She parted from him, and he too rose to his feet.

"And afterward," she said quietly, "and afterward you must die just as Tebaldeo died."

"That is the law, madonna. But whether Alessandro enters hell to-day or later, I am a lost man."

"Oh, that is very true," she said. "A moment since you were Count Eglamore, whom every person feared. Now there is not a beggar in the kingdom who would change lots with you, for you are a friendless and hunted man in peril of dreadful death. But even so, you are not penniless, Count Eglamore, for these jewels here which formed part of your masquerade are of great value, and there is a world outside. The frontier is not two miles distant. You have only to escape into the hill-country beyond the forest, and you need not kill Duke Alessandro after all. I would have you go hence with hands as clean as possible."

"Perhaps I might escape." He found it quaint to note how calm she was and how tranquilly his own thoughts ran. "But first the Duke must die, because I dare not leave you to his mercy."

"How does that matter?" she returned. "You know very well that my father intends to market me as best suits his interests. Here I am so much merchandise. The Duke is as free as any other man to cry a bargain." He would have spoken in protest, but Graciosa interrupted wearily: "Oh, yes, it is to this end only that we daughters of Duke Alessandro's vassals are nurtured, just as you told me—eh, how long ago!—that such physical attractions as heaven accords us may be marketed. And I do not see how a wedding can in any way ennoble the transaction by causing it to profane a holy sacrament. Ah, no, Balthazar's daughter was near attaining all that she had been taught to desire, for a purchaser came and he bid lavishly. You know very well that my father would have been delighted. But you must need upset the bargain. 'No, I will not have it!' Count Eglamore must cry. It cost you very highly to speak those words. I think it would have puzzled my father to hear those words at which so many fertile lands, stout castles, well-timbered woodlands, herds of cattle, gilded coaches, liveries and curious tapestries, fine clothing and spiced foods, all vanished like a puff of smoke. Ah, yes, my father would have thought you mad."

"I had no choice," he said, and waved a little gesture of impotence. He spoke as with difficulty, almost wearily. "I love you. It is a theme on which I do not embroider. So long as I had thought to use you as an instrument I could woo fluently enough. To-day I saw that you were frightened and helpless—oh, quite helpless. And something changed in me. I knew for the first time that I loved you and that I was not clean as you are clean. What it was of passion and horror, of despair and adoration and yearning, which struggled in my being then I cannot tell you. It spurred me to such action as I took,—but it has robbed me of sugared eloquence, it has left me chary of speech. It is necessary that I climb very high because of my love for you, and upon the heights there is silence."

And Graciosa meditated. "Here I am so much merchandise. Heigho, since I cannot help it, since bought and sold I must be, one day or another, at least I will go at a noble price. Yet I do not think I am quite worth the value of these castles and lands and other things which you gave up because of me, so that it will be necessary to make up the difference, dear, by loving you very much."

And at that he touched her chin, gently and masterfully, for Graciosa would have averted her face, and it seemed to Eglamore that he could never have his fill of gazing on the radiant, shamed tenderness of Graciosa's face. "Oh, my girl!" he whispered. "Oh, my wonderful, worshiped, merry girl, whom God has fashioned with such loving care! you who had only scorn to give me when I was a kingdom's master! and would you go with me now that I am friendless and homeless?"

"But I shall always have a friend," she answered—"a friend who showed me what Balthazar's daughter was and what love is. And I am vain enough to believe I shall not ever be very far from home so long as I am near to my friend's heart."

A mortal man could not but take her in his arms.

"Farewell, Duke Alessandro!" then said Eglamore; "farewell, poor clay so plastic the least touch remodels you! I had a part in shaping you so bestial; our age, too, had a part—our bright and cruel day, wherein you were set too high. Yet for me it would perhaps have proved as easy to have made a learned recluse of you, Alessandro, or a bloodless saint, if to do that had been as patently profitable. For you and all your kind are so much putty in the hands of circumspect fellows such as I. But I stood by and let our poisoned age conform that putty into the shape of a crazed beast, because it took that form as readily as any other, and in taking it, best served my selfish ends. Now I must pay for that sorry shaping, just as, I think, you too must pay some day. And so, I cry farewell with loathing, but with compassion also!"

Then these two turned toward the hills, leaving Duke Alessandro where he lay in the road, a very lamentable figure in much bloodied finery. They turned toward the hills, and entered a forest whose ordering was time's contemporary, and where there was no grandeur save that of the trees.

But upon the summit of the nearest hill they paused and looked over a restless welter of foliage that glittered in the sun, far down into the highway. It bustled like an unroofed ant-hill, for the road was alive with men who seemed from this distance very small. Duke Alessandro's attendants had found him and were clustered in a hubbub about their reviving master. Dwarfish Lorenzino de Medici was the most solicitous among them.

Beyond was the broad river, seen as a ribbon of silver now, and on its remoter bank the leaded roofs of a strong fortress glistened like a child's new toy. Tilled fields showed here and there, no larger in appearance than so many outspread handkerchiefs. Far down in the east a small black smudge upon the pearl-colored and vaporous horizon was all they could discern of a walled city filled with factories for the working of hemp and furs and alum and silk and bitumen.

"It is a very rich and lovely land," said Eglamore—"this kingdom which a half-hour since lay in the hollow of my hand." He viewed it for a while, and not without pensiveness. Then he took Graciosa's hand and looked into her face, and he laughed joyously.



JUDITH'S CREED

"It does not appear that the age thought his works worthy of posterity, nor that this great poet himself levied any ideal tribute on future times, or had any further prospect than of present popularity and present profit. So careless was he, indeed, of fame, that, when he retired to ease and plenty, while he was yet little declined into the vale of years, and before he could be disgusted with fatigue or disabled by infirmity, he desired only that in this rural quiet he who had so long mazed his imagination by following phantoms might at last be cured of his delirious ecstasies, and as a hermit might estimate the transactions of the world."



Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have's my own, Which is most faint.

Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so, that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon'd be, Let your indulgence set me free.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.—Epilogue to The Tempest.



He was hoping, while his fingers drummed in unison with the beat of his verse, that this last play at least would rouse enthusiasm in the pit. The welcome given its immediate predecessors had undeniably been tepid. A memorandum at his elbow of the receipts at the Globe for the last quarter showed this with disastrous bluntness; and, after all, in 1609 a shareholder in a theater, when writing dramas for production there, was ordinarily subject to more claims than those of his ideals.

He sat in a neglected garden whose growth was in reversion to primal habits. The season was September, the sky a uniform and temperate blue. A peachtree, laden past its strength with fruitage, made about him with its boughs a sort of tent. The grass around his writing-table was largely hidden by long, crinkled peach leaves—some brown and others gray as yet—and was dotted with a host of brightly-colored peaches. Fidgeting bees and flies were excavating the decayed spots in this wasting fruit, from which emanated a vinous odor. The bees hummed drowsily, their industry facilitating idleness in others. It was curious—he meditated, his thoughts straying from "an uninhabited island"—how these insects alternated in color between brown velvet and silver, as they blundered about a flickering tessellation of amber and dark green . . . in search of rottenness. . . .

He frowned. Here was an arid forenoon as imagination went. A seasoned plagiarist by this, he opened a book which lay upon the table among several others and duly found the chapter entitled Of the Cannibals.

"So, so!" he said aloud. "'It is a nation,' would I answer Plato, 'that has no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters——'" And with that he sat about reshaping Montaigne's conceptions of Utopia into verse. He wrote—while his left hand held the book flat—as orderly as any county-clerk might do in the recordance of a deed of sale.

Midcourse in larceny, he looked up from writing. He saw a tall, dark lady who was regarding him half-sorrowfully and half as in the grasp of some occult amusement. He said nothing. He released the telltale book. His eyebrows lifted, banteringly. He rose.

He found it characteristic of her that she went silently to the table and compared the printed page with what he had just written. "So nowadays you have turned pickpocket? My poet, you have altered."

He said: "Why, yes. When you broke off our friendship, I paid you the expensive compliment of falling very ill. They thought that I would die. They tell me even to-day I did not die. I almost question it." He shrugged. "And to-day I must continue to write plays, because I never learned any other trade. And so, at need, I pilfer." The topic did not seem much to concern him.

"Eh, and such plays!" the woman cried. "My poet, there was a time when you created men and women as glibly as Heaven does. Now you make sugar-candy dolls."

"The last comedies were not all I could have wished," he assented. "In fact, I got only some L30 clear profit."

"There speaks the little tradesman I most hated of all persons living!" the woman sighed. Now, as in impatience, she thrust back her traveling-hood and stood bare-headed.

Then she stayed silent,—tall, extraordinarily pallid, and with dark, steady eyes. Their gaze by ordinary troubled you, as seeming to hint some knowledge to your belittlement. The playmaker remembered that. Now he, a reputable householder, was wondering what would be the upshot of this intrusion. His visitor, as he was perfectly aware, had little patience with such moments of life as could not be made dramatic. . . . He was recollecting many trifles, now his mind ran upon old times. . . . No, no, reflection assured him, to call her beautiful would be, and must always have been, an exaggeration; but to deny the exotic and somewhat sinister charm of her, even to-day, would be an absurdity.

She said, abruptly: "I do not think I ever loved you as women love men. You were too anxious to associate with fine folk, too eager to secure a patron—yes, and to get your profit of him—and you were always ill-at-ease among us. Our youth is so long past, and we two are so altered that we, I think, may speak of its happenings now without any bitterness. I hated those sordid, petty traits. I raged at your incessant pretensions to gentility because I knew you to be so much more than a gentleman. Oh, it infuriated me—how long ago it was!—to see you cringing to the Court blockheads, and running their errands, and smirkingly pocketing their money, and wheedling them into helping the new play to success. You complained I treated you like a lackey; it was not unnatural when of your own freewill you played the lackey so assiduously."

He laughed. He had anatomized himself too frequently and with too much dispassion to overlook whatever tang of snobbishness might be in him; and, moreover, the charge thus tendered became in reality the speaker's apology, and hurt nobody's self-esteem.

"Faith, I do not say you are altogether in the wrong," he assented. "They could be very useful to me—Pembroke, and Southampton, and those others—and so I endeavored to render my intimacy acceptable. It was my business as a poet to make my play as near perfect as I could; and this attended to, common-sense demanded of the theater-manager that he derive as much money as was possible from its representation. What would you have? The man of letters, like the carpenter or the blacksmith, must live by the vending of his productions, not by the eating of them." The woman waved this aside.

She paced the grass in meditation, the peach leaves brushing her proud head—caressingly, it seemed to him. Later she came nearer in a brand-new mood. She smiled now, and her voice was musical and thrilled with wonder. "But what a poet Heaven had locked inside this little parasite! It used to puzzle me." She laughed, and ever so lightly. "Eh, and did you never understand why by preference I talked with you at evening from my balcony? It was because I could forget you then entirely. There was only a voice in the dark. There was a sorcerer at whose bidding words trooped like a conclave of emperors, and now sang like a bevy of linnets. And wit and fancy and high aspirations and my love—because I knew then that your love for me was splendid and divine—these also were my sorcerer's potent allies. I understood then how glad and awed were those fabulous Greekish queens when a god wooed them. Yes, then I understood. How long ago it seems!"

"Yes, yes," he sighed. "In that full-blooded season was Guenevere a lass, I think, and Charlemagne was not yet in breeches."

"And when there was a new play enacted I was glad. For it was our play that you and I had polished the last line of yesterday, and all these people wept and laughed because of what we had done. And I was proud——" The lady shrugged impatiently. "Proud, did I say? and glad? That attests how woefully I fall short of you, my poet. You would have found some magic phrase to make that ancient glory articulate, I know. Yet,—did I ever love you? I do not know that. I only know I sometimes fear you robbed me of the power of loving any other man."

He raised one hand in deprecation. "I must remind you," he cried, whimsically, "that a burnt child dreads even to talk of fire."

Her response was a friendly nod. She came yet nearer. "What," she demanded, and her smile was elfish, "what if I had lied to you? What if I were hideously tired of my husband, that bluff, stolid captain? What if I wanted you to plead with me as in the old time?"

He said: "Until now you were only a woman. Oh, and now, my dear, you are again that resistless gipsy who so merrily beguiled me to the very heart of loss. You are Love. You are Youth. You are Comprehension. You are all that I have had, and lost, and vainly hunger for. Here in this abominable village, there is no one who understands—not even those who are more dear to me than you are. I know. I only spoil good paper which might otherwise be profitably used to wrap herrings in, they think. They give me ink and a pen just as they would give toys to a child who squalled for them too obstinately. And Poesy is a thrifty oracle with no words to waste upon the deaf, however loudly her interpreter cry out to her. Oh, I have hungered for you, my proud, dark lady!" the playmaker said.

Afterward they stood quite silent. She was not unmoved by his outcry; and for this very reason was obscurely vexed by the reflection that it would be the essay of a braver man to remedy, rather than to lament, his circumstances. And then the moment's rapture failed him.

"I am a sorry fool," he said; and lightly he ran on: "You are a skilful witch. Yet you have raised the ghost of an old madness to no purpose. You seek a master-poet? You will find none here. Perhaps I was one once. But most of us are poets of one sort or another when we love. Do you not understand? To-day I do not love you any more than I do Hecuba. Is it not strange that I should tell you this and not be moved at all? Is it not laughable that we should stand here at the last, two feet apart as things physical go, and be as profoundly severed as if an ocean tumbled between us?"

He fell to walking to and fro, his hands behind his back. She waited, used as she was to his unstable temperament, a trifle puzzled. Presently he spoke:

"There was a time when a master-poet was needed. He was found—nay,—rather made. Fate hastily caught up a man not very different from the run of men—one with a taste for stringing phrases and with a comedy or so to his discredit. Fate merely bid him love a headstrong child newly released from the nursery."

"We know her well enough," she said. "The girl was faithless, and tyrannous, and proud, and coquettish, and unworthy, and false, and inconstant. She was black as hell and dark as night in both her person and her living. You were not niggardly of vituperation."

And he grimaced. "Faith," he replied, "but sonnets are a more natural form of expression than affidavits, and they are made effective by compliance with different rules. I find no flagrant fault with you to-day. You were a child of seventeen, the darling of a noble house, and an actor—yes, and not even a pre-eminent actor—a gross, poor posturing vagabond, just twice your age, presumed to love you. What child would not amuse herself with such engaging toys? Vivacity and prettiness and cruelty are the ordinary attributes of kittenhood. So you amused yourself. And I submitted with clear eyes, because I could not help it. Yes, I who am by nature not disposed to underestimate my personal importance—I submitted, because your mockery was more desirable than the adoration of any other woman. And all this helped to make a master-poet of me. Eh, why not, when such monstrous passions spoke through me—as if some implacable god elected to play godlike music on a mountebank's lute? And I made admirable plays. Why not, when there was no tragedy more poignant than mine?—and where in any comedy was any figure one-half so ludicrous as mine? Ah, yes, Fate gained her ends, as always."

He was a paunchy, inconsiderable little man. By ordinary his elongated features and high, bald forehead loaned him an aspect of serene and axiom-based wisdom, much as we see him in his portraits; but now his countenance was flushed and mobile. Odd passions played about it, as when on a sullen night in August summer lightnings flicker and merge.

His voice had found another cadence. "But Fate was not entirely ruthless. Fate bade the child become a woman, and so grow tired of all her childhood's playthings. This was after a long while, as we estimate happenings. . . . I suffered then. Yes, I went down to the doors of death, as people say, in my long illness. But that crude, corporal fever had a providential thievishness; and not content with stripping me of health and strength,—not satisfied with pilfering inventiveness and any strong hunger to create—why, that insatiable fever even robbed me of my insanity. I lived. I was only a broken instrument flung by because the god had wearied of playing. I would give forth no more heart-wringing music, for the musician had departed. And I still lived—I, the stout little tradesman whom you loathed. Yes, that tradesman scrambled through these evils, somehow, and came out still able to word adequately all such imaginings as could be devised by his natural abilities. But he transmitted no more heart-wringing music."

She said, "You lie!"

He said, "I thank Heaven daily that I do not." He spoke the truth. She knew it, and her heart was all rebellion.

Indefatigable birds sang through the following hush. A wholesome and temperate breeze caressed these silent people. Bees that would die to-morrow hummed about them tirelessly.

Then the poet said: "I loved you; and you did not love me. It is the most commonplace of tragedies, the heart of every man alive has been wounded in this identical fashion. A master-poet is only that wounded man—among so many other bleeding folk—who perversely augments his agony, and utilizes his wound as an inkwell. Presently time scars over the cut for him, as time does for all the others. He does not suffer any longer. No, and such relief is a clear gain; but none the less, he must henceforward write with ordinary ink such as the lawyers use."

"I should have been the man," the woman cried. "Had I been sure of fame, could I have known those raptures when you used to gabble immortal phrases like a stammering infant, I would have paid the price without all this whimpering."

"Faith, and I think you would have," he assented. "There is the difference. At bottom I am a creature of the most moderate aspirations, as you always complained; and for my part, Fate must in reason demand her applause of posterity rather than of me. For I regret the unlived life that I was meant for—the comfortable level life of little happenings which all my schoolfellows have passed through in a stolid drove. I was equipped to live that life with relish, and that life only; and it was denied me. It was demolished in order that a book or two be made out of its wreckage."

She said, with half-shut eyes: "There is a woman at the root of all this." And how he laughed!

"Did I not say you were a witch? Why, most assuredly there is."

He motioned with his left hand. Some hundred yards away a young man, who was carrying two logs toward New Place, had paused to rest. A girl was with him. Now laughingly she was pretending to assist the porter in lifting his burden. It was a quaintly pretty vignette, as framed by the peach leaves, because those two young people were so merry and so candidly in love. A symbolist might have wrung pathos out of the girl's desire to aid, as set against her fond inadequacy; and the attendant playwright made note of it.

"Well, well!" he said: "Young Quiney is a so-so choice, since women must necessarily condescend to intermarrying with men. But he is far from worthy of her. Tell me, now, was there ever a rarer piece of beauty?"

"The wench is not ill-favored," was the dark lady's unenthusiastic answer. "So!—but who is she?"

He replied: "She is my daughter. Yonder you see my latter muse for whose dear sake I spin romances. I do not mean that she takes any lively interest in them. That is not to be expected, since she cannot read or write. Ask her about the poet we were discussing, and I very much fear Judith will bluntly inform you she cannot tell a B from a bull's foot. But one must have a muse of some sort or another; and so I write about the world now as Judith sees it. My Judith finds this world an eminently pleasant place. It is full of laughter and kindliness—for could Herod be unkind to her?—and it is largely populated by ardent young fellows who are intended chiefly to be twisted about your fingers; and it is illuminated by sunlight whose real purpose is to show how pretty your hair is. And if affairs go badly for a while, and you have done nothing very wrong—why, of course, Heaven will soon straighten matters satisfactorily. For nothing that happens to us can possibly be anything except a benefit, because God orders all happenings, and God loves us. There you have Judith's creed; and upon my word, I believe there is a great deal to be said for it."

"And this is you," she cried—"you who wrote of Troilus and Timon!"

"I lived all that," he replied—"I lived it, and so for a long while I believed in the existence of wickedness. To-day I have lost many illusions, madam, and that ranks among them. I never knew a wicked person. I question if anybody ever did. Undoubtedly short-sighted people exist who have floundered into ill-doing; but it proves always to have been on account of either cowardice or folly, and never because of malevolence; and, in consequence, their sorry pickle should demand commiseration far more loudly than our blame. In short, I find humanity to be both a weaker and a better-meaning race than I had suspected. And so, I make what you call 'sugar-candy dolls,' because I very potently believe that all of us are sweet at heart. Oh no! men lack an innate aptitude for sinning; and at worst, we frenziedly attempt our misdemeanors just as a sheep retaliates on its pursuers. This much, at least, has Judith taught me."

The woman murmured: "Eh, you are luckier than I. I had a son. He was borne of my anguish, he was fed and tended by me, and he was dependent on me in all things." She said, with a half-sob, "My poet, he was so little and so helpless! Now he is dead."

"My dear, my dear!" he cried, and he took both her hands. "I also had a son. He would have been a man by this."

They stood thus for a while. And then he smiled.

"I ask your pardon. I had forgotten that you hate to touch my hands. I know—they are too moist and flabby. I always knew that you thought that. Well! Hamnet died. I grieved. That is a trivial thing to say. But you also have seen your own flesh lying in a coffin so small that even my soft hands could lift it. So you will comprehend. To-day I find that the roughest winds abate with time. Hatred and self-seeking and mischance and, above all, the frailties innate in us—these buffet us for a while, and we are puzzled, and we demand of God, as Job did, why is this permitted? And then as the hair dwindles, the wit grows."

"Oh, yes, with age we take a slackening hold upon events; we let all happenings go by more lightly; and we even concede the universe not to be under any actual bond to be intelligible. Yes, that is true. But is it gain, my poet? for I had thought it to be loss."

"With age we gain the priceless certainty that sorrow and injustice are ephemeral. Solvitur ambulando, my dear. I have attested this merely by living long enough. I, like any other man of my years, have in my day known more or less every grief which the world breeds; and each maddened me in turn, as each was duly salved by time; so that to-day their ravages vex me no more than do the bee-stings I got when I was an urchin. To-day I grant the world to be composed of muck and sunshine intermingled; but, upon the whole, I find the sunshine more pleasant to look at, and—greedily, because my time for sightseeing is not very long—I stare at it. And I hold Judith's creed to be the best of all imaginable creeds—that if we do nothing very wrong, all human imbroglios, in some irrational and quite incomprehensible fashion, will be straightened to our satisfaction. Meanwhile, you also voice a tonic truth—this universe of ours, and, reverently speaking, the Maker of this universe as well, is under no actual bond to be intelligible in dealing with us." He laughed at this season and fell into a lighter tone. "Do I preach like a little conventicle-attending tradesman? Faith, you must remember that when I talk gravely Judith listens as if it were an oracle discoursing. For Judith loves me as the wisest and the best of men. I protest her adoration frightens me. What if she were to find me out?"

"I loved what was divine in you," the woman answered.

"Oddly enough, that is the perfect truth! And when what was divine in me had burned a sufficiency of incense to your vanity, your vanity's owner drove off in a fine coach and left me to die in a garret. Then Judith came. Then Judith nursed and tended and caressed me—and Judith only in all the world!—as once you did that boy you spoke of. Ah, madam, and does not sorrow sometimes lie awake o' nights in the low cradle of that child? and sometimes walk with you by day and clasp your hand—much as his tiny hand did once, so trustingly, so like the clutching of a vine—and beg you never to be friends with anything save sorrow? And do you wholeheartedly love those other women's boys—who did not die? Yes, I remember. Judith, too, remembered. I was her father, for all that I had forsaken my family to dance Jack-pudding attendance on a fine Court lady. So Judith came. And Judith, who sees in play-writing just a very uncertain way of making money—Judith, who cannot tell a B from a bull's foot,—why, Judith, madam, did not ask, but gave, what was divine."

"You are unfair," she cried. "Oh, you are cruel, you juggle words, make knives of them. . . . You" and she spoke as with difficulty—"you have no right to know just how I loved my boy! You should be either man or woman!"

He said pensively: "Yes, I am cruel. But you had mirth and beauty once, and I had only love and a vocabulary. Who then more flagrantly abused the gifts God gave? And why should I not be cruel to you, who made a master-poet of me for your recreation? Lord, what a deal of ruined life it takes to make a little art! Yes, yes, I know. Under old oaks lovers will mouth my verses, and the acorns are not yet shaped from which those oaks will spring. My adoration and your perfidy, all that I have suffered, all that I have failed in even, has gone toward the building of an enduring monument. All these will be immortal, because youth is immortal, and youth delights in demanding explanations of infinity. And only to this end I have suffered and have catalogued the ravings of a perverse disease which has robbed my life of all the normal privileges of life as flame shrivels hair from the arm—that young fools such as I was once might be pleased to murder my rhetoric, and scribblers parody me in their fictions, and schoolboys guess at the date of my death!" This he said with more than ordinary animation; and then he shook his head. "There is a leaven," he said—"there is a leaven even in your smuggest and most inconsiderable tradesman."

She answered, with a wistful smile: "I, too, regret my poet. And just now you are more like him——"

"Faith, but he was really a poet—or, at least, at times——?"

"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme——'"

"Dear, dear!" he said, in petulant vexation; "how horribly emotion botches verse. That clash of sibilants is both harsh and ungrammatical. Shall should be changed to will." And at that the woman sighed, because, in common with all persons who never essayed creative verbal composition, she was quite certain perdurable writing must spring from a surcharged heart, rather than from a rearrangement of phrases. And so,

"Very unfeignedly I regret my poet," she said, "my poet, who was unhappy and unreasonable, because I was not always wise or kind, or even just. And I did not know until to-day how much I loved my poet. . . . Yes, I know now I loved him. I must go now. I would I had not come."

Then, standing face to face, he cried, "Eh, madam, and what if I also have lied to you—in part? Our work is done; what more is there to say?"

"Nothing," she answered—"nothing. Not even for you, who are a master-smith of words to-day and nothing more."

"I?" he replied. "Do you so little emulate a higher example that even for a moment you consider me?"

She did not answer.

When she had gone, the playmaker sat for a long while in meditation; and then smilingly he took up his pen. He was bound for "an uninhabited island" where all disasters ended in a happy climax.

"So, so!" he was declaiming, later on: "We, too, are kin To dreams and visions; and our little life Is gilded by such faint and cloud-wrapped suns—Only, that needs a homelier touch. Rather, let us say, We are such stuff As dreams are made on—Oh, good, good!—Now to pad out the line. . . . In any event, the Bermudas are a seasonable topic. Now here, instead of thickly-templed India, suppose we write the still-vexed Bermoothes—Good, good! It fits in well enough. . . ."

And so in clerkly fashion he sat about the accomplishment of his stint of labor in time for dinner. A competent workman is not disastrously upset by interruption; and, indeed, he found the notion of surprising Judith with an unlooked-for trinket or so to be at first a very efficacious spur to composition.

And presently the strong joy of creating kindled in him, and phrase flowed abreast with thought, and the playmaker wrote fluently and surely to an accompaniment of contented ejaculations. He regretted nothing, he would not now have laid aside his pen to take up a scepter. For surely—he would have said—to live untroubled, and weave beautiful and winsome dreams is the most desirable of human fates. But he did not consciously think of this, because he was midcourse in the evoking of a mimic tempest which, having purged its victims of unkindliness and error, aimed (in the end) only to sink into an amiable calm.



CONCERNING CORINNA

"Dr. Herrick told me that, in common with all the Enlightened or Illuminated Brothers, of which prying sect the age breeds so many, he trusted the great lines of Nature, not in the whole, but in part, as they believed Nature was in certain senses not true, and a betrayer, and that she was not wholly the benevolent power to endow, as accorded with the prevailing deceived notion of the vulgar. But he wished not to discuss more particularly than thus, as he had drawn up to himself a certain frontier of reticence; and so fell to petting a great black pig, of which he made an unseemly companion, and to talking idly."

A Gyges ring they bear about them still, To be, and not, seen when and where they will;

They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall, They fall like dew, and make no noise at all:

So silently they one to th' other come As colors steal into the pear or plum;

And air-like, leave no pression to be seen Where'er they met, or parting place has been.

ROBERT HERRICK.—My Lovers how They Come and Part.



CONCERNING CORINNA

The matter hinges entirely upon whether or not Robert Herrick was insane. Sir Thomas Browne always preferred to think that he was; whereas Philip Borsdale perversely considered the answer to be optional. Perversely, Sir Thomas protested, because he said that to believe in Herrick's sanity was not conducive to your own.

This much is certain: the old clergyman, a man of few friends and no intimates, enjoyed in Devon, thanks to his time-hallowed reputation for singularity, a certain immunity. In and about Dean Prior, for instance, it was conceded in 1674 that it was unusual for a divine of the Church of England to make a black pig—and a pig of peculiarly diabolical ugliness, at that—his ordinary associate; but Dean Prior had come long ago to accept the grisly brute as a concomitant of Dr. Herrick's presence almost as inevitable as his shadow. It was no crime to be fond of dumb animals, not even of one so inordinately unprepossessing; and you allowed for eccentricities, in any event, in dealing with a poet.

For Totnes, Buckfastleigh, Dean Prior—all that part of Devon, in fact—complacently basked in the reflected glory of Robert Herrick. People came from a long distance, now that the Parliamentary Wars were over, in order just to see the writer of the Hesperides and the Noble Numbers. And such enthusiasts found in Robert Herrick a hideous dreamy man, who, without ever perpetrating any actual discourtesy, always managed to dismiss them, somehow, with a sense of having been rebuffed.

Sir Thomas Browne, that ardent amateur of the curious, came into Devon, however, without the risk of incurring any such fate, inasmuch as the knight traveled westward simply to discuss with Master Philip Borsdale the recent doings of Cardinal Alioneri. Now, Philip Borsdale, as Sir Thomas knew, had been employed by Herrick in various transactions here irrelevant. In consequence, Sir Thomas Browne was not greatly surprised when, on his arrival at Buckfastleigh, Borsdale's body-servant told him that Master Borsdale had left instructions for Sir Thomas to follow him to Dean Prior. Browne complied, because his business with Borsdale was of importance.

Philip Borsdale was lounging in Dr. Herrick's chair, intent upon a lengthy manuscript, alone and to all appearances quite at home. The state of the room Sir Thomas found extraordinary; but he had graver matters to discuss; and he explained the results of his mission without extraneous comment.

"Yes, you have managed it to admiration," said Philip Borsdale, when the knight had made an end. Borsdale leaned back and laughed, purringly, for the outcome of this affair of the Cardinal and the Wax Image meant much to him from a pecuniary standpoint. "Yet it is odd a prince of any church which has done so much toward the discomfiture of sorcery should have entertained such ideas. It is also odd to note the series of coincidences which appears to have attended this Alioneri's practises."

"I noticed that," said Sir Thomas. After a while he said: "You think, then, that they must have been coincidences?"

"MUST is a word which intelligent people do not outwear by too constant usage."

And "Oh——?" said the knight, and said that alone, because he was familiar with the sparkle now in Borsdale's eyes, and knew it heralded an adventure for an amateur of the curious.

"I am not committing myself, mark you, Sir Thomas, to any statement whatever, beyond the observation that these coincidences were noticeable. I add, with superficial irrelevance, that Dr. Herrick disappeared last night."

"I am not surprised," said Sir Thomas, drily. "No possible antics would astonish me on the part of that unvenerable madman. When I was last in Totnes, he broke down in the midst of a sermon, and flung the manuscript of it at his congregation, and cursed them roundly for not paying closer attention. Such was never my ideal of absolute decorum in the pulpit. Moreover, it is unusual for a minister of the Church of England to be accompanied everywhere by a pig with whom he discusses the affairs of the parish precisely as if the pig were a human being."

"The pig—he whimsically called the pig Corinna, sir, in honor of that imaginary mistress to whom he addressed so many verses—why, the pig also has disappeared. Oh, but of course that at least is simply a coincidence. . . . I grant you it was an uncanny beast. And I grant you that Dr. Herrick was a dubious ornament to his calling. Of that I am doubly certain to-day," said Borsdale, and he waved his hand comprehensively, "in view of the state in which—you see—he left this room. Yes, he was quietly writing here at eleven o'clock last night when old Prudence Baldwin, his housekeeper, last saw him. Afterward Dr. Herrick appears to have diverted himself by taking away the mats and chalking geometrical designs upon the floor, as well as by burning some sort of incense in this brasier."

"But such avocations, Philip, are not necessarily indicative of sanity. No, it is not, upon the whole, an inevitable manner for an elderly parson to while away an evening."

"Oh, but that was only a part, sir. He also left the clothes he was wearing—in a rather peculiarly constructed heap, as you can see. Among them, by the way, I found this flattened and corroded bullet. That puzzled me. I think I understand it now." Thus Borsdale, as he composedly smoked his churchwarden. "In short, the whole affair is as mysterious——"

Here Sir Thomas raised his hand. "Spare me the simile. I detect a vista of curious perils such as infinitely outshines verbal brilliancy. You need my aid in some insane attempt." He considered. He said: "So! you have been retained?"

"I have been asked to help him. Of course I did not know of what he meant to try. In short, Dr. Herrick left this manuscript, as well as certain instructions for me. The last are—well! unusual."

"Ah, yes! You hearten me. I have long had my suspicions as to this Herrick, though. . . . And what are we to do?"

"I really cannot inform you, sir. I doubt if I could explain in any workaday English even what we will attempt to do," said Philip Borsdale. "I do say this: You believe the business which we have settled, involving as it does the lives of thousands of men and women, to be of importance. I swear to you that, as set against what we will essay, all we have done is trivial. As pitted against the business we will attempt to-night, our previous achievements are suggestive of the evolutions of two sand-fleas beside the ocean. The prize at which this adventure aims is so stupendous that I cannot name it."

"Oh, but you must, Philip. I am no more afraid of the local constabulary than I am of the local notions as to what respectability entails. I may confess, however, that I am afraid of wagering against unknown odds."

Borsdale reflected. Then he said, with deliberation: "Dr. Herrick's was, when you come to think of it, an unusual life. He is—or perhaps I ought to say he was—upward of eighty-three. He has lived here for over a half-century, and during that time he has never attempted to make either a friend or an enemy. He was—indifferent, let us say. Talking to Dr. Herrick was, somehow, like talking to a man in a fog. . . . Meanwhile, he wrote his verses to imaginary women—to Corinna and Julia, to Myrha, Electra and Perilla—those lovely, shadow women who never, in so far as we know, had any real existence——"

Sir Thomas smiled. "Of course. They are mere figments of the poet, pegs to hang rhymes on. And yet—let us go on. I know that Herrick never willingly so much as spoke with a woman."

"Not in so far as we know, I said." And Borsdale paused. "Then, too, he wrote such dainty, merry poems about the fairies. Yes, it was all of fifty years ago that Dr. Herrick first appeared in print with his Description of the King and Queen of the Fairies. The thought seems always to have haunted him."

The knight's face changed, a little by a little. "I have long been an amateur of the curious," he said, strangely quiet. "I do not think that anything you may say will surprise me inordinately."

"He had found in every country in the world traditions of a race who were human—yet more than human. That is the most exact fashion in which I can express his beginnings. On every side he found the notion of a race who can impinge on mortal life and partake of it—but always without exercising the last reach of their endowments. Oh, the tradition exists everywhere, whether you call these occasional interlopers fauns, fairies, gnomes, ondines, incubi, or demons. They could, according to these fables, temporarily restrict themselves into our life, just as a swimmer may elect to use only one arm—or, a more fitting comparison, become apparent to our human senses in the fashion of a cube which can obtrude only one of its six surfaces into a plane. You follow me, of course, sir?—to the triangles and circles and hexagons this cube would seem to be an ordinary square. Conceiving such a race to exist, we might talk with them, might jostle them in the streets, might even intermarry with them, sir—and always see in them only human beings, and solely because of our senses' limitations."

"I comprehend. These are exactly the speculations that would appeal to an unbalanced mind—is that not your thought, Philip?"

"Why, there is nothing particularly insane, Sir Thomas, in desiring to explore in fields beyond those which our senses make perceptible. It is very certain these fields exist; and the question of their extent I take to be both interesting and important."

Then Sir Thomas said: "Like any other rational man, I have occasionally thought of this endeavor at which you hint. We exist—you and I and all the others—in what we glibly call the universe. All that we know of it is through what we entitle our five senses, which, when provoked to action, will cause a chemical change in a few ounces of spongy matter packed in our skulls. There are no grounds for believing that this particular method of communication is adequate, or even that the agents which produce it are veracious. Meanwhile, we are in touch with what exists through our five senses only. It may be that they lie to us. There is, at least, no reason for assuming them to be infallible."

"But reflection plows a deeper furrow, Sir Thomas. Even in the exercise of any one of these five senses it is certain that we are excelled by what we vaingloriously call the lower forms of life. A dog has powers of scent we cannot reach to, birds hear the crawling of a worm, insects distinguish those rays in the spectrum which lie beyond violet and red, and are invisible to us; and snails and fish and ants—perhaps all other living creatures, indeed—have senses which man does not share at all, and has no name for. Granted that we human beings alone possess the power of reasoning, the fact remains that we invariably start with false premises, and always pass our judgments when biased at the best by incomplete reports of everything in the universe, and very possibly by reports which lie flat-footedly."

You saw that Browne was troubled. Now he rose. "Nothing will come of this. I do not touch upon the desirability of conquering those fields at which we dare only to hint. No, I am not afraid. I dare assist you in doing anything Dr. Herrick asks, because I know that nothing will come of such endeavors. Much is permitted us—'but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, to us who are no more than human, Ye shall not eat of it.'"

"Yet Dr. Herrick, as many other men have done, thought otherwise. I, too, will venture a quotation. 'Didst thou never see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heavens o'er our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.' Many years ago that lamentation was familiar. What wonder, then, that Dr. Herrick should have dared to repeat it yesterday? And what wonder if he tried to free the prisoner?"

"Such freedom is forbidden," Sir Thomas stubbornly replied. "I have long known that Herrick was formerly in correspondence with John Heydon, and Robert Flood, and others of the Illuminated, as they call themselves. There are many of this sect in England, as we all know; and we hear much silly chatter of Elixirs and Philosopher's Stones in connection with them. But I happen to know somewhat of their real aims and tenets. I do not care to know any more than I do. If it be true that all of which man is conscious is just a portion of a curtain, and that the actual universe in nothing resembles our notion of it, I am willing to believe this curtain was placed there for some righteous and wise reason. They tell me the curtain may be lifted. Whether this be true or no, I must for my own sanity's sake insist it can never be lifted."

"But what if it were not forbidden? For Dr. Herrick asserts he has already demonstrated that."

Sir Thomas interrupted, with odd quickness. "True, we must bear it in mind the man never married—Did he, by any chance, possess a crystal of Venice glass three inches square?"

And Borsdale gaped. "I found it with his manuscript. But he said nothing of it. . . . How could you guess?"

Sir Thomas reflectively scraped the edge of the glass with his finger-nail. "You would be none the happier for knowing, Philip. Yes, that is a blood-stain here. I see. And Herrick, so far as we know, had never in his life loved any woman. He is the only poet in history who never demonstrably loved any woman. I think you had better read me his manuscript, Philip."

This Philip Borsdale did.

Then Sir Thomas said, as quiet epilogue: "This, if it be true, would explain much as to that lovely land of eternal spring and daffodils and friendly girls, of which his verses make us free. It would even explain Corinna and Herrick's rapt living without any human ties. For all poets since the time of AEschylus, who could not write until he was too drunken to walk, have been most readily seduced by whatever stimulus most tended to heighten their imaginings; so that for the sake of a song's perfection they have freely resorted to divers artificial inspirations, and very often without evincing any undue squeamishness. . . . I spoke of AEschylus. I am sorry, Philip, that you are not familiar with ancient Greek life. There is so much I could tell you of, in that event, of the quaint cult of Kore, or Pherephatta, and of the swine of Eubouleus, and of certain ambiguous maidens, whom those old Grecians fabled—oh, very ignorantly fabled, my lad, of course—to rule in a more quietly lit and more tranquil world than we blunder about. I think I could explain much which now seems mysterious—yes, and the daffodils, also, that Herrick wrote of so constantly. But it is better not to talk of these sinister delusions of heathenry." Sir Thomas shrugged. "For my reward would be to have you think me mad. I prefer to iterate the verdict of all logical people, and formally to register my opinion that Robert Herrick was indisputably a lunatic."

Borsdale did not seem perturbed. "I think the record of his experiments is true, in any event. You will concede that their results were startling? And what if his deductions be the truth? what if our limited senses have reported to us so very little of the universe, and even that little untruthfully?" He laughed and drummed impatiently upon the table. "At least, he tells us that the boy returned. I fervently believe that in this matter Dr. Herrick was capable of any crime except falsehood. Oh, no I depend on it, he also will return."

"You imagine Herrick will break down the door between this world and that other inconceivable world which all of us have dreamed of! To me, my lad, it seems as if this Herrick aimed dangerously near to repetition of the Primal Sin, for all that he handles it like a problem in mechanical mathematics. The poet writes as if he were instructing a dame's school as to the advisability of becoming omnipotent."

"Well, well! I am not defending Dr. Herrick in anything save his desire to know the truth. In this respect at least, he has proven himself to be both admirable and fearless. And at worst, he only strives to do what Jacob did at Peniel," said Philip Borsdale, lightly. "The patriarch, as I recall, was blessed for acting as he did. The legend is not irrelevant, I think."

They passed into the adjoining room.

Thus the two men came into a high-ceiled apartment, cylindrical in shape, with plastered walls painted green everywhere save for the quaint embellishment of a large oval, wherein a woman, having an eagle's beak, grasped in one hand a serpent and in the other a knife. Sir Thomas Browne seemed to recognize this curious design, and gave an ominous nod.

Borsdale said: "You see Dr. Herrick had prepared everything. And much of what we are about to do is merely symbolical, of course. Most people undervalue symbols. They do not seem to understand that there could never have been any conceivable need of inventing a periphrasis for what did not exist."

Sir Thomas Browne regarded Borsdale for a while intently. Then the knight gave his habitual shrugging gesture. "You are braver than I, Philip, because you are more ignorant than I. I have been too long an amateur of the curious. Sometimes in over-credulous moments I have almost believed that in sober verity there are reasoning beings who are not human—beings that for their own dark purposes seek union with us. Indeed, I went into Pomerania once to talk with John Dietrick of Ramdin. He told me one of those relations whose truth we dread, a tale which I did not dare, I tell you candidly, even to discuss in my Vulgar Errors. Then there is Helgi Thorison's history, and that of Leonard of Basle also. Oh, there are more recorded stories of this nature than you dream of, Philip. We have only the choice between believing that all these men were madmen, and believing that ordinary human life is led by a drugged animal who drowses through a purblind existence among merciful veils. And these female creatures—these Corinnas, Perillas, Myrhas, and Electras—can it be possible that they are always striving, for their own strange ends, to rouse the sleeping animal and break the kindly veils?—and are they permitted to use such amiable enticements as Herrick describes? Oh, no, all this is just a madman's dream, dear lad, and we must not dare to consider it seriously, lest we become no more sane than he."

"But you will aid me?" Borsdale said.

"Yes, I will aid you, Philip, for in Herrick's case I take it that the mischief is consummated already; and we, I think, risk nothing worse than death. But you will need another knife a little later—a knife that will be clean."

"I had forgotten." Borsdale withdrew, and presently returned with a bone-handled knife. And then he made a light. "Are you quite ready, sir?"

Sir Thomas Browne, that aging amateur of the curious, could not resist a laugh.

And then they sat about proceedings of which, for obvious reasons, the details are best left unrecorded. It was not an unconscionable while before they seemed to be aware of unusual phenomena. But as Sir Thomas always pointed out, in subsequent discussions, these were quite possibly the fruitage of excited imagination.

"Now, Philip!—now, give me the knife!" cried Sir Thomas Browne. He knew for the first time, despite many previous mischancy happenings, what real terror was.

The room was thick with blinding smoke by this, so that Borsdale could see nothing save his co-partner in this adventure. Both men were shaken by what had occurred before. Borsdale incuriously perceived that old Sir Thomas rose, tense as a cat about to pounce, and that he caught the unstained knife from Borsdale's hand, and flung it like a javelin into the vapor which encompassed them. This gesture stirred the smoke so that Borsdale could see the knife quiver and fall, and note the tiny triangle of unbared plaster it had cut in the painted woman's breast. Within the same instant he had perceived a naked man who staggered.

"Iz adu kronyeshnago——!" The intruder's thin, shrill wail was that of a frightened child. The man strode forward, choked, seemed to grope his way. His face was not good to look at. Horror gripped and tore at every member of the cadaverous old body, as a high wind tugs at a flag. The two witnesses of Herrick's agony did not stir during the instant wherein the frenzied man stooped, moving stiffly like an ill-made toy, and took up the knife.

"Oh, yes, I knew what he was about to do," said Sir Thomas Browne afterward, in his quiet fashion. "I did not try to stop him. If Herrick had been my dearest friend, I would not have interfered. I had seen his face, you comprehend. Yes, it was kinder to let him die. It was curious, though, as he stood there hacking his chest, how at each stab he deliberately twisted the knife. I suppose the pain distracted his mind from what he was remembering. I should have forewarned Borsdale of this possible outcome at the very first, I suppose. But, then, which one of us is always wise?"

So this adventure came to nothing. For its significance, if any, hinged upon Robert Herrick's sanity, which was at best a disputable quantity. Grant him insane, and the whole business, as Sir Thomas was at large pains to point out, dwindles at once into the irresponsible vagaries of a madman.

"And all the while, for what we know, he had been hiding somewhere in the house. We never searched it. Oh, yes, there is no doubt he was insane," said Sir Thomas, comfortably.

"Faith! what he moaned was gibberish, of course——"

"Oddly enough, his words were intelligible. They meant in Russian 'Out of the lowest hell.'"

"But, why, in God's name, Russian?"

"I am sure I do not know," Sir Thomas replied; and he did not appear at all to regret his ignorance.

But Borsdale meditated, disappointedly. "Oh, yes, the outcome is ambiguous, Sir Thomas, in every way. I think we may safely take it as a warning, in any event, that this world of ours, whatever its deficiencies, was meant to be inhabited by men and women only."

"Now I," was Sir Thomas's verdict, "prefer to take it as a warning that insane people ought to be restrained."

"Ah, well, insanity is only one of the many forms of being abnormal. Yes, I think it proves that all abnormal people ought to be restrained. Perhaps it proves that they are very potently restrained," said Philip Borsdale, perversely.

Perversely, Sir Thomas always steadfastly protested, because he said that to believe in Herrick's sanity was not conducive to your own.

So Sir Thomas shrugged, and went toward the open window. Without the road was a dazzling gray under the noon sun, for the sky was cloudless. The ordered trees were rustling pleasantly, very brave in their autumnal liveries. Under a maple across the way some seven laborers were joking lazily as they ate their dinner. A wagon lumbered by, the driver whistling. In front of the house a woman had stopped to rearrange the pink cap of the baby she was carrying. The child had just reached up fat and uncertain little arms to kiss her. Nothing that Browne saw was out of ordinary, kindly human life.

"Well, after all," said Sir Thomas, upon a sudden, "for one, I think it is an endurable world, just as it stands."

And Borsdale looked up from a letter he had been reading. It was from a woman who has no concern with this tale, and its contents were of no importance to any one save Borsdale.

"Now, do you know," said Philip Borsdale, "I am beginning to think you the most sensible man of my acquaintance! Oh, yes, beyond doubt it is an endurable sun-nurtured world—just as it stands. It makes it doubly odd that Dr. Herrick should have chosen always to

'Write of groves, and twilights, and to sing The court of Mab, and of the Fairy King, And write of Hell.'"

Sir Thomas touched his arm, protestingly. "Ah, but you have forgotten what follows, Philip—

'I sing, and ever shall, Of Heaven,—and hope to have it after all.'"

"Well! I cry Amen," said Borsdale. "But I wish I could forget the old man's face."

"Oh, and I also," Sir Thomas said. "And I cry Amen with far more heartiness, my lad, because I, too, once dreamed of—of Corinna, shall we say?"



OLIVIA'S POTTAGE

"Mr. Wycherley was naturally modest until King Charles' court, that late disgrace to our times, corrupted him. He then gave himself up to all sorts of extravagances and to the wildest frolics that a wanton wit could devise. . . . Never was so much ill-nature in a pen as in his, joined with so much good nature as was in himself, even to excess; for he was bountiful, even to run himself into difficulties, and charitable even to a fault. It was not that he was free from the failings of humanity, but he had the tenderness of it, too, which made everybody excuse whom everybody loved; and even the asperity of his verses seems to have been forgiven."



I the Plain Dealer am to act to-day.

* * * * * *

Now, you shrewd judges, who the boxes sway, Leading the ladies' hearts and sense astray, And for their sakes, see all and hear no play; Correct your cravats, foretops, lock behind: The dress and breeding of the play ne'er mind; For the coarse dauber of the coming scenes To follow life and nature only means, Displays you as you are, makes his fine woman A mercenary jilt and true to no man, Shows men of wit and pleasure of the age Are as dull rogues as ever cumber'd stage.

WILLIAM WYCHERLEY.—Prologue to The Plain Dealer.



OLIVIA'S POTTAGE

It was in the May of 1680 that Mr. William Wycherley went into the country to marry the famed heiress, Mistress Araminta Vining, as he had previously settled with her father, and found her to his vast relief a very personable girl. She had in consequence a host of admirers, pre-eminent among whom was young Robert Minifie of Milanor. Mr. Wycherley, a noted stickler for etiquette, decorously made bold to question Mr. Minifie's taste in a dispute concerning waistcoats. A duel was decorously arranged and these two met upon the narrow beach of Teviot Bay.

Theirs was a spirited encounter, lasting for ten energetic minutes. Then Wycherley pinked Mr. Minifie in the shoulder, just as the dramatist, a favorite pupil of Gerard's, had planned to do; and the four gentlemen parted with every imaginable courtesy, since the wounded man and the two seconds were to return by boat to Mr. Minifie's house at Milanor.

More lately Wycherley walked in the direction of Ouseley Manor, whistling Love's a Toy. Honor was satisfied, and, happily, as he reflected, at no expense of life. He was a kindly hearted fop, and more than once had killed his man with perfectly sincere regret. But in putting on his coat—it was the black camlet coat with silver buttons—he had overlooked his sleevelinks; and he did not recognize, for twenty-four eventful hours, the full importance of his carelessness.

In the heart of Figgis Wood, the incomparable Countess of Drogheda, aunt to Mr. Wycherley's betrothed, and a noted leader of fashion, had presently paused at sight of him—laughing a little—and with one tiny hand had made as though to thrust back the staghound which accompanied her. "Your humble servant, Mr. Swashbuckler," she said; and then: "But oh! you have not hurt the lad?" she demanded, with a tincture of anxiety.

"Nay, after a short but brilliant engagement," Wycherley returned, "Mr. Minifie was very harmlessly perforated; and in consequence I look to be married on Thursday, after all."

"Let me die but Cupid never meets with anything save inhospitality in this gross world!" cried Lady Drogheda. "For the boy is heels over head in love with Araminta,—oh, a second Almanzor! And my niece does not precisely hate him either, let me tell you, William, for all your month's assault of essences and perfumed gloves and apricot paste and other small artillery of courtship. La, my dear, was it only a month ago we settled your future over a couple of Naples biscuit and a bottle of Rhenish?" She walked beside him now, and the progress of these exquisites was leisurely. There were many trees at hand so huge as to necessitate a considerable detour.

"Egad, it is a month and three days over," Wycherley retorted, "since you suggested your respected brother-in-law was ready to pay my debts in full, upon condition I retaliated by making your adorable niece Mistress Wycherley. Well, I stand to-day indebted to him for an advance of L1500 and am no more afraid of bailiffs. We have performed a very creditable stroke of business; and the day after to-morrow you will have fairly earned your L500 for arranging the marriage. Faith, and in earnest of this, I already begin to view you through appropriate lenses as undoubtedly the most desirable aunt in the universe."

Nor was there any unconscionable stretching of the phrase. Through the quiet forest, untouched as yet by any fidgeting culture, and much as it was when John Lackland wooed Hawisa under, its venerable oaks, old even then, the little widow moved like a light flame. She was clothed throughout in scarlet, after her high-hearted style of dress, and carried a tall staff of ebony; and the gold head of it was farther from the dead leaves than was her mischievous countenance. The big staghound lounged beside her. She pleased the eye, at least, did this heartless, merry and selfish Olivia, whom Wycherley had so ruthlessly depicted in his Plain Dealer. To the last detail Wycherley found her, as he phrased it, "mignonne et piquante," and he told her so.

Lady Drogheda observed, "Fiddle-de-dee!" Lady Drogheda continued: "Yes, I am a fool, of course, but then I still remember Bessington, and the boy that went mad there——"

"Because of a surfeit of those dreams 'such as the poets know when they are young.' Sweet chuck, beat not the bones of the buried; when he breathed he was a likely lad," Mr. Wycherley declared, with signal gravity.

"Oh, la, la!" she flouted him. "Well, in any event you were the first gentleman in England to wear a neckcloth of Flanders lace."

"And you were the first person of quality to eat cheesecakes in Spring Garden," he not half so mirthfully retorted. "So we have not entirely failed in life, it may be, after all."

She made of him a quite irrelevant demand: "D'ye fancy Esau was contented, William?"

"I fancy he was fond of pottage, madam; and that, as I remember, he got his pottage. Come, now, a tangible bowl of pottage, piping hot, is not to be despised in such a hazardous world as ours is."

She was silent for a lengthy while. "Lord, Lord, how musty all that brave, sweet nonsense seems!" she said, and almost sighed. "Eh, well! le vin est tire, et il faut le boire."

"My adorable aunt! Let us put it a thought less dumpishly; and render thanks because our pottage smokes upon the table, and we are blessed with excellent appetites."

"So that in a month we will be back again in the playhouses and Hyde Park and Mulberry Garden, or nodding to each other in the New Exchange,—you with your debts paid, and I with my L500——?" She paused to pat the staghound's head. "Lord Remon came this afternoon," said Lady Drogheda, and with averted eyes.

"I do not approve of Remon," he announced. "Nay, madam, even a Siren ought to spare her kin and show some mercy toward the more stagnant-blooded fish."

And Lady Drogheda shrugged. "He is very wealthy, and I am lamentably poor. One must not seek noon at fourteen o'clock or clamor for better bread than was ever made from wheat."

Mr. Wycherley laughed, after a pregnant silence.

"By heavens, madam, you are in the right! So I shall walk no more in Figgis Wood, for its old magic breeds too many day-dreams. Besides, we have been serious for half-an-hour. Now, then, let us discuss theology, dear aunt, or millinery, or metaphysics, or the King's new statue at Windsor, or, if you will, the last Spring Garden scandal. Or let us count the leaves upon this tree; and afterward I will enumerate my reasons for believing yonder crescent moon to be the paring of the Angel Gabriel's left thumb-nail."

She was a woman of eloquent silences when there was any need of them; and thus the fop and the coquette traversed the remainder of that solemn wood without any further speech. Modish people would have esteemed them unwontedly glum.

Wycherley discovered in a while the absence of his sleeve-links, and was properly vexed by the loss of these not unhandsome trinkets, the gifts of Lady Castlemaine in the old days when Mr. Wycherley was the King's successful rival for her favors. But Wycherley knew the tide filled Teviot Bay and wondering fishes were at liberty to muzzle the toys, by this, and merely shrugged at his mishap, midcourse in toilet.

Mr. Wycherley, upon mature deliberation, wore the green suit with yellow ribbons, since there was a ball that night in honor of his nearing marriage, and a confluence of gentry to attend it. Miss Vining and he walked through a minuet to some applause; the two were heartily acclaimed a striking couple, and congratulations beat about their ears as thick as sugar-plums in a carnival. And at nine you might have found the handsome dramatist alone upon the East Terrace of Ouseley, pacing to and fro in the moonlight, and complacently reflecting upon his quite indisputable and, past doubt, unmerited good fortune.

There was never any night in June which nature planned the more adroitly. Soft and warm and windless, lit by a vainglorious moon and every star that ever shone, the beauty of this world caressed and heartened its beholder like a gallant music. Our universe, Mr. Wycherley conceded willingly, was excellent and kindly, and the Arbiter of it too generous; for here was he, the wastrel, like the third prince at the end of a fairy-tale, the master of a handsome wife, and a fine house and fortune. Somewhere, he knew, young Minifie, with his arm in a sling, was pleading with Mistress Araminta for the last time; and this reflection did not greatly trouble Mr. Wycherley, since incommunicably it tickled his vanity. He was chuckling when he came to the open window.

Within a woman was singing, to the tinkling accompaniment of a spinet, for the delectation of Lord Remon. She was not uncomely, and the hard, lean, stingy countenance of the attendant nobleman was almost genial. Wycherley understood with a great rending shock, as though the thought were novel, that Olivia, Lady Drogheda, designed to marry this man, who grinned within finger's reach—or, rather, to ally herself with Remon's inordinate wealth,—and without any heralding a brutal rage and hatred of all created things possessed the involuntary eavesdropper.

She looked up into Remon's face and, laughing with such bright and elfin mirth as never any other woman showed, thought Wycherley, she broke into another song. She would have spared Mr. Wycherley that had she but known him to be within earshot. . . . Oh, it was only Lady Drogheda who sang, he knew,—the seasoned gamester and coquette, the veteran of London and of Cheltenham,—but the woman had no right to charm this haggler with a voice that was not hers. For it was the voice of another Olivia, who was not a fine and urban lady, and who lived nowhere any longer; it was the voice of a soft-handed, tender, jeering girl, whom he alone remembered; and a sick, illimitable rage grilled in each vein of him as liltingly she sang, for Remon, the old and foolish song which Wycherley had made in her praise very long ago, and of which he might not ever forget the most trivial word.

Men, even beaux, are strangely constituted; and so it needed only this—the sudden stark brute jealousy of one male animal for another. That was the clumsy hand which now unlocked the dyke; and like a flood, tall and resistless, came the recollection of their far-off past and of its least dear trifle, of all the aspirations and absurdities and splendors of their common youth, and found him in its path, a painted fellow, a spendthrift king of the mode, a most notable authority upon the set of a peruke, a penniless, spent connoisseur of stockings, essences and cosmetics.

He got but little rest this night.

There were too many plaintive memories which tediously plucked him back, with feeble and innumerable hands, as often as he trod upon the threshold of sleep. Then too, there were so many dreams, half-waking, and not only of Olivia Chichele, naive and frank in divers rural circumstances, but rather of Olivia, Lady Drogheda, that perfect piece of artifice; of how exquisite she was! how swift and volatile in every movement! how airily indomitable, and how mendacious to the tips of her polished finger-nails! and how she always seemed to flit about this world as joyously, alertly, and as colorfully as some ornate and tiny bird of the tropics!

But presently parochial birds were wrangling underneath the dramatist's window, while he tossed and assured himself that he was sleepier than any saint who ever snored in Ephesus; and presently one hand of Moncrieff was drawing the bed-curtains, while the other carefully balanced a mug of shaving-water.

Wycherley did not see her all that morning, for Lady Drogheda was fatigued, or so a lackey informed him, and as yet kept her chamber. His Araminta he found deplorably sullen. So the dramatist devoted the better part of this day to a refitting of his wedding-suit, just come from London; for Moncrieff, an invaluable man, had adjudged the pockets to be placed too high; and, be the punishment deserved or no, Mr. Wycherley had never heard that any victim of law appeared the more admirable upon his scaffold for being slovenly in his attire.

Thus it was as late as five in the afternoon that, wearing the peach-colored suit trimmed with scarlet ribbon, and a new French beaver, the exquisite came upon Lady Drogheda walking in the gardens with only an appropriate peacock for company. She was so beautiful and brilliant and so little—so like a famous gem too suddenly disclosed, and therefore oddly disparate in all these qualities, that his decorous pleasant voice might quite permissibly have shaken a trifle (as indeed it did), when Mr. Wycherley implored Lady Drogheda to walk with him to Teviot Bay, on the off-chance of recovering his sleeve-links.

And there they did find one of the trinkets, but the tide had swept away the other, or else the sand had buried it. So they rested there upon the rocks, after an unavailing search, and talked of many trifles, amid surroundings oddly incongruous.

For this Teviot Bay is a primeval place, a deep-cut, narrow notch in the tip of Carnrick, and is walled by cliffs so high and so precipitous that they exclude a view of anything except the ocean. The bay opens due west; and its white barriers were now developing a violet tinge, for this was on a sullen afternoon, and the sea was ruffled by spiteful gusts. Wycherley could find no color anywhere save in this glowing, tiny and exquisite woman; and everywhere was a gigantic peace, vexed only when high overhead a sea-fowl jeered at these modish persons, as he flapped toward an impregnable nest.

"And by this hour to-morrow," thought Mr. Wycherley, "I shall be chained to that good, strapping, wholesome Juno of a girl!"

So he fell presently into a silence, staring at the vacant west, which was like a huge and sickly pearl, not thinking of anything at all, but longing poignantly for something which was very beautiful and strange and quite unattainable, with precisely that anguish he had sometimes known in awaking from a dream of which he could remember nothing save its piercing loveliness.

"And thus ends the last day of our bachelorhood!" said Lady Drogheda, upon a sudden. "You have played long enough—La, William, you have led the fashion for ten years, you have written four merry comedies, and you have laughed as much as any man alive, but you have pulled down all that nature raised in you, I think. Was it worth while?"

"Faith, but nature's monuments are no longer the last cry in architecture," he replied; "and I believe that The Plain Dealer and The Country Wife will hold their own."

"And you wrote them when you were just a boy! Ah, yes, you might have been our English Moliere, my dear. And, instead, you have elected to become an authority upon cravats and waistcoats."

"Eh, madam"—he smiled—"there was a time when I too was foolishly intent to divert the leisure hours of posterity. But reflection assured me that posterity had, thus far, done very little to place me under that or any other obligation. Ah, no! Youth, health and—though I say it—a modicum of intelligence are loaned to most of us for a while, and for a terribly brief while. They are but loans, and Time is waiting greedily to snatch them from us. For the perturbed usurer knows that he is lending us, perforce, three priceless possessions, and that till our lease runs out we are free to dispose of them as we elect. Now, had I jealously devoted my allotment of these treasures toward securing for my impressions of the universe a place in yet unprinted libraries, I would have made an investment from which I could not possibly have derived any pleasure, and which would have been to other people of rather dubious benefit. In consequence, I chose a wiser and devouter course."

This statement Lady Drogheda afforded the commentary of a grimace.

"Why, look you," Wycherley philosophized, "have you never thought what a vast deal of loving and painstaking labor must have gone to make the world we inhabit so beautiful and so complete? For it was not enough to evolve and set a glaring sun in heaven, to marshal the big stars about the summer sky, but even in the least frequented meadow every butterfly must have his pinions jeweled, very carefully, and every lovely blade of grass be fashioned separately. The hand that yesterday arranged the Himalayas found time to glaze the wings of a midge! Now, most of us could design a striking Flood, or even a Last judgment, since the canvas is so big and the colors used so virulent; but to paint a snuff-box perfectly you must love the labor for its own sake, and pursue it without even an underthought of the performance's ultimate appraisement. People do not often consider the simple fact that it is enough to bait, and quite superfluous to veneer, a trap; indeed, those generally acclaimed the best of persons insist this world is but an antechamber, full of gins and pitfalls, which must be scurried through with shut eyes. And the more fools they, as all we poets know! for to enjoy a sunset, or a glass of wine, or even to admire the charms of a handsome woman, is to render the Artificer of all at least the tribute of appreciation."

But she said, in a sharp voice: "William, William——!" And he saw that there was no beach now in Teviot Bay except the dwindling crescent at its farthest indentation on which they sat.

Yet his watch, on consultation, recorded only five o'clock; and presently Mr. Wycherley laughed, not very loudly. The two had risen, and her face was a tiny snowdrift where every touch of rouge and grease-pencils showed crudely.

"Look now," said Wycherley, "upon what trifles our lives hinge! Last night I heard you singing, and the song brought back so many things done long ago, and made me so unhappy that—ridiculous conclusion!—I forgot to wind my watch. Well! the tide is buffeting at either side of Carnrick; within the hour this place will be submerged; and, in a phrase, we are as dead as Hannibal or Hector."

She said, very quiet: "Could you not gain the mainland if you stripped and swam for it?"

"Why, possibly," the beau conceded. "Meanwhile you would have drowned. Faith, we had as well make the best of it."

Little Lady Drogheda touched his sleeve, and her hand (as the man noted) did not shake at all, nor did her delicious piping voice shake either. "You cannot save me. I know it. I am not frightened. I bid you save yourself."

"Permit me to assist you to that ledge of rock," Mr. Wycherley answered, "which is a trifle higher than the beach; and I pray you, Olivia, do not mar the dignity of these last passages by talking nonsense."

For he had spied a ledge, not inaccessible, some four feet higher than the sands, and it offered them at least a respite. And within the moment they had secured this niggardly concession, intent to die, as Wycherley observed, like hurt mice upon a pantry-shelf. The business smacked of disproportion, he considered, although too well-bred to say as much; for here was a big ruthless league betwixt earth and sea, and with no loftier end than to crush a fop and a coquette, whose speedier extinction had been dear at the expense of a shilling's worth of arsenic!

Then the sun came out, to peep at these trapped, comely people, and doubtless to get appropriate mirth at the spectacle. He hung low against the misty sky, a clearly-rounded orb that did not dazzle, but merely shone with the cold glitter of new snow upon a fair December day; and for the rest, the rocks, and watery heavens, and all these treacherous and lapping waves, were very like a crude draught of the world, dashed off conceivably upon the day before creation.

These arbiters of social London did not speak at all; and the bleak waters crowded toward them as in a fretful dispute of precedence.

Then the woman said: "Last night Lord Remon asked me to marry him, and I declined the honor. For this place is too like Bessington—and, I think, the past month has changed everything——"

"I thought you had forgotten Bessington," he said, "long, long ago."

"I did not ever quite forget—Oh, the garish years," she wailed, "since then! And how I hated you, William—and yet liked you, too,—because you were never the boy that I remembered, and people would not let you be! And how I hated them—the huzzies! For I had to see you almost every day, and it was never you I saw—Ah, William, come back for just a little, little while, and be an honest boy for just the moment that we are dying, and not an elegant fine gentleman!"

"Nay, my dear," the dramatist composedly answered, "an hour of naked candor is at hand. Life is a masquerade where Death, it would appear, is master of the ceremonies. Now he sounds his whistle; and we who went about the world so long as harlequins must unmask, and for all time put aside our abhorrence of the disheveled. For in sober verity, this is Death who comes, Olivia,—though I had thought that at his advent one would be afraid."

Yet apprehension of this gross and unavoidable adventure, so soon to be endured, thrilled him, and none too lightly. It seemed unfair that death should draw near thus sensibly, with never a twinge or ache to herald its arrival. Why, there were fifty years of life in this fine, nimble body but for any contretemps like that of the deplorable present! Thus his meditations stumbled.

"Oh, William," Lady Drogheda bewailed, "it is all so big—the incurious west, and the sea, and these rocks that were old in Noah's youth,—and we are so little——!"

"Yes," he returned, and took her hand, because their feet were wetted now; "the trap and its small prey are not commensurate. The stage is set for a Homeric death-scene, and we two profane an over-ambitious background. For who are we that Heaven should have rived the world before time was, to trap us, and should make of the old sea a fowling-net?" Their eyes encountered, and he said, with a strange gush of manliness: "Yet Heaven is kind. I am bound even in honor now to marry Mistress Araminta; and you would marry Remon in the end, Olivia,—ah, yes! for we are merely moths, my dear, and luxury is a disastrously brilliant lamp. But here are only you and I and the master of all ceremony. And yet—I would we were a little worthier, Olivia!"

"You have written four merry comedies and you were the first gentleman in England to wear a neckcloth of Flanders lace," she answered, and her smile was sadder than weeping.

"And you were the first person of quality to eat cheese-cakes in Spring Garden. There you have our epitaphs, if we in truth have earned an epitaph who have not ever lived."

"No, we have only laughed—Laugh now, for the last time, and hearten me, my handsome William! And yet could I but come to God," the woman said, with a new voice, "and make it clear to Him just how it all fell out, and beg for one more chance! How heartily I would pray then!"

"And I would cry Amen to all that prayer must of necessity contain," he answered. "Oh!" said Wycherley, "just for applause and bodily comfort and the envy of innumerable other fools we two have bartered a great heritage! I think our corner of the world will lament us for as much as a week; but I fear lest Heaven may not condescend to set apart the needful time wherein to frame a suitable chastisement for such poor imbeciles. Olivia, I have loved you all my life, and I have been faithful neither to you nor to myself! I love you so that I am not afraid even now, since you are here, and so entirely that I have forgotten how to plead my cause convincingly. And I have had practice, let me tell you. . . . !" Then he shook his head and smiled. "But candor is not a la mode. See, now, to what outmoded and bucolic frenzies nature brings even us at last."

She answered only, as she motioned seaward, "Look!"

And what Mr. Wycherley saw was a substantial boat rowed by four of Mr. Minifie's attendants; and in the bow of the vessel sat that wounded gentleman himself, regarding Wycherley and Lady Drogheda with some disfavor; and beside the younger man was Mistress Araminta Vining.

It was a perturbed Minifie who broke the silence. "This is very awkward," he said, "because Araminta and I are eloping. We mean to be married this same night at Milanor. And deuce take it, Mr. Wycherley! I can't leave you there to drown, any more than in the circumstances I can ask you to make one of the party."

"Mr. Wycherley," said his companion, with far more asperity, "the vanity and obduracy of a cruel father have forced me to the adoption of this desperate measure. Toward yourself I entertain no ill-feeling, nor indeed any sentiment at all except the most profound contempt. My aunt will, of course, accompany us; for yourself, you will do as you please; but in any event I solemnly protest that I spurn your odious pretensions, release myself hereby from an enforced and hideous obligation, and in a phrase would not marry you in order to be Queen of England."

"Miss Vining, I had hitherto admired you," the beau replied, with fervor, "but now esteem is changed to adoration."

Then he turned to his Olivia. "Madam, you will pardon the awkward but unavoidable publicity of my proceeding. I am a ruined man. I owe your brother-in-law some L1500, and, oddly enough, I mean to pay him. I must sell Jephcot and Skene Minor, but while life lasts I shall keep Bessington and all its memories. Meanwhile there is a clergyman waiting at Milanor. So marry me to-night, Olivia; and we will go back to Bessington to-morrow."

"To Bessington——!" she said. It was as though she spoke of something very sacred. Then very musically Lady Drogheda laughed, and to the eye she was all flippancy. "La, William, I can't bury myself in the country until the end of time," she said, "and make interminable custards," she added, "and superintend the poultry," she said, "and for recreation play short whist with the vicar."

And it seemed to Mr. Wycherley that he had gone divinely mad. "Don't lie to me, Olivia. You are thinking there are yet a host of heiresses who would be glad to be a famous beau's wife at however dear a cost. But don't lie to me. Don't even try to seem the airy and bedizened woman I have known so long. All that is over now. Death tapped us on the shoulder, and, if only for a moment, the masks were dropped. And life is changed now, oh, everything is changed! Then, come, my dear! let us be wise and very honest. Let us concede it is still possible for me to find another heiress, and for you to marry Remon; let us grant it the only outcome of our common-sense! and for all that, laugh, and fling away the pottage, and be more wise than reason."

She irresolutely said: "I cannot. Matters are altered now. It would be madness——"

"It would undoubtedly be madness," Mr. Wycherley assented. "But then I am so tired of being rational! Oh, Olivia," this former arbiter of taste absurdly babbled, "if I lose you now it is forever! and there is no health in me save when I am with you. Then alone I wish to do praiseworthy things, to be all which the boy we know of should have grown to. . . . See how profoundly shameless I am become when, with such an audience, I take refuge in the pitiful base argument of my own weakness! But, my dear, I want you so that nothing else in the world means anything to me. I want you! and all my life I have wanted you."

"Boy, boy——!" she answered, and her fine hands had come to Wycherley, as white birds flutter homeward. But even then she had to deliberate the matter—since the habits of many years are not put aside like outworn gloves,—and for innumerable centuries, it seemed to him, her foot tapped on that wetted ledge.

Presently her lashes lifted. "I suppose it would be lacking in reverence to keep a clergyman waiting longer than was absolutely necessary?" she hazarded.



A BROWN WOMAN

"A critical age called for symmetry, and exquisite finish had to be studied as much as nobility of thought. . . . POPE aimed to take first place as a writer of polished verse. Any knowledge he gained of the world, or any suggestion that came to him from his intercourse with society, was utilized to accomplish his main purpose. To put his thoughts into choice language was not enough. Each idea had to be put in its neatest and most epigrammatic form."



Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipt me in ink, my parents', or my own? As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. The muse but served to ease some friend, not wife, To help me through this long disease, my life.

* * * * * *

Who shames a scribbler? break one cobweb through, He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew; Destroy his fib or sophistry in vain, The creature's at his foolish work again, Throned in the centre of his thin designs, Proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines!

ALEXANDER POPE.—Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.



A BROWN WOMAN

"But I must be hurrying home now," the girl said, "for it is high time I were back in the hayfields."

"Fair shepherdess," he implored, "for heaven's sake, let us not cut short the pastorelle thus abruptly."

"And what manner of beast may that be, pray?"

"'Tis a conventional form of verse, my dear, which we at present strikingly illustrate. The plan of a pastorelle is simplicity's self: a gentleman, which I may fairly claim to be, in some fair rural scene—such as this—comes suddenly upon a rustic maiden of surpassing beauty. He naturally falls in love with her, and they say all manner of fine things to each other."

She considered him for a while before speaking. It thrilled him to see the odd tenderness that was in her face. "You always think of saying and writing fine things, do you not, sir?"

"My dear," he answered, gravely, "I believe that I was undoubtedly guilty of such folly until you came. I wish I could make you understand how your coming has changed everything."

"You can tell me some other time," the girl gaily declared, and was about to leave him.

His hand detained her very gently. "Faith, but I fear not, for already my old hallucinations seem to me incredible. Why, yesterday I thought it the most desirable of human lots to be a great poet"—the gentleman laughed in self-mockery. "I positively did. I labored every day toward becoming one. I lived among books, esteemed that I was doing something of genuine importance as I gravely tinkered with alliteration and metaphor and antithesis and judicious paraphrases of the ancients. I put up with life solely because it afforded material for versification; and, in reality, believed the destruction of Troy was providentially ordained lest Homer lack subject matter for an epic. And as for loving, I thought people fell in love in order to exchange witty rhymes."

His hand detained her, very gently. . . . Indeed, it seemed to him he could never tire of noting her excellencies. Perhaps it was that splendid light poise of her head he chiefly loved; he thought so at least, just now. Or was it the wonder of her walk, which made all other women he had ever known appear to mince and hobble, like rusty toys? Something there was assuredly about this slim brown girl which recalled an untamed and harmless woodland creature; and it was that, he knew, which most poignantly moved him, even though he could not name it. Perhaps it was her bright kind eyes, which seemed to mirror the tranquillity of forests. . . .

"You gentry are always talking of love," she marveled.

"Oh," he said, with acerbity, "oh, I don't doubt that any number of beef-gorging squires and leering, long-legged Oxford dandies——" He broke off here, and laughed contemptuously. "Well, you are beautiful, and they have eyes as keen as mine. And I do not blame you, my dear, for believing my designs to be no more commendable than theirs—no, not at all."

But his mood was spoiled, and his tetchy vanity hurt, by the thought of stout well-set fellows having wooed this girl; and he permitted her to go without protest.

Yet he sat alone for a while upon the fallen tree-trunk, humming a contented little tune. Never in his life had he been happier. He did not venture to suppose that any creature so adorable could love such a sickly hunchback, such a gargoyle of a man, as he was; but that Sarah was fond of him, he knew. There would be no trouble in arranging with her father for their marriage, most certainly; and he meant to attend to that matter this very morning, and within ten minutes. So Mr. Alexander Pope was meanwhile arranging in his mind a suitable wording for his declaration of marital aspirations.

Thus John Gay found him presently and roused him from phrase-spinning. "And what shall we do this morning, Alexander?" Gay was always demanding, like a spoiled child, to be amused.

Pope told him what his own plans were, speaking quite simply, but with his countenance radiant. Gay took off his hat and wiped his forehead, for the day was warm. He did not say anything at all.

"Well——?" Mr. Pope asked, after a pause.

Mr. Gay was dubious. "I had never thought that you would marry," he said. "And—why, hang it, Alexander! to grow enamored of a milkmaid is well enough for the hero of a poem, but in a poet it hints at injudicious composition."

Mr. Pope gesticulated with thin hands and seemed upon the verge of eloquence. Then he spoke unanswerably. "But I love her," he said.

John Gay's reply was a subdued whistle. He, in common with the other guests of Lord Harcourt, at Nuneham Courtney, had wondered what would be the outcome of Mr. Alexander Pope's intimacy with Sarah Drew. A month earlier the poet had sprained his ankle upon Amshot Heath, and this young woman had found him lying there, entirely helpless, as she returned from her evening milking. Being hale of person, she had managed to get the little hunchback to her home unaided. And since then Pope had often been seen with her.

This much was common knowledge. That Mr. Pope proposed to marry the heroine of his misadventure afforded a fair mark for raillery, no doubt, but Gay, in common with the run of educated England in 1718, did not aspire to be facetious at Pope's expense. The luxury was too costly. Offend the dwarf in any fashion, and were you the proudest duke at Court or the most inconsiderable rhymester in Petticoat Lane, it made no difference; there was no crime too heinous for "the great Mr. Pope's" next verses to charge you with, and, worst of all, there was no misdoing so out of character that his adroit malignancy could not make it seem plausible.

Now, after another pause, Pope said, "I must be going now. Will you not wish me luck?"

"Why, Alexander—why, hang it!" was Mr. Gay's observation, "I believe that you are human after all, and not just a book in breeches."

He thereby voiced a commentary patently uncalled-for, as Mr. Pope afterward reflected. Mr. Pope was then treading toward the home of old Frederick Drew. It was a gray morning in late July.

"I love her," Pope had said. The fact was undeniable; yet an expression of it necessarily halts. Pope knew, as every man must do who dares conserve his energies to annotate the drama of life rather than play a part in it, the nature of that loneliness which this conservation breeds. Such persons may hope to win a posthumous esteem in the library, but it is at the bleak cost of making life a wistful transaction with foreigners. In such enforced aloofness Sarah Drew had come to him—strong, beautiful, young, good and vital, all that he was not—and had serenely befriended "the great Mr. Pope," whom she viewed as a queer decrepit little gentleman of whom within a week she was unfeignedly fond.