_PROEM:--Apologia pro Auctore_
It occurs to me that we here assume intimacy with a man of unusual
achievement, and therefore tread upon quaggy premises. Yet I do but avail
myself of to-day's privilege.... It is an odd thing that people will
facilely assent to Don Adriano's protestation against a certain travestying
of Hector,--"Sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the dead, for when he
breathed he was a man,"--even while through the instant the tide of romance
will be setting quite otherwhither, with their condonation. For in all
the best approved romances the more sumptuous persons of antiquity are
very guilty of twaddle on at least one printed page in ten, and nobody
remonstrates; and here is John Bulmer, too, lugged from the grave for your
delectation.
I presume, however, to palliate the offence. The curious may find the gist
of what I narrate concerning Ormskirk in Heinrich Löwe's biography of the
man, and will there discover that with established facts I have not made
bold to juggle. Only when knowledge failed have I bridged the void with
speculation. Perhaps I have guessed wrongly: the feat is not unhuman, and
in provision against detection therein I can only protest that this lack of
omniscience was never due to malice; faithfully I have endeavored to deduce
from the known the probable, and in nothing to misrepresent to you this big
man of a little age, this trout among a school of minnows.
Trout, mark you; I claim for Ormskirk no leviathan-ship. Rather I would
remind you of a passage from somewhat anterior memoirs: "The Emperor of
Lilliput is taller, by almost the breadth of my nail, than any of his
court, which alone is enough to strike an awe into his beholders."
This, however, is not the place to expatiate on Ormskirk's extraordinary
career; his rise from penury and obscurity, tempered indeed by gentle
birth, to the priviest secrets of his Majesty's council,--climbing
the peerage step by step, as though that institution had been a
garden-ladder,--may be read of in the history books.
"I collect titles as an entomologist does butterflies," he is recorded to
have said: "and I find the gaudier ones the cheapest. My barony I got for
a very heinous piece of perjury, my earldom for not running away until the
latter end of a certain battle, my marquisate for hoodwinking a half-senile
Frenchman, and my dukedom for fetching in a quack doctor when he was sore
needed by a lady whom the King at that time delighted to honor."
It was, you observe, a day of candors.
I
The Duke of Ormskirk, then (one gleans from Löwe's pages), dismissed from
mind the Audaine conspiracy. It was a pity to miss the salutary effect of a
few political executions just then, but after all there was nothing to be
done about it. So the Duke turned to the one consolation offered by the
affair, and set out for Halvergate House, the home of Marian Heleigh's
father. There one finds him, six days later, deep in a consultation with
his secretary, which in consideration of the unseasonable warmth was held
upon the east terrace.
"Yes, I think we had better have the fellow hanged on the thirteenth," said
Ormskirk, as he leisurely affixed his signature. "The date seems eminently
appropriate. Now the papers concerning the French treaty, if you please,
Mr. Langton."
The impassive-faced young man who sat opposite placed a despatch-box
between them. "These were sent down from London only last night, sir.
Mr. Morfit [Footnote: Perhaps the most adroit of all the many spies in
Ormskirk's employment. It was this same Morfit who in 1756 accompanied
Damiens into France as far as Calais; and see page 16.] has been somewhat
dilatory."
"Eh, it scarcely matters. I looked them over in bed this morning and found
them quite correct, Mr. Langton, quite--Why, heyday!" the Duke demanded,
"what's this? You have brought me the despatch-box from my dresser--not,
as I distinctly told you, from the table by my bed. Nay, I have had quite
enough of mistakes concerning despatch-boxes, Mr. Langton."
Mr. Langton stammered that the error was natural. Two despatch-boxes were
in appearances so similar--
"Never make excuses, Mr. Langton. '_Qui s'excuse--_' You can complete the
proverb, I suppose. Bring me Morfit's report this afternoon, then. Yes,
that appears to be all. You may go now, Mr. Langton. No, you may leave that
box, I think, since it is here. O man, man, a mistake isn't high treason!
Go away, Mr. Langton! you annoy me."
Left alone, the Duke of Ormskirk sat for a while, tapping his fingers
irresolutely against the open despatch-box. He frowned a little, for, with
fair reason to believe Tom Langton his son, he found the boy too stolid,
too unimaginative, to go far. It seemed to Ormskirk that none of his
illegitimate children displayed any particular promise, and he sighed. Then
he took a paper from the despatch-box, and began to read.
He sat, as one had said, upon the east terrace of Halvergate House. Behind
him a tall yew-hedge shut off the sunlight from the table where he and
Tom Langton had earlier completed divers businesses; in front of him a
balustrade, ivy-covered, and set with flower-pots of stone, empty as yet,
half screened the terraced gardens that sank to the artificial lake below.
The Duke could see only a vast expanse of sky and a stray bit of Halvergate
printing the horizon with turrets, all sober gray save where the two
big copper cupolas of the south façade burned in the April sun; but by
bending forward you glimpsed close-shaven lawns dotted with clipped trees
and statues,--as though, he reflected, Glumdalclitch had left her toys
scattered haphazard about a green blanket--and the white of the broad
marble stairway descending to the sunlit lake, and, at times, the flash
of a swan's deliberate passage across the lake's surface. All white and
green and blue the vista was, and of a monastic tranquillity, save for
the plashing of a fountain behind the yew-hedge and the grumblings of an
occasional bee that lurched complainingly on some by-errand of the hive.
Presently his Grace of Ormskirk replaced the papers in the despatch-box,
and, leaning forward, sighed. "_Non_ _sum qualis eram sub bonæ regno
Cynaræ_," said his Grace of Ormskirk. He had a statesman-like partiality
for the fag-end of an alcaic.
Then he lifted his head at the sound of a girl's voice. Somewhere rearward
to the hedge the girl idly sang--an old song of Thomas Heywood's,--in a
serene contralto, low-pitched and effortless, but very sweet. Smilingly the
Duke beat time.
Sang the girl:
"Pack clouds away, and welcome, day!
With night we banish sorrow:
Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft,
To give my love good-morrow.
Wings from the wind to please her mind,
Notes from the lark I'll borrow:
Bird, prune thy wing; nightingale, sing,
To give my love good-morrow."
And here the Duke chimed in with a sufficiently pleasing baritone:
"To give my love good-morrow,
Notes from them all I'll borrow."
"O heavens!" spoke the possessor of the contralto, "I would have thought
you were far too busy sending people to gaol and arranging their execution,
and so on, to have any time for music. I am going for a walk in the forest,
Jack." Considering for a moment, she added, "You may come, too, if you
like."
But the concession was made so half-heartedly that in the instant the
Duke of Ormskirk raised a dissenting hand. "I would not annoy you for an
emperor's ransom. Go in peace, my child."
Lady Marian Heleigh stood at an opening in the yew-hedge and regarded him
for a lengthy interval in silence. Slender, men called her, and women "a
bean pole." There was about her a great deal of the child and something of
the wood-nymph. She had abundant hair, the color of a dead oak-leaf, and
her skin was clear, with a brown tinge. Her eyes puzzled you by being
neither brown nor green consistently; no sooner had you convicted them of
verdancy than they shifted to the hue of polished maple, and vice versa;
but they were too large for her face, which narrowed rather abruptly
beneath a broad, low forehead, and they flavored her aspect with the shrewd
innocence of a kitten. She was by ordinary grave; but, animated, her
countenance quickened with somewhat the glow of a brown diamond; then her
generous eyes flashed and filmed like waters moving under starlight, then
you knew she was beautiful. All in all, you saw in Marian a woman designed
to be petted, a Columbine rather than a Cleopatra; her lures would never
shake the stability of a kingdom, but would inevitably gut its toy-shops;
and her departure left you meditative less of high enterprises than of
buying something for her.
Now Marian considered her betrothed, and seemed to come at last to a
conclusion that skirted platitude. "Jack, two people can be fond of each
other without wanting to be together all the time. And I really am fond of
you, Jack."
"I would be a fool if I questioned the first statement," rejoined the Duke;
"and if I questioned the second, very miserable. Nevertheless, you go in
pursuit of strange gods, and I decline to follow."
Her eyebrows interrogated him.
"You are going," the Duke continued, "in pursuit of gods beside whom I
esteem Zidonian Ashtoreth, and Chemosh, and Milcom, the abomination of
the Ammonites, to be commendable objects of worship. You will pardon my
pedantic display of learning, for my feelings are strong. You are going
to sit in the woods. You will probably sit under a youngish tree, and its
branches will sway almost to the ground and make a green, sun-steeped tent
about you, as though you sat at the heart of an emerald. You will hear the
kindly wood-gods go steathily about the forest, and you will know that they
are watching you, but you will never see them. From behind every tree-bole
they will watch you; you feel it, but you never, never quite see them.
Presently the sweet, warm odors of the place and its perpetual whispering
and the illimitably idiotic boasting of the birds,--that any living
creature should be proud of having constructed one of their nasty little
nests is a reflection to baffle understanding,--this hodge-podge of
sensations, I say, will intoxicate you. Yes, it will thoroughly intoxicate
you, Marian, and you sit there quite still, in a sort of stupor, drugged
into the inebriate's magnanimity, firmly believing that the remainder of
your life will be throughout of finer texture,--earth-spurning, free from
all pettiness, and at worst vexed only by the noblest sorrows. Bah!" cried
the Duke; "I have no patience with such nonsense! You will believe it to
the tiniest syllable, that wonderful lying message which April whispers to
every living creature that is young,--then you will return to me, a slim,
star-eyed Mænad, and will see that I am wrinkled. But do you go your ways,
none the less, for April is waiting for you yonder,--beautiful, mendacious,
splendid April. And I? Faith, April has no message for me, my dear."
He laughed, but with a touch of wistfulness; and the girl came to him,
laying her hand upon his arm, surprised into a sort of hesitant affection.
"How did you know, Jack? How did you, know that--things, invisible,
gracious things, went about the spring woods? I never thought that you knew
of them. You always seemed so sensible. I have reasoned it out, though,"
Marian went on, sagaciously wrinkled as to the brow. "They are probably the
heathen fauns and satyrs and such,--one feels somehow that they are all
men. Don't you, Jack? Well, when the elder gods were sent packing from
Olympus there was naturally no employment left for these sylvan folk. So
April took them into her service. Each year she sends them about every
forest on her errands: she sends them to make up daffodil-cups, for
instance, which I suppose is difficult, for evidently they make them out
of sunshine; or to pencil the eyelids of the narcissi--narcissi are brazen
creatures, Jack, and use a deal of kohl; or to marshal the fleecy young
clouds about the sky; or to whistle the birds up from the south. Oh, she
keeps them busy, does April! And 'tis true that if you be quite still you
can hear them tripping among the dead leaves; and they watch you--with
very bright, twinkling little eyes, I think,--but you never see them.
And always, always there is that enormous whispering,--half-friendly,
half-menacing,--as if the woods were trying to tell you something. 'Tis
not only the foliage rustling.... No, I have often thought it sounded like
some gigantic foreigner--some Titan probably,--trying in his own queer
and outlandish language to tell you something very important, something
that means a deal to you, and to you in particular. Has not anybody ever
understood him?"
He smiled. "And I, too, have dwelt in Arcadia," said his Grace of Ormskirk.
"Yes, I once heard April's message, Marian, for all my crow's-feet. But
that was a long while ago, and perhaps I have forgotten it. I cannot tell,
my dear. It is only from April in her own person that one hears this
immemorial message. And as for me? Eh, I go into the April woods, and I
find trees there of various sizes that pay no attention to me, and shrill,
dingy little birds that deafen me, and it may be a gaudy flower or two,
and, in any event, I find a vast quantity of sodden, decaying leaves to
warn me the place is no fitting haunt for a gentleman afflicted with
rheumatism. So I come away, my dear."
Marian looked him over for a moment. "You are not really old," she said,
with rather conscious politeness. "And you are wonderfully well-preserved.
Why, Jack, do you mind--not being foolish?" she demanded, on a sudden.
He debated the matter. Then, "Yes," the Duke of Ormskirk conceded, "I
suppose I do, at the bottom of my heart, regret that lost folly. A part
of me died, you understand, when it vanished, and it is not exhilarating
to think of one's self as even partially dead. Once--I hardly know"--he
sought the phrase,--"once this was a spacious and inexplicable world, with
a mystery up every lane and an adventure around each street-corner; a
world inhabited by most marvelous men and women,--some amiable, and some
detestable, but every one of them very interesting. And now I miss the
wonder of it all. You will presently discover, my dear, that youth is only
an ingenious prologue to whet one's appetite for a rather dull play. Eh, I
am no pessimist,--one may still find satisfaction in the exercise of mind
and body, in the pleasures of thought and taste and in other titillations
of one's faculties. Dinner is good and sleep, too, is excellent. But we men
and women tend, upon too close inspection, to appear rather paltry flies
that buzz and bustle aimlessly about, and breed perhaps, and eventually
die, and rot, and are swept away from this fragile window-pane of time that
opens on eternity."
"If you are, indeed, the sort of person you describe," said Marian,
reflectively, "I do not at all blame April for having no communication with
anyone possessed of such extremely unpleasant opinions. But for my own
part, I shall never cease to wonder what it is that the woods whisper
about."
Appraising her, he hazarded a cryptic question, "Vase of delights, and have
you never--cared?"
"Why, yes, I think so," she answered, readily enough. "At least, I used
to be very fond of Humphrey Degge,--that is the Marquis of Venour's place
yonder, you know, just past the spur of the forest,--but he was only a
younger son, so of course Father wouldn't hear of it. That was rather
fortunate, as Humphrey by and by went mad about Dorothy's blue eyes and
fine shape,--I think her money had a deal to do with it, too, and in any
event, she will be fat as a pig at thirty,--and so we quarrelled. And I
minded it--at first. And now--well, I scarcely know." Marian hesitated. "He
was a handsome man, but that ridiculous cavalry moustache of his was so
bristly--"
"I beg your pardon?" said the Duke.
"--that it disfigured him dreadfully," said she, with firmness. She had
colored.
His Grace of Ormskirk was moved to mirth. "Child, child, you are so
deliciously young it appears a monstrous crime to marry you to an old
fellow like me!" He took her firm, soft hand in his. "Are you quite sure
you can endure me, Marian?"
"Why, but of course I want to marry you," she said, naïvely surprised. "How
else could I be Duchess of Ormskirk?"
Again he chuckled. "You are a worldly little wretch," he stated; "but if
you want my title for a new toy, it is at your service. And now be off with
you,--you and your foolish woods, indeed!"
Marian went a slight distance and then turned about, troubled. "I am really
very fond of you, Jack," she said, conscientiously.
"Be off with you!" the Duke scolded. "You should be ashamed of yourself to
practice such flatteries and blandishments on a defenceless old gentleman.
You had best hurry, too, for if you don't I shall probably kiss you," he
threatened. "I, also," he added, with point.
She blew him a kiss from her finger-tips and went away singing.
Sang Marian:
"Blackbird and thrush, in every bush,
Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow,
You pretty elves, amongst yourselves,
Sing my fair love good-morrow.
To give my love good-morrow,
Sing birds, in every furrow."