and looked and looked into her fairy blue eyes without a word. A
curiously lined face it was for so young a woman--all beautiful silver
lines filled with delicate refinements of thought and feeling.
“Suffering,” said the ignorant world, attributing these silver lines to
the unfaithfulness of the poet. Yet, as a matter of fact, Isabel’s face
had been hardly less lined when she was twenty. The poet and the years
together had barely added half a dozen lines. In fact, nature had seemed
to intend, when making Isabel’s face, to show that beauty is something
more than velvet skin and dreamy eyes and rounded contours; to prove
that nothing is needed for the making of a beautiful face but--light.
Isabel’s face, indeed, seemed made of light. The lines in it were like
rays of brightness, and her eyes like deep springs of purest radiance.
There was, after all, something in Isabel’s face that the poet had seen
only there, something “fairy” that he had never ceased loving better
than anything else in the world. But Life had had its way with them.
Strong currents beyond the control of either had torn them apart,
brought them together again, and then again torn them apart. Still, they
had never really lost faith in each other’s natures, and though an
impertinent world had misunderstood their mutual forbearance, they had
never misunderstood each other.
“Isabel!” said the poet, still holding her face like a star in his
hands, “I am going to die, and I have called you to congratulate me--as
I know so wise a girl will. For we both know, better than any one, that
it is best.”
Isabel’s eyes filled with tears, and releasing her face from his hands,
she buried it in the bedclothes. Presently mastering her feeling, she
raised her head again, and looking with infinite pity into the poet’s
eyes, she said:
“O my dear boy--cannot you be human at last: just once before you die?
I have always thought of you like some Undine, a beautiful, gentle,
elemental being--lacking only a human soul. Indeed, sometimes I have
thought of you as a god--sitting aloof from our little every day
interests--but God knows I have loved you all the time, and you only
shall I love in all my life....”
The poet once more took her face in his hands, and looking into her
nereid eyes, he said: “Wife, dear wife--forgive the sorrow I have
brought you. If there was any joy, remember that. Life is very
difficult, very strange. It was all no fault of ours, not even mine. I
see it now very clearly--now that I am dying. I see how wrong I have
been--I see how right. I see how right you have been--I see how wrong.
Let us forgive each other. Let us be in love again before I die. Give me
your eyes. Let me kiss them once before I die....”
Then, a sudden thought taking him, “I wonder, dear,” he said, “if you
can find my “Euripides.” There is a passage I am thinking of in ‘The
Alcestis.’ It would comfort me to hear it again....”
Presently his wife brought him the volume, and turning over the pages,
the poet at last found the passage he was in search of.
“Yes! this is it,” he said:
“‘_Now have I moored my bark of life in a happier haven than before, and
so will own myself a happy man._’”
Then leaning back on his pillow, “Tell me Isabel,” he said, “why is
there so mysterious a comfort in words?”
“Alas! dear, it is for you to tell me,” she said, stroking his hair;
“you have loved words so well--and made so many beautiful words.”
“I know you think that I have loved nothing but words,” said the poet;
“I wonder if it is true?... I think not.”
“I think you meant to love life as well,” she answered, kissing his brow
gently.
She smoothed his hair a long while as they sat in silence together--the
past rolling over them like a river.
Presently Wasteneys broke the silence. “I have walked in a vague
course!” he said--“walked in a vague course!... if you will forgive,” he
added, presently, “my quoting once more. A dying man should not quote.
He is expected to say something original. Well, I will try
to-morrow....”
Then there fell over him once more that ante-lethal drowsiness of death,
and murmuring again, “I have walked in a vague course!” he fell asleep.
When she was sure he was asleep, his wife bent over him and kissed his
lips.
“After all,” she said, “he has never grown up. He is a baby still--just
a child, that is all....”
Wasteneys awoke after a little while, to find himself alone, save for
the silent presence of his lawyer.
“I fell asleep,” he said, “foolishly enough--for I have little time to
waste; and I shall soon have all the sleep I want....”
Then, after a pause, he added: “I wish to say good-bye to my little
girls. Will you have them brought to me?”
Presently there entered the room two beautiful children, one about
twelve years old, and the other five. They came hand in hand, laughing,
and ran across to their father’s bed, gleefully ignorant of the
significance of the still room, and the purple hangings, and the white
figure in the bed.
“Daddy! daddy!” they cried, climbing upon the bed. “What a time it is
since we saw you!... Tell us a story right away.”
The father took the long brown-gold curls of the elder girl in his
hands, and stroked the sunshine head of the little one. “Kiddies,” he
said, after a while, “your daddy is going on a long journey. Will you
think of him and love him while he is gone?”
“Where are you going, daddy?” asked the two young voices.
“O ever so far! It’s a country called ‘East of the Sun and West of the
Moon.’”
“O take us with you, daddy. It sounds such a lovely place.”
“I cannot take you with me, kiddies--but perhaps mother and you and I
will meet there one of these days ... if we’re all very good!”
“I wish we could go with you now, daddy,” said the elder girl; and the
younger, out of sheer reverence for her elder sister, repeated her.
“I wish we could go with you now, daddy,” she said.
“No,” said the father; “you must stay behind and look after Little
Mother. She would be so lonely without you.”
The children, with the volatility of their age, accepted this
explanation, and presently once more turned to their father with a
demand for a story.
“No!” he said; “it is your turn to tell me a story. I am tired to-day.
You, Pervenche, must say for me ‘The Three Kings,’ and you, Golla, must
say ‘The White Bird.’ I haven’t heard you say them for quite a long
time. And each standing up in turn, like a corporal saluting his
captain, Pervenche and Golla recited their little pieces; and as they
recited, the tears rolled down their father’s cheeks.
“You are crying, daddy,” suddenly exclaimed the little one. “What are
you crying for?”
The poet was crying because, among all the many human experiences he had
missed, he had missed his children too.
Their nurse near at hand rescued him from the dilemma. “Daddy is tired,”
she said; “bid him good-bye....”
And, wonderingly, the little creatures obeyed; but the tiny Golla,
already a sturdy sceptic, kept asking, when they were once more in the
nursery, “I wonder why daddy cried!”
When his little girls had gone, Wasteneys turned to his lawyer.
“What time is high tide to-day?”
He asked the question wearily, almost querulously; for, after all, he
was seriously dying.
“I will look in the newspaper,” said the lawyer; and having looked, he
answered, “At three minutes past four.”
“When will the tide turn?” asked the dying poet.
“It keeps at full for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and then begins to
ebb.”
“That gives us from now about four hours,” said the poet. “Four hours.
At the turning of the tide. Four hours ... and then!”
Wasteneys lay still after this, with his eyes closed.
Presently he roused himself. “I have one more farewell to make,” he
said; “will you ask them to bring me my children?...”
“Your children?” The lawyer, good friend as he was, did not at first
understand.
“Yes! My children. Please have them bring me my children.”
Wasteneys’s servant, happening to come into the room at the moment,
beckoned the lawyer, and explained his master’s meaning.
“Yes!” answered the lawyer, soothingly, after this informatory pause,
“they shall be brought to you.”
Then presently there entered two men servants carrying two high piles of
books. Placing them on a table, they left the room, returning in a few
moments with two more piles. Once more they went out and returned, their
arms still laden with books.
Meanwhile a new life seemed suddenly to have animated the poet’s frame.
His eyes shone, and he struggled to raise himself in the bed. The lawyer
packed the pillows at his back, and he sat up.
“Put them at the end of the bed,” he said; “let me see them all, let me
touch them....”
When his wish had been carried out, and the servants departed, he leaned
over the books and stroked them affectionately again and again.
“So you are really mine--really my children,” he said.
“Did I really write them?” he said, presently, turning to his friend.
“So many?”
“Yes! dear friend, you wrote them all,” answered the lawyer, too
solemnised to jest; for he saw that it was close on the turning of the
tide.
“How many are there?” asked Wasteneys, leaning back, already weary with
the excitement.
“I will count them ...” said his friend, and presently announced that
there were fifty-three volumes.
“Fifty-three!” exclaimed Wasteneys; “and how old am I?”
“Thirty-nine, next month,” said the lawyer.
“Next month!” said the poet.
Then he turned again to his friend.
“Read me a page here and there,” he said; “I will be my own critic. Even
a critic at the point of death may be expected to tell the truth. Read
to me that I may know before I die that something in all those
fifty-three volumes may perhaps be worth while.”
“What shall I read?” asked the lawyer.
“Read me ‘What of the Darkness?’”
And the lawyer read:
“What of the Darkness? Is it very fair?
Are there great calms, and find ye silence there?
Like soft-shut lilies, all your faces glow
With some strange peace our faces never know,
With some great faith our faces never dare,
Dwells it in Darkness? Do ye find it there?
“Is it a Bosom where tired heads may lie?
Is it a Mouth to kiss our weeping dry?
Is it a Hand to still the pulse’s leap?
Is it a Voice that holds the runes of sleep?
Day shows us not such comfort anywhere--
Dwells it in Darkness? Do ye find it there?
“Out of the day’s deceiving light we call--
Day that shows man so great, and God so small,
That hides the stars, and magnifies the grass--
O is the Darkness too a lying glass?
Or, undistracted, do ye find truth there?
What of the Darkness? Is it very fair?”
“Are you quite sure that I wrote that?” Asked the poet. “Look carefully.
Is it really my book?”
“It is, indeed. Printed when you were twenty.”
“I am so happy,” said the poet--“so happy to think I wrote that. Time
itself cannot rob me of that.”
Very soon it was plainly to be seen that the poet was on the very
border-line of life and death.
“Is there no one you would care to see?” asked the lawyer, gently.
“No, no one,” answered the poet.
“Not your physician?” asked the lawyer.
“O no, indeed,” answered the poet, with a flash of his odd smile. “Give
him my love. But tell him that I want to die--not to be killed.”
“What time is it?” he asked, presently.
“Five minutes to four.”
The poet lay silent a while, and then he turned to his lawyer with the
look of an old friendship. Indeed, his friendship for his lawyer, was,
odd as it may sound, one of the realities of his unearthly life.
“Friend,” he said, “I am afraid it is almost time for us also to say
good-bye. God bless you--for all. Look after--them, won’t you?” and he
waved his hand toward his wife’s quarters. “Good-bye....”
“But,” said his friend, “will you have no one with you?”
“Don’t you hear the turning of the tide?” answered the poet.
“No one?” reiterated the lawyer, agonised out of his professional
demeanour.
“No one!” answered Wasteneys, rising commandingly in his bed, and
sweeping his hand across the volumes at its foot--“No one--but my
children!”
THE BUTTERFLY OF DREAMS
It was said that a tragic disappointment accounted for young Lord
Laleham’s curious passion for butterflies. Actually there was no such
explanation, or, of course, any need of it; but pursuits out of the
common naturally demand uncommon excuses--for the common mind; and it
was evident to the watchful critics of Lord Laleham’s career that
nothing short of a great sorrow could have driven him to so trivial a
means of alleviation. According to others, this dainty passion--which
might well have subjected him to the contempt of his fellows, had he not
been able to give a somewhat formidable physical account of himself--was
to be put down as due to one of those strains of freakishness liable to
break out in old families. No one, of course, dreamed that Laleham could
care for butterfly-hunting for its own sake, except those entomologists
for whom his collection was famous throughout the world, authoritative,
classical; for Lord Laleham was one of the handsomest and richest of
young English peers, and as difficult for match-making mothers to catch
as one of his own butterflies--surely the last man in the world to seek
the humble laurel of the lepidopterist.
And, indeed, it was true that butterflies were something more to Laleham
than entomology. They were rather a poetic than a scientific passion.
There was a strong vein of the mystic and poetic in his nature to which
in some way, mysterious even to himself, these strange little painted
things had from childhood appealed. As the smallest boy, he had proved
himself a passionist of the solitudes of nature, by lone woodland
truancies and long tramps through that gipsy wilderness, which England,
with all its lawns and market-gardens and nurseries, has so remarkably
preserved. And, from the first moment that he found himself alone,
hushed and watching and listening, and a little afraid, in the belt of
mighty beeches that was perhaps the chief honour of his pedigree, there
had seemed a spell, an enchantment, over these lonely leaves, these
gnome-like shapes of mottled bole, and these twisted roots that seemed
to have become so through some mysterious agonies of ancient
torture--though indeed, to most folk there was nothing there but leaves
and the famous Laleham covers.
He had never forgotten the day when that spell of exquisite silence and
dappled sunshine--the whole woodland with its finger on its lip--had
suddenly become embodied in a tiny shape of coloured velvet wings that
came floating zig-zag up the dingle, swift as light, aery as a perfume,
soft and silent as the figured carpet in some Eastern palace. With what
awe he watched it, as at length it settled near him on a sunlit weed,
with what a luxury of observation his eyes noted its sumptuous unearthly
markings, and what an image of wonder and exquisite mystery it there and
forever left upon his mind. In a moment it was up and away upon its
uncharted travel through the wood. Instinctively, he ran in pursuit. But
it was too late. He had lost his first butterfly.
For Laleham, from that moment, all the beauty of the world, and the
mystery and the elusiveness of it, were symbolised in a butterfly. From
that moment it seemed to him that the success of life was--the catching
of a certain butterfly.
* * * * *
He was now thirty years old and had caught many butterflies, caught them
in every part of the world, and the adventures he had met with in the
apparently insignificant chase, were they to be written, would fully
justify the defence he sometimes made of what the world called his
whimsical hobby. “You must not look upon my butterflies as trivial,” he
would say. “The study of much smaller things has made modern science;
and a butterfly may well lead you to the ends of the earth--and even
lose you among the stars. You never know where it may take you. There
is no hunting more full of exciting possibilities. If you dare follow a
butterfly, you dare go anywhere; and no quarry will lead you into
stranger places, or into such beautiful unexpected adventures.”
At thirty he was still unmarried. Life was still for him a lonely
woodland, through which he chased the one butterfly he had never been
able to capture. The butterflies of the world were in his marvellously
arranged cabinets,--rainbow upon rainbow of classified wings--but one
butterfly was not there. The butterfly, indeed, might possibly have been
had by exchange with other collectors, though it was one so rare, and so
beyond equivalent in any form, that the man who had been fortunate
enough to come into possession of it seldom cared to part with it.
Besides, though occasionally Laleham had resorted to this means of
supplying a missing species, it was a course he seldom took. Nearly
every butterfly in his vast flower-garden of shimmering wings had been
caught by his own hand. There was no country in the world he had not
visited in his determined dream of being, one might say, the Balzac of
the butterfly; and it was only the commoner sort of butterfly he had
occasionally obtained by exchange. The butterfly that was missing from
his collection he made it a point of honour, and indeed, in course of
time, a sort of superstition, to capture for himself. To the ordinary
and non-entomological observer, untouched by Laleham’s mystic passion,
there would seem little enough to account for his preoccupation in the
quite insignificant object of it, a tiny blue butterfly, to ordinary
eyes not differing from any other tiny blue butterfly, and in fact only
to be known for what it was by a mystic marking almost imperceptible,
hidden beneath its wings. Not even the collector himself could be sure
of what he was pursuing, on account of the butterfly’s resemblance to
another species comparatively common, exactly like, except for that
hidden signature, that distinguishing hall-mark. If one were to
depreciate the value of this illustrious insect, and say that its sole
distinction was that of rarity, the collector would only smile, and
could afford to, perhaps. Rarity! only rarity! Was not that enough! Had
not mankind agreed, throughout recorded history, that rarity alone,
unaccompanied by any other precious characteristic, is of all
qualifications, the qualification of immortality; and is not rarity of
all values the ideal value, a value not measurable by the eye, or any
method of external judgment, a value of the soul. Besides, what are the
highest prizes in any chase or contest whatsoever--a simple wreath of
laurel, the antlers of a deer, objects in themselves only symbolically
valuable. Why, therefore, should not the ambitious pursuing spirit of
man stake its fortunes on a butterfly--for what could be more typical of
its own wandering course and ever changing goal.
* * * * *
The Laleham butterfly, as it is now called, and as not seldom happens
with other rare things in nature--this being, I may add, not the least
of nature’s mysterious whims--had never been found except in one remote
corner of England, a fenny country producing a hardly less rare variety
of flowering rush on which its caterpillar alone could feed. It was a
country of boundless marshy levels, and peaty solitudes, a country of
herons, and long dark-eyed pools, which, flashing every few yards under
the boundless sky, filled the loneliness with magic mirrors. For the gay
it was a dreary land, but for those who have found “nought so sweet as
melancholy” it was melancholy only as great music is melancholy, and its
loneliness was that of some splendid raven-haired widow with her tragic
gaze upon the sky. It was a thinly populated region, with here and there
an inn and a few cottages taking shelter under the wing of some
mouldering grange. It was, in short, one of the sad beautiful ends of
the earth. Here it was, and here alone, that Laleham’s butterfly had
chosen to dwell, to secret itself, indeed, as though in a place so
remote it might hope to preserve its fragile aristocratic race from
extinction. Yet, though it was known to inhabit this solitude, not a
dozen living people had ever seen it, and only two had caught it for
many years; for there again it illustrated another mystery of nature,
the persistent survival of a rare type, in such unchangeably small
numbers as almost to risk extinction, as it were, for the purpose of
aristocracy. For at least two hundred years, as long as it had been
known at all, the Laleham butterfly had existed apparently in the same
small family, only propagating itself sufficiently to keep its race and
name upon the earth, and no more. It had not become rare by process of
extinction, but because nature apparently had made few of it from the
beginning. Happily this aristocratic law of nature is not only applied
to butterflies. In fact one might justly say the same of the family that
had dwelt in an old embattled house which had stood here sinking deeper
and deeper into the solitude since the days of Richard II. Noctorum, the
house was called, as was the cluster of cottages around it--a name
appropriately dark and mysterious, like the cry of owls at night across
the fen.
In this old house of Noctorum, which had been built by his ancestors and
inhabited by Fantons ever since, lived studious old Sir Gilbert Fanton,
Baronet, alone most of the year round with his gout and his books, and
one beautiful daughter hardly yet a woman. A young wife, dead now many
years, had left him with two sons, both soldiers, and therefore seldom
at home, and one great-eyed little girl, who, far from finding the
solitude of her life irksome, had taken kindly to it, and had more and
more, year by year, seemed to embody the solemn beauty of her melancholy
surroundings. Laleham had been a friend of young Christopher Fanton’s at
Oxford, and had, several years before, come down to Noctorum with the
young soldier in quest of the butterfly which was the legendary glory of
the district.
Though Sir Gilbert was a much older man than himself, he had found in
him a scholar with mystic tendencies similar to his own, and, when the
sons had gone to the wars, Laleham continued to come down to visit the
father, and incidentally to pursue the quest of his butterfly. Then he
had taken a trip about the world, visiting the tropical haunts of his
hobby, which had lasted so long that when again he returned to England
it had been three years since he had visited his old friend. Besides, he
had once more returned from his pilgrimage without that mystic butterfly
which continued still to evade his persevering pursuit. In every part of
the world he had sought it, but still, so far as he could hear, the one
place in which it might be found was the marshes of Noctorum. So,
thinking less of his quest than of his friend, he determined to run down
and see what progress Sir Gilbert was making with his great book on the
folk-lore of the fens--for fairies and hobgoblins were Sir Gilbert’s
particular substitute for idleness. He found Sir Gilbert boyishly happy
over his recent discovery of an indigenous and heretofore unrecorded
variant of the story of Cupid and Psyche.
“Think of it!” exclaimed the old scholar, “here in this land of clods
and pitchforks, uncouth in form indeed, but still the old dainty fancy,
the old Greek fairy tale in homespun. Isn’t it strange how these frail
shapes of story, frail as moonbeams, are still hardy enough to make
their way from land to land, and take on the disguises of the peoples,
rough or gentle, among which, like a thistledown, they happen to
settle.”
“Yes!” answered Laleham smiling, “they are like the butterflies of the
imagination--frail but indestructible.”
Sir Gilbert laughed at this reminder that there were other hobbies than
his own.
“Forgive me,” he said, “I am afraid I am selfishly riding my own hobby;
and in my Psyche, forgetting yours. Tell me about your Psyche.”
Laleham shook his head, and proceeded to tell of his varying fortune in
foreign lands, and how he had come back with all the butterflies of the
world, except the one butterfly. Sir Gilbert gave him the sympathy of a
fellow collector.
“But surely,” he said, “you haven’t given up the chase--at your age.”
“Almost,” answered Laleham, “I am too old. The wildest enthusiasm--for
butterflies--can hardly outlive thirty. I think I shall take up some
serious study--like yours.”
Both the friends laughed, and Sir Gilbert said:
“But, seriously, I have heard of your butterfly having been seen within
a mile or two from here no longer than a week ago. There were two
fellows staying at the inn last month who called to see me, enthusiasts
like yourself, and they were positive that they had seen it over by the
Black Ditches--of course, you know the place. But they missed it, all
the same.”
“The worst of the beast is,” said Laleham, “that you cannot be sure, so
to say, that it is itself till you have it in your hand. The other brute
is so like it.”
“Yet you were once sure enough, dear friend,” answered Sir Gilbert.
“True,” said Laleham sadly, “but who knows, I may have been wrong.”