Chapter IV: New Loves for Old (2)

Though Sir Gilbert was a much older man than himself, he had found in him a scholar with mystic tendencies similar to his own, and, when the sons had gone to the wars, Laleham continued to come down to visit the father, and incidentally to pursue the quest of his butterfly. Then he had taken a trip about the world, visiting the tropical haunts of his hobby, which had lasted so long that when again he returned to England it had been three years since he had visited his old friend. Besides, he had once more returned from his pilgrimage without that mystic butterfly which continued still to evade his persevering pursuit. In every part of the world he had sought it, but still, so far as he could hear, the one place in which it might be found was the marshes of Noctorum. So, thinking less of his quest than of his friend, he determined to run down and see what progress Sir Gilbert was making with his great book on the folk-lore of the fens--for fairies and hobgoblins were Sir Gilbert’s particular substitute for idleness. He found Sir Gilbert boyishly happy over his recent discovery of an indigenous and heretofore unrecorded variant of the story of Cupid and Psyche.

“Think of it!” exclaimed the old scholar, “here in this land of clods and pitchforks, uncouth in form indeed, but still the old dainty fancy, the old Greek fairy tale in homespun. Isn’t it strange how these frail shapes of story, frail as moonbeams, are still hardy enough to make their way from land to land, and take on the disguises of the peoples, rough or gentle, among which, like a thistledown, they happen to settle.”

“Yes!” answered Laleham smiling, “they are like the butterflies of the imagination--frail but indestructible.”

Sir Gilbert laughed at this reminder that there were other hobbies than his own.

“Forgive me,” he said, “I am afraid I am selfishly riding my own hobby; and in my Psyche, forgetting yours. Tell me about your Psyche.”

Laleham shook his head, and proceeded to tell of his varying fortune in foreign lands, and how he had come back with all the butterflies of the world, except the one butterfly. Sir Gilbert gave him the sympathy of a fellow collector.

“But surely,” he said, “you haven’t given up the chase--at your age.”

“Almost,” answered Laleham, “I am too old. The wildest enthusiasm--for butterflies--can hardly outlive thirty. I think I shall take up some serious study--like yours.”

Both the friends laughed, and Sir Gilbert said:

“But, seriously, I have heard of your butterfly having been seen within a mile or two from here no longer than a week ago. There were two fellows staying at the inn last month who called to see me, enthusiasts like yourself, and they were positive that they had seen it over by the Black Ditches--of course, you know the place. But they missed it, all the same.”

“The worst of the beast is,” said Laleham, “that you cannot be sure, so to say, that it is itself till you have it in your hand. The other brute is so like it.”

“Yet you were once sure enough, dear friend,” answered Sir Gilbert.

“True,” said Laleham sadly, “but who knows, I may have been wrong.”

“Anyhow, here you are,” said Sir Gilbert, “in the best season of the year. You never had a better opportunity. If you don’t catch your butterfly this time, you never will. This is your home, you know, and you know too that I shall treat you with no ceremony. You can go about your butterflies, and I shall go about my fairies, and if I seem to neglect you, Mariana will make up for me.”

Mariana entered at that moment, and stood by her father. When Laleham had last seen her hers were still those reluctant feet of maidenhood of which the great poet has sung. Now she was a woman; a very young woman, it is true, but a woman. That grave beauty of the melancholy fens, of which I have spoken as having “passed into her face,” was there now in a still more decided presence. Her hair was black as English hair seldom is, her skin was an exquisite olive, and her eyes were like those strange pools which flashed darkly in the evening light outside the library window. Her black eyelashes were so thick that you could not help thinking of them as rushes guarding the secrecies of the strange mirrors inside. And, not externally only did she seem the very embodiment of her surroundings, but her spirit seemed also to have absorbed their passionate silence. Perhaps no landscape says so little, and is yet so richly eloquent, as the elegiac landscape of a fen country. How beyond all speech is its silence, how beyond the shallow spectacular changes of showier natural effects is its solemn art of imperturbability. Mariana was strangely silent--but indeed not speechless. The lesson of the nature about her seemed to have entered into her whole being, the lesson that such silence must only be broken by very significant, very beautiful, words--as though silence were an exquisite unsullied sky only now and again to be interrupted by stars.

Laleham had observed her but little on his former visits, for, as I have said, she was hardly more than a child; and, besides, was it the cloud of his butterflies, or was it some other unforgotten face that veiled for him the faces of women, so that all these years he had passed unscathed through all the battalions of beautiful faces. Be that as it may, it was on the occasion of this visit that he saw the beauty of Mariana Fanton for the first time, and, as the days went by, he found that beauty making an even stronger appeal to his imagination, which, as always is the case with such natures as his, lay very near to his heart. As Sir Gilbert had ‘threatened,’ it was on Mariana that he had to rely for companionship on those days when he was not out alone with his net across the fens; for Sir Gilbert was so hard at work upon a paper for the Folk-Lore Society on his recent discovery that he could only spare his evenings for his friend. As his visit lengthened into weeks, the days he spent alone grew less, and the days he spent with Mariana grew more, and the butterfly remained uncaught. Sometimes Mariana would go hunting it with him, but oftener they would go out on long aimless walks together, saying little, but always coming nearer and nearer through that language of expressive silence which both had been born to speak and understand. When Mariana did speak, what a heavenly animation swept its sunlight over her face; but her silence, as someone has said of her, was like a sky full of stars.

Laleham’s stay at Noctorum was nearing its end. So far as his old friend was concerned, he could, of course, have stayed there forever.

“If I were you,” said Sir Gilbert, “I would not leave this place till I had caught it.”

“The continued presence of such a determined huntsman might frighten it from the district altogether,” answered Laleham. “I will use stratagem, let it rest in security a while, and come again.”

It was the hour after dinner when the friends usually smoked their pipes together, and Sir Gilbert was genuinely sorry to lose his friend, but the proofs of his pamphlet on Cupid and Psyche had just arrived by the evening post, and his fingers were itching to open them. Besides, Laleham was to be with them yet a day or two longer. Presently Sir Gilbert’s proofs became irresistible, and turning to his friend he said:

“Do you mind, old man, but I am just dying to look at these silly proofs of mine--pride of authorship, you know--suppose you look up Mariana--she is out there, I see, on the veranda--and talk astronomy to her for a few minutes. Then we can have a talk....”

“With all my heart,” said Laleham, laughing as he opened the door on to the starlit veranda, and left the old man to himself.

As Laleham took a chair by Mariana’s side, her recognition of his presence would have been imperceptible to anyone who did not understand her language of silence. Her eyes remained fixed on the stars, and he sat down near her without attempting even to join her reverie. He was well content to look at her and know that she was near. Presently, without turning her head, with her eyes still among the stars, she said in her curious deep sudden voice:

“You have not found your butterfly?”

“No.”

“Do you still hope to find it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever seen it?”

“Yes.”

“How often?”

“Twice.”

“Twice!” she exclaimed, at length turning and looking at him. “Twice! and you lost it both times....”

Before he could answer, she raised her hand to the stars. “Look!” she said. “I sometimes think that the soul is like a butterfly, and that it goes from star to star, as a butterfly goes from flower to flower....” then, with another of her sudden, and often disconcerting, transitions, she turned again to Laleham:

“Will you tell me about those times you saw your butterfly?” she said.

“It is an odd story,” Laleham began, “and I am afraid you may think me superstitious. But you mustn’t think that it accounts for my butterflies, for I have loved them, for some unexplained reason, since I was a boy....”

“Perhaps,” he added, “some tastes are prophetic;” and then he went on. “The first time I saw it was one morning about eight years ago. I was hunting it among country similar to this, and suddenly it rose out of a bed of reeds. It was so near me that I made sure it was mine, so sure that I was in no haste to strike with my net, but watched it and studied it a while, was quite carelessly certain of it in fact ... and then, just as I held my net ready to capture it, away it went on the wind, not quite out of sight, but always keeping a coquettish distance, near enough to lure me on, far enough away to escape....”

“It rather served you right for being so sure, didn’t it?” said Mariana.

“You see I was only a young butterfly-hunter then,” said Laleham, “I have learnt wisdom since.”

“Go on,” prompted Mariana.

“Well, it led me on in this way for quite two hours, till we came to the end of the wild country, and suddenly dropped down into a small village. You will laugh at what follows, though it had its sad side for me. We had come on the village at the end where there stands the parish church....”

“I know the village,” said Mariana, absently, as if she were saying nothing. Laleham shot a troubled look at her, but continued.

“The churchyard was filled with a throng of people gaily dressed as for a wedding. What should my butterfly do but dash amongst them, and I after it, for it was too precious to lose. Soaring over the heads of the crowd, it dashed for shelter into the church, and I again after it, forgetting all but my butterfly--and there were two young people kneeling at the altar. My abrupt entrance naturally made a sensation which brought me to myself, and, dropping on my knees in a pew, I watched my butterfly flicker up the aisle till it settled itself on the clasped hands of the kneeling bride. In surprise, she turned her head, and....”

“Well?”

“I saw her face.”

“And the butterfly?”

“Escaped by the belfry.”

“Quite a fairy tale,” said Mariana, after a pause. “Now tell me about the second time you saw your butterfly.”

“I hardly care to speak of it, Mariana--unless you care very much to hear.”

“Would you rather not speak of it?”

“I would speak of it to no one but you.”

“Do you wish to speak?”

“I do. Do you wish me to speak?”

“Yes, speak of it--to me,” said Mariana gently.

“It is a very short story, Mariana--almost the same, excepting the end; for, three years afterwards, once more my butterfly rose out of the reeds in almost exactly the same spot, and once more it coquetted with me for miles, and once more it dashed into that little churchyard ... but this time it did not vanish into the church, but went from grave to grave, as you say the soul perhaps wanders from star to star, and presently it stopped at one of the graves. I thought that now it was surely mine, and raised my net to strike, but, as I did so, I read a name upon a stone....”

In the darkness Mariana reached out her hand and took Laleham’s, and, after a silence, she said:

“I know the grave,” and, after another silence, she said:

“I have heard that she was very beautiful.”

Then the two sat on, saying no more in the starlight, and all the while, though neither knew of it till they returned to the library lamps, a little blue butterfly had been hiding in Mariana’s hair.

MY CASTLE IN SPAIN

Perhaps the dream which a man gives up hardest is that of his ideal home, the dream-house builded just as he and Love would build it to dwell in together--had he and Love the money!--the dream-house which in every sensitive particular would be the appropriate habitation of his spirit; in short his castle-in-Spain. Castles in Spain are not necessarily expensive. A cottage in Spain is just as good as a castle if you think so; and if you know the secret you can make a castle in Spain out of one-room-and-bath in a New York apartment house. I myself have never done it. I have never been happy enough for that.

No, I am afraid I should need money for my castle-in Spain. It would cost a fortune to build and many fortunes to run. For it would be a real castle, and real castles have always been expensive, even in feudal days when labour was somewhat cheaper than it is now. I want no cloud-castle built of moonbeams and rainbows for me and Love to dwell in, but a real earth-castle like that of an old French troubadour, with walls 34 feet thick--to keep Love safe from other troubadours--a donjon 190 feet high and 100 feet in diameter, and other massive visible particulars. I see no reason why it should not be literally situated in Spain somewhere at the eastern end of the Pyrenees, but I confess a softness for Provence, perhaps on account of the name. A situation almost equally Spanish might be found for it there on a toppling crag, somewhere up among those strange rock villages of the Maritime Alps, filled with Moorish ghosts, in the nearness all chasms and parched shadows and the thirsty sun, in the distance forests of cork-oak, silhouettes of eucalyptus and cypress. Then olives and olives and the Mediterranean Sea.

I choose Provence because the situation of one’s castle-in-Spain is almost more important than the castle itself. Environment and association count for so much in the matter of one’s dream-house. You may build the most wonderful castle-in-Spain, but it will go for nothing, seem indeed almost ridiculous, a parody, if you build it in some absurdly wrong place. No offence to Omaha, no offence to Liverpool, no offence to Glasgow--but the most beautiful castle-in-Spain would be wasted in any one of those animated capitals of industry. As the setting of a jewel is hardly less important than the jewel itself, so is the situation of one’s castle-in-Spain. Stonehenge or Westminster Abbey would be as much at home transported, numbered stone by stone, to Herald Square or Michigan Avenue--and American capital has dreamed some such dream--as one’s castle-in-Spain built in any one of those, or such, cities as I have mentioned.

As Keats has written:

“.... the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple’s self.”

One indeed might add that without the trees there is no temple. I use trees here as symbolic of environment, but, literally speaking, it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of trees to one’s castle-in-Spain. Ancient trees have always brought distinction to their possessors. It is the old park and the avenues--the setting--that give many an English house its imposing significance. To cut down the trees would be like shaving the head of a beautiful woman.

So my castle-in-Spain must be almost lost amid miles of mysterious trees, surrounded on every side by haunted forests, the home of wood-demons and the wild boar and the hunting horn and the bearded robber and the maiden in distress; and, like lanes of silver trumpets, six avenues of lime-trees shall sweep up to its six drawbridges in the air.

Of course my castle would be fortified against a world which would naturally wish to rob me of my happiness. It would be armed to the teeth with quick-firing guns of the latest pattern, and these would be manned by Japanese gunners of the quaintest size and shape. I may say--in parenthesis--that my valets would not be Japanese, but English. Each nation has its own special gift to give us, and England still remains famous for its valets. I should need volumes in folio adequately to describe my castle-in-Spain, and at least three of them would be needed to tell about my garden. Ah, what a garden there would be in my castle-in-Spain! Perhaps, aside from other fancies which I should expect to indulge, there would only be three on which I would really set my heart:

(1) A garden.
(2) A library.
(3) A private chapel.

I should not hope, nor even could I wish, to be original in my garden; for man’s early desire of gardens had developed into a learned convoluted art even before Solomon wrote:

“A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a
fountain sealed. My plants are an orchard of pomegranate, with
pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard, spikenard with saffron;
calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and
aloes, with all the chief spices: A fountain of gardens, a well of
living waters, and streams from Lebanon. Awake, O north wind; and
come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may
flow out.”

My garden would, first of all, be made of dew; next of grass, and then of very old trees. Oak-trees, poplars and beeches, would dominate my garden; and, as for the other trees, they would all be trees of veritably _living_ green--chestnuts and sycamores and willows. There would be no so-called _ever_-greens in my garden, trees that are ever-green because they are never-green--except one: the only ever-green tree in my garden would be the laurel. Nothing but freshness and sap and leafage of transparent emerald would be trees in my garden; and the flowers of my garden would be all spring and summer: snowdrop, crocus and daffodil; violet, rose and honeysuckle. There would be no autumn in my garden. September with its paper flowers, chrysanthemum and dahlia, and all its knife-scented funereal blooms, must not walk in my garden; nor shall the white feet of winter tread down my shining lawns.

Here are but, so to say, the first principles of my garden. As I said, it would take volumes in folio adequately to tell about my garden. But this much further I may say: that among the many divisions and sub-divisions of my garden, there would be three. First there would be my star-garden. In this would be planted flowers that bloom only under the influence of the stars; flowers that open at the setting of the moon, and close with the rising of the morning star. For these flowers I should build a high hanging garden, dizzily thrust up into the morning sky, on the summit of some cloud-encircled turret of my castle. The flowers in this garden would be whiter than snow and purer than my first love.

Then there would be my sun-garden. In this would be planted the warm-breathed, earth-coloured flowers, the yellow and scarlet flowers, the purple and saffron, the orange and crimson, all the hot and savage flowers of the sun.

And, again, there would be my moon-garden, a subterranean realm of pale leaves and ghostly flowers, a dim garden of excavated terraces descending beneath the dungeoned foundations of my castle, irrigated from its green-mantled moat, and fed through slanting shafts of hollowed stone--with the surreptitious light of the moon.

I should allow but few birds in my garden. The eagle should nest, if it would, on some crag-like corner of my battlements, and the hawk would be welcome to soar and swoop about my towers. But I would have no nightingales in my gardens, those birds of make-believe melodious song, those posturing troubadours of the air. Only the simple sincere-throated birds should sing in my garden: the thrush and the black-bird and the robin; the starling with his simple-minded whistle, the curlew with his lost broken-hearted call; and, at twilight, the nightjar should make his rugged music amid the fern. And the swallow and the sparrow should be made welcome in every corner of my dominions. Generally, I should encourage the quiet birds, the working, building, fighting birds, the birds that sing no more than is necessary, or natural.

Everywhere in my garden shall be heard the sound of running water, brooks making their way unseen under secret boughs, and fountains whispering to themselves on solitary lawns. There shall be such a rustle of fresh boughs in my garden, and such a ripple of streams, that you shall hardly be able to tell whether the leaves or the brooks are talking. Also there shall be pools hidden away in sanctuaries of the garden, pools sacred with water-lilies, and visited only of the dragon-fly and the lonely bee.

And there shall be other ponds in my garden, green mossy ponds as old as the foundations of my castle, fish-ponds, the ancestral home of monastic carp, strange ancient fish with wise ugly faces, and gold collars round their necks, telling how some old king caught them and threw them back again into the pond two hundred years ago.

My library would, first of all, be vast and multitudinous, a mysterious collection of books without beginning and without end, a romantic infinitude of learning and fragrance of old leather. It should go uncatalogued as the wilderness. No human index in the form of a librarian should tame it into prim classification. It should grow wild as the virgin forest, and unlooked-for adventures of the soul should lie in ambush in every alcove and lonely backwater of its haunted shelves. No less than a thousand rooms, big and little, winding in and out, wandering here and there, would be needed to contain it. There are many book-lovers who will hardly understand this Gargantuan passion for a huge library. A small and sensitively chosen collection of books is their ideal. For me, however, a few books are no more a library than a few trees are a forest, or a few gallons of water an ocean. A library is the firmament of the soul, and each particular star gains in significance from being a shining unit in all that celestial mystery.

While I should aim to have a library coextensive with the mental history of humanity, from the clay books of Babylon to the latest French novel, the learned rooms I should oftenest loiter in would be those rainbowed with the gold and purple of monkish manuscripts, the rooms mysterious with grimoires and herbals and ancient treatises on the occult sciences, the rooms of black-letter and the types of Aldus and those other first printers through whose magic Virgil and Catullus and Horace rose again from the grave. And I would have my library built with innumerable secret chambers and sliding panels and hidden passages--so that, whenever it was my desire, I could shut myself up with a favourite author for a week at a time, and domestic search for me be quite in vain.

My chapel will need few words. It would be merely a crucifix, silence, and sunlight.

I said that there would be no librarian in my library, similarly there would be no gardener in my garden, no priest in my chapel. The places of the soul need no custodians. The worshippers are the priests.

Of course, I should expect to indulge many an idle fancy and picturesque whim in my castle-in-Spain but they would take too long to tell of. Here I have but set down what I conceive to be the reasonable necessities of a dream. I have said nothing, for example, of my treasure-caves beneath the castle, vaults lit by enormous carbuncles, and filled with countless coffers of bronze, overflowing with ancient coins and precious stones. Nor have I spoken of my paradise of butterflies, a great enclosed garden where I would rear all the flower-winged things that, like illuminated letters or the painted souls of Japanese girls, flit and flicker through the sunlit world. Nor have I told of my palace of serpents, where python and cobra and all the ringed, gliding, spangled creatures that hiss and sting should coil about tropical trees, and sleep their mysterious sleep, or fall down like lightning on their paralysed prey. Then, too, I might tell of my great aquarium where, at ease in my luxurious diving-bell, I would lie all day watching iridescent fishes all flounced and frilled with rainbows, and slow-moving elemental shapes that brood eternally at the bottom of the sea.

A hundred other such fancies I shall hope to indulge in my castle-in-Spain, and one more I must not forget, for no castle would be complete without it--the oubliette. Into that I would fling all my sorrows and cares, and all--unwelcome visitors.

ONCE-UPON-A-TIME

When I was a child there grew at the back of my father’s house a deep wood. It may not have been so vast in extent as it seemed to me; but to my childish imagination it seemed boundless, endless, dark and dense, and infinitely mysterious. It frightened me, yet the fear was full of fascination. Delicious was the thrill with which sometimes in my lonely rambles I would venture a few steps further within its haunted recesses than I was wont to have courage for. As a rule, I restricted my explorations to its sunlit margins, and, so soon as I found myself among the shadows, would fly back with a beating heart into the sun.

Never, said I to my childish heart, had the foot of man penetrated into these solitudes, on which lay so deep a spell of beautiful terror; and, so far back as I can remember, this wood was the wonderland which I peopled with all the fancies of a child’s imagination. All the heroes and heroines of my nursery-books lived somewhere in my wood. It was the scene of all their adventures, and, like a stage, was capable of supplying an ever-varying _mise-en-scéne_. Sometimes when the moon was up I thought of it as peopled by fairies, and was certain that, if only the hardihood were mine to dare its fantastic shadows, I should surely come upon a fairy revel in full swing. When in the daytime I came upon rings of toadstools with their quaint kobold hats, I knew that they were trolls who took that form during the day, and that if only I were to hide behind a tree and wait for night, I would see them suddenly, at the first touch of the wand of the moon, waken up as if nothing had happened, and once more set their merry wheels a-spinning. But then there was the old witch with the red hood to fear, and the ogre with the six heads, not to speak of the wolves and bears and various other wild beasts that roamed the woods after dark. Not only wolves--but were-wolves too!

As I grew older, I grew braver, and, persuading myself that I was one of those who bore a charmed life, I found courage to push my explorations further and further into the interior. Thus I became the discoverer of glades and dingles exquisitely lonely with sunshine and haunted flowers, brooding solitudes of silent fern, hidden springs brimming up through the hushed moss, and little rivers dripping from rock to rock in the stillness, like the sound of falling pearls.

But the spell over the wood was above all the spell of beauty, the spell of a breathless enchantment, a spell so deep that the wild-rose growing there seemed other than the wild-rose that grew outside, seemed indeed enchanted, and the very blackberries growing on the great cages of bramble, humming with bees and flickering with butterflies, seemed a magic fruit--which I ate with a beautiful fear that I should be changed into a milk-white fawn, or suddenly find myself a little silver fish in the stream yonder, with the Princess’s lost wedding ring in my inside.

The Princess! Why was it that almost from the first I associated the wood with a beautiful princess? I seemed always to be expecting her at some turning of the green pathways, riding upon a white palfrey. Of course, she would be riding upon a white palfrey. Or, perhaps I should come upon her suddenly in one of the sunny openings of the wood, combing her black hair with a golden comb. Or, perhaps she was dead, and this wild-rose was growing up out of her pure wild heart. I made up many stories about her, but this was the story that took strongest hold of my fancy--that she had lost her way in the wood, and at last, worn out with weariness and hunger, had lain her down and died--just here where this rose-bush had drawn its fragrance from her last sweet breath, and its bloom from her fading cheek. I used to sit for hours by the rose-bush, and picture her lying beneath with her eyes closed and a gold crown upon her head, and at morning when the roses were filled with dew, I would say to myself: “O the beautiful Princess! She has been weeping in the night.” And then I would drink her tears out of the little pearl cups of the rose; but I was careful never to mar the tender petals, lest the Princess should feel the pain of it down in the aromatic mould.

One day, however, my fancy took another turn, and I said to myself that perchance if I were to pluck one of her roses, the Princess would wake from her enchanted sleep, and stand before me with her strange death-sleepy eyes, and ask me the way back to her lost castle. So one morning when the roses were more than usually drenched with the tears of the Princess, I took heart and plucked the most beautiful rose, saying as I plucked it: “Arise, little Princess and I will take you back to your castle.” Then I waited, and presently I seemed to hear a sigh of happiness, like a spring zephyr, just behind me. I turned, and there stood a maiden with black hair, and eyes the colour of which I could not rightly discern, because they seemed filled with moonlight.

“Are you the Princess?” I asked.

“Yes!” she answered, “I am the Princess, and my name is Once-Upon-a-Time.”

“Beautiful Princess,” I said, “may I take you back to your castle?”

“Are you sure you know the way, little man?” she said, “for I have been asleep so long that I have quite forgotten it.”

“O yes!” I answered eagerly, though really I was far from sure--but I knew that I had friends in the wood on whom I could rely, if by chance I took the wrong turning. So, “O yes!” I answered, “I have in my wanderings passed by your castle many a time. It stands high among the rocks in the middle of the wood, so high among the summer clouds that it makes one dizzy to look up at it, with its donjons and keeps and draw-bridges and battlements, glittering with men-at-arms, and here and there, blowing loose among the stone towers, the bright hair of some beautiful waiting-woman, watching the dark avenues of the woods for the returning huntsmen, and one loved face among the merry horns. All around the castle grow the oldest trees of the wood, very close and dark, and seeming to touch the sky; and thereabout are grim rocks, and hollow caves haunted by dragons and many another evil thing. In one of these a giant lives, so terrible that the bravest knights have gone up against him--only to leave their bones to whiten at the mouth of his cave. And by the castle walls runs an enchanted river, in which live beautiful water-witches, that sing in the moonlight, and draw the lonely home-returning knight down into their watery bowers. In the castle itself is one tower loftier than all the rest, with windows on every side, through which you can see, as in a magic glass, the whole wide earth, with its cities and its roads and all its hidden places. And there, all day long, sits an aged wizard listening to the world, and weaving his spells----”

“Yes!” said the Princess, perhaps a little impatient at my long description. “That is my castle. But are you quite sure that you know the way?”

At that moment there came and perched upon a bough close by one of those friends, on whom, as I said, I was relying to help me out if I should lose my way. It was a Blue-Bird, with which I had become well-acquainted in my rambles in the wood.

“Wait a moment, Princess,” I said. “To make quite sure, I will consult this friend of mine here.”

Now I must explain that the Blue-Bird, being himself a singer, it is necessary to address him in song. Plain prose he is quite unable to understand. So, if I had said: “Blue-Bird, please tell me the way to the Castle of Princess Once-Upon-a-Time,” he would have shaken his head like a deaf man. Therefore, I spoke to him in this fashion instead; or, rather, I should say that this is the grown-up meaning of what I sang--for the actual song I have forgotten:

O Blue-Bird, sing the hidden way
To Once-Upon-a-Time;
We know you cannot speak in prose,
So answer us in rhyme.

Blue-Bird of Dreams, alone you know
The way the dream-folk take,
O tell us the right way to go,
Before, Blue-Bird, we wake.

Dreamers, we seek the way of dreams--
O you that know so well
Each twist and turning of the way,
Blue-Bird, will you not tell?

Blue-Bird, if aught that we possess
Has any worth to you,
O take it, Blue-Bird, here it is,
But tell us what to do.

The way of dreams, the wonder-way,
Wonder and winding streams,
Blue-Bird, two dreamers ask of you
To point the way of dreams.

The way is dangerous, we know,
And much beset with dread;
But then, it is the only way,
Blue-Bird, we care to tread.

For this we know: no fact or fear
Of the dream-world we seek
Can be so terrible to us
As those that, week by week,
Day in, day out, bleach and benumb
The sacred self sincere,
The death domestic who hath faced
Hath faced the whole of fear.

We are so fearful we may lose
The thrill and scent of things,
Forget the way to smell a flower,
Hear a bird when it sings.

O Blue-Bird, sing us on our way
Beyond the world that seems--
Two dreamers who have lost their way--
Back to the world of dreams.

To this the Blue-Bird made answer in a song, which, as before, I translate into grown-up language:

The way of dreams--the Blue-Bird sang--
Is never hard to find,
So soon as you have really left
The grown-up world behind.

So soon as you have come to see
That what the others call
Realities, for such as you,
Are never real at all;

So soon as you have ceased to care
What others say or do,
And understand that they are they,
And you--thank God!--are you.

Then is your foot upon the path,
Your journey well begun,
And safe the road for you to tread,
Moonlight, or morning sun.

Pence of this world you shall not take,
Yea! no provision heed;
A wild-rose gathered in the wood
Will buy you all you need.

Hungry, the birds shall bring you food,
The bees their honey bring;
And, thirsty, you the crystal drink
Of an immortal spring.

For sleep, behold how deep and soft
With moss the earth is spread,
And all the trees of all the world
Shall curtain round your bed.

Enchanted journey! that begins
Nowhere and nowhere ends,
Seeking an ever-changing goal,
Nowhither winds and wends.

For destination yonder flower,
For business yonder bird,
Aught better worth the travelling to
I never saw or heard.

O long dream-travel of the soul!
First the green earth to tread--
And still yon other starry track
To travel when you’re dead.

With directions so explicit, it was next to impossible to miss the way. So, with little hesitation, Princess Once-Upon-a-Time and I stepped out through the old wood on the way to her castle. As we went along, she told me many things that I have never forgotten, for all of them have come true; but it is necessary for the reader to be reminded that I was still quite a boy, little more than a child, and was, therefore, too inexperienced to give the proper value to what she told me. This speech of hers particularly has remained with me. She said it as we were nearing the end of our walk together, and the turrets of her castle were coming in sight.

“This is not the last time we shall meet,” she said, “indeed, we shall meet many times. In a sense we shall be always meeting, though you may not recognise me; for you are one of those who are born my subjects. You are one of those for whom there is no Present, no Future. Your life will always be lived as a dream of What-Might-Have-Been, or What-Once-Was. Your happiness will always be--once-upon-a-time! You are of those who are foredoomed to love the shadow of joy, and the dream of love. Nothing real will ever happen to you--for the reason that your experience will be forever haunted by the more beautiful things that might have happened, or once-upon-a-time did happen to more fortunate men. No beauty will ever seem beautiful enough--for your eyes will be always upon Helen of Troy, or Cleopatra of Egypt. However bright your fortune, the will-o’-the-wisp of a brighter fortune will continually flicker before you. Your dream can never be fulfilled--because it is so entirely a dream. All your days you shall be possessed of old stories, and forgotten fancies, and you shall love only the face you shall never find.”

And, as she ended, Princess Once-Upon-a-Time bade me farewell, for by this we had come to the gate of her castle.

I went back home through the wood, with her eyes in my heart, and her words talking to-and-fro in my brain. Twice I lost my way, but the friends on whom I relied did not forsake me. Once it was a beautiful little snake that zig-zagged in front of me till we came to the right turning. And once it was a chipmunk that seemed to know everything. By the time I came to the home-end of the wood, the stars were rising, and the little creatures of the night were creaking and whirring about me. The windows of home were shining with lamps--welcome beacons, no doubt you will say--and yet, strange as it may sound, I was rather sorry to come upon them so easily. They seemed so safe and comfortable--bed at nine and oatmeal porridge in the morning. I knew that so soon as I lifted the latch all mystery was at an end. Even the punishment that would surely fall upon me for my truancy was quite unmysterious--almost as familiar as my porridge. Bed and porridge--and those voices in the wood! O anti-climax of a wonderful day. How truly had the Princess spoken. What was home to me--with its trimmed lamps, and its quiet carpets and its regular hours; what was home compared with those night-voices and the rising moon.

Still, being hungry, I chose the kitchen door, and by a friendly domestic was smuggled away to bed--with a stomach full of pleasant dreams.

Such was my first meeting with Once-Upon-a-Time.

* * * * *

Next time I met her my boyhood was gone by, and my fancy was no longer occupied with the nursery-stories of which the Blue-Bird had sung. Giants and dragons were receding from my imagination, and my fancy, I must confess, was beginning to take a more sentimental turn. The wood still remained my wonderland, but the wonders I sought there were of a different, if scarcely less dangerous, character. By this I had exchanged my nursery-books for the Mort D’Arthur and Spenser and Shakespeare and such like romantic literature; and my head was, therefore, full of the beautiful ladies and noble lovers of old time. I fear there is no denying that I had by this become quite bookish, and you could scarcely have encountered me in the wood or elsewhere, without some poet or some old playbook under my arm. Ah, how happy were those long summer mornings when I would lie upon a green bank, absorbed in some honeyed tale of lovers dead and gone, with the green boughs above sunnily silhouetted on the page. And, just as when a boy the wood had been the scene of all my old nursery-stories, so still it served me as the stage for all my romantic heroes and heroines. It was by turns every wood mentioned in my poets. Of course, it was, first and foremost the Forest of Arden; and one particular glade presided over by a giant oak was easily identified by me as the green courtroom of the banished Duke. As for Jacques, I felt myself his very brother, and replenished the woodland streams with sentimental tears, with no less enjoyment of my own melancholy than he. Rosalind, of course, I was expecting to meet with every moment, and did not fail to inscribe the tree-trunks with sundry rhymes which I hoped might catch her eye. Of these I may have a story to tell later. When the wood was in darker moods, when it wore its tragic mask of thunder and lightning, or put on some sinister witchery of twilight, I would say that Macbeth was on his way to meet the weird sisters. Sometimes, it was “a wood near Athens,” or at others, remembering my Keats, it was that “forest on the shores of Crete,” where Lycius met the snake-woman Lamia. The wood, indeed, was filled with memories of Keats, and if any one in the world knew where the lover of Isabella had been buried by her murderous brothers, surely it was I. I too had discovered the hollow oak where Merlin lay entranced; and many a night, hidden behind the bole of some gigantic beech, had watched Selene bend in a bright crescent above her sleeping shepherd lad.

But it is time I told you of my second meeting with Once-Upon-a-Time. I was lying in a bower of wild-roses which I had purposely trained to resemble the bower in which Nicolete slept the night when she fled from the castle of Beaucaire, as we have all read in the delectable history of the loves of Aucassin and Nicolete. It was the golden end of afternoon, and the shadows were still made half of gold. I was lying face down over my book, when suddenly I seemed aware of a new presence near me--as one is conscious that a bird had alighted on a bough close by, or a flower newly opened. Being accustomed to such companions, I did not look up. I was too deep in the loves of my book folk, and too anxious to finish the long euphuistic chapter before the setting sun should warn me of dinner-time. But presently a low laugh sounded behind me, and the sweetest of voices said:

“Young sir, you are very selfish with that great book there”--I may say that it was a folio _Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney--“it is so big that I am sure that there is room for two pairs of eyes--”

“Come read with me,” said I, looking up and blushing.

“Nay, I am no Francesca,” she answered; “I would not interrupt your reading, young Paolo.”

“But I am tired of reading,” I said, closing the old book.

“The sun will soon be gone,” she answered. “Had you not better finish your chapter?”

“I would rather finish it by moonlight,” I answered, looking into her eyes.

“You are a saucy stripling,” she said. “I should not be surprised if you wrote these lines I just found on yonder tree.”

“What lines?” I asked; for the trees, to tell the truth, were tattooed with my verses.

“These,” she answered.

“O these!” I said, laughing.

“Read them to me,” she said.

“But they are so long,” I hesitated, “no less than a chant-royal--a Prayer to the Queen of Love, in five long verses, and an _envoi_! Are you quite sure you can support so much verse at one sitting--”

“I have not lived at the Court of King Renée for nothing,” she replied, laughing.

“The Court of King Renée!” I exclaimed, looking at her in amazement. “You have really lived there? How wonderful! Tell me about it.”

“Indeed, I have!” she answered, with a mocking expression that seemed strangely at variance with her romantic privileges. “O yes! No doubt it is a wonderful place for you ballad-making gentlemen. There you can strum and hum all day to your heart’s content, and your poor bored mistresses must listen to all your magniloquent nonsense, without a yawn--besides being quite sure that you don’t mean a single word of it. Yes! No woman can live at the Court of King Renée unless she is prepared for poetry morning, noon and night--Yes! and far into the middle of the night--and even, when at last you have fallen asleep again, after being awakened by some long-winded serenade, you are barely off, when, with the first break of dawn, comes another fool beneath your window with his lute and his falsetto singing you an ‘aubade!’ An aubade, indeed! And you at last so beautifully asleep. As you would have your lady love you, dear youth--never sing her an aubade!”

“I marvel that, with such a distaste for song-craft,” I said, “that you should bid me read you a chant-royal, a form so much longer than the aubade----”

“O that is different! It is not made use of to wake beautiful ladies from their sleep at unreasonable hours, but reminds one of dreamy old orchards in summer afternoons, and the drowsy bees and the flitting butterflies, and the sea a flickering riband of blue in the distance. It is like the murmur of a beautiful voice talking low to a beautiful lady in the still summer afternoon. The sound of the voice is soothing, and one pays no heed to the words. Besides,” she ended, laughing, “I like the poet, and that makes a great difference----”

At this I bent low and kissed her hand, and without further parley began to read:

O mighty Queen, our Lady of the fire,
The light, the music, and the honey, all
Blent in one power, one passionate desire
Man calleth Love--‘Sweet Love,’ the blessed call--
I come a sad-eyed suppliant to thy knee,
If thou hast pity, pity grant to me;
If thou hast bounty, here a heart I bring
For all that bounty thirst and hungering;
O Lady, save thy grace, there is no way
For me, I know, but lonely sorrowing--
Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!

I lay in darkness, face down in the mire,
And prayed that darkness might become my pall;
The rabble rout roared round me like some quire
Of filthy animals primordial;
My heart seemed like a toad eternally
Prisoned in stone, ugly and sad as he;
Sweet sunlight seemed a dream, a mythic thing,
And life some beldam’s dotard gossiping:
Then Lady, I bethought me of thy sway,
And hoped again, rose up this prayer to wing--
Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!

Lady, I bear no high resounding lyre
To hymn thy glory, and thy foes appal
With thunderous splendour of my rhythmic ire;
A little lute I lightly touch, and small
My skill thereon: yet, Lady, if it be
I ever woke ear-winning melody,
Twas for thy praise I sought the throbbing string,
Thy praise alone--for all my worshipping
Is at thy shrine, thou knowest, day by day;
Then shall it be in vain my plaint to sing?
Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!

Yea! Why of all men should this sorrow dire
Unto thy servant bitterly befall?
For, Lady, thou dost know I ne’er did tire
Of thy sweet sacraments and ritual;
In morning meadows I have knelt to thee,
In noontide woodlands hearkened hushedly
Thy heart’s warm beat in sacred slumbering,
And in the spaces of the night heart ring
Thy voice in answer to the spheral lay:
Nowneath thy throne my suppliant life I fling--
Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!

I ask no maid for all men to admire,
Mere body’s beauty bath in me no thrall,
And noble birth, and sumptuous attire,
Are gauds I crave not--yet shall have withal,
With a sweet difference, in my heart’s own She,
Whom words speak not, but eyes know when they see,
Beauty beyond all glass’s mirroring,
And dream and glory hers for garmenting;
Her birth--O Lady, wilt thou say me nay?--
Of thine own womb, of thine own nurturing--
Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!

ENVOI

Sweet Queen who sittest at the heart of spring,
My life is thine, barren or blossoming;
Tis thine to flush it gold or leave it grey:
And so unto thy garment’s hem I cling--
Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray.

“I wonder,” I said after a little while, when she had praised my verses, and I sat by her side holding her hands and looking into her strange far-away eyes, “I wonder if you are the answer to my prayer--for so soon as I looked upon you, I gave you all my love, and, if you cannot give me yours in return, my heart will break--”

She shook her head sadly, and her eyes seemed to grow still more far-away, but she made no answer more, for all my entreaties, till at last the day had gone, and the moon was rising through the wood--and she still sitting by my side like a spirit in the spectral light. Once I seemed to hear her moan in the silence, and a shiver passed through her body. Then she turned her eyes upon me--they seemed like wells brimming with stars:

“I love you,” she said, “but we can never be each other’s. My name is Once-Upon-a-Time.”

At this I threw myself at her feet face down in the grass and wept bitterly, and I felt her hand soothingly laid upon my hair, and heard her voice softly bidding me be comforted. And for a long time it was so with us, till methinks I must have fallen asleep of the sweet soothing of her hand on my hair, and the murmur of her sweet voice--for, when I raised my head from the grass, the place was empty and the dawn was stealing with feet of pearl through the wood.

The dawn!

“She feared,” I cried, bitterly, “she feared that I might sing her my aubade!”

But this, of course, was only the lip-cynicism of my sad young heart, stricken with the arrows of that haunted beauty.