Melville Davisson Post

“ What was there about this dark-haired, slender girl that effected this sorcery? On the instant, as at a signal, he felt the pull of some influence as old and resistless as that drawing the earth in its orbit.
He stood that night at the window looking out at the white fairy village beyond the Ardoch, and suddenly he realized that all of his life he had been comparing other women with this girl. He had not understood this. He had not understood that he was comparing them with anyone, but he was. When he had gauged the charming qualities of a woman, he had gauged them against a standard. ”

“ That one ought to follow what one feels? That all the excellent reasons which the Duke of Dorset repeated are to persuade us to accept the commonplace—to be contented with the reality, to abandon our hopes, our aspirations, our dreams? Do you mean to show me how it fares with the poor little mite of a girl, when she is persuaded that happiness is an illusion, and is made to give up the dream of it? How it would have gone with little Cinderella if she had been persuaded to believe there was no fairy godmother, and no prince coming to make her queen. ”

“ The Duke of Dorset looked up at the mountain, from which they had descended. The story of that tragedy, pieced together out of these fragments, thrilled him like a Saga. He could see the army waiting below, idle in its camp, while this death struggle went silently on, in the great, smoky wilderness above it. He followed, with every detail, vividly, these two desperate men, stalking one another with every trick, every cunning, every artifice. With unending patience, their eyes narrowed to slits, their ears straining, noiseless, tireless, ghastly with fatigue ”

“ The girl laughed. "It is a misfortune, Marchesa, from which I am certain to recover."
"Oh," continued the woman, drinking in the girl from her dainty feet, incased in quaint Japanese sandals, to the delicate contour of her bosom, showing above the open collar of the robe. "If only one could be always young, then one could, indeed, be always beautiful; but each year is sold to us, as it goes out it takes with it some bit of our priceless treasure, like evil fairies, stealing sovereigns from a chest, piece by piece, until the treasure is wholly gone." ”

“ And that emotion in the service of the principle of life, its hands hot on him, turned his eyes constantly to what his destiny was losing.
The Duke of Dorset, like every lover with the taste of lotus in his mouth, saw this girl moving in a nimbus. He could not, for his life, fix her with things real. She came forth from haze, from shadow, like those fairy women drawn by painters to represent what the flesh of man eternally longs for. There clung about her that freshness, that mystery, beyond belief, alluring to the egoistic senses of a man. ”

“ There is always back of order some one in authority. There is no distinction between the empire and republic except in a certain matter of disguises. The seizure of so-called liberty, attacking peoples, now and then, is a curious madness; a revolt against the school-master, ending always in the same fashion—disorder, riot, and a new master back at the desk. When this seizure passes, your government will again be able to control its subjects."
"But," said the Duke, "is there not an obligation on a government to see that its people are not underbid in the struggle for life!" ”

“ The morning was drawing on to midday. The sun lay warm on the forest. The soft haze stretched a blue mist through the hollows of the mountains. The peace, the stillness, the serenity of autumn lay through the cabin. The air was soft. No one in the cabin moved. Caroline Childers sat where she had been, fallen apparently into some vague and listless dreaming. Her hands wandered idly among the leaves, breaking a twig to bits, making now and then a foolish, irrelevant gesture. The Duke sat with his elbow on his knee, and his chin resting in the hollow of his hand. ”

“ The Duke saw this, and all that had been illusion, fancy, a state of the mind, emerged into reality. Not on the instant, but in gradual sequence, like one coming in broad day upon events approaching as he had seen them in a dream. It is a moment rare in the experience of life, when the situation dreamed of begins to arrive, in order, in the sun. And especially when these foreseen events appear to demand a decision which one must on the instant hazard. Here was the opportunity, coming in life, which had presented itself so many times to this man in fancy. ”

“ At the word the Marchesa caught Caroline Childers by the arm, and hurried with her through the corridor; the Duke followed. They crossed the south wing of the château; through picture galleries; through corridors, beautified by innumerable human fingers, hung with paintings worth the taxes of a province, decked with bits of wood, bits of ivory, cut curiously by masters who sat over that one work for a lifetime.
Finally they came to a last drawing-room, opening from the south tower of the château into the Italian garden. Its west windows, hung with curtains, looked out over the turf court. ”

“ Presently, when the mule turned the shoulder of the mountain, the girl stopped. At the same time, as upon some signal, the moon arose, pouring its silver light into the wilderness over the green tops of the fir trees and down into the road, etching delicate fantastic shadows on the bed of brown fir needles, filtering in among the vines massed on the wall, and turning the dark earth as by some magic into a soft, shimmering, illumined fairy world. ”

“ I do not know whether man is a spirit or a fungus. I only know that the human will is the one power in the universe, so far as we can find out, that is able to direct the moving of events. Nothing else that exists can make the most trivial thing happen or cease to happen. No imagined god or demon, in all the history of the race has ever influenced the order of events as much as the feeblest human creature in an hour of life. Is it not, then, the height of folly for the human mind, that exists and is potent, to yield the direction of events to gods, that are fabled and powerless? ”

“ On Western mountain ranges, adjacent to the sea, this protean virtue of the weather is sometimes a thing as instantaneous as sorcery. The soft rain is often followed by a stiff, heady breeze, sucked in landward from the ocean. This breeze travels like a broom sweeping its track. Thus, the Marchesa Soderrelli, wrapped in this mist, like a toy in wool, sitting on the floor of the cabin, believed herself present at some enchantment, when suddenly the mist departed, a cool wind blew in on her, and the sun entered. ”

“ There seemed to lie about her, like a vague perfume, something of the compelling lure of fairy women, called up by the fancy; of women dreamed of; of women created by the mind to satisfy every hunger of the senses. The Duke of Dorset could not regard this girl without this vague illusion entering his body like the first faint subtle odors of a garden. The illusion seemed constantly to attend her. The presence of others, commonplace surroundings, did not remove it. ”

“ He was one of those men who, prevented by necessity from living the life that he longed for, sought constantly his experiences of it at second hand. Since he must needs thus follow the sea, he craved, with a consuming hunger, the taste of conversation running on the forest, the plain, the trackless mountain. The Duke of Dorset had lived in all of its richness, the very life which this man, had his destiny been open, would have chosen for himself. ”

“ The Duke followed the river to the park east of the château. Here the road crossed on a single stone span rising gracefully over the black water. A low wall, no higher than a man's knee, inclosed the road over the long arch. Beyond was the forest, changing under the descending light from blue to purple, from purple into blackness—all forest, from the bridge end to the distant tree-laced sky line. Westward the park lifted to the château—a park like those to be found in England; forest trees standing in no order, the undergrowth removed, and the earth carpeted with grass. ”

“ The Duke understood now something of the plan of this American Childers. He had secured, here on the coast, a great tract of wild, primeval forest, and was making of it an estate suited to his fancy. He smiled at the assurance of one assuming a labor so gigantic. Either the man was a dreamer, forgetting the brevity of life, or he was Pharaoh, or more likely yet, a fool. It took three hundred years to make a garden; and yet here was a great wilderness cleaned of its fallen timber and climbing through the mountain was this road—the work surely of no little man steeped in fancies. ”

“ The Marchesa smiled again. "It seems infinitely little, doesn't it? And to a man it would be, but not so to a woman. A woman gets the pleasure of her life out of just such little things. You must not measure us in your big iron bushel. If you take away our little vanities, our flecks of egotism, our bits of fiction, you leave us with nothing by which we can manage to be happy. And so," she continued, lowering her eyes to the cloth and tapping the rim of the plate with her fingers, "if the Duke of Dorset appears in Oban and does not know me, I am conspicuously pilloried." ”

“ The Marchesa looked out at the bay flooded with its soft topaz color.
"It is wonderful," she said. "It makes me believe that somehow, somewhere, our dreams shall come true by the will of God."
The old man's jaw tightened on his answer.
"Who makes the will of God?"
"It is the great moving impulse at the heart of things," said the Marchesa.
"Nonsense," said the old man. "One makes the will of God for himself. The moving impulse is here," and he struck his chest with his clenched hand. "What we dream comes true if we make it come true. ”

“ The wisdom of Nature moving with every trick, every lure, every artifice, to the end that life may not perish from the earth!
The Duke of Dorset turned from the window. He did not realize what this emotion was, but he felt its presence, and for the first time in his life the man had a sense of panic, like one who suddenly finds his senses tricked and his judgment unreliable. He walked across the bedchamber into the dressing room. ”

“ The forest along these summits was open. Cyrus Childers had cleaned them of their fallen timber. They were now great groves of fir trees, shooting up their brown bodies into the sky, and stretching there a green, unending trellis through which the sunlight filtered.
The little party, traveling in these silent places, through this ancient wilderness, would have fitted into the morning of the world. The gigantic old man, the lank, huge mule, and the woman riding on the pack saddle might have come up in some patriarchal decade out of Asia. ”

“ The Marchesa Soderrelli and Cyrus Childers remained on the first terrace beside those exquisite pools rimmed with marble. The Duke and Caroline walked on, moved by that vague wanderlust with which this mysterious dead world seems to inspire every living creature when it moves naked and golden above the earth. They descended slowly from one terrace to another along the paths of the Italian garden to the green tile wall of the Egyptian garden. ”

“ He led him, panting with fatigue, through the vast, silent forests of Lithuania, day after day, in a path cut down like a ditch by the hoofs of a hundred beasts, one following the other—beasts, that the hunter, now himself a beast, running with the rifle in his hand, his hair caked with dirt, his body streaming with sweat, his heart lusting to kill, could never gain on. ”

“ Until then we pursue illusions, will-o'-the-wisps, shining destinies that do not, and cannot arrive; but when we have hardened into life we understand that power is the only source of happiness. We desire to rule, to dominate, to control. We wish to lay hold of the baton of authority; and, look, I have it ready to your hand. I have everything that the Fourteenth Louis had at Versailles, except the name, and what woman past the foolish springtime of life would deny herself such authority as that?"
The Marchesa drew herself up. The muscles in her body stiffened. ”

“ The Duke's impression was established, but his objection was also conclusively met. He returned smiling with the clumsy diplomat and Jezebel to the great road.
All the long, hazy afternoon they descended the mountain, on the brown, noiseless carpet, stretched between its walls of green dashed with scarlet. For the most part the men traveled steadily in silence, as the pioneer and the Indian travel always in the wilderness. Now and then, the mountaineer pointed out something of interest; an eagle rising in circles from some green abyss. ”

“ The man and the girl sprang up. The tense moment was shattered as by a blow. They remained without a word, looking down at the sea. A second rocket arose, and another as the warship added its bit of glitter to the gala night.
They returned slowly, walking side by side, without speaking, toward the Gathering hall. The salt air had wilted the girl's gown. It clung to her slim figure, giving it that appealing sweetness that the damp night gives to the body of a woman. ”

“ In the fantastic gala mood of such a day, one came easily to see, passing here, in life, under his eye, that perfect sample of youth and age—that king and that king's daughter—of which the legend has descended to us through the medium of stories told in the corner by the fire. Those two running through every tale of mystery, coming now, unknown, as if by some enchantment. The girl, dark eyed, dark haired, smiling. Her white cloth gown fitting to her figure ”