strolling upon the lawn. It
was an ordered, lovely scene, steeped now in the tranquillity of
evening. Above, the stars were losing diffidence. Below, and within
arms' reach, Mildred Claridge was treading the same planet on which he
fidgeted and stuttered.

Something in his heart snapped like a fiddle-string, and he was
entirely aware of this circumstance. As to her eyes, teeth, coloring,
complexion, brows, height and hair, it is needless to expatiate. The
most painstaking inventory of these chattels would necessarily be
misleading, because the impression which they conveyed to him was that
of a bewildering, but not distasteful, transfiguration of the universe,
apt as a fanfare at the entrance of a queen.

But he would be Prince Fribble to the last. And so, "Wait just a
moment, please," he said, "I want to harrow up your soul and freeze your
blood."

Wherewith he suavely told her everything about Paul
Vanderhoffen's origin and the alternatives now offered him, and she
listened without comment.

"Ai! ai!" young Vanderhoffen perorated; "the situation is
complete. I have not the least desire to be Grand-Duke of
Saxe-Kesselberg. It is too abominably tedious. But, if I do not join in
with Desmarets, who has the guy-ropes of a restoration well in hand, I
must inevitably be—removed, as the knave phrases it. For as long as I
live, I will be an insuperable barrier between Augustus and his Sophia.
Otototoi!" he wailed, with a fine tone of tragedy, "the one impossible
achievement in my life has always been to convince anybody that it was
mine to dispose of as I elected!"

"Oh, man proposes——" she began, cryptically. Then he deliberated,
and sulkily submitted: "But I may not even propose to abdicate. Augustus
has put himself upon sworn record as an eye-witness of my hideous death.
And in consequence I might keep on abdicating from now to the crack of
doom, and the only course left open to him would be to treat me as an
impostor."

She replied, with emphasis, "I think your cousin is a beast!"

"Ah, but the madman is in love," he pleaded. "You should not
judge poor masculinity in such a state by any ordinary standards. Oh
really, you don't know the Princess Sophia. She is, in sober truth, the
nicest person who was ever born a princess. Why, she had actually made a
mock of even that handicap, for ordinarily it is as disastrous to
feminine appearance as writing books. And, oh, Lord! they will be
marrying her to me, if Desmarets and I win out." Thus he forlornly
ended.

"The designing minx!" Miss Claridge said, distinctly.

"Now, gracious lady, do be just a cooing pigeon and grant that
when men are in love they are not any more encumbered by abstract
notions about honor than if they had been womanly from birth. Come,
let's be lyrical and open-minded," he urged; and he added, "No, either
you are in love or else you are not in love. And nothing else will
matter either way. You see, if men and women had been primarily designed
to be rational creatures, there would be no explanation for their being
permitted to continue in existence," he lucidly explained. "And to have
grasped this fact is the pith of all wisdom."

"Oh, I am very wise." A glint of laughter shone in her eyes. "I
would claim to be another Pythoness if only it did not sound so snaky
and wriggling. So, from my trident—or was it a Triton they used to stand
on?—I announce that you and your Augustus are worrying yourselves
gray-headed over an idiotically simple problem. Now, I disposed of it
offhand when I said, 'Man proposes.'"

He seemed to be aware of some one who from a considerable
distance was inquiring her reasons for this statement.

"Because in Saxe-Kesselberg, as in all other German states, when
a prince of the reigning house marries outside of the mediatized
nobility he thereby forfeits his right of succession. It has been done
any number of times. Why, don't you see, Mr. Vanderhoffen? Conceding you
ever do such a thing, your cousin Augustus would become at once the
legal heir. So you must marry. It is the only way, I think, to save you
from regal incarceration and at the same time to reassure the Prince of
Lueminster—that creature's father—that you have not, and never can have,
any claim which would hold good in law. Then Duke Augustus could
peaceably espouse his Sophia and go on reigning—— And, by the way, I
have seen her picture often, and if that is what you call beauty——" Miss
Claridge did not speak this last at least with any air of pointing out
the self-evident.

And, "I believe," he replied, "that all this is actually
happening. I might have known fate meant to glut her taste for irony."

"But don't you see? You have only to marry anybody outside of the
higher nobility—and just as a makeshift——" She had drawn closer in the
urgency of her desire to help him. An infinite despair and mirth as well
was kindled by her nearness. And the man was insane and dimly knew as
much.

And so, "I see," he answered. "But, as it happens, I cannot marry
any woman, because I love a particular woman. At least, I suppose she
isn't anything but just a woman. That statement," he announced, "is a
formal tribute paid by what I call my intellect to what the vulgar call
the probabilities. The rest of me has no patience whatever with such
idiotic blasphemy."

She said, "I think I understand." And this surprised him, coming
as it did from her whom he had always supposed to be the fiancee of Lord
Brudenel's title and bank-account.

"And, well!"—he waved his hands—"either as tutor or as
grand-duke, this woman is unattainable, because she has been far too
carefully reared"—and here he frenziedly thought of that terrible matron
whom, as you know, he had irreverently likened to a crocodile—"either to
marry a pauper or to be contented with a left-handed alliance. And I
love her. And so"—he shrugged—"there is positively nothing left to do
save sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings."

She said, "Oh, and you mean it! You are speaking the plain
truth!" A change had come into her lovely face which would have made him
think it even lovelier had not that contingency been beyond conception.

And Mildred Claridge said, "It is not fair for dreamers such as
you to let a woman know just how he loves her. That is not wooing. It is
bullying."

His lips were making a variety of irrational noises. And he was
near to her. Also he realized that he had never known how close akin
were fear and joy, so close the two could mingle thus, and be quite
undistinguishable. And then repentance smote him.

"I am contemptible!" he groaned. "I had no right to trouble you
with my insanities. Indeed I had not ever meant to let you guess how mad
I was. But always I have evaded my responsibilities. So I remain Prince
Fribble to the last."

"Oh, but I knew, I have always known." She held her eyes away
from him. "And I wrote to Lord Brudenel only yesterday releasing him
from his engagement."

And now without uncertainty or haste Paul Vanderhoffen touched
her cheek and raised her face, so that he saw it plainly in the rising
twilight, and all its wealth of tenderness newborn. And what he saw
there frightened him.

For the girl loved him! He felt himself to be, as most men do, a
swindler when he comprehended this preposterous fact; and, in addition,
he thought of divers happenings, such as shipwrecks, holocausts and
earthquakes, which might conceivably have appalled him, and understood
that he would never in his life face any sense of terror as huge as was
this present sweet and illimitable awe.

And then he said, "You know that what I hunger for is impossible.
There are so many little things, like common-sense, to be considered.
For this is just a matter which concerns you and Paul Vanderhoffen—a
literary hack, a stuttering squeak-voiced ne'er-do-well, with an
acquired knack for scribbling verses that are feeble-minded enough for
Annuals and Keepsake Books, and so fetch him an occasional guinea. For,
my dear, the verses I write of my own accord are not sufficiently
genteel to be vended in Paternoster Row; they smack too dangerously of
human intelligence. So I am compelled, perforce, to scribble such
jingles as I am ashamed to read, because I must write something.…"
Paul Vanderhoffen shrugged, and continued, in tones more animated:
"There will be no talk of any grand-duke. Instead, there will be columns
of denunciation and tittle-tattle in every newspaper—quite as if you, a
baronet's daughter, had run away with a footman. And you will very often
think wistfully of Lord Brudenel's fine house when your only title
is—well, Princess of Grub Street, and your realm is a garret. And for a
while even to-morrow's breakfast will be a problematical affair. It is
true Lord Lansdowne has promised me a registrarship in the Admiralty
Court, and I do not think he will fail me. But that will give us barely
enough to live on—with strict economy, which is a virtue that neither of
us knows anything about. I beg you to remember that—you who have been
used to every luxury! you who really were devised that you might stand
beside an emperor and set tasks for him. In fine, you know——"

And Mildred Claridge said, "I know that, quite as I observed, man
proposes—when he has been sufficiently prodded by some one who, because
she is an idiot—And that is why I am not blushing—very much——"

"Your coloring is not—repellent." His high-pitched pleasant
voice, in spite of him, shook now with more than its habitual suggestion
of a stutter. "What have you done to me, my dear?" he said. "Why can't I
jest at this… as I have always done at everything——?"

"Boy, boy!" she said; "laughter is excellent. And wisdom too is
excellent. Only I think that you have laughed too much, and I have been
too shrewd—But now I know that it is better to be a princess in Grub
Street than to figure at Ranelagh as a good-hearted fool's latest
purchase. For Lord Brudenel is really very good-natured," she argued,
"and I did like him, and mother was so set upon it—and he was rich—and I
honestly thought——"

"And now?" he said.

"And now I know," she answered happily.

They looked at each other for a little while. Then he took her
hand, prepared in turn for self-denial.

"The Household Review wants me to 'do' a series on famous
English bishops," he reported, humbly. "I had meant to refuse, because
it would all have to be dull High-Church twaddle. And the English
Gentleman wants some rather outrageous lying done in defense of the Corn
Laws. You would not despise me too much—would you, Mildred?—if I
undertook it now. I really have no choice. And there is plenty of
hackwork of that sort available to keep us going until more solvent
days, when I shall have opportunity to write something quite worthy of
you."

"For the present, dear, it would be much more sensible, I think,
to 'do' the bishops and the Corn Laws. You see, that kind of thing pays
very well, and is read by the best people; whereas poetry, of course—
But you can always come back to the verse-making, you know——"

"If you ever let me," he said, with a flash of prescience. "And I
don't believe you mean to let me. You are your mother's daughter, after
all! Nefarious woman, you are planning, already, to make a responsible
member of society out of me! and you will do it, ruthlessly! Such is to
be Prince Fribble's actual burial—in his own private carriage, with a
receipted tax-bill in his pocket!"

"What nonsense you poets talk!" the girl observed. But to him,
forebodingly, that familiar statement seemed to lack present
application.

THE LADY OF ALL OUR DREAMS

"In JOHN CHARTERIS appeared a man with an
inborn sense of the supreme interest and the overwhelming emotional and
spiritual relevancy of human life as it is actually and obscurely lived;
a man with unmistakable creative impulses and potentialities; a man who,
had he lived in a more mature and less self-deluding community—a
community that did not so rigorously confine its interest in facts to
business, and limit its demands upon art to the supplying of
illusions—might humbly and patiently have schooled his gifts to the
service of his vision.… As it was, he accepted defeat and compromised
half-heartedly with commercialism."

And men unborn will read of Heloise,

        And Ruth, and Rosamond,
and Semele,

        When none remembers your
name's melody

Or rhymes your name, enregistered with these.

And will my name wake moods as amorous

        As that of Abelard or
Launcelot

Arouses? be recalled when Pyramus

        And Tristram are
unrhymed of and forgot?—

Time's laughter answers, who accords to us

        More gracious fields,
wherein we harvest—what?



JOHN CHARTERIS. Torrismond's Envoi, in Ashtaroth's Lackey.

THE LADY OF ALL OUR DREAMS

"Our distinguished alumnus," after being duly presented as such,
had with vivacity delivered much the usual sort of Commencement Address.
Yet John Charteris was in reality a trifle fagged.

The afternoon train had been vexatiously late. The little
novelist had found it tedious to interchange inanities with the
committee awaiting him at the Pullman steps. Nor had it amused him to
huddle into evening-dress, and hasten through a perfunctory supper in
order to reassure his audience at half-past eight precisely as to the
unmitigated delight of which he was now conscious.

Nevertheless, he alluded with enthusiasm to the arena of life, to
the dependence of America's destiny upon the younger generation, to the
enviable part King's College had without exception played in history,
and he depicted to Fairhaven the many glories of Fairhaven—past, present
and approaching—in superlatives that would hardly have seemed inadequate
if applied to Paradise. His oration, in short, was of a piece with the
amiable bombast that the college students and Fairhaven at large were
accustomed to applaud at every Finals—the sort of linguistic debauch
that John Charteris himself remembered to have applauded as an
undergraduate more years ago than he cared to acknowledge.

Pauline Romeyne had sat beside him then—yonder, upon the fourth
bench from the front, where now another boy with painstakingly plastered
hair was clapping hands. There was a girl on the right of this boy, too.
There naturally would be. Mr. Charteris as he sat down was wondering if
Pauline was within reach of his voice? and if she were, what was her
surname nowadays?

Then presently the exercises were concluded, and the released
auditors arose with an outwelling noise of multitudinous chatter, of
shuffling feet, of rustling programs. Many of Mr. Charteris' audience,
though, were contending against the general human outflow and pushing
toward the platform, for Fairhaven was proud of John Charteris now that
his colorful tales had risen, from the semi-oblivion of being cherished
merely by people who cared seriously for beautiful things, to the
distinction of being purchasable in railway stations; so that, in
consequence, Fairhaven wished both to congratulate him and to renew
acquaintanceship.

He, standing there, alert and quizzical, found it odd to note how
unfamiliar beaming faces climbed out of the hurly-burly of retreating
backs, to say, "Don't you remember me? I'm so-and-so." These were the
people whom he had lived among once, and some of these had once been
people whom he loved. Now there was hardly any one whom at a glance he
would have recognized.

Nobody guessed as much. He was adjudged to be delightful,
cordial, "and not a bit stuck-up, not spoiled at all, you know." To
appear this was the talisman with which he banteringly encountered the
universe.

But John Charteris, as has been said, was in reality a trifle
fagged. When everybody had removed to the Gymnasium, where the dancing
was to be, and he had been delightful there, too, for a whole half-hour,
he grasped with avidity at his first chance to slip away, and did so
under cover of a riotous two-step.

He went out upon the Campus.

He found this lawn untenanted, unless you chose to count the
marble figure of Lord Penniston, made aerial and fantastic by the
moonlight, standing as it it were on guard over the College. Mr.
Charteris chose to count him. Whimsically, Mr. Charteris reflected that
this battered nobleman's was the one familiar face he had exhumed in all
Fairhaven. And what a deal of mirth and folly, too, the old fellow must
have witnessed during his two hundred and odd years of sentry-duty! On
warm, clear nights like this, in particular, when by ordinary there were
only couples on the Campus, each couple discreetly remote from any of
the others. Then Penniston would be aware of most portentous pauses
(which a delectable and lazy conference of leaves made eloquent) because
of many unfinished sentences. "Oh, YOU know what I mean, dear!" one
would say as a last resort. And she-why, bless her heart! of course, she
always did.… Heigho, youth's was a pleasant lunacy.…

Thus Charteris reflected, growing drowsy. She said, "You spoke
very well to-night. Is it too late for congratulations?"

Turning, Mr. Charteris remarked, "As you are perfectly aware, all
that I vented was just a deal of skimble-scamble stuff, a verbal
syllabub of balderdash. No, upon reflection, I think I should rather
describe it as a conglomeration of piffle, patriotism and pyrotechnics.
Well, Madam Do-as-you-would-be-done-by, what would you have? You must
give people what they want."

It was characteristic that he faced Pauline Romeyne—or was it
still Romeyne? he wondered—precisely as if it had been fifteen minutes,
rather than as many years, since they had last spoken together.

"Must one?" she asked. "Oh, yes, I know you have always thought
that, but I do not quite see the necessity of it."

She sat upon the bench beside Lord Penniston's square marble
pedestal. "And all the while you spoke I was thinking of those Saturday
nights when your name was up for an oration or a debate before the
Eclectics, and you would stay away and pay the fine rather than brave an
audience."

"The tooth of Time," he reminded her, "has since then written
wrinkles on my azure brow. The years slip away fugacious, and Time that
brings forth her children only to devour them grins most hellishly, for
Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation
of irony,—and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle? You
wouldn't have me put on exhibition as a lusus naturae?"

"Oh, but I wish you had not altered so entirely!" Pauline sighed.

"At least, you haven't," he declared. "Of course, I would be
compelled to say so, anyhow. But in this happy instance courtesy and
veracity come skipping arm-in-arm from my elated lips." And, indeed, it
seemed to him that Pauline was marvelously little altered. "I wonder
now," he said, and cocked his head, "I wonder now whose wife I am
talking to?"

"No, Jack, I never married," she said quietly.

"It is selfish of me," he said, in the same tone, "but I am glad
of that."

And so they sat a while, each thinking.

"I wonder," said Pauline, with that small plaintive voice which
Charteris so poignantly remembered, "whether it is always like this? Oh,
do the Overlords of Life and Death ALWAYS provide some obstacle to
prevent what all of us have known in youth was possible from ever coming
true?"

And again there was a pause which a delectable and lazy
conference of leaves made eloquent.

"I suppose it is because they know that if it ever did come true,
we would be gods like them." The ordinary associates of John Charteris,
most certainly, would not have suspected him to be the speaker. "So they
contrive the obstacle, or else they send false dreams—out of the gates
of horn—and make the path smooth, very smooth, so that two dreamers may
not be hindered on their way to the divorce-courts."

"Yes, they are jealous gods! oh, and ironical gods also! They
grant the Dream, and chuckle while they grant it, I think, because they
know that later they will be bringing their playthings face to face—each
married, fat, inclined to optimism, very careful of decorum, and
perfectly indifferent to each other. And then they get their
fore-planned mirth, these Overlords of Life and Death. 'We gave you,'
they chuckle, 'the loveliest and greatest thing infinity contains. And
you bartered it because of a clerkship or a lying maxim or perhaps a
finger-ring.' I suppose that they must laugh a great deal."

"Eh, what? But then you never married?" For masculinity in
argument starts with the word it has found distasteful.

"Why, no."

"Nor I." And his tone implied that the two facts conjoined proved
much.

"Miss Willoughby——?" she inquired.

Now, how in heaven's name, could a cloistered Fairhaven have
surmised his intention of proposing on the first convenient opportunity
to handsome, well-to-do Anne Willoughby? He shrugged his wonder off.
"Oh, people will talk, you know. Let any man once find a woman has a
tongue in her head, and the stage-direction is always 'Enter Rumor,
painted full of tongues.'"

Pauline did not appear to have remarked his protest. "Yes,—in the
end you will marry her. And her money will help, just as you have
contrived to make everything else help, toward making John Charteris
comfortable. She is not very clever, but she will always worship you,
and so you two will not prove uncongenial. That is your real tragedy, if
I could make you comprehend."

"So I am going to develop into a pig," he said, with relish,—"a
lovable, contented, unambitious porcine, who is alike indifferent to the
Tariff, the importance of Equal Suffrage and the market-price of hams,
for all that he really cares about is to have his sty as comfortable as
may be possible. That is exactly what I am going to develop into,—now,
isn't it?" And John Charteris, sitting, as was his habitual fashion,
with one foot tucked under him, laughed cheerily. Oh, just to be alive
(he thought) was ample cause for rejoicing! and how deliciously her
eyes, alert with slumbering fires, were peering through the moon-made
shadows of her brows!

"Well——! something of the sort." Pauline was smiling, but
restrainedly, and much as a woman does in condoning the naughtiness of
her child. "And, oh, if only——"

"Why, precisely. 'If only!' quotha. Why, there you word the
key-note, you touch the cornerstone, you ruthlessly illuminate the
mainspring, of an intractable unfeeling universe. For instance, if only

You were the Empress of Ayre and Skye,

        And I were Ahkond of
Kong,

We could dine every day on apple-pie,

And peddle potatoes, and sleep in a sty,

And people would say when we came to die,

'They never did anything wrong.'

But, as it is, our epitaphs will probably be
nothing of the sort. So that there lurks, you see, much virtue in this
'if only.'"

Impervious to nonsense, she asked, "And have I not earned the
right to lament that you are changed?"

"I haven't robbed more than six churches up to date," he
grumbled. "What would you have?"

The answer came, downright, and, as he knew, entirely truthful:
"I would have had you do all that you might have done."

But he must needs refine. "Why, no—you would have made me do it,
wrung out the last drop. You would have bullied me and shamed me into
being all that I might have been. I see that now." He spoke as if in
wonder, with quickening speech. "Pauline, I haven't been entirely not
worth while. Oh, yes, I know! I know I haven't written five-act
tragedies which would be immortal, as you probably expected me to do. My
books are not quite the books I was to write when you and I were young.
But I have made at worst some neat, precise and joyous little tales
which prevaricate tenderly about the universe and veil the pettiness of
human nature with screens of verbal jewelwork. It is not the actual
world they tell about, but a vastly superior place where the Dream is
realized and everything which in youth we knew was possible comes true.
It is a world we have all glimpsed, just once, and have not ever
entered, and have not ever forgotten. So people like my little tales.…
Do they induce delusions? Oh, well, you must give people what they want,
and literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase
everything except mirrors."

She said soberly, "You need not make a jest of it. It is not
ridiculous that you write of beautiful and joyous things because there
was a time when living was really all one wonderful adventure, and you
remember it."

"But, oh, my dear, my dear! such glum discussions are so sadly
out-of-place on such a night as this," he lamented. "For it is a night
of pearl-like radiancies and velvet shadows and delicate odors and big
friendly stars that promise not to gossip, whatever happens. It is a
night that hungers, and all its undistinguishable little sounds are
voicing the night's hunger for masks and mandolins, for rope-ladders and
balconies and serenades. It is a night… a night wherein I gratefully
remember so many beautiful sad things that never happened… to John
Charteris, yet surely happened once upon a time to me…"

"I think that I know what it is to remember—better than you do,
Jack. But what do you remember?"

"In faith, my dear, the most Bedlamitish occurrences! It is a
night that breeds deplorable insanities, I warn you. For I seem to
remember how I sat somewhere, under a peach-tree, in clear autumn
weather, and was content; but the importance had all gone out of things;
and even you did not seem very important, hardly worth lying to, as I
spoke lightly of my wasted love for you, half in hatred, and—yes, still
half in adoration. For you were there, of course. And I remember how I
came to you, in a sinister and brightly lighted place, where a horrible,
staring frail old man lay dead at your feet; and you had murdered him;
and heaven did not care, and we were old, and all our lives seemed just
to end in futile tangle-work. And, again, I remember how we stood alone,
with visible death crawling lazily toward us, as a big sullen sea rose
higher and higher; and we little tinseled creatures waited, helpless,
trapped and yearning.… There is a boat in that picture; I suppose it was
deeply laden with pirates coming to slit our throats from ear to ear. I
have forgotten that part, but I remember the tiny spot of courtplaster
just above your painted lips.… Such are the jumbled pictures. They are
bred of brain-fag, no doubt; yet, whatever be their lineage," said
Charteris, happily, "they render glum discussion and platitudinous
moralizing quite out of the question. So, let's pretend, Pauline, that
we are not a bit more worldly-wise than those youngsters who are
frisking yonder in the Gymnasium—for, upon my word, I dispute if we have
ever done anything to suggest that we are. Don't let's be cowed a moment
longer by those bits of paper with figures on them which our
too-credulous fellow-idiots consider to be the only almanacs. Let's have
back yesterday, let's tweak the nose of Time intrepidly." Then Charteris
caroled:

"For Yesterday! for Yesterday!

I cry a reward for a Yesterday

Now lost or stolen or gone astray,

With all the laughter of Yesterday!"

"And how slight a loss was laughter," she murmured—still with the
vague and gentle eyes of a day-dreamer—"as set against all that we never
earned in youth, and so will never earn."

He inadequately answered "Bosh!" and later, "Do you remember——?"
he began.

Yes, she remembered that, it developed. And "Do you remember——?"
she in turn was asking later. It was to seem to him in retrospection
that neither for the next half-hour began a sentence without this
formula. It was as if they sought to use it as a master-word wherewith
to reanimate the happinesses and sorrows of their common past, and as if
they found the charm was potent to awaken the thin, powerless ghosts of
emotions that were once despotic. For it was as if frail shadows and
half-caught echoes were all they could evoke, it seemed to Charteris;
and yet these shadows trooped with a wild grace, and the echoes thrilled
him with the sweet and piercing surprise of a bird's call at midnight or
of a bugle heard in prison.

Then twelve o'clock was heralded by the College bell, and Pauline
arose as though this equable deep-throated interruption of the music's
levity had been a signal. John Charteris saw her clearly now; and she
was beautiful.

"I must go. You will not ever quite forget me, Jack. Such is my
sorry comfort." It seemed to Charteris that she smiled as in mockery,
and yet it was a very tender sort of derision. "Yes, you have made your
books. You have done what you most desired to do. You have got all from
life that you have asked of life. Oh, yes, you have got much from life.
One prize, though, Jack, you missed."

He, too, had risen, quiet and perfectly sure of himself. "I
haven't missed it. For you love me."

This widened her eyes. "Did I not always love you, Jack? Yes,
even when you went away forever, and there were no letters, and the days
were long. Yes, even knowing you, I loved you, John Charteris."

"Oh, I was wrong, all wrong," he cried; "and yet there is
something to be said upon the other side, as always.…" Now Charteris was
still for a while. The little man's chin was uplifted so that it was
toward the stars he looked rather than at Pauline Romeyne, and when he
spoke he seemed to meditate aloud. "I was born, I think, with the desire
to make beautiful books—brave books that would preserve the glories of
the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people, and
re-awaken joy and magnanimity." Here he laughed, a little ruefully. "No,
I do not think I can explain this obsession to any one who has never
suffered from it. But I have never in my life permitted anything to
stand in the way of my fulfilling this desire to serve the Dream by
re-creating it for others with picked words, and that has cost me
something. Yes, the Dream is an exacting master. My books, such as they
are, have been made what they are at the dear price of never permitting
myself to care seriously for anything else. I might not dare to
dissipate my energies by taking any part in the drama I was attempting
to re-write, because I must so jealously conserve all the force that was
in me for the perfection of my lovelier version. That may not be the
best way of making books, but it is the only one that was possible for
me. I had so little natural talent, you see," said Charteris, wistfully,
"and I was anxious to do so much with it. So I had always to be careful.
It has been rather lonely, my dear. Now, looking back, it seems to me
that the part I have played in all other people's lives has been the
role of a tourist who enters a cafe chantant, a fortress, or a
cathedral, with much the same forlorn sense of detachment, and observes
what there is to see that may be worth remembering, and takes a note or
two, perhaps, and then leaves the place forever. Yes, that is how I
served the Dream and that is how I got my books. They are very beautiful
books, I think, but they cost me fifteen years of human living and human
intimacy, and they are hardly worth so much."

He turned to her, and his voice changed. "Oh, I was wrong, all
wrong, and chance is kindlier than I deserve. For I have wandered after
unprofitable gods, like a man blundering through a day of mist and fog,
and I win home now in its golden sunset. I have laughed very much, my
dear, but I was never happy until to-night. The Dream, as I now know, is
not best served by making parodies of it, and it does not greatly matter
after all whether a book be an epic or a directory. What really matters
is that there is so much faith and love and kindliness which we can
share with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly, simple, generous
living we approach perfection in the highest and most lovely of all
arts.… But you, I think, have always comprehended this. My dear, if I
were worthy to kneel and kiss the dust you tread in I would do it. As it
happens, I am not worthy. Pauline, there was a time when you and I were
young together, when we aspired, when life passed as if it were to the
measures of a noble music—a heart-wringing, an obdurate, an intolerable
music, it might be, but always a lofty music. One strutted, no doubt—it
was because one knew oneself to be indomitable. Eh, it is true I have
won all I asked of life, very horribly true. All that I asked, poor
fool! oh, I am weary of loneliness, and I know now that all the phantoms
I have raised are only colorless shadows which belie the Dream, and they
are hateful to me. I want just to recapture that old time we know of,
and we two alone. I want to know the Dream again, Pauline,—the Dream
which I had lost, had half forgotten, and have so pitifully parodied. I
want to know the Dream again, Pauline, and you alone can help me."

"Oh, if I could! if even I could now, my dear!" Pauline Romeyne
left him upon a sudden, crying this. And "So!" said Mr. Charteris.

He had been deeply shaken and very much in earnest; but he was
never the man to give for any lengthy while too slack a rein to emotion;
and so he now sat down upon the bench and lighted a cigarette and
smiled. Yet he fully recognized himself to be the most enviable of men
and an inhabitant of the most glorious world imaginable—a world wherein
he very assuredly meant to marry Pauline Romeyne say, in the ensuing
September. Yes, that would fit in well enough, although, of course, he
would have to cancel the engagement to lecture in Milwaukee.… How lucky,
too, it was that he had never actually committed himself with Anne
Willoughby! for while money was an excellent thing to have, how
infinitely less desirable it was to live perked up in golden sorrow than
to feed flocks upon the Grampian Hills, where Freedom from the mountain
height cried, "I go on forever, a prince can make a belted knight, and
let who will be clever.…"

"—and besides, you'll catch your death of cold," lamented Rudolph
Musgrave, who was now shaking Mr. Charteris' shoulder.

"Eh, what? Oh, yes, I daresay I was napping," the other mumbled.
He stood and stretched himself luxuriously. "Well, anyhow, don't be such
an unmitigated grandmother. You see, I have a bit of rather important
business to attend to. Which way is Miss Romeyne?"

"Pauline Romeyne? why, but she married old General Ashmeade, you
know. She was the gray-haired woman in purple who carried out her
squalling brat when Taylor was introducing you, if you remember. She
told me, while the General was getting the horses around, how sorry she
was to miss your address, but they live three miles out, and Mrs.
Ashmeade is simply a slave to the children.… Why, what in the world have
you been dreaming about?"

"Eh, what? Oh, yes, I daresay I was only napping," Mr. Charteris
observed. He was aware that within they were still playing a riotous
two-step.

BALLAD OF PLAGIARY

"Frères et matres, vous qui cultivez"—PAUL
VERVILLE.

Hey, my masters, lords and brothers, ye that till
the fields of rhyme,

Are ye deaf ye will not hearken to the clamor of your time?

Still ye blot and change and polish—vary, heighten
and transpose—

Old sonorous metres marching grandly to their tranquil close.

Ye have toiled and ye have fretted; ye attain
perfected speech:

Ye have nothing new to utter and but platitudes to preach.

And your rhymes are all of loving, as within the old
days when

Love was lord of the ascendant in the horoscopes of men.

Still ye make of love the utmost end and scope of
all your art;

And, more blind than he you write of, note not what a modest part

Loving now may claim in living, when we have scant
time to spare,

Who are plundering the sea-depths, taking tribute of the air,—

Whilst the sun makes pictures for us; since to-day,
for good or ill,

Earth and sky and sea are harnessed, and the lightnings work our will.

Hey, my masters, all these love-songs by dust-hidden
mouths were sung

That ye mimic and re-echo with an artful-artless tongue,—

Sung by poets close to nature, free to touch her
garments' hem

Whom to-day ye know not truly; for ye only copy them.

Them ye copy—copy always, with your backs turned to
the sun,

Caring not what man is doing, noting that which man has done.

We are talking over telephones, as
Shakespeare could not talk;

We are riding out in motor-cars where Homer had to walk;

And pictures Dante labored on of mediaeval
Hell

The nearest cinematograph paints quicker, and as well.

But ye copy, copy always;—and ye marvel when ye find

This new beauty, that new meaning,—while a model stands behind,

Waiting, young and fair as ever, till some singer
turn and trace

Something of the deathless wonder of life lived in any place.

Hey, my masters, turn from piddling to the turmoil
and the strife!

Cease from sonneting, my brothers; let us fashion songs from life.

Thus I wrote ere Percie passed me.… Then did
I epitomize

All life's beauty in one poem, and make haste to eulogize

Quite the fairest thing life boasts of, for I wrote of Percie's
eyes.

EXPLICIT DECAS POETARUM