Part 4

In this old house of Noctorum, which had been built by his ancestors and inhabited by Fantons ever since, lived studious old Sir Gilbert Fanton, Baronet, alone most of the year round with his gout and his books, and one beautiful daughter hardly yet a woman. A young wife, dead now many years, had left him with two sons, both soldiers, and therefore seldom at home, and one great-eyed little girl, who, far from finding the solitude of her life irksome, had taken kindly to it, and had more and more, year by year, seemed to embody the solemn beauty of her melancholy surroundings. Laleham had been a friend of young Christopher Fanton’s at Oxford, and had, several years before, come down to Noctorum with the young soldier in quest of the butterfly which was the legendary glory of the district.

Though Sir Gilbert was a much older man than himself, he had found in him a scholar with mystic tendencies similar to his own, and, when the sons had gone to the wars, Laleham continued to come down to visit the father, and incidentally to pursue the quest of his butterfly. Then he had taken a trip about the world, visiting the tropical haunts of his hobby, which had lasted so long that when again he returned to England it had been three years since he had visited his old friend. Besides, he had once more returned from his pilgrimage without that mystic butterfly which continued still to evade his persevering pursuit. In every part of the world he had sought it, but still, so far as he could hear, the one place in which it might be found was the marshes of Noctorum. So, thinking less of his quest than of his friend, he determined to run down and see what progress Sir Gilbert was making with his great book on the folk-lore of the fens--for fairies and hobgoblins were Sir Gilbert’s particular substitute for idleness. He found Sir Gilbert boyishly happy over his recent discovery of an indigenous and heretofore unrecorded variant of the story of Cupid and Psyche.

“Think of it!” exclaimed the old scholar, “here in this land of clods and pitchforks, uncouth in form indeed, but still the old dainty fancy, the old Greek fairy tale in homespun. Isn’t it strange how these frail shapes of story, frail as moonbeams, are still hardy enough to make their way from land to land, and take on the disguises of the peoples, rough or gentle, among which, like a thistledown, they happen to settle.”

“Yes!” answered Laleham smiling, “they are like the butterflies of the imagination--frail but indestructible.”

Sir Gilbert laughed at this reminder that there were other hobbies than his own.

“Forgive me,” he said, “I am afraid I am selfishly riding my own hobby; and in my Psyche, forgetting yours. Tell me about your Psyche.”

Laleham shook his head, and proceeded to tell of his varying fortune in foreign lands, and how he had come back with all the butterflies of the world, except the one butterfly. Sir Gilbert gave him the sympathy of a fellow collector.

“But surely,” he said, “you haven’t given up the chase--at your age.”

“Almost,” answered Laleham, “I am too old. The wildest enthusiasm--for butterflies--can hardly outlive thirty. I think I shall take up some serious study--like yours.”

Both the friends laughed, and Sir Gilbert said:

“But, seriously, I have heard of your butterfly having been seen within a mile or two from here no longer than a week ago. There were two fellows staying at the inn last month who called to see me, enthusiasts like yourself, and they were positive that they had seen it over by the Black Ditches--of course, you know the place. But they missed it, all the same.”

“The worst of the beast is,” said Laleham, “that you cannot be sure, so to say, that it is itself till you have it in your hand. The other brute is so like it.”

“Yet you were once sure enough, dear friend,” answered Sir Gilbert.

“True,” said Laleham sadly, “but who knows, I may have been wrong.”

“Anyhow, here you are,” said Sir Gilbert, “in the best season of the year. You never had a better opportunity. If you don’t catch your butterfly this time, you never will. This is your home, you know, and you know too that I shall treat you with no ceremony. You can go about your butterflies, and I shall go about my fairies, and if I seem to neglect you, Mariana will make up for me.”

Mariana entered at that moment, and stood by her father. When Laleham had last seen her hers were still those reluctant feet of maidenhood of which the great poet has sung. Now she was a woman; a very young woman, it is true, but a woman. That grave beauty of the melancholy fens, of which I have spoken as having “passed into her face,” was there now in a still more decided presence. Her hair was black as English hair seldom is, her skin was an exquisite olive, and her eyes were like those strange pools which flashed darkly in the evening light outside the library window. Her black eyelashes were so thick that you could not help thinking of them as rushes guarding the secrecies of the strange mirrors inside. And, not externally only did she seem the very embodiment of her surroundings, but her spirit seemed also to have absorbed their passionate silence. Perhaps no landscape says so little, and is yet so richly eloquent, as the elegiac landscape of a fen country. How beyond all speech is its silence, how beyond the shallow spectacular changes of showier natural effects is its solemn art of imperturbability. Mariana was strangely silent--but indeed not speechless. The lesson of the nature about her seemed to have entered into her whole being, the lesson that such silence must only be broken by very significant, very beautiful, words--as though silence were an exquisite unsullied sky only now and again to be interrupted by stars.

Laleham had observed her but little on his former visits, for, as I have said, she was hardly more than a child; and, besides, was it the cloud of his butterflies, or was it some other unforgotten face that veiled for him the faces of women, so that all these years he had passed unscathed through all the battalions of beautiful faces. Be that as it may, it was on the occasion of this visit that he saw the beauty of Mariana Fanton for the first time, and, as the days went by, he found that beauty making an even stronger appeal to his imagination, which, as always is the case with such natures as his, lay very near to his heart. As Sir Gilbert had ‘threatened,’ it was on Mariana that he had to rely for companionship on those days when he was not out alone with his net across the fens; for Sir Gilbert was so hard at work upon a paper for the Folk-Lore Society on his recent discovery that he could only spare his evenings for his friend. As his visit lengthened into weeks, the days he spent alone grew less, and the days he spent with Mariana grew more, and the butterfly remained uncaught. Sometimes Mariana would go hunting it with him, but oftener they would go out on long aimless walks together, saying little, but always coming nearer and nearer through that language of expressive silence which both had been born to speak and understand. When Mariana did speak, what a heavenly animation swept its sunlight over her face; but her silence, as someone has said of her, was like a sky full of stars.

Laleham’s stay at Noctorum was nearing its end. So far as his old friend was concerned, he could, of course, have stayed there forever.

“If I were you,” said Sir Gilbert, “I would not leave this place till I had caught it.”

“The continued presence of such a determined huntsman might frighten it from the district altogether,” answered Laleham. “I will use stratagem, let it rest in security a while, and come again.”

It was the hour after dinner when the friends usually smoked their pipes together, and Sir Gilbert was genuinely sorry to lose his friend, but the proofs of his pamphlet on Cupid and Psyche had just arrived by the evening post, and his fingers were itching to open them. Besides, Laleham was to be with them yet a day or two longer. Presently Sir Gilbert’s proofs became irresistible, and turning to his friend he said:

“Do you mind, old man, but I am just dying to look at these silly proofs of mine--pride of authorship, you know--suppose you look up Mariana--she is out there, I see, on the veranda--and talk astronomy to her for a few minutes. Then we can have a talk....”

“With all my heart,” said Laleham, laughing as he opened the door on to the starlit veranda, and left the old man to himself.

As Laleham took a chair by Mariana’s side, her recognition of his presence would have been imperceptible to anyone who did not understand her language of silence. Her eyes remained fixed on the stars, and he sat down near her without attempting even to join her reverie. He was well content to look at her and know that she was near. Presently, without turning her head, with her eyes still among the stars, she said in her curious deep sudden voice:

“You have not found your butterfly?”

“No.”

“Do you still hope to find it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever seen it?”

“Yes.”

“How often?”

“Twice.”

“Twice!” she exclaimed, at length turning and looking at him. “Twice! and you lost it both times....”

Before he could answer, she raised her hand to the stars. “Look!” she said. “I sometimes think that the soul is like a butterfly, and that it goes from star to star, as a butterfly goes from flower to flower....” then, with another of her sudden, and often disconcerting, transitions, she turned again to Laleham:

“Will you tell me about those times you saw your butterfly?” she said.

“It is an odd story,” Laleham began, “and I am afraid you may think me superstitious. But you mustn’t think that it accounts for my butterflies, for I have loved them, for some unexplained reason, since I was a boy....”

“Perhaps,” he added, “some tastes are prophetic;” and then he went on. “The first time I saw it was one morning about eight years ago. I was hunting it among country similar to this, and suddenly it rose out of a bed of reeds. It was so near me that I made sure it was mine, so sure that I was in no haste to strike with my net, but watched it and studied it a while, was quite carelessly certain of it in fact ... and then, just as I held my net ready to capture it, away it went on the wind, not quite out of sight, but always keeping a coquettish distance, near enough to lure me on, far enough away to escape....”

“It rather served you right for being so sure, didn’t it?” said Mariana.

“You see I was only a young butterfly-hunter then,” said Laleham, “I have learnt wisdom since.”

“Go on,” prompted Mariana.

“Well, it led me on in this way for quite two hours, till we came to the end of the wild country, and suddenly dropped down into a small village. You will laugh at what follows, though it had its sad side for me. We had come on the village at the end where there stands the parish church....”

“I know the village,” said Mariana, absently, as if she were saying nothing. Laleham shot a troubled look at her, but continued.

“The churchyard was filled with a throng of people gaily dressed as for a wedding. What should my butterfly do but dash amongst them, and I after it, for it was too precious to lose. Soaring over the heads of the crowd, it dashed for shelter into the church, and I again after it, forgetting all but my butterfly--and there were two young people kneeling at the altar. My abrupt entrance naturally made a sensation which brought me to myself, and, dropping on my knees in a pew, I watched my butterfly flicker up the aisle till it settled itself on the clasped hands of the kneeling bride. In surprise, she turned her head, and....”

“Well?”

“I saw her face.”

“And the butterfly?”

“Escaped by the belfry.”

“Quite a fairy tale,” said Mariana, after a pause. “Now tell me about the second time you saw your butterfly.”

“I hardly care to speak of it, Mariana--unless you care very much to hear.”

“Would you rather not speak of it?”

“I would speak of it to no one but you.”

“Do you wish to speak?”

“I do. Do you wish me to speak?”

“Yes, speak of it--to me,” said Mariana gently.

“It is a very short story, Mariana--almost the same, excepting the end; for, three years afterwards, once more my butterfly rose out of the reeds in almost exactly the same spot, and once more it coquetted with me for miles, and once more it dashed into that little churchyard ... but this time it did not vanish into the church, but went from grave to grave, as you say the soul perhaps wanders from star to star, and presently it stopped at one of the graves. I thought that now it was surely mine, and raised my net to strike, but, as I did so, I read a name upon a stone....”

In the darkness Mariana reached out her hand and took Laleham’s, and, after a silence, she said:

“I know the grave,” and, after another silence, she said:

“I have heard that she was very beautiful.”

Then the two sat on, saying no more in the starlight, and all the while, though neither knew of it till they returned to the library lamps, a little blue butterfly had been hiding in Mariana’s hair.

MY CASTLE IN SPAIN

Perhaps the dream which a man gives up hardest is that of his ideal home, the dream-house builded just as he and Love would build it to dwell in together--had he and Love the money!--the dream-house which in every sensitive particular would be the appropriate habitation of his spirit; in short his castle-in-Spain. Castles in Spain are not necessarily expensive. A cottage in Spain is just as good as a castle if you think so; and if you know the secret you can make a castle in Spain out of one-room-and-bath in a New York apartment house. I myself have never done it. I have never been happy enough for that.

No, I am afraid I should need money for my castle-in Spain. It would cost a fortune to build and many fortunes to run. For it would be a real castle, and real castles have always been expensive, even in feudal days when labour was somewhat cheaper than it is now. I want no cloud-castle built of moonbeams and rainbows for me and Love to dwell in, but a real earth-castle like that of an old French troubadour, with walls 34 feet thick--to keep Love safe from other troubadours--a donjon 190 feet high and 100 feet in diameter, and other massive visible particulars. I see no reason why it should not be literally situated in Spain somewhere at the eastern end of the Pyrenees, but I confess a softness for Provence, perhaps on account of the name. A situation almost equally Spanish might be found for it there on a toppling crag, somewhere up among those strange rock villages of the Maritime Alps, filled with Moorish ghosts, in the nearness all chasms and parched shadows and the thirsty sun, in the distance forests of cork-oak, silhouettes of eucalyptus and cypress. Then olives and olives and the Mediterranean Sea.

I choose Provence because the situation of one’s castle-in-Spain is almost more important than the castle itself. Environment and association count for so much in the matter of one’s dream-house. You may build the most wonderful castle-in-Spain, but it will go for nothing, seem indeed almost ridiculous, a parody, if you build it in some absurdly wrong place. No offence to Omaha, no offence to Liverpool, no offence to Glasgow--but the most beautiful castle-in-Spain would be wasted in any one of those animated capitals of industry. As the setting of a jewel is hardly less important than the jewel itself, so is the situation of one’s castle-in-Spain. Stonehenge or Westminster Abbey would be as much at home transported, numbered stone by stone, to Herald Square or Michigan Avenue--and American capital has dreamed some such dream--as one’s castle-in-Spain built in any one of those, or such, cities as I have mentioned.

As Keats has written:

“.... the trees That whisper round a temple become soon Dear as the temple’s self.”

One indeed might add that without the trees there is no temple. I use trees here as symbolic of environment, but, literally speaking, it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of trees to one’s castle-in-Spain. Ancient trees have always brought distinction to their possessors. It is the old park and the avenues--the setting--that give many an English house its imposing significance. To cut down the trees would be like shaving the head of a beautiful woman.

So my castle-in-Spain must be almost lost amid miles of mysterious trees, surrounded on every side by haunted forests, the home of wood-demons and the wild boar and the hunting horn and the bearded robber and the maiden in distress; and, like lanes of silver trumpets, six avenues of lime-trees shall sweep up to its six drawbridges in the air.

Of course my castle would be fortified against a world which would naturally wish to rob me of my happiness. It would be armed to the teeth with quick-firing guns of the latest pattern, and these would be manned by Japanese gunners of the quaintest size and shape. I may say--in parenthesis--that my valets would not be Japanese, but English. Each nation has its own special gift to give us, and England still remains famous for its valets. I should need volumes in folio adequately to describe my castle-in-Spain, and at least three of them would be needed to tell about my garden. Ah, what a garden there would be in my castle-in-Spain! Perhaps, aside from other fancies which I should expect to indulge, there would only be three on which I would really set my heart:

(1) A garden. (2) A library. (3) A private chapel.

I should not hope, nor even could I wish, to be original in my garden; for man’s early desire of gardens had developed into a learned convoluted art even before Solomon wrote:

“A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. My plants are an orchard of pomegranate, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard, spikenard with saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices: A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon. Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.”

My garden would, first of all, be made of dew; next of grass, and then of very old trees. Oak-trees, poplars and beeches, would dominate my garden; and, as for the other trees, they would all be trees of veritably _living_ green--chestnuts and sycamores and willows. There would be no so-called _ever_-greens in my garden, trees that are ever-green because they are never-green--except one: the only ever-green tree in my garden would be the laurel. Nothing but freshness and sap and leafage of transparent emerald would be trees in my garden; and the flowers of my garden would be all spring and summer: snowdrop, crocus and daffodil; violet, rose and honeysuckle. There would be no autumn in my garden. September with its paper flowers, chrysanthemum and dahlia, and all its knife-scented funereal blooms, must not walk in my garden; nor shall the white feet of winter tread down my shining lawns.

Here are but, so to say, the first principles of my garden. As I said, it would take volumes in folio adequately to tell about my garden. But this much further I may say: that among the many divisions and sub-divisions of my garden, there would be three. First there would be my star-garden. In this would be planted flowers that bloom only under the influence of the stars; flowers that open at the setting of the moon, and close with the rising of the morning star. For these flowers I should build a high hanging garden, dizzily thrust up into the morning sky, on the summit of some cloud-encircled turret of my castle. The flowers in this garden would be whiter than snow and purer than my first love.

Then there would be my sun-garden. In this would be planted the warm-breathed, earth-coloured flowers, the yellow and scarlet flowers, the purple and saffron, the orange and crimson, all the hot and savage flowers of the sun.

And, again, there would be my moon-garden, a subterranean realm of pale leaves and ghostly flowers, a dim garden of excavated terraces descending beneath the dungeoned foundations of my castle, irrigated from its green-mantled moat, and fed through slanting shafts of hollowed stone--with the surreptitious light of the moon.

I should allow but few birds in my garden. The eagle should nest, if it would, on some crag-like corner of my battlements, and the hawk would be welcome to soar and swoop about my towers. But I would have no nightingales in my gardens, those birds of make-believe melodious song, those posturing troubadours of the air. Only the simple sincere-throated birds should sing in my garden: the thrush and the black-bird and the robin; the starling with his simple-minded whistle, the curlew with his lost broken-hearted call; and, at twilight, the nightjar should make his rugged music amid the fern. And the swallow and the sparrow should be made welcome in every corner of my dominions. Generally, I should encourage the quiet birds, the working, building, fighting birds, the birds that sing no more than is necessary, or natural.

Everywhere in my garden shall be heard the sound of running water, brooks making their way unseen under secret boughs, and fountains whispering to themselves on solitary lawns. There shall be such a rustle of fresh boughs in my garden, and such a ripple of streams, that you shall hardly be able to tell whether the leaves or the brooks are talking. Also there shall be pools hidden away in sanctuaries of the garden, pools sacred with water-lilies, and visited only of the dragon-fly and the lonely bee.

And there shall be other ponds in my garden, green mossy ponds as old as the foundations of my castle, fish-ponds, the ancestral home of monastic carp, strange ancient fish with wise ugly faces, and gold collars round their necks, telling how some old king caught them and threw them back again into the pond two hundred years ago.

My library would, first of all, be vast and multitudinous, a mysterious collection of books without beginning and without end, a romantic infinitude of learning and fragrance of old leather. It should go uncatalogued as the wilderness. No human index in the form of a librarian should tame it into prim classification. It should grow wild as the virgin forest, and unlooked-for adventures of the soul should lie in ambush in every alcove and lonely backwater of its haunted shelves. No less than a thousand rooms, big and little, winding in and out, wandering here and there, would be needed to contain it. There are many book-lovers who will hardly understand this Gargantuan passion for a huge library. A small and sensitively chosen collection of books is their ideal. For me, however, a few books are no more a library than a few trees are a forest, or a few gallons of water an ocean. A library is the firmament of the soul, and each particular star gains in significance from being a shining unit in all that celestial mystery.

While I should aim to have a library coextensive with the mental history of humanity, from the clay books of Babylon to the latest French novel, the learned rooms I should oftenest loiter in would be those rainbowed with the gold and purple of monkish manuscripts, the rooms mysterious with grimoires and herbals and ancient treatises on the occult sciences, the rooms of black-letter and the types of Aldus and those other first printers through whose magic Virgil and Catullus and Horace rose again from the grave. And I would have my library built with innumerable secret chambers and sliding panels and hidden passages--so that, whenever it was my desire, I could shut myself up with a favourite author for a week at a time, and domestic search for me be quite in vain.

My chapel will need few words. It would be merely a crucifix, silence, and sunlight.