Chapter 2

I looked in the shops, and I stood beside the hawkers, and I listened to the sellers and gossiped with those who bought; but the noise, and the heat, and the dust that rose so thickly, were more than I had bargained for, and I felt lonely and disillusioned: so I very lamely turned my back on it all, and went away feeling that I should never find Her there.

Then I built for myself a study into which I gathered covetously the most perfect vintage of the human intellect--the ripest fruit our wise race has garnered during all the years it has been harvesting from time. And here I sat me down waiting for my Belovèd. She will surely show Her face to me here, said I.

The wind rattled the casement; the lamp-flame shook tremulously; and the fire burned cheerfully in the grotesque-tiled grate. I could hear the rain viciously swishing against the window-panes and gurgling unmelodiously through the gutters and from the pipes, but She whom I desired came not to keep me company.

For all the feast I have gathered for us, and for all the comfort I have secured for Her, She holds aloof, and I have never seen Her yet.

And sometimes now I fancy that possibly I may never see Her: but that one day, when I am lying in my coffin, She will press Her lips to mine--and I shall never know.

A PLEASANT ENTERTAINMENT.

"I HAVE here," said the Showman, "the most interesting entertainment to be witnessed on earth! Walk up! walk up, and judge for yourselves!" And with that he beat the drum and blew shrilly on the pipes.

The music travelled to the ears of his audience with a difference: or so it seemed to them, as they stood before the booth. Some heard in it, through the discordant hubbub of the fair, the rattle of vehicles and the tramp of feet in the busy thoroughfares of a great city; for others, it was the whistling of birds in the hedgerows; and to some, like the restless pulsations of the sea. To each, according to his memories and his mood. But the music of the Showman was a single tune for all.

"Walk up! walk up!" bawled the grey-coated Showman, blowing at the pipes and pounding on the drum.

"Darned if I wouldn't go in, if I had the brass!" quoth a lean, unshaven, shabby-looking man, who stood in front of the booth with his hands in his pockets.

"I'll stand treat, if you like!" cried a sunken-eyed young woman, whose cheap and much-bedraggled finery matched aptly enough with her wan and haggard countenance. It was the impulse of a moment, but she was the puppet of impulse and danced on the wires at the slightest touch of chance.

"Right you are!" cried the man.

And they mounted the steps together.

"It's like going up to the altar, isn't it?" giggled the woman to her companion.

"More like going up to the gallows," growled the man.

The Showman rattled the coins as he pocketed them, and flinging aside the canvas admitted them to the booth.

The interior was enveloped in a dim obscurity; hardly deep enough to be counted as darkness, but oppressive enough to slow the pulses of both. There was, however, at one end of the booth a large disc projected on the obscurity: a pale, empty, weirdly-lighted circle, which they stared at dumbly, with wonder in their eyes.

"Is this some darned fool's joke?" growled the man.

"Hush!" said the woman, "the entertainment has commenced."

And, true enough, the disc at which they had been staring had already a stirring, as of life, across its surface.

They were aware of a couple of enthralling faces fronting them side by side on the disc.

One was a woman's face, exquisitely beautiful, with soft blue eyes, full of the most charming gaiety, and with lips as sweetly winsome as a child's: the other was a man's face, proud and handsome, the mouth set firmly, the eyes full of thought.

"Such a face I had dreamed of as my own," sighed the woman.

"So I had imagined I might have been," mused the man.

And then the scenes on the disc began to wax and dwindle rapidly; like the momentary clinging, and as rapid vanishing, of breath across a mirror of polished steel.

There was a vague fluttering and interchange of images; an elusive, intangible influx of suggestions, and an equally dreamy efflux of the same.

A young girl growing into beautiful womanhood, well-dressed, shapely, sought eagerly in marriage, admired by the opposite sex, and envied by her own. Then a woman in the prime of her powers of enjoyment--with her charms undiminished and her wishes ripened--wedded, and successfully shaping her life: a woman blessed greatly, and very happy.

And side by side with these dream-fancies, or imaginings, went those of a young man facing the world gallantly; surmounting every obstacle easily, and conquering hearts as if by a spell. There was success for him in every scene on which he entered: he was proud and admired, and very haughty, and very rich.

Presently, as if through some dexterous sleight of hand, the pictures of his wooing blended waveringly and dimly with the pictures which emerged for the bedraggled woman who stood beside the loafer in front of the disc.

In the church, when the wedding-march was being played, and in the vignettes of domestic happiness that ensued, the faces and scenes mysteriously coalesced.

For the two spectators, who watched the shifting pictures breathlessly, there were no longer four figures in the scene, but only two.

"Some such future I had imagined for myself," the man muttered.

And the woman mused amazedly: "These were day-dreams of my own."

The disc became obscured, as if their eyes were blurred mistily.

The woman gulped down something: and the man clenched his teeth.

There was a sudden exquisite clarity in the pictures. They were looking at a cluster of white-washed cottages, with tall thatched roofs and with great stone chimneys: a lonely little hamlet drowsing in the sun. White-winged ducks were quacking in the roadway, a grey-coated donkey was grazing beside a hedge, and the threadlets of smoke, that mounted lazily above the roofs, rose up into a sky of the most exquisite purity, spacious, high, and cloudlessly blue. And again there was only one scene for them both.

"My God, that is where I was born!" groaned the man.

"That's my mother's cottage!" sobbed the woman, and wept aloud.

Then came rural scenes of almost every character, with a lad and a girl moving flittingly through them--laughing and kissing in the lanes among the brambles, drifting together everywhere, sweethearting through it all.

"Are you Nelly King, then?" asked the man, hoarsely.

"And you . . . you are Stephen Laity, are you not?"

"If we could both die here and now!" cried the man.

Then the pictures for a while grew blurred and confused, till presently they shewed the gas-lighted streets of London. . . .

"My God, I will see no more!" cried the girl. And she shudderingly held her hand before her eyes.

"Nor I, either!" cried the man, with an oath.

"However much you close your eyes," said the Showman, "you will cancel nothing of the pictures on the screen."

But they had turned and fled even while he was speaking.

"Even in the fair the pictures will pursue you!" said the stern-visaged Showman, following them with his eyes.

THE MAN WHO DESIRED TO BE A TREE.

THE sunshine streamed across the lush-grassed meadows, and beat fiercely down on the huge-limbed elms whose myriad leaves kept fluttering ceaselessly. In the dense green covert, formed by the multitude of interlacing branches, several wee brown songsters had built their nests, and they kept flitting to and fro and trilling joyously as the light breeze stirred the innumerable leaves.

The air was warm, and soft, and pleasant. The deep green arcades were cool and moist, full of the drowsy flutter that rippled through the branches, and full also of the deliciously delicate fragrance from the budding sprays and fresh green foliage. May was in the woodlands, shy and winsome; she had not yet shaken herself free from her day-dreams, and the wonder of her young hopes lingered about her still.

At the foot of a tree, reclining against its roots, lay a lean-visaged student, very shabbily dressed and with patches of thin grey hair around his temples. A volume of the _Faery Queen_ lay open beside him, but he had for some time ceased to pore over its pages, being engaged instead in chasing Fancy as she flitted hither and thither through the vast green woodland, dallying with the shadows and gossiping with the wind.

His mind's eye revelled in the picturesque suggestions that seemed to him, as he lay here with half-closed lids, to be fleetingly visible, as if in a dream. He was aware of beautiful damsels in gauzy draperies pantingly hurrying through the dusky avenues with steel-clad knights in hot pursuit; of grey old monks, cowled and sandalled, moving hither and thither in a world of utter peace; and of dryads and fairies, fauns and satyrs, filling the woodland with dreamy poetry, as the wind filled its giant rafters with music, and the brooks purled babblingly through the crevices of its floor.

How delightful it would be to be a denizen of the forest--to be this elm in whose shadow he was lying! he thought.

The huge tent-like shadow of the elm-tree deepened and widened with the dropping sun, and the shadows of other trees in the vicinity--dainty saplings and gnarled old foresters--fell across the nearer margin of the grass-land in fantastic, almost semi-human outlines: at least, so it seemed to the dreamy student, as he lay here watching the breeze ripple across the grass-blades and listened to the murmur of the forest at his back.

"I should like to be a tree," he sighed lazily and half aloud.

"Would you?" asked a voice from somewhere close to him.

It was a low, caressing, insinuating voice, with a strange seductiveness in its silvery intonation. And instead of feeling startled he felt a sudden wave of happiness, as if a beautiful female had breathed upon his cheek.

"Would you?" asked the voice, deliciously flattering him, "_would_ you like to be one of us indeed?"

A tree has a life void of trouble, he ruminated. The birds sing to it, and the wind caresses it, and it feels the sunshine, and greatens where it grows. Yes, I should like to be a tree indeed!

"Shall I grant your wish?" asked the voice whisperingly--how exquisitely sweet and soothing it was!--"shall I grant it here, and now?" it asked.

The student closed his eyes to leisurely consider; and then, half dreamily, answered, "Yes!"

To be a tree is to be in touch with Nature nakedly; to be stripped of the disguises that have gathered about the man, and to be thrown back blankly into the narrowest groove of life. The student felt the wind and the sun on his branches, and the birds sang joyously, nestling among his leaves; his feet were rooted in the fresh and wholesome earth, and the sap moved sluggishly in his rough-barked trunk.

It was a calm and deeply drowsy existence; but the restlessness of humanity was not yet eliminated from him, and he investigated his novel tenement wonderingly, and not without a touch of squeamish disgust.

But when the quiet night descended on him, and the cooling dews slid into his pores, the exquisite soothe of the darkness enveloped him, and to the rustling of his leaves he fell healthily asleep.

He was awakened presently by the gracious dawn, by the sweet and wholesome breath of morning, and the flash of the sunrise and the singing of birds. And had it not been for the dew-crumpled volume that now lay blotched and smirched at his feet, he would have forgotten his manhood and the unquiet life of cities and would have looked for his brothers only among the trees.

But so long as the volume lay there forlornly, so long he remembered, and had something to regret.

But the days passed--he could now keep no count of them--and human speech and human passions dropped away from his memory as quietly and painlessly as his own ripe leaves began presently to drop. And the tree's life narrowed to its narrow round of needs.

It sheltered the birds, and it took the wind's kisses gladly, and it caught the snows in the wrinkles and twists of its boughs; and the squirrel nested in it, and the wood-mouse nibbled at it; and its life sufficed it, answering its desires.

* * * * *

One day there swept a mighty storm across the forest: the thunder crashed and the lightning flashed continuously; and the whole land held its breath, listening to the uproar.

The Lord of the Forest was moving among his children: and some of them he passed without injuring or despoiling them; but others he smote wrathfully, so that he rent them and they died.

And when he came to the tree that had one-time been the student, he remembered, and desired to bestow on it a boon.

And he said to the elm, now gnarled and wrinkled, "You shall be a man again, if you earnestly desire it--a man again until you die."

The tree heard the great wind roaring among its brethren, and it was aware of the wee birds cowering among its boughs; and it remembered, as in a flash, the weary life of humanity, with hopes to befool it and despair for its reward: and it rustled its myriad leaves whispering mournfully, "Let me, O Master, remain as I am!"

And the Lord of the Forest was content, and passed on.

THE MAN WHO HAD SEEN.

ON the third day he recovered from the "trance" and regained consciousness, and took up the burden of his life as before.

But the revelation which had been vouchsafed to him had influenced him profoundly. He had now a new estimate of values and results. The centre of his mental life was permanently shifted, and a new bias had been given to his thoughts.

He went to the King, where he sat sunning himself in his palace.

"You are very rich," said the man to the King.

"God has so willed it, and I am grateful," said the King.

"You hope one day to see God face to face?"

"I _do_ hope so, fervently!" said the King, with unction.

"And if He questions you of your wealth you will express your gratitude and bow to Him, and God will accept the compliment and be content?"

The King was silent.

"You think He will ask no questions?" said the man. "He will not trouble to refer to His starving children, with whom you might reasonably have shared your superfluities; to the sick whom you might have succoured; or to the sorrowing whom you might have cheered? You had wealth, and were grateful for it: and you used it on yourself. And presently, when you are dead?" asked the man, more quietly. "If you sit beside the beggar who perished at your gates, what will you say to him if he should refer to matters such as these?"

"Sit beside a beggar!" cried the King, in high disdain.

"You forget it will be in heaven," said the man, gently.

"In heaven, of course, I shall be a king as I am here!"

"Oh, will you?" said the man: "I was not aware of that. I saw kings there performing the lowliest of services. And I saw many in hell: the majority of them were there." And therewith the man sighed heavily, as he mused.

The King turned his back on him: and they thrust him out at the gates.

* * * * *

The Archbishop was reading a novel by the fire.

"Your work, then, is ended, is it?" asked the man.

"Oh no! not by any means ended, I hope. I attended a drawing-room meeting at Lady Clack's yesterday," said the Archbishop, smiling benignantly on his questioner, "and this morning I have sanctioned proceedings against a vicar who for some time has been wavering heretically in his opinions. I think we can effectually silence him at last. Oh yes, I am extremely busy, I can assure you."

"There are no souls, then, to be saved?" said the man. "No lives to be reformed: and no mourners to be comforted? This side of your duties you have completed and closed?"

The Archbishop looked at him with extreme hauteur. "My dear sir, I leave these matters to my subordinates. I am here as an administrator, not as a minister."

"And you always choose the men best fitted to be ministers?"

"Of course. At any rate, I hope so," quoth the Archbishop.

"That young curate who has so successfully played the evangelist in Gorseshire--he will have one of your earliest nominations, then, no doubt?"

"Indeed, he will not! He has offended me deeply. Would you believe it? he wrote an article on me in one of the reviews, and he actually had the audacity, sir, to criticize me unfavourably! I will see that the man remains exactly where he is!"

"And when you by-and-by make your report to your Master, will you explain to Him your methods and your aims in this way? If so, do you think He will be satisfied with you? Your methods and His are at variance, surely? In heaven there are neither archbishops nor bishops, as such. If they pass the gates at all, it is merely as men who have done their duty. Do you think you will pass the gates on that score, your Grace?"

The Archbishop rang the bell sharply and abruptly.

"Please show this gentleman out!" said His Grace.

* * * * *

"So you persist in disowning your daughter?" asked the man, looking hard at the portly, pleasant-faced matron who was dandling her thirteenth infant on her knees. "You will show her no mercy, now she asks it at your hands?"

"She has disgraced me--I will never forgive her!" said the woman. "Let her starve with her brat. It will be well when they are dead."

"She has disgraced you, you say? But has she disgraced Nature? I thought it was Nature who was responsible for her sex and its instincts. She has obeyed the one and fulfilled the other. And they have been paramount considerations with you also, I perceive."

"Did she owe no duty, then, to her parents? Was I to count in her life merely as the soil to the plant?"

"In the scales of justice, as I saw them adjusted in heaven, the claim against the parents weighed the heaviest," said the man. "You suckled her at your breasts; but you brought her there to suckle. In your bringing her there, lies the onus of her claim."

"I tell you, she has disgraced me, and I will never forgive her!"

"_'Never'_ is a long day for a mortal. You will be judged yourself before you reach the end of it," said the man.

* * * * *

"Three months' imprisonment with hard labour," said the magistrate.

"For taking a loaf of bread when he was starving!" cried the man.

"Even so," said the magistrate, with his hands on his paunch.

"But surely this is a monstrous perversion of justice. Or, rather, let me call it a monstrous _in_justice!"

"The laws of the community must be respected," said the magistrate.

"Here is a man--alive by no fault of his own, and poor, even to starvation, through absolute want of work: and yet you begrudge him the necessaries of life! If he tries to commit suicide, you pillory and chastise him, and if he tries to keep life in him out of the superfluities of others, you pass on him this monstrous sentence!" cried the man. "Surely here is some fault in the structure of your society."

"It is the law of the community!" said the magistrate, pompously.

"And in what way is the law of the community so very sacred, that it should be counted of higher price than the life and welfare of a man? The law of the community may be a very pretty idol to play before, but in heaven it counts for nothing," said the quiet old man.

"This man is a pestilent fellow," said the community. "He troubles us overmuch with this vision that he has knowledge of. Come, let us kill him!"

And they smote him, and he died.

THE UNCHRISTENED CHILD.

"_Thee_ shaan't christen un, ef he's never christened!" said the father. "I've no faith in'ee: not a dinyun.[L] Go to Halifax to shoot gaanders: tha's all thee'rt fit for!"

"He'll suffer for it, both here and hereafter," said the parson.

"Doan't believe it!" said the man.

"Wherever he dies, whether on land or on water, he will become a creature of that element instead of going to his rest," said the parson, with an angry light in his eyes.

"Doan't believe it!" said the man: "an' thee doan't nayther."

The parson marched off, disdaining to reply.

The infant grew into a bright little lad, but there was always a certain oddity about him, and he saw and understood more than he ought.

One day he was out fishing with a companion, in a tiny punt they had borrowed for the purpose, when he leaned overboard too far and fell into the sea.

His little companion was so paralysed with terror that he could do nothing but set up a shrill screaming, clinging to the boat with both his hands.

Silas rose once--and twice--with wildly-pleading eyes: his mouth full of water: his hair plastered against his head: then sank; and a third time emerged just above the surface; so close to the boat that his companion, leaning over, could see him sinking down slowly into the crystalline depths, with his hands stretched up and the hair on his head tapering to a point like the flame of a candle.

"Silas! Silas!" the little lad shrieked.

But Silas sank down; and ever down: lower and lower beneath the translucent waters, the vast flood deepening its tint above him, till at last he was hopelessly buried out of sight.

When John Penberthy heard the terrible news he took the blow as a man might take a sentence of death--in grim silence, and with a sullen despair which nothing might henceforth banish or relieve. The roof-tree of his hopes was broken irretrievably, and he gazed down blankly at the ruin around his feet.

About three days after Silas was drowned, John was one afternoon out fishing for bait, and happened to be keeping rather close to the cliff-line, when he perceived a little seal emerge from a zawn[M] and come swimming, as with a settled purpose, towards the boat.

There was something so melancholy and so pathetically human in the soft, liquid eyes of the animal, that John felt his heart touched unaccountably.

Forgetting the line, which he was just about to draw in, he sat staring at the seal with a fixed intensity, as if he were looking in the familiar eyes of some one with whom he had a world of memories to interchange.

And, meanwhile, the seal swam straight up to him, till it was so close to the boat that he could touch it with his hand.

John leaned over and looked straight at the animal: fixing his eyes hungrily on the eyes of the seal.

"Why dedn'ee ha' me christened, faather?" asked the little seal, piteously.

"My God! are'ee Silas?" cried John, trembling violently.

"Iss, I'm Silas," said the little seal.

John stared aghast at the smooth brown head and the innocent eyes that watched him so pathetically.

"Why, I thought thee wert drownded, Silas!" he ejaculated.

"I caan't go to rest 'tell I'm christened," said the seal.

"How can us do it now?" asked the father, anxiously.

"Ef anywan who's christened wed change sauls weth me," said the seal, "then I cud go to rest right away."

"Thee shall ha' _my_ saul, Silas," said the father, tenderly.

"Wil'ee put thy mouth to mine an' braythe it into me, faather?"

"Iss, me dear, that I will!" said the father. "Rest thee shust have ef I can give it to'ee, Silas. Put thy haands or paws around me neck, wil'ee, soas?"

And John leaned over the side of the boat till his face touched that of the piteous little seal.

At that moment the boat--which for the last few minutes had been allowed to drift at the mercy of the tide, owing to John's pre-occupation--was caught among the irregular currents near a skerry, and John was suddenly jerked, or tilted, overboard, plunging into the waters with a sullen splash.

When he rose to the surface, with a deadly chill in him--the chill of his drear and imminent doom, even more than the grueing chill of the water--his first thought, even in that perilous moment, was of dear little Silas and the promise he had given to him, or, at least, the promise he had given to the seal.