A TRANSFORMATION.
When Cosmo the second time opened his eyes, he was afresh
bewildered. Which was the dream--that vision of wretchedness, or
this of luxury? If it was not a dream, how had they moved him
without once disturbing his sleep? It was as marvellous as anything
in the Arabian Nights! Could it be the same chamber? Not a thing
seemed the same, yet in him was a doubtful denial of transportance.
Yes, the ceiling was the same! The power of the good fairy had not
reached to the transformation of that! But the walls! Instead of
the great hole in the plaster close by the bed, his eyes fell on a
piece of rich old tapestry! Curtains of silk damask, all bespotted
with quaintest flowers, each like a page of Chaucer’s poetry, hung
round his bed, quite other than fit sails for the Stygian boat.
They had made the bed as different as the vine in summer from the
vine in winter. A quilt of red satin lay in the place of the
patchwork coverlid. Everything had been changed. He thought the
mattress felt soft under him--but that was only a fancy, for he saw
before the fire the feather-bed intended to lie between him and it.
He felt like a tended child, in absolute peace and bliss--or like
one just dead, while yet weary with the struggle to break free. He
seemed to recall the content, of which some few vaguest filaments,
a glance and no more, still float in the summer-air of many a
memory, wherein the child lies, but just awaked to consciousness
and the mere bliss of being, before wrong has begun to cloud its
pure atmosphere. For Cosmo had nothing on his conscience to trouble
it; his mind was stored with lovely images and was fruitful in
fancies, because in temperament, faith, and use, he was a poet; the
evil vapours of fever had just lifted from his brain, and were
floating away, in the light of the sun of life; he felt the
pressure of no duty--was like a bird of the air lying under its
mother’s wing, and dreaming of flight; his childhood’s most
cherished dream had grown fact: there was the sylph, the oriad, the
naiad of all his dreams, a living lady before his eyes--nor the
less a creature of his imagination’s heart; from her, as the centre
of power, had all the marvellous transformation proceeded; and the
lovely strength had kissed him on the forehead! The soul of Cosmo
floated in rapturous quiet, like the evening star in a rosy cloud.
But I return to the earthly shore that bordered this heavenly sea.
The old-fashioned, out-swelling grate, loose and awry in its
setting, had a keen little fire burning in it, of which, summer as
it was, the mustiness of the atmosphere, and the damp of the walls,
more than merely admitted. The hole in the floor had vanished under
a richly faded Turkey carpet; and a luxurious sofa, in blue damask,
faded almost to yellow, stood before the fire, to receive him the
moment he should cease to be a chrysalis. And there in an easy
chair by the corner of the hearth, wonder of all loveliest wonders,
sat the fairy-godmother herself, as if she had but just waved her
wand, and everything had come to her will!--the fact being,
however, that the poor fairy was not a little tired in legs and
arms and feet and hands and head, and preferred contemplating what
she had already done, to doing anything more for the immediate
present.
Cosmo lay watching her. He dared not move a hand, lest she should
move; for, though it might be to rise and come to him, would it not
be to change what he saw?--and what he saw was so much enough, that
he would see it forever, and desired nothing else. She turned her
eyes, and seeing the large orbs of the youth fixed upon her, smiled
as she had not smiled before, for a great weight was off her heart
now that the room gave him a little welcome. True, it was after all
but a hypocrite of a room,--a hypocrite, however, whose meaning was
better than its looks!
He put out his hand, and she rose and came and laid hers in it.
Suddenly he let it go.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I don’t know when my hands were
washed! The last I remember is digging in the garden. I wish I
might wash my face and hands!”
“You mustn’t think of it! you can’t sit up yet,” said Lady Joan.
“But never mind: some people are always clean. You should see my
brother’s hands sometimes! I will, if you like, bring you a towel
with a wet corner. I dare say that will do you good.”
She poured water into a basin from a kettle on the hob, and dipping
the corner of a towel in it, brought it to him. He tried to use it,
but his hands obeyed him so ill that she took it from him, and
herself wiped with it his face and hands, and then dried them--so
gently, so softly, he thought that must be how his mother did with
him when he was a baby. All the time, he lay looking up at her with
a grateful smile. She then set about preparing him some tea and
toast, during which he watched her every motion. When he had had
the tea, he fell asleep, and when he woke next he was alone.
An hour or so later, the gardener’s wife brought him a basin of
soup, and when he had taken it, told him she would then leave him
for the night: if he wanted anything, as there was no bell, he must
pull the string she tied to the bed-post. He was very weary, but so
comfortable, and so happy, his brain so full of bright yet
soft-coloured things, that he felt as if he would not mind being
left ages alone. He was but two and twenty, with a pure conscience,
and an endless hope--so might he not well lie quiet in his bed?
By the middle of the night, however, the tide of returning health
showed a check; there came a strong reaction, with delirium; his
pulse was high, and terrible fancies tormented him, through which
passed continually with persistent recurrence the figure of the old
captain, always swinging a stick about his head, and crooning to
himself the foolish rime,
“Catch yer naig an’ pu’ his tail;
In his hin’ heel caw a nail;
Rug his lugs frae ane anither;
Stan’ up, an’ ca’ the king yer brither.”
At last, at the moment when once more his persecutor was commencing
his childish ditty, he felt as if, from the top of a mountain a
hundred miles away, a cold cloud came journeying through the sky,
and descended upon him. He opened his eyes: there was Joan, and the
cold cloud was her soft cool hand on his forehead. The next thing
he knew was that she was feeding him like a child. But he did not
know that she never left him again till the morning, when, seeing
him gently asleep, she stole away like a ghost in the gray dawn.
The next day he was better, but for several nights the fever
returned, and always in his dreams he was haunted by variations on
the theme of the auld captain; and for several days he felt as if
he did not want to get better, but would lie forever a dreamer in
the enchanted palace of the glamoured ruin. But that was only his
weakness, and gradually he gained strength.
Every morning and every afternoon Lady Joan visited him, waited on
him, and staid a longer or shorter time, now talking, now reading
to him; and seldom would she be a whole evening absent--then only
on the rare occasion when Lord Mergwain, having some one to dine
with him of the more ordinary social stamp, desired her presence as
lady of the house. Even then she would almost always have a peep at
him one time or another. She did not know much about books, but
would take up this or that, almost as it chanced to her hand in the
library; and Cosmo cared little what she read, so long as he could
hear her voice, which often beguiled him into the sweetest sleep
with visions of home and his father. If the story she read was
foolish, it mattered nothing; he would mingle with it his own
fancies, and weave the whole into the loveliest of foolish dreams,
all made up of unaccountably reasonable incongruities: the sensible
look in dreams of what to the waking mind is utterly incoherent, is
the most puzzling of things to him who would understand his own
unreason. And the wild _mӓrchenhaft_ lovelinesses that fashioned
themselves thus in his brain, outwardly lawless, but inwardly so
harmonious as to be altogether credible to the dreamer, were not
lost in the fluttering limbo of foolish invention, but, in altered
shape and less outlandish garments, appeared again, when, in after
years, he sought vent for the all but unspeakable. During this time
he would often talk verse in his sleep, such as to Lady Joan, at
least, sometimes seemed lovely, though she never could get a hold
of it, she said; for always, just as she seemed on the point of
understanding it, he would cease, and her ears would ache with the
silence.
One warm evening, when now a good deal better, and able to sit up a
part of the day, Cosmo was lying on the sofa, watching her face as
she read. Through the age-dusted window came the glowing beams of
the setting sun, lined and dulled and blotted. They fell on her
hands, and her hands reflected them, in a pale rosy gleam, upon her
face.
“How beautiful you are in the red light, Joan!” said Cosmo.
“That’s the light, not me,” she returned.
“Yes, it _is_ you. The red light shows you more as you are. In the
dark even _you_ do not look beautiful. Then you may say if you like,
‘That is the dark, not me.’ Don’t you remember what Portia says in
The Merchant of Venice,
‘The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark
When neither is attended; and I think
The nightingale, if she should sing by day
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by reason reasoned are
To their right praise and true perfection!’
You see he says, not that beautiful things owe their beauty, but
the right seeing of their beauty, to circumstance. So the red light
makes me _see_ you more beautiful--not than you are--that could not
be--but than I could see you in another light--a gray one for
instance.”
“You mustn’t flatter me, Cosmo. You don’t know what harm you may do
me.”
“I love you too much to flatter you,” he said.
She raised the book, and began to read again.
Cosmo had gone on as he began--had never narrowed the channels that
lay wide and free betwixt his soul and his father and Mr. Simon;
Lady Joan had no such aqueducts to her ground, and many a bitter
wind blew across its wastes; it ought not therefore to be matter of
surprise that, although a little younger, Cosmo should be a good
way ahead of Joan both in knowledge and understanding. Hence the
conversations they now had were to Joan like water to a thirsty
soul--the hope of the secret of life, where death had seemed
waiting at the door. She would listen to the youth, rendered the
more enthusiastic by his weakness, as to a messenger from the land
of truth. In the old time she had thought Cosmo a wonderful boy,
saying the strangest things like common things everybody knew: now
he said more wonderful things still, she thought, but as if he knew
they were strange, and did his best to make it easier to receive
them. She wondered whether, if he had been a woman with a history
like hers, he would have been able to keep that bright soul shining
through all the dreariness, to see through the dusty windows the
unchanged beauty of things, and save alive his glorious hope. She
began to see that she had not begun at the beginning with anything,
had let things draw her this way and that, nor put forth any effort
to master circumstance by accepting its duty.
On Cosmo’s side, the passion of the believer in the unseen had laid
hold upon him; and as the gardener awaits the blossoming of some
strange plant, of whose loveliness marvellous tales have reached
his ears, so did he wait for something entrancing to issue from the
sweet twilight sadnesses of her being, the gleams that died into
dusk, the deep voiceless ponderings into which she would fall.
They talked now about any book they were reading, but it mattered
little more what it was, for even a stupid book served as well as
another to set their own fountains flowing. That afternoon Joan was
reading from one partly written, partly compiled, in the beginning
of the century, somewhat before its time in England. It might have
been the work of an imitator at once of de la Motte Fouqué, and the
old British romancers. And this was what she read.