THE LOVE LETTERS 
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The Love-Letters of the King 
 
The Love -Letters 
 of the King 
 
 Or, The Life Romantic 
 
 BY 
 
 RICHARD LE GALLIENNE 
 
 M 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 
 1901 
 
Copyright, 1901, 
 BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 UNIVERSITY PRESS JOHN WILSON 
 AND SON CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 
 
PZ3 
 U<5 
 
 1-7 
 
 TO 
 JULIE AND HESPER AND EVA 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. IN A TWO-WHEELED HEAVEN i 
 
 II. IN WHICH PAGAN WASTENEYS CURSES 
 
 AND BLESSES WOMEN 5 
 
 III. ONE WAY OF SORROW 12 
 
 IV. CONCERNING ESSENTIAL EXISTENCE ... 16 
 V. SOME POOR ALTERNATIVES 21 
 
 VI. A MOON-BATH 32 
 
 VII. "AND O, YE FOUNTAINS, MEADOWS, HILLS, 
 
 AND GROVES " 34 
 
 VIII. EASTER 37 
 
 IX. OLD WALLS AND YOUNG DAYS .... 45 
 
 X. THE MEADOW OF REMEMBRANCE .... 51 
 
 XI. ADELINE WOOD 57 
 
 XII. "THE LOVE-LETTERS OF THE KING" ... 66 
 
 XIII. "THE LOVE-LETTERS OF THE KING," con- 
 
 tinued 77 
 
 XIV. MERIEL 82 
 
 XV. A VIGIL 92 
 
 XVI. " THE SAD HEART OF PAGAN WASTENEYS " 101 
 
viii Contents 
 
 CHAPTER P AGE 
 
 XVI I . IN WHICH WASTENEYS SEES MERIEL ONCE 
 
 MORE 112 
 
 XVIII. MERIEL EXPLAINS HERSELF 121 
 
 XIX. THE MAN FROM FAIRYLAND .... 132 
 
 XX. AN OLD LOVE-DOCTOR 137 
 
 XXI. IN WHICH WASTENEYS COUNTS UP HIS 
 
 FORCES 145 
 
 XXII. MYRTLE ROME 149 
 
 XXIII. UNEXPECTED HAPPINESS FOR ADELINE 
 
 WOOD 154 
 
 XXIV. "THE ROMANTICS" AT WASTENEYS . . 160 
 XXV. THE GREAT DUEL 185 
 
 XXVI. RELIGION TO THE RESCUE 194 
 
 XXVII. SISTER CATHERINE UPON ROSE-GARDENS 216 
 
 XXVIII. VICTORY IN SIGHT 230 
 
 XXIX. THE WATERS OF FORGETFULNESS . . 234 
 
 XXX. ADELINE AS DEPUTY-MOTHER .... 243 
 
 XXXI. IN WHICH MERIEL CALLS ONCE MORE . 254 
 
 XXXII. THE LAST JOURNEY 259 
 
 XXXIII. PHILOSOPHERS OF THE BUTTERFLY . . 262 
 
 XXXIV. "AURORE DE PROVENCE" 266 
 
The Love-Letters of the King 
 
The 
 
 Love-Letters of the King 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 IN A TWO-WHEELED HEAVEN 
 
 LATE one spring afternoon, quite recently, 
 a hansom, almost intolerably radiant with 
 happiness so it seemed to other han- 
 soms going east was driving through St. James's 
 Park in the direction of Buckingham Palace. It 
 contained two people, a man and a woman, not too 
 young and not too old, and it was from them that 
 the effulgence proceeded. 
 
 "Let us make life wonderful for each other," the 
 man was saying. 
 
 " You have already made it wonderful for me," 
 the woman answered. 
 
 Thus they completed the second hour of their 
 acquaintance. 
 
 They were in all the exaltation of first love 
 experienced for the twentieth time. Sudden love 
 had come upon them while they were drinking tea 
 at Mrs. Lanyon's that very afternoon. In an in- 
 
: '( ;2-' : tTfce* Love-Letters of the King 
 
 stant they had known each other, swooped down 
 into each other's eyes. Their first words had been 
 almost a declaration. 
 
 " How strange it is ! " Pagan Wasteneys had 
 said, in his most mystic and sincere manner. 
 
 "What is strange?" asked Daffodil Mendoza, 
 with warm eyes that knew quite well. 
 
 " Strange that we should meet." 
 
 " Would n't it have been stranger if we had not 
 met?" asked Daffodil, pretending to be shy at her 
 impulsiveness. 
 
 " You feel that too ! . . . But it is strange all 
 the same, for I so narrowly missed coming here 
 to-day at all. To tell the truth, I was feeling 
 rather bored, and inclined just to laze away the 
 afternoon in my chair; but something kept on 
 saying ' go.' Have you instincts like that? Mys- 
 terious senses that hint impending joy or sorrow? 
 I 'm sure you have. Well, something kept say- 
 ing that I would meet You. ... I have n't even 
 caught your name, but I know it is You ! " 
 
 " Yes, it is I," said Daffodil, half laughing and 
 half impassioned. " I, Daffodil Mendoza." 
 
 " Mrs. Daffodil Mendoza? " 
 
 " Yes " with a pretty sigh. 
 
 " I always think ' Mrs.' such a charming addi- 
 tion to the prettiest name/' 
 
In a Two- Wheeled Heaven 3 
 
 " Yes ! it is strange," said Wasteneys again, 
 meditatively, half to himself, as the dullest of all 
 palaces came in sight, " very strange." 
 
 " Tell me," asked Daffodil, with tenderest sym- 
 pathy. She knew that Wasteneys' face was plainly 
 hinting at despairs and perhaps depths from which 
 she had come at the decreed moment to save 
 him. 
 
 " So strange," Wasteneys continued, " that we 
 should meet now now, when I need you so." 
 
 " Do you think I can help you? " Daffodil asked 
 O, so womanly. 
 
 For answer Wasteneys looked at her, and rev- 
 erently laid his hand on hers, his face plainly show- 
 ing that he could not speak of it now, but that 
 indeed she and she alone could save him from the 
 abyss of that mysterious sorrow. 
 
 " Don't speak of it, if it hurts you," said Daf- 
 fodil, adding a " dear " as shy and fragrant as a 
 blush-rose. 
 
 " Some day," said Wasteneys. 
 
 " Is there to be a ' some day ' for us ? " 
 
 " Can you doubt it? Don't you know ? " 
 
 " Yes, I know." 
 
 " May I call you ' Daffodil ' ? " 
 
 " Yes Pagan." 
 
 "You darling!" 
 
4 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 " When shall we meet again ? " 
 
 "To-morrow? It must be to-morrow. Will 
 you come for tea about three?" 
 
 "May I?" 
 
 " Yes and now I 'm afraid you must go. We 
 had better not drive up to the door together. We 
 are very near now. O, it is so hard to leave you. 
 Think of me to-night." 
 
 " God keep you, Daffodil ; you don't know what 
 this means to me." 
 
 " And to me." 
 
 Now, of course, each knew that it meant abso- 
 lutely nothing. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 IN WHICH PAGAN WASTENEYS CURSES AND 
 BLESSES WOMEN 
 
 THE hansom had hardly moved on again 
 before Pagan Wasteneys had already 
 drafted in his head the telegram of dis- 
 appointment which he would send at the last 
 moment on the morrow. 
 
 " O, what folly it all is ! " he said, half aloud. 
 " It must end. I am sick, sick of it all. 
 
 " * What of soul was left, I wonder 
 When the kissing had to stop ? ' " 
 
 In fact, Pagan Wasteneys was exceedingly sad 
 about himself. And, without wishing to be hard 
 upon him, it was quite time he should realize 
 that he was wasting a rare nature and exceptional 
 gifts in an idle pursuit of women, which had not 
 even the excuse of an imperative sensuality. Yes ! 
 a crowd of little women, without a thought of 
 harm, were eating up his soul as they would nibble 
 chocolate. It must have been his own fault, you 
 say ! Of course. Everything is our own fault 
 
6 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 if you are able to think so. Sadder observers 
 of human life have been driven to the conclu- 
 sion that a man's mistakes are not so much his 
 own as he would fain believe; that, indeed, he 
 makes them, not so much to please himself, as 
 to gratify the vanity of some natural law, which 
 for the moment whirls him about, as a master- 
 ful stream has its way with a straw. Woman is a 
 natural law. She has her way with us ; an absurd, 
 irrational force, which we laugh at, while it sweeps 
 us away. 
 
 Wasteneys had taken to women as some men take 
 to dominoes. His life had failed or seemed to 
 fail. It had ended at twenty-eight ; ended, that is, 
 for all the uses to which he cared to put it. But, 
 in spite of this essential conclusion of his life, 
 Wasteneys found himself in the possession of a 
 superfluous stock of vitality, which must be spent 
 somehow. Occasionally, he used it still to make 
 an unavoidable poem of. Being moderately rich, 
 he was debarred from the wasting exertions of that 
 struggle for existence which mercifully shortens 
 life. Parliament was too foolish. Literature was 
 too ambitious besides, he had succeeded in lit- 
 erature. Suicide was too serious. Only women 
 were left. And he let the women take him. For 
 a man in despair woman is the line of least resist- 
 ance. What did it matter, after all ! 
 
Wasteneys Curses and Blesses 7 
 
 And, of course, it was the One Woman that was 
 responsible for all this. 
 
 Yet a man is a man, and to every man God has 
 given something to do unless he does which he 
 goes to his grave an active disappointment, likely 
 to appear later as a turbulent ghost. Some spirit, 
 leaning out of the air, had whispered to Pagan 
 Wasteneys even in his cradle that he was born 
 with Something to Do, and he had never been able 
 quite to forget that divine whisper. He knew that 
 he was a Noun, and that these little women were 
 but parasitical Adjectives. Therefore it was that, 
 at twilight that spring evening, Pagan Wasteneys 
 solemnly cursed women, as he walked back to his 
 lodging through St. James's Park. 
 
 Yet even as he cursed them, he could not help 
 blessing them too for the sake of the One 
 Woman; and there came to his lips a certain 
 prayer of Thanksgiving for Kind and Beautiful 
 Women which he had written long ago. 
 
 To the Power that made me, and, all undeserving, set me in 
 
 this wonderful world, 
 
 I give thanks for kind and beautiful Women. 
 For their sweet faces, I give thanks. 
 For their soft voices, I give thanks. 
 For their thick bright hair and their little ears, I give 
 
 thanks. 
 For their deep eyes and their kind lips and for their little 
 
 feet. 
 
8 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 And for their musical walking, and every other grace and 
 mystery and goodness that is theirs ; I give thanks to the 
 Power that made me and gave me eyes to see them, and 
 ears to hear them, and hands to touch them. 
 
 For Kind and Beautiful Women, O Gracious Unseen Power, 
 receive the Thanks of a Man. 
 
 In his heart Wasteneys thought far more seri- 
 ously of women than one might gather from this 
 prayer, with its almost Oriental attitude to woman, 
 as half child and half toy. He was too modern to 
 think otherwise ; and, if indeed he considered that 
 woman's beauty was more important than her mind, 
 it was because, in whatever relation, he always con- 
 sidered beauty more important than mind. Beauty 
 was to him the most serious meaning of life, or 
 rather hint of life's meaning. 
 
 Woman also brought him that sense of strange- 
 ness and original wildness, that zest of mystery and 
 unfathomable delight in being, for which he chiefly 
 valued all natural things. She was the wild bird 
 in civilization. She never forgot the woods, how- 
 ever tame and content she might seem in the social 
 aviary. Leave the door of her cage open a mo- 
 ment and she was off somewhere singing " Free ! 
 free ! free ! " among the green leaves. 
 
 Then, too, how good she was, how brave, how 
 true ! What a mother heart there was somewhere 
 even in the most trivial woman he had known. 
 What warm, heroic impulses she had, what a 
 
Wasteneys Curses and Blesses 9 
 
 gift for sacrifice. Beneath a surface cynicism, he 
 never forgot how good the most unimportant little 
 woman who had wasted his days had been to him. 
 He remembered kind looks, which alone were acts 
 of divine charity. Yes ! Woman took much 
 yet she gave back much again. All, at least, she 
 had to give. If she were a vampire, she was 
 a vampire quite unconscious and well-meaning. 
 Even that big sensual Daffodil meant no harm. 
 How could she be expected to know that she was 
 one more danger to a sad and striving soul she 
 a danger who had meant only to be a delight 
 particularly when that sad and striving soul chose 
 to disguise itself in the flippancies of a whimsical 
 amorist? 
 
 But cursing is seldom logical. On the contrary 
 it is essentially illogical. It is really meant to be 
 a general recognition in terms of strong emotion 
 that something has gone wrong with our lives; 
 but it is apt to take advantage of some particular 
 accident, in itself probably innocent, whereby the 
 more forcibly to express itself. The fault need 
 not indeed be our own though, indeed, if clearly 
 so, damning oneself is as uninteresting as solo whist. 
 The Universe is the real culprit but what is the 
 use of damning the Universe ? 
 
 Wasteneys had no sincere quarrel with women, 
 not even with the One Woman, but his recognition 
 
i o The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 of that fact, and of all their beauty and mysterious 
 greatness, did not prevent his once more cursing 
 them, as he remembered all he was ordained to be 
 and all he was not because of One Woman, or 
 rather because he had lost One Woman, and be- 
 cause of all the women who were the innocent 
 obstacles in the upward pathway of his life. And 
 his cursing was somewhat in this fashion no 
 more entirely serious, it will be observed, than 
 his blessing : 
 
 Cursed be Woman ! 
 
 Cursed be all Women except One Woman, whom God 
 
 bless. 
 
 Cursed be the Woman who forgets all for your sake. 
 Cursed be the Woman who writes to you every day. 
 Cursed be the Woman who would gladly die for you. 
 Cursed be the Woman who has a Mission to Help you. 
 Cursed be Women with Blue eyes, likewise Women with 
 
 Gray, Brown, Green, Hazel and Violet eyes. 
 Cursed be Little Women, and cursed also be Women that 
 
 are tall. 
 Cursed be Women with Golden Hair, and also Women with 
 
 Black. 
 Cursed too the Brown-haired Women . . . 
 
 Wasteneys could curse no further without laugh- 
 ing. It was his gravest weakness that he could not 
 long be serious without laughing. He used to say 
 that it was his humor alone that prevented his 
 being a great man; and, if you think of it, no 
 really great world-making man has had a sense 
 
Wasteneys Curses and Blesses 1 1 
 
 of humor except Shakespeare, who, after all, 
 was only a writer. 
 
 Pagan Wasteneys was seriously unhappy about 
 himself, black sorrowful: so it was that as he 
 mounted his staircase he was humming this sad 
 little new-made song: 
 
 " O Pagan Wasteneys ! Pagan Wasteneys O ! 
 Why will you waste your one existence so ! 
 Waste it on married women and unmarried ; 
 Waste it on every woman that you know ! " 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 ONE WAY OF SORROW 
 
 THE greatest of all poets has written : " He 
 jests at scars that never felt a wound." 
 Now I venture to think that there he is 
 precisely wrong. It is your mortally wounded 
 man who jests at scars. Pagan Wasteneys was 
 mortally wounded. He knew that, however he 
 might carry himself externally, his soul was finally 
 stricken. Had it been otherwise, it had been 
 easier to be ambitious, easier to cut a serious 
 figure in the world, easier to do that Something, 
 whatever it might be, for which beneath all he felt 
 himself created. The nature and manner of his 
 mortal wound will transpire later. 
 
 Sorrow is popularly supposed to have an en- 
 nobling and refining influence like Poverty. On 
 some few natures it doubtless operates in that way. 
 Oftener, I fear, its influence is quite otherwise. For 
 what, after all, does a really great sorrow mean 
 but the withdrawal of our raison d'etre ? A few 
 unnatural people may thrive on the loss of all that 
 makes life real to them, but for the majority cut 
 the tap-roots of joy, and the human tree falls into 
 
One Way of Sorrow 1 3 
 
 decay. Moralist spectators may say that there is 
 still left you an extravagant supply of reasons for 
 going on living. If only they had your gifts, your 
 opportunities, your wealth ! How gladly they 
 might take them all. Ah ! the beautiful apparatus 
 
 so useless now ! 
 
 Besides, who are you that shall dictate to the 
 mysterious soul of another? The soul of man 
 takes strange fancies. It is apt to lay up its 
 treasure in little precarious heavens, the heavenli- 
 ness of which others cannot understand. A little 
 child, perhaps, shall be its heaven. The child dies 
 
 or lives on to break your heart. It is true that 
 Parliament is still open to you. Many sounding 
 things remain to be done. The gates of other 
 people's heavens are hospitably thrown open. But 
 where is your little child? 
 
 There still remains much beauty, much music, 
 in the world but it all belongs to other people. 
 Your beauty has withered, your music has ceased. 
 The heaven has enough stars for us all but 
 what if the tiny star on which we had set our 
 hearts has shot down the gulf of space some 
 November night, and shines for us no more, is 
 perhaps lying somewhere, a cinder, on the iron 
 floor of the universe? 
 
 No ! Heaven is a personal matter. The soul 
 can submit to no dictation concerning its heaven. 
 
1 4 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 The heart knows its own bitterness, because it 
 knows so well its own joy. 
 
 Well, Wasteneys had lost his joy. His little star 
 had shot beyond his vision even at his first mo- 
 ment of beholding it. Do you wonder that he 
 should be indifferent to Parliament, or that books 
 seemed hardly worth writing now? The springs 
 of action had dried up with the springs of joy. By 
 every law of sorrow, made by those who have 
 never known it, he should have come out of all 
 this a greater man. It should, in fact, have been 
 the making of him. Perhaps, unknown to himself, 
 it was doing this for him all the time, one of those 
 expensive processes of development which we do 
 not realize till they have done their work. 
 
 It must not be supposed that Wasteneys had 
 fanatically nursed his sorrows, or willingly set up 
 the image of one woman thus to preside over his 
 life. On the contrary, he had mocked and flouted 
 this possession of his, and been unfaithful to it in 
 every possible way. Nor even had he disdained 
 the vulgar anodynes though, indeed, he laughed 
 as he tried them, to think it might be supposed 
 possible for any such cheap drugs to narcotize a 
 soul like his. 
 
 Besides, he had seriously sought some other 
 face of woman that might with its lustre dim the 
 face that burned day and night in his heart. That 
 
One Way of Sorrow 1 5 
 
 was perhaps the reason of his turning eagerly to 
 women, when the one woman he had loved had 
 been lost to him. As a great living poet expresses 
 it : " He had sought the asp for serpents' bites ! " 
 
 " But woman is not I opine 
 Her sex's antidote." 
 
 The old wound was as fresh as ever, and he was 
 sick to death of the paltry cures. Laughter was 
 the only real help he had. So he laughed softly 
 at himself night and day, and took what pleasure 
 he could in trifles, posing now this way and now 
 that, incidentally making several good little women 
 happy for he hurt none of them with the sur- 
 plusage of his soul. 
 
 Thus he gained a great reputation for " Ro- 
 mance ! " It was whispered that he lived " The 
 Life Romantic ! " What strange mistakes are 
 made by the intelligent spectator! 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 CONCERNING ESSENTIAL EXISTENCE 
 
 NOW I can well understand that this talk 
 about women and strangeness and what 
 not, this hinted spectacle of an able- 
 bodied man ruined because life refused him the 
 particular moonbeam on which, like a big baby, 
 he had set his heart: that all this is very tire- 
 some and exasperating for certain readers for 
 whom it is not intended. Why on earth could n't 
 Wasteneys go and hack somebody with a sword 
 like a man? 
 
 Well, Wasteneys could have done that too had 
 he been so minded; for he was a well-made 
 athletic fellow, a passionate rider, a great out- 
 of-doors man, for all his moonbeams but then 
 he did n't care about it. It did n't amuse him. 
 Killing, however brilliant, stirred his sense of 
 pity, not his lust for blood ; though indeed there 
 was that in him which vibrated with joy at the 
 assassination of a tyrant, or the noble murder of 
 a mean enemy. 
 
 Broadly speaking, there are in England only 
 two recognized occupations for a gentleman. He 
 
Concerning Essential Existence 17 
 
 can either kill his fellow men, or govern them. 
 To Wasteneys one occupation was as uninterest- 
 ing as the other. 
 
 In short, his circumstances allowed to him the 
 perilous privilege of what I may call essential 
 living. It is a privilege which any one not abso- 
 lutely compelled to work for a livelihood may 
 enjoy. It is the most terrible burden of the rich, 
 and it is the danger of most women. The life- 
 time of the multitude is providentially occupied 
 in non-essential living, in various mechanical 
 businesses done merely from the widely diffused 
 desire to keep going man's physical existence. 
 
 I believe that most men, not merely poets, 
 work on in the hope that some day they will have 
 so securely provided for the body, that they will 
 have time before the end to work for the soul. 
 To them too the body is but a pedestal at which 
 all this time they have been working, so that 
 some day they may proudly set upon it the 
 winged marble of the soul. Perhaps they are 
 the happier in that they seldom complete even 
 the pedestal, and indeed, after a time, forget that 
 there is anything beyond pedestal. Better far 
 be strenuously absorbed in clothing and feeding 
 the body than have too much leisure for the soul ; 
 unless indeed your soul be very active, or very 
 happy. The material necessities of life shield 
 
1 8 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 us from the fierce cold of the outer abyss of 
 thought, as they save us too from the siren call 
 of the senses. Blessed are the bricklayer, and 
 the clerk, and the shopman, and all other slaves ; 
 for when the hard day is done they are too weary 
 for thought, too weary for sorrow, too weary for 
 disastrous dreams. 
 
 When a man is not compelled to earn his own 
 food and clothing, and takes no interest either in 
 killing or governing his fellows, he is in great 
 danger. That is why most rich men are either 
 so sad, so dull, or so brutalized. They have 
 nothing to do. They were born to work eight 
 hours a day at the pedestal, and they are unac- 
 customed to the business of the soul. Their only 
 hope is some trivial hobby. Such may save 
 them. Else, being denied the energizing activ- 
 ity of clothing and feeding their bodies, they 
 may devote themselves to the one physical occu- 
 pation left : that of sensualizing them. 
 
 Wasteneys, of course, was not so poor in spirit- 
 ual resources. But for a divine accident, he had 
 been more than content to find the meaning of 
 life in one of those arts of beauty for which a 
 lifetime is proverbially short. As a boy his 
 dream was to be a poet, and by the side of this 
 dream though he had his youthful loves and 
 friendships, very ardent all human interests 
 
Concerning Essential Existence 19 
 
 were but phantom voices to which now and again 
 he would pay courteous heed. In his heart, how- 
 ever, he knew that he cared for nothing but to 
 make beautiful things. And this desire, being 
 accompanied by faculty, had not gone without its 
 fruition. Pagan Wasteneys had made beautiful 
 things. This dream and its fulfilment had satis- 
 fied him right through his young manhood. It 
 was more than enough, he thought, for many 
 lives. At least it overflowed his present life with 
 rainbows. 
 
 It need hardly be said that he had not created 
 beauty without the willing aid of love. Women 
 had inspired him as they have inspired all the 
 men who have made or done anything. Not ac- 
 cidentally, we may be sure, did the Greeks, with 
 their unerring instinct for universal symbolism, 
 make the Muses women. But as yet women had 
 stopped at inspiring him. That the beauty of a 
 woman might not merely inspire but eclipse the 
 beauty of art, was a thought that had never pre- 
 sented itself to his mind in the vaguest form. 
 Even when that miracle had happened it took him 
 long to realize. But it did happen one strange 
 morning in his twenty-ninth year, and from that 
 moment his occupation was gone. All the beauty 
 of the world had suddenly concentrated and with- 
 drawn in one face. No art could any longer fill 
 
20 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 the large leisure of his soul. So Pagan Was- 
 teneys found himself with the burden of a life 
 which he was compelled to live " essentially " 
 but from which the motive essential had been 
 taken away. 
 
 Many men in his position would have worked 
 all the harder, and indeed he did work harder 
 for a while. Not being a soldier, he could not 
 recklessly hurl the charmed life of sorrow into 
 some hell of fight; nor did the House of Com- 
 mons seem to offer a sufficiently august employ- 
 ment for the disbanded energies of his spirit. 
 But he threw himself wildly into the old life 
 of words till one day he suddenly realized that 
 words were as dreary to him as all else. All the 
 words in the world seemed to have died. Only 
 a woman's name survived. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 SOME POOR ALTERNATIVES 
 
 OF course, there were a few other things 
 Wasteneys might have done besides kill- 
 ing or governing his fellows. He might 
 have taken to climbing terrible mountain-peaks, 
 become one of those idealists of height, whose 
 formula of romance is the phrase : " so many 
 thousand feet above the sea." But then Was- 
 teneys loved the sea. 
 
 He might have travelled "in strange lands," 
 and he would undoubtedly have done so, but for 
 the conviction that they were no longer strange, 
 and that, at all events, they would not seem 
 strange to him. Besides, he had already trav- 
 elled. He was seeking a strangeness that went 
 deeper than well-known changes of climate and 
 costume and speech. He sought: 
 
 . . . " a drink more deadly and more strange 
 Than ever grew on any earthly vine " ; 
 
 and his search was all the more hopeless because 
 he knew that he had finally found what he was 
 seeking. 
 
22 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 He knew that nothing would ever seem strange 
 to him again, except the face that was with him 
 night and day. Therefore, his search was only 
 half-hearted, and he soon gave up any serious 
 thought of it. In fact, he ceased to be a serious 
 being altogether. As far as possible, he locked 
 up his real self, as he thought, in a safe place, 
 and prepared to take life as lightly as some 
 friends of his, whose sad laughing faces he began 
 to understand; to live it as a very light com- 
 edy. He had once said that life was a tragedy 
 with intervals of farce. He proposed to live it 
 as a farce, with as few intervals of tragedy as 
 possible. 
 
 He early began to note certain changes in his 
 nature. He who had always loved solitude sud- 
 denly discovered that he dreaded to be alone. 
 So he fell upon the scientific discovery and 
 sorrow is a far greater discoverer than Newton 
 of Society as an Anodyne. He had often won- 
 dered, austerely occupied with his art, why men 
 and women, year after year, paced the dull round 
 of social life, flocked so talkatively to dull din- 
 ners, dull luncheons, dull receptions, dull wed- 
 dings. Now he began to understand. These 
 were serious people who dare not be serious. 
 Like madmen, it was not safe for them to be 
 left alone with their thoughts. Any society was 
 
Some Poor Alternatives 23 
 
 better than their own. Society was a place where 
 they might, literally, laugh at their terrors, pro- 
 fanely mock their hearts' tragedies to each other 
 in glittering talk; as in plague-stricken cities of 
 old time men and women flouted the fear of death 
 with terrible toasts an eternal emblem of the 
 mirth of society. So it was that Wasteneys be- 
 came a diner-out, a talker, a maker of mots. Ah ! 
 
 " Was it for this that he had given away 
 His ancient wisdom and austere control ? " 
 
 Sometimes unseen he would shed a tear into his 
 wine-glass, and next moment present it to his 
 neighbor as a pearl of wit. Champagne has this 
 curious effect upon tears. The aphoristic influ- 
 ence of sorrow is one of the strangest things 
 about it. Of course, there were those who under- 
 stood. Society is very clever. One of Was- 
 teneys' friends, who had never yet had to face 
 anything real, and had, therefore, remained seri- 
 ous, once asked Wasteneys what was wrong with 
 him. 
 
 " There is a ghastly burning in your face, old 
 man," he had said; "what's the trouble?" 
 
 "Witty degeneration of the heart," Wasteneys 
 had answered and the phrase was something 
 more than a cheap epigram. 
 
 Wasteneys noted too that he began to weary 
 
24 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 of, positively dislike, good people; not because 
 they were good, but because they were serious. 
 Really bad people he disliked still more, because 
 they were still more serious. Any one who was 
 really doing or being something strenuously suc- 
 cessful he fled from as from a North-Easter. 
 More and more he sought the companionship of 
 the seriously unsuccessful; the men who talked 
 brilliantly of what they might have done, and 
 were, of course, still going to do. Men with 
 strong brains and weak wills; idealistic drunk- 
 ards, who grew Titanic with creative energy, 
 though they never moved from their chairs; all 
 sad men who talked, and from whose lips rose 
 the fairy bubbles of dreams that would exist for- 
 ever in no other form. Over these he grew 
 compassionate. 
 
 There was one man, a fat, beaming, silvery 
 voice of failure, to whom his heart was particu- 
 larly drawn, and whom he pet-named " Coleridge* 
 a man of "commanding" brain, a brain, how- 
 ever, which could never be induced to give the 
 word of command. The wonderful dreams " Cole- 
 ridge " extemporized in obscure bar-parlors, the 
 flights of angels that ascended and descended the 
 bright rays of his talk, the wisdom of this unwise 
 man ! Wasteneys' heart ached sometimes to hear 
 him talk all that fine brain and beautiful spirit 
 
Some Poor Alternatives 25 
 
 into the air. And the irony of so-called success 
 and so-called failure was revealed to him as he 
 reflected that, but for the divine accident of 
 " Kubla Khan," the real Coleridge had been for- 
 gotten as his poor nick-named " Coleridge " will 
 be forgotten. Yes! Coleridge's was a narrow 
 escape indeed! And how kind, after all, is the 
 judgment of the world that will forgive all for 
 one handful of strange rhyme. 
 
 On the night of his introduction to the reader, 
 Wasteneys had dined alone, and, the unaccus- 
 tomed loneliness weighing upon him, he had 
 suddenly thought of "Coleridge." Knowing too 
 well where that divine gasometer was always to 
 be found about ten in the evening, he had saun- 
 tered out to a certain old-fashioned tavern in the 
 neighborhood of Covent Garden, once perhaps 
 the resort of polite wits in days long past, from 
 which days externally it still preserved a certain 
 distinction the kind of distinction that be- 
 longs to a ripe Stilton but now a sad, silly 
 place of joyless drinking and rotting epileptic 
 brains. 
 
 Wasteneys was too good for the place, as in- 
 deed was "Coleridge," but, having once been 
 taken there by accident and met "Coleridge," 
 he had sometimes dropped in to meet him again. 
 " Coleridge " kept on there from old habit, a habit 
 
26 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 begun in the better days of the house. It was 
 indeed his club. His letters came there, and a 
 certain leather chair in the chimney corner was 
 tacitly regarded as his private library. There he 
 wrote his letters, received his friends, and occa- 
 sionally dozed over a well-thumbed classic; and 
 I am glad to be able to add that " Coleridge " 
 was always treated with great respect. Poor and 
 shabby as he was, thought had thrown over him 
 its indefinable distinction. He was received 
 with a deference similar to that which we in- 
 voluntarily pay to the humblest priest. Though 
 irreclaimably devoted to gin-and-water, he was 
 none the less recognized as, shall I say, an un- 
 frocked priest of the humanities. 
 
 Wasteneys shouldered his way through a pha- 
 lanx of men drinking at an outer bar, and emerged 
 on a quaint inner room, where prints of dead actors 
 and old play-bills looked down upon the throng 
 of men and women drinking and talking in knots 
 in a thick atmosphere of tobacco smoke. Only 
 one chair in the room was vacant. " Coleridge " 
 had not yet arrived. Wasteneys presumed to 
 occupy the chair, pending his arrival. 
 
 Looking round the room, he was glad to find 
 that he knew no one. To-night the place filled 
 him with more than his usual disgust and pity. 
 So this was pleasure! he thought to himself as 
 
Some Poor Alternatives 27 
 
 he looked around: this pleasure! Fancy any 
 one taking this for pleasure. As a matter of 
 fact, there was perhaps no one in that room who 
 did. Surely it was not those plain, worn-out, 
 patched-up women. Surely it was not those 
 heavy-eyed, flushed, unfathomably melancholy 
 men. Why then did they come here day after 
 day, night after night? What was the spell 
 beneath the unutterable dreariness? Heaven 
 knows! Perhaps they had begun going there 
 because some one had told them that there the 
 nightingale of pleasure might be heard singing 
 towards midnight. Sometimes, maybe, they had 
 thought they had heard it and so came and 
 came in the hope of hearing it again. Thus a 
 deferred hope had developed a confirmed habit 
 and a habit is enough reason. 
 
 As Wasteneys watched them, fascinated, his 
 imagination saw them in shuddering and revolt- 
 ing forms. Sometimes he saw them as animal 
 symbols of horrible vices, leering, slithering 
 creatures, with reptile and hoggish forms. He 
 watched diseases genially shaking hands, with a 
 fearful unconsciousness of what they were, drunk- 
 ards who never dreamed they were "drunkards;" 
 women who still spoke, and even thought, of 
 themselves as women creatures unspeakably 
 unattractive, to whom silly old men, bald and 
 
28 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 ape-like, gibbered senile compliments with hor- 
 rible airs of boyhood. 
 
 Wasteneys turned his face from them, over- 
 come with nausea of the spirit, and took a book 
 from his pocket, as in an infected place one goes 
 through the streets with a pomander of purifying 
 spices at one's nostrils. It was a strange book 
 indeed to be reading in that place, and it was in 
 his pocket by an accident of forgetfulness. He 
 had bought it a day or two before merely for its 
 format. It was a particularly beautiful little edi- 
 tion of "The Pilgrim's Progress"! 
 
 Owing to his early Catholic training, he had 
 never read it as a child, nor, till this moment, 
 had it since fallen in his way. He opened it 
 with some curiosity. Had the book, he was 
 wondering, any spiritual message for a modern 
 man, for a man like him? He opened it at 
 random, and one of those things happened which 
 had happened so often in his reading that he had 
 grown to be an almost serious consultant of the 
 sortes litterarum. This was the passage that first 
 met his eye : 
 
 " Thou didst faint at first setting out, when thou wast 
 almost choked in the Gulf of Despond ; thou diddest 
 attempt wrong ways to be rid of thy burden, whereas 
 thou shouldest have stayed till thy Prince had taken it 
 off: Thou didst sinfully sleep and loose thy choice 
 
Some Poor Alternatives 29 
 
 thing : Thou wast also almost persuaded to go back, at 
 the sight of the Lions ; and when thou talkest of thy 
 Journey, and of what thou hast heard and seen, thou 
 art inwardly desirous of vainglory in all that thou sayest 
 or doest." 
 
 He put the book down. His eyes were sud- 
 denly smitten with a gust of tears, like an April 
 window. Had this old book a message for his 
 modern heart? a message for a man like him? 
 Had it not ? His foul surroundings became in- 
 stantly more than ever insupportable. He rose 
 to leave the place ; but, as he did so, the proprie- 
 tress, who had hitherto been absent, a painted 
 fungus of a woman in black satin, came forward, 
 smiling with horrible cordiality. Did he expect 
 
 Mr. ? Had he not heard the sad news? Mr. 
 
 had died suddenly yesterday morning, in the 
 
 act of dressing. 
 
 " ' Coleridge ' dead ? " exclaimed Wasteneys, 
 " poor old ' Coleridge ' dead ? That 's too bad ! " 
 and he turned and looked at his chair affection- 
 ately. Then suddenly " Mrs. , will you 
 
 sell me this chair? Have it taken upstairs at 
 once. No one here must ever sit in his chair 
 again ! " 
 
 The proprietress assented to his whim, and, 
 having learnt the day of the funeral, Wasteneys 
 went out into the street. 
 
30 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 "To think of it ' old Coleridge ' dead ! " 
 he repeated to himself as he walked back to his 
 rooms. 
 
 And then there came back to him the solemn 
 sentences which for the moment the news had 
 driven from his mind: "Thou diddest attempt 
 wrong ways to be rid of thy burden. . . . Thou 
 didst sinfully sleep and loose thy choice thing." 
 Sorrow had made him superstitious a not un- 
 common effect of sorrow; and it seemed to him 
 worth thinking that he had read those words in 
 "Coleridge's" chair. What if "Coleridge's" 
 dead hand had turned the pages and invisibly 
 pointed to that passage! 
 
 " Thou diddest attempt wrong ways to be rid of thy 
 burden. Thou didst sinfully sleep and loose thy choice 
 thing." 
 
 "It is quite true," he said to himself. 
 
 And old " Coleridge " was dead ! Why should 
 he have had the impulse to go to that place just 
 on this particular night? He had not been there 
 for weeks. Was not this another warning? 
 Warnings had been coming to him of late. Even 
 silly little women had turned prophetesses, and 
 gravely told him that he was wasting his life. 
 Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings! So 
 he pondered as he walked homewards and then 
 
Some Poor Alternatives 31 
 
 suddenly the unconscious need of weeks found 
 expression. Looking at his watch, he saw that 
 there was still time to catch the last train to his 
 country home. A great longing for green leaves, 
 the stars and the fresh country night, had come 
 upon him. He suddenly realized that he had 
 been choking for that pure air, and it seemed 
 to him that to sleep another night in London 
 would stifle him. So it was that, an hour and 
 a half afterwards, the train had set him down 
 in the moonlight of a Surrey common. 
 
 O, the clean moon, and all the silent trees ! 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 A MOON-BATH 
 
 WASTENEYS walked the two moonlit 
 miles of country road to his old home 
 in an ecstasy of purification. 
 
 " Yes ! nature is moral," he said to himself, 
 " nature is terribly pure and sane. But how sweet 
 to be pure and sane ! " 
 
 He lifted up his face into the moonlight, bathing 
 and bathing it in the clean and holy light. The 
 moon and he seemed to be the only waking beings 
 in the world. In soft lines of repose the earth lay 
 beneath the moon like a sleeping woman, tenderly 
 veiled in mist and shadow. The moon seemed to 
 be taking care of the world. Dreaming shapes of 
 hill and wood, himself and the moon. O, the clean 
 moon ! 
 
 Wasteneys had been born with a face constitu- 
 tionally pure and he still came, as a line in one 
 of his poems expressed it, " with a pure face from 
 a thousand sins ! " The reason, of course, was that 
 he had never been able to take " sin," so-called, 
 seriously just as he could not have seriously 
 over-eaten himself. He had, it is true, experi- 
 mented with various " sins," which had a reputa- 
 
A Moon-Bath 33 
 
 tion for inducing forgetfulness, as one tries the 
 authenticated medical specifics for affections of the 
 nerves. But to take " sin " seriously ! Why, he 
 would as soon have thought of substituting a 
 sleeping-draught for his wine at dinner. 
 
 Yet bad medicines, in addition to doing no good, 
 do harm as well, and Wasteneys was obliged to 
 admit that his experiments in spiritual medicine 
 had resulted in a certain spiritual deterioration, 
 almost humorously empirical though they had 
 been. His spiritual constitution had been im- 
 paired, his spiritual complexion had suffered. So 
 again and again he bathed his face in the moon. 
 To himself his face felt grimy with sensual living. 
 Too seldom of late had it been bathed from 
 within with the bright stream of high thoughts, 
 too seldom bathed from without with the cleans- 
 ing radiance of seriously beautiful things. 
 
 He seemed to feel it growing cleaner as he 
 washed it in that vestal light. As a boy he had 
 thought of the moon as an amorous goddess. 
 To-night her face was the face of a nun. So nature, 
 having no ascertainably definite meaning, means 
 all things to us all. Once the moon had seemed 
 pale with passion, to-night she was pale with 
 purity : for to-night Wasteneys was passionate to 
 be pure ! 
 
 O, the clean moon! 
 
 3 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 "AND O, YE FOUNTAINS, MEADOWS, HILLS 
 AND GROVES " 
 
 NEXT morning Wasteneys was up as early 
 as the young man in Gray's " Elegy.'* 
 With what eager steps he brushed the 
 dew away ! He was as impatient as the Eastern 
 king for the purifying river : the purifying river 
 of the morning air. 
 
 He had looked carefully at his face, as he 
 dressed in the strange light of the summer dawn. 
 Yes ! The moonlight had helped. As he had 
 stepped from his bath he was almost boisterous 
 with moral determination. " I feel as if I could 
 fight all the gods and all the devils ! " he cried 
 aloud. 
 
 " You will have an opportunity, never fear," 
 whispered a cautious voice within his soul. 
 
 His eagerness swept him before long to the 
 glittering freshness of a green hill, whence he 
 could look with pathos and exaltation upon his 
 own home, from the chimneys of which there 
 curled as yet no early-rising smoke. The country- 
 side lay as still and sleepy as last night in the 
 moonlight, and the sun was as yet the only living 
 
"And O, Ye Fountains" 35 
 
 thing at work. Wasteneys realized how much the 
 purity of country air comes of solitude, of having 
 the world to oneself. So soon as human figures 
 began to move about the village, Wasteneys took 
 his eyes from the village of Wasteneys, and sought 
 deeper recesses of the morning. 
 
 The hawthorn was hanging on the hedges, and 
 to a man sad and sinful from the town, it was 
 heart-breaking to listen to the birds. The least 
 bit of a bird seemed an emperor of joy. O, the 
 lovers in the hedges the calls the answers! 
 
 " Be quick 
 Be quick 
 Be quick 
 Quick ! 
 Be quick ! 
 Sweet ! 
 Sweet ! 
 Sweet ! 
 
 Sweet i ki ! 
 Sweet i ki ! 
 Sweet i ki ! 
 Chuck chuck 
 
 Twe-ey Twe-ey Twe-ey." 
 
 It seemed centuries since Wasteneys had heard 
 a bird sing. In fact he had almost forgotten that 
 there were birds. 
 
 Wherever his eye turned, or his ear listened, he 
 was met with the rectitude and chastity of nature ! 
 Indeed, Nature was almost self-righteous in her 
 
36 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 asceticism. How business-like she was about her 
 beauty; how methodical with her flowers. It was 
 wonderful to think that not once in all the ages had 
 she missed bringing in the hawthorn at its due 
 season, not once disappointed mankind of the 
 cuckoo. Punctually each year the wild-rose had 
 bloomed, punctually faded and fallen on the grass, 
 punctually the nightingale had sung. Not once 
 had the moon failed to pass melodiously from silver 
 change to change, nor was there any recorded 
 year in which the trees had neglected to bud, the 
 birds to build, or the swallows to fly south. 
 
 All around him Wasteneys watched each natural 
 thing strenuously doing its appointed work. For 
 no private grief might the law of gravitation leave 
 its task, nor any natural law halt a moment to 
 gratify some personal whim. 
 
 He beheld nature as the great martinet, and, 
 with something of shame, he asked himself: How 
 was he taking his place in this vast harmony? He 
 did not shirk the answer : 
 
 11 Because of a woman's face," he said to himself, 
 "or rather because you cannot look upon it all 
 day it is, you know, somewhere beautiful in the 
 world, that should be enough ! you have thrown 
 all the purpose of your life to the winds, you have 
 allowed your faculties to rust, you have mocked at 
 your ideals, you have lost yourself." 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 EASTER 
 
 AS Wasteneys returned home, absorbed in 
 such self-examination, he was aroused by 
 the ringing of church bells. It was Sun- 
 day. He had forgotten. There was, too, in the 
 ringing an unusual joyfulness. Then he remem- 
 bered that it was Easter morning. And, with the 
 remembrance, he thought almost for the first time 
 of an old friend to whom always on his rare visits 
 home he hastened to pay his respects. Wasteneys 
 came of an old Catholic family. For their loyalty 
 to the old faith, his family had suffered much in 
 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and be- 
 cause his ancestors had hidden priests in a certain 
 ingenious chamber still shown to curious visitors, 
 Wasteneys was a comparatively poor man to-day. 
 But the family had remained faithful throughout 
 all their trials, and no day of all those years had 
 passed without some hand placing flowers on the 
 altar of the little chapel hidden away among the 
 Elizabethan gables, which had proved a spiritual 
 refuge, too, for the handful of peasantry who also 
 adhered to the ancient way of faith. There had 
 
38 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 never been a time when there had been no chaplain 
 at Wasteneys, and, though Pagan Wasteneys had 
 long since abandoned the creed of his fathers, he 
 still kept up that tradition : partly from reverence 
 to the memory of his mother, who, after a long 
 widowhood, had died six years before, partly be- 
 cause he felt a spiritual obligation not to deprive 
 his dependents of their immemorial altar, and 
 perhaps mainly for love of the old father, under 
 whose eye his young mind had opened, and whose 
 beautiful old face was as necessary in his thought 
 of home as the old home itself. 
 
 During his mother's lifetime, Wasteneys had 
 concealed from her the intellectual change that 
 early made it impossible for him to give more than 
 an external adherence to the Christian faith; but 
 on her death he had firmly confessed himself to 
 Father Selden. 
 
 The old man knew his pupil better than Waste- 
 neys knew himself, and, with the tact of his church, 
 he had refrained from interfering with what he re- 
 garded with the sanction of long experience 
 as one of those processes in the wayward develop- 
 ment of the human soul, which in certain natures 
 are best left to work themselves out. 
 
 " My son," he had said as a conclusion to their 
 talk, " I believe it is God's will that you should 
 wander in this way. For some natures it is 
 
Easter 39 
 
 necessary that they should wander long in the 
 wilderness, so that when at last they do come 
 home, they know indeed that it is home. You 
 may have far to go, my poor boy. It is better, 
 perhaps, that you set out early upon your pilgrim- 
 age, that you may the sooner come back home. 
 I shall pray for you quietly here, and wait your 
 return. I do not fear for you. You belong to 
 God. More than many you were born His child. 
 You cannot escape His love." 
 
 These words had often come back to Wasteneys 
 during these last sad years. Year followed year, 
 but the father's prophecy seemed further and 
 further from fulfilment. Father Selden had not 
 failed to note the later change in his pupil, a 
 change far more serious than a mere intellectual 
 change. Partly divining the reason, he knew that 
 some emotional process was at work, and he wel- 
 comed it fearing it at the same time. Religion 
 has nothing, in the end, to fear from human reason. 
 It has much more to fear or hope from human 
 love. But Father Selden was more glad than 
 fearful. 
 
 " If he loves a woman," he said to himself, " he 
 must end by loving God." He never in all that 
 time revealed to Wasteneys any sign of anxiety or 
 impatience. Nor indeed was his anxiety great. 
 The way might seem long, but the end was sure. 
 
40 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 In the security of his age, he often felt a divine 
 pity for the young life struggling there in the maze 
 of existence, turning hither and thither, breathless, 
 bewildered, almost heart-broken, apparently with 
 no clue to the way, no hint of the meaning of it all. 
 But, while he pitied, the old man smiled, seeing 
 with clear eyes from the hill of his vision that 
 those very mistakes, those wrong turnings, seem- 
 ingly so irremediable, were surely bringing him 
 nearer and nearer to the one way out, the way of 
 the spirit. 
 
 Meanwhile, he said little to Wasteneys, beyond 
 an occasional friendly exhortation, given with one 
 of those lovely smiles which had made Wasteneys 
 as a little boy think of his face as the very gate of 
 Heaven. Once when accidentally he had come 
 upon Wasteneys in a moment of deep sadness, he 
 had put his hand on his shoulder. 
 
 " Is the way long, my son? Fear not, you are 
 safe. You follow a light you cannot see. I can 
 see it for you. Be brave. You will understand 
 some day." 
 
 And Wasteneys had bowed his head, and thanked 
 him with a pressure of the hand. 
 
 All this came back to him with great force, as 
 he hastened home. Father Selden would be in the 
 chapel at this moment, with the tiny band of the 
 country faithful around him. Wasteneys deter- 
 
Easter 41 
 
 mined to slip in and take his place in a small gal- 
 lery at the back of the chapel, where he could 
 remain unseen. As he entered, the exquisite little 
 organ, one of the oldest in England, was sing- 
 ing like many nightingales the resurrection of 
 Christ ; and his heart gave a strange bound of joy 
 as the beautiful old words fell upon his ear : 
 
 " Die, nobis, Maria, quid vidisti in via ? 
 Sepulcrum Christi viventis et gloriam vidi resurgentis." 
 
 The chapel was filled with the breath of spring 
 flowers, but it was not the music and the perfume 
 that most touched his heart. They were not so 
 sweet or so pure as the old man's face at the altar, 
 and from these simple hearts about him there was 
 rising an incense of adoring faith which made him 
 sigh and bury his face in his hands. 
 
 For all these Christ had risen. For him only 
 He still slept on in the unopening tomb. 
 
 In a dream he listened to the chapter which to 
 all present but himself was the veritable history of 
 a divine event. In a dream the hymn filled the 
 little chapel: 
 
 " O Filii et Filiae, 
 
 Rex celestis, Rex gloriae ! 
 Morte surrexit hodie, 
 Alleluia." 
 
42 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 And presently he heard the reproof of Thomas : 
 
 " Vide, Thoma, vida latus, 
 Vide pedes, vide manus ; 
 Noli esse incredulus. 
 Alleluia." 
 
 Something deeper, something nobler, than reason 
 rose up against his brains. Why did he still doubt? 
 Why did he refuse this revelation to which the 
 innermost soul of him mysteriously responded? 
 " Noli esse incredulus." 
 
 Reason ! 
 
 Reason? Was it the life of the reason that he 
 had been living these last five years? Was it at 
 the dictate of reason that he had thrown aside all 
 the serious purpose of his life? What part had 
 reason in such a possession as that to which, from 
 the first moment of revelation, he had given un- 
 questioning assent and service? The world was 
 full of beautiful faces, full of noble women ; why 
 among all should he fix his choice upon one face, 
 one woman, that could never be his, and reject all 
 the rest? Was this reason? Reason had, over and 
 over again, spoken to him in vain. For something 
 had told him that here he knew better than reason, 
 that this passion was subject to a higher, more 
 mysterious, sanction. And the instinct which 
 bade him hold to his dream of human love in 
 spite of reason, was the same instinct that was 
 
Easter 43 
 
 appealing to him this morning in the name of 
 the Divine Love. He had accepted the lesser rev- 
 elation, in spite of reason. Could he reject the 
 greater on a pretence which had been unequal to 
 dismissing the lesser? Even reason itself protested 
 against the anomaly. 
 
 Ah, could he but see the face of God as clearly 
 as he could see that face which was with him night 
 and day, the face which rose up in the music, and 
 in the breath of the flowers. Could it be that it 
 was this face that hid from him the face of God? 
 
 Father Selden was secretly very happy at 
 Wasteneys' coming home in this way and at this 
 season. Accustomed, too, to read the visible signs 
 of the soul in the face, he saw something in Was- 
 teneys' face which seemed to tell him that his 
 prophecy was slowly fulfilling itself. But of this 
 he said nothing to his pupil. Perhaps he was 
 a thought more tender to him, indefinably infusing 
 into his smile and his hand-grasp an unobtrusive 
 sympathy too subtle to claim a conscious recogni- 
 tion. No more than that. Father Selden was too 
 wise a fisher of men. 
 
 " The soul," he used to say, " is like a little 
 frightened bird that hops and hops in sight of the 
 heavenly food, then suddenly flies away ; and then 
 as suddenly comes and hops and hops again a 
 
44 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 little nearer. Some would encourage it with 
 friendly calls, but those only alarm it, and the 
 more we call it the further off it stands, for the 
 soul is very shy. Best to pretend not to notice. 
 Sooner or later, if we leave it alone, it will gain 
 heart and carry off one crumb of the bread of 
 life, and then another." 
 
 So it seemed to Father Selden that the soul 
 of Pagan Wasteneys animula, vagula, blandula, 
 was coming nearer and nearer to the heavenly 
 bread, like a timid, long-wandering bird. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 OLD WALLS AND YOUNG DAYS 
 
 NATURE, as we have seen, had straightly 
 impeached Wasteneys with his way of 
 life, his forgetfulness of his old vision 
 of her; religion had appealed to him once more, 
 and at a moment when his ears were open, and his 
 heart prepared to understand, as never in his life 
 before; but nature had not been so stern in her 
 impeachment of him, nor religion so persuasive, 
 as his old home, every stone of which seemed to 
 have been cemented with the earnestness and in- 
 tegrity of serious ancestors, and in every room of 
 which still sang the memories of his happy and 
 beautiful boyhood. 
 
 It was not a great or famous house, but all the 
 more significant was the general air of firmness 
 with which it had been set down upon the land. 
 It was evident that its builders had meant it to 
 endure. Resolution and purpose were in every 
 line of it, distinction in every curve. The more 
 credit to his ancestors, who had been in no way 
 illustrious, but men and women of the common 
 
46 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 strength and virtue. There were rooms the mere 
 shape and proportions of which were like a chap- 
 ter in Marcus Aurelius. Wasteneys sat long in 
 them, hoping that something of the force they 
 still stored might pass into him. 
 
 Very marvellous is this impressibility of material 
 surroundings to the lives that are lived among 
 them. We build or we furnish a house to suit our 
 own comfort and taste, as it pleases us, or as we 
 must; we die, and our sons inherit us, and live 
 their lives, and maybe add rooms and furniture in 
 accordance with their comfort and their taste, and 
 so generation follows generation ; and, meanwhile, 
 from all these lives something impalpable has been 
 passing into the very walls, and, in some myste- 
 rious way, the old house has become a reservoir 
 of persuasive, even compelling, influence. One is 
 conscious of this influence even in an old house 
 in which we dwell for awhile as strangers, and to 
 which we are bound by no ancestry of occupation. 
 How much more powerful must that influence be 
 when the house we inherit has been lived in by 
 men and women of our own blood for centuries. 
 Who has not vibrated to the stored courage in a 
 noble name? An old house that has been bravely 
 and beautifully lived in has just this power of 
 bracing influence ; and for a man who possesses 
 such an old home, to come back to it is to con- 
 
Old Walls and Young Days 47 
 
 nect himself with a hundred currents of energizing 
 ancestral force. 
 
 Wasteneys felt his old home crying out against 
 him from every corner. Everywhere was purpose, 
 control, order, content. He took refuge from its 
 impeachment in the dim gallery where hung 
 many portraits of his ancestors. With a certain 
 wistfulness he scanned their faces, as though in 
 search of sympathy. Had they all been strong 
 and successful and content? Was there no face 
 amongst them that seemed to hint a prophecy of 
 his own life ? One vague sad face there was, the 
 face of a woman, of whom the legend ran that she 
 had died of love ; but there was little except her 
 weakness to distinguish her from the rest. And 
 he was seeking sympathy in no pathetic face of 
 failure ; but rather in some proud strong face that 
 plainly told of a world lost which it had not cared 
 to win. Love may be as strong losing as winning, 
 stronger maybe. That face he sought in vain. 
 
 Of all the rooms of his old home that thus 
 called upon him to come out of his dream and 
 do his destined work, it was his library, as might 
 be expected, which called to him with the most 
 definite and the most moving voice. There the 
 strenuous intellectual struggles of his boyhood 
 and young manhood had taken place, there he 
 had nobly aspired to follow the great masters in 
 
48 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 the greatest of all/the arts. Their names as he 
 looked round his shelves seemed to-day terribly 
 victorious, and sternly reproachful. He smiled 
 sadly as he recalled the ardor with which he had 
 once echoed another's cry: 
 
 " Oh that my name were numbered among theirs, 
 Then gladly would I end my mortal days." 
 
 The poet who uttered that cry had indeed suc- 
 ceeded in his desire. His name stood for a fact 
 in the world of the mind. When it was spoken, it 
 had a definite meaning, like the name of a color. 
 As Wasteneys' eyes passed from one great name 
 to another, he realized, with a new thrill of ambi- 
 tion and despair, what to make a name really 
 means. 
 
 To have lived so forcibly, with such vivid signifi- 
 cance, and so to have charged a few handfuls of 
 words with the dynamic potency of your spirit; 
 or maybe to have lived so graciously, with such 
 sweet perfume of living, and so to have impreg- 
 nated a few handfuls of words with an undying 
 sweetness ; that your name alone means all you 
 have done and all you have been : is not all that 
 meant when we put a name on a binding a 
 name alone? 
 
 " Dante." There is no need to explain. There 
 is no need to print the name in full, for fear of 
 
Old Walls and Young Days 49 
 
 mistake, no need to explain that the volume 
 contains the works of Messer Dante Alighieri 
 of Florence a certain vision in three books. 
 So soon as we see the name we say to our- 
 selves : Beatrice Florence Hell Purgatory 
 and Heaven. Such beautiful and mighty mean- 
 ings was a great man able to concentrate in a 
 little name of five letters: the love of woman, 
 the love of country, the fear of hell, the pains of 
 purgatory, the love of God. 
 
 Wasteneys wrote out his own name. Alas ! he 
 had not yet made one letter of it ! " It is such a 
 long name ! " he said, taking shelter in a sad laugh, 
 which was far indeed from real laughter. Such 
 laughter is either the despair or the cowardice of 
 the disappointed spirit. 
 
 But he could not laugh, even so superficially as 
 that, when from time to time he took down some 
 classic which he had strenuously read and care- 
 fully marked, years before, and found the mes- 
 sages which his youth had left there for his middle 
 age. Ah ! how strong that boy has been, how 
 stern of purpose, how pure of heart, how sure of 
 the heavenly vision ! 
 
 Scattered up and down his books were flowers. 
 They had nothing to do with love. They were 
 keepsakes of the spirit. Wasteneys had long 
 since forgotten their special reference, but their 
 
 4 
 
50 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 general significance his aching heart well knew. 
 How many spring mornings they stood for, when, 
 wandering through the fields in the early dew, the 
 heavens had opened, and voices of thrilling certi- 
 tude had proclaimed to him the spiritual order of 
 the universe. Ah ! to be caught up once more 
 by that angelic singing, to wander once more, an 
 inspired boy, up the stairways of the morning 
 star. 
 
 " Sing me a song of a boy that is gone 
 Say can that boy be I ? " 
 
 But whence and how had come the change? 
 He was still young, still strong, his heart was still 
 pure, if the surface of his life was not indelibly 
 stained. 
 
 A woman's face ! A woman's face ! 
 
 Fool! 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE MEADOW OF REMEMBRANCE 
 
 THROUGH three of the morning weeks 
 of the year Wasteneys lived in the lus- 
 tral solitude of nature, and meanwhile he 
 gradually recovered an old understanding with 
 her, an almost forgotten relationship. As a boy, 
 ten years before, it was not indeed as a tonic, a 
 spiritual regimen, that he had sought her. Then 
 it had seemed enough reason for life to be allowed 
 to look in her face, to gaze into it in those long 
 trances of pantheistic ecstasy, which, as he thought 
 back upon his life, seemed to be the most com- 
 plete moments of existence. There is that union 
 between the universe and its unit, as of mother 
 and child, which is entirely absorbing and satisfy- 
 ing. The child asks only the mother's breast, only 
 her smile as he lies feeding there. So there are 
 certain temperaments which are still so filially at- 
 tached to the great Mother, that her love and her 
 beauty are all they need. The mystic relation be- 
 tween them and what we call nature suffices them. 
 They are so filled with " the All" that they are 
 independent of the contributory unit. Anchorites 
 
5 2 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 of green loneliness, monks of the morning star, a 
 great dream has set them free from the lesser 
 dependencies of humanity. As a boy, Wasteneys 
 had known that mystic rapport with nature in rare 
 completeness. Now, as he found himself regain- 
 ing it, he realized with a pang how complete, too, 
 the intervening estrangement had been. 
 
 Now he saw that all these years during which 
 he had laid up his treasure in one human face, 
 nature had been to him as half-heeded spectacular 
 scenery for the human drama. When the great 
 stage had been empty of human figures, he had 
 been overborne with an oppressive, almost terrify- 
 ing loneliness. And once the lonely summer night 
 had seemed like a room full of friends. But this 
 noble friendship was being day by day more and 
 more restored to him. Again he felt, or thought 
 he felt, that the complete human life is lived as 
 a unit. The man alone, and yet not alone; the 
 woman alone, and yet not alone and the uni- 
 verse. Again he felt, or thought he felt, mysteri- 
 ous sustenance streaming into him out of the air. 
 He was the mother's child again. The human 
 prodigal had come back home. Lost satisfactions 
 were his once more, complete moments filled with 
 deep content. There were hours, even days, in 
 which he felt as whole-heartedly at home in the 
 world as a child, hours and days unmarred by that 
 
The Meadow of Remembrance 53 
 
 human ache. Would the time come when that 
 ache would cease forever, when once more life's 
 standard of value would be changed for him, and 
 the Whole become again what the part too long 
 had been? Would he ever regain his lost place in 
 the great harmony, fulfil himself, do his small 
 share in the cosmic work, with joyous efficiency 
 as a bird sings, or a tree grows? 
 
 All this time there had been one meadow which 
 he had not entered. It was a meadow secluded 
 with hawthorn hedges, half a mile or so from his 
 house. It swept down from a green upland to the 
 banks of the trout-stream that loitered its osiered 
 course through that country-side. In all these 
 walks, whenever Wasteneys approached it, he 
 took some devious way to avoid it. He had 
 vowed that he would walk in that meadow no 
 more, that he dared not walk in it. For a flower 
 was growing there to which the hawthorn was 
 scentless. But he said to himself one day that it 
 were better to go and stand in that meadow, and 
 smell that flower, now in the new strength of his 
 soul ; lest the power of their enchantments might 
 grow with his avoidance of them. Anything we 
 dare not look at must in the end conquer us. Yes ! 
 he would go to the meadow, and smell the strange 
 flower again, and his heart would ache, but it 
 would not fail. 
 
54 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 So, early one morning, Wasteneys went up to 
 his meadow through the freshness and the still- 
 ness. His heart beat and he quickened his steps 
 as he neared it. Something whispered that his 
 soul had meant to come here all the time that 
 he would go on coming here forever ; that nature 
 was not enough, that all nature, and more besides, 
 was in that little blue flower. Little blue flower 
 which fills all the morning sky with fragrance. 
 Little blue flower filled with all the ache and 
 sweetness of human hearts. 
 
 An hour afterwards Wasteneys lay face down in 
 the grass. The Great Mother pressed close to him 
 for comfort; she flooded his sad figure with sun- 
 light ; her morning breezes pressed cool hands 
 against his brow; little birds came near and peeped 
 and sang; all the mighty morning begged to be 
 his friend. But Wasteneys lay on unheeding, face 
 down in the grass, crying like a child. 
 
 That night found him back again in his London 
 rooms. In his desk was a beautiful locked manu- 
 script volume, to which half humorously he had 
 given the name of " The Sad Heart of Pagan 
 Wasteneys." It was a sort of intermittent diary of 
 his possession. About midnight he slid aside the 
 moonstone which masked the curiously contrived 
 
The Meadow of Remembrance 55 
 
 lock, and added this lyric to the other sad writing 
 in the book : 
 
 " For lack and love of you, love, 
 I pine the long days through ; 
 
 I waste the powers 
 
 Of the rich hours, 
 For lack and love of you. 
 
 " For lack and love of you, love, 
 
 All life is grown untrue ; 
 O, I squander 
 And I wander, 
 
 For lack and love of you. 
 
 " For lack and love of you, love, 
 
 I grow myself untrue ; 
 I am drowning, 
 Drowning, drowning, 
 
 For lack and love of you." 
 
 As he closed the book and turned out the lamp, 
 a strange thought struck him: Was this lyric 
 quite, absolutely, simply true ? Was this passion 
 really all it had seemed to him? Did it really 
 mean all it had seemed to mean? The thought 
 filled him with a curious wonder. So might a 
 prisoner one day rub his eyes and say: "Am I 
 really in prison? " 
 
 That he had returned to town thus in a panic 
 of loneliness must not be taken to mean that the 
 last three weeks had been in vain. Spiritual 
 
56 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 changes are seldom completed all at once. One 
 such emotional mood as that through which Was- 
 teneys had just passed is not sufficient. Many 
 such may be needed, and meanwhile it may seem 
 to the spectator, and even to the soul itself, that 
 no change is taking place. Yet in the darkness 
 the change is surely being wrought. Wasteneys 
 came back to town to seek it once more as an 
 anodyne, but he was not the same man that had 
 left it three weeks before. Already, it had lost its 
 power to harm him. Already a new principle of 
 life was moving in him. Vital purposes long 
 asleep were dimly astir. But of these he was to 
 be unconscious for a long time to come. Life has 
 a way of keeping us in the dark as to its purpose 
 with us till that purpose is accomplished. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 ADELINE WOOD 
 
 THERE was one woman who was really 
 good for Wasteneys. Adeline Wood was 
 a little West-country girl who had felt 
 herself one too many in a big family of girls, and 
 had managed, with no little romantic excitement 
 and personal courage, to detach herself and come 
 to London. How much is romance indebted to 
 trivial barriers for its opportunities ! Many thou- 
 sand travellers enter London every day by the 
 great doors of its railway termini. They scatter 
 themselves in hansoms and hotel omnibuses in one 
 direction and another ; and they transact their 
 business without a thought that this is Fairy- 
 land ! Who has not known men to whom Rome 
 is but a market-town, and Antioch a city of 
 mulberry-trees and tobacco plants? To Adeline 
 Wood, romance had always expressed itself, 
 firstly : as London ; secondly, and with multiple 
 suggestiveness, as all that might happen in Lon- 
 don. To Adeline Wood London was Bagdad, 
 whose first nights were Arabian Nights; and 
 whose streets were peopled with grand viziers in 
 
58 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 disguise. Just to have lodgings in London 
 lodgings and a London latchkey was a suffi- 
 ciently romantic beginning. I don't pretend to 
 say why. The potent fancies of human beings, 
 even little provincial girls, go deeper than reason. 
 
 Adeline Wood was one of those eager bachelor 
 girls who starve themselves to buy books they 
 cannot else afford, who carry camp stools to the 
 pits of theatres, who sacrifice a mere lunch to see 
 a Bond Street exhibition. Probably her zest in 
 these things was chiefly the zest in being free. 
 The emancipated slave naturally revels in being 
 able to do anything of his or her own free-will. 
 One must have been such a slave as Woman to 
 realize the excitement of such rudimentary free- 
 doom. Such has been the bondage of the Eng- 
 lish provincial girl for hundreds of years, that to 
 gain at last the freedom to earn a hundred pounds 
 a year, by her own labor, thus foregoing many a 
 comfort and elegance of her prosperous West- 
 country home, but thus ransoming her own body 
 and soul, may well have seemed a notable triumph 
 not merely for herself, but for her sex. 
 
 Adeline Wood might have fought and won the 
 battle of sex, differently; merely in fact with 
 the weapon of a beauty which was perhaps just a 
 little too intellectual. But the conquests so far 
 within her reach had not been to her mind. 
 
Adeline Wood 59 
 
 Marriage seemed nothing like so romantic to her, 
 as having two little rooms of her own in London, 
 and making her own living by the delicate craft 
 of book-binding. 
 
 She was one of a little band of men and women 
 inspired by the influence of a certain master- 
 craftsman, who brought something like a reli- 
 gious enthusiasm to his craft, and taught his 
 followers that the humblest artificers in the tem- 
 ple of art participated in their degree in the 
 sacerdotal office of beauty. Little Adeline Wood 
 went about her work like an acolyte carrying 
 sacred vessels. She was very happy, a little 
 perhaps as nuns are happy; a happiness which, 
 like all true happiness, included a certain auster- 
 ity, and discipline, and watchful aspiration, of 
 life. It was wonderful what pleasure and excite- 
 ment she extracted from every little incident and 
 circumstance of her existence. So much of our 
 pleasure, far more than we know, comes of an 
 unspoilt appetite. Even her simple little meals 
 had an air about them. Selection is, as we 
 know, a most important formative principle of 
 every art. It is especially important to the art 
 of living. Thus, poverty, with its enforced care- 
 ful choice among pleasures, is a fine sharpener of 
 the taste. There is no such connoisseur as your 
 poor connoisseur. Poverty keeps the eye eagerly 
 
60 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 clean for quality; for, while quality in quantity 
 is beyond its reach, it may still hope to possess 
 itself of an occasional example of "quality." 
 One really fine thing ! In that you have the 
 essential excellence and wonder. Long galleries 
 of collections do not go deeper than that. If 
 you possess one really fine piece of old silver, 
 the richest collection of old silver in the world 
 does not really surpass you. They have more 
 of the same thing but you have the essential 
 unit of quality. Multiplication is not distinc- 
 tion. Indeed, it tends precisely in the other 
 direction. 
 
 This merely in illustration of Adeline Wood, 
 from whom Wasteneys found a letter awaiting 
 him on his return to town. Of course, hers was 
 not the only letter awaiting him. There was one 
 from Myrtle Rome too, beginning "My King!" 
 as Myrtle's really beautiful and very romantic 
 letters always began. Of Myrtle more later on. 
 Wasteneys laid aside that picturesque spray of 
 womanhood, to read Adeline's austere little 
 note of invitation to tea tea and a new book- 
 binding. 
 
 The thought of Adeline was like the cool even- 
 ing star rising over the hot earth. Why had he 
 never made love to Adeline? You could not see 
 her handwriting without understanding what a 
 
Adeline Wood 61 
 
 wonderful wife she would make. Well, perhaps, 
 it was that a man would need to be a very good 
 husband to be worthy of Adeline; and then 
 Wasteneys had never thought of marrying any 
 woman. 
 
 Wasteneys had met Adeline at his cousin's, 
 Lady Lucy Silchester's. Lady Lucy was one of 
 those noble ladies, who flirt with Grub Street and 
 send cards of invitation to popular authors they 
 do not know. That is, she was "literary." In 
 her kind shallow heart she believed herself a 
 poet. It was really a pity that she should have 
 contracted this illusion, for it made intercourse 
 with her a little precarious. Wasteneys had suf- 
 fered much from her sad little manuscripts, and 
 it was his fear of them that made him a rarer 
 visitor than he would otherwise have been ; for 
 he liked his cousin, with her pretty head and 
 bright popular ways. 
 
 In support of her literary character, Lady Lucy 
 filled her rooms with an indiscriminate collection 
 of men and women in one way or another living 
 the sad life of the pen. With a genuine appre- 
 ciation of good literature, she would yet surprise 
 you at times with an equally sincere enthusiasm 
 for bad. Her taste was what is known as "un- 
 certain " and of this uncertainty she was herself, 
 one could sometimes note, nervously conscious. 
 
62 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 Therefore, she often wrote to Wasteneys for his 
 "opinion" on this or that new book, and he 
 smiled sometimes to see how daintily she would 
 reproduce it at her next afternoon. 
 
 Her acquaintance with Adeline Wood had 
 come of Lady Lucy's following the fashion in 
 book-binding, and she had taken a genuine fancy 
 for the girl, with her gentle, distinguished, and 
 somewhat haughty air. 
 
 Among Wasteneys' letters had been a heart- 
 breaking appeal from Lady Lucy to help her with 
 a tea on the morrow, and, as Wasteneys had 
 neglected her somewhat callously for a long time, 
 he decided to give ear to it. Besides, it was not 
 unlikely that Adeline might be there. 
 
 His first thought on entering Lady Lucy's 
 drawing-room next afternoon was that Adeline 
 was there. She sent him one of her long sweet 
 smiles across a sea of talkers through which it 
 was plainly impossible to swim on the instant to 
 her side. Indeed, Lady Lucy made that clear at 
 once. 
 
 "Don't think you are going off to sit in a 
 corner with Adeline," she said, knowing the 
 friendship between the two. " You have to make 
 up your arrears with me first." 
 
 A great book by a profound and sorrowful mas- 
 ter had just been published. Lady Lucy asked 
 
Adeline Wood 63 
 
 Wasteneys' opinion of it, as though it had been 
 a new brand of cigarettes. 
 
 " Do you think it right to speak of it here ? " 
 he said and he looked round. 
 
 "Of course, I know it is very deep," said Lady 
 Lucy, not quite understanding. 
 
 Then her duties as hostess called her away, and 
 Wasteneys found himself listening in a dream to an 
 American lady journalist who was asking him his 
 opinion of "pessimism." Pessimism! It was like 
 asking what one thought of Mr. Stephenson's won- 
 derful invention of the steam-engine. However! 
 
 "I should define pessimism," said Wasteneys 
 gravely, "as making the best of it." 
 
 "And saying the worst," added a neighboring 
 talker, one of those good-natured persons who 
 love to cast light upon other people's jokes. 
 
 "I think that very clever," said the American 
 lady, not in the least comprehending. " Do you 
 mind writing it down for me? " and she produced 
 a card case and asked Wasteneys to write it upon 
 one of her cards. 
 
 " It is always such a pleasure to meet men of 
 genius," she added. 
 
 At last by a daring and somewhat shameless 
 piece of social strategy Wasteneys shot across to 
 Adeline. 
 
 "At last!" he said. 
 
64 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 "Well?" said Adeline, meaning, "what news 
 since we last met? " and then without waiting for 
 him to reply she said, looking critically into his 
 face. 
 
 " You look better ! " 
 
 "Better?" 
 
 " Then gooder so to speak. " 
 
 " I 've been watching flowers grow and listen- 
 ing to birds singing." 
 
 "I'm glad." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "Because it 's good for you. I wish you would 
 do it oftener. " 
 
 "Won't looking at book-bindings do as well? " 
 
 "Are you coming to-morrow? " 
 
 "Of course." 
 
 " What were you saying to that lady over there ? " 
 
 "Why do you ask?" 
 
 "Because I noticed that curious smile which 
 comes over your face when you have said some- 
 thing absurd." 
 
 " Well, she asked me think of it what I 
 thought of pessimism." 
 
 " And what did you say ? " 
 
 " I said I should define pessimism as mak- 
 ing the best of it." 
 
 "Poor soul! Had she a notion of what you 
 meant ? " 
 
Adeline Wood 65 
 
 " She asked me to copy it down for her. " 
 
 "It was true though," said Adeline a little 
 sadly then turning to Wasteneys, "Why aren't 
 you a pessimist? " 
 
 "I 'm going to be." 
 
 "You are really going to make the best of it." 
 
 "What nonsense are you two talking?" sud- 
 denly broke in Lady Lucy, who was not so happy 
 with her other guests as she tried to appear. 
 
 "Adeline has just made a bad pun, for my 
 spiritual good," laughed Wasteneys. 
 
 "Well, I hope it will not be made in vain," 
 said Lady Lucy. "Have you seen Adeline's 
 latest binding? " 
 
 "No, I am to see it to-morrow." 
 
 And with the buzz of such small talk this chap- 
 ter may as well end. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 "THE LOVE-LETTERS OF THE KING" 
 
 ADELINE had two pretty old-fashioned 
 rooms high up, overlooking one of the old 
 London squares, and it was one of the 
 joys of her life that she did her work under an 
 Adams ceiling. Her rooms, simple as they were, 
 gave one that pleasure which rooms expressive of 
 a refined occupant with individual taste always 
 give. Everything in them meant a personal 
 preference, and the whole formed a symbol of the 
 inner life of a girl, who in everything had dared 
 to choose for herself. It was autobiography in 
 the form of carefully selected furniture, pictures 
 and books. Nothing was irrelevant. Adeline, 
 too, had a way of discovering pictures no one 
 else had, and framing them for a few shillings 
 as no one else framed theirs. Just as clever 
 women can make a hat for half-a-crown that sets 
 all their rich friends asking who is their distin- 
 guished milliner, so Adeline contrived to give to 
 her little rooms an air which the rooms of the 
 rich, by the comparative indifference to single 
 details which comes of abundance, seldom attain. 
 
"The Love-Letters of the King'' 67 
 
 Her little tea-table seemed like no other tea- 
 table. Old silver and old china far more costly 
 might fail to give so exquisite an impression; 
 and Adeline's bread and butter! Well no 
 doubt it was because she always cut it herself. 
 There is nothing which so rewards a personal 
 exertion as bread and butter. The way in which 
 one cuts bread and butter is an unfailing test of 
 one's delicacy. Nothing is so eloquent of the 
 division between the laboring and the cultured 
 classes as the relative thickness of their bread 
 and butter. Adeline's bread and butter seemed 
 rather to belong to the world of spirit than to 
 the world of matter. It had the immateriality of 
 certain flowers. Her tea also was the very soul 
 of tea. 
 
 When Wasteneys came on the morrow, the 
 little drawing-room seemed unusually fresh and 
 sunny. 
 
 "It is so good for me to be here, Adeline," he 
 said. 
 
 Adeline smiled, as, having warmed the tea-pot 
 for a due space, she poured the hot water upon 
 the fragrant leaves. 
 
 In the room were two great presses, pictur- 
 esque engines of her art, recalling the early 
 printers, in which the bindings underwent cer- 
 tain mysterious processes ; and in an alcove were 
 
68 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 shelves full of shining tools. A roll of colored 
 skins, some day to become bindings, lay upon the 
 floor. 
 
 "It is truly a sacerdotal art," said Wasteneys, 
 as he admiringly examined Adeline's new bind- 
 ing. "There is no satisfaction equal to having 
 made something beautiful literally with one's 
 hands. The sensitive absorption of the work 
 alone is a great reward. You must be happy, 
 Adeline." 
 
 "But mine is such a tiny art," said Adeline; 
 "what is it compared with an art like yours? If 
 to bind a book is such a joy, what must it be to 
 write one! " 
 
 " Ah ! there you mistake an art is a joy to 
 practise the more it is a physical craft. Lit- 
 erature is only a handicraft in that it employs 
 handwriting, which many literary men abhor. 
 Personally, I love handwriting, and I find it diffi- 
 cult to think till my pen is in my hand. For 
 the rest, literature so far as so humble a writer 
 can speak of it is an art practised either in a 
 state of exhausting delirium, or still more ex- 
 hausting ennui. And even the mere material, in 
 the case of personal writers, is costly to the point 
 of tragedy. Everything that is really written is 
 written in human blood either that of the writer, 
 or that of his victim." 
 
" The Love-Letters of the King " 69 
 
 " In whose blood have you been writing lately ? " 
 asked Adeline, quizzically. 
 
 "To tell the truth," answered Wasteneys, 
 laughing, "just before I came to you, I found 
 in my desk a half-forgotten manuscript written 
 in my own ! It is only a fragment, but it rather 
 interested me to read it again, and, knowing your 
 indulgence, I have brought it with me. Shall I 
 read it now, or shall we keep it for the creme de 
 menthe ? " 
 
 Tea with Adeline, as they both knew, always 
 prolonged itself into dinner at a little Italian 
 restaurant, where distinguished poverty dined 
 delicately on a few shillings and what survived 
 in Wasteneys of the artist was never so happy as 
 when, with the coming of coffee and cigarettes, 
 Adeline allowed him to read her his latest manu- 
 script. Men write their books to many women 
 by accidental association, but there is usually one 
 woman for whom they are written. The woman 
 to whom you write has probably no interest in 
 literature at all, and she probably considers you 
 an eccentric creature who will write bewildering 
 books about her, which even she, the subject of 
 them, cannot understand. The artist cares noth- 
 ing for what she thinks. He would as little 
 think of asking his three-year-old child her opin- 
 ion on his last cradle-song. The woman who 
 
yo The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 inspires is of n0 importance; it is the woman 
 who understands that is the real muse. 
 
 Now, as I have implied, there was no sentiment 
 between Adeline Wood and Pagan Wasteneys, 
 yet, all the same, it was true that everything he 
 wrote was written for her for the simple rea- 
 son, maybe, that no line of it was written to her. 
 To win her praise was his idea of success. The 
 praise of the critical journals was nothing like 
 so important to him, though, as a matter of fact, 
 it was more within his reach ; for the laurels of 
 Adeline Wood were not easy to win. 
 
 " Let us keep it for the creme de menthe" 
 said Adeline, "but you can tell me the title 
 now." 
 
 '"The Love-Letters of the King,'" said 
 Wasteneys. 
 
 "A picturesque title," said Adeline, "a little 
 too picturesque." 
 
 "A title is in the nature of a poster," said 
 Wasteneys, "and must be flamboyant to catch 
 the eye of the mind." 
 
 "Quite true!" said Adeline, "and I confess 
 your poster is so effective that I think you had 
 better read it to me now." 
 
 " No ! " said Wasteneys, firmly, " let us wait 
 till the creme de menthe. That is the truly criti- 
 cal hour of the day, and I desire your most 
 
"The Love-Letters of the King" 71 
 
 searching criticism, Adeline. You might praise 
 me weakly, if I read to you now." 
 
 "Just tell me, then, what sort of a thing it is." 
 
 "It is a fairy tale." 
 
 " A fairy tale ! I see, you mean autobiog- 
 raphy?" 
 
 "All real writing is autobiography," said 
 Wasteneys modestly. 
 
 "Well, don't you think it is time to begin 
 reading ? " asked Adeline, an hour or two after- 
 wards in a secluded corner of prandial candle- 
 light. 
 
 " All right ! " said Wasteneys, diving abruptly 
 into the pearl-fishery of his manuscript. 
 
 "It was May in the King's garden, and the 
 King sat there towards the close of the afternoon, 
 with his admiring court about him. He was still 
 young to look on, but there was that sadness in 
 his dark handsome face which tells that the heart 
 is old before its time. No one knew how sorrow 
 had come to the King, but to eyes accustomed to 
 read the human soul there was sorrow in all his 
 ways, even in his gayest moments. Such might 
 guess that his half-cynical preoccupation with 
 light pleasures, his absorption in the toys of art 
 and emotion, served only to veil an inner life of 
 
72 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 a very different seriousness. His kingdom was 
 so small that there was nothing for a king to 
 do, except to superintend his architects and the 
 various artists who daily wrought at his palace, in 
 obedience to his learned and innovating fancy. 
 Nothing more serious than that but idler hours 
 the King spent in such delicate literary trifling as 
 was occupying him and his court this afternoon. 
 
 "It had been one of his fancies to revive the 
 fantastic toys of the cours d'amour, and he was 
 looked upon by all his court as a master of the 
 arts of literary love. It was one of his fancies 
 to revive the love-letter as a literary form, to use 
 it merely as a mould, as the poet uses the ballade 
 or the sestina, and the experiments he had made 
 in that subtle form had won him high apprecia- 
 tion among les prtcieuses of his court. ' The 
 King's Love-Letters ' went from hand to hand in 
 beautifully illuminated copies, and the boudoir 
 of every lady of quality was duly provided with 
 the latest perfumed edition. For gallants and 
 all casuists of the gentle art they were regarded 
 as an indispensable manual. Of course, no one 
 dreamed of attaching to them any personal human 
 application. It was understood that they were 
 exercises by a master in the difficult art of prose, 
 nothing more; for it was well known that, though 
 the King might occasionally dally with this or 
 
"The Love-Letters of the King" 73 
 
 that lady of his court, out of courtesy or ennui, 
 he was seriously attached to no one no one, at 
 all events, that any one knew of. 
 
 "To-day the King had written a wonderful 
 new love-letter, and as he languidly read it to 
 his court a court which in secret he despised 
 
 scribes were busy in the background taking 
 down each delicately-chosen and carefully-placed 
 word that fell from his lips. 
 
 "When he had finished reading, the court 
 broke out into the customary ecstasies of appre- 
 ciation. Enthusiastic ladies pressed close to 
 the King and marvelled at his knowledge of 
 the deep heart of love, petit-maitres picked out 
 this or that sentence, for its masterly this or its 
 miraculous that. No writer of the day equalled 
 the King, said one, in the superb orchestration 
 of prose. This was undeniable, for no one, in- 
 cluding king and critic, knew exactly what such 
 praise meant. But it sounded well the 'orches- 
 tration of prose ! ' and there was a murmur of 
 applause. 
 
 "An imitative critic thereon ventured to praise 
 a passage where what he might call the oboe of 
 prose for a moment dominated the grander music 
 
 a very black-bird of a sentence! 
 
 "And there were many more comments of a 
 like nature. 
 
74 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 "The King listened and smiled. All the time 
 he was watching the lonely, somewhat bewil- 
 dered, face of a beautiful young girl. He sur- 
 mised that she was a stranger at the court, come 
 up from some simple country castle to visit 
 friends in the great world. Her face had caught 
 his eye as he began reading, and he had watched 
 it all the while. It had remained throughout 
 like the face of one who listens to a song in a 
 language he does not understand. Its only 
 change was a deepening perplexity which 
 seemed meekly to ask the meaning of it all. 
 This troubled young face was the only critic the 
 King heeded. For his sad eyes saw the light 
 of love upon it, the light that was on no other 
 face. Presently, as his flatterers spent them- 
 selves and dispersed in groups about the garden, 
 he took an opportunity to speak to his silent 
 little critic. 
 
 "'All these people have been so kind,' he 
 said, laughing, ' but you have said nothing kind 
 to me.' 
 
 "The girl's eyes filled with tears. She had 
 never before spoken to a king, and she was very 
 timid. But, dropping a quaint little country 
 curtsey, she summoned courage to say: 
 
 " ' It was very beautiful your Majesty but 
 it was not a love-letter. ' 
 
"The Love-Letters of the King" 75 
 
 " Then, with the na'fve daring of the innocent, 
 she slipped her hand into her bosom and drew 
 out a warm little writing, which she offered to 
 the King to read. 
 
 "The King read it gravely, and, as he read it, 
 it was his eyes that filled with tears. When he 
 had finished reading, he folded it reverently, and, 
 giving it back to her, said : ' No, mine was not a 
 love-letter. ' 
 
 "Then, taking off his hat and bending slightly, 
 he kissed her hand and turned away with a sigh." 
 
 "You have written more than that," said Ade- 
 line, as Wasteneys suddenly ceased reading; 
 "won't you go on?" 
 
 "Hadn't I better keep some for next time? 
 Besides, if you don't mind, I would rather not 
 read any more to-night. Let us dine together 
 again to-morrow, and I will read you the rest 
 that is, so far as it goes; for it is a long way 
 from being finished " 
 
 His face had grown drawn and tired, and his 
 eyes seemed suddenly filled with memories. 
 
 "Of course," said Adeline, divining more 
 than he thought. "But tell me this before 
 you go. The King understood because he 
 had really known love once. Is that the 
 meaning ? " 
 
j6 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 " Yes ! " said .Wasteneys, softly and half to 
 himself, "the King had known love." 
 
 "I thought so," said Adeline, with a sigh. 
 
 As Wasteneys spoke he saw a vision of a 
 woman gathering mushrooms in the dawn! 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 "THE LOVE-LETTERS OF THE KING" (continued) 
 
 " P ^HE King understood," said Adeline, as 
 
 dinner neared its close the next even- 
 
 -*- ing, and taking up their talk where they 
 
 had left it, "because he had really known love. 
 
 Now go on." 
 
 "Yes! the King understood," proceeded Was- 
 teneys, " because in a golden box set with moon- 
 stones he had five real love-letters. They were 
 very short, and he had come by them in this way. 
 
 " One morning rising early, as was his custom, 
 he had walked alone in a dewy upland some little 
 way from his palace, and he had suddenly come 
 upon a beautiful woman gathering mushrooms. 
 For a few moments she did not see the King, 
 and he had time to see how beautiful she was, 
 as she bent down here and there, softly tearing 
 the milk-white things out of the green grass. 
 She was all in white, save her hair, which was 
 black as -- " 
 
 "Oh, she had black hair!" interrupted Adeline 
 involuntarily. 
 
78 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 " Yes ! very black hair ! " Wasteneys continued, 
 "and her body was very tall and straight, and her 
 skin white as the pith of a peeled willow wand. 
 
 "Presently she saw the King and stopped 
 gathering the mushrooms, looking long at him 
 with great fearless eyes, like a child's. The 
 King had never seen such eyes, and she had 
 never seen such eyes as the King's; so they stood 
 long looking strangely at each other, alone on 
 the uplands in the silence of the morning. And 
 such is the mystery of human hearts, that they 
 knew from that look that they would love each 
 other, and no other, as long as they lived. Then 
 the King laughed, and the woman laughed too, 
 as if they had known each other for years. 
 
 " ' Do you know that you are stealing the King's 
 mushrooms? ' asked the King. 
 
 "'Are you the King?' 
 
 " ' Yes. ' 
 
 " ' The King of all these mushrooms? ' 
 
 " ' Yes every one ! ' 
 
 " * What then will happen to me ? ' 
 
 " ' I will spare your life on one condition 
 that we sit under yonder tree and eat them 
 together. ' 
 
 " So the King and the woman laughed like 
 children, while they silently gave their hearts to 
 each other. 
 
" The Love-Letters of the King " 79 
 
 " Suddenly the woman looked at him with her 
 child's eyes, and said: 
 
 " ' Are you a real king ? ' 
 
 " ' I think so. ' 
 
 " ' Do you lead great armies, and govern a 
 mighty land? ' 
 
 " ' I have such a little land to govern. ' 
 
 " ' But you should make it great. ' 
 
 " ' Stay with me and I will be a real king. ' 
 
 "'Alas! I cannot. I have promised to make 
 another man a king. 
 
 "' But this will I do,' said the woman after a 
 silence. ' I will meet you once a year in this 
 meadow and ask you that question : Are you a 
 real king ? and once a year I will write you a 
 letter to help you to be a real king.' 
 
 "Now, when the woman had gone, the King 
 fell sad on account of those eyes, and spent his 
 time idly with minstrels and such folk, and be- 
 came from year to year less and less a king. But 
 each year as that day came round, the King went 
 up to the meadow at early dawn, and there was 
 the woman awaiting him as each year there 
 came a plumed and perfumed messenger bring- 
 ing a letter to the King. 
 
 " This was the first letter : '/ love you. ' 
 
 "And the King said: 'This will make me 
 great. ' 
 
8o The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 "This was the second letter: 1 1 love you.' 
 " And the King said : ' I will be great. ' 
 "This was the third letter: ' 7 love you.' 
 " And the King said : ' I can be great. ' 
 "This was the fourth letter: ' '/ love you.' 
 " And the King said : * I must be great. ' 
 "But on the fifth year there came this letter: 
 ' 1 must love you no more. I can only love a king. ' 
 "When the King read the fifth letter he went 
 more wildly with his minstrels and flatterers than 
 ever, living weakly in pleasures that gave him 
 no joy, and in the wine and the harp-playing he 
 strove to forget; but always the woman's voice 
 went on asking in his soul : ' Are you a real 
 king ? ' 
 
 " All day long he heard his flatterers call him 
 ' King,' and ' King,' and ' King,' and sometimes 
 when the wine was in him their words would 
 seem true, and he would smile foolishly to him- 
 self and say: ' I am a king! what is one woman 
 out of all the world? ' 
 
 " And the harps would answer : ' Thou art a 
 king!' and the bugles and the banners would 
 answer: ' Thou art a king! ' But sometimes the 
 King would snatch himself away from them all 
 in bitter sadness, crying aloud in his soul : ' I 
 am not a king. ' " 
 
" The Love-Letters of the King " 8 1 
 
 Wasteneys had come to the end of his manu- 
 script, and there was a long silence. Adeline 
 just placed her hand gently on his for applause; 
 and presently in her soft pure voice she said : 
 
 " But, of course, he is a real king in the end. 
 He must be a real king . . . mustn't he?" she 
 asked wistfully, as Wasteneys kept silence. 
 
 "Oh, of course," said Wasteneys. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 MERIEL 
 
 WHEN Wasteneys returned home that 
 night, he went to a large old cabinet 
 of beautiful Renaissance workmanship 
 that stood in his room, and pressed a secret 
 spring. A panel slid back and revealed a little 
 shrine of ebony ; but, instead of a crucifix, there 
 hung there the miniature of a beautiful girl. 
 Two gold candlesticks stood in front of it, and a 
 china jar filled with white roses. Wasteneys lit 
 the candles and gazed on the face. 
 
 The face, I have said, was beautiful, but the 
 more one looked at it the less one regarded its 
 beauty, and the more one became occupied with 
 something indefinably strange in its expression. 
 It was impossible to say exactly what it was; but 
 perhaps it consisted in an unusual combination of 
 unfathomable calm and elemental wildness. Its 
 calm was that massive calm which seems to give 
 an expression of moral grandeur to certain of the 
 nobler animals, and its wildness was the wild- 
 ness of woodland things that live free lives under 
 moon and stars. It was not a human face, but 
 
Meriel 83 
 
 was rather a face one might imagine for some 
 serious dryad or nymph of the forest pools; some 
 being midway between gods and men. The 
 fables which have invented such beings are far 
 from being wholly fictions. They symbolize cer- 
 tain half-human types of men and women, who, 
 in the outward seeming of humanity, are really 
 creatures of another element, and are essentially 
 as remote from humanity as, say, a wild bird on 
 the one hand, and a star on the other. Half 
 human, half immortal; man loves them at ter- 
 rible peril. For a time the humanity in them 
 prevails, and they bring the mortal who has 
 dared to love them a happiness beyond the gift 
 of mortal women; but sooner or later their own 
 element will reclaim them. The swan-maiden 
 will pine for her wings, and the mer-maiden 
 will hear the voices of the deep sea-caves. They 
 are not cruel, they are not kind. They are only 
 different from us. 
 
 Wasteneys, indeed, was as yet far from clearly 
 understanding the meaning of the face he wor- 
 shipped. But understanding is no part of wor- 
 ship is it not rather the end of worship? 
 
 He stood long in adoration of the face. 
 
 " O, Meriel ! Meriel ! " he cried at last. " How 
 I love you ! " 
 
 Then from a little drawer beneath the picture 
 
84 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 he took a small packet of letters and read them 
 slowly, with many pauses; for sometimes his eyes 
 were too full of tears, and sometimes the tears 
 rained down his cheeks, and with bent head he 
 sobbed before the image of the woman he loved. 
 
 In a luxury of agony he lived over again mo- 
 ment by moment the few brief hours that, speak- 
 ing merely in terms of time, made the whole 
 history of his love. 
 
 The fairy-tale he had read to Adeline, though 
 in some respects symbolic only of the experiences 
 of his spirit, was yet in one respect so externally 
 faithful to his own story that there is hardly need 
 to tell again how he had seen Meriel for the first 
 time. 
 
 It had, indeed, come about early one September 
 morning in that meadow near Wasteneys, much as 
 it had happened with the King. Since his boy- 
 hood Wasteneys had always included that meadow 
 in his early morning walks, and till that Septem- 
 ber morning he had always had the meadow to 
 himself. 
 
 But that morning he was half startled to find a 
 young and beautiful girl there before him. She 
 carried in her hand a little basket, which she was 
 filling with the new-born mushrooms, plentifully 
 dotted about the grass the dewiest white in the 
 world. She gathered them eagerly, like a child, 
 
Meriel 85 
 
 and Wasteneys watched her a few moments 
 unobserved. She seemed the very incarnation 
 of morning freshness, and all the terrible mag- 
 netism of young life when in April it comes up 
 laughing from the earth in torrents of sunlit blos- 
 som. There was the bloom upon her of some 
 superb butterfly that has just awakened from its 
 strange sleep, and stands waving its sumptuous 
 wings. Wasteneys watched her in silent wonder, 
 and to his eyes she seemed supernaturally fair. 
 
 Suddenly she seemed to be conscious that she 
 was not alone, and, looking up, she saw Wasteneys. 
 For a moment or two neither spoke. Wasteneys' 
 breath seemed to fail him, and it was with an 
 almost audible gasp of delight that he first looked 
 into Mend's great eyes. An expression as of 
 some beautiful frightened animal flashed through 
 them as she looked at Wasteneys, then a reassur- 
 ance, and then she looked at him with the calm 
 gaze of a child. The silence was only for a brief 
 moment, and yet it seemed to both of them that it 
 had endured for endless time. The look was rather 
 like a long joyful recognition than an introduction. 
 Then both smiled, and Wasteneys spoke. 
 
 " Good morning," he said ; and Meriel said 
 " Good morning." 
 
 To have met in such solitude and silence seemed 
 to make companionship inevitable. The world is 
 
86 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 so thinly inhabited at seven in the morning that 
 the few who* move about it, should their paths cross, 
 cannot ignore each other without affectation. In 
 fact, the choice of such an hour to walk abroad in 
 makes a freemasonry. It implies that this dawn- 
 wanderer is, at all events, nearer to us than the rest 
 of the world by the operation of one process of 
 selection. 
 
 " I am glad you like my mushrooms," said 
 Wasteneys, presently. 
 
 " Your mushrooms? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "You are lord of the manor is that it?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "And that is your thrush, eh?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " Then really I have no right to hear it sing 
 without your permission?" 
 
 " Strictly speaking, I suppose not." 
 
 "You could, I suppose, put me in prison then 
 for stealing these mushrooms?" 
 
 " Certainly." 
 
 " You make me quite frightened." 
 
 This heavenly being had a curious boyish 
 humor a suggestion, absurd as it may sound, 
 of gaminerie. 
 
 " There is one way out of the difficulty," said 
 Wasteneys, " if you care to take it." 
 
Meriel 87 
 
 "Oh?" 
 
 " That we breakfast together on your stolen 
 mushrooms." 
 
 " Without salt ? " 
 
 " Oh no ! exquisitely cooked by my own hand 
 and some excellent coffee too." 
 
 " Here? Are you a magician? Can you make 
 a frying-pan v/ut of the morning air? and I don't 
 see any coffee growing in the meadow." 
 
 " I know where to find both coffee and frying- 
 pan," and, as Wasteneys spoke, he pointed to a 
 little shepherd's hut in a hidden corner of the 
 meadow. 
 
 It had been one of his fancies to place it there, 
 and furnish it with kettle and tea-pot and the vari- 
 ous utensils and materials necessary, when the 
 fancy took him, to make his own breakfast on 
 his early morning walks. Wasteneys took a key 
 from his pocket, and unlocked the door. 
 
 " You are delightful ! " said the girl. He had 
 unconsciously struck the chord of wildness to which 
 her nature vibrated. 
 
 " Now," said Wasteneys, " while I light the fire, 
 you take this jug and bring some water from the 
 stream. You will find it down there by those alders 
 at the bottom of the meadow." 
 
 " Oh, I know the stream," said Meriel ; " have n't 
 I caught trout there for the last month? " 
 
88 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 " You have ? " said Wasteneys, with admiration ; 
 and then added, "for the last month," meaning 
 " and we have been all this time so near, and have 
 never met before ! " 
 
 But Meriel was already off to the stream, swing- 
 ing the jug in her hand, and striding like a glad 
 boy. 
 
 When she returned, Wasteneys had lit the fire, 
 and sat at the door of the hut peeling the mush- 
 rooms. 
 
 " Have we any milk? " said Meriel, in a practical 
 voice. 
 
 " I 'm afraid we have n't." 
 
 " I saw a cow just now," said Meriel, smiling, 
 " who would, I think, be glad to give us some. Is 
 she your cow, do you know? Will you give me 
 permission to steal some milk?" 
 
 " You can milk ! " 
 
 " Of course. Let me take that stool, and this 
 jug," and off she went again. Wasteneys heard 
 her voice calling soothingly to the milk-mother 
 down in the meadow, who by this had begun to 
 low, plaintively reproaching a neglectful herdsman, 
 that by some chance had missed her as he had 
 driven the herd to the milking two hours before. 
 
 In a short time Meriel returned with a jug full 
 of warm frothing milk. 
 
 " I 'm afraid I drank out of the jug," she said. 
 
Meriel 89 
 
 " I can't resist fresh milk and the poor old thing 
 wanted to give me far more." 
 
 Wasteneys was by this occupied with the mush- 
 rooms, which were deliciously browning in seas of 
 hissing butter. 
 
 " Shall I lay the table?" said Meriel. 
 
 " Do," said Wasteneys, as he pointed to a small 
 cupboard, "you will find everything in there." 
 
 Already they were strangely at home together. 
 
 " You were right," said Meriel, presently, " you 
 can cook. These mushrooms are delicious." 
 
 " And the coffee ? " asked Wasteneys. 
 
 " I never tasted such coffee." 
 
 "Are you happy?" asked Wasteneys, presently. 
 
 "Very. And you?" 
 
 " Very." 
 
 Of course, they said many other things to each 
 other like any ordinary human beings. They 
 talked of trout-fishing, and birds and beasts and 
 butterflies of which Wasteneys had a very inti- 
 mate knowledge, which greatly interested Meriel. 
 
 Meanwhile, the morning was rapidly growing 
 into the forenoon, and suddenly Meriel rose. " I 
 must go now." 
 
 So near had they come in this short time, as by 
 the renewal of an old intercourse rather than by 
 the quick ripening of a new acquaintance that 
 
90 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 there seemed something absurd in their parting at 
 all. They took each other's hands very simply, 
 and looked into each other's eyes, a sudden gravity 
 coming over them and it seemed nothing new or 
 strange for Wasteneys to be saying very quietly : 
 " I love you." 
 
 "I know," answered Meriel, "and I love you. 
 But we shall never be happier than we have been 
 this morning. You must not love me like that. 
 Love me as you would love a tree or a wild bird 
 or a star ; but not as a woman. I can never make 
 you happy. Now, kiss me." 
 
 Wasteneys took her in his arms. Yet, when she 
 had gone, he said to himself that it was a strange 
 kiss ; there seemed so little of " the human trouble " 
 in it. So one might be kissed by a dear sister, or 
 be taken into the cool heart of a flower. 
 
 " We shall meet again," Meriel had said as she 
 went away, " but we must not fix a time. If we 
 are to meet, we shall meet. How dare we fix a 
 day and an hour for the soul ! " 
 
 But Wasteneys had something commonplace and 
 earthly in his composition that set his heart aching 
 at this speech. He felt that it was wonderful in 
 Meriel to feel like that, but, all the same, he would 
 have preferred a simple definite appointment, after 
 the manner of this world. 
 
 After all, Meriel was more human than her 
 
Meriel 9 1 
 
 words for when Wasteneys took his walk next 
 morning, quite hopeless of such a miracle happen- 
 ing twice, there she was again. 
 
 " I had to come.," she said ; and she put up her 
 face to be kissed, as though she had been his 
 child. 
 
 For several successive mornings they met in this 
 way, and then she suddenly vanished, like the 
 moon when it has completed its quarters. As 
 Wasteneys entered the meadow that morning, his 
 heart sank with a premonition that she would not 
 be there, and, coming to his hut, he found a letter 
 pinned to the door. She had been there before 
 him. 
 
 She could come thus and slip away again, and 
 bear not to see him ! There he vaguely felt was 
 a difference in their loves. The letter was brief, 
 but filled with an unearthly intensity and fairy- 
 like exquisiteness of feeling. So a star un- 
 conscious of its starriness might write to a moth 
 that loved it. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 A VIGIL 
 
 WASTENEYS' meeting with Meriel made 
 conscious for the first time a latent 
 expectancy in his attitude to life. He 
 had deemed himself content, happily busied with 
 his art or the various occupations of a young man 
 socially fortunate. But now he realized that, un- 
 consciously, he had been all the time waiting for 
 something to happen something, one might say, 
 miraculous, which would suddenly fill life with an 
 almost supernatural sense of perfect joy. We 
 must all of us be familiar with those dreams in 
 which we imagine that our heart's desire hope- 
 lessly unrealizable in the daylight of fact has 
 suddenly been granted to us. Perhaps we dream 
 that some one long since dead and lost to us has 
 never been dead at all. They come to us with 
 shining faces, and the old aching heart is suddenly 
 replaced by a thrilling security.* Our hopes were 
 not foolish after all. Here they are safe, safe. 
 We shall never lose them again. The fairy tale 
 of life has come true. 
 
A Vigil 93 
 
 So with Wasteneys. In meeting Meriel he 
 realized for the first time that life is meant to 
 flower in an ideal transfiguration ; that, uncon- 
 sciously, we all dream of, and wait for, that flower- 
 ing; and that, as with some trees in the natural 
 world, the life-tree of some may never flower at 
 all, or suddenly as by miracle once in a hundred 
 years. 
 
 There are two revelations perhaps one at 
 heart which perfect life by throwing across it 
 this ideal glory: the revelation of Religion, and 
 the revelation of Love ; and the half-conscious 
 longing which even simple, common natures 
 know for this breaking into flower of the staid 
 leafage of their lives we call the desire of " ro- 
 mance." Romance ! That is the lead of daily 
 life suddenly turning to gold, in the fire of an 
 unfamiliar emotion, a strange experience, a face 
 like morning in heaven. 
 
 Love makes us radiantly certain of two things : 
 certain that life really meant us to be happy, after 
 all ; and certain of the soul's immortality. Love 
 has but one fear : that , love may end suddenly as 
 it began, that the magic light may suddenly fade, 
 and leave the world gray once more, as it was be- 
 fore the magic light streamed across it. 
 
 To have met Meriel was for Wasteneys the 
 same as if some religious soul tossed in doubt 
 
94 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 should suddenly be -blest with a blinding vision 
 of the Holy Mother; blinding, yet bringing 
 with it a calm indubitable assurance of heavenly 
 realities. 
 
 And it seemed too that Meriel's meeting with 
 Wasteneys had meant for her a like exaltation of 
 the spirit. Her letter revealed her in hushed 
 adoration before the mystery which had thus 
 suddenly been shown to them. " Let me be still 
 and live and wonder," she wrote, concluding, as 
 with face raised in prayer, a letter of strange 
 superhuman ecstasy. But Wasteneys sought in 
 vain for the human cry, the simple earthly long- 
 ing for the nearness of the beloved, which his own 
 less transcendental nature craved. It seemed as 
 if she loved not him but the Love which meeting 
 him had revealed to her. He was a priest who 
 had revealed to her a great and lovely mystery; 
 and she called on him to worship it with her. 
 Alas ! the priest's eyes were on the mortal woman. 
 It was not Love he loved, it was Meriel. But 
 Meriel's gaze was on the star that had been born 
 of their living eyes as a mother, in loving her 
 child, will sometimes forget the husband through 
 whom it came into being. 
 
 Wasteneys loved her after the manner of men and 
 women who dream of a fair home together, and 
 little children, born of their love. His dream was 
 
A Vigil 95 
 
 divine, but it was domestic too : a Holy Family, 
 with Meriel as the Madonna. But very soon he 
 realized that this dream could never be fulfilled. It 
 was as though one should ask some airy being of 
 the element to come and keep house with us under 
 a roof, some sylph, whose only home is among the 
 star-beams and the ranging winds. 
 
 It was the gradual, but certain, realization of this 
 as time went on that had filled Wasteneys with all 
 that unworthy disintegrating sorrow. Alas ! this 
 love, so unearthly in its spiritual exaltation, was to 
 prove a love of peculiar hopelessness. Superhu- 
 man in its joy alas ! it was to prove superhuman 
 in its conditions too. It may be said that if Waste- 
 neys had been made of finer clay, he would have 
 been content with this transcendental union, and 
 entered into Meriel's dream of a love that was as 
 content to be far as to be near in a world where 
 space and time did not exist, divinely indifferent to 
 human satisfactions. But this would be to ask, not 
 so much a refinement of mortal clay as human 
 material not human at all. One might as well ask 
 a man to breathe without air, or to breathe in 
 water, like a fish, or, like a salamander, in the fire. 
 It was no more a duty of Wasteneys' nature to 
 adapt itself to Meriel's conditions of loving than it 
 was a duty of hers to adapt itself to his. They 
 loved differently, and the difference made an airy 
 
96 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 barrier between them which neither could perma- 
 nently pass. For brief hours Meriel could become 
 tenderly and gayly human a simple woman, a 
 home-woman, a mother of little human babes 
 and for brief hours Wasteneys could reach up into 
 her ideal element, and forget that he was a man, a 
 human husband and father. In such hours each 
 dreamed delusively that at last their own dream 
 of union was to be made perfect. But too soon 
 came the understanding that they had not meant 
 alike, after all. Wasteneys had all the time been 
 hoping that perhaps the moment had now come 
 when the sylph-woman would become all woman, 
 and make her home in his arms forever a simple 
 human wife. 
 
 In the three years which had gone by since their 
 first meeting he had met Meriel only five times. 
 Suddenly, after months of waiting, the silence would 
 flower in a letter tender and longing as if it were 
 the love-letter of a veritable human woman. It al- 
 most seemed as if Meriel was like one of those 
 fabled beings who are human only for certain brief 
 hours each year. Unconsciously, Wasteneys was 
 waiting for these letters all the year. Meanwhile, 
 he filled in the time, as those who wait are apt to 
 do trivially, sometimes unworthily. 
 
 Here it was that Meriel harmed him, though she 
 knew nothing of what she did. It never occurred 
 
A Vigil 97 
 
 to her that it was cruel to leave him thus month 
 after month without a word. She herself felt no 
 need of letters from him, no need to see his face ; 
 and yet she loved him all the time, in her strange 
 way. To her he was always present. Only, it 
 seemed, once a year did the longing come over 
 her to see him face to face, to look into his eyes 
 and touch his hand. So much human nourishment 
 her starry passion needed so much, but alas ! no 
 more. 
 
 And those five meetings had told him little more 
 of the human Meriel than he had known at the 
 beginning. She had told him nothing of herself, 
 nor had she cared to ask anything about him. 
 Such particulars were irrelevant for two who met, 
 so to say, merely as essential personalities, divested 
 of incidental associations and conditions. They 
 might as well discuss housekeeping or dressmak- 
 ing. Wasteneys' value for Meriel was an ideal 
 value. To his mere human history she was indif- 
 ferent, and he was well content for the brief hour 
 that she lived in his eyes to " be still and live and 
 wonder." 
 
 To the average human being in love those meet- 
 ings would have seemed strangely unlike the meet- 
 ings of lovers. They were made up of childish 
 surface gayety, as of happy children on a picnic, 
 and silence. Meriel had an almost terrible love 
 
 7 
 
9 8 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 of silence. She seemed to fear words as she feared 
 every other human device of expression. " Words 
 are nearly always wrong," she said, " and when 
 they are right they are unnecessary." And as she 
 and Wasteneys would sit with their hands clasped 
 across their country luncheon table for some- 
 times they had met at an old inn they had fancied, 
 and sometimes in the fields it was true indeed 
 that silence said all. Sometimes Meriel would 
 break it with a deep sigh of happiness, just to 
 say: 
 
 " So you are really alive. I have seen you once 
 more. Now I can be alone again." 
 
 It was idle to wonder why she should thus be 
 content with looking once a year into the face that 
 might be all day and every day within her sight. 
 When Wasteneys sometimes whispered that, the 
 untamed look would come into her eyes, the look 
 of the bird that feared the cage. She would 
 look at him half defiantly and half piteously, as 
 though begging him not to rob her of her wild 
 wings. 
 
 When Wasteneys came to the end of the little 
 packet of letters, he turned to the book in which 
 we have before seen him writing. To-night he 
 was insatiable for memories. And even his own 
 records of past moments of feeling had a value for 
 him almost as if they had been written by Meriel 
 
A Vigil 99 
 
 herself, impregnated as they were with that im- 
 mediacy of impression which words, simple enough, 
 written in an emotional present, are sometimes 
 able to retain far into the future, when perhaps 
 the opportunities of such emotion can occur no 
 more. Such is the value of a journal, such is the 
 value of all concrete expression. A journal of 
 old feeling is like a telescope through which we 
 see the past history of the heart, not as a mere 
 hazy cloud of distant glory, but separate star by 
 star, moment by moment. The old agonies, the 
 old ecstasies, may thus be repeated for us, as by 
 some diabolical marvel of physical science. Was- 
 teneys, fanatically eager to protect his passion 
 against the slightest dulling of time, had written 
 in this book from day to day the history of his 
 heart. Sometimes it was a poem, sometimes it 
 was an extract from one of Mend's letters, some- 
 times it was a letter of his own in which it had 
 seemed to him that he had used words at a for- 
 tunate moment under the inspiring influence of 
 some literary planet ! There were many moods 
 and moments recorded moods even of rebellion 
 against this tyranny of the ideal though these 
 were few, and chiefly one must notice the almost 
 pathetic patience with which Wasteneys tried to 
 understand and adapt himself to an ideal of love 
 which was not his own, but the imperious fantastic 
 
ioo The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 dream of a beautiful non-human being in the de- 
 lusive shape of a human woman. The whole of 
 The Sad Heart of Pagan Wasteneys can never be 
 published, but the next chapter consists of a few 
 of its most important pages. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 " THE SAD HEART OF PAGAN WASTENEYS " 
 
 I AM trying, God knows, to understand this 
 strange and bitter love this Love whose two 
 words are Absence and Silence. To-day in 
 a mood, I am afraid, of some bitterness, I wrote 
 these lines, trying rather after the expression of 
 what it would seem Meriel wishes me to feel, than 
 what I really feel myself the tentative expres- 
 sion of an abstract love, of which both Meriel and 
 I are the accidental instruments. One may come 
 to love the violin for the music it stores within it, 
 but such love is mere association, and our real 
 love is for the music. So is it that Meriel loves 
 me. She loves Love not me. Ah, if only I 
 could love Meriel in the same way ! 
 
 " To love ! 
 That is my prayer. 
 Gifted to love, 
 
 Just the old simple everlasting way; 
 Of all life's gifts 
 That is the gift I crave. 
 
Ib2 : The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 4< I ask not kindness, 
 I ask not any gift or any grace, 
 Or any charity ; 
 The love I mean 
 Is not for you to give or take away. 
 
 " That you are cruel 
 Shall be no less provocative 
 Than that you're kind, 
 And whether you remember or forget 
 Shall to the love I crave 
 Be equal lure. 
 
 " I ask not nearness, 
 You are ever near ; 
 I ask not sympathy 
 In common aims, 
 I ask not comprehension. 
 I ask not anything. 
 
 " Only I pray to love, 
 And bring my heart 
 Gladly for you to break, 
 If break it can, 
 
 Gladly to feel your fair contemptuous feet 
 Grind it beneath you 
 In the passionate dust. 
 Yea, break my heart, 
 For that were ecstasy ! 
 
 " Think not 't is you I crave, 
 You to possess, command, nay ! nor to serve ; 
 My love would not be kind, 
 Nor live in offices of tenderness ; 
 You to the thing I crave 
 Are but the accident from which it springs. 
 
" Sad Heart of Wasteneys " 103 
 
 " It is not admiration, 
 It is not gratitude, 
 It is only love, 
 A madness, 
 
 A glory burning in the lonely brain. 
 A fearful fire filling the lonely heart. 
 
 " To love, to love, to love ! 
 Is this the way ? " 
 
 To-day I said to myself: If you love her, how 
 can you follow unworthy pleasures which, before 
 you taste them, you know to be dust and ashes. 
 Ah ! ask one who writhes in torment why he seeks 
 the anodyne that gives him at least a little ease 
 though alas ! it is but renewing his capacity for 
 further pain. 
 
 And, dwelling on this thought, I wrote this son- 
 net, imagining an accuser who is none other 
 than my own heart; for only to my own heart is 
 Meriel known. 
 
 " I heard a liar say my love doth cease, 
 
 Heart of my heart, because sometimes I rest 
 My burning head upon some other breast, 
 
 Seeking in all this hell a little peace ; 
 
 A little comfort in this long disease 
 
 Of loss I suffer, loss by them unguessed 
 
 Who find in the new-born East for long-lost West 
 
 Sufficient heaven. I am not of these. 
 
 " But, sometimes, when the life I may not kill 
 Grinds pitiless iron on the screaming nerve, 
 
1 04 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 I cry for woman as ether, woman as wine, 
 Lest Death's black poppies in my hair I twine 
 Thus, faithful-faithless, work I on until 
 Finished the bidding of the saint I serve." 
 
 In a like mood of self-accusation I wrote this 
 fable also: 
 
 " ' What a wonderful influence you have on the sea ! ' 
 said a star to the moon. 
 
 "'That depends upon what you call an influence/ 
 replied the moon. 
 
 " ' It is true that the sea worships me, and follows me 
 whither I will, like a great shaggy dog but, so far as I 
 can see, his love of me has done nothing to soften his 
 cruel heart, he is as wild a liver now as when we first 
 met, and his bosom, as of old, is full of monsters.' " 
 
 Men talk of the influence of women. But do 
 women really influence us at all? 
 
 It was Meriel's birthday to-day. I could not 
 resist breaking the silence with some flowers. 
 With them I sent these lines, which I copy out 
 only because they are true : 
 
 " True heart, 
 True heart, 
 
 I have no joy but thee. 
 Sugared delights may be, 
 
Sad Heart of Wasteneys " 105 
 
 And colored toys, 
 But my enduring joys 
 
 Must come from thee ; 
 
 Always and always, love, 
 
 Must come from thee." 
 
 Meriel wrote to-day : 
 
 " Do you believe in an immortal love which 
 ceases but to grow in sleep more perfect? Can 
 you endure the silence of who knows how many 
 centuries to come and yet still love me at the 
 end?" 
 
 I answered : " Very little child, I shall love you 
 as long as this strange life lasts longer, I cannot 
 say, as I am too old and too real to make promises 
 for an eternity of which I know nothing " 
 
 I have had a strange feeling this week that Meriel 
 was in London, though I have no word from her ; 
 and the feeling has been so strong that I have 
 walked the streets looking for her in vain. As 
 I walked I made this little song: 
 
 " I sought through London for one face, 
 
 London with all her lovely faces, 
 At every hour in every place 
 I sought my one beloved face, 
 Yea ! sought it in unlovely places. 
 
 " But, though I waited all day long, 
 She never never never came, 
 
1 06 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 In vain I drown my heart in song, 
 In vain each day I call her name 
 
 God give me courage to be strong, 
 And love her still the same." 
 
 [Letter from Wasteneys to Meriel, written while 
 at a little fishing village in Brittany.] 
 
 " Impossible dear fairy whom I have just 
 raised my eyes from this paper to look at and 
 say : ' Is it possible that that wonderful being 
 there loves me ? ' 
 
 " I have just sat through a wonderful sunsetting 
 down there in the old fishing harbor, my back 
 against the sea, at the far end of a rude pier of 
 tumbled stones, fenced in by a strong basket-work 
 of beams and piles and my face to the sky, 
 made* curiously heart-breaking with rigging and 
 old men's faces. The sky was a smoky orange, 
 and the sea a strange immaterial silver, very pale 
 and volatile everything unreal, and yet every- 
 thing so real one could hardly bear it I watched 
 the patient fishermen hauling in their heavy boats 
 over the sandy bar, at the narrow mouth of the 
 little corral, where they all come scudding in to 
 stable at evening, and the manly little sailor lads 
 rowing out briskly in the phantasmal light just for 
 a frolic, and the ancient man who came to light 
 the funny old lantern at the end of the pier. . . . 
 
" Sad Heart of Wasteneys " 1 07 
 
 O, and a hundred human touches and a hundred 
 lights and changes on the face of the beautiful sad, 
 sad world; and all the time I wanted you to be 
 with me, for it is only you and I together who can 
 understand anything like that. We should n't have 
 spoken a word, but we should have loved it just 
 in the same way, with childish eyes and, having 
 stayed till we were quite sure we had caught cold, 
 we would have turned next to the hotel in search 
 of cognac or hot whisky ! 
 
 " O, little child, little child, I care for nothing at 
 all sad or glad in life, except to know that you 
 really love me. Nothing could seem so happy 
 and successful for me as just to come and lay my 
 head on your shoulder, the whole world else, with 
 its arts, and its ambitions, forgotten. I have felt 
 this first for you of all human beings, and I shall 
 never feel it for any one else. You are my one 
 necessity. Without you I can seem to be happy, 
 and seem to succeed in a hundred ways, for in the 
 world are many brave and loving hearts, and many 
 beautiful things to do ; but without you, my inner- 
 most heart will be dusty with failure. 
 
 " My very soul grows sick to think that you 
 may, just this very tick of the clock, have ceased 
 to love me ! 
 
 "O, my little child don't let us lose each 
 other ! Don't take fancies and think you don't 
 
io8 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 love me, or I you Be fantastic in all else, but 
 not in our love. In this just be prosaic and com- 
 mon-sensible, as you know so well, thank goodness, 
 how to be. Yes, I think it is the prose I want 
 most to live with you, with the humorous childish 
 touches that are ours. 
 
 " Child, do you remember all the times we have 
 been together, the way we looked at each other, 
 the sound of our voices? I went to our little inn 
 the other day, and had lunch laid for us in our 
 little room, and a bottle of our own wine waiting 
 for you. , . . But you never came. So I set 
 a rose in your place. 
 
 " Another day, I went to the Wood of Silence 
 do you remember? where I grew angry with 
 your knotted dumbness, and walked away from 
 you up and down on the common, till you came 
 up to me, like a child, with eyes just hinting tears, 
 as the sky at twilight hints stars and said you 
 had been ' naughty.' Little angel-face. God help 
 me ! 
 
 " Meriel will you never love me with a simple 
 wish to have me by you as I love you ! 
 
 " O, forgive me for breaking the silence. To- 
 night I felt I must speak must call to you. Do 
 you hear me, away up there in the stars where you 
 live Greatest of all things Great? " 
 
" Sad Heart of Wasteneys " 1 09 
 
 Is it not strange and terrible to think that as I 
 was writing that letter to Meriel she was at the 
 same moment writing this to me? 
 
 [Part of a letter from Meriel, crossing letter from 
 Wasteneys just quoted.] 
 
 " O, say once more that you are mine that I 
 am yours. And then I think that Heaven's gates 
 will open and pour forth wonderful music which 
 I shall hear forever, until I die. You were mine 
 since the beginning of the world. How can we 
 part? My little child all things pass; but the 
 great truths remain, and we live in their shadow or 
 their light. Our love is a great truth, I think 
 a truth so sure that I feel that I need never see 
 you, never possess you, yet see you always and 
 possess you always. 
 
 " Last night I walked along the road with you, 
 and, as we talked, the stars and the warm winds 
 caressed us and the water lapped the shore at 
 our feet, so lazily. . . . We can always be to- 
 gether now, dear child. My heart leaps to think 
 of the frolics we can have, here in this silent land, 
 so full of voices. 
 
 " There are moments when I think that I shall 
 really become Silence indeed a living, gleaming 
 Silence ! I am growing so used to sitting alone 
 with my soul talking to it in the language of 
 
1 1 o The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 Silence. I often feel that there is nothing in the 
 world so beautiful as this silence. I 'm so glad you 
 understand that side of me for it is such a large 
 side ! The side that speaks grows more and more 
 afraid to speak more and more fond of its silent 
 sister whom it fears to disturb." 
 
 Sitting watching the sea to-night, I made this 
 song for Meriel. 
 
 " O love, I look across the sea, 
 
 The sails go by, 
 
 From vastness into vastness fade, 
 Lost in the sky. 
 
 " O the great world ! so wide and cold, 
 
 And you so far ! 
 If only you could come as near 
 As yonder star. 
 
 " Aloft, alone, I vex it not 
 
 With me or mine, 
 So far yet am I near enough 
 To see it shine." 
 
 Here is another song I made for her. 
 
 " Long after you are dead 
 
 I will kiss the shoes of your feet, 
 And the long bright hair of your head 
 Will go on being sweet ; 
 
Sad Heart of Wasteneys " 1 1 1 
 
 In each little thing you wore 
 We shall go on meeting, love ; 
 In a ring we shall meet, 
 In a fan we shall meet, 
 Or a long-forgotten glove. 
 Long after you are dead, 
 O, the bright hair of your head, 
 And the shoes of your little feet ! " 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 IN WHICH WASTENEYS SEES MERIEL 
 ONCE MORE 
 
 THE candles had burnt low and their light 
 was paling before the dawn as Wasteneys 
 finished reading. He threw himself into 
 bed exhausted with his debauch of memory, and 
 was soon in a sound sleep, and in his sleep he 
 dreamed a dream of simple happiness. Meriel 
 had been changed into a little human woman who 
 loved him, and came with wifely eyes to give her 
 life into his hands. He woke with an intense 
 security of peace enfolding him like a blissful 
 music. And his sleep, instead of banishing a wild 
 wish that had been born of his reading in the 
 book of the past, rather reinforced it with morning 
 vigor. As he had read, he had felt that, whatever 
 it cost, he must see Meriel once more. He would 
 not violate her seclusion. She should not see 
 him. All he craved was to see her to watch 
 her from a distance, as she took her walks by the 
 sea to hold his breath as she passed by, so 
 close perhaps that he could almost touch her 
 
Wasteneys sees Meriel 113 
 
 dress with his hand to watch her goings in and 
 out, as he might watch the Host being carried in 
 some solemn procession wherein he took no part. 
 It was now some six months since he had re- 
 ceived a letter from her, and it was hardly likely 
 that she was still staying at the little fishing vil- 
 lage from which she had last written a remote, 
 rarely-visited cluster of houses among the cliffs of 
 the Devonshire coast chosen, so she had said, for 
 its wonderful Silence. The Sea and the Silence. 
 However, he could at least try. And, in his pres- 
 ent mood, merely to travel in the hope of seeing 
 her would be a relief to the tension of his spirit. 
 Merely to look out the trains made his heart beat 
 with hope. Who knows but his dream might 
 come true, and he should find her waiting for him 
 
 his wife at last? 
 
 At all events, he should see her again see her 
 again see her again ! O God, just to see her 
 again ! 
 
 It was inadvisable for his plan that he should go 
 to the same village, for thus he could hardly hope 
 to avoid Meriel's discovery of him ; but, as it hap- 
 pened, knowing the coast-line well, he chose a still 
 more obscure fishing inlet three miles north. For 
 a mile or so the coast near Meriel's village was 
 fringed with a thin woodland, on which he relied 
 for cover. He smiled boyishly as he thought of 
 
 8 
 
1 1 4 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 the desperate scouting tactics to which he must 
 have recourse in pursuit of a moonbeam. He 
 was to track, and spy upon, his love as though she 
 were his enemy. His enemy ! What if she were 
 really that? 
 
 Besides, still more fortunately for his plan, 
 Meriel's village was all clustered together at the 
 outlet of a deep, wooded cleft, by which a little 
 river made its way to the sea. For some three 
 miles inland a path ran by the river's side right up 
 into the hills. Meriel might choose this landward 
 walk, or the walk along the coast by the sea. 
 Whichever she chose, Wasteneys would be able to 
 see even her very starting out. The little house, 
 next door to the Post Office, and within a few 
 yards of the Beach Hotel, was well-known to him. 
 By some freak of former occupation it was called 
 " Les Rossignols," and was marked by the posses- 
 sion of a small balcony from its two upper win- 
 dows. Wasteneys had only to place himself 
 sufficiently early high up on the adjacent hill 
 which commanded the whole village, to see the 
 first faint smoke that rose from its morning chim- 
 ney. No one could go in or out of its rose-clus- 
 tered doorway without his seeing them. 
 
 But Wasteneys' train and twenty miles of 
 coach brought him so early to his destination on 
 a certain moonlit evening of May, that he could 
 
Wasteneys sees Meriel 115 
 
 not wait for morning. After a brief impatient 
 meal, he walked the three miles of moon-mys- 
 terious, sea-murmuring coast, and found himself in 
 a thick hush of trees looking down into a gulf of 
 moon-white and shadow-black village. 
 
 The little boisterous river glittered quartz-like, 
 half in shadow, half in the moon making a 
 childish treble against the recurrent bass of the 
 sea. Ruddy windows and occasional naked 
 lamp-flames warmed the shadows here and there. 
 From the billiard-room of the Beach Hotel came 
 a bar-parlor radiance. The night was so still 
 that one could hear the click of the billiard balls, 
 and through the undrawn blinds Wasteneys noted 
 mechanically the marker flatteringly scoring breaks 
 of three and four. 
 
 He had already noted that the balcony windows 
 of " Les Rossignols " shone with a muffled radi- 
 ance. At least the rooms were not empty. Was 
 it Meriel behind those blinds, like a precious 
 jewel swathed in coverings and yet shining 
 through them? 
 
 It must be Meriel. All else had answered so 
 eloquently to the stress of his mood the won- 
 derful night, the little singing river, the deep- 
 sighing, sympathetic darkness of the trees, like 
 the backwoods of the soul, his own high heart 
 happy and resolute. Why ! he half believed that 
 
1 1 6 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 if Meriel were not there, his masterful wonder- 
 working love would have power to bring her 
 there. " If ye have faith " the old words came 
 back to him " ye shall move mountains " ! His 
 love seemed mighty enough at that moment to 
 take the sea in its hand and bring it to Meriel for 
 a garment, and to reach up into the sky and 
 snatch the moon for a pearl to clasp it with. 
 
 Meriel must be there ! God denies us the 
 complete dial, but he is usually generous with 
 moments. Wasteneys was sure of this moment, 
 and his assurance was right. Presently the muf- 
 fled light parted like a leafy envelope and let slip 
 a flower of clear light. When it had closed again 
 two figures were seated on the balcony. Waste- 
 neys noted that they were both women noted 
 it with an unpremeditated gratitude. It only oc- 
 curred to him now for the first time that the other 
 figure might have been a man for, of course, he 
 knew with the first beat of his heart that followed 
 his first sight of that loved presence that it was 
 Meriel. You who have known the bliss of seeing 
 a loved woman once more, after many months, 
 can imagine for me the bliss that possessed 
 Wasteneys as he looked on his distant, moon- 
 shadowy Meriel again. Presently Meriel took 
 something into her arms. Soon Wasteneys real- 
 ized that it was a violin and he realized, too, at 
 
Wasteneys sees Meriel 1 1 7 
 
 the same moment, how pathetically little he knew 
 of the daily occupations of her life, her ways and 
 her tastes. In fact, he knew as little of her as he 
 knew of yonder star. All he really knew was that 
 it was good to see her shine but of the inner 
 life of that radiant planet, set in the sky like a 
 white rose, he knew nothing. 
 
 Meriel began to play very softly, almost 
 timorously: tentative breathings, half-suppressed 
 sighs of longing, little sudden frightened calls that 
 ran back again, as it were, into the strings as soon 
 as uttered ; and then suddenly, as though deter- 
 mined to dare to the height and depth of her 
 desire, wood and strings strained together in a 
 great flooding call that seemed to fill the sky with 
 tall summoning angels of passion, with flocks of 
 little birds warbling desire, and silver butterflies 
 of flitting hope. 
 
 No one who knew anything of the mystical 
 cabala of music could doubt that here was a soul 
 calling across the sea to another soul. Here was 
 a soul-call clear and full as a bird-call. Across 
 the hundreds of miles this soul was calling to its 
 other soul, as sure of being heard as when thrush 
 calls to thrush in the dawn, or the nightjar churrs 
 heart-brokenly to its fern-hidden mate in the 
 thickening woods. 
 
 Wasteneys' heart beat with volcanic world- 
 
1 1 8 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 creating joy. Could it be that she was calling 
 him ? Surely, surely ', she was calling and surely 
 it was he she was calling. O to be a morning 
 star, that he might break out into sudden answer 
 of singing from his covert in the dark wood, or to 
 have brought with him twelve nightingales in a 
 cage shrouded all day in a black velvet hood, 
 but released to singing on the sudden sight of the 
 moon. O, for an answer to that call no verbal, 
 mortal cry, no intermediate symbolic articulation 
 in some provincial human tongue, but some es- 
 sential cry of the very soul and body of things. 
 Properly, there is only one verb for love. It is 
 not " amo" It is not " aimer." It is not the 
 softest Italian verb. No printed language of man 
 knows it. But the violin knows it, and the wild 
 bird knows it, even the sea knows it. The rose is 
 it, and the moon is it. And the look of a man's 
 eyes into a woman's is it, and the look of a 
 woman's eyes back again is it. But no man or 
 woman can say it, in any language that endures. 
 
 Only a violin, and a nightingale, and a woman 
 talking in her sleep, can be trusted to say it as 
 alone it can worthily be said. 
 
 Poor Wasteneys felt humiliatingly conscious of 
 his own narrowness of expression as Meriel's 
 violin called across the sea. 
 
 Alas ! for the stiff square words that stuck in 
 
Wasteneys sees Meriel 1 1 9 
 
 his throat and refused to melt into any universal 
 music. Poems he could write, of course he 
 wrote one as he walked back to his lodging 
 through the sea-talking woods but what is a 
 poem against a violin? Meriel had called him, 
 and he had nothing better to answer her with than 
 a poem. Even a pistol-shot a little shining 
 revolver (there was a thought !) had been better 
 than that. There had been a real essential sound, 
 a sound that needed no translation, a verb of a 
 universal language. But a poem ! Yet, as the 
 only poor utterance he had, he copied out the 
 poem on his return to his inn. 
 
 The gods express themselves in flaming min- 
 erals, that after millions of years cool to continents 
 of equatorial green; man drills his thought in 
 marble ; woman cries herself into a child ; the 
 soldier wastes himself in fire ; but the poet deli- 
 cately walks in a garden of words he takes here 
 a petal and there a petal, expressing himself in 
 soft garlands of unperilous flowers. 
 
 However, as Wasteneys thought it worth while 
 to copy it out, I, too, will reproduce here the 
 poem referred to. Remember, in his favor, that it 
 was really but a form of enforced silence. He 
 longed for more immediate utterance of the love 
 that was in him, but that the very reverence of 
 his love denied him. 
 
i 20 The Love-Letters of the King 
 Here is the little, poem : 
 
 " Canst thou be true across so many miles, 
 So many days that keep us still apart ? 
 Ah, canst thou live upon remembered smiles, 
 And ask no warmer comfort for thy heart ? 
 
 " I call thy name right up into the sky, 
 
 Dear name, O surely she shall hear and hark ! 
 Nay, though I toss it singing up so high> 
 It drops again, like yon returning lark. 
 
 " O be a dove, dear name, and find her breast, 
 There croon and nestle all the lonely day ; 
 Go tell her that I love her still the best, 
 So many days, so many miles, away." 
 
 After all, he was not the first man who has 
 found himself unequal to answering a violin played 
 by a beautiful woman. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 MERIEL EXPLAINS HERSELF 
 
 WASTENEYS was early at his green 
 watch-tower next day, and Meriel, still 
 apparently an early riser, was not long 
 after him in taking the morning air. She came 
 out carrying her violin-case, and with a letter in 
 her hand. This she posted, and then, crossing the 
 little bridge that spanned the stream, took the 
 path which led along the beach. From his wood- 
 land Wasteneys would be able to keep her in 
 sight all the time. Through his glass he could 
 bring her face so near that it seemed almost to 
 touch his, and he could look so closely into her 
 eyes that he felt she must feel his eyes upon her. 
 
 How wonderful it was to see her again ! Only 
 just to be allowed to look at her like this day 
 after day! He felt that that would more than 
 content his aching heart. In fact, it seemed to 
 him that his love craved nothing more, that indeed 
 there was nothing more to crave. Was she not 
 right, perhaps, after all, in her aloofness from 
 human ties? Such beauty was not to wive. 
 Would it not naturally fulfil itself in some diviner 
 
122 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 way? One might as well dream that the Monna 
 Lisa should descend from her immortal canvas, to 
 be the mother of mortal babes. 
 
 Yes ! if only he might look at Meriel, every day 
 and all day long. His passion was so far sub- 
 limated as to have become a passion of mere sight 
 If only the human masterpiece would consent to 
 the eternal gaze of the worshipping eyes ! 
 
 The comparison gave Wasteneys a little shiver 
 of fear. He had read in old books of men who 
 had loved statues, hoping, maybe, that one day in 
 a spring rain of warm kisses they would turn to 
 very woman heaving, sighing, clinging, violet- 
 breathing woman. These men, he recalled, had 
 always gone mad, and sometimes had broken the 
 beloved image into a hundred white fragments. 
 Was he the victim of such a dream ? Perhaps he 
 was. He did not care. There was Meriel picking 
 her way along the shore he could see her, see 
 her. His heart might still be aching, but his eyes 
 were in heaven. 
 
 He followed her stealthily through the trees. 
 At last she came to a secluded rocky place, and, 
 sitting down, took her nightingale from its cage. 
 Soon it was singing once more across the sea. 
 Again it was the voice of longing. No one could 
 hear and doubt that it was calling some one as 
 a siren might sing to distant ships. Meriel was 
 
Meriel explains Herself 123 
 
 calling him ! Very softly he stole down the cliffs 
 from his hiding-place forgotten all his resolu- 
 tions, and, as the last long cry of the violin died 
 away, he was within a dozen yards of the woman 
 he loved. 
 
 " Meriel," he said, very softly. 
 
 She turned with a slight start. 
 
 " How strange ! " she said ; " and yet I knew 
 you would come." 
 
 " You were calling me? " 
 
 " Did you not hear? " 
 
 " Did you call me two nights ago ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " I heard you " and Wasteneys realized that 
 his passion of memory had been but an answer to 
 her distant call. 
 
 " How wonderful how terrible life is, when 
 I can call and you can hear like this," said Meriel. 
 
 " I grew suddenly afraid of the Silence," she 
 continued, " and longed to hold your hand while 
 I listened to it." 
 
 " Still the Silence ! " said Wasteneys. 
 
 " I love it more and more. Some day I think I 
 shall grow all Silence, like those who are turned to 
 stone in fairy-tales. Words are only attempts to 
 say over again what nature has said already. Why 
 talk of the sea when you have the sea itself? So 
 soon as we really feel . . . but there are already 
 
1 24 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 two good essays- on Silence," she ended with a 
 laugh, " and I know you have read them both." 
 
 " Let us build a temple to Silence," said 
 Wasteneys. " I could dream," he added presently, 
 " of a Trappist monastery of two, who should love 
 each other forever in silence gazing into each 
 other's eyes." 
 
 " Ah ! " laughed Meriel. " But you would break 
 your vows the first day. You would be compelled 
 to say, * I love you.' You could not love without 
 words. Then, too, you would be unable to resist 
 your fancy and your wit. I love them both," she 
 added, as if fearing to hurt him, "but you will 
 admit that they are not Silence." 
 
 " Might not two silences sometimes crave the 
 offspring of words? " asked Wasteneys ; " even the 
 Trappists are. allowed speech once a year." 
 
 " Yes ! but I 'm sure the true Trappist would 
 have only one thing to say : ' How good is the 
 Silence ! ' " 
 
 " I heard your violin calling to me last night," 
 said Wasteneys. "Was that Silence?" 
 
 " Yes ! it was the deepest Silence," said Meriel, 
 laughing. " It was only Silence made audible, as 
 certain seers are able to see the forms that move 
 invisible to us in the air. Human speech is very 
 different. It is provincial sound whereas the 
 speech of the violin is universal sound." 
 
Meriel explains Herself I 25 
 
 " Would you expect a cow, then, to understand 
 it?" asked Wasteneys. 
 
 "Ah! it is there you fail! you must laugh, 
 you must talk even in heaven ! " 
 
 " I don't think I should," said Wasteneys wist- 
 fully, " if I were sure it was heaven or rather if 
 I were sure it was a heaven meant for me." 
 
 "Poor human child ! " said Meriel. " You have 
 been suffering. I can see how lonely you have 
 been." 
 
 Wasteneys was as humbly glad as a dog for a 
 caress, 
 
 " But," said Meriel, after a while, " I cannot 
 help it ! " 
 
 " I know," answered Wasteneys ; " I love you." 
 
 He meant : " Crucify me as you will. I am 
 yours till the end of the world." 
 
 " You think me strange, and even cruel, I know," 
 said Meriel, presently. 
 
 " I love you," Wasteneys answered. 
 
 " But you must try and understand," Meriel 
 continued, " that you are no less strange to me. 
 Perhaps you think me ' inhuman ' so to say. 
 But then I might retort that you are ' human ' 
 you have many strange little warm needs that I 
 can't understand. And yet you are capable of the 
 great simple satisfactions if you would only try." 
 
 " Now, at least, I am content," said Wasteneys. 
 
1 26 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " Because I am near you." 
 
 " Ah, yes ! but you should be as happy when 
 we are far away." 
 
 " But why be so afraid of nearness? " 
 
 " Because nearness awakens the Little Needs. 
 In a sense it makes us further away. It obscures 
 the great meaning by trivial expression." 
 
 "Why am I here?" 
 
 " Because I love you." 
 
 " Even you sometimes crave nearness too." 
 
 " Yes ! " said Meriel, half laughing. " I am so 
 far human but it is weakness all the same." 
 
 " Then you think that the greatest lovers would 
 always be invisible to each other." 
 
 " Yes physically invisible. Spiritually they 
 are always near. I never love you so much when 
 you are near to me as when you are far away 
 and yet sometimes I feel that I must hold your 
 hands and look into your eyes." 
 
 "Even kiss me?" 
 
 " Yes ! even that," said Meriel, and she kissed 
 him. 
 
 " You are human, after all," said Wasteneys. 
 
 " Once a year," said Meriel, laughing. 
 
 " I should have expected you to understand," 
 said Meriel, presently. 
 
Meriel explains Herself i 27 
 
 " Through my mind I do," said Wasteneys, 
 " but such understanding amounts to little more 
 than a recognition that your nature is subject to 
 different laws than mine. I can understand that 
 it is natural for a bird to fly but alas ! I cannot 
 fly." 
 
 " Not with me?" 
 
 " Will you not walk with me instead ? " 
 
 " Alas ! I cannot ! " 
 
 " Alas ! I cannot fly except perhaps once a 
 year. I am flying now." 
 
 " I am walking," said Meriel. 
 
 "Forget your wings, and stay with me on the 
 earth till my wings grow ; and then we can fly 
 away together right up among the stars, and never 
 come down to earth any more." 
 
 " If I stayed so long on the earth, I should for- 
 get how to fly. Your wings would have grown, 
 perhaps, but mine would have withered." 
 
 " No," mused Meriel presently, after a silence, 
 " we love differently. We shall never love the 
 same." 
 
 "Can such love continue? " asked Wasteneys. 
 
 "No yours will die. It is already . dying 
 though you do not yet know it," said Meriel, look- 
 ing very gravely into his eyes. " But mine will 
 last forever. Yours will die, because I cannot 
 give it the human food it craves. Mine will live 
 
128 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 because it asks nothing but the idea of you . . . 
 the dream of you that exists in my mind. If I 
 were to live with you day after day that dream 
 would be dimmed. Little daily cares, little human 
 blemishes in themselves unimportant would 
 obscure it. I should be unable to see you as you 
 really are, from very nearness. I should see you, 
 as it were, through a microscope. I would rather 
 see you far off, like a star. Then you would grow 
 old," and Meriel shuddered. 
 
 "But I should love you for those very blemishes 
 as well," said Wasteneys ; " they would be dear to 
 me, not only because they were yours, but be- 
 cause of their very humanity. And how sweet to 
 grow old together ! " 
 
 " I cannot understand," said Meriel. " It seems 
 to me that there is a moment when the soul's 
 beauty and the body's beauty are one. That 
 moment is youth. All fresh and unused, the body 
 is then as beautiful as the soul, but soon, alas ! the 
 body, being made of perishable stuff, begins to 
 wear, and less and less resembles the soul within. 
 The soul is growing more beautiful, perhaps, every 
 day, but the body is dying. In vain it strives to 
 answer to the soul within. I know you will say 
 that some old faces are beautiful. They are, but 
 it is a negative beauty, like the beauty of what we 
 call skeleton leaves the beauty of a clean decay. 
 
Meriel explains Herself 129 
 
 It does not really represent the soul within, for the 
 soul is always growing younger; and wrinkled 
 cheeks, however beautiful the wrinkles, are age. 
 They speak of no future, whereas the soul is all 
 future. No, the beauty of age is only a kind 
 word. . . ." 
 
 " You make me wish that your face was 
 wrinkled, Meriel." 
 
 " You shall never see it then," answered Meriel. 
 
 " Human nature, so to say, is wrinkles," said 
 Wasteneys " and the love of wrinkles." 
 
 " How sad to be human ! " said Meriel. 
 
 " It is," said Wasteneys, perhaps with an un- 
 conscious bitterness. 
 
 As Meriel talked, Wasteneys became conscious 
 of an unwonted operation of his mind which filled 
 him with dim alarm. At last his mind said it out 
 clear : He was criticising her. 
 
 If it had only been Meriel's mind that he had 
 to encounter these rather youthful transcenden- 
 tal opinions he might securely have counted 
 upon victory. For so had he not talked ten years 
 ago, a dreaming boy? But, alas! these were not 
 merely Meriel's opinions it was her nature. 
 With him the reverse had been the case. He was 
 for the first time in his life consciously face to face 
 with a different nature, and he recognized more 
 poignantly than ever the hopelessness of the dream 
 
 9 
 
130 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 that possessed him, at once the hopelessness and 
 the unreason of it. For was he not asking Meriel 
 to be different from what she was like a com- 
 mon human husband? She was the moon in the 
 sky he commanded her to step down and be 
 a flower in his little walled garden. And the 
 image admonished him that all these last three 
 years had been but a childish crying for the 
 moon. 
 
 She was not a human thing; she never would 
 be. Wives were different. If you wanted little 
 human babes, and a home sweet as wall-flower, 
 you must not love the moon. 
 
 And yet she looked so human, such a woman, 
 was so tender and simple at whiles. What was 
 she, after all, but a child? She would change. 
 And, O God, how beautiful she was and how 
 clear was the flame of his worship of that beauty ; 
 how small a part in it had that " Little Love " 
 which Meriel despised. If only he might look 
 at her have her growing, like some " angel- 
 watered lily," in his sight day after day. Sight 
 was enough possession. 
 
 As they thus sat together talking and musing, 
 Meriel took her violin and sent gay little butter- 
 flies of sound flitting along the shore. She at 
 least was happy. When she had tired of the 
 violin, she turned to Wasteneys very gently: 
 
Meriel explains Herself 1 3 1 
 
 " Dear, you must go now. My mother will be 
 waiting for me." 
 
 " That lady I saw on the balcony last night was 
 your mother?" 
 
 " Yes ! I have to be very good to her she 
 is blind." 
 
 " Blind ! " and in the exclamation Wasteneys 
 put his sympathy and his recognition of the 
 paradox which made Meriel human at this one 
 point. 
 
 "Yes ! be kind to her," he added. 
 
 " She needs me so," said Meriel. There were 
 some human needs that even Meriel regarded. 
 To his need of her she gave no thought. 
 
 "To-morrow?" said Wasteneys, as she rose 
 and placed her violin in its case. 
 
 "No," said Meriel. "I cannot. We have 
 seen each other. To-morrow would be merely 
 repetition." 
 
 Wasteneys' heart ached, and a certain dim sense 
 of rebellion stirred within him. 
 
 " What if I should disobey? " he said. 
 
 " I should hate you " she answered very quietly. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE MAN FROM FAIRYLAND 
 
 WASTENEYS returning to London was 
 the Man from Fairyland. In spite of 
 all the complexity of his feelings, the 
 sum of him was one happy thought. He had 
 seen Meriel once more. His face shone with 
 it it almost seemed to him that his joy must 
 cling to him like a discovering perfume, that 
 passers-by must point him out in the street. 
 London seemed strange and unreal, and all the 
 roar of its traffic went by like a sound heard in 
 a dream. As he walked along the streets, a door 
 kept softly opening in the traffic, and there was 
 that calm little haven, bathed in all blessing and 
 all peace. 
 
 The morning after his return, towards noon, he 
 was walking along Piccadilly, which was fresh 
 and gay as only London can look in the May 
 sunshine. He noticed little and smiled to him- 
 self as he went along. Presently his attention 
 was caught by a lady in a hansom who was wav- 
 ing her parasol to him. She was a very pretty 
 
The Man from Fairyland 133 
 
 lady, and looked all the prettier in her fresh 
 spring gown. 
 
 ''Why!" said Wasteneys with an inner laugh, 
 "it 's Mrs. Mendoza!" 
 
 He gave her his best smile as he bowed, and 
 was for passing on, but she stopped the hansom, 
 and leaning out, said: 
 
 "Won't you drive with me a little way? It is 
 years since we met you faithless boy." 
 
 Really she was very pretty, and Wasteneys had 
 been half consciously feeling the need of some 
 not too serious companion to whom he could 
 talk and talk and yet tell them nothing. 
 
 "You are looking very happy," she said, as he 
 seated himself beside her. 
 
 "lam." 
 
 " Do you think it quite polite to be so happy 
 when we haven't met all this time?" 
 
 " Surely there is all the more reason for me to 
 look happy now that we have met." 
 
 " But that cruel telegram, and not one word 
 since." 
 
 Wasteneys pleaded mysterious family troubles. 
 
 " And you really have been faithful to me, in 
 spite of appearances ? " 
 
 " Do you doubt me ? " 
 
 Daffodil was considerately unexacting in her 
 demand for proofs. She lazily took Wasteneys' 
 
134 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 word; but, of course, it was only seemly to have 
 these little affectations of seriousness. 
 
 "We shall still make life wonderful for each 
 other," said Wasteneys slyly. 
 
 "Can you not make it wonderful for me 
 to-day?" 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "Take me to lunch." 
 
 "May I? You are free?" 
 
 In the slight stress Wasteneys laid on the word 
 "free" Daffodil detected a tentative reference to 
 Mr. Mendoza; so she laughed. 
 
 "Why do you laugh?" 
 
 "O, nothing." 
 
 "Tell me." 
 
 " Do you remember asking me if I were Mrs. 
 Daffodil Mendoza?" 
 
 "Yes. What of that?" 
 
 "Well, I am but you didn't wait to hear 
 that there is no Mr. Mendoza." 
 
 " He is dead ? " Wasteneys asked, with a decent 
 lowering of his voice. 
 
 " Yes three years ago. " 
 
 They were both respectfully silent for a mo- 
 ment before the shade of the late Mr. Mendoza. 
 
 "Why did n't you tell me?" 
 
 " You seemed so relieved that I was ' Mrs. ' 
 that I could n't find it in my heart to disappoint 
 
The Man from Fairyland 135 
 
 you. And don't you remember saying that * the 
 worst of unmarried women was that they always 
 wanted a man to marry them, and the worst 
 of married women was that they were already 
 married.' I couldn't say anything after that, 
 could I?" 
 
 " But how sly of you not letting me come up to 
 the door!" 
 
 "I should, if I had only known about that 
 horrid telegram." 
 
 "Ah, you see! I might n't have sent it then." 
 
 There was really a great comfort in Daffodil's 
 simple materialism. As they presently sat at 
 luncheon on a gay balcony overlooking the 
 Thames, merely to look across at her soothed his 
 brain. She was just woman unindividualized: 
 as one might say "a bunch of flowers," yet not 
 think it necessary to say what flowers they were. 
 She was really very beautiful too, and quite a 
 good-hearted, loving creature. As he looked at 
 her, Wasteneys wondered if the men were not 
 wisest who chose wives of the simple flower-like 
 pattern, women who made no fantastic demands 
 upon one's heart or brain, wives indeed of an 
 Eastern pattern, child-women, asking only sun- 
 shine and sweetmeats and pretty things to wear, 
 creatures of butterfly joy and April sorrow. 
 
136 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 The Jews, profound students of women, declared 
 that women had no souls, and, as Wasteneys sat 
 with Daffodil drinking wine in the sun, he felt 
 that the theory was true of most women, the 
 women perhaps who were happiest and made 
 most men most happy. But alas ! there were also 
 women who were in a painful process of evolu- 
 tion the women who were developing souls ! 
 and really threatened to go far beyond man in the 
 process. 
 
 Meriel. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 AN OLD LOVE-DOCTOR 
 
 IT was an old habit of Wasteneys to read in 
 bed, particularly in the early morning, and 
 his shelf of carefully selected bed-books was, 
 so to say, a microcosm of his larger library. All 
 his tastes were represented, and thus the concen- 
 trated eclecticism of the little collection provided 
 many sharp, even quaint, contrasts, such as are 
 more or less lost sight of in a larger collection. 
 Perhaps some of the more classical books were 
 there in reminiscence of the imitative taste of a 
 grave reverential youth. He could not truthfully 
 have said that the "Imitation of Christ" has ever 
 meant to him what it seems to have meant to 
 many others; nor, to take a very different book, 
 which stood next to it, had he ever been able to 
 read right through the merry monotonous 
 tales of Boccaccio. After the first few personal 
 chapters, he had found the " Confessions of St. 
 Augustine " ceasing to hold him. Nor had he 
 long remained under the spell of these selections 
 from Confucius. "The Pilgrim's Progress" had 
 
138 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 recently been added, under circumstances with 
 which the reader is acquainted, but, after that 
 first momentous dip into its pages, he had found 
 no more messages. But there was a Theocritus 
 of which he never tired, and a volume of Lamb, 
 an "Opium-Eater," and, of course, a Shakespeare. 
 Then there was an Apuleius, and a Montaigne, 
 a "Tom Jones," a "Trois Mousquetaires," and 
 "The Cloister and the Hearth." There were, 
 too, a Bible and a Burns, a Keats and Byron's 
 "Don Juan." There was a Shelley and a Rabe- 
 lais. Of recent books there was a "Richard 
 Feverel," a "Marius," a Walt Whitman, and 
 Stevenson's "Underwoods." And there was 
 some of the most delicate verse and prose from 
 France. 
 
 Among the books which were there, as I have 
 said, rather in obedience to traditional taste than 
 to his own, was Burton's "Anatomy of Melan- 
 choly." Burton is quite worth having for his 
 own sake there is no other such fascinating 
 rag-bag in literature but, of course, most of us 
 bought our folios, in the first instance, to please 
 Lamb. At all events, Wasteneys had done so, 
 and he had to confess that his "Anatomy of 
 Melancholy " had been upon his shelves for some- 
 thing like ten years, without his making more 
 than an occasional dip into those yellow pages 
 
An Old Love-Doctor 139 
 
 of strange tessellated learning. So books bide 
 their time. For years they remain dry and life- 
 less for us, and then suddenly, in an accidental 
 sunbeam, they are blossoming like Aaron's rod. 
 It was literally owing to the accident of an early 
 sunbeam momentarily lighting up the old leather 
 as though a golden finger was pointing out 
 the neglected volume that Wasteneys one early 
 morning, soon after his return from Meriel, took 
 down his " Anatomy," and lighted on the section 
 which treats of Love-Melancholy, with such an 
 odd mixture of grotesque learning, legendary 
 illustration, dry humor, and no little common- 
 sense. 
 
 Love-Melancholy: its causes, its symptoms, 
 its cures. Alas! it was his very subject. He 
 read of Love's surprising power and extent, how 
 the very minerals were not safe from its influ- 
 ence. He read of a peacock in Leucadia that 
 had loved a maid, and of a crane in Majorca that 
 had loved a Spaniard, of fishes that had pined 
 away and waxed lean for love "if Gomesius's 
 authority be taken. " He read of two palm-trees 
 in Italy, the male growing at Brundisium, the 
 female at Otranto, which remained barren till at 
 last they grew high enough to see each other, 
 "though many stadiums asunder." Such "fury" 
 even is there " in vegetals " ! 
 
140 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 He read happy.fairy tales of true love, as how 
 "Rhodope, the fairest Lady in her days in all 
 Egypt, went to wash her, and by chance (her 
 maids meanwhile looking but carelessly to her 
 clothes) an eagle stole away one of her shoes, 
 and laid it in Psammetichus the King of Egypt's 
 lap at Memphis; he wondered at the excellency 
 of the shoe, and pretty foot, but more aquila 
 factum, at the manner of the bringing of it, and 
 caused forthwith proclamation to be made, that 
 she that owned that shoe should come presently 
 to his Court; the Virgin came, and was forthwith 
 married to the King." 
 
 Then sprigs of old verses set here and there, 
 with such a freshness of contrast among all the 
 crabbed learning, stirred his heart like the smell 
 of gillyflowers : 
 
 " The silly wren, the titmouse also, 
 The little redbreast have their election, 
 They fly I saw and together gone, 
 Whereas hem list, about environ, 
 As they of kinde have inclination, 
 And as nature impress and guide, 
 Of everything list to provide." 
 
 He read old stories of love's extremity: How 
 "Stratocles the Physician, upon his Wedding 
 day, when he was at dinner, could not eat his 
 meat for kissing the Bride"; how "the Sultan of 
 
An Old Love-Doctor 141 
 
 Sana's wife in Arabia, because Vertomannus was 
 fair and white, could not look off him, from Sun- 
 rising to Sun-setting she could not desist "; how 
 "Galeatus of Mantua . . . when he was almost 
 mad for love of a fair Maid in the City, she, to 
 try him, belike, what he would do for her sake, 
 bade him, in jest, leap into the River Po, if he 
 loved her; he forthwith did leap headlong off the 
 bridge, and was drowned " ; how " Another at 
 Ficinum in like passion, when his Mistress by 
 chance (thinking no harm I dare swear) bade him 
 go hang, the next night at her doors hanged him- 
 self " ; how some have taken a journey to Japan, 
 for their love's sake; and how others have kept 
 silence a whole twelvemonth, in obedience to 
 their mistress's command. And many more like 
 marvels. 
 
 He read with tears the laments of old lovers, 
 such as this of Philostratus : "I am ready to die, 
 Sweetheart, if it be thy will; allay his thirst 
 whom thy star has scorched and undone; 
 the fountains and rivers deny no man drink 
 that comes; the fountain doth not say, thou 
 shalt not drink, nor the apple, thou shalt not 
 eat, nor the fair meadow, walk not in me, but 
 thou alone wilt not let me come near thee, or 
 see thee; contemned and despised, I die for 
 grief." 
 
142 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 He read, too, .of that "honest Country -fellow 
 (as Fulgosus relates it) in the Kingdom of 
 Naples, at plough by the sea side, saw his wife 
 carried away by Mauritanian Pirates, he ran after 
 in all haste, up to the chin first, and when he 
 could wade no longer, swam, calling to the Gov- 
 ernor of the ship to deliver his wife, or if he 
 must not have her restored, to let him follow as 
 a prisoner, for he was resolved to be a Galley- 
 slave, his drudge, willing to endure any misery, 
 so that he might but enjoy his dear wife. The 
 Moors, seeing the man's constancy, and relating 
 the whole matter to their Governor at Tunis, 
 set them both free, and gave them an honest 
 pension to maintain themselves during their 
 lives." 
 
 But it was to the chapter on the " Cure of 
 Love-Melancholy " that he turned with a mock- 
 serious eagerness. Was there any help in this 
 absurd old book for a modern mind diseased ? 
 Many lovers, he read, had found great benefit 
 from eating " Cowcumber, Melons, Purselan, 
 Water-Li lies, Rue, Woodbine, Ammi, and Let- 
 tice" lettuce being specially recommended both 
 by Lemnius and Mizaldus. Alas ! his love was 
 not of the kind to be allayed by cooling herbs. 
 He must seek another cure. He read how Ama- 
 tus Lusitanus cured a young Jew that was almost 
 
An Old Love-Doctor 143 
 
 mad for love, with the syrup of Hellebore; and 
 how highly Avicenna thought of blood-letting. 
 He read of Leucata Petra, " that renowned rock 
 in Greece, of which Strabo writes," '"from 
 which if any Lover fling himself down headlong, 
 he was instantly cured ! " The ironical old 
 scholar! So one might urge decapitation as an 
 unfailing cure for toothache. He read, too, that 
 "amongst the Cyziceni, there is a well conse- 
 crated to Cupid, of which if any lover 
 taste, his passion is mitigated " ; also he read 
 of the river Selemnus, in Greece, which pos- 
 sessed like properties "by reason of the 
 extreme coldness belike," adds the satirical 
 rogue. 
 
 If these and such other cures failed, there 
 were but two others to try. The first, strongly 
 recommended by Avicenna, is ut amanti cedat 
 amatum that the lover be granted his desire ! 
 Arculanus is of the same opinion, and Burton 
 agrees that ^Esculapius himself cannot in- 
 vent a better remedy. This, however, being a 
 remedy not always within reach of unhappy 
 lovers, Burton gives them this parting advice 
 that they " wisely and warily tmwind them- 
 selves. " 
 
 When Wasteneys came to that, he put the book 
 down with a smile and a sigh. The old book had 
 
144 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 delivered its message. It had given him a new 
 idea. Why not try wisely and warily to un- 
 wind himself? The thought occupied him all 
 day, and there was a curious smile on his face 
 a fighting smile, one might say. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 IN WHICH WASTENEYS COUNTS UP HIS FORCES 
 
 WISELY and warily to unwind himself! 
 Excellent advice ! But how shall one 
 put it into practice ! Ah ! it is not so 
 easy, old Dryasdust, living among the bookish 
 shadows of human passions, as a botanist among 
 dried flowers. This shrivelled, yellowing " speci- 
 men " do you imagine that this is the rose? 
 Have you never seen it in the morning with the 
 dew on it? Ah! what a perfume it had, what a 
 glory ! and how the young heads would go dizzy 
 with the smell of it. It is easy enough to resist 
 it now, as it lies here pressed in your worm-eaten 
 folio. 
 
 Easy to say, old man, but do you know what 
 you are saying? O, it is to fight against all the 
 sweetness of the world, to make yourself the enemy 
 of the very sweetest thing. To take your heart's 
 desire by the throat, and strangle it slowly day by 
 day. To long, till your heart almost breaks, for the 
 sound of one voice, and yet to say : I will never 
 hear it again I desire to hear it no longer I 
 
 10 
 
146 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 should hate to hear it again it means nothing to 
 me now ; and then, suddenly, at some chance echo 
 of it in your thought, to feel your whole will melt 
 away and your whole soul crying like a child for 
 its home and all the fighting to be done over 
 again ! 
 
 Yet, of course, the old man is right. If it can 
 only be done ! 
 
 To fight one's way out of a dream. To plot an 
 escape from one's joy. To find entirely new reasons 
 for living, new incentives, new rewards. Literally 
 to begin one's life again. No one can imagine that 
 a light task. Yet to have conceived the bare idea 
 of such a deliberate struggle was something per- 
 haps a great deal. Before Wasteneys' eyes had 
 fallen upon that old love-doctor's wisdom, the mere 
 idea of such a change in him would have seemed 
 wild and unnatural. He had never thought of dis- 
 puting the instinctive, rather boyish, transcenden- 
 talism which had told him that in Meriel, for good 
 or ill, he had found the final reason of his life ; that 
 outside her his life could have neither purpose nor 
 joy, and that, losing her, he must inevitably lose 
 himself. He had been accustomed to regard his 
 love for her as a part of the mysterious, changeless 
 order of things, an inviolable and sacred affinity. 
 But he must now ask himself if, after all, this had 
 not been a fancy, a fancy somewhat wilfully and 
 
Wasteneys counts Forces 147 
 
 wastefully indulged. He must now ask himself if 
 life had not other purposes more serious and im- 
 perative for him purposes in which this love had 
 been but a passing shaping process, and purposes 
 his fulfilment of which would in the end bring him 
 satisfaction to which his love for Meriel would seem 
 a toy. 
 
 " O, Meriel ! Meriel ! From to-day I must be 
 your enemy. My heart must take up arms against 
 itself." 
 
 But where were his weapons? What motive 
 impulses had he to draw him from her, to range 
 against the one imperious impulse that, with the 
 force of gravitation, drew him to her night and 
 day? 
 
 He sighed. It almost seemed that he had none. 
 Yet, without knowing it, he was already stronger 
 than he thought by a vague unformulated rest- 
 lessness and rebellion in his soul. He had already 
 conceived of escape, though it had been but an 
 accidental thought full of pain yet soon he would 
 desire to escape. Then he would determine. Then, 
 perhaps by good fortune ! he would actually 
 escape. 
 
 Meanwhile, he whimsically counted up his forces, 
 drawing them upon paper in order of battle. On 
 one side was that shining embattled name (O, face 
 like a rose in armor !) 
 
148 The Love- Letters of the King 
 
 'MERIEL, 
 
 on the other himself, assisted by : 
 
 (1) Religion. (Who knows?) 
 
 (2) Humor. (No use!) 
 
 (3) Another love. (Impossible and yet ) 
 
 (4) Pride. (Nonsense!) 
 
 (5) Distraction. (A failure.) 
 
 (6) Anger. (Mere talk!) 
 
 (7) Literature. (Absurd and yet, why not?) 
 
 As he thus reviewed his spiritual army, it pre- 
 sented but a sorry appearance to his mind. He 
 knew too well that the whole cowardly host would 
 take flight with one glance of Meriel's eyes. She 
 had but to call his name, and the commander-in- 
 chief would run to her, eager to throw down his 
 arms. 
 
 All the same, that vague rebellion did not cease 
 to stir within him ; and those old words continued 
 to work in his mind. Wisely and warily to unwind 
 himself! 
 
 Meanwhile, he would try the drug distraction 
 once more; which meant, though he was not 
 aware of it, that he would play a little longer 
 till the reinforcements came up. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 MYRTLE ROME 
 
 DISTRACTION meant nothing more dan- 
 gerous than Daffodil Mendoza, and the 
 renewal of a long-standing picturesque 
 flirtation with Myrtle Rome. Myrtle Rome was 
 one of those beautiful women that are flowers 
 thrown up by a decaying adulterous aristocracy. 
 The active forcible vices of her, at first sight, 
 incongruous ancestors, and in fact quite near 
 progenitors, had blossomed in her in a decor- 
 ative romanticism. Through the medium of 
 poetry and music and strange art, she played with 
 sins which her family had taken more seriously, 
 sins for which she herself had no gifts merely 
 a literary inclination. She was pretty, with a 
 strangely fresh and innocent beauty, and she had 
 a girlish na'ivetf of manner which masked the most 
 eager vanity, and the hardest of young hearts. 
 She said daring things, but had never been known 
 to do any. Myrtle had no senses beyond what she 
 could satisfy in a keen and very cultivated passion 
 for the orchids of modern art. 
 
150 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 Yet, withal, she was a fascinating young creature 
 so long as one did not take her too seriously. 
 Beautiful, exquisitely cultivated and very clever, 
 she was a delicious human flower. 
 
 Her mother had been, and indeed still was, a 
 famous beauty, the heroine of one of the most 
 beautiful scandals of the period, and for her 
 Wasteneys felt that respect which he always paid 
 to sincerity. She had done what her daughter 
 only dreamed of. The signatures of many passions 
 were written upon her still beautiful face. Her 
 daughter was merely a flowery shadow of her fiery 
 mother. " It is your mother whom I really love," 
 Wasteneys said one day to Myrtle, " the shadow of 
 her in you. She has understood that the true 
 romance is reality. You will never know romance 
 because you are always seeking it. Real romance 
 never thinks of itself by that name any more 
 than a hero would think of calling himself a hero, 
 or a saint be conscious of his halo." 
 
 They were sitting in a shaded corner of the 
 garden at Myrtle's country home where Waste- 
 neys was spending a few summer days, as one of a 
 little house-party and Myrtle, who had quite a 
 society reputation for her silver-points, was making 
 a sketch of Wasteneys' head. 
 
 " Don't look so grim," she said ; " you look like 
 John Knox lecturing Queen Mary. Please look 
 
Myrtle Rome 151 
 
 happy again. Do you always look so unhappy 
 when you talk of romance? I'm afraid it's no 
 use asking so serious a person to join my new 
 club." 
 
 "What is that?" asked Wasteneys. 
 
 " It is called the Romantics. The members are 
 to wear in secret a silver rose, and are to recognize 
 each other by the blowing of a silver whistle. 
 Representatives of all forms of romance are ad- 
 mitted to membership, the romance of daily life 
 alone excepted. A sort of new Collegia d 'Amore 
 you know." 
 
 " I see," said Wasteneys ; " we should discourse 
 on the divinity of love, and the best way of knot- 
 ting your lady's shoe tie, so that it cannot possibly 
 come untied six times in one walk, and kindred 
 subjects. Is that the sort of thing?" 
 
 " Just my idea." 
 
 " It might be amusing," said Wasteneys, think- 
 ing of the drug distraction ; " suppose you all come 
 down to Wasteneys for a week? The old place is 
 lonely, and would be glad of some young faces." 
 
 " Now you 're quite a dear again ! " said Myrtle. 
 " I should just love it." 
 
 " All right then, let's do it; and, when we are 
 tired of the divinity of love, we can dress up and 
 play lutes on the lake and row in the moonshine, 
 and perhaps we can get Yaffle to raise the devil ! " 
 
152 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 Yaffle was a charming young " kabbalistic " poet 
 known to both of them. 
 
 " Better and better. Oh, will you do it? " 
 
 " Certainly," said Wasteneys, whimsically pur- 
 suing the idea, not without irony, " and we might 
 produce a play exactly in the old way without 
 scenery, of course, and almost without actors ! A 
 real Celtic play and we '11 pronounce our lines 
 as nearly as possible like the bards of the ninth 
 century." 
 
 " How perfectly romantic ! " exclaimed Myrtle, 
 clapping her hands. 
 
 " And, of course, we '11 crown the most beautiful 
 woman, and carry her in a litter of sweet-smelling 
 wood; and, who knows? perhaps some of us may 
 find romance ! But we must take care to ask no 
 dull people. Only beautiful, serious people, with 
 entertaining bees in their bonnets who can dance 
 and flirt as well. And we must have one really 
 amusing man, a man who makes one laugh and 
 yet, curiously enough, never makes an epigram. 
 And some of us perhaps during the Celtic play 
 shall play at tin soldiers, like one poet, and 
 some of us sail paper-boats on the lake, like an- 
 other " 
 
 Myrtle put down her sketch, so taken was she 
 with this new serious frivolity. " Let 's make out 
 a list of people at once," she said. 
 
Myrtle Rome 153 
 
 By the time they had settled the list to their 
 satisfaction, the long shadows were beginning to 
 stretch across the grass. The little collaboration, 
 frivolous as it was, had stirred up memories of an 
 old May-time, none the less sweet because it had 
 failed to keep its promise. Looking towards the 
 sun-dial that stood near them, Myrtle said, her 
 musical voice purposely wistful with reminiscence : 
 " I wonder what time it is at Aleppo." 
 
 It was one of those old dials which tells you the 
 time, not only in your garden, but at Bagdad and 
 at Constantinople, and Pekin, and many another 
 old market of the world, and it had been one of 
 Myrtle's fancies that their time should be reckoned 
 from Aleppo. It sounded like the Arabian Nights ! 
 
 Wasteneys smiled sympathetically, and he was 
 not insensible to the charm of her fragrant youth. 
 
 " Ah ! we almost loved each other, did n't we, 
 Myrtle?" 
 
 "You never understood how much I loved you," 
 said Myrtle, really half in earnest. In that summer 
 afternoon light any one else would have believed 
 her. 
 
 " Little Myrtle," he said gently, " what a pity 
 you are so romantic ! " 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 UNEXPECTED HAPPINESS FOR ADELINE WOOD 
 
 IN that marshalling of his forces Wasteneys 
 had necessarily not counted two allies for 
 how could he know that, morning and night, 
 Father Selden and Adeline Wood named him very 
 tenderly and appealingly in their prayers? Had 
 he known, touched as, of course, he would have 
 been, he might hardly have counted the prayer of 
 another as a serious energy. For his rationalism 
 still clung to him, in spite of his irrational posses- 
 sion. Yet, if Meriel could call to him across space 
 and be heard, was it impossible to believe that the 
 love of two friends might also project itself, if not 
 indeed as a forcible pleading at the throne of God, 
 still as a bracing sustaining wave of spiritual influ- 
 ence ? If as, of course, is common experience 
 friends can strengthen each other as they talk 
 together, the prayerful longing of one to help the 
 other charging that other with a new vitality of 
 determination or hope, and if, as will hardly be 
 denied, the help then given has little to do with 
 the spoken wisdom, but is mainly the mysterious 
 
Happiness for Adeline Wood 155 
 
 passing of power from one to the other by the ethe- 
 real vibration of love ; may we not hope that the 
 currents of love are uninterrupted by distance, and 
 that it is possible for one friend to send waves of help 
 to another, however separated by space and time ? 
 The power of what we call prayer is partly that, 
 and those who have entered into the secrets of the 
 soul know that, just as we may save a friend from 
 drowning by the energy of our straining arms, so 
 we may sustain him in moments of spiritual peril by 
 the energy of our resolute prayers. There may be 
 still more mysterious efficacy in prayer, but surely 
 that there is ; and often, perhaps, when Wasteneys 
 felt a new strength in him, it was some prayer of 
 Father Selden's or Adeline Wood's that had just 
 reached him after its journey through the air. 
 
 Day after day, night after night, in the solitude 
 of Wasteneys, Father Selden prayed for his son. 
 Life was so simple there, so relieved from merely 
 material preoccupations, that an old man might, 
 undisturbed, spend all his remaining energies in 
 prayer as some poets are privileged to spend 
 their lives in the contemplation and expression of 
 their vision of the world. Blessed privilege be- 
 yond the privilege of poets to devote one's life 
 to the divine art of prayer ! 
 
 His life was growing near to its end. If he 
 might only see his son, the son of his old dear 
 
156 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 friend, safe within' the arms of the Divine Love, the 
 love that went seeking him so patiently, so ten- 
 derly, through the years : then the old man could 
 cheerfully sing his Nunc dimittis. 
 
 When he heard from Wasteneys that the sad 
 old home was once more to be filled with young 
 voices, it seemed to him that his prayer had come 
 a step nearer to fulfilment. For, as he said to him- 
 self: " Man comes back to God with cheerfulness, 
 with laughter and singing." The clouds of obscur- 
 ing sorrow were passing, and the beams of the 
 divine joy were breaking through. Wasteneys in- 
 deed had not thought of the visit of the Romantics 
 to Wasteneys in that way; but perhaps the old 
 Father was right, after all. The soul steals back 
 to God in many shamefaced disguises, in frivolous 
 masques, and idle dances. Then suddenly it falls 
 upon its knees ! 
 
 Adeline's prayers were less definitely theo- 
 logical ; for prayer with her was rather the sur- 
 vival of a girlish habit than the exercise of a 
 living faith. Straightly catechised she would have 
 proved, it is to be feared, a sad heretic, but so 
 much religious force had been stored in her by a 
 religious ancestry that she went on praying all 
 the same. Had she known of Father Selden's 
 prayers, the last thing she could have wished 
 would have been an answer to them for English 
 
Happiness for Adeline Wood 1 57 
 
 nonconformity was still, unconsciously, a strong 
 prejudice in her blood. Her prayer for Wasteneys 
 was very simple. " O help him to be good," she 
 prayed, " and give him his joy." 
 
 Give him his joy ! It was an unselfish prayer ; 
 for, though Adeline knew nothing definitely of his 
 story, she knew, particularly after "The Love- 
 Letters of the King," all a woman need know. 
 His joy she knew could not be hers, except in her 
 secret heart because it was his. She never 
 allowed herself to acknowledge to herself that she 
 loved Wasteneys. When she had taken up her 
 bachelor life, her attitude had been and partly 
 no doubt at the time sincerely so that of many 
 modern women, who profess the independent 
 blessedness of the female unit. As if woman, born 
 to be a wife and a mother, could find a substitute 
 in bookbinding ! Of course, in her heart Adeline 
 knew better. She was only rational in self- 
 defence. She was ready O! so ready to be 
 a simple wife-woman the moment she dare be it in 
 safety. If only the man she loved had loved her ! 
 But to that fancy, with the heroic self-repressive 
 power of some women, she gave no ear. Indeed, 
 as far as Wasteneys was concerned, it had hardly 
 at any time been so definite as a fancy. In her 
 vision of the future she saw herself strenuously un- 
 mated, distilling from life her own lonely satisfac- 
 
158 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 tions, and dependent for her excitements on the 
 reflected joys and sorrows of others. 
 
 The fourth-born of six sisters, this was a Spartan 
 ideal with which she had already made acquaint- 
 ance in girlhood. It is seldom that six sisters of 
 a family can hope all to eat of the tree of mar- 
 riage. The attractive fruit on that tree is soon 
 exhausted, and, naturally, the beautiful elder sis- 
 ters or, not unlikely, some suddenly maturing 
 younger sister gather the fairest, before the 
 others have any interest in the fruit at all. Three 
 of Adeline's sisters were already mothers, and 
 Adeline had thus approached to the joys of 
 motherhood by the nearness of an aunt. 
 
 One day, while Wasteneys was planning " The 
 Romantics " with Myrtle, Adeline received a letter 
 from one of these married sisters living in the 
 country, that made her face flush with a happy, 
 half ashamed, rose-color, which it was a pity 
 Wasteneys had not been there to see. This sister, 
 some twelve months before, had given birth to a 
 little girl ; and since then her health had been very 
 frail. She had too a little son of four. Now the 
 doctor had ordered her away to the south, and 
 she wrote to know, if, while she was away with her 
 husband, Adeline would take care of her house 
 and her two little children. Could she be spared 
 from her bookbinding ? 
 
Happiness for Adeline Wood 159 
 
 If Adeline had suddenly been whispered that 
 she was going to be a mother herself, she could 
 hardly have been more excited than by this news. 
 Why ! she would be almost a mother a sort of 
 transfigured aunt, at all events. To be all day 
 long with little children little fairy children to 
 watch their minds opening like flowers, to listen to 
 them trying to talk, like birds trying to sing. O ! 
 this was luck, for a poor girl with no babies of her 
 own wasn't it? She almost forgot to be sorry 
 for her sister's illness. Her real thought was that 
 she was going to be a mother by proxy ! She 
 could n't afford to sigh that it was only by proxy. 
 She was grateful that it should be as it was. 
 " Yes ! Yes ! Yes ! " she telegraphed back im- 
 mediately, " only too happy ! " 
 
 And that was the reason why she could n't 
 accept Wasteneys' invitation to the Romantics, 
 which came five minutes after she had sent her 
 telegram. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 " THE ROMANTICS " AT WASTENEYS 
 
 BEFORE writing this chapter I have sought 
 high and low among the curiosity shops, 
 scanned catalogues, telegraphed famous 
 dealers for " any pen used by Thomas Love 
 Peacock." A famous lady collector, with an op- 
 timism which seldom disappoints one, promises 
 me one within a month. Unfortunately, however, 
 I cannot wait so long. I have already delayed 
 this chapter for a full fortnight, and it can wait no 
 longer. If I only dared to ask Peacock's literary 
 grandson to lend me for one day the pen that 
 wrote "The New Republic"! But then I dare 
 not, though, judging by his later books, he does 
 not seem nowadays to have much use for it 
 himself, and, therefore, might perhaps spare it 
 me if I only had the courage to ask. Well, I 
 have n't, so I must do the best I can with my own 
 pen. 
 
 The list of guests which Myrtle Rome and 
 Wasteneys had drawn up that afternoon in the 
 garden comprised the following: 
 
"The Romantics'* 161 
 
 (1) A young Polish musician who played upon 
 a curious heart-shaped violin of his own invention, 
 with a bow made from the hair of the women who 
 had loved him* 
 
 (2) A novelist who vivisected his heart, regard- 
 less of his sufferings for his own amusement. 
 
 (3) A famous lady faith-healer who was also 
 beautiful. 
 
 (4) An illustrious devil-worshipper, on a visit 
 from Paris. 
 
 (5) An esoteric dramatist who said he was 
 greater than Shakespeare, and who found many 
 to believe him. 
 
 (6) A poet so exquisitely gifted that not merely 
 did he shrink from the paper and print of custom- 
 ary publication, but would consent only to com- 
 municate his poems once a year, in a musical 
 whisper, to a carefully-chosen audience, not ex- 
 ceeding twelve, in a room specially designed for 
 the purpose, in which shape and color, the degree 
 and fall of the light, and the regulation of the tem- 
 perature, were all nicely adjusted to the poem thus 
 revealed. For, as will be obvious to any but the 
 coarsest artistic perception, the ear which is to 
 receive the divine voice must be, in its kind, as 
 exquisite as the voice itself. Actually, as this poet 
 was in the habit of maintaining, one really needed 
 a different room for the revelation of each poem, 
 
 n 
 
1 62 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 and a different audience though those were con- 
 ditions difficult to compass. The very complexions 
 of the listeners had a subtle effect on the revelation 
 of his poems, and he has been known to attribute 
 the failure of one of his poems to the lack of green 
 in the eyes of the ladies present. 
 
 (7) A young French painter, who, finding it 
 impossible to work in daylight, had made a curious 
 little habitation for himself in one of the disused 
 sewers of Paris ; his subterranean salon being one 
 of the most fashionable rallying points of all the 
 advanced movements. 
 
 (8) A dandy who dressed in the manner of the 
 Regency, but was so witty that nobody minded. 
 
 (9) Lady Caroline Wenlock. \ 
 
 (10) Miss Black. 
 
 (11) Mrs. Williamson. Beautiful 
 
 (12) and (13) The Misses Waters. women ' 
 (14) Miss Knowles. / 
 
 Myrtle Rome and Wasteneys completed the 
 company. 
 
 The contributions of these sixteen members to 
 the seven days' session of the club can be more or 
 less readily imagined from the brief descriptions 
 attached to their names. Lacking the two pens 
 I have referred to, I shall not venture on any 
 detailed account of the transactions. Myrtle read 
 a bright paper: "On the Influence of Beautiful 
 
"The Romantics " 163 
 
 Names upon the Affections," and Wasteneys dis- 
 coursed on " Recent Improvements in the Nav- 
 igation of Paper Boats." 
 
 But there were two papers of real importance, 
 which demand a fuller record. The first was a 
 paper by the Esoteric Dramatist, entitled " The 
 Vowelization of the Drama " ; and the second was 
 a startling deliverance by the Vivisection Novelist, 
 entitled " A Possible Duty Towards the Beloved." 
 
 The Esoteric Dramatist advanced that the es- 
 sence of true drama lay in the stage directions, 
 and that the drama of the future would consist 
 mainly of interjections provided with explana- 
 tory stage directions. Music and poetry even 
 painting he went on, had been reduced to a 
 primary symbolism of the five vowels: "A, noir; 
 E, blanc; I, rouge; O, bleu; U, vert." Now 
 the drama was no less reducible to the same 
 simple terms. The drama was, so to say, the 
 A-E-I-O-U of human action. Unconsciously, no 
 doubt, the earliest playwrights had written their 
 plays in five acts five acts, five vowels ; no mere 
 coincidence. Each act represented a human cry 
 under given circumstances which it was the 
 business of the stage directions to interpret. 
 Latterly, dramatists had been content with three 
 acts, and here no doubt he must seem whimsical, 
 even flippant, yet he could not forbear to note 
 
1 64 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 the correspondence between the last three vowels 
 and the three acts of the modern social, seventh 
 commandment, drama. 
 
 Act I. I ! (Stage directions of at least twenty 
 pages.) 
 
 Act II. Oh! (Stage directions of at least 
 twenty pages.) 
 
 Act III. You! (Stage directions of at least 
 twenty pages.) 
 
 He did not, of course, offer this as a serious 
 illustration, but it really did jocularize his seri- 
 ous meaning. 
 
 The paper, which was very brief and con- 
 fessedly experimental, was illustrated by a per- 
 formance of one of the Esoteric Dramatist's own 
 plays entirely without actors. The play was 
 entitled "Why Did You?" and threw the audi- 
 ence into fits of laughter. The proceedings con- 
 cluded with the author making a speech, in which 
 (under some misconception of dissent from an 
 entirely delighted audience) he defied an inatten- 
 tive universe to prevent his writing as many more 
 plays of the same kind as he had a mind to ! 
 
 Then he returned to his normal state as one of 
 the most charming men alive. 
 
 The Novelist's paper on "A Possible Duty 
 Towards the Beloved " was of so unexpected a 
 character, and had indeed, for a while, so great 
 
"The Romantics" 165 
 
 an influence upon at least one of its hearers that 
 I shall give it more or less complete. I should 
 explain that it was more or less well known to 
 the company that the novelist had suffered much 
 extremity from love, and it will be imagined that 
 his paper, therefore, brought with it a delightful 
 thrill of autobiography, and even a little shudder. 
 His stern suffering face plainly showed that he 
 was theorizing from a drama not yet completed. 
 He began by placing a beautiful little revolver 
 upon the table merely, of course, as a symbol, 
 and thus proceeded : 
 
 "The longer one studies life the less one comes 
 to value the reasoned action of human beings, 
 and the more one comes to value that instinctive 
 action which reason has so often (and particularly 
 during the last two centuries) depreciated and 
 attempted to discredit. When one really reflects, 
 can one say that any of the important actions and 
 motives of human beings are reasonable actions 
 and motives? Is our joy, properly speaking, 
 reasonable? Is our sorrow reasonable ? Are the 
 duties reasonable to which we abandon ourselves, 
 without a thought of the tragic self-sacrifice 
 involved? Seriously speaking, we can give no 
 good reason for any of our important actions or 
 preoccupations; for the primary human operations 
 there are no reasons. Consider the most impor- 
 
1 66 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 tant of all human' feelings human love. Con- 
 sider it in what form you will. Say in its purest 
 form: the love of a mother for a child. What 
 can be less reasonable than an affection which 
 entails upon the mother so constant and so wear- 
 ing a sacrifice of her own personal comfort and 
 pleasure, and which inexorably destines her to so 
 pitiless a disillusionment? There may seem to 
 be more reason for the love of a man for a woman 
 and a woman for a man, and yet in its apparent 
 origin what could be less reasonable? A reason- 
 able love would be one which selected for its 
 object a being whom it regarded as the most 
 beautiful and generally the most worthy of her 
 sex. It is true that a lover loves, because he is 
 under an impression that such is the object of 
 his passion; but that impression is one that has 
 not come to him through his reason, but through 
 some other medium of spiritual apprehension, 
 which overrules the reason the reason not un- 
 commonly, in cases of the strongest passion, 
 entering its serious protest in vain. Reason, it 
 must be remembered, is an impersonal standard 
 of values. It is not yours or mine. It belongs to 
 the general intellectual equipment of mankind; 
 and its results are as little influenced by indi- 
 vidual preferences as, say, a barometer is influ- 
 enced by its possessor's desire for fair weather. 
 
" The Romantics " 167 
 
 There is no such thing as your reason, and my 
 reason. There is only reason. And, that being 
 so, if love were reasonable, all the men in the 
 world would be in love with one woman that is 
 the woman who, according to the tests of reason, 
 was the most worthy of being loved. 
 
 "Then, too, if love were reasonable, would it 
 set its affections upon an object that is so subject 
 to the change and wear of life as man and woman ; 
 subject to death, and to an ante-mortem disinte- 
 gration even more painful to the eyes of a lover? 
 
 "Then, to leave for a moment the considera- 
 tion of Love, what are the other motive forces 
 of Human Life? Religion, War, the Desire of 
 Fame. Is there any need to labor the unreason- 
 ableness of these powerful and august influences? 
 Religion has been, and rightly, the bitter foe of 
 Reason from the beginning. Rightly understood, 
 Religion is the Formulated Adoration of the Un- 
 utterably Unreasonable, the Blessed Belief in the 
 Divinely Incredible. What we value in War are 
 its superhuman, unreasonable, moments ; moments 
 when men seem to take more delight in giving 
 their lives than in taking the lives of others 
 moments of transfigured suicide: divine irrespon- 
 sible charges, forlorn last stands of heroes. Were 
 War a reasonable institution, it would have ceased 
 two thousand years ago. And is war even so un- 
 
1 68 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 reasonable as the desire for fame? the desire of 
 one who despises his contemporaries to have his 
 name upon the lips of future fools. 
 
 " If you say I have omitted the most impera- 
 tive of all human motives The Desire to Live, 
 merely for its own sake whether happily or not, 
 with Love or without, with Religion, with Fame, 
 or without; surely we have there summed up in 
 one comprehensive absurdity the radical unrea- 
 sonableness of human existence. 
 
 " What we call civilization is the unsuccessful 
 attempt of the reason to supplant the motive 
 forces of human life; the attempt, one might say, 
 remembering the old fable, of the brain to do 
 away with the very organs that make possible, 
 by their conveyance of its humble nutrition, its 
 aristocratic designs. So might some proud flower 
 plot against the coarse processes going on at its 
 root. 
 
 "If this reasoning be correct, it follows that 
 what men have done for generations, simply, un- 
 reasonably, has some deep, essentially, perhaps 
 mysterious, basis for its being done. Men have 
 loved and prayed and fought since the beginning ; 
 and, in spite of the long interference of reason, 
 they are loving and praying and fighting with not 
 less, perhaps even more, vehemence to-day than 
 ever. 
 
"The Romantics" 169 
 
 " It was necessary to trouble you with this 
 general vindication of the unreasonableness of 
 all essential human action, to prepare you for a 
 theory which will, doubtless, at first sight seem 
 a little startling, though, on second thoughts, 
 you will see that it is not so much a theory as 
 a law deduced from the very general immemorial 
 practice of humanity. 
 
 " Since the world began, men and women have 
 loved each other and among the many and vari- 
 ous manifestations of love since the beginning is 
 one, indeed terrible, yet perhaps not entirely 
 inexplicable (allowing for the mystery of the 
 whole subject), for which I would beg a deeper 
 consideration than has perhaps been extended to 
 it before: namely that, as men and women have 
 loved from the beginning, just as surely have 
 men and women killed each other for love and, 
 in disregard of religion or social laws, felt them- 
 selves justified in doing so." 
 
 At this point the novelist paused to drink a 
 glass of water. Involuntarily he caressed his re- 
 volver, and an agreeable shudder passed through 
 his audience. 
 
 " And felt themselves justified in doing so!" 
 he repeated, with emphasis, as he continued: 
 "There is no need to produce historical instances 
 of this familiar human phenomenon. They range 
 
1 70 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 from the earliest classics to the latest murder 
 trial of our day. Only a week ago I read of a 
 laboring man who had murdered his wife because 
 he had discovered her infidelity. He confessed 
 his guilt, but entirely without contrition. ' I 
 would do it again, ' he said, and a reporter present 
 noted a curious light as of a fanatical idealism 
 upon his face. ' Brute ! ' you say, and ' brute ' 
 no doubt he was; but, all the same, the scientific 
 observer may see in his action the working of an 
 outraged idealism of which it would be easy to 
 find more decorative, but not more suggestive, 
 examples. Within recent memory an American 
 millionaire murdered his wife's lover under simi- 
 lar circumstances; and, strange as it may seem, 
 the sympathy of the court was with him, and he 
 received but a slight sentence. ' Brute ! ' no 
 doubt again, and I wish it to be understood that 
 I arti not justifying these, or any, particular in- 
 stances. I am only noting examples of a familiar 
 human phenomenon, and I note them for the pur- 
 pose of this general question : ' Allowing that all 
 such love-murders as I have mentioned are far 
 from being worthy illustrations of the law, do 
 they not, nevertheless, proceed from some deep- 
 seated instinct in human nature which tells us 
 all however "brutal," however "civilized " 
 that there are certain offences against love, cer- 
 
"The Romantics" 171 
 
 tain spiritual disloyalties (of which the physical 
 are but shadows) for which there is no reparation 
 but that of death? ' " 
 
 The speaker paused again, and then proceeded 
 once more amid the held breath of his audience: 
 
 " Such examples as I have given must be taken 
 in the same spirit as we take the crude theolog- 
 ical symbolism of savage tribes. We say that, 
 uncouth and often terrible as such symbolism is, 
 yet it hints at a divine idea. And you will see 
 from this illustration that it has been profitable 
 to take such crude examples of love-murder as I 
 have given, rather than examples more canonized 
 by romance, for the reason that the human sacri- 
 fices of a savage are robuster witnesses to a divine 
 presence in the universe than the rose-water de- 
 votions of a dean. The less sophisticated the 
 creature in which we find these manifestations of 
 mysterious things, the more powerful is their 
 witness. Now, as it is likely that the savage 
 has not always sacrificed the right people or to 
 the right gods, so it must often have happened 
 that the terrible idealism which we are consider- 
 ing has too often sacrificed the wrong victim, 
 from the wrong motive. Men, no doubt, have 
 murdered their wives and their wives' lovers 
 from a low sense of the invasion of their material 
 property property which, spiritually speaking, 
 
172 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 was never theirs by any consent of the being so 
 imagined as their possession. Women have mur- 
 dered men from a like erroneous belief on, so 
 to say, invalid documents of the heart. Our 
 concern is not with these mistakes in the work- 
 ing of what appears to be an eternal law, but 
 our interest is in the law itself. Our question 
 is: Whether there really is such a law, essentially 
 a spiritual law, frequently expressing itself, like 
 other laws, grotesquely, unjustly, but still a law 
 having for its end some mysterious perfection of 
 which we cannot even dream. 
 
 " I will beg leave to draw one last illustration 
 from a piece of literature with which you will all 
 be familiar. It is a play by a famous Spanish 
 dramatist of our own time, which I may say that 
 I first read with considerable distaste. The 
 theme seemed so crudely barbaric. One felt that 
 it was time for a serious dramatist to leave such 
 themes for the common theatre. But, as I have 
 since pondered the play, it seems to me that, 
 whether it was intentional with the dramatist or 
 not and I am inclined to think it was not 
 there is behind the barbarism of his dramatic 
 symbols a spiritual meaning which is eternally 
 valid in the relations of men and women. 
 
 "A certain Spanish gentleman, of very ancient 
 and distinguished family, a man of noble, of 
 
"The Romantics" 173 
 
 somewhat stern, character, is married to a beauti- 
 ful but somewhat weak girl. She takes a lover, 
 and in due course the husband discovers the 
 liaison. Although the custom of his country 
 would justify his putting both the guilty ones to 
 death, he refrains, and in a spirit, so to say, of 
 stern tenderness, he forgives his wife whose 
 weak soul is in a bewilderment 'twixt right and 
 wrong and craves his strong direction on the 
 condition that if she ever finds herself tempted 
 again she will come and tell him. She does find 
 herself so tempted, and in the moment she comes 
 and tells her husband. On hearing it, and realiz- 
 ing, one may suppose, that her weakness is not 
 passing, but permanent, he, with great gentle- 
 ness, shoots her through the heart calmly; not 
 merely as her husband, but as her judge and her 
 executioner. Of course, it is terrible, and at 
 first one revolts from it. Yet, as one ponders the 
 situation, one may come to see that it is rather 
 the form under which it is presented than the 
 situation itself that revolts one. We have out- 
 grown the formulae. We no longer recognize 
 this mediaeval marital proprietorship in woman. 
 Allowing, however, for the provincialism in time 
 and space of the form, is not the play the shadow- 
 show of an eternal situation, the crisis of an eter- 
 nal issue? If one imagines the parts reversed, 
 
1 74 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 one gets rid of the confusing historical, economi- 
 cal features. Let the man be the law-breaker, 
 the woman the executioner. It is all one. And 
 for the old childish ' pride of birth ' and marital 
 proprietorship, let us substitute a spiritual dig- 
 nity and a mutual spiritual proprietorship of soul 
 in soul, a proprietorship freely given, and never, 
 not even in the moment of disloyalty, denied. 
 Man and woman alike has said : ' I belong to you 
 forever and ever, in the light of the holiest reve- 
 lation of life. There is nothing of me which is 
 not yours. If I give a hair of my head to another, 
 I am worthy of death, and were I so to profane 
 the law of our love, I should not wish to live a 
 moment after. If I be weak and seem to desire 
 unworthy life after this sin, if I fail and faint and 
 seem to desire no longer the high levels on which 
 we walked together, O, my beloved, be you my 
 executioner, and carry my dead body in your 
 arms to heaven. ' ' 
 
 One more brief pause, and the novelist ended, 
 somewhat abruptly, shaken with evident emotion. 
 He had several more pages to read, but he hur- 
 riedly passed these over, and, reading only the 
 last, thus concluded : " Love is an idealism, a 
 thing of ideal joys and sorrows; but, in the 
 expression of these ideal joys and sorrows, it 
 employs material vessels which become holy and 
 
"The Romantics" 175 
 
 inviolable by that sacred use. Profanation of 
 the vessel is profanation of the spirit. And, if 
 love be allowed physical joy, it must also be 
 meted physical punishment. For love veritably 
 operates as a transubstantiation : 
 
 " ' I know not thy soul from thy body, 
 Neither our love from God.' 
 
 The sin of the body thus becomes the sin of the 
 soul. Let us not deceive ourselves in this. Nor 
 let us, if ever the occasion arise, weakly spare 
 the body of the beloved. Let us do our stern 
 duty though we must still their beating hearts 
 with fearful fire. Love lays upon us many duties. 
 O, may he leave us free from this last duty 
 towards our Beloved." 
 
 This paper produced a profound sensation 
 among its listeners, a sensation to which the 
 novelist was as profoundly indifferent, evidently 
 wrapped in a bitter dream. He cut off all pos- 
 sibility of intrusive discussion by stalking from 
 the room, revolver in hand, on the conclusion of 
 his paper. Presently he was seen walking across 
 the moonlit lawn, in the direction of the lake. 
 There were those who feared that he might never 
 return. 
 
 " How do you drag a lake? " asked pretty Lady 
 Constance Wenlock of her companion, with obvi- 
 
1 76 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 ous allusiveness'. " One often reads of it in 
 novels. I wonder if they have a set of the 
 proper fishing tackle, would you call it, here at 
 Wasteneys grappling irons, of course, I mean. 
 I have never seen them. It would be exceed- 
 ingly interesting." 
 
 "Is the lake very deep?" asked Miss Black, 
 hopefully. 
 
 " I should think so, " answered Mrs. Williamson. 
 
 "His hair would make it easier to find him," 
 said the Misses Waters, sympathetically. 
 
 "But I think he will shoot himself," said Miss 
 Knowles; "he seemed so fond of that little 
 revolver." 
 
 So beautiful women talk when left to them- 
 selves. 
 
 The novelist, however, was to prove a disap- 
 pointment. Had any one had the curiosity, or 
 humanity, to follow him, they would have ob- 
 served him a quarter of an hour later coldly cor- 
 recting proofs of his paper by the light of an 
 exceptionally brilliant moon. He had read, of 
 course, from a tear-stained manuscript knowing 
 what was expected of him but in his pocket all 
 the time he had carried the proof received that 
 morning from the editor of a fashionable monthly 
 magazine. And yet his paper had been a sincere 
 utterance all the same; for, as Miss Black told 
 
" The Romantics " 1 77 
 
 Mrs. Williamson in confidence, it was well known 
 that a certain actress had treated him with a cru- 
 elty that would have made Caligula turn pale 
 with envy. 
 
 Indeed, that proof-correcting by the light of 
 the moon was anything but what at first sight it 
 may have seemed to mean. It was a last indig- 
 nity of prosaic irony in a peculiarly cramped and 
 inclement career. It meant only that the Vivi- 
 section Novelist was an exquisitely unpopular 
 writer, who, by the inharmonious conjunction of 
 an accident in his early life and the bad taste 
 of the public, was doomed to support a wife and 
 three children on the literary proceeds of a sub- 
 sequent dream. If he thus corrected proofs in 
 haste, it was merely lest he should miss the early 
 morning post. 
 
 The fact that " A Possible Duty Towards the 
 Beloved " was to be published in a monthly maga- 
 zine must not be allowed to obscure its serious 
 import. Wasteneys was perhaps the only one 
 who divined its sincerity, and understood, in 
 some degree, its dark idealism. Though he had 
 never formulated them, he was conscious, as he 
 listened, that feelings very like those expressed 
 by the novelist had moved dimly in the back- 
 ground of his mind; and he could not resist the 
 impulse next morning to confide something of 
 
178 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 his own story to -one who, evidently, had passed 
 through a like experience. 
 
 The novelist's comment on his confidence was 
 brief and to the point : 
 
 " You must either kill her or forget her. 
 There is no other way." 
 
 And presently he added : " If you can forget, 
 you are more fortunate than I am. . . . Between 
 ourselves, I intend to kill. I am only waiting 
 till I can afford it; that is, till I can leave 
 my wife and family properly provided for. . . . 
 Then ..." 
 
 Kill, or forget ! 
 
 The words haunted Wasteneys for many a day. 
 
 Kill, or forget ! The novelist's advice plainly 
 was to kill. Curiously, the very next day this 
 thing happened. 
 
 For years back every new possessor of Was- 
 teneys had understood that Blue-Bell Hollow, 
 for certain months of the year, was the camping- 
 ground of the Smith tribe of gipsies. The visit 
 of "The Romantics" chanced to fall during that 
 period. Naturally, every one wanted their for- 
 tunes told particularly Myrtle. So the whole 
 club repaired in a body to the little colony of 
 basket-makers, palmists, and poultry-thieves, in 
 Blue-Bell Hollow. 
 
 There is, happily, no need to describe a gipsy 
 
" The Romantics " 179 
 
 encampment. In presence of so familiar a scene 
 the writer may rest from his labors and leave the 
 reader to conjure up for himself Romany pictures 
 according to his fancy. Among the Smiths there 
 were three women, variously marked by weather 
 and middle-age, who were credited with the gift 
 of sortilege; but there was one who was unmis- 
 takably the high priestess. She had a beautiful 
 worn, eagle face, and it was obvious that hers 
 was a mind which merited a larger sphere of 
 operation. Nature had evidently meant her to 
 tell the fortunes of people of quality, leaving 
 to the other augurs the long and tedious annals 
 of the poor. Certainly she was a quick reader of 
 character. Myrtle, at all events, she read at a 
 glance. 
 
 "Ah! noble lady," she said, "no one will ever 
 break your heart though you will break 
 many." 
 
 Myrtle was so flattered that she gave the seer 
 half-a-crown instantly. Nothing flatters one like 
 the imputation of a hard heart. The secret ambi- 
 tion of us all is to feel nothing except keen joy 
 in torturing the feelings of others. It is our 
 misfortune that so much congenital Christianity 
 makes the r61e of Nero so difficult for the modern 
 man or woman. We feel in spite of the most 
 inhuman resolutions. How cruel we would be 
 
180 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 if we only could. Alas! old kindness in our 
 blood compels us to be kind. 
 
 When the seer approached Wasteneys, he shook 
 his head. 
 
 " No ! no ! " he said, " I know my doom. " 
 
 "I know it too," answered the gipsy, with 
 ready wit; and in spite of himself Wasteneys 
 became interested, because, of course, he really 
 didn't know. 
 
 "You may know it," added the gipsy, "but I 
 could help you all the same." 
 
 Wasteneys laughed, but, so superstitious had 
 he become, that later on in the day he found him- 
 self wandering, with aimless aim, in the neigh- 
 borhood of Blue-Bell Hollow. The gipsy was 
 on the look-out. 
 
 "I expected you," she said. 
 
 " O, nonsense ! " said Wasteneys. 
 
 "As you will, sir! but I know her face as 
 well as you know it." 
 
 Wasteneys started. 
 
 "I could show it you this minute," she added. 
 
 "Show it me then," he said, half in earnest. 
 
 " Will you walk with me a little way to a more 
 quiet place ? " 
 
 They came to a bend of the little stream - 
 from which long ago Meriel had taken the 
 water for their morning coffee. Here it was 
 
"The Romantics" 181 
 
 a deep, silent pool, darkened by a circle of tall 
 elms. It was muddied, for there the cattle came 
 to drink. At this hour it was very lonely and 
 still. 
 
 The gipsy took a little phial from her bosom, 
 and poured a few drops into the dark pool. As 
 she did so, it instantly cleared, and became a 
 pellucid mirror. 
 
 "Look down there," she said, "and tell me 
 what you see." 
 
 "I see only my own face," said Wasteneys in 
 a moment. 
 
 "Wait, and go on looking." 
 
 Presently she asked again, noticing that Was- 
 teneys' face had grown attentive, even startled: 
 "Do you see anything?" 
 
 " O, God ! " was his only answer, as he went on 
 looking. 
 
 " I will tell you what you see," said the woman. 
 " You see a meadow in the early morning, and in 
 the meadow a woman is gathering mushrooms. 
 She has black hair, and large very large dark 
 eyes. Now she raises her head, and she is 
 looking at you . . . ' 
 
 " O God ! " cried Wasteneys, and turned his 
 eyes away. 
 
 " Will you look again ? " said the woman. 
 
 He looked again, and there in the pool was 
 
1 8 2 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 Meriel sitting by'the sea playing upon her violin, 
 as he had seen her last. 
 
 "You are only reading my thoughts," he said 
 impatiently. "I have seen all this before." 
 
 " Look again," said the woman quietly. 
 
 He looked, and out of the depths of the pool 
 came the shadowy aisles of a Gothic church. 
 From the centre presently grew and grew a soft 
 light, and, as his eyes became used to it, he saw 
 a chancel lit with many candles. Then he be- 
 came conscious of sad figures kneeling. Then at 
 last he saw a white figure lying among flowers. 
 A dead, beautiful woman lying among flowers. 
 Suddenly it seemed that she opened her eyes and 
 spoke. 
 
 It was Meriel ! but what she said he could 
 not hear. 
 
 " What does she say ? " he asked the gipsy 
 involuntarily. 
 
 " I cannot hear ! " she answered and then a 
 shoal of small fishes troubled the pool and the 
 vision passed away in muddy ripples. 
 
 Wasteneys turned from the pool as one who 
 comes out of a dream. The familiar meadows 
 and riverside seemed suddenly strange to him. 
 In the sun-reddened twilight the gipsy looked 
 like some ancient prophetess, and there was some- 
 thing almost motherly tender in the way she 
 
"The Romantics" 183 
 
 looked at him. It was strange, too, to think that 
 she was the only one in the world who really 
 knew his story. 
 
 "Mother!" he said involuntarily, "you have 
 seen her face. What am I to do ? " 
 
 "Poor Child of the Dark Star," she said, "you 
 can never be really happy. But I can help you 
 in a sad way." 
 
 " How ? " 
 
 " I can help you to forget." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 " See ! in this packet is Forgetfulness " and 
 she drew a little white packet from the folds of 
 her dress. 
 
 " Dissolve a few grains of this in a glass of 
 golden wine, every time you feel you must think 
 of her . . . and, if you cannot forget her, it will 
 soon become a joy to remember." 
 
 "Must I forget? " asked Wasteneys; "is there 
 no other way? " 
 
 "There is only one other," she said, signifi- 
 cantly, and Wasteneys thought of the novelist. 
 
 "Only that," she answered. "Shall I help you 
 to that? Love is very strange. It is a noble 
 way." 
 
 "Leave me, mother," said Wasteneys, throwing 
 himself down upon the grass. "Leave me." 
 
 For long he lay there in a reverie. The world 
 
1 84 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 grew more and more spectral with the thickening 
 dusk. An owl began to whistle from a neighbor- 
 ing copse. Presently he roused himself, and his 
 hand touched a small white object. It was the 
 packet of Forgetfulness. He picked it up and 
 turned homewards. 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 
 THE GREAT DUEL 
 
 MOST men of character begin life with a 
 sturdy belief in their control of their own 
 destiny, and, like one setting out upon a 
 journey, they scan the map of existence, choose 
 their destination, and mark out the route they 
 propose to take. If they avoid the one conclusive 
 accident of death, they probably reach their des- 
 tination, but by how different a route than the 
 one proposed. And the destination, when now it 
 is reached, how different it seems. Indeed, little 
 of the original destination is left but its name, 
 and, if they have preserved the map of their origi- 
 nal route, how scored over it is with sudden diver- 
 gence here, and huge circumambulation there; 
 and what a history of unforeseen circumstance 
 has been the whole dusty yet marvellous journey. 
 Indeed, looked back upon, it seems a series of 
 spiritual ambushes; at every turn of the road 
 some masked purpose of God. There are those 
 who early in the pilgrimage perceive the vanity of 
 their boyish maps, and, tearing them in four, cease 
 
1 86 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 to affect knowledge of their itinerary, throwing the 
 reins upon the necks of their horses. Why affect 
 control of them, when, every few miles, some dark 
 or shining rider will suddenly sweep out upon the 
 way and take the reins in his imperious hands. 
 And sometimes how slight the causes of diver- 
 gence. A butterfly flitting suddenly into a by- 
 way, a wandering scent, a song a hundred yards 
 away from the high-road, and then another and 
 still another, and always another hundred yards 
 away. Then too the many false destinations that 
 one takes for the real destination, the fair or diffi- 
 cult places where we loiter, then camp, then build, 
 then marry, which must some day prove no real 
 destinations after all, and be left behind. 
 
 Again, sometimes it may seem that, in passion- 
 ate pursuit of some by-way, we have forgotten 
 our original destination, forgotten it with joy, nay 
 even deliberately renounced it; the road we are 
 now taking seems so absolutely other ; or perhaps, 
 with bitter sorrow, we see ourselves irresistibly 
 carried further and further from the highway of 
 our purpose. Yet, all the time, whether we be 
 glad or sorry to have wandered, the mysterious 
 guides are surely leading us to the one predes- 
 tined goal. 
 
 When Wasteneys had drawn up his forces in 
 battle-array against Meriel, as we saw in a previous 
 
The Great Duel 187 
 
 chapter, he had, it may be remembered, included 
 " Anger " and " Pride " with derisive comments. 
 He had not then foreseen what reinforcements 
 unexpected circumstance- might bring to those 
 despised branches of the service. Nor had he 
 realized the significance of his merely naming 
 them, however ironically, among his forces. That 
 he should even have thought of them meant far 
 more than he understood. Evidently there had 
 been some vague feelings moving dimly at the 
 back of his mind, which had at last so far suc- 
 ceeded in asserting themselves as to suggest his 
 giving them names. A few months ago he could 
 not have conceived of anger even in jest 
 against Meriel. Anger against Meriel ! That 
 had seemed, indeed, an inconceivable sacrilege. 
 For was she not the embodiment of the Divine 
 Principle in his life, the queen that could do no 
 wrong? He had blamed himself even for that first 
 whisper of criticism deep down in his mind, and 
 he had hushed it sternly as one hushes profane 
 thoughts in a church. And as to " Pride " what 
 indeed was he that he should rebel against the 
 mysterious behavior of the Divine? 
 
 Destiny, however, which does really seem to 
 take a surprising interest in our very unimportant 
 human affairs, had, it would appear, sent down 
 that frivolous club of " Romantics" to Wasteneys 
 
1 88 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 with a more serious purpose than any proposed 
 by Myrtle Rome. 
 
 Not indeed as direct counsel, but as indirect 
 suggestion, that paper of the Vivisection Novel- 
 ist's had no little influence upon Wasteneys. To 
 begin with, it brought clearly into his conscious- 
 ness the reality of that eternal duel of the sexes, 
 which a year or two before he would either have 
 denied altogether, from sheer ignorance, or de- 
 clared done away with by the so-called emanci- 
 pation of woman ; as if that " emancipation " 
 meant anything more than a temporary advantage 
 of one party to the duel a temporary advantage 
 of the eternal coquetry of woman, expressing it- 
 self indeed more seriously than heretofore, or 
 rather with more pretentiousness, but essentially 
 no more serious than any such advantage gained 
 by woman over man since the beginning. 
 
 What does the " emancipation " of woman mean, 
 except that woman has now discovered that her 
 mind is available for purposes of overcoming man 
 as well as her body? The female mind, however 
 remarkable, however skilfully it may imitate the 
 male, is only an advanced form of chiffons. It 
 is merely one more lure, one more honey-guide, 
 for the desired man-bee. For woman is eternally 
 a flower and what a beautiful destiny ! a 
 flower that must await the choice, and do the 
 
The Great Duel 189 
 
 pleasure, of her lord the bee, both together serv- 
 ing thus the cosmic will. 
 
 And in this duel Wasteneys began to conceive 
 that it was necessary for the man to win ; or, at all 
 events, that, in the interests of the universe, the 
 issue must at worst be a draw, and that man should 
 be conquered was a disgraceful accident not per- 
 missible even to consider. 
 
 A duel. Yes ! a very serious duel. And, as he 
 pondered on this new thought that had come to 
 him, he began slowly to recognize a certain deep- 
 seated primal hatred between the sexes. It almost 
 seemed as if it was hatred rather than love that 
 kept the sexes together; or as if, at all events, 
 along with the instinct that bound them in appar- 
 ent bonds of love, went a corresponding resent- 
 ment that they should thus be bound, as it were, 
 in spite of themselves. Among the other animals, 
 who has failed to observe that hatred, toothed and 
 clawed, often follows the tenderest union of love? 
 It would almost seem as if two everlasting irrecon- 
 cilable enemies have, as by a love philtre, been 
 tricked into a truce of humiliating caresses 
 solely for the advantage of a third party, whom 
 we call Nature. Perhaps the female really hates 
 the male, and the male the female, but, for her 
 own mysterious purpose, Nature throws over each 
 a scented cloud of illusion, whioh, when her strange 
 
190 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 work is done, disperses, to the mutual humiliation 
 of the two helpless instruments. 
 
 Whether or not this be a true theory, at all 
 events Wasteneys, with some surprise, found him- 
 self growingly rebellious against this " divine " 
 revelation that for so long had ruled his life. 
 Seditious thoughts, which made his better self 
 shudder, began to fill his mind. Once, in a hushed 
 midnight, soon after the departure of "The Ro- 
 mantics," he said to himself, scarcely above his 
 breath: "After all, a Man is something be 
 Woman what she may ! " 
 
 Growing bolder, he even ventured upon the 
 assertion that, miraculous as Meriel was, he, 
 Pagan Wasteneys, was also something some- 
 thing entitled to consideration in the scheme of 
 things, a being too with a duty towards himself, 
 even an imperative duty, in which he could only 
 fail at immortal peril. But it was with no light 
 heart that he thus timorously ventured to formu- 
 late, step by step, so iconoclastic a philosophy. 
 O, God of Love! was he indeed an atheist; 
 was he, a mere mortal, daring to ask questions? 
 He covered his face expectant of, even hoping 
 for, the lightning. Yet how superfluous is any ex- 
 ternal punishment of the questioner of divine 
 things. Poor persecuted explorer, the agony of 
 finding out is pain and penalty enough. Were it 
 
The Great Duel 191 
 
 & 
 
 not better to suffer under the protection of an 
 illusion than thus to suffer on behalf of so weary 
 a truth? Why trouble to be free? Slavery at 
 least had its rewards. Where are the rewards of 
 freedom? "The reward of freedom," cried his 
 soul, " is to be free ! " Alas ! the reward had an 
 abstract sound. 
 
 Yes ! it almost seemed sometimes as if it were 
 not so much himself that was fighting this battle, 
 as some universal principle that was using him 
 on behalf of the Everlasting Male. 
 
 Ancestral instincts of dominance thus unexpect- 
 edly came to his aid, instincts which, but a short 
 time ago, he would have " reasoned " away; and 
 at this moment he came upon a philosopher, who 
 was evidently too ill-balanced to be taken without 
 many reservations, but one of whose phrases 
 persisted hatefully in his mind : " Thou goest to 
 woman, remember thy whip." But a short time 
 ago he would have hated this phrase with his 
 whole soul ; and he was much disquieted to note 
 the change in him which allowed him even men- 
 tally to tolerate it. To him the idea of any form 
 of arrogant mastership of one being over another 
 had always been painful. Apart from any of 
 those considerations which sound more serious, 
 but perhaps do not go deeper, it jarred his sense 
 of courtesy. Even the accepted lordship of man 
 
192 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 over the animals had been to him an unwelcome 
 thought, and to thrash a dog or to " break " a 
 horse had always hurt something in him, which 
 resented this arrogant interference of one species 
 with the native liberty of another; whether or 
 not the subservience of the one and the lordship 
 of the other had been scripturally or scientifically 
 decreed. All, higher and lower, were so evidently 
 servants of a mysterious universe, in which per- 
 haps the distance between a man and a dog was 
 so slight, compared with the distance between 
 man and unknown supernal beings, that to some 
 high-watching unseen eye man's arrogant asser- 
 tion of it might well seem supremely ridiculous 
 and pathetic. 
 
 For the man, therefore, who had felt thus about 
 the very animals, it was necessarily surprising and 
 painful for him to find something unreasoning 
 within him suddenly asserting the lordship of man 
 over woman, and saying over with a certain com- 
 placence the phrase I have quoted. No doubt it 
 was only a reaction from the other extreme in 
 which so long he had resided, and really amounted 
 to nothing more than a reassertion of his own 
 independence violently made. 
 
 But the feeling, however open to criticism, 
 served its purpose in that it contributed to the en- 
 ergy necessary for that wise and wary unwinding 
 
The Great Duel 193 
 
 of himself which the old love-doctor had advised. 
 It seemed a coarse way with Meriel, but some 
 gossamers are so closely spun about the captive 
 soul that they can only be severed with a sword 
 or even a common hatchet. But the pain of 
 cutting these gossamers ! They were no longer 
 like exterior bonds, but thrilling silken strings, 
 each one of which seemed to pass through his 
 heart. Wasteneys, indeed, was like a man who 
 must perform a surgical operation upon himself 
 the most difficult of all surgical operations. He 
 must himself cut out his own heart for the good 
 of his general health ! 
 
 To help him in this, Providence, apparently, 
 had first put into Myrtle Rome's pretty frivo- 
 lous head the idea of " The Romantics," and then 
 sent down a mad novelist to Wasteneys. So 
 roundabout and apparently inconsequent are the 
 methods of Providence. 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 RELIGION TO THE RESCUE 
 
 AGAIN, he had written down " Religion," 
 with but little hope that it would answer 
 to his summons. Where, indeed, was the 
 religious impulse to come from ; or rather, where 
 was the form to make his vague, though rich, 
 religious impulse operative, the form he could 
 accept? for, strange as it may seem, religion, 
 in the most religious minds, is thus dependent 
 upon its form. And yet, perhaps, this is not so 
 very surprising, for what is form but an instru- 
 ment? When one closely considers the matter, 
 one comes to see that the religious sense naturally 
 craves, even relies upon, formulae for its expres- 
 sion, as the artistic sense relies upon its formulae, 
 form and color, and so forth. Religion is one 
 of the forms of human expression let us unani- 
 mously admit that it is the highest and is, there- 
 fore, as inconceivable without form as language 
 without words. 
 
 Though Wasteneys had come to see that mere 
 reason was inadequate as a critic of religion, he 
 
Religion to the Rescue 195 
 
 was not yet prepared nor was he ever likely 
 to be prepared to return for the expression of 
 his spiritual sense to formulae which certainly came 
 within the scope of the critical reason. Long as 
 he might, in such moments as that Easter morning, 
 to employ again the fair old sanctified forms of 
 religious usage ; he knew that for him the life had 
 gone out of them forever. They had no longer 
 any power to concentrate the spiritual force of his 
 nature which, thus lacking organs for its ex- 
 pression, ran to waste. He had at one time 
 dreamed that it might be his task to strike out new 
 forms for the homeless religious spirit, and it had 
 seemed to him, as to others with the same dream, 
 that the forms of art must more and more take 
 upon them sacerdotal duties. Art, at its highest, 
 is an affirmation of the spiritual nature of human 
 life, and of all life ; and such affirmation is the 
 essence of religion. Yet art represented rather 
 a longing, an aspiration, than an actual authorita- 
 tive revelation. Art dreams, but religion knows. 
 
 And, after all, perhaps it was not so much new 
 formulae that Wasteneys had been in need of, as 
 of some new emotional impulse, a renewed vision 
 of divine things sufficiently clear and sure to arouse 
 his sluggish soul to that passionate optimism the 
 practical outcome of which is that serious conduct 
 of life, for which so long he had lacked a motive 
 
196 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 sufficiently powerful. Given that vivifying im- 
 pulse, it might well happen that the old forms 
 might once more become for him living organs 
 sufficiently expressive. Yes ! the more he pon- 
 dered, the more he saw that it was not so much 
 the old forms that had worn out, but the vital 
 spiritual forces in his own soul that had dried up. 
 So long as these were renewed, surely it mattered 
 little what forms they chose to vitalize. When the 
 fire descends upon the altar, the constituents of 
 the sacrifice are of small importance. 
 
 Though his love for Meriel had certainly not 
 begun as a reinforcement of his spiritual life, but 
 had indeed, superficially speaking, operated in 
 precisely the opposite direction, yet he began to 
 see that in the end its significance was to be that 
 of a spiritual revelation ; that this love had come 
 to him, not for his personal joy, not for any mere 
 human happiness, but simply for the sake of that 
 renewed vision of the divine. For many years 
 " reason " had closed his eyes to the essentially 
 supernatural ordinance of life. It was necessary 
 for a passion whose reality he could not question, 
 and yet a passion essentially unreasonable, to 
 possess him, that he might perceive once more 
 the obscured divinity in mortal things, and thus 
 awaken to his immortal responsibilities as a 
 mysterious actor in a mysterious universe. 
 
Religion to the Rescue 1 97 
 
 Wasteneys had indeed been right in considering 
 Meriel as of supreme importance in his life ; and 
 he had been mistaken only in his estimate of the 
 nature of that importance. He had deemed 1 her 
 important for her own sake. Now he began to 
 see that she was not the end, but one means to an 
 end, an end which for a while he had forgotten. 
 Though the first result of her influence had been 
 that he had cast all his duties to the winds, she 
 had really come into his life that he should appre- 
 hend all the more forcefully the one duty which 
 includes all others, man's duty towards the cosmos. 
 This, of course, is what Father Selden had fore- 
 seen when he had said to himself: " If he loves 
 a woman, he must end by loving God." One 
 need hardly say that the phrase had not occurred 
 to him as for general application. It is only in 
 exceptional natures that the love of woman ends 
 in the love of God. For the majority of men, 
 as the Catholic Church has foreseen, the love of 
 woman is anything but an ally of the love of God. 
 In the average nature, indeed, it is a dangerous 
 sensual distraction, against which the Catholic 
 Church does well to protest by the symbol of 
 celibacy for, as all the world knows, celibacy is 
 not a literal, but only a symbolical condition of the 
 Catholic priesthood. It is merely a metaphorical 
 recognition that for most men women are dan- 
 
198 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 gerous enemies of the divine life. It is only the 
 select natures among men that are helped by 
 the love of women, and they are helped, because 
 they have the power to use woman as a means 
 instead of an end. It is one of the fiercest temp- 
 tations of the spiritual-natured to treat woman as 
 an end in herself. You might as well consider 
 a rose-bush as an end in itself. Woman, indeed, 
 like the elemental spirits, is for man exactly what 
 man chooses to make her. She can materialize 
 him, or spiritualize him, as he himself decides. 
 Had Meriel only been more normally woman, 
 had his love for the mortal creation been more 
 indulged, Wasteneys' materialization had been 
 inevitable. Fortunately, Meriel had denied him 
 those satisfactions that narcotize the soul. Instead 
 she had reawakened in him an unrest which claimed 
 a nobler peace than any which woman could bring, 
 set his soul once more asking questions for which 
 no mere woman was sufficient answer. Once more 
 the boyish hunger and thirst after righteousness 
 was clamorous within him. Surely it was well 
 that he should have been saved from deeming 
 a woman adequate for the satisfaction of that 
 divine appetite. And yet, what must he do to be 
 saved? Whence was to come the true heavenly 
 food, and what was the heavenly work clearly 
 given him to do? 
 
Religion to the Rescue 199 
 
 In spite of his love and reverence for Father 
 Selden, Wasteneys knew that the answers of his 
 Father Confessor to these questions could not be 
 his answers. The Church of Rome had been, and 
 still continued, so dangerous a spiritual obscuran- 
 tist, so unscrupulous a trader in human supersti- 
 tion, that, so far from his ever dreaming of joining 
 that subtle communion, he rather regarded the 
 complete demolition of the church of his fathers 
 as the first condition of the New Church of the 
 Spirit. The Church of Rome was the Bastile of 
 Faith. So long as one stone of it stood upon an- 
 other, no spiritual, or even political, progress was 
 possible for mankind. Rather indeed than return 
 to that exquisite, aristocratic, politically vigorous, 
 but spiritually effete, communion, he could have 
 conceived himself joining some na'ive, democratic, 
 even vulgar and grotesque, schism, in which, how- 
 ever coarsely, the warm blood of faith freely circu- 
 lated. Religion, he realized, was a serious matter, 
 not merely the concern of spiritual and moral 
 dandies. Like all forces with a big universal work 
 to do, it must often be coarse in its methods, 
 and unfastidious in the choice of its instruments. 
 There had recently been moments in which 
 Wasteneys had seriously considered whether or 
 not it was his duty to join the Salvation Army. 
 And when the small devil known as the Sense 
 
2OO The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 of Humor grinned him out of the impulse, he real- 
 ized more than ever that humor, as usually un- 
 derstood, is an impertinent critic of such feelings ; 
 and that, perhaps, your true humorist is known 
 by no gift so surely as his power to distinguish 
 between what we call " a lack of humor " and 
 a serious purpose. Indeed, few people are strong 
 and wise enough to be trusted with the sense of 
 humor, which becomes a dangerous solvent in 
 the wrong hands, too often destroying in its pos- 
 sessor his more serious qualities of heart and 
 mind. 
 
 For this religious sense, too, the mysteriously 
 decreed reinforcement had been provided, and it 
 was to come from one of those popular expres- 
 sions of religion where at one time he would have 
 been little inclined to seek it. Adeline Wood had 
 been brought up among Nonconformists, and, 
 though she had been compelled to abandon Non- 
 conformist theology, she sometimes found herself 
 involuntarily longing for those old-fashioned Sun- 
 day mornings of stormy prayer and praise, when 
 each individual in some inspired congregation of 
 earnest worshippers seems to lose personal iden- 
 tity and be merged in the general gusto of jubilant 
 faith. A few streets away from her Adams ceiling 
 was the great chapel of a Wesleyan preacher, a 
 famous spiritual fighter, a man of great personal 
 
Religion to the Rescue 201 
 
 force and charm. There she would sometimes go, 
 as sometimes she would go to hear great music, 
 or press her way into the pit at theatres. She 
 loved the sea-like invigoration of a great crowd 
 of people all filled with the same enthusiasm. It 
 made her forget the loneliness that sometimes 
 came over her, like an ache. She lost her per- 
 sonal identity, and became but one joyous wave 
 of a buoyant human sea. Of this great preacher 
 Adeline had occasionally spoken to Wasteneys, 
 and one Sunday afternoon, chancing to pass the 
 doors of the great man's chapel, and, seeing the 
 preacher's name conspicuously posted, he decided 
 to go in, partly out of curiosity, and partly for 
 Adeline's sake. Adeline was still at her post as 
 nurse, and Wasteneys was missing her more than 
 he realized. She wrote to him sometimes, happy 
 letters full of the joys and humors of her deputy 
 motherhood, letters which gave him dim pangs 
 of an undefined pain, and made him feel strangely 
 lonely. 
 
 On entering the vast circular hall already a 
 humming bee-hive of faith, though the service 
 did not begin for half-an-hour Wasteneys was 
 struck, even startled, with a characteristic which 
 he had never before associated with churches and 
 chapels: the place was alive! indeed it vibrated 
 with vitality. He understood at once why Adeline 
 
202 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 cared to come here. It was a sort of human sea- 
 side. The mere murmur of the vast crowd was as 
 invigorating as the sound of the sea. It was a 
 spiritual ocean awaiting its Neptune. 
 
 When the Great Preacher took his place upon the 
 platform, Westeneys was immediately attracted. 
 He recognized him at once as a notable performer 
 upon the Human Instrument and, in so describ- 
 ing him, he implied no charlatanism. Far from 
 that, he soon gave himself up to the master- 
 ful bow of the speaker's energetic faith. By a 
 coincidence, which bore an unfortunate resem- 
 blance to the stories of the Religious Tract Soci- 
 ety, the preacher had chosen a theme which, for 
 appropriateness, he could not have bettered, had 
 he deliberately spoken individually to Wasteneys, 
 instead of generally to two thousand odd listeners, 
 all equally in need of salvation. His theme was 
 the necessity of national religion, and the inade- 
 quacy of mere " culture " to take its place. With 
 much force, and with a grasp of historical illus- 
 tration which gained, rather than lost, from pic- 
 turesqueness of presentation, he showed how the 
 best-intentioned morality was ineffective compared 
 with an apprehension of certain supernaturally re- 
 vealed truths. Man collectively, as individually, 
 was incapable of saving himself. Indeed, without 
 the assurance of some " far-off divine event," it 
 
Religion to the Rescue 203 
 
 was not to be expected that man should even see 
 the necessity of " saving " himself. If his life 
 ended with the grave, and if the harvest of his 
 self-discipline was to be reaped entirely by his 
 descendants, it was asking a superhuman, almost 
 priggish, sacrifice on his part when one con- 
 sidered the hardships of godly living that he 
 should deny himself the comparatively small mar- 
 gin of self-indulgence which even a worldly life of 
 average success allows. Without the impetus of 
 an immortal significance, morality, so-called - 
 that is clean and seemly, and reasonably altruistic 
 living was merely a matter of taste. Really 
 nice people might prefer to be spiritually clean, 
 as they preferred physical cleanliness, from per- 
 sonal comfort; but, without the assurance of a 
 divine meaning to the human struggle, it was 
 difficult to show how that struggle was worth 
 while for those who lacked the taste or energy for 
 carrying it on. Spiritual aesthetics might help 
 some natures, but such natures were few, and, 
 for the most part, lacking in force. What the 
 world needed was as real a reason for believing 
 in goodness as it had for believing in food and 
 clothing. Unless goodness could be proved a 
 vital necessity of the individual soul, it was idle 
 to ask large numbers of people to practise it. As 
 life is usually lived, it necessitates quite sufficient 
 
204 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 self-sacrifice. To expect us to deny ourselves not 
 merely in the present but in the future, not merely 
 for our children and our friends, but for the 
 unborn mendicant, is surely a fanciful demand; 
 unless man is indeed a being of an immortal 
 destiny, and, therefore, properly, of immortal 
 obligations. 
 
 Morality, the gospel of " sweetness and light," 
 might be sufficient for natures of exceptional grace, 
 though even so it might be held that such force as 
 it possessed came of the religious impulse from 
 which it originally sprang. All our secular altru- 
 istic movements took their life originally from 
 Christianity, however careful they might be to 
 dissociate themselves from Christian theology. 
 And, however counsels of morality might operate 
 upon special natures, who, it is usually seen, are 
 living good lives on an inherited capital of good- 
 ness, transferred to them from pious ancestors ; it 
 was certain that mankind en masse stood in need 
 of supernatural incentives to clean and serious 
 living. It was one of the clearest lessons of his- 
 tory that what we call national prosperity went 
 hand in hand with a vigorous national religion. 
 When a nation begins to secularize ideals, which 
 are properly dependent for their life on mysterious 
 revelations and mysteriously supplied energy, its 
 power begins to decline from that moment. When 
 
Religion to the Rescue 205 
 
 in Greece and Rome human philosophy took the 
 place of the gods imperfect hints of the divine 
 as those gods were Greece and Rome surely 
 declined, before nations inspired by the vigorous 
 youth of a new religious ideal. Modern philoso- 
 phers, who would substitute moral philosophy for 
 religion, had in Greece and Rome an object lesson 
 which was unanswerable. The experiment they 
 would try had been tried before, and completely 
 failed ; tried, too, under circumstances exceptionally 
 favorable, tried with two races which an eminent 
 ethnologist had declared as superior intellectually 
 to the English race as that race was to some savage 
 race of central Africa. Could there be a clearer 
 illustration of the truth that man's brains cannot 
 save him? If philosophy and culture could save a 
 nation, Greece and Rome would have been power- 
 ful nations to this day. And this law of nations is 
 the law of individuals too. Some few exceptions 
 only proved the rule; and, generally speaking, it 
 was true for individuals as for nations that serious 
 and beautiful lives could not be lived merely on 
 social motives and incentives. 
 
 A year or two before Wasteneys would have 
 contested this reasoning, but life had taught him 
 how essentially true it was. The divine motive in 
 his life had been symbolized by Meriel. That with- 
 drawn, how purposeless, how unworthy, his life had 
 
206 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 been. Poor, indeed, had seemed the interests of 
 culture, and certainly little dynamic ; so soon as he 
 lacked the Divine Incentive. 
 
 Yet though he realized this mentally, and was 
 conscious of an awakening within him of spiritual 
 forces long dormant, he could not yet see where 
 the new incentive was to come from. Here the 
 preacher failed him. The Divine Incentive, said 
 the preacher, could only come through an accept- 
 ance of the Christian revelation. Wasteneys, on 
 the other hand, could not but feel that here the 
 preacher was endeavoring to lay down his own 
 personal experience as a universal law. Not to 
 speak it profanely, Wasteneys might in a sense 
 have preached that the only way of salvation was 
 belief in Meriel for it was through her that the 
 something divine in existence had been most 
 authoritatively revealed to him. Mentally, Waste- 
 neys was very much at one with the preacher. 
 He might almost have used the very words of the 
 Christian creed : " I believe in the Holy Ghost ; the 
 holy Catholic Church ; the Communion of Saints ; 
 the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the 
 body, and the life everlasting" all these being 
 symbolical terms for literal truths which he was 
 beginning to comprehend. But how to make this 
 mental acceptance operative in the moral sphere ! 
 One firmly believes in many facts which have no 
 
Religion to the Rescue 207 
 
 influence upon our lives, and one may admire many 
 various activities without any wish to participate in 
 them ourselves. Belief, to be of any practical force, 
 must be passionate. The preacher apprehended 
 these truths so passionately that he desired with 
 all his heart to persuade others to apprehend them 
 too. Perhaps Wasteneys would some day appre- 
 hend them no less passionately, but, meanwhile, 
 he saw them as a convalescent contemplates the 
 vigor of athletic youth with but a dim wish to 
 take part in the game. 
 
 It is the failure of many preachers to realize that 
 it is comparatively easy for some to reach that state 
 of mind in which one exclaims : " Lord, I believe." 
 The business of the great preacher, as the greatest 
 have instinctively realized, is not argument, but 
 persuasion. It is their success to infuse into us 
 their personal enthusiasm, to make us as passion- 
 ate for righteousness, as if righteousness were a 
 woman ! 
 
 Of this quality of persuasiveness the preacher 
 presently proved himself possessed in no common 
 degree. His sermon had struck Wasteneys by its 
 intelligence, by its first-hand acquaintance with 
 the things of the soul ; but it was not till an after- 
 service, in which the preacher drew closer to that 
 more earnest and sensitive part of his audience 
 which had remained behind after the completion 
 
208 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 of the general service as is the custom among 
 Wesleyans that he realized what a force the man 
 was. The service in which the preacher makes an 
 individual appeal to such members of his audience 
 as have not before accepted the Christian revela- 
 tion, definitely to proclaim themselves then and 
 there Christians, is a customary feature of all 
 Wesleyan services, and, like all religious offices, 
 may be, and often is, ridiculous, in the wrong 
 hands. The preacher, however, was not only a 
 born evangelist, but he possessed sacerdotal gifts 
 as well ; and he was thus able poignantly to vitalize 
 a hackneyed method with his personal sincerity, 
 and to impart a moving dignity to an office which 
 might well have offended by a democratic famili- 
 arity of tone. There was something almost tragic 
 in the strong emotion of his appeal, and Wasteneys 
 noted as strange how remarkably he was able to 
 establish a particular rapport with each single 
 member of his audience, to make each forget that 
 this was a public gathering, and entirely to banish 
 that shamefaced self-consciousness which naturally 
 besets all but the most ardent souls, when called 
 upon to make such public confession of faith. 
 Conventional tremors fell away before that master- 
 ful pleading voice. Here and there in the vast 
 audience one and another silently stood up, and 
 the preacher spoke to the man or woman thus 
 
Religion to the Rescue 209 
 
 mutely signifying the mystic change of the heart, 
 as though they two were alone together in the 
 presence of God. Wasteneys marvelled at the love 
 in the man's voice, the yearnings to make those 
 who were still wandering in darkness see the light 
 that was so clear to him, and the skill with which 
 time after time he varied his mode of appeal. He 
 was so good and yet so clever this fisher of men. 
 But how good ! How unselfishly was he spending 
 a physical strength manifestly not inexhaustible, 
 straining every emotional, magnetizing, nerve in 
 him to catch another wandering soul. 
 
 " God ! how good the man is ! " Wasteneys ex- 
 claimed under his breath, and it seemed to him 
 that in another moment he must obey that plead- 
 ing voice, so stern and yet so gentle, and definitely 
 take his stand on the side of the spirit. 
 
 But the platform ! Was it his platform ? 
 Was this somewhat crude and provincial organiza- 
 tion that through which he could best express the 
 surging truth that was in him ? The more vital 
 voice within warned him against a spiritual fas- 
 tidiousness, which has brought so many spiritual 
 impulses to nought. It told him that the man 
 who does the work of the spirit takes the first 
 instruments to his hand, at the moment of his 
 call, and is not delicate because some of them 
 
 14 
 
2 1 o The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 chance to be somewhat old-fashioned and coun- 
 trified in shape. 
 
 While he hesitated, suddenly a sweet voice near 
 him said: " Would you care to speak with Mr. 
 
 after the service ? " 
 
 A little bird-like girl, in a costume that suggested 
 both a nurse and a nun, had stolen near to him 
 while he was wrapt in the preacher's voice. 
 
 " I should," he said, almost involuntarily, noting 
 the lit small face, and thinking how beautiful good- 
 ness made certain faces. 
 
 It had been one of the preacher's innovations in 
 a church which sometimes looked askance at him 
 for the umconventionality and consequent suc- 
 cess of his methods, to found a kind of lay sis- 
 terhood. Though he was a stalwart enemy of 
 Rome, he was not a narrow one. He saw that the 
 methods of Rome were founded on a deep knowl- 
 edge of human nature, and answered to human 
 needs, and in this sisterhood he adopted one of the 
 most powerful of them. This sisterhood of 
 which the sisters were not required to take any 
 irrevocable vows was not so much religious in 
 character as a secular plan for utilizing by clever 
 organization the unemployed pity and goodness 
 of lonely woman-hearts. Little Sister Catherine 
 was one of the most active of the sisters. A child- 
 ishly tiny, fragile girl, with a face that was al- 
 
Religion to the Rescue 2 1 1 
 
 most spectral with eager spiritual light, one would 
 hardly have thought, as one looked at her, how 
 much intimate knowledge of the world's darkness 
 lay behind those pure brows and living blue 
 eyes. That holy little face had looked on human 
 sorrow and vice in their foulest and most pain- 
 ful forms, and that pure girl's heart was the 
 sympathetic depository of the strangest human 
 histories. 
 
 The work of the sisterhood might have been 
 summed up in the beautiful old words : " Come 
 unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, 
 and I will give you rest." No one was too foul or 
 too broken to win the sympathy and help of these 
 good sisters. They had only to come and say: 
 " I am unhappy. Help me " ; and it was the aim 
 even of the sisters to save them this exertion, so 
 far as possible. At these services, one of which 
 Wasteneys was attending, they made it their busi- 
 ness to hunt for souls, like sleuth-hounds, in the 
 vast audience. They watched the faces of the lis- 
 teners, and, with their terrible knowledge of human 
 misery, they picked out the faces it might be 
 possible to help, unerring specialists of sorrow. 
 Sister Catherine had noted Wasteneys early in 
 the service, for there was that about him which 
 made him somewhat of an apparition in that Non- 
 conformist hall, where, however, it was no un- 
 
212 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 common occurrence such was the spell and the 
 fame of the preacher to find a Cabinet Minister, 
 or a great artist, listening, with a long look in his 
 eyes. She had watched the effect of the service 
 upon his face and divined something of his need. 
 Thus her instinct for sad people had once more 
 distinguished itself. 
 
 When Wasteneys went behind to see the preacher, 
 any embarrassment he might naturally have feared 
 was instantly dispersed by the immediacy of the 
 preacher's recognition of him. The preacher was 
 not a spiritual leader for nothing, and, as the 
 woman in Sister Catherine had seen the sorrow in 
 his face, so the man in the preacher had divined 
 something of the cause of it. 
 
 The wise provision of tea gave a social character 
 to a serious occasion, and Wasteneys was inter- 
 ested to notice how merry these Christians were 
 over their cups of tea. 
 
 There were several sisters and many of their 
 conquests gathered in the little tea-room. No 
 doubt each of these spiritual victims, so to say, 
 had expected some rather unctuous t$te-a-tete with 
 the great preacher. If so, they were pleasantly 
 disappointed. Instead, they found him the gay 
 father of his spiritual family. The stern prophet 
 of the platform was for the moment laid aside and 
 he was the gayest of men, a very boy for all his 
 
Religion to the Rescue 2 1 3 
 
 sixty years. Such humanity seldom accompan- 
 ies such sound and serious divinity. He chaffed, 
 one might almost say flirted, in a fatherly way, 
 with the sisters, and all sorts of stories of the 
 humors behind the serious work of the day were 
 exchanged and discussed. The new-comers felt 
 themselves admitted to a sort of innocent be- 
 hind-the-scenes. 
 
 At the same time, the preacher was on the look- 
 out for the serious word with any one of his visit- 
 ors who seemed anxious to seek it; and, when 
 Wasteneys found himself, tea-cup in hand, for a 
 moment tete-a-tete with him, he was almost startled 
 with the sudden intimacy of the few brief words 
 the preacher addressed to him words in no way 
 sanctimonious, no mere perfunctory talk, but words 
 that he felt were really meant for him. 
 
 He on his part had been outspokenly sincere. 
 
 " It almost broke my heart," he had said, " to 
 hear how you pleaded with us, how you strove to 
 make us feel what you were feeling, see what you 
 were seeing." 
 
 " I wish you would come and help me," the 
 preacher had replied, looking at him steadfastly. 
 " There are few who could help me as much as 
 you." 
 
 Wasteneys thought of Father Selden's words: 
 " I do not fear for you. You belong to God. 
 
214 ' The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 More than many you were born His child. You 
 cannot escape His love." 
 
 So different in external methods, there was a 
 deep resemblance between the two men, the re- 
 semblance that all holy and strenuous men bear 
 to each other. 
 
 So Wasteneys made an important new friend, 
 and so it seemed that he saw once more the mys- 
 terious guiding hand in his life. From this time 
 he seldom spent a Sunday in town without drink- 
 ing at the bracing wells of the great preacher's 
 eloquent faith ; and, in addition, he became a wel- 
 comed guest at the great preacher's house, a famil- 
 iar of his book-lined study, which resounded often 
 with the alternating clash and mirth of vigorous 
 debate. His first impulse to embrace the preach- 
 er's faith and calling died away, as he realized the 
 intellectual difficulties it involved ; but his chance 
 dropping-in upon that Wesleyan chapel was far 
 from being in vain. Father Selden's prophecy 
 was coming true. In the maze of life his appar- 
 ently erratic wanderings were bringing him nearer 
 and nearer to the one way out the Way of the 
 Spirit. There were many by-ways leading into 
 that great high-road. Father Selden pointed to 
 one, the preacher to another. Wasteneys felt that 
 there was still another by-way his own. It 
 seems strange that when men clearly see that they 
 
Religion to the Rescue 215 
 
 are travelling to the same destination they should 
 be so fastidious about their particular route. But 
 so it is, and thus, alas ! the dearest friends have 
 travelled a whole lifetime in painful estrangement 
 from each other, though both were surely journey- 
 ing by different roads to the City of God. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 SISTER CATHERINE UPON ROSE-GARDENS 
 
 GOODNESS! We have seen that one of 
 the results of Wasteneys' possession was 
 that he early shrank from good people. 
 They were so serious ! It was a sign of his re- 
 turning health that the great charm for him of 
 the people amongst whom he had been brought by 
 his accidental encounter with the preacher was 
 their wonderfully attractive goodness. For all these 
 years, beauty that is the world as revealed to 
 the delighted eye of the senses had been for 
 him his standard of life. Now he was beginning 
 to feel that goodness was even more beautiful than 
 beauty; and the purpose in these good people, 
 the fruitfully directed purpose in their lives, stirred 
 within him an emulative desire once more to live 
 his life energetically to fine issues. 
 
 Yes ! how good they were, and what a divine 
 pity it must be that sustained them in lives of such 
 arduous, yet so light-hearted self-sacrifice. He 
 had never met any people so happy as these who 
 literally had not a moment of time to call their 
 
Sister Catherine 217 
 
 own. And several of the sisters had given up 
 homes of delicate comfort to live in slums where 
 every sense was jarred from morning till night; 
 places painful alike to sight and sound and smell, 
 and places inexpressibly painful to the finer senses 
 of the soul. Sometimes, Wasteneys felt a longing 
 to join in the work they were doing, on its purely 
 social side. If other duties might seem doubtful, 
 there could be no doubt of the Tightness of allevi- 
 ating human misery, of lightening human darkness. 
 If this was not his special call, at least he might, 
 in some humble practical way, be assisting in that, 
 while the special call became clearer. 
 
 Sister Catherine smiled when he confided to her, 
 somewhat shyly, his thought. 
 
 " Come and try by all means," she said, " but 
 you need n't be unhappy if you don't feel at home 
 in the work, after all. I think you have another 
 work to do." 
 
 " How do you mean? " 
 
 " Well, your mission, so to say, is to the classes, 
 rather than like mine to the masses. But 
 come and read to my match-girls some evening 
 and try. They love poetry particularly Brown- 
 ing; and I am making them quite interested in 
 Maeterlinck ! " 
 
 This, of course, was only half serious. Sister 
 Catherine was too practical a missionary to think 
 
2i 8 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 much of rose-water as a means of salvation, though 
 she realized that it had its uses sometimes, and she 
 applied it, with no little success, to the more sensi- 
 tive natures coming under her care. For she was 
 a great believer in the essential refinement of the 
 average human creature. 
 
 Wasteneys never summoned up courage to face 
 Sister Catherine's match-girls, but he would some- 
 times seek her for tea and a talk in her workman's 
 dwelling. 
 
 The connoisseur in human misery and degrada- 
 tion could not have found a place more favorable 
 for his melancholy studies. On his first visit 
 Wasteneys had some difficulty in discovering Sis- 
 ter Catherine's building. He sought information 
 of a sad, bloated woman, who was carrying a jug 
 of beer from a public house, which was a remark- 
 able example of the sensitiveness to ignoble use 
 even of brick and wood and three coats of paint. 
 In nothing is the mysterious power of the invisi- 
 ble over the visible so clearly seen as the effect of 
 human habitation upon the very material of which 
 our houses are built. Clean, strenuous, living re- 
 sults in a stately old house like Wasteneys'. What 
 a different tale was told by every house in that 
 street, but particularly the grimy leering front of 
 " The Jolly Fellows." Even by charming streams, 
 where the water runs clear and the green leaves 
 
Sister Catherine 219 
 
 ripple, the place where the beasts come to drink 
 is always miry with the tread of hoofs. 
 
 But to return : 
 
 "You go down to the mews yonder," said the 
 woman, "and turn to the left, just before you 
 come to the coffin factory." 
 
 The coffin factory! "The Jolly Fellows," and 
 the coffin factory ! Such were the two extremes 
 between which Sister Catherine had chosen to 
 live her life. He thought of his grassy garden 
 at Wasteneys, its green shadows, its luxuriously 
 grouped trees, its azalea-scented air. Into that 
 garden came no sounds save the call and call and 
 call again of the cuckoo, or the chiming of the 
 village clock; and all day long clean clover- 
 breathed winds fanned it with freshness. 
 
 The coffin factory! There was ignominy too 
 both towards life and death in thus compelling 
 the twain to live, as it were, side by side in this 
 gruesome ludicrous fashion. It must mar the 
 proper solemnity of the thought of death in the 
 minds of the living, as surely it must unduly 
 overshadow existences with at best but little 
 sunlit margin. Life must be dreary enough in 
 "Jones's Rents," without its being thus further 
 darkened with so grim an industry. To Was- 
 teneys it seemed now as if that street was pre- 
 sided over by a grinning skeleton but, of 
 
220 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 course, such thoughts troubled little the heads, 
 say, of the woman who guided him, or of the 
 children playing within sound of the screaming 
 circular saws, that, from gaslit dawn till gaslit 
 eve, cut out the cheap wooden shrouds. Such 
 thoughts were only for people who lived in gar- 
 dens, and were buried in marble vaults. Even 
 the last luxury of appreciating their degradation 
 is denied to the poor. Wasteneys wondered if 
 he was not perhaps a little over-sensitive to live 
 the life of a philanthropic worker. Yet, the 
 flower of Sister Catherine's face managed to keep 
 as bright and pure amid it all, as if it had been 
 washed in May dew. 
 
 Her little kitchen was a wonderful contrast to 
 its grim, unsavory surroundings. Here again 
 was another illustration of the influence of the 
 invisible human spirit upon its surroundings. 
 Literally a workman's kitchen, with an open 
 grate and oven, and a dresser or plate shelf, and 
 two or three rough chairs. Yet how fresh and 
 pure, and even distinguished, it looked. Sister 
 Catherine, who evidently luxuriated in asceti- 
 cism, allowed herself no other luxuries not 
 even a comfortable chair. Wasteneys wondered, 
 as he looked at her face, which was a little over- 
 wrought, whether she allowed herself even such 
 necessities as sufficient food and sleep. He 
 
Sister Catherine 221 
 
 thought too as he looked round the little kitchen, 
 severe as a monk's cell, of the strange diversity 
 of human nature. On one hand were men and 
 women seeking to gratify their senses by every 
 possible device of novel indulgence; on the other 
 there were men and women who found their satis- 
 faction in denying themselves systematically all 
 the others so greedily sought. He could not 
 help smiling to himself. How absurd human 
 nature was, even its idealisms. Then his eye 
 fell upon Sister Catherine's little bookshelf: 
 Blake, Emerson, Shelley, Edward Carpenter, 
 Maeterlinck. 
 
 Ah! 
 
 Starry food all of it. 
 
 A playful application of a profound line of 
 Lucretius occurred to him as he noted the food 
 of this starry little woman. 
 
 " Unde cether sidera pascit ?" he said, laughing. 
 
 "Translate, please," said Sister Catherine. 
 
 " O, only something about ' on what does the 
 ether feed the stars?' I was thinking of your 
 books, the food of stars ! " 
 
 "You mustn't pay compliments. It's never 
 done, I assure you, in Jones's Rents." 
 
 No indeed ! and at the moment there plainly 
 came to their ears the moaning of the steam 
 saws turning out the poor man's coffins. 
 
222 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 Wasteneys took down "Wisdom and Destiny," 
 and his eye fell upon a passage of peculiar fitness 
 to the moment : " Indeed, if we had only the cour- 
 age to listen to the simplest, the nearest, most 
 pressing voice of our conscience, and be deaf to 
 all else, it were doubtless our solitary duty to 
 relieve the suffering about us to the greatest 
 extent in our power. It were incumbent upon 
 us to visit and nurse the poor, to console the 
 afflicted ; to found model factories, surgeries, dis- 
 pensaries, or at least to devote ourselves, as 
 men of science do, to wresting from nature the 
 material secrets which are most essential to man. 
 But yet, were the world at a given moment to 
 contain only persons thus actively engaged in 
 helping each other, and none venturesome enough 
 to dare snatch leisure for research in other direc- 
 tions, then could this charitable labor not long 
 endure; for all that is best in the good that at 
 this day is being done round about us was con- 
 ceived in the spirit of one of those who neglected, 
 it may be, many an urgent, immediate duty in 
 order to think, to commune with themselves, in 
 order to speak. Does it follow that they did the 
 best that was to be done? To such a question as 
 this who shall dare to reply? The soul that is 
 meekly honest must ever consider the simplest, 
 the nearest duty to be the best of all things it can 
 
Sister Catherine 223 
 
 do; but yet were there cause for regret had all 
 men for all time restricted themselves to the 
 duty that lay nearest at hand. In each genera- 
 tion some men have existed who held in all 
 loyalty that they fulfilled the duty of the pass- 
 ing hour by pondering on those of the hour to 
 come. Most thinkers will say that these men 
 were right." 
 
 Wasteneys pointed the passage out to Sister 
 Catherine. 
 
 "Don't you think the philosopher excuses him- 
 self a little lamely for hastening back to his own 
 quiet pursuits, instead of taking his place in the 
 hospital of human suffering? 'Thinkers' will 
 agree, he says. Of course. Thinkers naturally 
 back thinkers. And what a delightful euphe- 
 mism is that word ' venturesome ' ! " 
 
 "But surely he is right? We have each one 
 our work, and, however much we may wish, we 
 can do no other." 
 
 " Of course, I know that that is the flattering 
 unction which artists and philosophers lay to 
 their souls. Yet I confess I am inclined to 
 think the human importance which they attach 
 to their work is only a sop to their consciences, 
 only a grand way of excusing a selfish indulgence. 
 It is true that a philosopher may be serving man- 
 kind, as he walks to and fro his grassy Academe, 
 
224 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 and ponders to the song of the birds but, at all 
 events, it is a very pleasant way of serving man- 
 kind. Philosophy! Poetry! what are they worth, 
 compared with good surgery and good nursing? 
 All the philosophers and poets that ever lived 
 have done nothing for humanity compared with 
 the man who discovered chloroform." 
 
 " But you forget that all ways of serving man- 
 kind are pleasant. Else, I 'm afraid no one 
 would serve." 
 
 "That sounds cynical, does n't it? " 
 
 "I suppose it does. Yet you wouldn't have 
 people doing work for which they are unfitted? 
 and in work fitness and pleasure always go 
 together. Do you think the man who discovered 
 chloroform would ever have found it unless it had 
 been a passion with him to find it unless he had 
 been a born doctor, and took as positive and per- 
 sonal self-indulgent pleasure in relieving hu- 
 man pain as others seem to take in causing it? " 
 
 " No doubt that is true, but, all the same, you 
 cannot deny that a larger proportion of self- 
 sacrifice enters into some professions than into 
 others, and equally it would seem a large amount 
 of practical human usefulness. Doctors and 
 nurses, no doubt, enjoy their sleep as well as 
 other human beings, but how ready they are to 
 give it up at the call of human suffering." 
 
Sister Catherine 225 
 
 " Of course, you cannot enjoy a pleasure with- 
 out paying something for it. One has to choose. 
 Would you say that a poet's life holds no sacri- 
 fices ? " 
 
 " Well, at all events, they have told us enough 
 about them," said Wasteneys. 
 
 "You are hard on your own calling," said Sis- 
 ter Catherine. "You talk of anaesthetics. You 
 forget what a wonderful spiritual anaesthetic is 
 a good book." 
 
 " O, I know ! A poet is a sort of nerve-doctor, 
 if you like. He can help people who imagine 
 they are ill, and sit at home nursing their petty 
 spiritual ailments. But I envy the man who can 
 stop a real pain, a pain that makes the poor tor- 
 tured body scream out in agony, or the woman 
 who brings bread to the starving, or takes little 
 lonely frightened children and makes them happy. 
 They are doing the real useful work, the good 
 work." 
 
 " You have a work no less useful, no less real. 
 Believe me, that you would only waste your time 
 trying to do another's work. My work, for in- 
 stance, little as it is you could n't do it no 
 more than I could do yours." 
 
 "I should love to try." 
 
 "Would you like to live in a place like this? 
 Could you, even? Answer me candidly." 
 
 15 
 
226 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 " Surely I could do it, if you can. " 
 
 " No, that is not an answer. This is my work, 
 and in a true sense I would rather live here than 
 anywhere else ; that is, taking my nature all round, 
 this life gives it its fullest satisfaction." 
 
 The sound of the coffin-saw wailed on in the 
 distance. 
 
 "I 'm afraid, after all, I could n't," he said. 
 
 "But you needn't be unhappy about that," said 
 Sister Catherine, after a pause; "there must be 
 some men to look after the rose-gardens. 
 
 " You are in danger of laying too much stress 
 on self-sacrifice," she continued. "Some help 
 the world that way though there is much less 
 self-sacrifice, and far more self-indulgence, in 
 such work than you think of but others help 
 it by self -fulfilment. I mean that some help the 
 world by doing without, and others help it by en- 
 joying everything within their reach. Though, 
 indeed, doing without is for some natures a part 
 of self-fulfilment. Then again, you must remem- 
 ber that to relieve pain is not the only way of 
 making men and women happy. There is the 
 other way that of definitely adding to their joy. 
 The man who invented anaesthetics was indeed a 
 benefactor to the race, but the man who grows 
 roses in his country garden and sends them to 
 
Sister Catherine 227 
 
 a hospital is no less a friend of human suffering. 
 The poet who expresses the joy of life in a lyric, 
 or the philosopher who concentrates his vision 
 of the ultimate good of things in some bracing 
 essay, is surely doing the world's work, like any 
 other worker, and, because his work may seem 
 more easy and pleasant, he must not fall out with 
 it on that account. 
 
 "Yes! there must be some men to look after 
 the rose-gardens. That may be the gardener's 
 form of self-sacrifice to accept the burden of 
 enjoying and singing, while his heart all the 
 time cries out against his own security and yearns 
 to join the sufferers in the darkness outside his 
 gate. He will help them best by staying in his 
 garden and singing with a light heart among his 
 roses. So they too will walk in the garden." 
 
 "Ah, it is an easy way." 
 
 " Perhaps not so easy after all. Roses do not 
 grow of themselves. They need much care. 
 Have you thought of that thought how sweet 
 the soil must be kept, how the roses must be 
 pruned, and trained and protected from blight? 
 You speak of the unselfish care of doctors and 
 nurses, but believe me that a really beautiful 
 rose needs as much care as a wound." 
 
 Wasteneys' face grew a little sad. He had 
 neglected his rose-garden. 
 
228 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 " You had forgotten that ? " said Sister Cath- 
 erine, gently. 
 
 "I 'm afraid I had," he answered. 
 
 "Then think of the responsibility of the man 
 to whom a rose-garden has been given. How 
 careful he must be not to fail in his trust, not to 
 neglect his garden, not to allow it to lie idle and 
 devoured by weeds. But there is even a greater 
 danger than neglect. He may forget that the 
 garden was given to grow roses in, and, out of 
 the evil of his heart, just to indulge a dark fancy, 
 he may grow beautiful evil things in his garden, 
 poison-flowers instead of roses." 
 
 " Yes, he must be a good man the man who 
 grows the roses," said Wasteneys, with a sigh. 
 
 " He is, and will be, and he will grow more 
 wonderful roses than he has yet dreamed of." 
 
 " You really believe that ? " 
 
 "I do." 
 
 He seemed to hear an echo of Adeline's voice: 
 " But, of course, he is a real king in the end, he 
 must be a real king." 
 
 " Alas ! You don't know how he has neglected 
 the garden." 
 
 "Never mind, the gardener will work all the 
 harder for that. Perhaps he had to forget his 
 garden for a time that he might value it the more 
 when he came back to it. " 
 
Sister Catherine 229 
 
 " How good you are ! And how strangely you 
 understand." 
 
 " Hush ! . . . I am not good. I love roses, 
 and I am only making friends with the gardener. 
 Mind you bring me a rose, dear gardener, next 
 time you come to Jones's Rents." 
 
 So Sister Catherine contributed her share in 
 the saving of one more soul. 
 
 "How good women are!" he said to himself, 
 as he walked home, quite forgetting that he had 
 recently cursed them in St. James's Park. 
 
CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 VICTORY IN SIGHT 
 
 " IT" "W~ E must be good the man who grows 
 
 I 1 the roses ! " At all events, he must be 
 
 -^- -*- serious. He must take rose-growing 
 seriously. 
 
 Roses! He found himself humming: "I shall 
 never again be friends with roses," and then, 
 having, to speak the truth, forgotten it for many 
 days, he opened his manuscript volume and wrote 
 therein to this effect : 
 
 " World that once was a garden 
 
 Where is the Rose ? 
 Where has the Nightingale gone? 
 
 It has followed the Rose. 
 Where is the face that once lit, 
 
 Like a flower, at the Nightingale's song ? 
 Gone with the Rose and the Nightingale, 
 
 Gone with the song." 
 
 But, though he was rather pleased with these 
 lines, he realized that their sincerity, so to say, 
 was retrospective. He no longer felt quite like 
 that. Indeed, the world was once more becom- 
 
Victory in Sight 231 
 
 ing a garden. If the roses were scarcely budding 
 as yet, he realized that they were still alive. 
 The winter had not killed them, after all. And 
 if the roses came back, the nightingales must 
 follow. But what of 
 
 " the face that once lit, 
 Like a flower, at the Nightingale's song ? " 
 
 Well, who knows ! Perhaps he had been mis- 
 taken in thinking that the world held only one 
 beautiful face. 
 
 At the same time, Wasteneys well knew that 
 it was to no face that he was to owe his emanci- 
 pation, if that emancipation was ever to come 
 about. His imperious possession was to be cast 
 out by no rival possession. He knew that in any 
 strife of faces, there would never for him, as long 
 as he lived, be any face that would seem more 
 lovely than the face of Meriel. He could not, 
 would not, rob that face of its beauty; he was 
 determined only to rob it of its power over his 
 life. This he had willed, vaguely and brokenly 
 indeed; but, however feebly we will, if we will 
 really, good or bad powers of the air hasten to 
 help us and we have seen how Wasteneys was 
 being helped. He was being helped by the 
 reawakening in himself of divine forgotten in- 
 stincts, instincts that forbade him any longer 
 
232 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 to treat his life merely as his own; to use, or 
 waste, or give away, as he pleased. Larger laws 
 of his nature were reasserting themselves, to 
 which even Meriel must bow. Like some states- 
 man, who dare not wreck his country for a mis- 
 tress's smile, so Wasteneys slowly realized once 
 more his duties to his own soul. 
 
 He was a man, he was an artist, he was per- 
 haps an eternal spirit, liable to render an account 
 of his stewardship before the throne of some mys- 
 terious Lord of Life, who, having given all, had 
 surely a right to demand something in return. 
 
 One owed it even as a courtesy to the Divine 
 Unknown to make some little of this beautiful 
 gift of life. Yes ! Life was beautiful beauti- 
 ful, in spite of all. Of course, it was beautiful ! 
 It was the merest priggishness of pessimism to 
 deny it. 
 
 Life without Meriel ? Yes ! O, apostasy ! 
 life without Meriel ! 
 
 Thus it seemed in some moments that the 
 battle was ended; and the reader might well 
 imagine that this history might now make a con- 
 siderate conclusion on the spot. May the his- 
 torian remark, as an excuse for its necessary 
 continuation, that the hero is now evidently 
 enskying himself on very lofty pinnacles indeed, 
 
Victory in Sight 233 
 
 and that, therefore, as he is not yet quite at the 
 
 top, there may presently be well, a fall. It 
 
 is not anticipated that he will fall to the very 
 bottom of the precipice and yet, one can never 
 tell! 
 
CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 THE WATERS OF FORGETFULNESS 
 
 IN the matter of resolution much depends 
 upon your avoiding anything likely to break 
 down your resolution. If you possess the 
 portrait of some one that you don't want to love, 
 but do love keep it in a drawer ; if you have 
 a packet of letters locked away throw the key 
 into the river. If you have work to do, and a 
 bottle of old wine is likely to tempt you at dinner 
 don't let it be brought to table. We poor 
 human beings pride ourselves, amusingly, upon 
 what we call our free will, and yet there is per- 
 haps nothing in creation more at the mercy of 
 external influences than man. There is no im- 
 portant part of us that cannot be influenced by 
 powers, vegetable and mineral, of which every 
 village doctor knows the properties. Little herbs 
 that grow in the meadows can turn our brains, 
 can fill us with a fever of loving, or, with a little 
 yellow juice, stop forever the beat of our ambi- 
 tious hearts. The spirits that live in crystals 
 and the virtues that belong to soft-colored earths 
 are quick to brighten or deaden the soul; and, 
 
The Waters of Forgetfulness 235 
 
 indeed, all we are and do is actually the result 
 of the co-operation of innumerable and often 
 indefinable forces including the very humblest. 
 An extra cup of tea, a glass of wine too little, 
 or a forgotten pilule of energizing chemical, may 
 decide one's fate. There is nothing too humble 
 to be counted in that mysterious collaboration 
 called a human deed. If a man does during the 
 day what he sets out to do in the morning, he 
 does it only by rigid attention to those influences 
 which he has learnt to know can alone fulfil 
 what he is pleased to call his intention! If he 
 neglects, or attempts to substitute, one of them, 
 he jeopardizes his whole purpose. Let him look 
 into no unexpected eyes for a sudden face at a 
 corner may ruin all. Let him shut eyes and ears 
 to every sight and sound not in the day's reckon- 
 ing. Only so shall he escape alive at the day's 
 end into the arms of his purpose. 
 
 Nothing would be easier for a man who knew 
 his friend, and who was at the same time properly 
 skilled, to set himself to defeat any of his friend's 
 early-morning resolves by a clever arrangement 
 of distracting influences. A book left open at 
 a certain place, a song hummed at a given 
 moment, a drink a propos, a handkerchief faintly 
 scented with a past that you chance to know 
 of. 
 
236 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 What an art there is lying here as yet unformu- 
 lated, a terrible art and yet as capable of beau- 
 tiful, as of sinister, employment. As Wasteneys 
 looked back upon his history, he seemed to see 
 that the life which he had flattered himself had 
 been of his own strenuous making had actually 
 been as helpless as the unfolding of a flower. It 
 is true that we have just seen him deliberately 
 willing, and so far succeeding in, a certain course 
 of action. He had willed to be free of Meriel. 
 Actually, life, when it had first wrapped up his 
 various fateful characteristics in a little magical 
 seed, had never for a moment intended him to 
 be Meriel' s slave, except for so long as was nec- 
 essary for one of its unfolding processes. 
 
 But, of course, Wasteneys did n't know that. 
 That is where nature is at once so kind and 
 so unkind with us. She pretends, the Great 
 Mother, that, children-like, we are walking all 
 by ourselves, and we have no idea that she is 
 secretly supporting us, and directing our foot- 
 steps, all the time. 
 
 Will did Wasteneys say? Did he really flat- 
 ter himself that it was his will that had been help- 
 ing him in this battle? I suppose that sometimes 
 he did particularly as week after week went by 
 without his giving Meriel even a thought. So an 
 explosive will lie quiet for years, and one might 
 
The Waters of Forgetfulness 237 
 
 even come to the conclusion that it had lost its 
 explosive qualities, a harmless handful of black 
 dust. One might even try it with a match, secure 
 in its long idleness. Wise people don't ! Wise 
 people are so clever ! But, alas ! an unwise human 
 man, inclined to be happy that he (he !) is getting 
 the best of some powerful malign influence in his 
 life, is all too likely to gratify himself by putting 
 his security to the test. 
 
 It was weeks, indeed months, since Wasteneys 
 had unlocked that ebony shrine. He told himself 
 that he really did not care about looking at Meriel's 
 face any more, and there was a certain measure of 
 pure untroubled forgetfulness of that shrine before 
 which the candles had long been extinguished, 
 and the white roses withered. There were days 
 on which he forgot Meriel entirely which was 
 terrible. Sometimes when this forgetfulness was 
 brought home to him he thought he was very 
 unhappy, but, mixed with his unhappiness, was a 
 certain exultation at his growing power of resis- 
 tance. So out of sheer confidence he circled 
 round the explosive, and in one rash moment 
 decided that it was really no explosive at all. 
 Anyhow, he was eager to try the experiment, and 
 so, one night, radiant with self-reliance, he turned 
 the key in the Renaissance cabinet and looked 
 again at the face. 
 
238 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 His willy did -.we say ? He was willing now 
 with all his might, as he looked at Meriel but 
 he might as well have pitted his will against 
 chloroform as against Mend's face. What was all 
 this he had been thinking and saying to himself? 
 Anger, pride, religion, his duty towards the cosmic 
 scheme Heaven save us ! were all very well 
 for theoretical warfare; but, when Meriel herself 
 appeared on the field of battle, where were they? 
 Before that beauty, and the joy of beholding it, 
 will and duty and all such abstractions fell to 
 ashes. Here was his joy let him will or think 
 what he liked ; and though, thanks to the powers 
 unknown that were helping him, he was deter- 
 mined to win, none the less, he realized that it 
 was to be a negative victory a victory that his 
 immediate self would rather not have gained a 
 victory indeed that he must win for something in 
 himself which expressed itself to him rather as 
 duty than as joy. Meriel still remained for him 
 the one thing in life he wanted ! He was engaged 
 in delicately rearing other life instincts, with con- 
 siderable success ; but he could not truthfully say 
 that any one of them, or that they all together, 
 possessed any such vitality as his love for Meriel. 
 He must be a " King," and a King he would be, 
 but, without the love of Meriel, to be anything at 
 all seemed foolish and unprofitable. A child may 
 
The Waters of Forgetfulness 239 
 
 seriously feel that too much confectionery is bad 
 for it, and restrain its appetite accordingly, but it 
 is no use pretending that it prefers spelling, or 
 that, however successfully he may spell, whatever 
 school-crowns he may wear, spelling will ever take 
 the place of the surreptitious sweetmeat. Yet, as 
 childish habits of luxury have to be held in check, 
 if the child is to grow into the man ; so, it would 
 appear, the luxurious fancies of the grown-up 
 man and woman must be disregarded, if that man 
 or women has serious intentions of becoming an 
 angel. 
 
 Ah ! but such images are inadequate, perhaps 
 even disrespectful and yet, maybe, they are not 
 so inadequate after all, for there is nothing more 
 mysterious than the palate, and its various music. 
 There is, seriously speaking, no profounder mys- 
 tery presented to us than the taste and distaste 
 for olives. Heaven, as we remarked on an early 
 page of this book, is a personal matter on 
 which other people's criticism is irrelevant not 
 to speak of its being discourteous. 
 
 No, we do many things in this life that, when, with 
 no little effort, they are done, we are glad, even 
 proud, of; but which, personally, we would not 
 have chosen to do. We really wanted to do 
 something else, wanted to do it with all our hearts 
 but nature, taking no account of our personal 
 
240 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 wishes, intent only on her own plans, insisted on 
 our doing this beautiful " self-sacrificing " thing ! 
 
 Wasteneys was determined (so nature bade 
 him!) forcibly to banish Meriel from his life. 
 He still loved her must always love her, in a 
 sense yet he was determined to put an end to 
 her power. 
 
 But the agony of it ! As he looked at her face 
 again, it seemed as if these last months, with their 
 impressive resolutions, had meant nothing. His 
 longing for her was as keen and simple as at the 
 beginning. What were all these substitutes that 
 he had been carefully nurturing? In his heart he 
 knew that there was no duty or ambition that 
 could for a moment withstand one look of Meriel's 
 eyes. And as he realized this, the old longing 
 came over him to see her again, the old wild hope 
 possessed him. At last, maybe, she was a simple 
 human woman. After all, she was so young ! He 
 had not sufficiently remembered that. He saw 
 her once more in the strange morning light, in all 
 the bloom of her young womanhood. For him 
 she still remained " the miracle " the miracle 
 that only befalls once in a life for man or woman. 
 Other women might be beautiful and noble too, 
 might make far better wives than Meriel, but their 
 gifts and qualities were human, whereas Meriel 
 was superhuman. She was the miracle-woman in 
 
The Waters of Forgetfulness 241 
 
 Wasteneys' life, and in the mere thought of her 
 was all the wonder of the world. 
 
 " O, she is my joy my joy! " he cried, strug- 
 gling hard with memories and longings. He did 
 not know of Adeline's prayer : " O keep him good, 
 and give him his joy " a prayer about answer- 
 ing which nature had her own ideas. Yet, though 
 in the fierce fire of his longing all his newly- 
 gained strength seemed to melt like wax, enough 
 was left to make him determined to conquer. He 
 would not go back to Meriel, though his heart 
 broke with staying away. Could it be that she 
 was calling him again? Was all this suddenly 
 awakened pain the mysterious answer of his heart 
 to the far music of her violin ? 
 
 No, no ! He would not listen. Whatever it 
 cost him, he would forget. Forget ! he laughed 
 savagely as he fought with his longing like a 
 great coiling snake. Forget ! 
 
 It was in such a moment that he came upon 
 the gipsy's packet of forgetfulness, which he had 
 tossed into a drawer of his desk with an incredu- 
 lous smile. He smiled again as he rediscovered 
 it ; but, like some one in physical agony, he was in 
 the mood to try anything, however fantastic, that 
 promised to ease awhile the cruel aching of his 
 heart. He undid the packet. It was absurd and 
 yet who knows ? Besides, the white powder, 
 
 16 
 
242 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 the gipsy had said, was to be mixed in with wine. 
 The wine alone might help. He had heard men 
 talk of drowning their troubles in wine. Had he 
 not seen them doing it? ... and a thrill of horror 
 passed through him, at a memory of " Coleridge's " 
 old haunt. A more gracious memory intervened 
 in the verse of one who had professed much com- 
 fort in wine : 
 
 " And lately, by the Tavern Door agape, 
 Came shining through the Dusk an Angel Shape 
 
 Bearing a Vessel on his Shoulder ; and 
 He bid me taste of it ; and 't was the Grape ! " 
 
 Yes ! in all ages, there had been men who had 
 found peace in wine ah ! but what a peace ! 
 And what a cowardly running away ! Better the 
 pain a hundred times. No, no, no ! and yet 
 the pain ! O, Meriel ! 
 
 Cowardice or not O, the pain! he would 
 bear it no more : this unfathomable loneliness of 
 the heart. No one dreamed it cowardice to shelter 
 the bodily senses from pain with numbing drugs. 
 Why then should it be cowardly to seek an anaes- 
 thetic for the suffering of the soul? 
 
 So it was that, pulled this way and that, he at 
 last ended the struggle, and set his lips to the 
 waters of forgetfulness. 
 
CHAPTER XXX 
 
 ADELINE AS DEPUTY-MOTHER 
 
 SPRING had come again, and Adeline Wood 
 was sitting over some " mending " in her 
 sister's Surrey garden. It was a bright 
 April afternoon, suddenly warm as summer, and 
 near her her two young charges were playing in 
 the sun : Harold, a boy of four, already experi- 
 enced in the management of toy railways, and 
 the movements of large bodies of tin horse and 
 foot; and Agnes, a mysterious mite of sixteen 
 months, rapidly assimilating the various human 
 formulae, and already knowing a good deal more 
 than she was able to put into words. Words, 
 however, were coming fast, and one word she said 
 in a way that wrung poor Adeline's heart with a 
 joy that was half pain. It was the word " Auntie." 
 When she called " Aunt-ie," in her little childish 
 quaver, Adeline would pick her up and strain 
 her to her bosom with a passion that an obser- 
 vant eye might have found full of pathos. If 
 " Auntie " were so sweet, how wonderful it must 
 be to hear a little creature say " Mother " or 
 
244 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 " ' Mammy ' I suppose they say to real mothers," 
 Adeline surmised. 
 
 Along with the joy of her deputy motherhood, 
 Adeline was beginning to understand and antici- 
 pate the peculiar sorrow of nurses, of childless 
 women who give all their warm mother-love to 
 another woman's child, only in the sure irresistible 
 course of time to be torn from it, with a cold 
 check to heal their bleeding hearts. In a sense 
 the nurse's profession is a peculiarly tragic form of 
 prostitution. The nurse sells her mother-love for 
 money, as another woman sells her wifehood ; 
 both being the slaves of an unjust society. For 
 many months now Adeline had known the nurse's 
 joys. With a shiver, she realized that she was 
 soon to experience the nurse's sorrow, for her 
 sister was coming home and " I am sure," the 
 sister had written, " you are longing to be back at 
 your book-binding." 
 
 Book-binding ! How little mothers seem to 
 understand their blessedness how little under- 
 standing they seem to have of the hearts of child- 
 less ones whose ears are " filled with the murmur 
 of rocking cradles." How complacently the happy 
 married sister, with her home and her husband 
 and her children, regards the lot of her unmarried 
 sisters, and, with the best will in the world, con- 
 gratulates them on their book-binding ! One 
 
Adeline as Deputy-Mother 245 
 
 sister, maybe, is earning quite a big salary as a 
 high-school teacher, another perhaps is doing well 
 in an office and so on. How lucky for them! 
 " But you you," one can imagine the high-school 
 teacher, and the clerk, exclaiming in a moment of 
 feeling: " You are a mother! You have fulfilled 
 yourself as a woman. We have failed. We only 
 hang on to existence by doing man's work. Book- 
 binding ! High-school teaching ! Type-writing ! 
 Don't you understand that we were born to be 
 mothers? Mothers! Mothers!" 
 
 Yes ! Adeline's heart ached as she watched the 
 moment approaching when she would have to go 
 back to her book-binding. How dusty and lonely 
 that little work-room seemed in her thoughts for 
 all its Adams ceiling. There were moments when 
 she felt that she could even marry a stockbroker, 
 and settle down among " handsome " furniture in 
 some horrible suburban villa if only, if only, she 
 might have a little child, a little child, that no one 
 had the right to take from her. So distressingly 
 had Adeline retrograded from her early intellec- 
 tualism ; with one result, at least, that must be 
 noted she was all the prettier for it. The slight 
 suggestion of the woman's rights look had dis- 
 appeared from her face, which had also grown 
 rounder, owing to country air and regular meals. 
 Her eyes too were softer, and deep in them slum- 
 
246 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 bered a warm fire that had never been there before. 
 Poor Adeline ! Was it to be her fate quietly to 
 quench those fires, and by degrees put off her 
 nurse's apron and put on once more the whole 
 armor of bachelor womanhood; or would some 
 one come along to meet that fire with answering 
 fire, and would there some day leap out a little 
 white flame of love which she should shield in her 
 bosom from the winds of life. O, would the lover 
 come who should whisper : " To-day with the 
 rising of the sun, we shall make his blue eyes; 
 and at noon we shall lie together and make his 
 warm heart ; when evening comes we shall mould 
 his rich and secret mouth; " or: "Beloved, some- 
 day we will lie all moon-naked on the top of the 
 world, and from our lips shall rise an incense 
 which shall presently break into a little soft ascend- 
 ing star." 
 
 This afternoon her " mending " had been mo- 
 mentarily forgotten, and her eyes were bright 
 with such dreams, as a servant came across the 
 grass bearing a card upon a tray. She took it 
 up absently, then blushed with a great wave of 
 feeling. Wasteneys had taken it into his head to 
 run down and surprise her at her nursing. Was- 
 teneys had indeed been rather surprisingly the 
 sport of fancies and sudden impulse of late. This 
 was one of the good impulses. 
 
Adeline as Deputy-Mother 247 
 
 " O yes ! " she exclaimed, possibly betraying 
 her delight to the maid, " please ask Mr. Waste- 
 neys to come into the garden." 
 
 " Why ! how well you are looking ! " exclaimed 
 Wasteneys, with really something of surprise in 
 his voice, as they shook hands. 
 
 " You say it as if you had never seen me look 
 well before," she replied, blushing again, and not 
 without some inkling of what he had meant. He 
 meant: " How much prettier you look than I have 
 ever seen you look before and something else 
 too," but he answered : " Well, I don't think I 
 ever saw you look well quite in the same way 
 if the remark is not too stupid." 
 
 "Never mind me. But how are you? You 
 don't look too well, I 'm sorry to say. What 
 have you been doing with yourself? You look 
 tired." 
 
 And she looked anxiously into his face, but 
 seeing something there that she felt she ought not 
 to question, she took the opportunity of Agnes's 
 toppling approach to turn away and leave the 
 question unanswered. Agnes came up calling 
 "Aunt-ie" in her most heartbreaking way, and, 
 of course, had to be hugged on the spot. Then 
 she was introduced to Wasteneys, who, though he 
 lacked the violent arts of childish entertainment, 
 had a quiet way of attracting the childish atten- 
 
248 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 tion which would no doubt develop into more 
 articulate and formulated methods under practice. 
 At present his methods were very humble and 
 limited, but, such as they were, they sufficed soon 
 to win for him the shy friendship of both Agnes 
 and Harold. Harold, who was learning botany 
 as well as tin soldiers, presently asked his opinion 
 as to the name of a flower growing in the meadow, 
 with the result that all repaired thither, Agnes 
 enthroned on Wasteneys' shoulder, the sad man 
 having become a light-hearted " gee-gee " for the 
 occasion, a gee-gee urged across the meadow by 
 a spirited switch in the hands of Harold. The 
 flower duly found and named, Wasteneys took the 
 driver on to his other shoulder, and so all returned 
 to the lawn in triumph. 
 
 A nurse presently taking the children away, 
 Adeline and Wasteneys were left to their grown-up 
 interests though indeed the thoughts of neither 
 strayed very far from the children. Both secretly 
 desired to be again with the children, for the 
 children protected them from each other, saved 
 them from a self-revelation which each was desir- 
 ing, yet fearing. It was not till they were in the 
 nursery that they were real again. This was at 
 bed-time, when, Adeline explained, she was ex- 
 pected to sing certain little songs of her own 
 making which had attained a great nursery popu- 
 
Adeline as Deputy-Mother 249 
 
 larity. Wasteneys begged leave ta be present. 
 Poor Adeline ! It was too bad. Yet Wasteneys 
 begged hard, and then perhaps deep down in her 
 heart she was not unwilling that he should see 
 what a good mother she could make. Harold, 
 although four and a man, did not hold aloof 
 from this child's hour as might be expected, but 
 entered with great simplicity and gusto into the 
 revels. 
 
 The reader unfamiliar with their charm may wish 
 to be spared an account of these revels ; while the 
 reader whom happy nightly experiences have made 
 familiar with them will not need to be told. Be- 
 tween the two readers, the writer may conveniently 
 escape a difficult task. But he is of opinion that 
 no harm can be done from including one of 
 Adeline's little baby songs which have a rele- 
 vancy in this history in that they moved Wasteneys 
 as the very greatest poetry had long failed to do, 
 and filled his eyes with surreptitious, but not 
 wholly unrecorded, tears. 
 
 Here was Adeline's latest jingle for Agnes, and, 
 of course, it had a witching tune to it, also of 
 Adeline's making, which, had you been Agnes 
 or Wasteneys ! you would wish to go on for- 
 ever, and without which the words sound flat and 
 unmusical. It will be seen too that the lines lent 
 themselves to that literal farm-yard imitation which 
 
250 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 is the surest way. to a child's heart. (If you can 
 really crow like a cock, or grunt like a pig, your 
 fortune is made in any nursery.) But here is 
 Adeline's poem: 
 
 " O where has baby been to-day ! 
 And what has baby seen to-day ! 
 She saw the Moo-Cow, and she heard 
 The pretty little Dicky-Bird, 
 She heard the Cock-a-doodle-doo, 
 She heard the Pussy-Cat say ' Mew,' 
 She heard the Donkey say ' Hee-Haw ' 
 So much and more she heard and saw. 
 She also heard the Gee-Gee neigh 
 O baby, what a busy day ! " 
 
 Does the reader smile smile the smile of the 
 superior person at Adeline, for making such 
 nonsense, at Wasteneys for appreciating it (actually 
 with tears in his eyes !) and, most of all, at the 
 writer who records it? All the same, it is in such 
 nonsense that man is happy. 
 
 " O Lord, by these things men live, and in all 
 these things is the life of my spirit. . . ." 
 
 As Wasteneys watched Adeline, a voice in his 
 heart broke through the bonds of silence, and 
 insisted on being heard. 
 
 " Why ! I love her ! " he suddenly said to him- 
 self. " How good she is ! how beautiful ! " But 
 immediately a jailer voice within his soul was 
 
Adeline as Deputy-Mother 251 
 
 heard sternly commanding the escaped thought to 
 its prison : 
 
 " No, you do not. You love me only me. 
 There is no joy in life for you, except me." 
 
 So spake the Enthroned Superstition in his 
 soul but a thought that has once escaped into 
 utterance will escape again. After all, Nature is a 
 tremendous ally, and Nature had her plans for 
 these two people. It was not for nothing that the 
 voices of children were growing to seem sweeter 
 and sweeter in the ears of both. 
 
 " A mother of little human babes ! " Even when 
 Meriel had been by, Wasteneys had been conscious 
 of that deep need of his nature. Alas ! Meriel 
 could never be that for him and more and more 
 the mysterious Love of the Child was growing 
 within him. A few days ago, unobserved at his 
 windows, he had watched the village lads playing 
 cricket on the green. How he had loved their 
 gayety, their absurd exuberant antics, their prank- 
 ish inexhaustible vitality. Why had he suddenly 
 burst into tears as he watched them? Could it be 
 that he had no little son of his own? 
 
 Of course, the thought intellectually speak- 
 ing was absurd ; entirely against the dictates of 
 reason for who but a madman would desire to 
 bring into existence a being of voracious appetites 
 which can only be fed at one's own heart, a beak of 
 
252 The Love- Letters of the King 
 
 young needs that pecks vigorously at one's purse, 
 and, as soon as it develops a voice, fills the old 
 nest with its domineering notes heir to the 
 eternal illusion that the world was made for it, and 
 it alone? Yet, here again Nature tricks us. The 
 tragedy of motherhood has been the theme of 
 poets and philosophers since the beginning, and, 
 if all the world were wise, there would be no such 
 foolish thing as a mother and father to be found on 
 this planet. One can only hope that mothers and 
 fathers get some pleasure out of their parenthood. 
 Perhaps, after all, the pelican loves to give its own 
 blood to its young who can doubt it? and, if no 
 young come tapping at its breast, considers itself 
 a disappointed bird. This seems to be as good an 
 explanation as any other of the mysterious con- 
 tinuance of parents on this planet. 
 
 Before Wasteneys left to catch his town-train 
 that night, he asked, with a blush that might have 
 been Adeline's : 
 
 " Do you think I could could see them 
 asleep? " 
 
 O what a happy girl he was making Adeline ! 
 
 Yes ! He saw them asleep ; and, as Adeline 
 and he bent over Agnes's cot, and loved the 
 chubby little determined face, he said softly, half 
 to himself: 
 
 " So this is a little child ! A little child ! " 
 
Adeline as Deputy-Mother 253 
 
 " Yes ! a little child," echoed Adeline, " is n't it 
 wonderful?" 
 
 And then they" had looked at each other with 
 strange eyes, and held each other's hands a 
 moment over that sturdy little sleeper who no 
 doubt was dreaming of " gee-gees," or, if her sleep 
 were fortunate, of pigs. 
 
 An hour later, Adeline came and kissed them 
 softly. He had not kissed her, but he had kissed 
 them. So Adeline had become a perilously happy 
 girl. 
 
CHAPTER XXXI 
 
 IN WHICH MERIEL CALLS ONCE MORE 
 
 YES ! it was a perilous happiness for Adeline, 
 for, like most joys, it was made of hopes, 
 and waiting for Wasteneys at his rooms in 
 St. James's Street was a letter very dangerous for 
 those hopes. After all this silence, one more of 
 the old Commands ! 
 
 " Come to me. I am lonely;' ran the selfish little 
 note. 
 
 The mere sight of Meriel's handwriting always 
 made Wasteneys' heart beat as though it would 
 break, and indeed it beat now, but he was a little 
 surprised to notice that there was comparatively 
 little of the old joy in the beating. Indeed, the 
 main pulse of it was a curiously different feeling. 
 Elation there certainly was. He was glad, glad, of 
 this letter, but glad in a queer fierce way glad, 
 it might almost seem with anger. 
 
 " Yes ! I will come," he said, almost fiercely, 
 " be sure I will come." 
 
 I have said that for some time Wasteneys had 
 been subject to sudden fantastic impulses. Many 
 of them came to nothing, owing to a saving indo- 
 
Meriel Calls once More 255 
 
 lence of nature. A mere passing thought would 
 sometimes glow gigantically into a fully equipped 
 purpose, and then as suddenly fade back again 
 into nothingness. It mattered not how wild the 
 thought it was a serious matter for the moment. 
 In such a mood he had renewed once more his 
 intercourse with Daffodil Mendoza, under an amus- 
 ing impression that there was peace for him in her 
 arms : the simple elemental woman ! In such a 
 mood he had sought Sister Catherine and asked 
 her to marry him, glowing, as he was at the mo- 
 ment, with a dream of joint spiritual work together ; 
 a combined slum and rose-garden, one may sup- 
 pose ! Fortunately for both, Sister Catherine was 
 obliged to confess that her heart was elsewhere. 
 In her work? Well, not entirely. In such a mood 
 he had violently reopened the old love-story with 
 Myrtle, and received in exchange many letters of 
 great literary beauty. 
 
 These were the most harmless of his fancies, but 
 there were others which were less innocent, and 
 two especially which held him with a dark fas- 
 cination. He was growing more and more super- 
 stitious, he, who had once been a very prig of 
 rationalism ! and he found himself giving heed 
 to hints and indications, to dreams and omens and 
 warnings, which before he would have brushed 
 aside, or indeed never have remarked at all. Had 
 
256 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 the gipsy mingled madness in the drink she had 
 given him? Was it Death, after all, that waited 
 for him and for Her ! in the Waters of For- 
 getfulness ? 
 
 Death, for him and for her : that was the 
 thought that was more and more possessing him. 
 We have seen how he was impressed by that 
 strange paper of the Vivisection Novelist. Even 
 before that, once or twice, his unformulated resent- 
 ment had, so to say, vaguely fondled a revolver. 
 His reason had laughed him to scorn. Let him 
 make an end of his own life if he pleased. But 
 why should she lose hers merely because her 
 nature was different from his? The point of view 
 was preposterous. So said reason, but instinct 
 went on fondling the revolver. Presently instinct 
 even began to reason absurdly as instinct will. 
 She loved him. That she confessed. That is she 
 was his, and he was hers. Their lives were indis- 
 soluble. She belonged to him, as he to her. But 
 he was lord so said Nature. The man was the 
 ruler. His will must prevail. She loved him, and 
 yet she denied him her love, toyed with him, tor- 
 tured him, profaned and wasted the marvel that 
 life had given them, saw his life turned to dust for 
 her sake, yet felt no shame tried no way to help 
 it dreamed idly by the sea : an idle woman 
 needing the whip ! 
 
Meriel Calls once More 257 
 
 The whip ! She was too strong for that. No 
 small mortal whip would serve. There was only 
 one whip for her haughty spirit a sudden lash 
 of flame on her white breast. Then how good to 
 lash out his own life with the same white fire, and 
 lie all ended for both of them by her side. 
 The gipsy's words often came to his mind : " It is 
 a noble way." 
 
 This was the dream that was growing danger- 
 ously sweet for him, as day by day he drank of the 
 Waters of Forgetfulness. For a moment he had 
 forgotten it as he had stood with Adeline over the 
 cradle of that little child ; but, when he reached 
 home that night, nerve-worn with the various 
 emotions of the day, and found that letter O, 
 then the dream suddenly grew a giant again, and, 
 as Wasteneys took a deep draught of wine from a 
 tray that glittered in the waiting lamplight, he 
 laughed the laughter of one who feels that the 
 end is coming at length : sad or glad, what matter, 
 the end, and being the end, surely glad ! 
 
 He took out his little revolver from his desk, 
 and fondled it. He had been practising with it 
 of late, and two cartridges remained in it. These 
 he carefully drew. It must not go off by mistake. 
 No ! it must go off very deliberately. He even 
 dreamed that perhaps Meriel might consent to her 
 execution ; see that it was just, that it was best, 
 
 17 
 
258 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 that it was even the only happy way for both of 
 them. A sentence in one of her letters came to 
 his mind. It read like a prophecy : " The chill 
 of fairy fingers is on my heart the chill that 
 ends in death." 
 
 Replacing the revolver in his desk, he turned 
 to look for his Bradshaw. She wrote from some 
 inaccessible little place in Provence. 
 
 Provence ! It sounded like Myrtle ! Trouba- 
 dours, roses, old French ! Suppose Meriel after 
 all was only a more cunning form of Myrtle? 
 Had his deep simple feeling been fooled, after all, 
 by a woman's taste for the decorative in human 
 passion? 
 
 Such a woman would hardly be worthy of 
 death. And, yes, yes Meriel was worthy of 
 death. So Death decided on the ten train next 
 morning from Victoria. 
 
 Meanwhile, Adeline could not sleep for 
 dreaming. 
 
CHAPTER XXXII 
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY 
 
 THE making of a resolution is always 
 invigorating, but no resolution is so in- 
 vigorating as the resolution to make an 
 end, to come to conclusions with one's destiny. 
 When at last a man says, " I will stand it no 
 more, " and really means it, a great energy passes 
 into him, and with it a great peace. Wasteneys 
 had not been so happy for many months as he was 
 during his journey south. All the confusions of 
 his life were soon to be at an end, all the wander- 
 ings hither and thither, all the misleading hopes 
 and the misconceived endeavors. The power of 
 life to harm was soon to pass; soon he would 
 be beyond the control of any chance. 
 
 " Fear no more the heat o' the sun 
 
 Or the winter's furious rages. 
 Thou thy worldly task has done, 
 Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages." 
 
 His journey seemed one long ecstasy of fare- 
 well. Every mile he travelled was a good-by to 
 another mile of earth. It was strange to think he 
 
260 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 would never see London again, never see Paris, 
 never speed through these vineyards of Central 
 France any more as long as the world endured. 
 
 And for Meriel, too, was he not bringing the 
 gift of peace? For he knew that their love had 
 been a thing of pain for her also, a broken promise 
 of perfect things. If she had failed him, he no 
 less had failed her ; and yet neither could win free 
 of the uncompleted dream. Imperfect as it was, 
 it held too much beauty for any other dream to 
 take its place. There was only one way of bring- 
 ing it to an end, and in that moment of ending 
 perhaps the dream would grow suddenly perfect, 
 just for a strange moment before it went out 
 forever. 
 
 He wondered how it would all be, and involun- 
 tarily he pictured their meeting then suddenly 
 her fearful terror as she realized his mission. He 
 saw her look frantically this way and that as if to 
 escape, and then he saw all the wild beating of her 
 wings quietly subside beneath his firm eyes. She 
 had sometimes doubted his reality, the reality of 
 his love, now she would know that he was real 
 at last she would believe in his love, believe 
 that it was a passion no less transcendental, no less 
 free of the " little love "of earth, than her own. 
 
 So with unmoved purpose, and with the tran- 
 quillity of the sure end upon him, he slept peace- 
 
The Last Journey 261 
 
 fully through the last few hours of his journey, 
 opening dreamy eyes a moment upon a phan- 
 tasmal moonlit Avignon, and arriving at Marseilles 
 in a great calm of dawn. An hour or two later, 
 he found himself at the end of his journey in one 
 of the less frequented stations of the Riviera; 
 a little green shelf of white terraces looking through 
 palm trees out across the Mediterranean Sea. 
 Meriel was not here, but in a little rock village 
 of the hills half-a-dozen miles away, to which 
 this was the nearest point 
 
 It was still quite early in the day, so he was 
 glad to throw himself into bed and finish his 
 interrupted sleep. 
 
CHAPTER XXXIII 
 
 PHILOSOPHERS OF THE BUTTERFLY 
 
 LATER in the day, towards the end of 
 the afternoon, he was sitting in a little 
 cafe overlooking the sea. Near him two 
 middle-aged Englishmen were talking. No one 
 else was in the cafe. It was a small room 
 and Wasteneys was compelled to hear their 
 talk. 
 
 " I saw plenty of Cleopatra up on the golf 
 ground," said one of the two men. 
 
 " Any Thais ? " asked the other man. 
 
 "One or two." 
 
 They were not talking about women, but about 
 butterflies, as Wasteneys, an old entomologist, 
 realized. One of the men had a butterfly-net 
 and a specimen tin at his side. 
 
 Taking advantage presently of a friendly salu- 
 tation on the part of these botanists of the 
 air, Wasteneys, to show that he was free of 
 the mystery, hazarded an entomological re- 
 mark. 
 
 " Did you take any ' Aurore de Provence ' to- 
 
Philosophers of the Butterfly 263 
 
 day?" he asked, " I have an old affection for the 
 fly." 
 
 "Memories?" said one of the men, laughing 
 pleasantly. 
 
 " Yes, memories." 
 
 "Ah! butterflies are all memories. . . . What 
 do you say, Willis?" addressing his friend. 
 
 " Yes, yes ! " said the other, " anything to pass 
 the time. Some men take to politics, some to 
 butterflies. Butterflies are least trouble and 
 much prettier." 
 
 Then the man who had first spoken passed his 
 collecting tin to Wasteneys, inviting him to look at 
 his day's catch. The cork-lined tin was filled with 
 what at first sight seemed flowers, with pins for 
 stalks. Each pin held a separate species. Some 
 of the pins were crowded with rich wings, and 
 all were arranged with the exquisite neatness of 
 the collector. Here and there frail limbs twitched, 
 and a wing rose and sank again. But, for the 
 most part, the collector had been merciful, and 
 the cyanide bottle had previously put them beyond 
 the reach of any pain. 
 
 The talk then became a general comparing of 
 notes species, habitats and so forth and Waste- 
 neys' new acquaintance soon took up an attitude 
 of respect to him, as in forgotten cells of memory 
 long-slumbering knowledge re-awakened, and one 
 
264 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 butterfly after another came back to him, each 
 with its syllabled Latin name. As they talked, an 
 old boyish desire awoke within him, and involun- 
 tarily his hand reached out to the net resting on 
 the table. 
 
 " I declare, you make me long to go out for a 
 day on the hills myself," he said. 
 
 " Why not?" 
 
 " Well, for one thing, I have no net . . . and 
 besides I have no time." 
 
 His mind suddenly recalled him to his pur- 
 pose in being here at all. Think of a man on 
 such an errand going butterflying ! And yet 
 why not? Why not one boyish day in the open 
 air before the long night ? Nox est perpetua 
 una dormienda. 
 
 " As for the net and in fact anything you want 
 I shall be happy to lend them to you," said the 
 collector. 
 
 " But will you think me unsociable if I go 
 off alone?" asked Wasteneys. "Memories, you 
 know? " 
 
 "Of course not. No one hunts butterflies with- 
 out a serious cause. I take it that all butterfly 
 hunters chasseurs des papillons^ as they grandly 
 call us here are sad men, who make a profession 
 of trifles to hide. . . . O well, you evidently know 
 all about it. . Eh, Willis?" 
 
Philosophers of the Butterfly 265 
 
 " Quite so," answered, Willis, pouring out for 
 himself a further supply of brandy. 
 
 So it was settled, and with the morrow's morn 
 behold Wasteneys afoot, with butterfly net and 
 knapsack singing singing ! 
 
CHAPTER XXXIV 
 "AURORE DE PROVENCE" 
 
 WASTENEYS had awakened early to a 
 world of pure gold. A vast sunshine, 
 and the Mediterranean, veiled as yet 
 in mists of pale violet. Before his window lay a 
 rich plain, gardens in which this happy land was 
 growing the spring for the rest of Europe : " vio- 
 lettes en fairs saisons" palm trees, walls of 
 cypresses, and the sea. Behind rose dark hills, 
 terraced with olive-orchards, and swarthy with 
 forests of cork-oak ; but, hidden within their huge 
 arms, green valleys and running rivers and the 
 young vine. 
 
 Wasteneys' way lay among the hills, and, as he 
 mounted higher and higher, and the sea spread out 
 in broader spaces beneath him, his heart seemed 
 to rise with his ascending feet and his soul to grow 
 cleansed and free. Very strange is the influence 
 of height and great spaces on the soul. It would 
 sometimes seem as if one has only to climb high 
 enough and to stay there for all our earthly 
 
" Aurore de Provence" 267 
 
 imperfections and weaknesses to fall away. The 
 spirits evil and heavy that weight us down to earth 
 on the ordinary levels cannot breathe upon the 
 hills. It is impossible to think certain weary 
 thoughts at a certain altitude they belong so 
 exclusively to the low-lands, to narrow streets 
 and dark rooms of the town. 
 
 It was already summer in Provence. To open 
 a window or a door was to let in the breath of 
 roses like a tide of perfume, and the nightingales 
 were busy tuning their throats in the thick-leaved 
 gardens not yet the long violin-like calls, only 
 the first tentative chucklings, like bubbles rising 
 from still unfathomable seas. 
 
 As Wasteneys passed up the well-known hillside, 
 nature was playing once more the same divine tune 
 she had played when, a boy, he threaded the rocky 
 orchard paths ten years before. Not a note was 
 different ; and she might well be content with the 
 old music. The fig-trees, that had looked so lifeless 
 but a week or two ago, were suddenly holding out 
 large green hands. Cistus, white and red, was 
 feeding in great flocks at the morning sun at 
 first sight bringing one's heart into one's mouth, 
 so like was it to an English wild rose. Here and 
 there, among the underbush, neighbors of the 
 holly-like dwarf oaks, orchids, ivory and velvet 
 and dew, added to the general luxury; and 
 
268 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 among the stones the asphodel reared its steeples 
 of silver stars. 
 
 And here ! ah ! surely far from home was 
 an English hawthorn ! 
 
 Flying grasshoppers suddenly shot across into 
 the olives with a dry clatter of wings like dead 
 leaves, lizards rustled every few yards, and now 
 and again some innocent little snake would flash 
 in terrified loops into the grass. Humming-bird 
 hawk-moths flickered over the rocky places, and 
 here a scarabeus was rolling his circular house- 
 hold to some suitable burial place. Distinguished 
 butterflies, like tiny Japanese fans, came and went 
 swiftly on the breeze, or danced together in pairs 
 high up against the morning sky. 
 
 Presently Wasteneys made his first swoop with 
 his net. 
 
 " Charaxes lasius ! " he exclaimed the words 
 coming instantly to his lips, though he had not 
 used them for ten years. A large handsome fly, 
 not uncommon around there. Deftly taking it 
 from the net, he uncorked the cyanide bottle. 
 In a moment the lovely wings had grown weary, 
 and its butterfly joys and sorrows were at an end. 
 He thought of Meriel as he watched the fair 
 thing die for, curiously, it was to a great 
 sumptuous butterfly that he had compared her on 
 his first vision of her in that morning meadow. 
 
"Aurora de Provence" 269 
 
 Presently he lost sight of the sea, as the rocky 
 path, cresting the hill, turned inland into a world 
 of dark rolling hills, which at first sight prom- 
 ised nothing but the evergreen of the cork-oaks. 
 As one walked on, however, many a hidden grassy 
 place became revealed, and dingles of a more 
 spring-like green. Far away down in the very 
 heart of the hills the eye was suddenly gladdened 
 by what at the distance looked like an avenue of 
 fountains playing. It was a great lane of plane 
 trees just breaking into leaf, and, though the 
 house was yet hidden, Wasteneys knew that it 
 led to a large farmhouse which gathered in the 
 riches of one of the broad valleys opening out 
 among the hills. The wealth of that valley was 
 chiefly in its vines, and he remembered long ago 
 looking with awe into one of the great barns, 
 cool and dark and smelling of wine, where the 
 grape was stored in enormous vats and barrels. 
 A large genial old Frenchman, whom he had 
 thought of as the God Bacchus himself, had 
 come out as he peered in, and offered him a 
 draught of wine. He had seen it drawn from 
 one of the great barrels, and he remembered still 
 how good it had been, fresh and pure as though 
 it had just been drawn from the earth itself as 
 in fact it had. Wasteneys, another day, had 
 bought a whole litre bottle of it for forty cen- 
 
270 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 times. He wondered if the old man was still 
 there for it was upon him that he relied for the 
 jug of wine for his breakfast in the wilderness. 
 
 As he walked on, he felt as happy as a man 
 who has just come out of prison. The world 
 seemed as fresh as though it had been newly 
 created. Never even in his boyhood had he 
 taken more sheer simple joy in the sun and the 
 breeze and the woodland loneliness. In a dream 
 he wandered on, now on the path, and now drawn 
 away from it by some beckoning gleam of the 
 sun suddenly lighting up a distant flower, or by 
 one or another of the little flitting shapes he was 
 ostensibly hunting. Only entomologists would 
 be interested in an account of his captures, and 
 to himself they were chiefly interesting for their 
 power of reminiscence. Each species that he 
 was able to name brought back his boyhood the 
 more vividly, and he was surprised to find, in 
 spite of all the years, how easy it was to recap- 
 ture this old boyish satisfaction, how little his 
 intervening experience had impaired his zest in 
 these old rambles hand in hand with nature. He 
 was still the old nympholept who could fall into 
 a dream over an effect of sunshine, or listen by 
 the hour to the sound of water over stones. 
 
 Yes! it was a good world, and, after all, was 
 there any wound nature could not heal if only we 
 
"Aurore de Provence" 271 
 
 gave her time, and submitted ourselves more con- 
 stantly to the cleansing streams of sun and air 
 and flowing river? One could almost imagine 
 even physical wounds being healed by the mere 
 touch of this wonderful southern sun, the gentle 
 surgery of this golden inexhaustible god. Waste- 
 neys recalled with shame that nature had offered 
 him healing in just this way a year ago, for it 
 would soon be Easter again; and, meanwhile, 
 many other good and gentle influences had come 
 offering to make him whole. In spite of them 
 all, the wound was still open, so it seemed and 
 during this last winter he had fallen back upon 
 those paltry anodynes which he knew to be as 
 powerless as they were unworthy. He was dis- 
 appointed, disgusted, with himself, but evidently 
 the wound was one that could never be healed 
 or be healed only in one way. . . . 
 
 As his thoughts thus wandered into the shadows 
 a light little gleam called them back into the sun. 
 
 " Aurore de Provence!" exclaimed the stricken 
 
 lover, with his net suddenly alert and pursuing 
 
 -but his reverie had been indulged too long, 
 
 and the little speck of sun escaped the cyanide 
 
 for that day. 
 
 After three or four hours' wandering among 
 the hills, he came out suddenly at last upon the 
 avenue of plane trees and there, as if indeed 
 
272 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 his boyhood was determined to come back in 
 every particular, was old Bacchus standing in his 
 path, superintending the swarming of a hive of 
 bees which had taken a fancy to cluster in a 
 large velvety mass on one of the knobs of the 
 planes. It seemed to Wasteneys that the old 
 man looked exactly as he had last seen him, for 
 Bacchus had long been at one of those fortunate 
 ages when ten years make little perceptible 
 change in a face. He was still an old firm oak of 
 a man, and Wasteneys looked at him with envy 
 and some shame. So it was to have lived in 
 accord with nature, like a tree : one looked in 
 vain upon that handsome healthy old face for 
 traces of a mind diseased, or fancies of the heart. 
 This excellent old man had done his duty to the 
 universe like some mighty vegetable, that looks 
 not to the right or to the left, but just grows in 
 obedience to the cosmic order. So, though his 
 girth grew larger, no young tree in the forest 
 was more freshly or abundantly vernal than this 
 vast old man, who would certainly never die of 
 old age, but only because the woodman has de- 
 creed that no tree can go on growing forever. 
 
 So once more Wasteneys peered into the great 
 wine-smelling barns, and once more became the 
 possessor of a litre of the purple earth wine for 
 forty centimes. By this time it was close on 
 
" Aurore de Provence " 273 
 
 noon, and the knapsack was growing heavy on 
 the shoulder. It creaked pleasantly with its new 
 burden of the wine, and Wasteneys began to 
 look on grassy corners with an eye to breakfast. 
 Presently he came to the banks of a happy little 
 river, and, in a meadow thick with mauve anem- 
 ones, he sat him down with his back to a shelter- 
 ing tree, and the river running deep and clear at 
 his feet. As he unpacked his knapsack, he grew 
 trivial with elation : 
 
 "A Book of Verses /" he exclaimed, as he took 
 the first series of " Poems and Ballads " from his 
 knapsack. 
 
 " Underneath the Bough " a sycamore. 
 
 "A Loaf of Bread" a pati, French rolls, 
 Roquefort cheese and two oranges, with leaves 
 on them. 
 
 " A Jug of Wine " at forty centimes the jug. 
 
 "And . . ." 
 
 Wasteneys stopped a moment and then went on 
 laughing 
 
 " Ah ! Wilderness were Paradise enow. " 
 
 Indeed, it was a wilderness to which "Thou" 
 had been almost superfluous. It was a solitude 
 so satisfying that a companion would have been 
 an intrusion. 
 
 He spread out his meal neatly before him and 
 presently fell to with that appetite which is more 
 
274 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 than half our joy in earthly things. When the 
 meal was finished, he rolled himself a cigarette 
 and serenely contemplated the green world about 
 him, lost in a mighty satisfaction. Idly he had 
 picked up his Swinburne, read a verse or two of 
 " Felise," and idly let it slip from his hand again. 
 But some lines went on idly singing in his mind, 
 the words of the only English poet of our time 
 who has written words worthy to be set to music 
 by a running river. He said them over to him- 
 self dreamily, in no way accenting their applica- 
 tion to his own story, barely indeed conscious of 
 it, so deeply charmed was he by the various wood 
 magic, lulled by all the murmurs and perfumes 
 and flecks of light and shade: 
 
 " We played at bondsman and at queen, 
 
 But as the days change men change too ; 
 I find the gray sea's notes of green, 
 The green sea's fervent flakes of blue, 
 More fair than you. 
 
 " Your beauty is not over fair 
 
 Now in mine eyes, who am grown up wise. 
 The smell of flowers in all your hair 
 Allures not now ; no sigh replies 
 If your heart sighs." 
 
 And then, lying with half-closed eye-lids, just 
 aware of the murmur of the bees, like a golden 
 harp-string thrumming in the sun, he found him- 
 self saying to himself again and again : 
 
" Aurora de Provence " 275 
 
 " The sweetest name that ever love 
 Grew weary of." 
 
 Then he forgot all except the hot sun and the 
 warm scents and the river. Slowly as he watched 
 the river rippling at his feet, he became lost to 
 all except its freshness and its coolness and its 
 merry running. One by one his senses stole 
 away to bathe in the laughter of some miniature 
 rapids that made most of the music, and sud- 
 denly, almost before he realized what he was 
 doing, he found his body undressing and on its 
 way to join his spirit in the laughing water! 
 Merely to have said that he bathed, like any 
 other man or woman might, in a cool river on a 
 hot summer afternoon, would not be adequate to 
 the occasion, for this river of Provence may well 
 seem to have possessed unusual qualities. The 
 old love-doctor, it may be recalled, had written 
 of " a river in Greece " : " that if any Lover 
 washed himself in it, by a secret virtue of that 
 water, he was healed of Love's torments." Water 
 indeed, as he adds, " omni auro pretiosior. " Had 
 this river of Provence a similar occult property? 
 For, as Wasteneys lay in the rapids, with the 
 boisterous water streaming over him, conscious 
 only of its cool ecstasy, the green glory of sum- 
 mer, and the brilliant sky, which the river 
 seemed to have brought down blue and warm into 
 
276 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 his very arms, a marvellous contentment pos- 
 sessed him ; and with it came a terrible thought 
 that his soul dared at last to speak aloud. 
 
 " Why ! you are happy ! Happy ! " cried his soul. 
 
 The Enthroned Superstition frowned : 
 
 "You are not happy! you cannot be happy 
 away from me." 
 
 " You are happy can you deny it ? " reiterated 
 his soul. 
 
 A breath of hawthorn blew so sweetly across 
 from the river bank that it may be held to 
 have intoxicated him into making his amazing 
 reply: 
 
 "No! I cannot deny it," he said, suddenly 
 sitting up in the water. "I cannot deny it. I 
 will not deny it. I am happy quite happy. 
 Oh, what a fool I have been ! " 
 
 And then he gave a great laugh of pure joy, 
 and then another laugh of victory. 
 
 "It was all a beautiful disease," he said, "this 
 river has washed me whole. It was all a wilful 
 fancy. I see it now." 
 
 Once more he lay in the rushing water for 
 that moment a being in entire harmony with the 
 nature of which he was a part. 
 
 " How dare a man be unhappy," he said to him- 
 self, " while this sun shines, and this river flows, 
 and all these green leaves are his friends? " 
 
"Aurore de Provence" 277 
 
 In no human intercourse he had known had so 
 entire a satisfaction possessed him, and in his 
 consciousness of that satisfaction he realized that 
 the happy human life is that which is independ- 
 ent of any intermediate human being, and draws 
 its joy direct from the primal springs of being. 
 The man who really loves the sun and the stars, 
 the rivers of the water, and the rivers of the air 
 rippling the green leaves, needs no other friends, 
 and may well be indifferent to the kindness or 
 cruelty of the fairest woman. The great swim- 
 mer and the great climber know an ecstasy of 
 communion with the elements which dwarfs all 
 their sweetest human ties. And such are but 
 special examples of the great Earth-Passion, of 
 which the love of man for woman, or woman for 
 man, is but a function. All love of the individ- 
 ual, merely as the individual, is limitation; it is 
 only in the love of the whole that man finds the 
 true measure of himself and his joy. 
 
 " Oh, good, good, good world ! " he shouted to 
 the sun and the river; and then, spying his knap- 
 sack on the river side, he ran laughing up the 
 bank and took from it that absurd revolver! 
 
 From sheer glee of living and joy that he was 
 free, he emptied its six chambers into the sweet 
 sky. He felt glad that he had at hand so elo- 
 quent a means of expressing himself. Then, 
 
278 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 with a shout, h.e threw the revolver away from 
 him with all his might so that it fell in the 
 deepest part of the river. 
 
 Slowly returning to the necessity of a more 
 normal behavior, he took one last plunge in the 
 river and dressed. There was still some wine in 
 the bottle, and he drank jubilantly to the health 
 of the sun. Presently the joy rhythm in his 
 blood insisted on humming itself into words, 
 something after this fashion : 
 
 " All the loving ever done 
 Is not so sweet as the kiss o' the sun, 
 Nor a woman ever born 
 As good to look on as the morn. 
 Up, my soul, and let 's away 
 Over the hills at break of day, 
 Following whate'er befalls 
 Yonder fairy horn that calls, 
 Angel-blown in yonder star ; 
 Better far, O ! better far, 
 Better far than any girl, 
 Is the morning's face of pearl, 
 And the wind about our ears 
 The true music of the spheres, 
 And the running of the river 
 Good to listen to forever." 
 
 These lines prompted a final piece of boyish- 
 ness. The empty wine-bottle had suggested his 
 throwing it into the river and pelting it with 
 stones after the approved manner at picnics. 
 
"Aurore de Provence " 279 
 
 But he thought of something more to the point. 
 Taking a leaf from his pocket-book he copied out 
 the lines he had just written, and to them added 
 these lines, which he had once written in an 
 early mood of rebellion: 
 
 " I love her love no more. I would have died 
 For her least need, but of her cruel whims 
 I am no slave. Man is too much a god 
 To worship even a woman utterly. 
 This let one woman learn and one man teach. 
 A man is woman and a man besides, 
 A woman only woman." 
 
 Placing the poetry in the bottle, he secured the 
 cork and dropped the bottle carefully into the 
 main stream. Then, taking up the net, he went 
 his way back, singing his new song. 
 
 At the cabaret he found the two entomologists 
 at their afternoon drink. 
 
 "Any luck?" they asked. 
 
 "The very best," he answered, though he could 
 not explain further. 
 
 " But I wanted an ' Aurore de Provence, ' and 
 just missed one," he presently added. 
 
 "Accept one from me," said the entomologist, 
 turning to his collecting tin. 
 
 And so it comes about that a small case con- 
 taining a carefully set little butterfly has a place 
 of honor in Wasteneys' study. 
 
280 The Love-Letters of the King 
 
 No one but himself and Adeline knows what it 
 means. 
 
 Yes ! Adeline. For though Wasteneys had 
 realized that our deepest life is lived as units, 
 he had realized too that great aids to the full and 
 happy living of it are a woman who loves you, 
 and little children. To this too, as we have seen, 
 Nature, who had finally rescued him that spring 
 day, had long been leading him. Needless to 
 say, he had returned home without seeing Meriel, 
 and, a few days later, he was walking at evening 
 once more with Adeline in her Surrey garden. 
 The children's hour had once more drawn them 
 close to each other, and there was a great calm 
 in both their hearts. 
 
 "Adeline," said Wasteneys, presently, "if you 
 loved any one, would you wish them to be near 
 you, and would you be sorry when they were far 
 away? " 
 
 "Of course." 
 
 "And would you mind if they talked some- 
 times, and even told you that they loved you a 
 little oftener than strictly necessary?" 
 
 " Of course I would n't. What woman would ? 
 What a strange question ! " 
 
 "You 're quite sure? " 
 
 "Certain." 
 
" Aurore de Provence" 281 
 
 "And would you mind their growing old? 
 And would you fear that daily life together 
 would make each other's little imperfections 
 show too clear? " 
 
 " Of course not ; surely that is love. But why 
 do you ask ? " 
 
 "Well, because if you really feel like that, I 
 wish you would find it in your heart to love me." 
 
 "But . . ." 
 
 She looked up with solemn inquiry in her face. 
 
 "You mean the woman the king loved? " 
 
 "Yes!" 
 
 " She was not a woman. She was a beautiful 
 unearthly spirit not meant for human love. 
 The king has since learnt to love a real woman." 
 
 " Are you sure ? " 
 
 " Look at me. Do you doubt ? " 
 
 " Yes ! I think you love me, " said Ade- 
 line, looking long into his eyes. 
 
 And so it was that Adeline gave up her book- 
 binding. 
 
 THE END 
 
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