Richard Le Gallienne

“ The thought is one that is insupportably lonely, and sometimes she looks at the invalid-chair, at the cup and saucer in which she serves her mother’s simple food, at the medicine-bottle and the measuring-glass, at the knitted shawl which protects the frail old form against draughts, and at all such sad furniture of an invalid’s life, and pictures the day when the homely, affectionate use of all these things will be gone forever; for so poignant is humanity that it sanctifies with endearing associations even objects in themselves so painful and prosaic. ”

“ And great Nature, who gave us our dream, will thus take it back into her bosom; and Miranda’s lovely thoughts will blossom again in anemone and violet, and out of that grave of beautiful words, as spring follows spring, two young oak trees will grow, inextricably entwined in root and branch, and there the birds will sing more sweetly than in any other part of the wood, and there the silence will be like the silence of a temple, and to those who sit and listen there will come soothing messages of the spirit out of the stillness. ”

“ No hand can gather up the withered fallen petals of the Rose of youth.
Petal by petal, Margaret had watched the rose of her youth fading and falling. More than all her sisters, she was endowed with a zest for existence. Her superb physical constitution cried out for the joy of life. She was made to be a great lover, a great mother; and to her, more than most, the sunshine falling in muffled beams through the lattices of her mother’s sick-room came with a maddening summons to—live. ”

“ 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{127} 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 ”

“ He had desired to kiss the siren—it was impossible to deny that; and surely the very wish to do so was unfaithfulness; and the only reason that had restrained him—was it not the fear of losing Rosamund? No, it was more than that, and with the realisation that it was really more than that—a real aspiration, however feeble, toward the better way of loving, a repugnance for the old way, and a genuine preference, very young and tender indeed as yet, for a finer ideal—he grew a little comforted. ”

“ She knows how I reverence the memory of our dream, and I think she is almost as proud to have dreamed it as I am.
We are not bitter or jealous toward each other, but, on the contrary, each of us is glad that the other is so happy with—some one else. Such sorrow as remains to us is the abstract, wistful sorrow which natures, such as ours—and O Miranda, how alike we were!—feel at the passing of any beautiful thing. ”

“ A young wife, dead now many years, had left him with two sons, both soldiers, and therefore seldom at home, and one great-eyed little girl, who, far from finding the solitude of her life irksome, had taken kindly to it, and had more and more, year by year, seemed to embody the solemn beauty of her melancholy surroundings. Laleham had been a friend of young Christopher Fanton’s at Oxford, and had, several years before, come down to Noctorum with the young soldier in quest of the butterfly which was the legendary glory of the district. ”

“ 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{133} 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. ”

“ When the noon of Wednesday came, the poet lay in his great bed awaiting his creditors. There had only been a week since his talk with his lawyer, but even that good-natured sceptic had come to admit the truth of his client’s prediction. No one could look on that weary form stretched so straight and slim under the clothes, or upon that worn ivory face, so worn and yet so strangely smiling, without reading the unmistakable signs.
“Do you believe it now?” said the poet to his lawyer. “It is only a jest—you must not take it too seriously. It is only death. Don’t be unhappy, old friend. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some beautiful girl of our acquaintance may be so full of charm for us as to cause us so to fall in love with her that we imagine hers to be the destined name. But, after a while that prescience in our ears saves us from the illusion. The ear does not give back that fairy chime when we hear her name, which it can give only to the sound of the name of names. Often our ears seem on the point of vibrating, as a woman tells us her name for the first name, but, after{178} all—it was a false alarm of beauty, and we still go on seeking for the sound that alone can ring true. ”

“ When we take a dose of medicine to tonic our nerves, we don’t laugh sceptically, or even give a thought to the wonder of its operation. Yet surely it is mystery itself that distillations from plants, and tinctures drawn from stones, should hold for us the keys of life and death, and exalt or depress our immortal spirits. Have you ever thought on the marvel that an almost infinitesimal quantity of certain juices distilled from some innocent-faced meadow-flower, a mere dewdrop of harmless-looking liquid, can shatter our life out of us like a charge of dynamite?... ”

“ Sid sat down, with non-committal aloofness. She put her arm around his rigid shoulders, and whispered.
“You are the greatest goose that ever lived. I never kissed Jack Meriden. I love you—not as a man loves, but as a woman loves.”
“I love you the same way,” answered Sid, the storm-clouds suddenly swept from his face, “there is only one way of—loving. The other thing needs another name.”
And, with that, Rosamund snapped to the door of his cage forever. ”

“ The nurse and the priest are initiates of the same knowledge. Each alike is a sentinel on the mysterious frontier between this world and the next. The nearer we approach that frontier, the more we understand, not only of that world on the other side, but of the world on this. It is only when death throws its shadow over the page of life that we realise the full significance of what we are reading. Thus, by her mother’s bedside, Margaret was learning to read the page of life under the illuminating shadow of death. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I caught sight of her through the garden hedge, sitting on the grass playing with alphabetical bricks. Nurse sat a short way off sewing.
Nurse is such an old friend of ours and so clothed with vice-maternal authority that I am almost as much afraid of her in regard to Eva’s and my truancies as I am of Eva’s mother. Men rightly enough, by natural law, are allowed little to say in the rearing of their own babies, and, however much the master of the house you may deem yourself, your authority stops with the good woman who guards your child. ”

“ I am serious. Do you realise that you are in a cage, my cage, for life—that escape is impossible—that it will be in vain to beat on the bars—that only I have the key—that you are there for better or for worse—that you are there, I repeat, for life—that there is no help for it—nothing to do but make the best of it—do you realise that?”
The sense of certitude, of absolute possession, which Rosamund, comedian as she was, infused into her voice, was irresistible, and Sid laughed, laughed for joy that the girl he loved had such attractive brains as well. ”

“ 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 braced himself with the thought of Rosamund as with a prayer. He crossed himself with the remembrance of his last look as they had parted. It may sound laughable that anyone should arm himself so cap-à-pie against a kiss, yet the stakes in any contest are represented by some apparently trivial symbol. A kiss was the symbol here; and the siren, at all events, did not under-rate its symbolic value. ”

“ But it was true for all that, as Wasteneys’s familiar doctor could attest: for on one occasion Wasteneys, being taken with a sudden attack of the heart and apparently near death, had burst into tears—not at the thought of his wife, not at the thought of his two little girls, but at the thought of his creditors. After all, he was to die in debt! That thought alone obsessed him, leaving room for no other—tenderness. However, oxygen granted him still another reprieve, and once more he worked like a madman till at last he had written enough. ”

“ Whatever the reason, however, there is no doubt that, as you say, the world is conscious of a certain distinction, and even romantic beauty attaching to sorrow which it does not associate with joy. Sorrow seems to imply a certain initiation into the arcana of human experience, a certain direct relation with the regent powers of our destiny, august and hidden, and only revealing their supernatural faces to this and that mortal here and there, henceforth stricken, and, so to say, ‘enchanted’, as one touched by the sacred lightning and yet alive among men. ”

“ If you said pleasures, you would be nearer the mark. It is pleasure, not sorrow, that makes the butterfly’s wings turn grey.”
“One’s sorrows are one’s pleasures—are they not?” I retorted.
“Yes!” said the Sphinx, wistfully, “you are right. ‘Of our tears she hath made us pearls, and of our sobbing she hath made unto us a song’—who said that? Was it you?{5}”
“Very likely,” said I.
“Yes! you are right,” she continued. “Our pleasures we could spare—but not our sorrows—our beautiful sorrows.”
“Sorrows,” I ventured, “are the opals of the soul.” ”

“ For instance, we are happy together when we take a walk through the woods, or sit through the afternoon in the old garden, or read a book together. How happy we have been on the sea together, with no one but we two under the blue sky. Yet I have never felt so near to you, never so at harmony with you, as when we have sat at this table and looked into each other’s eyes over our wineglasses. ”

“ He recalled looks out of Meriel’s eyes which told him long after that she had known he was not ready for the love she could give him, and, unconsciously, the occasional thought of this old shortcoming of his had prepared him for—Rosamund, of whom Meriel came to seem in his mind a beautiful prophecy. Thus old love dies that new may live, or rather lives on in giving its life to the new. Certainly, Sid could never have loved Rosamund more had he not loved Meriel so much. ”

“ Even in the history of the heart recent events have a certain crudity, and love itself seems the more romantic for having lain in lavender for fifty years. A certain style, a certain distinction, beyond question{162} go with antiquity, and to spend your days with a refined old mother is no less an education in style and distinction than to spend them in the air of old cities, under the shadow of august architecture, and in the sunset of classic paintings. ”

“ I think that she comprehended the wonder and joy of children more than if she had been a real mother.
Seclusion and renunciation are great sharpeners and refiners of the sense of joy, chiefly because they encourage the habit of attentiveness.
“Our excitements are very tiny,” once said the old mother to Margaret, “therefore we make the most of them.”
“I don’t agree with you, mother,” Margaret had answered. “I think it is theirs that are tiny—trivial indeed, and ours that are great. People in the world lose the values of life by having too much choice; too much choice—of things not worth having. ”