It seems to me very wicked that it should be so.



CHAPTER XXV.

THOUGH the portfolio was pushed aside and dust had gathered on the table, except where her arm touched it, Amaryllis came daily, and often twice a day, to her flowers to pray.

From the woods she brought the delicate primrose opening on the mossy bank among the grey ash-stoles; the first tender green leaflet of hawthorn coming before the swallow; the garden crocus from the grass of the garden; the first green spikelet from the sward of the meadow; the beautiful white wild violets gathered in the sunlit April morning while the nightingale sang.

With these she came to pray each day, at the window-niche. After she had sat awhile at the table that morning, thinking, she went and knelt at the window with her face in her hands; the scent of the violets filled her hair.

Her prayer was deeper than words and was not put in language, but came rushing through her heart;—"That her dear mother might not suffer any more, that the strain of ceaseless trouble might be removed from her mind, that peace and rest might come to her in her old age. Let her step become firm, and the nervousness depart, and her eyes shine like they used to, so clear and bright, and do not let the grey hairs show more than they do now, or increase in number. Let her smile and be happy and talk cheerfully, and take an interest in the house and all the order of household things, and also see and understand that her husband meant to please her, even in such a little thing as splitting up useful wood for the fire, that he intended to please her, and that she might not misunderstand him any more. He intended to be kind in many ways, but misfortune had blinded her, and she took things the wrong way. And give her more change and friends to ask her out from home on visits, so that she might be amused, and make them come to see her and pass the time in contentment. Give her also enough money to buy good clothes so as to look nice as she ought to do, and if possible a conveyance of some kind—not a grand carriage, she did not wish for that—but a conveyance to drive about now and then, because she was not so strong as she used to be, and could not walk far. And let me, thought Amaryllis, let me be able to give her a watch, for other people have watches, and my mother has not got one, and it does seem so strange it should be so after all the hard work she has done. Let me, too, get her some nice things to eat, some fish and wine, for she cannot eat our plain bacon now every day, she has not got an appetite, and her teeth too are bad, and I should so like to give her a set of artificial teeth that her food might do her more good. But what I really want is that she may be happy, and be like my mother herself really is when she is herself. Give my father money enough to pay his creditors, for I know that though he is so quiet and says nothing, these debts are wearing him out, and I know he wishes to pay them, and does not willingly keep them waiting. He is so patient, and so good, and bears everything, I am sure no one was ever like him, and it is so dreadful to see him work, work, work, every day from five o'clock in the morning, and yet to be always worried with these debts and people that will not let him have peace one single day. Do, please, let him have less work to do, it makes me miserable to see him in the rain, and he is not young now, and sometimes carrying such heavy things, great pieces of timber and large trusses of hay, and making his back ache digging. Surely it must soon be time for him to leave off working, he has done such a lot, and I do not think he can see quite so well as he used to, because he holds the paper so close to his eyes. Please let him leave off working soon now and have some rest and change, and go about with my mother, and when he is at home not have anything more to do than his garden, because he is so fond of that; let him love the flowers again as he used to, and plant some more, and have nothing harder to do than to gather the fruit from the trees he has planted. And let me get him some new books to read, because I know he is so fond of books; he has not had a new book for so long. Let him go to London and see people and things, and life, because I know he is full of ideas and thoughts though he works and digs, and that is what would do him good. Give him some money now at last, now he has worked all these years, forty years on this farm, and ever so much work before that; do give him some money at last. Do make my grandfather kinder to him and not so harsh for the rent, let him give the place to my father now, for it can be no use to him; let my father have it for his very own, and then I think he would be happy after all, he does so like to improve things and make them beautiful, and if it was his very own there is so much that he could do. That would be nice work and work that he would enjoy doing, and not just to get a few wretched shillings to pay other people. I am sure he would never be cross then, and he would be so kind to my mother, and kind and good to everybody. There is nobody like him, as you know, in this place; they are not clever like him, and good to the labouring men and their families like he is (and so is my mother too); they are so rough, and so unkind and stupid; I do not mean anything against them, but they are not like he is. And if you were to help him he would soon help the poor people and give them food and more wages; you know how good he is in his heart. And he would do it, not because other people should praise him, but because he would like to do it; if he does not go to church his heart is very true, and it is because he likes to be true and genuine, and not make any false show. Do, please, help him, and give him some money, and do, please, let him have this place for his very own, for I do so fear lest those who set my grandfather against him, should have a will made, so that my father should not have this house and land as he ought to do, as the son. He has made it so beautiful with trees, and brought the fresh spring water up to the house, and done so many clever things, and his heart is here, and it is home to him, and no other place could be like it. I think it would kill him not to have it, and for me, I should be so—I cannot tell, I should be so miserable if he did not, but I will not think of myself. There are so many things I know he wants to do if only he was not so worried with debts, and if he could feel it was his own land; he wants to plant a copse, and to make a pond by the brook, and have trout in it, and to build a wall by the rick-yard. Think how my dear father has worked all these years, and do help him now, and give him some money, and this place, and please do not let him grow any more grey than his hair is now, and save his eyes, for he is so fond of things that are beautiful, and please make my mother happy with him."

When Amaryllis rose from her knees her face was quite white, emotion had taken away her colour, and tears were thick on her cheek. She sat a little while by the table to recover herself, still thinking, and remembered that again last night she had dreamed the same dream about fire in the thatch. Somehow there seemed to be an alarm in the night, and they ran out of doors and found the corner of the roof on fire, over the window with the wire network instead of glass. It ran up from the corner towards the chimney, where the roof was mossy by the ridge. There was no flame, but a deep red seething heat, as if the straw burned inwardly, and was glowing like molten metal. Each straw seemed to lie in the furious heat, and a light to flicker up and down, as if it breathed fire. The thatch was very thick there, she knew, and recollected it quite well in her dream; Iden himself had laid on two thick coats in his time, and it was heavy enough before then. He talked about the thatching of it, because it was an argument with him that straw had a great power of endurance, and was equal to slates for lasting. This thickness, she saw, was the reason the fire did not blaze up quickly, and why, fortunately, it was slow in moving up the roof. It had not yet eaten through, so that there was no draught—once it got through, it would burn fast—if only they could put it out before then all might yet be saved. In the midst of her anxiety Iden came with the largest ladder in the rickyard, and mounted up, carrying a bucket of water. She tried to follow, holding on to the rungs of the ladder with one hand, and dragging up a heavy bucket with the other—the strain and effort to get up woke her.

This dream had happened to her so many times, and was so vivid and circumstantial—the fire seemed to glow in the thatch—that at last she began to dread lest it should come true. If it did not come true of the house itself, perhaps it would of the family, and of their affairs; perhaps it signified that the fire of debt, and poverty, and misfortune would burn them, as it were, to the ground. She tried to think whether in the dream they were getting the fire under before she woke, or whether they could not master it; it seemed dubious.

She did not tell her mother of the dream, afraid lest it might excite her again; nor could she tell Iden, who would have laughed at her.

Yet, though she knew it was but a dream, and dreams have ceased to come true, she did not like it; she felt uncertain, as if some indefinable danger was threatening round about. As she sat at the table she added to her prayer the supplication that the dear old house might not be burned down.

Soon afterwards she went down stairs, and on the lower flight paused, to listen to voices—not those of her mother and Iden—creditors, doubtless, come to cry aloud, "Pay me that thou owest!"—the very sum and total of religion. Her heart beat quicker—the voices came again, and she thought she recognized them, and that they were not those of creditors. She entered the sitting-room, and found that two visitors, from widely separated places, had arrived; one with a portmanteau, the other with an old, many-coloured carpet-bag. They were Amadis Iden, from Iden Court, over the Downs, the Court Idens, as they were called, and Alere Flamma, from London; the Flammas were carpet-bag people.

Her father was making them very welcome, after his wont, and they were talking of the house the Idens of yore had built in a lonely spot, expressly in order that they might drink, drink, drink undisturbed by their unreasonable wives.



CHAPTER XXVI.

THEY talked on and on, these three, Iden, Amadis Iden, and Alere Flamma, with Amaryllis listening, from the end of April till near the end of May; till "a month passed away," and still they were talking. For there is nothing so good to the human heart as well agreed conversation, when you know that your companion will answer to your thought as the anvil meets the hammer, ringing sound to merry stroke; better than wine, better than sleep, like love itself—for love is agreement of thought—"God listens to those who pray to him; let us eat and drink, and think of nothing," says the Arabian proverb. So they ate and drank—very moderate the drinking—and thought of nothing, and talked, which should be added to complete felicity. Not, of course, all of them always together, sometimes all four, sometimes Alere, Amadis, and Amaryllis, sometimes only the last two.

The round summer-house was their Parliament House whenever the east winds sank and the flowers shone forth like sunshine; as the sun shines when the clouds withdraw, so when the harsh east winds cease the May flowers immediately bloom and glow.

It was a large round house, properly builded of brick, as a summer-house should be—put not thy faith in lath work—and therefore dry and warm; to sit in it was like sitting in a shell, warm and comfortable, with a sea of meadow-grass, smooth and coloured, stretching in front, islanded about with oak, and elm, and ash.

The finches came to the boughs that hung over the ivy-grown thatch, and sang in the sycamore opposite the door, and in the apple-trees, whose bloom hung down almost to the ground.

These apple-trees, which Iden had planted, flung sackfuls of bloom at his feet. They poured themselves out in abandoned, open-armed, spendthrift, wasteful—perfectly prodigal—quantities of rose-tinted petal; prodigal as a river which flows full to the brim, never questioning but what there will be plenty of water to follow.

Flowers, and trees, and grass, seemed to spring up wherever Iden set down his foot: fruit and flowers fell from the air down upon him. It was his genius to make things grow—like sunshine and shower; a sort of Pan, a half-god of leaves and boughs, and reeds and streams, a sort of Nature in human shape, moving about and sowing Plenty and Beauty.

One side of the summer-house was a thick holly-bush, Iden had set it there; he builded the summer-house and set the ivy; and the pippin at the back, whose bloom was white; the copper-birch near by; the great sycamore alone had been there before him, but he set a seat under it, and got woodbine to flower there; the drooping-ash he planted, and if Amaryllis stood under it when the tree was in full leaf you could not see her, it made so complete an arbour; the Spanish oak in the corner; the box hedge along the ha-ha parapet; the red currants against the red wall; the big peony yonder; the damsons and pear; the yellow honey-bush; all these, and this was but one square, one mosaic of the garden, half of it sward, too, and besides these there was the rhubarb-patch at one corner; fruit, flowers, plants, and herbs, lavender, parsley, which has a very pleasant green, growing in a thick bunch, roses, pale sage—read Boccaccio and the sad story of the leaf of sage—ask Nature if you wish to know how many things more there were.

A place to eat and drink, and think of nothing in, listening to the goldfinches, and watching them carry up the moss, and lichen, and slender fibres for their nest in the fork of the apple; listening to the swallows as they twittered past, or stayed on the sharp, high top of the pear tree; to the vehement starlings, whistling and screeching like Mrs. Iden herself, on the chimneys; chaffinches "chink, chink," thrushes, distant blackbirds, who like oaks; "cuckoo, cuckoo," "crake, crake," buzzing and burring of bees, coo of turtle-doves, now and then a neigh, to remind you that there were horses, fulness and richness of musical sound; a world of grass and leaf, humming like a hive with voices.

When the east wind ceases, and the sun shines above, and the flowers beneath, "a summer's day in lusty May," then is the time an Interlude in Heaven.

And all this, summer-house and all, had dropped out of the pocket of Iden's ragged old coat.

There was a magic power of healing in the influences of this place which Iden had created. Both Amadis and Alere Flamma had already changed for the better.

That morning when Amaryllis had found them, just arrived, the one with a portmanteau, and the other with a carpet-bag, they were both pale to the last degree of paleness.

Three years had gone by since Amadis had stayed at Coombe Oaks before, when Amaryllis was thirteen and he eighteen; fine romps they had then, a great girl, and a great boy, rowing on the water, walking over the hills, exploring the woods; Amadis shooting and fishing, and Amaryllis going with him, a kind of gamekeeper page in petticoats. They were of the same stock of Idens, yet no relations; he was of the older branch, Amaryllis of the younger.

She had grown into a woman; Amadis Iden into a man.

Sadly, indeed, he had altered. Looking at him, she could scarce believe he was the same; so pale, so thin, so drooping, and fireless—the spark of life sunk into the very ashes. He sat at the dinner-table that morning like a ghost. He was convalescent from low fever: that dread disease which has taken the place of ague in the country. At one time it was ague; in these times it is low fever.

At Coombe Oaks they had heard of his illness in a far-off way, but had received no distinct particulars, for the news came in a roundabout way by word of mouth, country-folk never write. The distance between the two houses was less than ten miles, and might as well have been five hundred for all the communication.

So that the ghastly paleness of his face came upon her as a spectre in daylight. You could see at a glance what was wrong—the vital energy had been sapped; as a tree fades without a branch broken, or bark scored, fades and withers from the lack of the mysterious force which brings forth fresh leaves, so he drooped in his chair. The body—the tree—was there, but the life was not in it.

Alere Flamma, aged forty-nine, or nearly, was pale from other causes, and it was a different kind of paleness; not bloodlessness, like Amadis, but something lacking in the blood, a vitiated state. Too much Fleet Street, in short; too much of the Oracle—Pantagruel's Oracle of the Bottle.

His hands shook as he held his knife and fork—oddly enough, the hands of great genius often do shake; now and then when he put his glass to his lips, his teeth snapped on it, and chinked.

It seemed curious that such puffy, shaky hands could hold a pencil, and draw delicate lines without a flaw.

Many who never resort to the Oracle have hands that tremble nearly as much—the nervous constitution—and yet execute artists' work of rare excellence.

Alere's constitution, the Flamma constitution, naturally nervous, had been shaken as with dynamite by the bottle, and the glass chinked against his teeth. Every two or three years, when he felt himself toppling over like a tree half sawn through, Alere packed his carpet-bag, and ran down to Coombe Oaks. When the rats began to run up the wall as he sat at work in broad daylight, Alere put his slippers into his carpet-bag and looked out some collars.

In London he never wore a collar, only a bright red scarf round his neck; the company he kept would have shunned him—they would have looked him up and down disdainfully:—"Got a collar on—had no breakfast." They would have scornfully regarded him as no better than a City clerk, the class above all others scorned by those who use tools.

"Got a collar on—had no breakfast." The City clerk, playing the Masher on thirty shillings a week, goes without food to appear the gentleman.

Alere, the artist, drank with the men who used hammer, and file, or set up type—a godless set, ye gods, how godless, these setters up of type at four o'clock in the morning; oysters and stout at 4 a.m.; special taverns they must have open for them—open before Aurora gleams in the east—Oh! Fleet Street, Fleet Street, what a place it is!

By no possible means could Alere work himself into a dress-coat.

Could he have followed the celebrated advice—"You put on a dress-coat and go into society"—he would soon have become a name, a fame, a taker of big fees, a maker of ten thousand yearly.

To a man who could draw like Alere, possessed, too, of the still rarer talent—the taste to see what to draw—there really is no limit in our days; for as for colour, you do not require a genius for colour in an age of dinginess—why, the point, nowadays, is to avoid colour, and in a whole Academy you shall scarcely find as much as would tint a stick of sealing-wax.

"You put on a black coat and go into society"—that is the secret of commissions, and commissions are fortune. Nothing so clever in the way of advice has been sent forth as that remark. The great Tichborne said something about folk that had money and no brains, and folk that had brains but no money; and they as has no brains ought to be so managed as to supply money to those who had. But even the greatness of the great Tichborne's observation falls into insignificance before Chesterfield in one sentence: "Put on a black coat and go into society."

What are the sayings of the seven wise men of Greece compared to that?



CHAPTER XXVII.

BY no possible means could Alere Flamma work himself into a dress coat. The clubs, the houses of the great, the mutual admiration dinners—those great institutions of the day—were all closed to him because of the Dress Coat.

If he had really desired to enter, of course he would have squeezed into the evening monkey-skin somehow; but, in truth, Alere did not want to enter.

Inside he might have finished a portrait a month at a thousand guineas—twelve portraits per annum equals twelve thousand guineas a year; you see I am looking up the multiplication table, preparatory to going into the tallow trade.

What he actually did was to make designs for book-covers—magnificent book-covers that will one day fetch their weight in bank-notes—manipulating a good deal of it himself—"tooling"—for the libraries of noble connoisseurs. They were equal to anything ever done in Paris.

For a week's work—say half-an-hour a day—he got perhaps about ten pounds. With the ten pounds he was satisfied—ten pounds represents a good deal of brandy, or stout, or even wine, about as much as one man can manage at a bout; besides tobacco, the gallery at the theatre, and innumerable trifles of that kind. Ten pounds represents a good deal of street life.

Sometimes he drew—and engraved—illustrations for books, being as clever with the engraver's tools as with the pencil; sometimes he cut out those odd, fantastic "initials," "ornaments," "finials," which are now so commonly seen in publications, catching the classical grotesque of the Renaissance to perfection, and deceiving the experienced; sometimes he worked in the press-room in the House of Flamma, Fleet Street, pulling artists' proofs, or printing expensively illustrated volumes—numbered, and the plates destroyed—actual manual work, in his shirt sleeves.

He could stop when he liked and take a swig of stout. That was the Alere style.

Smoking was forbidden in the old House of Flamma because of the worm-eaten beams, the worm-eaten rafters and staircase, the dusty, decayed bookshelves, the dry, rotten planks of the floor, the thin wooden partitions, all ready to catch fire at the mere sight of a match. Also because of the piles of mouldy books which choked the place, and looked fit for nothing but a bonfire, but which were worth thousands of pounds; the plates and lithographic stones, artists' proofs, divers and sundry Old Masters in a room upstairs, all easily destructible.

But Alere, being a son of the house, though not in command, did not choose to be amenable to rules and orders in fact, in fiction he was. He smoked and kept the glue-pot ready on the stove; if a certain step was known to be approaching the pipe was thrust out of sight, and some dry glue set melting, the powerful incense quite hiding the flavour of tobacco. A good deal of dry glue is used in London in this way.

If I could but write the inside history of Fleet Street, I should be looked upon as the most wonderful exponent of human life that had ever touched a pen. Balzac—whom everybody talks of and nobody has read, because the discrimination of Paternoster Row has refused him a translation till quite lately—Zola, who professes to be realistic, who is nothing if not realistic, but whose writings are so curiously crude and merely skim the surface; even the great Hugo, who produced the masterpiece of all fiction, Les Miserables; all three of them, the entire host of manuscript-makers, I am sure I could vanquish them all, if I could only write the inside life of Fleet Street.

Not in any grace of style or sweeping march of diction, but just pencil-jotted in the roughest words to hand, just as rich and poor, well-dressed ladies and next-door beggars are bundled into a train, so, without choice of language, but hustling the first words anyhow, as it were, into the first compartment. If I could only get Alere to tell me all he had seen in Fleet Street, and could just jot it down on the margin of a stained newspaper, all the world would laugh and weep. For such things do go on in Fleet Street as no man has written yet.

If only Victor Hugo were alive and young again!

Alere liked pulling off the proofs in his shirt-sleeves, swigging his stout, smoking on the sly, working with all the genius of an inspired mechanic one moment and dropping into absolute idleness the next, spending infinite pains in finishing one bit of work, as if his very life depended on the smoothing of an edge of paper, putting off the next till the end of the month, pottering, sleeping, gossiping, dreaming over old German works, and especially dreaming over Goethe, humming old German songs—for he had been a great traveller—sometimes scrawling a furious Mazzinian onslaught in a semi-Nihilist foreign print, collecting stray engravings, wandering hither and thither.

Alere Flamma, artist, engraver, bookbinder, connoisseur, traveller, printer, Republican, conspirator, sot, smoker, dreamer, poet, kind-hearted, good-natured, prodigal, shiftless, man of Fleet Street, carpet-bag man, gentleman shaken to pieces.

He worked in his shirt-sleeves and drank stout, but nothing vulgar had ever been recorded against Alere Flamma. He frequented strong company—very strong meat—but no vile word left his lips.

There was a delicacy in all his ways in the midst of the coarsest surroundings, just as he appeared in the press-room among the printer's ink in the whitest of clean shirt-sleeves, fit to wear with the abhorred dress-coat.

In his rooms at his lodgings there were literally hundreds of sketches, done on all sorts and sizes of paper, from the inside of an envelope hastily torn open to elephant. The bureau was full of them, crammed in anyhow, neither sorted nor arranged; nothing, of course, could be found if it was wanted. The drawers of the bookcase—it was his own furniture—were full of them; the writing-table drawer; a box in one corner; some were on the mantelpiece smoked and gritty; some inside his books, most of which were interleaved in this manner; literally hundreds of sketches, the subjects as numerous and varied.

Views in English country lanes, views on the Danube, bands playing in band-loving Vienna, old Highgate Archway, studies from Canterbury Cathedral, statuary in the Louvre, ships battling with the north wind in the North Sea—a savage fight between sail and gale—horses in the meadow, an aged butler, a boy whipping a top, charcoal-burners in the Black Forest, studies from the nude—Parisian models, Jewesses, almost life-size, a drayman heaving up a huge tankard, overshadowing his face like Mount Atlas turned over his thumb, designs to illustrate classical mythology, outlines expressing the ideas of Goethe—outlines of Marguerite and Faust among the roses—"He loves me; he loves me not," big-armed Flemish beauties with breasts as broad as the Zuyder-Zee was deep in the song, roofs of Nuremberg, revolutionary heroes charging their muskets in the famous year '48, when Alere had a bullet through his hat, in Vienna, I think; no end to them.

Sometimes when Alere had done no work for a month or two, and his ten pounds were spent, if he wanted a few guineas he would take a small selection of these round to the office of a certain illustrated paper; the Editor would choose, and hand over the money at once, well aware that it was ready money his friend needed. They were not exactly friends—there are no friends in London, only acquaintances—but a little chummy, because the Editor himself had had a fiery youth, and they had met in sunny Wien. That was the only paper that ever got sketches out of Alere.

If only Alere would have gone and sketched what he was asked to sketch! Ah! there is the difference; he could not do it, his nature would not let him; he could draw what he saw with his own eyes, but not what other people wanted him to see. A merry income he might have made if he would only have consented to see what other eyes—common, vulgar eyes—wanted to see, and which he could so easily have drawn for them.

Out of these piles of varied sketches there were two kinds the Editor instantly snapped at: the one was wild flowers, the other little landscape bits.

Wild flowers were his passion. They were to Flamma as Juliet to Romeo. Romeo's love, indeed, rushed up like straw on fire, a great blaze of flame; he perished in it as the straw; perhaps he might not have worshipped Juliet next year. Flamma had loved his wild flowers close upon forty years, ever since he could remember; most likely longer, for doubtless the dumb infant loved the daisies put in his chubby hand.

His passion they were still as he drew near fifty, and saw all things become commonplace. That is the saddest of thoughts—as we grow older the romance fades, and all things become commonplace.

Half our lives are spent in wishing for to-morrow, the other half in wishing for yesterday.

Wild flowers alone never become commonplace. The white wood-sorrel at the foot of the oak, the violet in the hedge of the vale, the thyme on the wind-swept downs, they were as fresh this year as last, as dear to-day as twenty years since, even dearer, for they grow now, as it were, in the earth we have made for them of our hopes, our prayers, our emotions, our thoughts.

Sketch-book upon sketch-book in Alere's room was full of wild flowers, drawn as he had found them in the lanes and woods at Coombe Oaks—by the footpaths, by the lake and the lesser ponds, on the hills—as he had found them, not formed into an artificial design, not torn up by the roots, or cut and posed for the occasion—exactly as they were when his eye caught sight of them. A difficult thing to do, but Alere did it.

In printing engravings of flowers the illustrated magazines usually make one of two mistakes; either the flower is printed without any surroundings or background, and looks thin, quite without interest, however cleverly drawn, or else it is presented with a heavy black pall of ink which dabs it out altogether.

These flowers the Editor bought eagerly, and the little landscapes. From a stile, beside a rick, through a gap in a hedge, odd, unexpected places, Alere caught views of the lake, the vale, the wood, groups of trees, old houses, and got them in his magical way on a few square inches of paper. They were very valuable for book illustration. They were absolutely true to nature and fact.



CHAPTER XXVIII.

PERHAPS the reason Alere never took to colours was because of his inherent and unswerving truthfulness of character. Genuine to a degree, he could not make believe—could not deceive—could not masquerade in a dress-coat.

Now, most of the landscape-painting in vogue to-day is nature in a dress-coat.

In a whole saloon of water colours, in a whole Academy, or Grosvenor Gallery you shall hardly find three works that represent any real scene in the fields.

I have walked about the fields a good deal in my brief, fretful hour, yet I have never seen anything resembling the strange apparitions that are hung on these walls every spring. Apparitions—optical illusions, lit up with watery, greenish, ghastly, ghost-light—nothing like them on earth I swear, and I suspect not in Heaven or Hades.

Touched-up designs: a tree taken from one place, a brook from another, a house from another—and mixed to order, like a prescription by the chemist—xv. grs. grass, 3 dr. stile, iiij. grs. rustic bridge. Nature never plants—nature is no gardener—no design, no proportion in the fields.

Colours! Passing a gasworks perhaps you may have noticed that the surface of the water in the ditch by the roadside bears a greenish scum, a pale prismatic scum; this is the colour-box of modern landscape.

How horrible the fields would look if they wore such hues in reality as are accepted on canvas at the galleries! Imagine these canvas tints transferred to the sward, the woods, the hills, the streams, the sky! Dies irae, dies illae—it would, indeed, be an awful day, the Last Day of Doom, and we should need the curtain at Drury Lane drawn before our eyes to shut it out of sight.

There are some who can go near to paint dogs and horses, but a meadow of mowing grass, not one of them can paint that.

Many can draw nature—drawings are infinitely superior generally to the painting that follows; scarce one now paints real nature.

Alere could not squeeze his sketches into the dress-coat of sham colour for any sacred exhibition wall whatever.

One thing Alere never attempted to draw—a bird in flight. He recognized that it was impossible; his taste rejected every conventional attitude that has been used for the purpose; the descending pigeon, the Japanese skewered birds, the swallow skimming as heavily as a pillow. You cannot draw a bird in flight. Swallows are attempted oftenest, and done worst of all.

How can you draw life itself? What is life? you cannot even define it. The swallow's wing has the motion of life—its tremble—its wonderful delicacy of vibration—the instant change—the slip of the air;—no man will ever be able to draw a flying swallow.

At the feet of this Gamaliel of Fleet Street, Amaryllis had sat much, from time to time, when the carpet-bag was packed and Alere withdrew to his Baden-Baden—i.e., to Coombe Oaks and apple-bloom, singing finch, and wild-flowers.

There were no "properties" in Alere's room at his lodgings; no odd bits collected during his wanderings to come in useful some day as make-up, realistic rock work, as it were, in the picture. No gauntlets or breast-plates, scraps of old iron; no Turkish guns or yataghans, no stags' horns, china, or carvings to be copied some day into an illustration. No "properties."

No studio effects. The plaster bust that strikes the key and tones the visitors' mind to "Art," the etchings, the wall or panel decorations, the sliding curtains, the easels in the corner, the great portfolios—the well-known "effects" were absent.

A plain room, not even with a north light, plain old furniture, but not very old—not ostensibly ancient, somewhere about 1790 say—and this inherited and not purchased; Flamma cared not one atom for furniture, itself, old or new; dusty books everywhere, under the table, on the mantelpiece, beside the coal scuttle; heaps on chairs, quartos on the sofa, crowds more in his bedroom, besides the two bookcases and drawers; odd books most of them, Cornelius Agrippa, Le Petit Albert, French illustrated works, editions of Faust, music, for Flamma was fond of his many-keyed flute.

Great people once now and then called and asked to see Alere Flamma at the business place in Fleet Street; people with titles, curiously out of place, in the press-room, gold leaf on the floor, odour of printer's ink, dull blows of machinery, rotten planking, partitions pasted over with illustrations and stained with beer, the old place trembling as the engine worked; Flamma, in his shirt-sleeves, talking to "His Excellency."

Flamma's opinion, information he could give, things he knew; abroad they thought much of him.

Presents came occasionally—a boar's head from Germany; fine Havana cigars—Alere always had a supply of the best cigars and Turkish tobacco, a perennial stream of tobacco ran for him; English venison; once a curious dagger from Italy, the strangest present good-natured Alere could possibly have received!

Sometimes there came a pressing invitation from a noble connoisseur to his country seat; Flamma's views were wanted about the re-arrangement of the library, the re-binding of some treasure picked up in a cover all too poor for its value, the building of another wing, for the artist is the true architect, as the princes of Italy knew of old time. Till the artist is called in we shall never again see real architecture in the world. Did not Benvenuto design fortifications? Did not Michael Angelo build St. Peter's at Rome?

If my lord duke wants a palace he cannot have it till he calls in the artist, the Alere Flamma, to draw it for him; if my lord bishop needs a cathedral he cannot have it till he calls in the poet-draughtsman, till he goes to Alere Flamma.

Our so-called architects are mere surveyors, engineers, educated bricklayers, men of hard straight ruler and square, mathematically accurate, and utterly devoid of feeling.

The princes of Italy knew better—they called in the poet and the painter, the dreamers to dream for them.

You call in your "practical" architect, and he builds you a brick box; not for a hundred thousand pounds in fees could he build you a palace or a cathedral.

The most ignorant of men are the "practical" people. It is meet and fitting that they should be worshipped and set on high. The calf worshipped of old was at least golden, and these are of lead.

But Alere could not go; he would do anything he was asked in this way; he would take infinite pains to please, but he could not leave Fleet Street for any mansion.

When a man once gets into Fleet Street he cannot get out.

Conventionally, I suppose, it would be the right thing to represent Alere as a great genius neglected, or as a genius destroyed by intemperance. The conventional type is so easy—so accepted—so popular; it would pay better, perhaps, to make him out a victim in some way.

He was not neglected, neither was he the victim of intemperance in the usual sense.

The way to fame and fortune had always been wide open to him; there were long intervals when he did not drink, nor did drink enfeeble his touch; it was not half so much to struggle against as the chest diseases from which professional men so often suffer; I believe if he had really tried or wished he could have conquered his vice altogether. Neither of these causes kept him from the foremost rank.

There was no ambition, and there was no business-avarice. So many who have no ideal are kept hard at work by the sheer desire of money, and thus spurred onward, achieve something approaching greatness. Alere did not care for money.

He could not get out of Fleet Street. Ten pounds was a large sum in the company he frequented; he did not want any more.



CHAPTER XXIX.

SOMETHING in Fleet Street holds tight those who once come within its influence. The cerebellum of the world, the "grey matter" of the world's brain, lies somewhere thereabouts. The thoughts of our time issue thence, like the radiating spokes of a wheel, to all places of the earth. There you have touch of the throbbing pulse of the vast multitudes that live and breathe. Their ideas come from Fleet Street.

From the printing-press and the engraver's wood-block, the lithographic-stone, the etcher's plate, from book and magazine, periodical and pamphlet, from world-read newspaper.

From Fleet Street, the centre whence ideas flow outwards.

It is joyous to be in the flower-grown meads; it is sweet to be on the hill-top; delicious to feel the swell and the long roll of the hexameter of the seas; doubtless there is a wild rapture on the summit of the Himalayas; triumph in the heart of the African explorer at the river's source. But if once the mind has been dipped in Fleet Street, let the meads be never so sweet, the mountain-top never so exalted, still to Fleet Street the mind will return, because there is that other Mind, without whose sympathy even success is nothing—the Mind of the world.

I am, of course, thinking not only of the thoroughfare, Fleet Street, but of all that the printing-press means.

Alere was no leader of thought, but it was necessary to him to live and breathe in the atmosphere of thought—to feel the throb and swell around him—to be near the "grey matter" of the world's brain.

Once a man gets into Fleet Street he cannot get out. Flamma would not leave it for months of gilded idleness in any nobleman's mansion.

The flame must be fed. His name had some connection with the design of the Roman lamp on the splendid bindings of the books tooled in the House of Flamma. Alere Flammam—feed the flame. The flame of the mind must be fed.

Sad things happen on the stones of Fleet Street; if I could but get at it all to write the inside life of it, it would, indeed, be a book. Stone-cold poverty hovers about. The rich, living in the fool's paradise of money, think they know life, but they do not, for, as was said of the sea——

Only those who share its dangers Comprehend its mystery.

Only those who have shared the struggle literally for bread—for a real, actual loaf—understand the dread realities of man's existence.

Let but a morsel of wood—a little splinter of deal, a curl of carpenter's shaving—lie in Fleet Street, and it draws to it the wretched human beasts as surely as the offal draws the beast of the desert to the camp. A morsel of wood in the streets that are paved with gold!

It is so valuable. Women snatch it up and roll it in their aprons, clasping it tightly, lest it should somehow disappear. Prowling about from street to street, mile after mile, they fill their aprons with these precious splinters of deal, for to those who are poor fuel is as life itself.

Even the wealthy, if they have once been ill, especially of blood-thinning diseases (as rheumatism), sometimes say they would rather go without food than coal. Rather emptiness than chill.

These women know where there are hoardings erected by builders, where shop-fronts are being rebuilt, where fires have taken place, where alterations are proceeding; they know them as the birds know the places where they are likely to find food, and visit them day by day for the scraps of wood and splinters that drop on the pavement.

Or they send their children, ragged urchins, battling for a knot of pine-wood.

The terror of frost to these creatures is great indeed. Frost is the King of Terrors to them—not Death; they sleep and live with death constantly, the dead frequently in the room with the living, and with the unborn that is near birth.

Alere's ten pounds helped them. The drunkard's wife knew that Flamma, the drinker, would certainly give her the silver in his pocket.

The ragged urchins, battling for a knot of pine-wood, knew that they could charm the pennies and the threepenny bits out of his waistcoat; the baked potatoes and the roasted chestnuts looked so nice on the street stove.

Wretched girls whose power of tempting had gone, and with it their means of subsistence, begged, and not in vain, of shaky Alere Flamma. There are many of these wretches in Fleet Street. There is no romance about them to attract the charity of the world.

Once a flower-girl, selling flowers without a licence in the street, was charged by the police. How this harshness to the flower-girl—the human representation of Flora—roused up sentiment in her behalf!

But not every starving girl has the fortune to rouse up sentiment and to be fed. Their faces disfigured with eruptions, their thin shoulders, their dry, disordered hair—hair never looks nice unless soft with its natural oil—their dingy complexions, their threadbare shawls, tempt no one. They cannot please, therefore they must starve.

The good turn from them with horror—Are they not sin made manifest? The trembling hand of Alere fed them.

Because the boys bawl do you suppose they are happy? It is curious that people should associate noise with a full stomach. The shoeblack boys, the boys that are gathered into institutions and training ships, are expected to bawl and shout their loudest at the annual fetes when visitors are present. Your bishops and deans forthwith feel assured that their lives are consequently joyous.

Why then do they set fire to training ships? Why do they break out of reformatory institutions? Bawling is not necessarily happiness. Yet fatuous fools are content if only they can hear a good uproar of bawling.

I have never walked up Fleet Street and the Strand yet without seeing a starving woman and child. The children are indeed dreadful; they run unguarded and unwatched out of the side courts into the broader and more lively Strand—the ceaseless world pushes past—they play on the pavement unregarded. Hatless, shoeless, bound about with rags, their faces white and scarred with nameless disease, their eyes bleared, their hair dirty; little things, such as in happy homes are sometimes set on the table to see how they look.

How can people pass without seeing them?

Alere saw them, and his hand went to his waistcoat pocket.

The rich folk round about this great Babylon of Misery, where cruel Want sits on the Seven Hills—make a cartoon of that!—the rich folk who receive hundreds on the turn of a stock, who go to the Bank of England on dividend days—how easily the well-oiled doors swing open for them!—who dwell in ease and luxury at Sydenham, at Norwood, at Surbiton, at Streatham, at Brighton, at Seven-oaks, wherever there is pure air, have distinguished themselves lately in the giving of alms, ordained by the Lord whom they kneel before each Sunday, clad in silk, scarlet, and fine linen, in their cushioned pews.

They have established Homes for Lost Dogs and Homes for Lost Cats, neither of which are such nuisances as human beings.

In the dog institution they have set up an apparatus specially designed by one of the leading scientific men of the age. The dogs that are not claimed in a certain time, or that have become diseased—like the human nuisances—are put into this apparatus, into a comfortable sort of chamber, to gnaw their last bone. By-and-by, a scientific vapour enters the chamber, and breathing this, the animal falls calmly to death, painlessly poisoned in peace.

Seven thousand dogs were thus happily chloroformed "into eternity" in one season. Jubilant congratulations were exchanged at the success of the apparatus. Better than shooting, drowning, hanging, vivisection, or starvation!

Let a dog die in peace. Is not this an age of humanity indeed? To sell all you have and give to the poor was nothing compared to this. We have progressed since Anno Domini I. We know better how to do it now.

Alere did not seem to trouble himself much about the dogs; he saw so much of the human nuisances.

What a capital idea it would be to set up an apparatus like this in the workhouses and in conjunction with the hospitals!

Do you know, thoughtless, happy maiden, singing all the day, that one out of every five people who die in London, die in the workhouse or the hospital?

Eighty-two thousand people died in London in 1882, and of these, fourteen thousand expired in the workhouses, and six thousand in hospitals!

Are not these ghastly figures? By just setting up a few Apparatuses, see what an immense amount of suffering would be saved, and consider what a multitude of human nuisances would he "moved on!"

The poor have a saying that none live long after they have been in a certain hospital. "He's been in that hospital—he won't live long." They carry out such wonderful operations there—human vivisections, but strictly painless, of course, under chloroform—true Christian chopping-up—still the folk do not live long when they come out.

Why not set up the Apparatus? But a man must not die in peace. Starvation is for human nuisances.

These rich folk dwelling round about the great Babylon of Misery, where Want sits on the Seven Hills, have also distinguished themselves by yet another invention. This is the organization of alms. Charity is so holy we will not leave it to chance—to the stray penny—we will organize it. The system is very simple: it is done by ticket. First you subscribe a few shillings to some organization, with its secretary, its clerks, its offices, board-room, and "machinery." For this you receive tickets.

If a disagreeable woman with a baby in her arms, or a ragged boy, or a maimed man asks you for a "copper," you hand him a ticket. This saves trouble and responsibility.

The beggar can take the ticket to the "office" and get his case "investigated." After an inquiry, and an adjournment for a week; another inquiry, and another adjournment for a week; a third inquiry, and a third adjournment, then, if he be of high moral character and highly recommended, he may get his dinner.

One great advantage is conspicuous in this system: by no possible means can you risk giving a penny to a man not of high moral character, though he be perishing of starvation.

If a man asks for bread, will ye give him a stone? Certainly not; give him a ticket.

They did not understand how to do things in Judea Anno Domini I.

This organization of charity saves such a lot of money: where people used to give away five pounds they now pay five shillings.

Nothing like saving money. And, besides, you walk about with a clear conscience. No matter how many maimed men, or disagreeable women, or ragged boys you see, you can stroll on comfortably and never think about them; your charity is organized.

If the German thinkers had not found out twenty years ago that there was no Devil, one would be inclined to ascribe this spurious, lying, false, and abominable mockery to the direct instigation of a Satan.

The organization of charity! The very nature of charity is spontaneousness.

You should have heard Alere lash out about this business; he called it charity suppression.

Have you ever seen London in the early winter morning, when the frost lies along the kerb, just melting as the fires are lit; cold, grey, bitter, stony London?

Whatever can morning seem like to the starved and chilly wretches who have slept on the floor, and wake up to frost in Fleet Street?

The pavements are covered with expectoration, indicating the chest diseases and misery that thousands are enduring. But I must not write too plainly; it would offend.



CHAPTER XXX.

A PRINTER in the office crawled under the bed of the machine to replace something—a nut that had dropped; it was not known that he was there; the crank came round and crushed him against the brickwork. The embrace of iron is death.

Alere fed his helpless children, and apprenticed them when they were old enough.

Ten pounds was enough for him—without ambition, and without business-avarice; ten pounds was enough for his Fleet Street life.

It was not only the actual money he gave away, but the kindness of the man. Have you ever noticed the boys who work in printing-offices?—their elbows seem so sharp and pointed, bony, and without flesh. Instead of the shirt-sleeve being turned up, it looks as if the pointed elbow had thrust its way through.

He always had something for them;—a plate of beef, soup, beer to be shared, apples, baked potatoes, now and then half-a-dozen mild cigars. Awful this, was it not? Printers' boys will smoke; they had better have Flamma's fine tobacco than the vile imitation they buy.

They always had a tale for him; either their mothers, or sisters, or some one was in trouble; Flamma was certain to do something, however little might be within his power. At least he went to see.

Had a man an income of a million he could not relieve the want of London; the wretch relieved to-day needs again to-morrow. But Alere went to see.

Ten pounds did much in the shaky hands of a man without ambition, and without business-avarice, who went to see the unfortunate.

His own palsied mother, at the verge of life, looked to Alere for all that the son can do for the parent. Other sons seemed more capable of such duty; yet it invariably fell upon Alere. He was the Man. And for those little luxuries and comforts that soothe the dull hours of trembling age she depended entirely upon him.

So you see the ten-pound notes that satisfied him were not all spent in drink.

But alas! once now and then the rats began to run up the wall in broad daylight, and foolish Alere, wise in this one thing, immediately began to pack his carpet-bag. He put in his collars, his slippers, his sketch-books and pencils, some of his engraving tools, and a few blocks of boxwood, his silver-mounted flute, and a book for Amaryllis. He packed his carpet-bag and hastened away to his Baden-Baden, to Coombe Oaks, his spa among the apple-bloom, the song of finches, and rustle of leaves.

They sat and talked in the round summer-house in Iden's garden, with the summer unfolding at their knees; Amaryllis, Amadis, Iden, and Flamma.

By Flamma's side there stood a great mug of the Goliath ale, and between his lips there was a long churchwarden pipe.

The Goliath ale was his mineral water; his gaseous, alkaline, chalybeate liquor; better by far than Kissingen, Homburg, Vichy; better by far than mud baths and hot springs. There is no medicine in nature, or made by man, like good ale. He who drinks ale is strong.

The bitter principle of the aromatic hops went to his nervous system, to the much-suffering liver, to the clogged and weary organs, bracing and stimulating, urging on, vitalizing anew.

The spirit drawn from the joyous barley warmed his heart; a cordial grown on the sunny hill-side, watered with dew and sweet rain, coloured by the light, a liquor of sunshine, potable sunbeam.

Age mingling hops and barley in that just and equitable proportion, no cunning of hand, no science can achieve, gave to it the vigour of years, the full manhood of strength.

There was in it an alchemic power analysis cannot define. The chemist analyzes, and he finds of ten parts, there are this and there are that, and the residue is "volatile principle," for which all the dictionaries of science have no explanation.

"Volatile principle"—there it is, that is the secret. That is the life of the thing; by no possible means can you obtain that volatile principle—that alchemic force—except contained in genuine old ale.

Only it must be genuine, and it must be old; such as Iden brewed.

The Idens had been famous for ale for generations.

By degrees Alere's hand grew less shaky; the glass ceased to chink against his teeth; the strong, good ale was setting his Fleet Street liver in order.

You have "liver," you have "dyspepsia," you have "kidneys," you have "abdominal glands," and the doctor tells you you must take bitters, i.e., quassia, buchu, gentian, cascarilla, calumba; aperients and diluents, podophyllin, taraxacum, salts; physic for the nerves and blood, quinine, iron, phosphorus; this is but the briefest outline of your draughts and preparations; add to it for various purposes, liquor arsenicalis, bromide of potassium, strychnia, belladonna.

Weary and disappointed, you turn to patent medicines—American and French patent physic is very popular now—and find the same things precisely under taking titles, enormously advertised.

It is a fact that nine out of ten of the medicines compounded are intended to produce exactly the same effects as are caused by a few glasses of good old ale. The objects are to set the great glands in motion, to regulate the stomach, brace the nerves, and act as a tonic and cordial; a little ether put in to aid the digestion of the compound. This is precisely what good old ale does, and digests itself very comfortably. Above all things, it contains the volatile principle, which the prescriptions have not got.

Many of the compounds actually are beer, bittered with quassia instead of hops; made nauseous in order that you may have faith in them.

"Throw physic to the dogs," get a cask of the true Goliath, and "drenk un down to the therd hoop."

Long before Alere had got to the first hoop the rats ceased to run up the wall, his hand became less shaky, he began to play a very good knife and fork at the bacon and Iden's splendid potatoes; by-and-by he began to hum old German songs.

But you may ask, how do you know, you're not a doctor, you're a mere story-spinner, you're no authority? I reply that I am in a position to know much more than a doctor.

How can that be?

Because I have been a Patient. It is so much easier to be a doctor than a patient. The doctor imagines what his prescriptions are like and what they will do; he imagines, but the Patient knows.



CHAPTER XXXI.

SOME noble physicians have tried the effect of drugs upon themselves in order to advance their art; for this they have received Gold Medals, and are alluded to as Benefactors of Mankind.

I have tried the effects of forty prescriptions upon My Person. With the various combinations, patent medicines, and so forth, the total would, I verily believe, reach eighty drugs.

Consequently, it is clear I ought to receive eighty gold medals. I am a Benefactor eighty times multiplied; the incarnation of virtue; a sort of Buddha, kiss my knees, ye slaves!

I have a complaisant feeling as I walk about that I have thus done more good than any man living.

I am still very ill.

The curious things an invalid is gravely recommended to try! One day I was sitting in that great cosmopolitan museum, the waiting-room at Charing Cross station, wearily glancing from time to time at the clock, and reckoning how long it would be before I could get home. There is nothing so utterly tiring to the enfeebled as an interview with a London physician. So there I sat, huddled of a heap, quite knocked up, and, I suppose, must have coughed from time to time. By-and-by, a tall gentleman came across the room and sat down beside me. "I hope I don't intrude," said he, in American accents. "I was obliged to come and speak to you—you look bad. I hate to hear anybody cough." He put an emphasis on hate, a long-drawn nasal haate, hissing it out with unmeasured ferocity. "I haate to hear anybody cough. Now I should like to tell you how to cure it, if you don't mind."

"By all means—very interesting," I replied.

"I was bad at home, in the States," said he. "I was on my back four years with a cough. I couldn't do anything—couldn't help myself; four years, and I got down to eighty-seven pounds. That's a fact, I weighed eighty-seven pounds."

"Very little," I said, looking him over; he was tall and broad-shouldered, not very thick, a square-set man.

"I tried everything the doctors recommended—it was no use; they had to give me up. At last a man cured me; and how do you think he did it?"

"Can't think—should much like to know."

"Crude petroleum," said the American. "That was it. Crude petroleum! You take it just as it comes from the wells; not refined, mind. Just crude. Ten drops on a bit of sugar three times a day, before meals. Taste it? No, not to speak of; you don't mind it after a little while. I had in a ten-gallon keg. I got well. I got up to two hundred and fifty pounds. That's true. I got too fat, had to check it. But I take the drops still, if I feel out of sorts. Guess I'm strong enough now. Been all over Europe."

I looked at him again; certainly, he did appear strong enough.

"But you Britishers won't try anything, I suppose, from the States, now."

I hastened to assure him I had no prejudice of that sort—if it would cure me, it might come from anywhere.

"You begin with five drops," he said, solemnly. "Or three, if you like, and work up to ten. It soon gets easy to take. You'll soon pick up. But I doubt if you'll get a keg of the crude oil in this country; you'll have to send over for it. I haate to hear anybody cough"—and so we parted.

He was so much in earnest, that if I had egged him on, I verily believe he would have got the keg for me himself. It seemed laughable at the time; but I don't laugh now. I almost think that good-natured American was right; he certainly meant well.

Crude petroleum! Could anything be more nauseous? But probably it acts as a kind of cod-liver oil. Sometimes I wish I had tried it. Like him, I hate to hear anybody cough! Better take a ten-gallon keg of petroleum.

Alere's crude petroleum was the Goliath ale, and he had hardly begun to approach the first hoop, when, as I tell you, he was heard to hum old German songs; it was the volatile principle.

Songs about the Pope and the Sultan

But yet he's not a happy man, He must obey the Alcoran, He dares not touch one drop of wine, I'm glad the Sultan's lot's not mine.

Songs about the rat that dwelt in the cellar, and fed on butter till he raised a paunch that would have done credit to Luther; songs about a King in Thule and the cup his mistress gave him, a beautiful old song that, none like it—

He saw it fall, he watched it fill, And sink deep, deep into the main; Then sorrow o'er his eyelids fell, He never drank a drop again.

Or his thought slipped back to his school-days, and beating the seat in the summer-house with his hand for time, Alere ran on:—

Horum scorum suntivorum, Harum scarum divo, Tag-rag, merry derry, perriwig, and a hatband, Hic hoc horum genitivo—

To be said in one breath.

Oh, my Ella—my blue bella, A secula seculorum, If I have luck, sir, she's my uxor, O dies Benedictorum!

Or something about:

Sweet cowslips grace, the nominative case, And She's of the feminine gender.

Days of Valpy the Vulture, eating the schoolboy's heart out, Eton Latin grammar, accidence—do not pause, traveller, if you see his tomb!

"Play to me," said Amaryllis, and the Fleet-Street man put away his pipe, and took up his flute; he breathed soft and low—an excellent thing in a musician—delicious airs of Mozart chiefly.

The summer unfolded itself at their knees, the high buttercups of the meadow came to the very door, the apple-bloom poured itself out before them; music all of it, music in colour, in light, in flowers, in song of happy birds. The soothing flute strung together the flow of their thoughts, they were very silent, Amaryllis and Amadis Iden—almost hand in hand—listening to his cunning lips.

He ceased, and they were still silent, listening to their own hearts.

The starlings flew by every few minutes to their nests in the thatch of the old house, and out again to the meadow.

Alere showed how impossible it was to draw a bird in flight by the starling's wings. His wings beat up and down so swiftly that the eye had not time to follow them completely; they formed a burr—an indistinct flutter; you are supposed to see the starling flying from you. The lifted tips were depressed so quickly that the impression of them in the raised position had not time to fade from the eye before a fresh impression arrived exhibiting them depressed to their furthest extent; you thus saw the wings in both positions, up and down, at once. A capital letter X may roughly represent his idea; the upper part answers to the wings lifted, the lower part to the wings down, and you see both together. Further, in actual fact, you see the wings in innumerable other positions between these two extremes; like the leaves of a book opened with your thumb quickly—as they do in legerdemain—almost as you see the spokes of a wheel run together as they revolve—a sort of burr.

To produce an image of a starling flying, you must draw all this.

The swift feathers are almost liquid; they leave a streak behind in the air like a meteor.

Thus the genial Goliath ale renewed the very blood in Alere's veins.

Amaryllis saw too that the deadly paleness of Amadis Iden's cheeks—absolute lack of blood—began to give way to the faintest colour, little more than the delicate pink of the apple-bloom, though he could take hardly a wine-glass of Goliath. If you threw a wine-glassful of the Goliath on the hearth it blazed up the chimney in the most lively manner. Fire in it—downright fire! That is the test.

Amadis could scarcely venture on a wine-glassful, yet a faint pink began to steal into his face, and his white lips grew moist. He drank deeply of another cup.



CHAPTER XXXII.

"LET me try," said Amadis, taking the handle of the churn from Jearje. The butter was obstinate, and would not come; it was eleven o'clock in the morning, and still there was the rattle of milk in the barrel, the sound of a liquid splashing over and over. By the sounds Mrs. Iden knew that the fairies were in the churn. Jearje had been turning for hours.

Amadis stooped to the iron handle, polished like silver by Jearje's rough hands—a sort of skin sand-paper—and with an effort made the heavy blue-painted barrel revolve on its axis.

Mrs. Iden, her sleeves up, looked from the dairy window into the court where the churn stood.

"Ah, it's no use your trying," she said, "you'll only tire yourself."

Jearje, glad to stand upright a minute, said, "First-rate, measter."

Amaryllis cried, "Take care; you'd better not, you'll hurt yourself."

"Aw!—aw!" laughed Bill Nye, who was sitting on a form by the wall under the dairy window. He was waiting to see Iden about the mowing. "Aw!—aw! Look 'ee thur, now!"

Heavily the blue barrel went round—thrice, four times, five times; the colour mounted into Amadis's cheeks, not so much from the labour as the unwonted stooping; his breath came harder; he had to desist, and go and sit down on the form beside Bill Nye.

"I wish you would not do it," said Amaryllis. "You know you're not strong yet." She spoke as if she had been his mother or his nurse, somewhat masterfully and reproachfully.

"I'm afraid I'm not," said poor Amadis. His chin fell and his face lengthened—his eyes grew larger—his temples pinched; disappointment wrung at his heart.

Convalescence is like walking in sacks; a short waddle and a fall.

"I can tell 'ee of a vine thing, measter," said Bill Nye, "as I knows on; you get a pint measure full of snails——"

"There, do hold your tongue, it's enough to make anyone ill to think of," said Amaryllis, angrily, and Bill was silent as to the cod-liver oil virtues of snails. Amaryllis went to fetch a glass of milk for Amadis.

A robin came into the court, and perching on the edge of a tub, fluttered his wings, cried "Check, check," "Anything for me this morning?" and so put his head on one side, languishing and persuasive.

"My sister, as was in a decline, used to have snail-oil rubbed into her back," said Luce, the maid, who had been standing in the doorway with a duster.

"A pretty state of things," cried Mrs. Hen, in a passion. "You standing there doing nothing, and it's butter-making morning, and everything behind, and you idling and talking,"—rushing out from the dairy, and following Luce, who retreated indoors.

"Hur'll catch it," said Bill Nye.

"Missis is ——" said Jearje, supplying the blank with a wink, and meaning in a temper this morning. "Missis," like all nervous people, was always in a fury about nothing when her mind was intent on an object; in this case, the butter.

"Here's eleven o'clock," she cried, in the sitting-room, pointing to the clock, "and the beds ain't made."

"I've made the beds," said stolid Luce.

"And the fire isn't dusted up."

"I've dusted up the fire."

"And you're a lazy slut"—pushing Luce about the room.

"I bean't a lazy slut."

"You haven't touched the mantelpiece; give me the duster!"—snatching it from her.

"He be done."

"All you can do is to stand and talk with the men. There's no water taken up stairs."

"That there be."

"You know you ought to be doing something; the lazy lot of people in this house; I never saw anything like it; there's Mr. Iden's other boots to be cleaned, and there's the parlour to be swept, and the path to be weeded, and the things to be taken over for washing, and the teapot ought to go in to Woolhorton, you know the lid's loose, and the children will be here in a minute for the scraps, and your master will be in to lunch, and there's not a soul to help me in the least," and so, flinging the duster at Luce, out she flew into the court, and thence into the kitchen, where she cut a great slice of bread and cheese, and drew a quart of ale, and took them out to Bill Nye.

"Aw, thank'ee m'm," said Bill, from the very depth of his chest, and set to work happily.

Next, she drew a mug for Jearje, who held it with one hand and sipped, while he turned with the other; his bread and cheese he ate in like manner, he could not wait till he had finished the churning.

"Verily, man is made up of impatience," said the angel Gabriel in the Koran, as you no doubt remember; Adam was made of clay (who was the sculptor's ghost that modelled him?) and when the breath of life was breathed into him, he rose on his arm and began to eat before his lower limbs were yet vivified. This is a fact. "Verily, man is made up of impatience." As the angel had never had a stomach or anything to sit upon, as the French say, he need not have made so unkind a remark; if he had had a stomach and a digestion like Bill Nye and Jearje, it is certain he would never have wanted to be an angel.

Next, there were four cottage children now in the court, waiting for scraps.

Mrs. Iden, bustling to and fro like a whirlwind, swept the poor little things into the kitchen and filled two baskets for them with slices of bread and butter, squares of cheese, a beef bone, half a rabbit, a dish of cold potatoes, two bottles of beer from the barrel, odds and ends, and so swept them off again in a jiffy.

Mrs. Iden! Mrs. Iden! you ought to be ashamed of yourself, that is not the way to feed the poor. What could you be thinking of, you ignorant farmer's wife!

You should go to London, Mrs. Iden, and join a Committee with duchesses and earlesses, and wives of rich City tradesfolk; much more important these than the duchesses, they will teach you manners. They will teach you how to feed the poor with the help of the Rev. Joseph Speechify, and the scientific Dr. Amoeba Bacillus; Joe has Providence at his fingers' ends, and guides it in the right way; Bacillus knows everything to a particle; with Providence and Science together they must do it properly.

The scientific dinner for the poor must be composed of the principles of food in the right proportion: (1) Albuminates, (2) Hydro-Carbons, (3) Carbo-hydrates. Something juicy coming now!

The scientific dinner consists of haricot beans, or lentil soup, or oatmeal porridge, or vegetable pot-bouilli; say twopence a quart. They can get all the proteids out of that, and lift the requisite foot-tons.

No wasteful bread and butter, no scandalous cheese, no abominable beef bone, no wretched rabbit, no prodigal potatoes, above all, No immoral ale!

There, Mrs. Iden.

Go to the famous Henry Ward Beecher, that shining light and apostle, Mrs. Iden, and read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest what he says:—

"A man who cannot live on bread is not fit to live. A family may live, laugh, love and be happy that eats bread in the morning with good water, and water and good bread at noon, and water and bread at night."

Does that sound like an echo of the voice that ceased on the Cross?

Guilty Mrs Iden, ignorant farmer's wife; hide your beef and ale, your rabbit and potatoes.

To duchesses and earlesses, and plump City ladies riding in carriages, and all such who eat and drink five times a day, and have six or eight courses at dinner, doubtless once now and then a meal of vegetable pot-bouilli, or oatmeal porridge, or lentil soup (three halfpence a pound lentils), or haricot beans and water would prove a scientifically wholesome thing.

But to those who exist all the week on hunches of dry bread, and not much of that, oatmeal porridge doesn't seem to come as a luxury. They would like something juicy; good rumpsteak now, with plenty of rich gravy, broad slices from legs of mutton, and foaming mugs of ale. They need something to put fresh blood and warmth into them.

You sometimes hear people remark: "How strange it is—the poor never buy oatmeal, or lentils!"

Of course they don't; if by any chance they do get a shilling to spend, they like a mutton chop. They have enough of farinaceous fare.

What Mrs. Iden ought to have done had she been scientific, was to have given each of these poor hungry children a nicely printed little pamphlet, teaching them how to cook.

Instead of which, she set all their teeth going; infinitely wicked Mrs. Iden!



CHAPTER XXXIII.

"YOU must drink it all—every drop," said Amaryllis, masterfully, as Amadis lingered over the glass of milk she had brought him. He had but half finished it; she insisted, "Come, drink it all." Amadis made an effort, and obeyed.

But his heart was bitter as absinthe.

Everyone else was strong, and hardy, and manly; even the women were manly, they could eat and drink.

Rough-headed Jearje, at the churn, ate hard cheese, and drank ale, and turned the crank at the same time.

Round-headed Bill Nye sat on the form, happily munching cheese, oh so happily! Gabriel (of the Koran) would never believe how happily, sipping his tall quart-mug.

Mrs. Iden bustled to and fro, for all her fifty years, more energetic than all the hamlet put together.

Luce, the maid, had worked since six, and would go on hours longer.

Alere Flamma was smoking and sipping Goliath ale in the summer-house; he could eat, and drink, and walk about as a man should.

Amaryllis was as strong as a young lioness; he had seen her turn the heavy cheese-tub round as if it were a footstool.

He alone was weak, pale, contemptible; unable to eat strong meat; unable to drink strong drink; put down to sip milk as an infant; unable to walk farther than Plum Corner in the garden; unable to ride even; a mere shadow, a thing of contempt.

They told him he was better. There was just a trifle of pink in his face, and he could walk to Plum Corner in the garden without clinging to Amaryllis's arm, or staying to steady himself and get his balance more than three or four times. He had even ventured a little way up the meadow-path, but it made him giddy to stoop to pick a buttercup. They told him he was better; he could eat a very little more, and sip a wine-glassful of Goliath.

Better! What a mockery to a man who could once row, and ride, and shoot, and walk his thirty miles, and play his part in any sport you chose! It was absinthe to him.

He could not stoop to turn the churn—he had to sip milk in the presence of strong men drinking strong drink; to be despised; the very servant-maid talking of him as in a decline.

And before Amaryllis; before whom he wished to appear a man.

And full of ideas, too; he felt that he had ideas, that he could think, yet he could scarce set one foot safely before the other, not without considering first and feeling his way.

Rough-headed Jearje, without a thought, was as strong as the horses he led in the waggon.

Round-headed Bill Nye, without an idea, could mow all day in the heat of July.

He, with all his ideas, his ambitions, his exalted hopes, his worship of Amaryllis—he was nothing. Less than nothing—a shadow.

To despise oneself is more bitter than absinthe.

Let us go to Al Hariri once again, and hear what he says. The speaker has been very, very ill, but is better:—

And he prostrated himself long in prayer: then raised his head, and said:—

"Despair not in calamities of a gladdening that shall wipe away thy sorrows; For how many a simoom blows, then turns to a gentle breeze, and is changed! How many a hateful cloud arises, then passes away, and pours not forth! And the smoke of the wood, fear is conceived of it, yet no blaze appears from it; And oft sorrow rises, and straightway sets again. So be patient when fear assails, for Time is the Father of Wonders; And hope from the peace of God blessings not to be reckoned!"



How should such a chant as this enter a young man's heart who felt himself despicable in the sight of his mistress?

"Should you like a little more?" asked Amaryllis, in a very gentle tone, now he had obeyed her.

"I would rather not," said Amadis, still hanging his head.

His days were mixed of honey and wormwood; sweet because of Amaryllis, absinthe because of his weakness.

A voice came from the summer-house; Flamma was shouting an old song, with heavy emphasis here and there, with big capital letters:—

The jolly old Sun, where goes he at night? And what does he Do, when he's out of Sight? All Insinuation Scorning; I don't mean to Say that he Tipples apace, I only Know he's a very Red Face When he gets up in the Morning!

"Haw! Haw! Haw!" laughed Bill Nye, with his mouth full. "Th' zun do look main red in the marning, surely."

They heard the front door open and shut; Iden had come in for his lunch, and, by the sound of the footsteps, had brought one of his gossips with him.

At this Mrs. Iden began to ruffle up her feathers for battle.

Iden came through into the dairy.

"Now, you ain't wanted here," she said. "Poking your nose into everything. Wonder you don't help Luce make the beds and sweep the floor!"

"Can I help'ee?" said Iden, soothingly. "Want any wood for the fire—or anything?"

"As if Luce couldn't fetch the wood—and chop it, as well as you. Why can't you mind your business? Here's Bill Nye been waiting these two hours to see you"—following Iden towards the sitting-room. "Who have you brought in with you now? Of course, everybody comes in of a butter-making morning, just the busiest time! Oh! it's you! Sit still, Mr. Duck; I don't mind you. What will you take?"

More ale and cheese here, too; Iden and Jack Duck sat in the bow-window and went at their lunch. So soon as they were settled, out flounced Mrs. Iden into the dairy: "The lazy lot of people in this house—I never saw anything like it!"

It was true.

There was Alere Flamma singing in the summer-house; Amadis Iden resting on the form; Amaryllis standing by him; Bill Nye munching; Jearje indolently rotating the churn with one hand, and feeding himself with the other; Luce sitting down to her lunch in the kitchen; Iden lifting his mug in the bow-window; Jack Duck with his great mouth full; eight people—and four little children trotting down the road with baskets of food.

"The lazy lot of people in this house; I never saw anything like it."

And that was the beauty of the place, the "Let us not trouble ourselves;" "a handful in Peace and Quiet" is better than set banquets; crumbs for everybody, and for the robin too; "God listens to those who pray to him. Let us eat, and drink, and think of nothing;" believe me, the plain plenty, and the rest, and peace, and sunshine of an old farmhouse, there is nothing like it in this world!

"I never saw anything like it. Nothing done; nothing done; the morning gone and nothing done; and the butter's not come yet!"

Homer is thought much of; now, his heroes are always eating. They eat all through the Iliad, they eat at Patroclus' tomb; Ulysses eats a good deal in the Odyssey: Jupiter eats. They only did at Coombe-Oaks as was done on Olympus.



CHAPTER XXXIV.

AMARYLLIS went outside the court, and waited; Amadis rose and followed her. "Come a little way into the Brook-Field," she said.

They left the apple-bloom behind them, and going down the gravel-path passed the plum trees—the daffodils there were over now—by the strawberry patch which Iden had planted under the parlour window; by the great box-hedge where a thrush sat on her nest undisturbed, though Amaryllis's dress brushed the branches; by the espalier apple, to the little orchard-gate.

The parlour-window—there are no parlours now, except in old country houses; there were parlours in the days of Queen Anne; in the modern villas they have drawing-rooms.

The parlour-window hung over with pear-tree branches, planted beneath with strawberry; white blossom above, white flower beneath; birds' nests in the branches of the pear—that was Iden.

They opened the little orchard-gate which pushed heavily against the tall meadow-grass growing between the bars. The path was almost gone—grown out with grass, and as they moved they left a broad trail behind them.

Bill Nye the mower, had he seen, would have muttered to himself; they were trespassing on his mowing-grass, trampling it, and making it more difficult to cut.

Her dress swept over the bennets and shook the thick-stemmed butter-cups—branched like the golden candlestick, and with flowers of golden flame. For the burnished petals reflect the sun, and throw light back into the air.

Amadis began to drag behind—he could not walk much farther; they sat down together on the trunk of an oak that had been felled by a gateway close to the horse-chestnut trees Iden had planted. Even with his back leaning against a limb of the oak, Amadis had to partly support himself with his hands.

What was the use of such a man?—He had nothing but his absurdly romantic name from Don Quixote to recommend him.

That was the very thought that gnawed at poor Amadis's heart as he sat by her side. What use to care for him?

Iden's flag-basket of tools lay by the gate, it was a new gate, and he had been fitting it before he went in to lunch. His basket was of flag because the substance of the flag is soft, and the tools, chisels, and so on, laid pleasant in it; he must have everything right. The new gate was of solid oak, no "sappy" stuff, real heart of oak, well-seasoned, without a split, fine, close-grained timber, cut on the farm, and kept till it was thoroughly fit, genuine English oak. If you would only consider Iden's gate you might see there the man.

This gateway was only between two meadows, and the ordinary farmer, when the old gate wore out, would have stopped it with a couple of rails, or a hurdle or two, something very, very cheap and rough; at most a gate knocked up by the village carpenter of ash and willow, at the lowest possible charge.

Iden could not find a carpenter good enough to make his gate in the hamlet; he sent for one ten miles, and paid him full carpenter's wages. He was not satisfied then, he watched the man at his work to see that the least little detail was done correctly, till the fellow would have left the job, had he not been made pliable by the Goliath ale. So he just stretched the job out as long as he could, and talked and talked with Iden, and stroked him the right way, and drank the ale, and "played it upon me and on William, That day in a way I despise." Till what with the planing, and shaving, and smoothing, and morticing, and ale, and time, it footed up a pretty bill, enough for three commonplace gates, not of the Iden style.

Why, Iden had put away those pieces of timber years before for this very purpose, and had watched the sawyers saw them out at the pit. They would have made good oak furniture. There was nothing special or particular about this gateway; he had done the same in turn for every gateway on the farm; it was the Iden way.

A splendid gate it was, when it was finished, fit for a nobleman's Home Park. I doubt, if you would find such a gate, so well proportioned, and made of such material on any great estate in the kingdom. For not even dukes can get an Iden to look after their property. An Iden is not to be "picked up," I can tell you.

The neighbourhood round about had always sneered in the broad country way at Iden's gates. "Vit for m' Lard's park. What do he want wi' such geates? A' ain't a got no cattle to speak on; any ould rail ud do as good as thuck geat."

The neighbourhood round about could never understand Iden, never could see why he had gone to such great trouble to render the homestead beautiful with trees, why he had re-planted the orchard with pleasant eating apples in the place of the old cider apples, hard and sour. "Why wouldn't thaay a' done for he as well as for we?"

All the acts of Iden seemed to the neighbourhood to be the acts of a "vool."

When he cut a hedge, for instance, Iden used to have the great bushes that bore unusually fine May bloom saved from the billhook, that they might flower in the spring. So, too, with the crab-apples—for the sake of the white blossom; so, too, with the hazel—for the nuts.

But what caused the most "wonderment" was the planting of the horse-chestnuts in the corner of the meadow? Whatever did he want with horse-chestnuts? No other horse-chestnuts grew about there. You couldn't eat the horse-chestnuts when they dropped in autumn.

In truth Iden built for all time, and not for the little circumstance of the hour. His gate was meant to last for years, rain and shine, to endure any amount of usage, to be a work of Art in itself.

His gate as the tangible symbol of his mind—was at once his strength and his folly. His strength, for it was such qualities as these that made Old England famous, and set her on the firm base whereon she now stands—built for all Time. His folly, because he made too much of little things, instead of lifting his mind higher.

If only he could have lived three hundred years the greater world would have begun to find out Iden and to idolize him, and make pilgrimages from over sea to Coombe Oaks, to hear him talk, for Iden could talk of the trees and grass, and all that the Earth bears, as if one had conversed face to face with the great god Pan himself.

But while Iden slumbered with his head against the panel—think, think, think—this shallow world of ours, this petty threescore years and ten, was slipping away. Already Amaryllis had marked with bitterness at heart the increasing stoop of the strong back.

Iden was like the great engineer who could never build a bridge, because he knew so well how a bridge ought to be built.

"Such a fuss over a mess of a gate," said Mrs. Iden, "making yourself ridiculous: I believe that carpenter is just taking advantage of you. Why can't you go into town and see your father?—it would be a hundred pounds in your pocket"—as it would have been, no doubt. If only Mrs. Iden had gone about her lecture in a pleasanter manner perhaps he would have taken her advice.

Resting upon the brown timber in the grass Amaryllis and Amadis could just see a corner of the old house through the spars of the new gate. Coombe Oaks was a grown house, if you understand; a house that had grown in the course of many generations, not built to set order; it had grown like a tree that adapts itself to circumstances, and, therefore, like the tree it was beautiful to look at. There were windows in deep notches, between gables where there was no look-out except at the pears on the wall, awkward windows, quite bewildering. A workman came to mend one one day, and could not get at it. "Darned if I ever seed such a crooked picter of a house!" said he.

A kingfisher shot across above the golden surface of the buttercups, straight for the brook, moving, as it seemed, without wings, so swiftly did he vibrate them, that only his azure hue was visible, drawn like a line of peacock blue over the gold.

In the fitness of things Amaryllis ought not to have been sitting there like this, with Amadis lost in the sweet summer dream of love.

She ought to have loved and married a Launcelot du Lake, a hero of the mighty arm, only with the income of Sir Gorgius Midas: that is the proper thing.

But the fitness of things never comes to pass—everything happens in the Turkish manner.

Here was Amaryllis, very strong and full of life, very, very young and inexperienced, very poor and without the least expectation whatever (for who could reconcile the old and the older Iden?), the daughter of poor and embarrassed parents, whom she wished and prayed to help in their coming old age. Here was Amaryllis, full of poetic feeling and half a painter at heart, full of generous sentiments—what a nature to be ground down in the sordidness of married poverty!

Here was Amadis, extremely poor, quite feeble, and unable to earn a shilling, just talking of seeing the doctor again about this fearful debility, full too, as he thought at least, of ideas—what a being to think of her!

Nothing ever happens in the fitness of things. If only now he could have regained the health and strength of six short months ago—if only that, but you see, he had not even that. He might get better; true—he might, I have tried 80 drugs and I am no better, I hope he will.