“Yes, sir. Squeeze it on your eyes and you can see things a good ways
off, they say.”
Shepherd or god, I liked him after that. I took a bit of the mandrake
from him and asked him whether he had ever tried it and what he had
seen; but at this he blushed so furiously that as we moved away Pelleas
hastened to set him at his ease by some crisp commonplace about the
night. And there we left him, standing under the birch with his
mandrake in his hand, looking down, I instantly guessed, for some one
in that brightness below us in the hollow.
“Pelleas,” I said, “Pelleas, without any doubt there is somebody down
there whom he wants to see. I dare say the temple may not be enchanted,
after all. For that fine young fellow and his blushes--they seemed to
me very human!”
“That’s the reason,” Pelleas said most wisely, “why there is likely to
be some enchantment about. The more human you are the more wonderful
things are likely to happen.”
That is true enough, and it was in very human fashion that next instant
the figure in pink in the portico of the temple came swiftly toward
us and took me in her arms. It was Avis, all tender regret for what
she fancied to be her inhospitality and as perfectly the hostess as
if it were usual for her to receive her guests in a white temple. And
manifestly it was usual; for when she had led us within, there on a
_papier maché_ rock on the edge of a _papier maché_ ocean sat Hobart
Eddy himself and Lawrence Knight in a dress as picturesque as Hobart’s;
and about them in a confusion of painted idols and crowns and robes
were all the house-party at Little Rosemont and a score from the
countryside.
“Upon my word,” Pelleas said, “they must have let us off at Arcady at
last. I always knew I’d buy a through ticket some day.”
Hobart Eddy came forward, twitching an amazing shepherd’s cloak about
him, and shook his shepherd’s crook at us.
“I’m head goat,” he explained, “but they let me call myself a goatherd
because they think I won’t see through the offence.”
Then Avis, laughing, drew Pelleas and me away to tell us how at last
her dream had come true and that the white temple was the theater which
she had wanted for her guests at Little Rosemont, and that on Monday
it was to be opened with some tableaux and an open-air play on the
grass-plot, under the moon. And when she had shown us all the charms
and wonders of the pretty place she led us away for our drive across
the fields to the house.
As we emerged on the wide portico Pelleas stopped us with a gesture.
“Look,” he said softly, “look there. Really, you know, it’s like being
somewhere else.”
Between the two central pillars we could see the moon streaming full
upon the tiled floor; and in the brightness a little figure was
standing, sandaled and crowned and in white, a solitary portress of
this sylvan lodge. She had heard our approach and she turned, a radiant
little creature with bright hair along her straight gown, and drew back
and dropped a quick, unmistakable courtesy!
I have seldom been more amazed than by the dipping courtesy of that
crowned head. Then I saw to my further bewilderment that the salutation
had been intended for me. And as I looked at her a certain familiarity
in her prettiness smote me, and I knew her.
“It is Bonnie!” I said.
“O, ma’am,” said Bonnie, “yes’m,” and blushed and waxed still prettier.
And this was Bonnie, the little maid whom I had last seen as I sat with
Enid’s baby under the pink crab apple-tree; and she was come to Little
Rosemont, Avis told me later, because her mother lived there in charge
of the cedar linen room. (So her mother cannot have been Demeter after
all!) I remembered her because of her really unusual prettiness which
in print gowns and white caps was hardly less notable than in this
splendour of white robe and unbound hair. It was easy to see why Avis
had pressed her in service for the Monday tableaux. It was easy to see
that no one could be more charmingly picturesque than Bonnie. And as I
looked down in her face upturned to answer some slight thing that I was
saying to her, in a flash something else was clear to me. With Bonnie
here in this fair guise was it not the easiest matter in the world to
see who had been in the mind of that fine young fellow up yonder there,
with mandrake in his hands?
It was a wild guess, if you like, but a guess not difficult to make in
that place of enchantment. I protest that there are nights when one
suspects one’s very gateposts of observing each other kindly across
one’s gate.
“Bonnie,” said I, with an instant intention, “come to my room to-night,
please, and help me about my unpacking. I’ve something to say to you.”
“O, yes’m,” said Bonnie, and I went away smiling at the incongruity of
having a radiant creature in a diadem to brush my sad gray curls.
“I have put her in a tableau,” Avis said, in the carriage, “in ‘The
Return of Endymion.’ She is a quaint little Diana. I have never seen
such hair.”
On which, “Avis,” I asked serenely, “who, pray, is that fine young
fellow hereabout who is in love with Bonnie?”
Avis, sitting tranquil in the white light with a basket of rhinestones
in her lap, looked flatteringly startled.
“Half an hour on the place, Aunt Etarre,” she said, shaking her head,
“and you know our one romance!”
“So does Pelleas,” I claimed defensively, “or, at all events, he has
actually talked with the lover.”
“Pooh!” said Pelleas in that splendid disdain which, in matters of
romance, he always pretends, “we were talking botany.”
“That’s he,” said Avis, nodding. “Bonnie’s sweetheart is the young
under-gardener--if you can call a man a sweetheart who is as shy as
Karl. He is really Faint Heart. But I think those two little people
are in love.”
Then I learned how, ever since the coming of Bonnie to Little Rosemont,
this big young Karl had paid her the most delicate and the most distant
attention. He had brought roots of violets and laid them outside her
window-ledge; and he had tossed in her blind clusters of the first
lady-slippers and the first roses. But though all the household at
Little Rosemont had good-naturedly done what it could to help on the
affair, some way it had not prospered. And as I listened I resolved
past all doubting that something must be done. For Pelleas and I are
fain to go through the world seeking out people who love each other
without knowing, and saying to them: “Fair Heart and Faint Heart, take
each other’s hands and follow us.”
Still, I was obliged to be certain that Bonnie was in love as well as
the young god whom we had surprised, and I meant to look in her eyes
the while I named the name of this young Karl. I think that there are
no eyes which I cannot read in a like circumstance and the pastime is
one of the delights of my hours.
“Bonnie,” said I to the little maid as she brushed my hair that night,
“I’ve an idea that you were wishing something delightful when you stood
in that great doorway to-night. Were you not?”
“O, ma’am,” said little Bonnie, and I saw her face, shadowy above my
own in the mirror, burn sudden crimson.
“Of course you were,” said I briskly. “Bonnie,” I pursued, “when
I came upon you I had just seen under a birch-tree not far away a
fine young fellow with a flower in his hand. Can that have been the
under-gardener?”
“O, ma’am,” said Bonnie, “I s’pose, if he had a flower--” and her voice
trembled, and she did not meet my eyes in the mirror.
“Bonnie!” said I.
Her eyes met mine.
“I know all about it,” said I boldly.
“O, ma’am,” she said, and tangled the comb in my sad gray curls.
Whereupon I flattered myself that I had taken Bonnie’s testimony and
that I was fortified with a thousand reasons for doing my best. But
it was not until the next day that I knew how, of all people, I could
count on Hobart Eddy to help me to be a kind of servant of Fate.
I was in the library next morning when, every one else being
frightfully enthusiastic and gone to look at the puppies, he came in
and sat on an ottoman at my feet--dear Hobart Eddy, with his tired eyes
and worldly-wise words and smile of utter sweetness.
“Aunt Etarre,” he said, “I feel bored and miserable. Let’s go out in
the world, hand in hand, and do a good deed. They say it sets you on
your feet. I’d like to try it.”
I shook my head, smiling. Nobody does more charmingly generous things
than Hobart and nobody, I suppose, poses for such a man of self.
“No, Hobart,” I said, “good deeds are a self-indulgence to you.”
“Everything I want to do they say will be a self-indulgence,” he
observed reflectively. “I dare say when I die they’ll all say I let
myself go at last.”
“What will they say when you fall in love?” I asked idly.
“What have they said?” he parried.
“Everything,” I replied truthfully.
“Just so,” he answered; “you wouldn’t think they would have so much
ingenuity. The queer thing,” he added meditatively, “is that such dull
folk have the originality to get up such good gossip.”
“But I mean,” I said, “when you really fall in love.”
“I am in love,” he told me plaintively, “with seeing other people in
love. I would go miles merely to look on two who are really devoted to
each other. I look about for them everywhere. Do you know,” he said,
“speaking of being in love myself, there is a most exquisite creature
in a tableau I’m in Monday night. I am in love with her, but, by
Jove, it being a tableau I can’t say a word to tell her so. It’s my
confounded luck. Sometimes I think I’m in a tableau all the time and
can’t say any of the things I really mean.”
“And who may she be?” I asked politely, being old to the meaningless
enthusiasms of Hobart Eddy.
“By Jove! I didn’t find out,” he remembered. “Nobody knew when I asked
’em. I suppose _they_ were in a tableau, too, and speechless. I forgot
to ask Avis. She’s a goddess, asleep on a bank. She’s Diana--sandals
and crown and all that. And I believe I’m to come swooning down a cloud
with a gold club in my hand. Anyway--”
“Hobart Eddy,” I cried, “are you Endymion?”
“But why not?” he asked with a fine show of indignation; “do you think
I should be just an ordinary shepherd, with no attention paid me?”
“Hobart Eddy, Hobart Eddy,” I said, “listen.”
Then I told him about Bonnie and Faint Heart, young god of the gardens.
And he heard me, smiling, complaisant, delighted, and at the last, when
he had seen what I had in mind, properly enthusiastic.
“Bonnie is going to look beautiful Monday night, Hobart,” I impressed
him, “and that boy will not be there to see her--save from far off,
with mandrake on his eyes! But he ought to be there to see her--and
Hobart, why can you not take him to the wings with you for the
tableaux and pretend that you need him to help you? And after he has
seen Bonnie in her tableau you ought to be trusted to arrange something
pleasant--”
He listened, pretending to be wholly amused at my excitement. But for
all that he put in a word of planning here and there that made me trust
him--dear Hobart Eddy.
“By Jove!” he finally recalled plaintively, “but I’m in love with her
myself, you know, confound it.”
“Ah, but think,” I comforted him, “how easily you can forget your
loves.”
The night of Monday came like a thing of cloud that had been going
before the day and had become silver bright when the darkness overtook
it. We walked through the park from the house--Avis and Lawrence and
Pelleas and Hobart Eddy and I, across the still fields never really
waked from sleep by any human voice. And when we came to the little
temple the moon was so bright that it was as if we had passed into a
kind of day made youthful, as we dream our days.
Pelleas and I found our seats in one of the half-circle of boxes built
of sweet boughs, open to the moon and walled by leaves. There was a
vacant chair or two and Avis and Lawrence and Hobart Eddy sat with us
in turn while the folk gathered--guests from the near country-houses,
guests who had motored out from town, and the party from Little
Rosemont. The edge of the wood was hung with lanterns, as if a shower
of giant sparks were held in the green.
“How will it be, Hobart?” I asked him eagerly as he joined us.
“Be? The love story? O, he’s up there,” Hobart assured me, “happy as
anything. I think he’ll put grease paint in Endymion’s eyes when he
comes to make me up, he’s that bereft.” He dropped his voice. “He has a
bunch of scarlet salvia the size of a lamp,” he confided. “I think he
means to fire it at us in the blessed middle of the tableau.”
I am a sentimental old woman. For all through that evening of beautiful
pictures and beautiful colour, I sat with my thought hovering about
Bonnie and that young Faint Heart. And yet I am not ashamed of that.
What better could my thought hover round than such a joy, trembling
into being?
“Pelleas,” I whispered, “O, Pelleas. Look at those people there, and
there, and down there. They don’t know what a charming secret is
happening.”
“Pooh!” said Pelleas, “they never do know. Besides,” he added, “maybe
they know one of their own.”
“Maybe they do,” I thought, and looked with new eyes on that watching
half-circle, with moving fans and fluttering scarfs. That is the best
thing about an audience: the little happy secrets that are in the
hearts.
When “The Return of Endymion” was announced I was in the pleasantest
excitement. For I love these hours when Love walks unmasked before me
and I am able to say: Such an one loves such an one and O, I wish them
well! The music sank to a single strain that beckoned to the curtain
of vines behind the portico; the lights were lowered and a ripple of
expectation, or so I fancied, ran here and there. And in the same
instant I heard beside me a familiar voice.
“Good setting for ’em, by Jove!” it said, and there was Hobart Eddy,
dropped down between Pelleas and me.
“Hobart,” I said excitedly, “Hobart Eddy! This is your tableau.”
He smiled, his familiar smile of utter sweetness, and rested his chin
on his hand and looked at the stage.
“No, Aunt Etarre,” he said; “see.”
Before the portico the curtain of vines parted to the tremble of the
violins. There was the slope, flower-spangled like the slope on which
we sat and across which, two nights ago, Pelleas and I had fancied
ourselves to be looking on immortal things. And there on the flowers
lay Diana asleep, her hair spread on the green, the crescent glittering
on her forehead, her white robe sweeping her sandaled feet. This was
Bonnie, dear little maid, and it was her hour; she would never again be
so beautiful before the whole world.
Even then I hardly understood until I saw him come from the
wings--Endymion, in the shepherd’s cloak, with the shepherd’s crook
in his hands. And as he went near to her and stood looking down at
her, Bonnie opened her eyes and saw what I saw, that her Endymion was
that young god of an under-gardener. Erect, splendid, crowned with
oak leaves--it was Karl’s hour, too, and he had come to her. As the
rose-light went stealing across the picture, embracing the shadows,
glowing in her awakened face, he opened his arms to her and caught
her and held her to him. The light burned vividly and beautifully;
and, all her hair rippling on his shepherd’s cloak, she clung to him,
before those people who sat and never guessed, under the moon. It was
their hour, the hour of Bonnie and Karl, and Pelleas and I were really
looking toward a place of enchantment and on immortal things.
The curtain of vines swept together in a soft thunder of applause. Who
were they, every one was asking, but who were they, who had given to
the tableau a quality that was less like a picture than like a dream?
“Hobart, Hobart,” I said, trembling, “how did you dare?”
Hobart Eddy was smiling at the ineffectual entreaties of the audience
for a repetition of the picture. In vain they begged, the curtain of
vines did not lift; the music swelled to a note of finality and lights
leaped up.
“He wasn’t so faint-hearted,” said Hobart Eddy. “To be sure, I was
obliged to make him do it. But then he did it. Faint Hearts aren’t like
that.”
“Hobart,” said I raptly, “you are the fairy godmother, after all.”
“Ah, well,” Hobart Eddy said dissentingly, “I only did it because I
wanted that minute when she opened her eyes. I’d go miles to see two
who are really devoted. And I was in love with her myself, confound it!
But then,” he added philosophically, “if I’d been there to take her in
my arms I couldn’t have looked on.”
In the intermission before the open-air play Pelleas gave me a certain
signal that we know and love and he rose and slipped from our box of
boughs. I followed him without, and stepped with him across the green
to the edge of the wood. There we took our way, as we had done on the
night of our coming, by the path in the trees, the path that was just
wide enough for, say, two violets when they venture out to walk two
by two in the safe night. “I was afraid we might not be able to come
here again,” Pelleas explained, “and I thought we ought ...” he added
vaguely. But I understood for I had wanted to come no less than he.
“Pelleas,” I said, as we stepped along the narrow way, “suppose it had
been as we fancied? Suppose it had all been some enchanted place that
would have vanished with us?”
“Every time we fail to vanish from this world,” Pelleas said
reflectively, “something charming happens. I suppose it is always so.”
“O, always,” I echoed confidently.