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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Certain Hour, by James Branch Cabell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Certain Hour
+
+Author: James Branch Cabell
+
+Release Date: April 29, 2008 [EBook #288]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CERTAIN HOUR ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+
+
+
+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
+
+
+"_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_.
+
+
+
+
+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._"
+
+
+
+
+  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
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Certain Hour, by James Branch Cabell
+
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