CHAPTER XIX

WHY THE STRANGER WOULD NOT LOSE HIS SHELLEY FOR THE WORLD

Picking up the book, I opened it involuntarily at the titlepage, and

then--I resisted a great temptation! I shut it again. A little flowery

plot of girl's handwriting had caught my eye, and a girl's pretty name.

When Love and Beauty meet, it is hard not to play the eavesdropper, and

it was easy to guess that Love and Beauty met upon that page. St.

Anthony had no harder fight with the ladies he was unpolite enough to

call demons, than I in resisting the temptation to take another look at

that pen-and-ink love making. Now, as I look back, I think it was

sheer priggishness to resist so human and yet so reverent an impulse.

There is nothing sacred from reverence, and love's lovers have a right

to regard themselves as the confidants of lovers, whenever they may

chance to surprise either them or their letters.

While I was still hesitating, and wondering how I could get the book

conveyed to its romantic owner, suddenly a figure turned the corner of

the road, and there was Alastor coming back again. I slipped the book,

in distracted search for which he was evidently still engaged, under

the ferns, and, leisurely lighting a pipe, prepared to tease him. He

was presently within hail, and, looking up, caught sight of me.

"Have you found your Shelley yet?" I called down to him, as he stood a

moment in the road.

He shook his head. No! But he meant to find it, if he had to hunt

every square foot of the valley inch by inch.

Wouldn't any other book do, I asked him. Would he take a Boccaccio, or

a "Golden Ass," or a "Tom Jones," in exchange?--for of such consisted

my knapsack library. He laughed a negative, and it seemed a shame to

tease him.

"It is not so much the book itself," he said.

"But the giver?" I suggested.

"Of course," he blushingly replied.

"Well, suppose I have found it?" I continued.

"You don't mean it--"

"But suppose I have--I'm only supposing--will you give me the pleasure

of your company at dinner at the next inn and tell me its story?"

"Indeed I will, gladly," he replied.

"Well, then," I said, "catch, for here it is!"

The joy with which he recovered it was pretty to behold, and the

eagerness with which he ran through the leaves, to see that the violets

and the primroses and a spray of meadowsweet, young love's bookmarkers,

were all in their right places, touched my heart.

He could not thank me enough; and as we stepped out to the inn, some

three or four miles on the road, I elicited something of his story.

He was a clerk in a city office, he said, but his dreams were not

commercial. His one dream was to be a great poet, or a great writer of

some sort, and this was one of his holidays. As I looked at his

sensitive young face, unmarred by pleasure and unscathed by sorrow,

bathed daily, I surmised, in the may-dew of high philosophies--ah, so

high! washed from within by a constant radiancy of pure thoughts, and

from without by a constant basking in the shine of every beautiful and

noble and tender thing,--I thought it not unlikely that he might fulfil

his dream.

But, alas! as he talked on, with lighted face and chin in the air, how

cruelly I realised how little I had fulfilled mine.

And how hard it was to talk to him, without crushing some flower of his

fancy or casting doubt upon his dreams. Oh, the gulf between twenty

and thirty! I had never quite comprehended it before. And how

inexpressibly sad it was to hear him prattling on of the ideal life, of

socialism, of Walt Whitman and what not,--all the dear old

quackeries,--while I was already settling down comfortably to a

conservative middle age. He had no hope that had not long been my

despair, no aversion that I had not accepted among the more or less

comfortable conditions of the universe. He was all for nature and

liberty, whereas I had now come to realise the charm of the artificial,

and the social value of constraint.

"Young man," I cried in my heart, "what shall I do to inherit Eternal

Youth?"

The gulf between us was further revealed when, at length coming to our

inn, we sat down to dinner. To me it seemed the most natural thing in

the world to call for the wine-list and consult his choice of wine;

but, will you believe me, he asked to be allowed to drink water! And

when he quoted the dear old stock nonsense out of Thoreau about being

able to get intoxicated on a glass of water, I could have laughed and

cried at the same time.

"Happy Boy!" I cried, "still able to turn water into wine by the divine

power of your youth"; and then, turning to the waiter, I ordered a

bottle of No. 37.

"Wine is the only youth granted to middle age," I continued,--"in vino

juventus, one might say; and may you, my dear young friend, long remain

so proudly independent of that great Elixir--though I confess that I

have met no few young men under thirty who have been excellent critics

of the wine-list."

As the water warmed him, he began to expand into further confidence,

and then he told me the story of his Shelley, if a story it can be

called. For, of course, it was simple enough, and the reader has long

since guessed that the reason why he wouldn't lose his Shelley for the

world was the usual simple reason.

I listened to his rhapsodies of HER and HER and HER with an aching

heart. How good it was to be young! No wonder men had so desperately

sought the secret of Eternal Youth! Who would not be young for ever,

for such dreams and such an appetite?

Here of course was the very heaven-sent confidant for such an

enterprise as mine. I told him all about my whim, just for the pleasure

of watching his face light up with youth's generous worship of all such

fantastic nonsense. You should have seen his enthusiasm and heard all

the things he said. Why, to encounter such a whimsical fellow as myself

in this unimaginative age was like meeting a fairy prince, or coming

unexpectedly upon Don Quixote attacking the windmill. I offered him

the post of Sancho Panza; and indeed what would he not give, he said,

to leave all and follow me! But then I reminded him that he had

already found his Golden Girl.

"Of course, I forgot," he said, with I'm afraid something of a sigh.

For you see he was barely twenty, and to have met your ideal so early

in life is apt to rob the remainder of the journey of something of its

zest.

I asked him to give me his idea of what the Blessed Maid should be, to

which he replied, with a smile, that he could not do better than

describe Her, which he did for the sixth time. It was, as I had

foreseen, the picture of a Saint, a Goddess, a Dream, very lovely and

pure and touching; but it was not a woman, and it was a woman I was in

search of, with all her imperfections on her head. I suppose no boy of

twenty really loves a WOMEN, but loves only his etherealised extract of

woman, entirely free from earthy adulteration. I noticed the words

"pure" and "natural" in constant use by my young friend. Some lines

went through my head, but I forbore to quote them:--

Alas I your so called purity

Is merely immaturity,

And woman's nature plays its part

Sincerely but in woman's art.

But I couldn't resist asking him, out of sheer waggery, whether he

didn't think a touch of powder, and even, very judiciously applied, a

touch of rouge, was an improvement to woman. His answer went to my

heart.

"Paint--a WOMAN!" he exclaimed.

It was as though you had said--paint an angel!

I could bear no more of it. The gulf yawned shiveringly wide at

remarks like that; so, with the privilege of an elder, I declared it

time for bed, and yawned off to my room.

Next morning we bade good-bye, and went our several ways. As we

parted, he handed me a letter which I was not to open till I was well

on my journey. We waved good-bye to each other till the turnings of

the road made parting final, and then, sitting down by the roadside, I

opened the letter. It proved to be not a letter, but a poem, which he

had evidently written after I had left him for bed. It was entitled,

with twenty's love for a tag of Latin, Ad Puellam Auream, and it ran

thus:--

The Golden Girl in every place

Hides and reveals her lovely face;

Her neither skill nor strength may find--

'T is only loving moves her mind.

If but a pretty face you seek,

You'll find one any day or week;

But if you look with deeper eyes,

And seek her lovely, pure, and wise,

Then must you wear the pilgrim's shoon

For many a weary, wandering moon.

Only the pure in heart may see

That lily of all purity,

Only in clean unsullied thought

The image of her face is caught,

And only he her love may hold

Who buys her with the spirit's gold.

Thus only shall you find your pearl,

O seeker of the Golden Girl!

She trod but now the grassy way,

A vision of eternal May.

The devil take his impudence! "Only the pure in heart," "clean,

unsullied thought." How like the cheek of twenty! And all the same

how true! Dear lad, how true! Certainly, the child is father to the

man. Dirige nos! O sage of the Golden Twenties!

As I meditatively folded up the pretty bit of writing, I made a

resolution; but it was one of such importance that not only is another

chapter needed to do it honour, but it may well inaugurate another book

of this strange uneventful history.

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH I DECIDE TO BE YOUNG AGAIN

Yes, I said to myself, the lad is quite right; I will follow his

advice. I'm afraid I was in danger of developing into a sad cynic,

with a taste for the humour of this world. What should have been a

lofty high-souled pilgrimage, only less transcendental than that of the

Holy Grail itself, has so far failed, no doubt, because I have

undertaken it too much in the wanton spirit of a troubadour.

I will grow young and serious again. Yes, why not? I will take a vow

of Youth. One's age is entirely a matter of the imagination. From this

moment I am no longer thirty. Thirty falls from me like a hideous

dream. My back straightens again at the thought; my silvering hair

blackens once more; my eyes, a few moments ago lacklustre and sunken,

grow bright and full again, and the whites are clear as the finest

porcelain. Veni, veni, Mephistophile! your Faust is young

again,--young, young, and, with a boy's heart, open once more to all

the influences of the mighty world.

I bring down my stick upon the ground with a mighty ring of resolution,

and the miracle is done. Who would take me for thirty now? From this

moment I abjure pessimism and cynicism in all their forms, put from my

mind all considerations of the complexities of human life, unravel all

by a triumphant optimism which no statistics can abash or criticism

dishearten. I likewise undertake to divest myself entirely of any

sense of humour that may have developed within me during the baneful

experiences of the last ten years, and, in short, will consent for the

future to be nothing that is not perfectly perfect and pure. These, I

take it, are the fundamental conditions of being young again.

And as for the Quest, it shall forthwith be undertaken in an entirely

serious and high-minded spirit. From this moment I am on the look-out

for a really transcendental attachment. No "bright-eyed bar-maids,"

however "refined," need apply. Ladies who are prodigal of their white

petticoats are no longer fit company for me. Indeed I shall no longer

look upon a petticoat, unless I am able first entirely to spiritualise

it. It must first be disinfected of every earthly thought.

Yes, I am once more a young man, sound in wind and limb, with not a

tooth or an illusion lost, my mind tabula rasa, my heart to be had for

the asking. Oh, come, ye merry, merry maidens! The fairy prince is on

the fairy road.

Incipit vita nuova!

So in the lovely rapture of a new-born resolution--and is there any

rapture like it?--nature has no more intoxicating illusion than that of

turning over a new leaf, or beginning a new life from to-day--I sprang

along the road with a carolling heart; quite forgetting that Apuleius

and Fielding and Boccaccio were still in my knapsack--not to speak of

the petticoat.

CHAPTER II

AT THE SIGN OF THE SINGING STREAM

Apuleius and Fielding and Boccaccio, bad companions for a petticoat,

I'm afraid, bad companions too for so young a man as I had now become.

However, as I say, I had for the time forgotten that pagan company, or,

in my puritanic zeal, I might have thrown them all to be washed clean

in the upland stream, whose pure waters one might fancy were fragrant

from their sunny day among the ferns and the heather, fragrant to the

eye, indeed, if one may so speak, with the shaken meal of the

meadowsweet. This stream had been the good angel of my thoughts all the

day, keeping them ever moving and ever fresh, cleansing and burnishing

them, quite an open-air laundry of the mind.

We were both making for the same little town, it appeared, and as the

sun was setting we reached it together. I entered the town over the

bridge, and the stream under it, washing the walls of the high-piled,

many-gabled old inn where I proposed to pass the night. I should hear

it still rippling on with its gentle harpsichord tinkle, as I stretched

myself down among the cool lavendered sheets, and little by little let

slip the multifarious world.

The inn windows beamed cheerily, a home of ruddy rest. Having ordered

my dinner and found my room, I threw down my knapsack and then came out

again to smoke an ante-prandial pipe, listen to the evensong of the

stream, and think great thoughts. The stream was still there, and

singing the same sweet old song. You could hear it long after it was

out of sight, in the gathering darkness, like an old nurse humming

lullabies in the twilight.

The dinner was good, the wine was old, and oh! the rest was sweet!

Nothing fills one with so exquisite a weariness as a day spent in good

resolutions and great thoughts. There is something perilously sensuous

in the relaxation of one's muscles, both of mind and body, after a day

thus well spent.

Lighting up my pipe once more, and drawing to the fire, I suddenly

realised a sense of loneliness. Of course, I was lonely for a

book,--Apuleius or Fielding or Boccaccio!

An hour ago they had seemed dangerous companions for so lofty a mood;

but now, under the gentle influences of dinner, the mood had not indeed

changed--but mellowed. So to say, we would split the difference between

the ideal and the human, and be, say, twenty-five.

It was in this genial attitude of mind that I strode up the quaint

circular staircase to fetch Fielding from my room, and, shade of Tom

Jones! what should be leaving my room, as I advanced to enter it,

but--well, it's no use, resolutions are all very well, but facts are

facts, especially when they're natural, and here was I face to face

with the most natural little natural fact, and withal the most charming

and merry-eyed, that--well, in short, as I came to enter my room I was

confronted by the roundest, ruddiest little chambermaid ever created

for the trial of mortal frailty.

And the worst of it was that her merry eye was in partnership with a

merry tongue. Indeed, for some unexplained reason, she was bubbling

over with congested laughter, the reason for which mere embarrassment

set one inquiring. At last, between little gushes of laughter which

shook her plump shoulders in a way that aroused wistful memories of

Hebe, she archly asked me, with mock solemnity, if I should need a

lady's maid.

"Certainly," I replied with inane promptitude, for I had no notion of

her drift; but then she ran off in a scurry of laughter, and still

puzzled I turned into my room, TO FIND, neatly hung over the end of the

bed, nothing less than the dainty petticoat and silk stockings of

Sylvia Joy.

You can imagine the colour of my cheeks at the discovery. No doubt I

was already the laughing-stock of the whole inn. What folly! What a

young vixen! Oh, what's to be done? Pay my bill and sneak off at once

to the next town; but how pass through the grinning line of boots, and

waiter, and chambermaid, and ironically respectful landlord and

landlady, in the hall...

But while I thus deliberated, something soft pressed in at the door;

and, making a sudden dart, I had the little baggage who had brought

about my dilemma a prisoner in my arms.

I stayed some days at this charming old inn, for Amaryllis--oh, yes,

you may be sure her name was Amaryllis--had not betrayed me; and indeed

she may have some share in my retrospect of the inn as one of the most

delightful which I encountered anywhere in my journeying. Would you

like to know its name? Well, I know it as The Singing Stream. If you

can find it under that name, you are welcome. And should you chance to

be put into bedroom No. 26, you can think of me, and how I used to lie

awake, listening to the stream rippling beneath the window, with its

gentle harpsichord tinkle, and little by little letting slip the

multifarious world.

And if anything about this chapter should seem to contradict the high

ideals of the chapter preceding it, I can only say that, though the

episode should not rigidly fulfil the conditions of the transcendental,

nothing could have been more characteristic of that early youth to

which I had vowed myself. Indeed, I congratulated myself, as I looked

my last at the sign of The Singing Stream, that this had been quite in

my early manner.

CHAPTER III

IN WHICH I SAVE A USEFUL LIFE

Though I had said good-bye to the inn, the stream and I did not part

company at the inn-door, but continued for the best part of a morning

to be fellow-travellers. Indeed, having led me to one pleasant

adventure, its purpose, I afterwards realised, was to lead me to

another, and then to go about its own bright business.

I don't think either of us had much idea where we were or whither we

were bound. Our guiding principle seemed to be to get as much sunshine

as possible, and to find the easiest road. We avoided dull sandy

levels and hard rocky places, with the same instinctive dexterity. We

gloomed together through dark dingles, and came out on sunny reaches

with the same gilded magnificence. There are days when every stream is

Pactolus and every man is Croesus, and thanks to that first and

greatest of all alchemists, the sun, the morning I write of was a

morning when to breathe was gold and to see was silver. And to breathe

and see was all one asked. It was the first of May, and the world

shone like a great illuminated letter with which that father of

artists, the sun, was making splendid his missal of the seasons.

The month of May was ever his tour de force. Each year he has strained

and stimulated his art to surpass himself, seeking ever a finer and a

brighter gold, a more celestial azure. Never had his gold been so

golden, his azure so dazzlingly clear and deep as on this particular

May morning; while his fancy simply ran riot in the marginal

decorations of woodland and spinney, quaint embroidered flowers and

copses full of exquisitely painted and wonderfully trained birds of

song. It was indeed a day for nature to be proud of. So seductive was

the sunshine that even the shy trout leapt at noonday, eager apparently

to change his silver for gold.

O silver fish in the silver stream,

O golden fish in the golden gleam,

Tell me, tell me, tell me true,

Shall I find my girl if I follow you?

I suppose the reader never makes nonsense rhymes from sheer gladness of

heart,--nursery doggerel to keep time with the rippling of the stream,

or the dancing of the sun, or the beating of his heart; the gibberish

of delight. As I hummed this nonsense, a trout at least three pounds

in weight, whom you would know again anywhere, leapt a yard out of the

water, and I took it, in my absurd, sun-soaked heart, as a good omen,

as though he had said, "Follow and see."

I had no will but to follow, no desire but to see. All the same,

though I affected to take him seriously, I had little suspicion how

much that trout was to mean to me,--yes, within the course of a very

few moments. Indeed, I had hardly strolled on for another quarter of a

mile, when I was suddenly aroused from wool-gathering by his loud cries

for help. Looking up, I saw him flashing desperately in mid-air, a

lovely foot of writhing silver. In another second he was swung through

the sunlight, and laid out breathing hard in a death-bed of buttercups

and daisies.

There was not a moment to be lost, if I were to repay the debt of

gratitude which in a flash I had seen that I owed him.

"Madam," I said, breathlessly springing forward, as a heavenly being

was coldly tearing the hook from the gills of the unlucky trout,

"though I am a stranger, will you do me a great favour? It is a matter

of life or death..."

She looked up at me with some surprise, but with a fine fearless

glance, and almost immediately said, "Certainly, what can I do?"

"Spare the life of that trout--"

"It is a singular request," she replied, "and one," she smiled,

"self-sacrificing indeed for an angler to grant, for he weighs at least

three pounds. However, since he seems a friend of yours, here goes--"

And with the gladdest, most grateful sound in the world, the happy

smack of a fish back home again in the water, after an appalling three

minutes spent on land, that prophetic trout was once more an active

unit in God's populous universe.

"Now that's good of you," I said, with thankful eyes, "and shows a kind

heart."

"And kind hearts, they say, are more than coronets," she replied

merrily, indulging in that derisive quotation which seems to be the

final reward of the greatest poets.

For a moment there was a silence, during which I confess to wondering

what I should say next. However, she supplied my place.

"But of course," she said, "you owe it to me, after this touching

display of humanitarianism, to entertain me with your reason for

interposing between me and my just trout. Was it one of those

wonderful talking fishes out of the Arabian Nights, or are you merely

an angler yourself, and did you begrudge such a record catch to a girl?"

"I see," I replied, "that you will understand me. That trout was, so

to speak, out of the Arabian Nights. Only five minutes ago it was a

May-day madness of mine to think that he leaped out of the water and

gave me a highly important message. So I begged his life from a mere

fancy. It was just a whim, which I trust you will excuse."

"A whim! So you are a follower of the great god Whim," she replied,

with somewhat of an eager interest in her voice. "How nice it is to

meet a fellow-worshipper!"

"Do women ever have whims?" I respectfully asked.

"I don't know about other women," she replied. "Indeed, I'm afraid I'm

unnatural enough to take no interest in them at all. But, as for

me,--well, what nonsense! Tell me some more about the trout. What was

the wonderful message he seemed to give you? Or perhaps I oughtn't to

ask?"

"I'm afraid," I said, "it would hardly translate into anything

approaching common-sense."

"Did I ask for common-sense?" she retorted. It was true, she hadn't.

But then I couldn't, with any respect for her, tell her the trout's

message, or, with any respect for myself, recall those atrocious

doggerel lines. In my dilemma, I caught sight of a pretty book lying

near her fishing-basket, and diverted the talk by venturing to ask its

name.

"'T is of Aucassin and Nicolete," she replied, with something in her

voice which seemed to imply that the tender old story would be familiar

to me. My memory served me for once gallantly.

I answered by humming half to myself the lines from the prologue,--

"Sweet the song, the story sweet,

There is no man hearkens it,

No man living 'neath the sun,

So outwearied, so foredone,

Sick and woful, worn and sad,

But is healed, but is glad

'T is so sweet."

"How charming of you to know it!" she laughed. "You are the only man

in this county, or the next, or the next, who knows it, I'm sure."

"Are the women of the county more familiar with it?" I replied.

"But tell me about the trout," she once more persisted.

At the same moment, however, there came from a little distance the

musical tinkle of a bell that sounded like silver, a fairy-like and

almost startling sound.

"It is my lunch," she explained. "I'm a worshipper of the great god

Whim too, and close by here I have a little summer-house, full of books

and fishing-lines and other childishness, where, when my whim is to be

lonely, I come and play at solitude. If you'll be content with rustic

fare, and promise to be amusing, it would be very pleasant if you'd

join me."

O! most prophetic and agreeable trout! Was it not like the old fairy

tales, the you-help-us and we'll-help-you of Psyche and the ants?

It had been the idlest whim for me to save the life of that poor trout.

There was no real pity in it. For two pins, I had been just as ready

to cut it open, to see if by chance it carried in its belly the golden

ring wherewith I was to wed the Golden--

However, such is the gratitude of nature to man, that this little

thoughtless act of kindness had brought me face to face with--was it

the Golden Girl?

CHAPTER IV

'T IS OF NICOLETE AND HER BOWER IN THE WILDWOOD

But I have all this time left the reader without any formal descriptive

introduction to this whimsical young lady angler. Not without reason,

for, like any really charming personality, she was very difficult to

picture. Paint a woman! as our young friend Alastor said.

Faces that fall into types you can describe, or at all events label in

such a way that the reader can identify them; but those faces that

consist mainly of spiritual effect and physical bloom, that change with

everything they look upon, the light in which ebbs and flows with every

changing tide of the soul,--these you have to love to know, and to

worship to portray.

Now the face of Nicolete, as I learnt in time to call her, was just

soul and bloom, perhaps mainly bloom. I never noticed whether she had

any other features except her eyes. I suppose she had a nose; a little

lace pocket-handkerchief I have by me at the moment is almost too small

to be evidence on that important point.

As I walked by her side that May morning, I was only conscious of her

voice and her exquisite girlhood; for though she talked with the APLOMB

of a woman of the world, a passionate candour and simple ardour in her

manner would have betrayed her, had her face not plainly declared her

the incarnation of twenty. But if she were twenty years young, she was

equally twenty years OLD; and twenty years old, in some respects, is

the greatest age attained to by man or woman. In this she rather

differed from Alastor, of whom otherwise she was the female

counterpart. Her talk, and something rather in her voice than her

talk, soon revealed her as a curious mixture of youth and age, of

dreamer and desillusionee.

One soon realised that she was too young, was hoping too much from

life, to spend one's days with. Yet she had just sufficiently that

touch of languor which puts one at one's ease, though indeed it was

rather the languor of waiting for what was going to happen than the

weariness of experience gone by. She was weary, not because of the

past, but because the fairy theatre of life still kept its curtain

down, and forced her to play over and over again the impatient overture

of her dreams.

I have no doubt that it was largely nervousness that kept the

mysterious playwright so long fumbling behind the scenes, for it was

obvious that it would be no ordinary sort of play, no every-day

domestic drama, that would satisfy this young lady, to whom life had

given, by way of prologue, the inestimable blessing of wealth, and the

privilege, as a matter of course, of choosing as she would among the

grooms (that is, the bride-grooms) of the romantic British aristocracy.

She had made youth's common mistake of beginning life with books, which

can only be used without danger by those who are in a position to test

their statements. Youth naturally believes everything that is told it,

especially in books.

Now, books are simply professional liars about life, and the books that

are best worth reading are those which lie the most beautifully. Yet,

in fairness, we must add that they are liars, not with intent to

mislead, but merely with the tenderest purpose to console. They are

the good Samaritans that find us robbed of all our dreams by the

roadside of life, bleeding and weeping and desolate; and such is their

skill and wealth and goodness of heart, that they not only heal up our

wounds, but restore to us the lost property of our dreams, on one

condition,--that we never travel with them again in the daylight.

A library is a better world, built by the brains and hearts of poets

and dreamers, as a refuge from the real world outside; and in it alone

is to be found the land of milk and honey which it promises.

"Milk and honey" would have been an appropriate inscription for the

delicious little library which parents who, I surmised, doted on

Nicolete in vain, had allowed her to build in a wild woodland corner of

her ancestral park, half a mile away from the great house, where, for

all its corridors and galleries, she could never feel, at all events,

spiritually alone. All that was most sugared and musical and generally

delusive in the old library of her fathers had been brought out to this

little woodland library, and to that nucleus of old leather-bound poets

and romancers, long since dead, yet as alive and singing on their

shelves as any bird on the sunny boughs outside, my young lady's

private purse had added all that was most sugared and musical and

generally delusive in the vellum bound Japanese-paper literature of our

own luxurious day. Nor were poets and romancers from over sea--in

their seeming simple paper covers, but with, oh, such complicated and

subtle insides!--absent from the court which Nicolete held here in the

greenwood. Never was such a nest of singing-birds. All day long, to

the ear of the spirit, there was in this little library a sound of

harping and singing and the telling of tales,--songs and tales of a

world that never was, yet shall ever be. Here day by day Nicolete fed

her young soul on the nightingale's-tongues of literature, and put down

her book only to listen to the nightingale's-tongues outside. Yea,

sun, moon, and stars were all in the conspiracy to lie to her of the

loveliness of the world and the good intentions of life. And now, thus

unexpectedly, I found myself joining the nefarious conspiracy. Ah,

well! was I not twenty myself, and full of dreams!

CHAPTER V

'T IS OF AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE

Thus it was that we lunched together amid the books and birds, in an

exquisite solitude a deux; for the ringer of the silver bell had

disappeared, having left a dainty meal in readiness--for two.

"You see you were expected," said Nicolete, with her pretty laugh. "I

dreamed I should have a visitor to-day, and told Susan to lay the lunch

for two. You mustn't be surprised at that," she added mischievously;

"it has often happened before. I dream that dream every other night,

and Susan lays for two every day. She knows my whims,--knows that the

extra knife and fork are for the fairy knight that may turn up any

afternoon, as I tell her--"

"To find the sleepless princess," I added, thinking at the same time

one of those irrelevant asides that will go through the brain of

thirty, that the woman who would get her share of kisses nowadays must

neither slumber nor sleep.

A certain great poet, I think it was Byron, objected to seeing women in

the act of eating. He thought their eating should be done in private.

What a curiously perverse opinion! For surely woman never shows to

better advantage than in the dainty exercises of a dainty repast, and

there is nothing more thrilling to man than a meal alone with a woman

he loves or is about to love. Perhaps, deep down, the reason is that

there still vibrates in the masculine blood the thrilling surprise of

the moment when man first realised that the angel woman was built upon

the same carnivorous principles as his grosser self.

That is one of the first heart-beating surprises that come upon the boy

Columbus, as he sets out to discover the New World of woman; and indeed

his surprise has not seldom deepened into admiration, as he has found

that not only does woman eat, but frequently eats a lot.

This privilege of seeing woman eat is the earliest granted of those

delicate animal intimacies, the fuller and fuller confiding of which

plays not the least important part, and ever such a sweet one, even in

a highly transcendental affection. It is this gradual humanising of

the divine female that brings about the spiritualising of the

unregenerate male.

In the earliest stages of love the services are small that we are

privileged to do for the loved one. But if we are allowed to sit at

meat with her,--ever a royal condescension,--it is ours at least to

pass her the salt, to see that she is never kept waiting a moment for

the mustard or the pepper, to cut the bread for her with geometrical

precision, and to lean as near her warm shoulder as we dare to pour out

for her the sacred wine.

Yes! for sure I was twenty again, for the performance of these simple

services for Nicolete gave me a thrill of pure boyish pleasure such as

I had never expected to feel again. And did she not make a knight of

me by gently asking if I would be so kind as to carve the chicken, and

how she laughed quite disproportionally at my school-boy story of the

man who, being asked to carve a pigeon, said he thought they had better

send for a wood-carver, as it seemed to be a wood pigeon.

And while we ate and drank and laughed and chatted, the books around us

were weaving their spells. Even before the invention of printing books

were "love's purveyors." Was it not a book that sent Paolo and

Francesca for ever wandering on that stormy wind of passion and of

death? And nowadays the part played by books in human drama is greater

than we perhaps realise. Apart from their serious influence as

determining destinies of the character, what endless opportunities they

afford to lovers, who perhaps are denied all other meeting-places than

may be found on the tell-tale pages of a marked volume. The method is

so easy and so unsuspect. You have only to put faint pencil-marks

against the tenderest passages in your favourite new poet, and lend the

volume to Her, and She has only to leave here and there the dropped

violet of a timid confirmatory initial, for you to know your fate. And

what a touchstone books thus become! Indeed they simplify love-making,

from every point of view. With books so inexpensive and accessible to

all as they are to-day, no one need run any risks of marrying the wrong

woman. He has only to put her through an unconscious examination by

getting her to read and mark a few of his favourite authors, and he is

thus in possession of the master clues of her character. With a list

of her month's reading and a photograph, a man ought to be able to make

up his mind about any given woman, even though he has never spoken to

her. "Name your favourite writer" should be one of the first questions

in the Engagement Catechism.

There is, indeed, no such short cut to knowledge of each other as a

talk about books. One short afternoon is enough for any two

book-lovers, though they may have met for the first time in the

morning, to make up their minds whether or not they have been born for

each other. If you are agreed, say, in admiring Meredith, Hardy, Omar

Khayyam, and Maeterlinck,--to take four particularly

test-authors,--there is nothing to prevent your marrying at once.

Indeed, a love for any one of these significant writers will be enough,

not to speak of an admiration for "Aucassin and Nicolete."

Now, Nicolete and I soon found that we had all these and many another

writer in common, and before our lunch was ended we were nearer to each

other than many old friends. The heart does not more love the heart

that loves it than the brain loves the brain that comprehends it; and,

whatever else was to befall us, Nicolete and I were already in love

with each other's brains. Whether or not the malady would spread till

it reached the heart is the secret of some future chapter.

CHAPTER VI

A FAIRY TALE AND ITS FAIRY TAILORS

As this is not a realistic novel, I do not hold myself bound, as I have

said before, to account reasonably for everything that is done--least

of all, said--within its pages. I simply say, So it happened, or So it

is, and expect the reader to take my word. If he be uncivil enough to

doubt it, we may as well stop playing this game of fancy. It is one of

the first conditions of enjoying a book, as it is of all successful

hypnotism, that the reader surrenders up his will to the writer, who,

of course, guarantees to return it to him at the close of the volume.

If you say that no young lady would have behaved as I have presently to

relate of Nicolete, that no parents were ever so accommodating in the

world of reality, I reply,--No doubt you are right, but none the less

what I have to tell is true and really did happen, for all that. And

not only did it happen, but to the whimsically minded, to the true

children of fancy, it will seem the most natural thing in the world.

No doubt they will wonder why I have made such a preamble about it, as

indeed, now I think of it, so do I.

Again I claim exemption in this wandering history from all such

descriptive drudgery upon second, third, and fourth dramatis

personsonae as your thorough-going novelist must undertake with a good

grace. Like a host and hostess at a reception, the poor novelist has

to pretend to be interested in everybody,--in the dull as in the

brilliant, in the bore as in the beauty. I'm afraid I should never do

as a novelist, for I should waste all my time with the heroine; whereas

the true novelist is expected to pay as much attention to the heroine's

parents as though he were a suitor for her hand. Indeed, there is no

relative of hero or heroine too humble or stupid for such a novelist as

the great Balzac. He will invite the dullest of them to stay with him

for quite prolonged visits, and without a murmur set apart a suite of

chapters for their accommodation. I'm not sure that the humanity of

the reader in these cases is of such comprehensive sympathy as the

novelist's, and it may well be that the novelist undertakes all such

hard labour under a misapprehension of the desires of the reader, who,

as a rule, I fancy, is as anxious to join the ladies as the novelist

himself. Indeed, I believe that there is an opportunity for a new form

of novel, in which the novelist, as well as the reader, will skip all

the dull people, and merely indicate such of them as are necessary to

the action by an outline or a symbol, compressing their familiar

psychology, and necessary plot-interferences with the main characters,

into recognised formulae. For the benefit of readers voracious for

everything about everybody, schedule chapters might be provided by

inferior novelists, good at painting say tiresome bourgeois fathers,

gouty uncles and brothers in the army, as sometimes in great pictures

we read that the sheep in the foreground have been painted by Mr.

So-and-so, R.A.

The Major-General and his Lady were taking the waters at Wiesbaden.

That was all I knew of Nicolete's parents, and all I needed to know;

with the exception of one good action,--at her urgent entreaty they had

left Nicolete behind them, with no other safeguard than a charming

young lady companion, whose fitness for her sacred duties consisted in

a temperament hardly less romantic and whimsical than Nicolete's own.

She was too charming to deserve the name of obstacle; and as there was

no other--

But I admit that the cart has got a little in front of the horse, and I

grow suddenly alarmed lest the reader should be suspecting me of an

elopement, or some such romantic vulgarity. If he will only put any

such thoughts from his mind, I promise to proceed with the story in a

brief and business-like manner forthwith.

We are back once more at the close of the last chapter, in Nicolete's

book-bower in the wildwood. It is an hour or two later, and the

afternoon sun is flooding with a searching glory all the secret places

of the woodland. Hidden nooks and corners, unused to observation,

suddenly gleam and blush in effulgent exposure,--like lovers whom the

unexpected turning on of a light has revealed kissing in the dark,--and

are as suddenly, unlike the lovers, left in their native shade again.

It was that rich afternoon sunlight that loves to flash into teacups as

though they were crocuses, that loves to run a golden finger along the

beautiful wrinkles of old faces and light up the noble hollows of

age-worn eyes; the sunlight that loves to fall with transfiguring beam

on the once dear book we never read, or, with malicious

inquisitiveness, expose to undreamed-of detection the undusted picture,

or the gold-dusted legs of remote chairs, which the poor housemaid has

forgotten.

So in Nicolete's bower it illuminated with strange radiancy the dainty

disorder of deserted lunch, made prisms out of the wine-glasses,

painted the white cloth with wedge-shaped rainbows, and flooded the

cavernous interiors of the half-eaten fowl with a pathetic yellow

torchlight.

Leaving that melancholy relic of carnivorous appetite, it turned its

bold gold gaze on Nicolete. No need to transfigure her! But, heavens!

how grandly her young face took the great kiss of the god! Then it

fell for a tender moment on the jaundiced page of my old Boccaccio,--a

rare edition, which I had taken from my knapsack to indulge myself with

the appreciation of a connoisseur. Next minute "the unobstructed beam"

was shining right into the knapsack itself, for all the world like one

of those little demon electric lights with which the dentist makes a

momentary treasure-cave of your distended jaws, flashing with startled

stalactite. At the same moment Nicolete's starry eyes took the same

direction; then there broke from her her lovely laughter, merry and

inextinguishable.

Once more, need I say, my petticoat had played me false--or should I

not say true? For there was its luxurious lace border, a thing for the

soft light of the boudoir, or the secret moonlight of love's permitted

eyes, alone to see, shamelessly brazening it out in this terrible

sunlight. Obviously there was but one way out of the dilemma, to

confess my pilgrimage to Nicolete, and reveal to her all the fanciful

absurdity to which, after all, I owed the sight of her.

"So that is why you pleaded so hard for that poor trout," she said,

when I had finished. "Well, you are a fairy prince indeed! Now, do you

know what the punishment of your nonsense is to be?"

"Is it very severe and humiliating?" I asked.

"You must judge of that. It is--to take me with you!"

"You,--what do you mean?"

"Yes,--not for good and all, of course, but just for, say, a fortnight,

just a fortnight of rambles and adventures, and then to deliver me safe

home again where you found me--"

"But it is impossible," I almost gasped in surprise. "Of course you

are not serious?"

"I am, really, and you will take me, won't you?" she continued

pleadingly. "You don't know how we women envy you men those wonderful

walking-tours we can only read about in Hazlitt or Stevenson. We are

not allowed to move without a nurse or a footman. From the day we are

born to the day we die, we are never left a moment to ourselves. But

you--you can go out into the world, the mysterious world, do as you

will, go where you will, wander here, wander there, follow any bye-way

that takes your fancy, put up at old inns, make strange acquaintances,

have all kinds of romantic experiences-- Oh, to be a man for a

fortnight, your younger brother for a fortnight!"

"It is impossible!" I repeated.

"It isn't at all," she persisted, with a fine blush. "If you will only

be nice and kind, and help me to some Rosalind's clothes. You have only

to write to your tailors, or send home for a spare suit of

clothes,--with a little managing yours would just fit me, you're not so

much taller,--and then we could start, like two comrades, seeking

adventures. Oh, how glorious it would be!"

It was in vain that I brought the batteries of common-sense to bear

upon her whim. I raised every possible objection in vain.

I pointed out the practical difficulties. There were her parents.

Weren't they drinking the waters at Wiesbaden, and weren't they to go

on drinking them for another three weeks? My fancy made a picture of

them distended with three weeks' absorption of mineral springs. Then

there was her companion. Nicolete was confident of her assistance.

Then I tried vilifying myself. How could she run the risk of trusting

herself to such intimate companionship with a man whom she hadn't known

half a dozen hours? This she laughed to scorn. Presently I was silent

from sheer lack of further objections; and need I say that all the

while there had been a traitor impulse in my heart, a weak sweetness

urging me on to accept the pretty chance which the good genius of my

pilgrimage had so evidently put in my way,--for, after all, what harm

could it do? With me Nicolete was, indeed, safe,--that, of course, I

knew,--and safely she should come back home again after her little

frolic. All that was true enough. And how charming it would be to

have such a dainty companion! then the fun, the fancy, the whim of it

all. What was the use of setting out to seek adventures if I didn't

pursue them when found.

Well, the long and short of it was that I agreed to undertake the

adventure, provided that Nicolete could win over the lady whom at the

beginning of the chapter I declared too charming to be described as an

obstacle.

By nine o'clock the following morning the fairy tailors, as Nicolete

called them, were at work on the fairy clothes, and, at the end of

three days, there came by parcel-post a bulky unromantic-looking

brown-paper parcel, which it was my business to convey to Nicolete

under cover of the dark.

CHAPTER VII

FROM THE MORNING STAR TO THE MOON

I quite realise that this book is written perhaps only just in time for

the motive of these two or three chapters to be appreciated in its

ancient piquancy. Very soon, alas! the sexes will be robbed of one of

the first and most thrilling motives of romance, the motive of As You

Like It, the romance of wearing each other's clothes. Alas, that every

advance of reason should mean a corresponding retreat of romance! It

is only reasonable that woman, being--have you yet realised the

fact?--a biped like her brothers, should, when she takes to her

brothers' recreations, dress as those recreations demand; and yet the

death of Rosalind is a heavy price to pay for the lady bicyclist. So

soon as the two sexes wear the same clothes, they may as well wear

nothing; the game of sex is up. In this matter, as in others, we

cannot both have our cake and eat it. All romance, like all

temptation, is founded on the Fascination of the Exception. So soon as

the exception becomes, instead of merely proving, the rule, that

particular avenue of romance is closed. The New Woman of the future

will be the woman with the petticoats, she who shall restore the

ancient Eleusinian mysteries of the silk skirt and the tea-gown.

Happily for me, my acquaintance among the Rosalinds of the bicycle, at

this period of my life, was but slight, and thus no familiarity with

the tweed knickerbocker feminine took off the edge of my delight on

first beholding Nicolete clothed in like manhood with ourselves, and

yet, delicious paradox! looking more like a woman than ever.

During those three days while the fairy tailors were at work our

friendship had not been idle. Indeed, some part of each day we had

spent diligently learning each other, as travellers to distant lands

across the Channel work hard at phrase-book and Baedeker the week

before their departure. Meanwhile too I had made the acquaintance of

the charming lady Obstacle,--as it proved so unfair to call her,--and

by some process of natural magnetism we had immediately won each

other's hearts, so that on the moonlight night on which I took the

river path with my brown-paper parcel there was no misgiving in my

heart,--nothing but harping and singing, and blessings on the river

that seemed all silver with the backs of magic trout. As I thought of

all I owed that noble fish, I kneeled by the river's bearded lip, among

the nettles and the meadowsweet, and swore by the inconstant moon that

trout and I were henceforth kinsmen, and that between our houses should

be an eternal amity. The chub and the dace and the carp, not to speak

of that Chinese pirate the pike, might still look to it, when I came

forth armed with rod and line; but for me and my house the trout is

henceforth sacred. By the memory of the Blessed Saint Izaak, I swore it!

My arrival at Beaucaire was one of great excitement. Nicolete and the

Obstacle were both awaiting me, for the mysteries of masculine attire

were not to be explored alone. The parcel was snatched quite

unceremoniously from my hands, the door shut upon me, and I laughingly

bidden go listen to the nightingale. I was not long in finding one,

nor, being an industrious phrase-maker, did I waste my time, for,

before I was summoned to behold Nicolete in all her boyhood, I had

found occasion and moonlight to remark to my pocket-book that, Though

all the world has heard the song of the Nightingale to the Rose, only

the Nightingale has heard the answer of the Rose. This I hurriedly hid

in my heart for future conversation, as the pre-arranged tinkle of the

silver bell called me to the rose.

Would, indeed, that I were a nightingale to sing aright the beauty of

that rose with which, think of it, I was to spend a whole

fortnight,--yes, no less than fourteen wonderful days.

The two girls were evidently proud of themselves at having succeeded so

well with the mysterious garments. There were one or two points on

which they needed my guidance, but they were unimportant; and when at

last Nicolete would consent to stand up straight and let me have a good

look at her,--for, poor child! she was as shy and shrinking as though

she had nothing on,--she made a very pretty young man indeed.

She didn't, I'm afraid, look like a young man of our degenerate day.

She was far too beautiful and distinguished for that. Besides, her dark

curling hair, quite short for a woman, was too long, and her eyes--like

the eyes of all poets--were women's eyes. She looked, indeed, like one

of those wonderful boys of the Italian Renaissance, whom you may still

see at the National Gallery, whose beauty is no denial, but rather the

stamp of their slender, supple strength, young painters and sculptors

who held the palette for Leonardo, or wielded the chisel for

Michelangelo, and anon threw both aside to take up sword for Guelf or

Ghibelline in the narrow streets of Florence.

Her knapsack was already packed, and its contents included a serge

skirt "in case of emergencies." Already, she naughtily reminded me, we

possessed a petticoat between us.

The brief remainder of the evening passed in excited chatter and

cigarettes, and in my instructing Nicolete in certain tricks of

masculine deportment. The chief difficulty I hardly like mentioning;

and if the Obstacle had not been present, I certainly dare not have

spoken of it to Nicolete. I mean that she was so shy about her pretty

legs. She couldn't cross them with any successful nonchalance.

"You must take your legs more for granted, dear Nicolete," I summoned

courage to say. "The nonchalance of the legs is the first lesson to be

learnt in such a masquerade as this. You must regard them as so much

bone and iron, rude skeleton joints and shins, as though they were the

bones of the great elk or other extinct South Kensington

specimen,"--"not," I added in my heart, "as the velvet and ivory which

they are."

We had agreed to start with the sun on the morrow, so as to get clear

of possible Peeping Toms; and when good-nights had been said, and I was

once more swinging towards my inn, it seemed but an hour or two, as

indeed it was, before I heard four o'clock drowsily announced through

my bedroom door, and before I was once more striding along that

river-bank all dew-silvered with last night's moonlight, the sun

rubbing his great eye on the horizon, the whole world yawning through

dainty bed-clothes of mist, and here and there a copse-full of birds

congratulating themselves on their early rising.

Nicolete was not quite ready, so I had to go listen to the lark, about

whom, alas! I could find nothing to say to my pocket-book, before

Nicolete, armed cap-a-pie with stick and knapsack, appeared at the door

of her chalet.

The Obstacle was there to see us start. She and Nicolete exchanged many

kisses which were hard to bear, and the first quarter of an hour of our

journey was much obstructed by the farewells of her far-fluttering

handkerchief. When at last we were really alone, I turned and looked

at Nicolete striding manfully at my side, just to make sure that it was

really true.

"Well, we're in for it now," I said; "aren't you frightened?"

"Oh, it's wonderful," she replied; "don't spoil it by talking."

And I didn't; for who could hope to compete with the sun, who was

making the whole dewy world shake with laughter at his brilliancy, or

with the birds, any one of whom was a poet at least equal to Herrick?

Presently we found ourselves at four crossroads, with a four-fingered

post in the centre. We had agreed to leave our destination to chance.

We read the sign-post.

"Which shall we choose?" I said,--

"Aucassin, true love and fair, To what land do we repair?"

"Don't you think this one," she replied, "this one?--To the Moon!"

"Certainly, we couldn't find a prettier place; but it's a long way," I

replied, looking up at the sky, all roses and pearls,--"a long way from

the Morning Star to the Moon."

"All the longer to be free," cried Nicolete, recklessly.

"So be it," I assented. "Allons--to the Moon!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE KIND OF THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE MOON

Two friends of my youth, with whom it would be hopeless to attempt

competition, have described the star-strewn journey to the moon. It is

not for me to essay again where the ingenious M. Jules Verne and Mr.

William Morris have preceded me. Besides, the journey is nowadays much

more usual, and therefore much less adventurous, than when those

revered writers first described it. In the middle ages a journey to the

moon with a woman you loved was a very perilous matter indeed. Even in

the last century the roads were much beset with danger; but in our own

day, like most journeys, it is accomplished with ease and safety in a

few hours.

However, to the latter-day hero, whose appetite for dragons is not

keen, this absence of adventure is perhaps rather pleasurable than

otherwise; and I confess that I enjoyed the days I spent on foot with

Nicolete none the less because they passed in tranquil

uneventfulness,--that is, without events of the violent kind. Of

course, all depends on what you call an event. We were not waylaid by

robbers, we fed and slept unchallenged at inns, we escaped collision

with the police, and we encountered no bodily dangers of any kind; yet

should I not call the journey uneventful, nor indeed, I think, would

Nicolete.

To me it was one prolonged divine event, and, with such daily

intercourse with Nicolete, I never dreamed of craving for any other

excitement. To walk from morning to evening by her side, to minister

to her moods, to provide such entertainment as I might for her brain,

and watch like a father over her physical needs; to note when she was

weary and too proud to show it, and to pretend to be done up myself; to

choose for her the easiest path, and keep my eyes open for wayside

flowers and every country surprise,--these, and a hundred other

attentions, kept my heart and mind in busy service.

To picnic by some lonely stream-side on a few sandwiches, a flask of

claret, and a pennyworth of apples; to talk about the books we loved;

to exchange our hopes and dreams,--we asked nothing better than this

simple fare.

And so a week went by. But, though so little had seemed to happen, and

though our walking record was shamefully modest, yet, imperceptible as

the transition had been, we were, quite insensibly indeed, and

unacknowledged, in a very different relation to each other than when we

had started out from the Morning Star. In fact, to make no more words

about it, I was head over heels in love with Nicolete, and I think,

without conceit, I may say that Nicolete was rapidly growing rather

fond of me. Apart from anything else, we were such excellent chums. We

got along together as if indeed we had been two brothers, equable in

our tempers and one in our desires.

At last the feeling on my side became so importunate that I could no

longer keep silence.

We were seated together taking tea at a small lonely inn, whose windows

looked out over a romantic little lake, backed by Salvator Rosa

pine-woods. The sun was beginning to grow dreamy, and the whole world

to wear a dangerously sentimental expression.

I forget exactly what it was, but something in our talk had set us

glowing, had touched tender chords of unexpected sympathy, and

involuntarily I stretched out my hand across the corner of the table

and pressed Nicolete's hand as it rested on the cloth. She did not

withdraw it, and our eyes met with a steady gaze of love.

"Nicolete," I said presently, when I could speak, "it is time for you

to be going back home."

"Why?" she asked breathlessly.

"Because," I answered, "I must love you if you stay."

"Would you then bid me go?" she said.

"Nicolete," I said, "don't tempt me. Be a good girl and go home."

"But supposing I don't want to go home," she said; "supposing--oh,

supposing I love you too? Would you still bid me go?"

"Yes," I said. "In that case it would be even more imperative."

"Aucassin!"

"It is true, it is true, dear Nicolete."

"Then, Aucassin," she replied, almost sternly, in her great girlish

love, "this is true also,--I love you. I have never loved, shall never

love, any man but you!"

"Nicolete!"

"Aucassin!"

There were no more words spoken between us for a full hour that

afternoon.

CHAPTER IX

WRITTEN BY MOONLIGHT

I knew deep down in my heart that it couldn't last, yet how deny myself

these roses, while the opportunity of gathering them was mine!--the

more so, as I believed it would do no harm to Nicolete. At all events,

a day or two more or less of moonshine would make no matter either way.

And so all next day we walked hand in hand through Paradise.

It has been said by them of old time, and our fathers have told us,

that the kiss of first love, the first kiss of the first woman we love,

is beyond all kisses sweet; and true it is. But true is it also that

no less sweet is the first kiss of the last woman we love.

Putting my faith in old saws, as a young man will, I had never dreamed

to know again a bliss so divinely passionate and pure as came to me

with every glance of Nicolete's sweet eyes, with every simple pressure

of her hand; and the joy that was mine when sometimes, stopping on our

way, we would press together our lips ever so gravely and tenderly,

seems too holy even to speak of.

The holy angels could not have loved Nicolete with a purer love, a love

freer from taint of any earthly thought, than I, a man of thirty,

blase, and fed from my youth upon the honeycomb of woman.

It was curious that the first difficulty of our pilgrimage should

befall us the very next day. Coming towards nightfall to a small inn

in a lonely unpopulated countryside, we found that the only

accommodation the inn afforded was one double-bedded room, and there

was no other inn for at least ten miles. I think I was more troubled

than Nicolete. When, after interviewing the landlady, I came and told

her of the dilemma, where she sat in the little parlour wearied out

with the day's walk, she blushed, it is true, but seemed little put

about. Indeed, she laughed, and said it was rather fun, "like

something out of Sterne,"--of such comfort is a literary reference in

all seasons and circumstances,--and then she added, with a sweet look

that sent the blood rioting about my heart, "It won't matter so much,

will it, love, NOW?"

There proved nothing for it but to accept the situation, and we made

the arrangement that Nicolete was to slip off to bed first, and then

put out the light and go to sleep. However, when I followed her,

having sat up as long as the landlady's patience would endure, I found

that, though she had blown out the candle, she had forgotten to put out

the moon, which shone as though it were St. Agnes' Eve across half the

room.

I stole in very shyly, kept my eyes sternly from Nicolete's white bed,

though, as I couldn't shut my ears, the sound of her breathing came to

me with indescribable sweetness. After I had lain among the sheets

some five or ten minutes, I was suddenly startled by a little voice

within the room saying,--

"I'm not asleep."

"Well, you should be, naughty child. Now shut your eyes and go to

sleep,--and fair dreams and sweet repose," I replied.

"Won't you give me one little good-night kiss?"

"I gave you one downstairs."

"Is it very wicked to want another?"

There was not a foot between our two beds, so I bent over and took her

soft white shoulders in my arms and kissed her. All the heaped-up

sweetness of the whitest, freshest flowers of the spring seemed in my

embrace as I kissed her, so soft, so fragrant, so pure; and as the

moonlight was the white fire in our blood. Softly I released her,

stroked her brown hair, and turned again to my pillow. Presently the

little voice was in the room again,--

"Mayn't I hold your hand? Somehow I feel lonely and frightened."

So our hands made a bridge across which our dreams might pass through

the night, and after a little while I knew that she slept.

As I lay thus holding her hand, and listening to her quiet breathing, I

realised once more what my young Alastor had meant by the purity of

high passion. For indeed the moonlight that fell across her bosom was

not whiter than my thoughts, nor could any kiss--were it even such a

kiss as Venus promised to the betrayer of Psyche--even in its fiercest

delirium, be other than dross compared with the wild white peace of

those silent hours when we lay thus married and maiden side by side.

CHAPTER X

HOW ONE MAKES LOVE AT THIRTY

My sleeplessness while Nicolete slept had not been all ecstasy, for I

had come to a bitter resolution; and next morning, when we were once

more on our way, I took a favourable opportunity of conveying it to

Nicolete.

"Nicolete," I said, as we rested awhile by the roadside, "I have

something serious to say to you."

"Yes, dear," she said, looking rather frightened.

"Well, dear, it is this,--our love must end with our holiday. No good

can come of it."

"But oh, why? I love you."

"Yes, and I love you,--love you as I never thought I could love again.

Yet I know it is all a dangerous dream,--a trick of our brains, an

illusion of our tastes."

"But oh, why? I love you."

"Yes, you do to-day, I know; but it couldn't last. I believe I could

love you for ever; but even so, it wouldn't be right. You couldn't go

on loving me. I am too old, too tired, too desillusione, perhaps too

selfish."

"I will love you always!" said girl Nicolete.

"Whereas you," I continued, disregarding the lovely refrain of her

tear-choked voice, "are standing on the wonderful threshold of life,

waiting in dreamland for the dawn. And it will come, and with it the

fairy prince, with whom you shall wander hand in hand through all its

fairy rose-gardens; but I, dear Nicolete,--I am not he."

Nicolete did not speak.

"I know," I continued, pressing her hand, "that I may seem young enough

to talk like this, but some of us get through life quicker than others,

and when we say, 'It is done,' it is no use for onlookers to say, 'Why,

it is just beginning!' Believe me, Nicolete, I am not fit husband for

you."

"Then shall I take no other," said Nicolete, with set face.

"Oh, yes, you will," I rejoined; "let but a month or two pass, and you

will see how wise I was, after all. Besides, there are other reasons,

of which there is no need to speak--"

"What reasons?"

"Well," I said, half laughing, "there is the danger that, after all, we

mightn't agree. There is nothing so perilously difficult as the daily

intercourse of two people who love each other. You are too young to

realise its danger. And I couldn't bear to see our love worn away by

the daily dropping of tears, not to speak of its being rent by the

dynamite of daily quarrels. We know each other's tastes, but we know

hardly anything of each other's natures."

Nicolete looked at me strangely. 'Troth, it was a strange way to make

love, I knew.

"And what else?" she asked somewhat coldly.

"Well, then, though it's not a thing one cares to speak of, I'm a poor

man--"

Nicolete broke through my sentence with a scornful exclamation.

"You," I continued straight on,--"well, you have been accustomed to a

certain spaciousness and luxury of life. This it would be out of my

power to continue for you. These are real reasons, very real reasons,

dear Nicolete, though you may not think so now. The law of the world

in these matters is very right. For the rich and the poor to marry is

to risk, terribly risk, the very thing they would marry for--their

love. Love is better an unmarried than a married regret."

Nicolete was silent again.

"Think of your little woodland chalet, and your great old trees in the

park,--you couldn't live without them. I have, at most, but one tree

worth speaking of to offer you--"

I purposely waived the glamour which my old garden had for my mind, and

which I wouldn't have exchanged for fifty parks.

"Trees!" retorted Nicolete,--"what are trees?"

"Ah, my dear girl, they are a good deal,--particularly when they are

genealogical, as my one tree is not."

"Aucassin," she said suddenly, almost fiercely, "can you really jest?

Tell me this,--do you love me?"

"I love you," I said simply; "and it is just because I love you so much

that I have talked as I have done. No man situated as I am who loved

you could have talked otherwise."

"Well, I have heard it all, weighed it all," said Nicolete, presently;

"and to me it is but as thistledown against the love within my heart.

Will you cast away a woman who loves you for theories? You know you

love me, know I love you. We should have our trials, our ups and

downs, I know; but surely it is by those that true love learns how to

grow more true and strong. Oh, I cannot argue! Tell me again, do you

love me?"

And there she broke down and fell sobbing into my arms. I consoled her

as best I might, and presently she looked up at me through her tears.

"Tell me again," she said, "that you love me, just as you did

yesterday, and promise never to speak of all those cruel things again.

Ah! have you thought of the kind of men you would give me up to?"

At that I confess I shuddered, and I gave her the required assurance.

"And you won't be wise and reasonable and ridiculous any more?"

"No," I answered; adding in my mind, "not, at all events, for the

present."

CHAPTER XI

HOW ONE PLAYS THE HERO AT THIRTY

Had we only been able to see a day into the future, we might have

spared ourselves this agonising, for all our doubts and fears were

suddenly dispersed in an entirely unexpected manner. Happily these

interior problems are not infrequently resolved by quite exterior

forces.

We were sitting the following afternoon in one of those broad bay

windows such as one finds still in some old country inns, just thinking

about starting once more on our way, when suddenly Nicolete, who had

been gazing out idly into the road, gave a little cry. I followed her

glance. A carriage with arms on its panels had stopped at the inn, and

as a smart footman opened the door, a fine grey-headed military-looking

man stepped out and strode hurriedly up the inn steps.

"Aucassin," gasped Nicolete, "it is my father!"

It was too true. The old man's keen eye had caught sight of Nicolete

at the window also, and in another moment we were all three face to

face. I must do the Major-General the justice of saying that he made

as little of a "scene" of it as possible.

"Now, my girl," he said, "I have come to put an end to this nonsense.

Have you a petticoat with you? Well, go upstairs and get it on. I

will wait for you here... On you, sir, I shall waste no words. From

what I have heard, you are as moonstruck as my daughter."

"Of course," I stammered, "I cannot expect you to understand the

situation, though I think, if you would allow me, I could in a very few

words make it somewhat clearer,--make you realise that, after all, it

has been a very innocent and childish escapade, in which there has been

no harm and a great deal of pleasure--"

But the Major-General cut me short.

"I should prefer," he said, "not to discuss the matter. I may say that

I realise that my daughter has been safe in your hands, however

foolish,"--for this I thanked him with a bow,--"but I must add that

your eccentric acquaintance must end here--"

I said him neither yea nor nay; and while we stood in armed and

embarrassed silence, Nicolete appeared with white face at the door,

clothed in her emergency petticoat. Alas! it was for no such emergency

as this that it had been destined that merry night when she had packed

it in her knapsack. With a stern bow her father turned from me to join

her; but she suddenly slipped past him, threw her arms round me, and

kissed me one long passionate kiss.

"Aucassin, be true," she cried, "I will never forget you,--no one shall

come between us;" and then bursting into tears, she buried her face in

her hands and followed her father from the room.

In another moment she had been driven away, and I sat as one stupefied

in the inn window. But a few short minutes ago she had been sitting

merrily prattling by my side, and now I was once more as lonely as if

we had never met. Presently I became conscious in my reverie of a

little crumpled piece of paper on the floor. I picked it up. It was a

little note pencilled in her bedroom at the last moment. "Aucassin,"

it ran, just like her last passionate words, "be true. I will never

forget you. Stay here till I write to you, and oh, write to me soon!--

Your broken-hearted Nicolete."

As I read, I saw her lovely young face, radiant with love and sorrow as

I had last seen it, and pressing the precious little letter to my lips,

I said fervently, "Yes, Nicolete, I will be true."

CHAPTER XII

IN WHICH I REVIEW MY ACTIONS AND RENEW MY RESOLUTIONS

No doubt the youthful reader will have but a poor opinion of me after

the last two chapters. He will think that in the scene with the

Major-General I acted with lamentably little spirit, and that generally

my friend Alastor would have proved infinitely more worthy of the

situation. It is quite true, I confess it. The whole episode was made

for Alastor. Nicolete and he were born for each other. Alas! it is

one of the many drawbacks of experience that it frequently prevents our

behaving with spirit.

I must be content to appeal to the wiser and therefore sadder reader,

of whom I have but a poor opinion if he too fails to understand me.

He, I think, will understand why I didn't promptly assault the

Major-General, seize Nicolete by the waist, thrust her into her

ancestral carriage, haul the coachman from his box, and, seizing the

reins, drive away in triumph before astonishment had time to change

into pursuit. Truly it had been but the work of a moment, and there was

only one consideration which prevented my following this

now-I-call-that-heroic course. It is a consideration I dare hardly

venture to write, and the confession of which will, I know, necessitate

my changing my age back again to thirty on the instant. Oh, be

merciful, dear romantic reader! I didn't strike the Major-General,

because, oh, because I AGREED WITH HIM!

I loved Nicolete, you must have felt that. She was sweet to me as the

bunch of white flowers that, in their frail Venetian vase, stand so

daintily on my old bureau as I write, doing their best to sweeten my

thoughts. Dear was she to me as the birds that out in the old garden

yonder sing and sing their best to lift up my leaden heart. She was

dear as the Spring itself, she was only less dear than Autumn.

Yes, black confession! after the first passion of her loss, the

immediate ache of her young beauty had passed, and I was able to

analyse what I really felt, I not only agreed with him, I thanked God

for the Major-General! He had saved me from playing the terrible part

of executioner. He had just come in time to behead the Lady Jane Grey

of our dreams.

I should have no qualms about tightening the rope round the neck of

some human monster, or sticking a neat dagger or bullet into a

dangerous, treacherous foe, but to kill a dream is a sickening

business. It goes on moaning in such a heart-breaking fashion, and you

never know when it is dead. All on a sudden some night it will come

wailing in the wind outside your window, and you must blacken your

heart and harden your face with another strangling grip of its slim

appealing throat, another blow upon its angel eyes. Even then it will

recover, and you will go on being a murderer, making for yourself day

by day a murderer's face, without the satisfaction of having really

murdered.

But what of Nicolete? do you exclaim. Have you no thought for her,

bleeding her heart away in solitude? Can you so soon forget those

appealing eyes? Yes, I have thought for her. Would God that I could

bear for her those growing pains of the heart! and I shall never forget

those farewell eyes. But then, you see, I had firmly realised this,

that she would sooner recover from our separation than from our

marriage; that her love for me, pretty and poignant and dramatic while

it lasted, was a book-born, book-fed dream, which must die soon or

late,--the sooner the better for the peace of the dreams that in the

course of nature would soon spring up to take its place.

But while I realised all this, and, with a veritable aching of the

heart at the loss of her, felt a curious satisfaction at the turn of

events, still my own psychology became all the more a puzzle to me, and

I asked myself, with some impatience, what I would be at, and what it

was I really wanted.

Here had I but a few moments ago been holding in my hands the very

dream I had set out to find, and here was I secretly rejoicing to be

robbed of it! If Nicolete did not fulfil the conditions of that

mystical Golden Girl, in professed search for whom I had set out that

spring morning, well, the good genius of my pilgrimage felt it time to

resign. Better give it up at once, and go back to my books and my

bachelorhood, if I were so difficult to please. No wonder my kind

providence felt provoked. It had provided me with the sweetest

pink-and-porcelain dream of a girl, and might reasonably have concluded

that his labours on my behalf were at an end.

But, really, there is no need to lecture me upon the charms and virtues

of Nicolete, for I loved them from the first moment of our strange

introduction, and I dream of them still. There was indeed only one

quality of womanhood in which she was lacking, and in which, after much

serious self-examination, I discovered the reason of my instinctive

self-sacrifice of her,--SHE HAD NEVER SUFFERED. As my heart had warned

me at the beginning, "she was hoping too much from life to spend one's

days with." She lacked the subtle half-tones of experience. She lacked

all that a pretty wrinkle or two might have given. There was no

shadowy melancholy in her sky-clear eyes. She was gay indeed, and had

a certain childish humour; but she had none of that humour which comes

of the resigned perception that the world is out of joint, and that you

were never born to set it right. These characteristics I had yet to

find in woman. There was still, therefore, an object to my quest.

Indeed my experience had provided me with a formula. I was in search

of a woman who, in addition to every other feminine charm and virtue,

was a woman who had suffered.

With this prayer I turned once more to the genius of my pilgrimage.

"Grant me," I asked, "but this--A WOMAN WHO HAS SUFFERED!" and,

apparently as a consequence, he became once more quite genial. He

seemed to mean that a prayer so easy to grant would put any god into a

good temper; and possibly he smiled with a deeper meaning too.

BOOK III

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH I RETURN TO MY RIGHT AGE AND ENCOUNTER A COMMON OBJECT OF THE

COUNTRY

And so when the days of my mourning for Nicolete were ended (and in

this sentence I pass over letters to and fro,--letters wild from

Nicolete, letters wise from Aucassin, letters explanatory and

apologetic from the Obstacle--how the Major-General had suddenly come

home quite unexpectedly and compelled her to explain Nicolete's

absence, etc., etc. Dear Obstacle! I should rather have enjoyed a

pilgrimage with her too)--I found myself one afternoon again upon the

road. The day had been very warm and dusty, and had turned sleepy

towards tea-time.

I had now pretty clearly in my mind what I wanted. This time it was,

all other things equal, to be "a woman who had suffered," and to this

end, I had, before starting out once more, changed my age back again at

the inn and written "Aetat. 30" after my name in the visitors' book.

As a young man I was an evident failure, and so, having made the

countersign, I was speedily transformed to my old self; and I must say

that it was a most comfortable feeling, something like getting back

again into an old coat or an old pair of shoes. I never wanted to be

young again as long as I lived. Youth was too much like the Sunday

clothes of one's boyhood. Moreover, I had a secret conviction that the

woman I was now in search of would prefer one who had had some

experience at being a man, who would bring her not the green plums of

his love, but the cunningly ripened nectarines, a man to whom love was

something of an art as well as an inspiration.

It was in this frame of mind that I came upon the following scene.

The lane was a very cloistral one, with a ribbon of gravelly road,

bordered on each side with a rich margin of turf and a scramble of

blackberry bushes, green turf banks and dwarf oak-trees making a rich

and plenteous shade. My attention was caught firstly by a bicycle

lying carelessly on the turf, and secondly and lastly by a graceful

woman's figure, recumbent and evidently sleeping against the turf bank,

well tucked in among the afternoon shadows. My coming had not aroused

her, and so I stole nearer to her on tiptoe.

She was a pretty woman, of a striking modern type, tall,

well-proportioned, strong, I should say, with a good complexion that

had evidently been made just a little better. But her most striking

feature was an opulent mass of dark red hair, which had fallen in some

disorder and made quite a pillow for her head. Her hat was off, lying

in its veil by her side, and a certain general abandon of her

figure,--which was clothed in a short cloth skirt, cut with that

unmistakable touch which we call style--betokened weariness that could

no longer wait for rest.

Poor child! she was tired out. She must never be left to sleep on

there, for she seemed good to sleep till midnight.

I turned to her bicycle, and, examining it with the air of a man who

had won silver cups in his day, I speedily discovered what had been the

mischief. The tire of the front wheel had been pierced, and a great

thorn was protruding from the place. Evidently this had been too much

for poor Rosalind, and it was not unlikely that she had cried herself

to sleep.

I bent over her to look--yes, there were traces of tears. Poor thing!

Then I had a kindly human impulse. I would mend the tire, having

attended ambulance classes, do it very quietly so that she wouldn't

hear, like the fairy cobblers who used to mend people's boots while

they slept, and then wait in ambush to watch the effect upon her when

she awoke.

What do you think of the idea?

But one important detail I have omitted from my description of the

sleeper. Her left hand lay gloveless, and of the four rings on her

third finger one was a wedding-ring.

"Such red hair,--and a wedding-ring!" I exclaimed inwardly. "How this

woman must have suffered!"

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH I HEAL A BICYCLE AND COME TO THE WHEEL OF PLEASURE

Moving the bicycle a little away, so that my operations upon it might

not arouse her, I had soon made all right again, and when I laid it

once more where she had left it, she was still sleeping as sound as

ever. She had only to sleep long enough, a sly thought suggested, to

necessitate her ending her day's journey at the same inn as myself,

some five miles on the road. One virtue at least the reader will allow

to this history,--we are seldom far away from an inn in its pages.

When I thought of that I sat stiller than ever, hardly daring to turn

over the pages of Apuleius, which I had taken from my knapsack to

beguile the time, and, I confess, to give my eyes some other occupation

than the dangerous one of gazing upon her face, dangerous in more ways

than one, but particularly dangerous at the moment, because, as

everybody knows, a steady gaze on a sleeping face is apt to awake the

sleeper. And she wasn't to be disturbed!

"No! she mustn't waken before seven at the latest," I said to myself,

holding my breath and starting in terror at every noise. Once a great

noisy bee was within an ace of waking her, but I caught him with

inspired dexterity, and he buzzed around her head no more.

But despite the providential loneliness of the road, there were one or

two terrors that could not be disposed of so summarily. The worst of

all was a heavy miller's cart which one could hardly crush to silence

in one's handkerchief; but it went so slowly, and both man and horses

were so sleepy, that they passed unheard and unnoticing.

A sprightly tramp promised greater difficulty, and nothing but some

ferocious pantomime and a shilling persuaded him to forego a choice

fantasia of cockney humour.

A poor tired Italian organ-grinder, tramping with an equally tired

monkey along the dusty roads, had to be bought off in a similar

manner,--though he only cost sixpence. He gave me a Southern smile and

shrug of comprehension, as one acquainted with affairs of the

heart,--which was a relief after the cockney tramp's impudent

expression of, no doubt, a precisely similar sentiment.

And then at last, just as my watch pointed to 6.50 (how well I remember

the exact moment!) Rosalind awoke suddenly, as women and children do,

sitting straight up on the instant, and putting up her hands to her

tousled hair, with a half-startled "Where am I?" When her hair was

once more "respectable," she gave her skirts a shake, bent sideways to

pull up her stockings and tighten her garters, looked at her watch, and

then with an exclamation at the lateness of the hour, went over, with

an air of desperate determination, to her bicycle.

"Now for this horrid puncture!" were the first words I was to hear fall

from her lips.

She sought for the wound in the india-rubber with growing bewilderment.

"Goodness!" was her next exclamation, "why, there's nothing wrong with

it. Can I have been dreaming?"

"I hope your dreams have been pleasanter than that," I ventured at this

moment to stammer, rising, a startling apparition, from my ambush

behind a mound of brambles; and before she had time to take in the

situation I added that I hoped she'd excuse my little pleasantry, and

told her how I had noticed her and the wounded bicycle, et cetera, et

cetera, as the reader can well imagine, without giving me the trouble

of writing it all out.

She was sweetness itself on the instant.

"Excuse you!" she said, "I should think so. Who wouldn't? You can't

tell the load you've taken off my mind. I'm sure I must have groaned

in my sleep--for I confess I cried myself to sleep over it."

"I thought so," I said with gravity, and eyes that didn't dare to smile

outright till they had permission, which, however, was not long

withheld them.

"How did you know?"

"Oh, intuition, of course--who wouldn't have cried themselves to sleep,

and so tired too!"

"You're a nice sympathetic man, anyhow," she laughed; "what a pity you

don't bicycle!"

"Yes," I said, "I would give a thousand pounds for a bicycle at this

moment."

"You ought to get a good one for that," she laughed,--"all bright parts

nickel, I suppose; indeed, you should get a real silver frame and gold

handle-bars for that, don't you think? Well, it would be nice all the

same to have your company a few miles, especially as it's growing

dark," she added.

"Especially as it's growing dark," I repeated.

"You won't be going much farther to-night. Have you fixed on your

inn?" I continued innocently. She had--but that was in a town too far

to reach to-night, after her long sleep.

"You might have wakened me," she said.

"Yes, it was stupid of me not to have thought of it," I answered,

offering no explanation of the dead bee which at the moment I espied a

little away in the grass, and saying nothing of the merry tramp and the

melancholy musician.

Then we talked inns, and thus she fell beautifully into the pit which I

had digged for her; and it was presently arranged that she should ride

on to the Wheel of Pleasure and order a dinner, which she was to do me

the honour of sharing with me.

I was to follow on foot as speedily as might be, and it was with a high

heart that I strode along the sunset lanes, hearing for some time the

chiming of her bell in front of me, till she had wheeled it quite out

of hearing, and it was lost in the distance.

I never did a better five miles in my life.

CHAPTER III

TWO TOWN MICE AT A COUNTRY INN.

When I reached the Wheel of Pleasure, I found Rosalind awaiting me in

the coffee-room, looking fresh from a traveller's toilette, and with

the welcome news that dinner was on the way. By the time I had washed

off the day's dust it was ready, and a merry meal it proved. Rosalind

had none of Alastor's objections to the wine-list, so we drank an

excellent champagne; and as there seemed to be no one in the hotel but

ourselves, we made ourselves at home and talked and laughed, none

daring to make us afraid.

At first, on sitting down to table, we had grown momentarily shy, with

one of those sudden freaks of self-consciousness which occasionally

surprise one, when, midway in some slightly unconventional situation to

which the innocence of nature has led us, we realise it--"for an

instant and no more."

Positively, I think that in the embarrassment of that instant I had

made some inspired remark to Rosalind about the lovely country which

lay dreamy in the afterglow outside our window. Oh, yes, I remember the

very words. They were "What a heavenly landscape!" or something

equally striking.

"Yes," Rosalind had answered, "it is almost as beautiful as the Strand!"

If I'd known her better, I should have exclaimed, "You dear!" and I

think it possible that I did say something to that effect,--perhaps

"You dear woman!" At all events, the veil of self-consciousness was

rent in twain at that remark, and our spirits rushed together at this

touch of London nature thus unexpectedly revealed.

London! I hadn't realised till this moment how I had been missing it

all these days of rustication, and my heart went out to it with a vast

homesickness.

"Yes! the Strand," I repeated tenderly, "the Strand--at night!"

"Indeed, yes! what is more beautiful in the whole world?" she joined in

ardently.

"The wild torrents of light, the passionate human music, the hansoms,

the white shirts and shawled heads, the theatres--"

"Don't speak of them or you'll make me cry," said Rosalind.

"The little suppers after the theatre--"

"Please don't," she cried, "it is cruel;" and I saw that her eyes were

indeed glistening with tears.

"But, of course," I continued, to give a slight turn aside in our talk,

"it is very wrong of us to have such sophisticated tastes. We ought to

love these lonely hills and meadows far more. The natural man revels in

solitude, and wants no wittier company than birds and flowers.

Wordsworth made a constant companion of a pet daisy. He seldom went

abroad without one or two trotting at his side, and a skylark would

keep Shelley in society for a week."

"But they were poets," retorted Rosalind; "you don't call poets

natural. Why, they are the most unnatural of men. The natural person

loves the society of his kind, whereas the poet runs away from it."

"Well, of course, there are poets and poets, poets sociable and poets

very unsociable. Wordsworth made the country, but Lamb made the town;

and there is quite a band of poets nowadays who share his distaste for

mountains, and take London for their muse. If you'll promise not to cry

again, I'll recall some lines by a friend of mine which were written

for town-tastes like ours. But perhaps you know them?"

It will gratify my friend to learn that Rosalind had the verses I refer

to by heart, and started off humming,--

"Ah, London, London, our delight,

Great flower that opens but at night,

Great city of the midnight sun,

Whose day begins when day is done...

Like dragon-flies the hansoms hover

With jewelled eyes to catch the lover;"

and so on, with a gusto of appreciation that must have been very

gratifying to the author had he been present.

Thus perceiving a taste for a certain modern style of poetry in my

companion, I bethought me of a poem which I had written on the roadside

a few days before, and which, I confess, I was eager to confide to some

sympathetic ear. I was diffident of quoting it after such lines as

Rosalind had recalled, but by the time we had reached our coffee, I

plucked up courage to mention it. I had, however, the less diffidence

in that it would have a technical interest for her, being indeed no

other than a song of cycling a deux which had been suggested by one of

those alarmist danger-posts always placed at the top of the pleasantest

hills, sternly warning the cyclist that "this hill is dangerous,"--just

as in life there is always some minatory notice-board frowning upon us

in the direction we most desire to take.

But I omit further preface and produce the poem:--

"This hill is dangerous," I said,

As we rode on together

Through sunny miles and sunny miles

Of Surrey heather;

"This hill is dangerous--don't you think

We'd better walk it?"

"Or sit it out--more danger still!"

She smiled--"and talk it?"

"Are you afraid?" she turned and cried

So very brave and sweetly,--

Oh that brave smile that takes the heart

Captive completely!

"Afraid?" I said, deep in her eyes

Recklessly gazing;

"For you I'd ride into the sun

And die all blazing!"

"I never yet saw hill," I said,

"And was afraid to take it;

I never saw a foolish law,

And feared to break it.

Who fears a hill or fears a law

With you beside him?

Who fears, dear star, the wildest sea

With you to guide him?"

Then came the hill--a cataract,

A dusty swirl, before us;

The world stood round--a village world--

In fearful chorus.

Sure to be killed! Sure to be killed!

O fools, how dare ye!

Sure to be killed--and serve us right!

Ah! love, but were we?

The hill was dangerous, we knew,

And knew that we must take it;

The law was strong,--that too we knew

Yet dared to break it.

And those who'd fain know how we fared

Follow and find us,

Safe on the hills, with all the world

Safely behind us.

Rosalind smiled as I finished. "I'm afraid," she said, "the song is as

dangerous as the hill. Of course it has more meanings than one?"

"Perhaps two," I assented.

"And the second more important than the first."

"Maybe," I smiled; "however, I hope you like it."

Rosalind was very reassuring on that point, and then said musingly, as

if half to herself, "But that hill is dangerous, you know; and young

people would do well to pay attention to the danger-board!"

Her voice shook as she spoke the last two or three words, and I looked

at her in some surprise.

"Yes, I know it," she added, her voice quite broken; and before I

realised what was happening, there she was with her beautiful head down

upon the table, and sobbing as if her heart would break.

"Forgive me for being such a fool," she managed to wring out.

Now, usually I never interrupt a woman when she is crying, as it only

encourages her to continue; but there was something so unexpected and

mysterious about Rosalind's sudden outburst that it was impossible not

to be sympathetic. I endeavoured to soothe her with such words as

seemed fitting; and as she was crying because she really couldn't help

it, she didn't cry long.

These tears proved, what certain indications of manner had already

hinted to me, that Rosalind was more artless than I had at first

supposed. She was a woman of the world, in that she lived in it, and

loved its gaieties, but there was still in her heart no little of the

child, as is there not in the hearts of all good women--or men?

And this you will realise when I tell you the funny little story which

she presently confided to me as the cause of her tears.

CHAPTER IV

MARRIAGE A LA MODE

For Rosalind was no victim of the monster man, as you may have supposed

her, no illustration of his immemorial perfidies. On the contrary, she

was one half of a very happy marriage, and, in a sense, her sufferings

at the moment were merely theoretical, if one may so describe the

sufferings caused by a theory. But no doubt the reader would prefer a

little straightforward narrative.

Well, Rosalind and Orlando, as we may as well call them, are two newly

married young people who've been married, say, a year, and who find

themselves at the end of it loving each other more than at the

beginning,--for you are to suppose two of the tenderest, most devoted

hearts that ever beat as one. However, they are young people of the

introspective modern type, with a new theory for everything.

About marriage and the law of happiness in that blessed estate, they

boasted the latest philosophical patents. To them, among other

matters, the secret of unhappy marriages was as simple as can be. It

was in nothing more or less than the excessive "familiarity" of

ordinary married life, and the lack of personal freedom allowed both

parties to the contract. Thus love grew commonplace, and the unhappy

ones to weary of each other by excessive and enforced association.

This was obvious enough, and the remedy as obvious,--separate bedrooms,

and a month's holiday in each year to be spent apart (notoriously all

people of quality had separate bedrooms, and see how happy they were!).

These and similar other safeguards of individual liberty they had in

mock-earnest drawn up and signed on their marriage eve, as a sort of

supplemental wedding service.

It would not be seemly to inquire how far certain of these conditions

had been kept,--how often, for example, Orlando's little hermit's bed

had really needed remaking during those twelve months! Answer, ye

birds of the air that lie in your snug nests, so close, so close,

through the tender summer nights, and maybe with two or three little

ones besides,--unless, indeed, ye too have felt the influence of the

Zeit-geist, and have taken to sleeping in separate nests.

The condition with which alone we have here to concern ourselves was

one which provided that each of the two lovers, hereafter to be called

the husband of the one part and the wife of the other part, solemnly

bound themselves to spend one calendar month of each year out of each

other's society, with full and free liberty to spend it wheresoever,

with whomsoever, and howsoever they pleased; and that this condition

was rigidly to be maintained, whatever immediate effort it might cost,

as the parties thereto believed that so would their love the more

likely maintain an enduring tenderness and an unwearied freshness. And

to this did Orlando and his Rosalind set their hands and hearts and

lips.

Now, wisdom is all very well till the time comes to apply it; and as

that month of June approached in which they had designed to give their

love a holiday, they had found their courage growing less and less.

Their love didn't want a holiday; and when Orlando had referred to the

matter during the early days of May, Rosalind had burst into tears, and

begged him to reconsider a condition which they had made before they

really knew what wedded love was. But Orlando, though in tears himself

(so Rosalind averred), had a higher sense of their duty to their ideal,

and was able, though in tears, to beg her look beyond the moment, and

realise what a little self-denial now might mean in the years to come.

They hadn't kept any other of their resolutions,--thus Rosalind let it

out!--this must be kept.

And thus it had come about that Orlando had gone off for his month's

holiday with a charming girl, who, with the cynic, will no doubt

account for his stern adherence to duty; and Rosalind had gone off for

hers with a pretty young man whom she'd liked well enough to go to the

theatre and to supper with,--a young man who was indeed a dear friend,

and a vivacious, sympathetic companion, but whom, as a substitute for

Orlando, she immediately began to hate. Such is the female heart!

The upshot of the experiment, so far as she was concerned, was that she

had quarrelled with her companion, and had gone off in search of her

husband, on which search she was embarked at the moment of my

encountering her. The tears, therefore,--that is, the first lot of

tears by the roadside,--had not been all on account of the injured

bicycle, you see.

Now the question was, How had Orlando been getting on? I had an

intuition that in his case the experiment had proved more enjoyable,

but I am not one to break the bruised reed by making such a suggestion.

On the contrary, I expressed my firm conviction that Orlando was

probably even more miserable than she was.

"Do you really think so?" she asked eagerly, her poor miserable face

growing bright a moment with hope and gratitude.

"Undoubtedly," I answered sententiously. "To put the case on the most

general principles, apart from Orlando's great love for you, it is an

eternal truth of masculine sentiment that man always longs for the

absent woman."

"Are you quite sure?" asked Rosalind, with an unconvinced half-smile.

"Absolutely."

"I thought," she continued, "that it was just the other way about; that

it was presence and not absence that made the heart of man grow fonder,

and that if a man's best girl, so to say, was away, he was able to make

himself very comfortable with his second-best!"

"In some cases, of course, it's true," I answered, unmoved; "but with a

love like yours and Orlando's, it's quite different."

"Oh, do you really mean it?"

"Certainly I do; and your mistake has been in supposing that an

experiment which no few every-day married couples would be only too

glad to try, was ever meant for two such love-birds as you. Laws and

systems are meant for the unhappy and the untractable, not for people

like you, for whom Love makes its own laws."

"Yes, that is what we used to say; and indeed, we thought that this was

one of love's laws,--this experiment, as you call it."

"But it was quite a mistake," I went on in my character as matrimonial

oracle. "Love never made a law so cruel, a law that would rob true

lovers of each other's society for a whole month in a year, stretching

them on the rack of absence--" There my period broke down, so I began

another less ambitiously planned.

"A whole month in a year! Think what that would mean in a lifetime.

How long do you expect to live and love together? Say another fifty

years at the most. Well, fifty ones are fifty. Fifty months

equal--four twelves are forty-eight and two over--four years and two

months. Yes, out of the short life God allows even for the longest

love you would voluntarily throw away four years and two months!"

This impressive calculation had a great effect on poor Rosalind; and it

is a secondary matter that it and its accompanying wisdom may have less

weight with the reader, as for the moment Rosalind was my one concern.

"But, of course, we have perfect trust in each other," said Rosalind

presently, with charming illogicality.

"No doubt," I said; "but Love, like a good householder (ahem!), does

well not to live too much on trust."