Part 5

“That I am of smirched repute, madam, I lack both grounds and inclination to deny. Yet I am not so through choice. Believe me, I am innately of wellnigh ducal disposition; and by preference, an ill name is as obnoxious to me as—shall we say?—soiled linen or a coat of last year’s cut. But then, _que voulez-vous?_ as our lively neighbors observe. Squeamishness was never yet bred in an empty pocket; and I am thus compelled to the commission of divers profitable peccadilloes, once in a blue moon, by the dictates of that same haphazard chance which to-night has pressed me into the service of innocence and virtue.”

She kept silence; and he went on in lightheaded wonder as to what this dream, so plainly recognized as such, was all about, and as to whence came the words which sprang so nimbly to his lips, and as to what was the cause of his great wistful sorrow. Perhaps if he listened very attentively to what he was saying, he might find out.

“You do not answer, madam. Yet think a little. I am a notorious rogue: the circumstance is conceded. But do you think I have selfishly become so in quest of amusement? Nay, I can assure you that Newgate, the wigged judge, the jolting cart, the gallows, is no pleasant dream o’ nights. But what choice had I? Cast forth to the gutter’s miring in the susceptible years of infancy, a girl of the town’s byblow, what choice had I, in heaven’s name? If I may not live as I would, I must live as I may; in emperors and parsons and sewer-diggers and cheese-mites that claim is equally allowed.”

“You are a thief?” she asked, pensively.

“Let us put it, rather, that I have proved in life’s hard school an indifferent Latinist, by occasionally confounding _meum_ with _tuum_.”

“A murderer?”

“Something of the sort might be my description in puritanic mouths. You know at least what happened at The Cat and Hautbois.”

(“_But what in the world had happened there?_” Kennaston wondered.)

“And yet—” The sweet voice marveled.

“And yet I have saved you from Lord Umfraville? Ah, madam, Providence labors with quaint instruments, dilapidating Troy by means of a wood rocking-horse, and loosing sin into the universe through a half-eaten apple. Nay, I repeat, I am not all base; and I have read somewhere that those who are in honor wholly shipwrecked will yet very often cling desperately to one stray spar of virtue.”

He could tell her hand had raised to the knocker on the closed door. “Mr. Vanringham, will you answer me a question?”

“A thousand. (_So I am Vanringham._”)

“I have not knocked. I possess, as you know, a considerable fortune in my own right. It would be easy for a strong man—and, sure, your shoulders are prodigiously broad, Mr. Cut-throat!—very easy for him to stifle my cries and carry me away, even now. And then, to preserve my honor, I would have no choice save to marry that broad-shouldered man. Is this not truth?”

“It is the goddess herself, newly stolen from her well. _O dea certé!_”

“I am not absolutely hideous, either?” she queried, absent-mindedly.

“Dame Venus,” Kennaston observed, “may have made a similar demand of the waves at Cythera when she first rose among their billows: and I doubt not that the white foaming waters, amorously clutching at her far whiter feet, laughed and murmured the answer I would give did I not know your question was put in a spirit of mockery.”

“And yet—” she re-began.

“And yet, I resist all these temptations? Frankly, had you been in my eyes less desirable, madam, you would not have reached home thus uneventfully; for a rich marriage is the only chance adapted to repair my tattered fortunes; and the devil is cunning to avail himself of our flesh’s frailty. Had you been the fat widow of some City knight, I would have played my lord of Umfraville’s part, upon my pettier scale. Or, had I esteemed it possible for me to have done with my old life, I would have essayed to devote a cleaner existence to your service and worship. Indeed, indeed, I speak the truth, however jestingly!” he said, with sudden wildness. “But what would you have? I would not entrust your fan, much less your happiness, to the keeping of a creature so untrustworthy as I know myself to be. In fine, I look upon you, madam, in such a rapture of veneration and tenderness and joy and heartbreaking yearning, that it is necessary I get very tipsy to-night, and strive to forget that I, too, might have lived cleanlily.”

And Kennaston, as he spoke thus, engulfed in darkness, knew it was a noble sorrow which possessed him—a stingless wistful sorrow such as is aroused by the unfolding of a well-acted tragedy or the progress of a lofty music. This ruffian longing, quite hopelessly, to be made clean again, so worshipful of his loved lady’s purity and loveliness, and knowing loveliness and purity to be forever unattainable in his mean life, was Felix Kennaston, somehow.... What was it Maugis d’Aigremont had said?—“I have been guilty of many wickednesses, I have held much filthy traffic such as my soul loathed; and yet, I swear to you, I seem to myself to be still the boy who once was I.” Kennaston understood now, for the first time with deep reality, what his puppet had meant; and how a man’s deeds in the flesh may travesty the man himself.

But the door opened. Confusedly Kennaston was aware of brilliantly-lighted rooms beyond, of the chatter of gay people, of thin tinkling music, and, more immediately, of two lackeys, much be-powdered as to their heads, and stately in new liveries of blue-and-silver. Confusedly he noted these things, for the woman had paused in the bright doorway, and all the loveliness of Ettarre was visible now to him, and she had given a delighted cry of recognition.

“La, it is Horvendile! and we are having the same dream again!”

This much he heard and saw as her hand went out gladly toward him. Then as she touched him the universe seemed to fold about Felix Kennaston, just as a hand closes, and he was sitting at the writing-table in the library, with a gleaming scrap of metal before him.

* * * * *

He sat thus for a long while.

“I can make nothing of all this. I remember of course that I saw Muriel Allardyce stand very much like that, in the doorway of the Royal Hotel, at the Green Chalybeate—and how many years ago, good Lord!... And equally of course the most plausible explanation is that I am losing my wits. Or, else, it may be that I am playing blindfold with perilous matters. Felix Kennaston, my friend, the safest plan—the one assuredly safe plan for you—would be to throw away this devil’s toy, and forget it completely.... And, I will, too—the very first thing to-morrow morning—or after I have had a few days to think it over, any way....”

But even as he made this compact it was without much lively faith in his promises.

_Book Third_

══════════════════════

“Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again! For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of long day.

“Come, as thou cam’st a thousand times, A messenger from lovelier climes, To smile on our drear world, and be As kind to others as to me!”

══════════════════════

I

They Come to a High Place

HE was looking down at the most repulsive old woman he had ever seen. Hers was the abhorrent fatness of a spider; her flesh appeared to have the coloring and consistency of dough. She sat upon the stone pavement, knitting; her eyes, which raised to his unblinkingly, were black, secretive, and impersonally malevolent; and her jaws stirred without ceasing, in a loose chewing motion, so that the white hairs, rooted in the big mole on her chin, twitched and glittered in the sunlight.

“But one does not pay on entering,” she was saying. “One pays as one goes out. It is the rule.”

“And what do you knit, mother?” Kennaston asked her.

“Eh, I shall never know until God’s funeral is preached,” the old woman said. “I only know it is forbidden me to stop.”

So he went past her, aware that through some nameless grace the girl whom he had twice seen in dreams awaited him there, and that the girl’s face was the face of Ettarre. She stood by a stone balustrade, upon which squatted tall stone monsters—weird and haphazard collocations, as touched anatomy, of bird and brute and fiend—and she in common with these hobgoblins looked down upon a widespread comely city. The time was a bright and windy morning in spring; and the sky, unclouded, was like an inverted cup which did not merely roof Ettarre and the man who had come back to her, but inclosed them in incommunicable isolation. To the left, beyond shimmering tree-tops, so far beneath them that it made Felix Kennaston dizzy to look, the ruffling surface of a river gleamed.... It was in much this fashion, he recalled, that Ettarre and Horvendile had stood alone together among the turrets of Storisende.

“But now I wonder where on the face of—or, rather, so far above the face of what especial planet we may happen to be?” Kennaston marveled happily—“or east of the sun or west of the moon? At all events, it hardly matters. Suffice it that we are in love’s land to-day. Why worry over one particular inexplicable detail, where everything is incomprehensible?”

“I was never here before, Horvendile; and I have waited for you so long.”

He looked at her; and again his heart moved with glad adoration. It was not merely that Ettarre was so pleasing to the eye, and distinguished by so many delicate clarities of color—so young, so quick of movement, so slender, so shapely, so inexpressibly virginal—but the heady knowledge that here on dizzying heights he, Felix Kennaston, was somehow playing with superhuman matters, and that no power could induce him to desist from his delicious and perilous frolic, stirred, in deep recesses of his being, nameless springs. Nameless they must remain; for it was as though he had discovered himself to possess a sixth sense; and he found that the contrivers of language, being less prodigally gifted, had never been at need to invent any terms wherewith to express this sense’s gratification. But he knew that he was strong and admirable; that men and men’s affairs lay far beneath him; that Ettarre belonged to him; and, most vividly of all, that the exultance which possessed him was a by-product of an unstable dream.

“Yet it is not any city of to-day,” he was saying. “Look, how yonder little rascal glitters—he is wearing a helmet of some sort and a gorget. Why, all those pigmies, if you look closely, go in far braver scarlets and purples than we elect to skulk about in nowadays; and there is not an office-building or an electric-light advertisement of chewing-gum in sight. No, that hotchpotch of huddled gables and parapets and towers shaped like lanterns was stolen straight out of some Doré illustration for Rabelais or _Les Contes Drolatiques_. But it does not matter at all, and it will never matter, where we may chance to be, Ettarre. What really and greatly matters, is that when I try to touch you everything vanishes.”

The girl was frankly puzzled. “Yes, that seems a part of the sigil’s magic....”

II

Of the Sigil and One Use of It

IT proved that this was indeed a part of the sigil’s wonder-working: Kennaston learned by experience that whenever, even by accident, he was about to touch Ettarre his dream would end like a burst bubble. He would find himself alone and staring at the gleaming fragment of metal.

Before long he also learned something concerning the sigil of Scoteia, of which this piece of metal once formed a part; for it was permitted him to see the sigil in its entirety, many centuries before it was shattered: it was then one of the treasures of the Didascalion, a peculiar sort of girls’ school in King Ptolemy Physcon’s city of Alexandria, where women were tutored to honor fittingly the power which this sigil served. But it is not expedient to speak clearly concerning this; and the real name of the sigil was, of course, quite different from that which Kennaston had given it in his romance.

So began an odd divided life for Felix Kennaston. At first he put his half of the sigil in an envelope, which he hid in a desk in the library, under a pile of his dead uncle’s unused bookplates; whence, when occasion served, it was taken out in order that when held so as to reflect the lamplight—for this was always necessary—it might induce the desired dream of Ettarre.

Later Kennaston thought of an expedient by which to prolong his dreams. Nightly he lighted and set by his bedside a stump of candle. Its tiny flame, after he had utilized its reflection, would harmlessly burn out while his body slept with a bit of metal in one hand; and he would be freed of Felix Kennaston for eight hours uninterruptedly. To have left an electric-light turned on until he awakened, would in the end have exposed him to detection and the not-impossible appointment of a commission in lunacy; and he recognized the potentialities of such mischance with frank distaste. As affairs sped, however, he could without great difficulty buy his candles in secret. He was glad now he was well-to-do, if only because, as an incidental result of materially bettered fortunes, he and his wife had separate bedrooms.

III

Treats of a Prelate and, in Part, of Pigeons

THE diurnal part of Kennaston’s life was largely devoted to writing _The Tinctured Veil_—that amazing performance which he subsequently gave to a bewildered world. And for the rest, his waking life went on in the old round.

But this is not—save by way of an occasional parenthesis—a chronicle of Felix Kennaston’s doings in the flesh. You may find all that in Mr. Froser’s _Biography_. Flippant, inefficient and moody, Felix Kennaston was not in the flesh particularly engaging; and in writing this record it is necessary to keep his fat corporeal personality in the background as much as may be possible, lest it should cause you, as it so often induced us of Lichfield, to find the man repellent, and nothing more.

Now it befell that this spring died Bishop Arkwright—of the Cathedral of the Bleeding Heart—and many dignitaries of his faith journeyed to Lichfield to attend the funeral. Chief among these was a prelate who very long ago had lived in Lichfield, when he was merely a bishop. Kennaston was no little surprised to receive a note informing him that this eminent churchman would be pleased to see Mr. Felix Kennaston that evening at the Bishop’s House.

The prelate sat alone in a sparsely furnished, rather dark, and noticeably dusty room. He was like a lean effigy carved in time-yellowed ivory, and his voice was curiously ingratiating. Kennaston recognized with joy that this old man talked like a person in a book, in completed sentences and picked phrases, instead of employing the fragmentary verbal shorthand of ordinary Lichfieldian conversation: and Kennaston, to whom the slovenliness of fairly cultured people’s daily talk was always a mystery and an irritant, fell with promptitude into the same tone.

The prelate, it developed, had when he lived in Lichfield known Kennaston’s dead uncle—“for whom I had the highest esteem, and whose friendship I valued most dearly.” He hoped that Kennaston would pardon the foibles of old age and overlook this trespass upon Kennaston’s time. For the prelate had, he said, really a personal interest in the only surviving relative of his dead friend.

“There is a portrait of you, sir, in my library—very gorgeous, in full canonicals—just as my uncle left the room,” said Kennaston, all at sea. But the prelate had begun to talk—amiably, and in the most commonplace fashion conceivable—of his former life in Lichfield, and of the folk who had lived there then, and to ask questions about their descendants, which Kennaston answered as he best could. The whole affair was puzzling Kennaston, for he could think of no reason why this frail ancient gentleman should have sent for a stranger, even though that stranger were the nephew of a dead friend, just that they might discuss trivialities.

So their talking veered, as it seemed, at random....

“Yes, I was often a guest at Alcluid—a very beautiful home it was in those days, famed, as I remember, for the many breeds of pigeons which your uncle amused himself by maintaining. I suppose that you also raise white pigeons, my son?”

Kennaston saw that the prelate now held a small square mirror in his left hand. “No, sir,” Kennaston answered evenly; “there were a great many about the place when it came into our possession; but we have never gone in very seriously for farming.”

“The pigeon has so many literary associations that I should have thought it would appeal to a man of letters,” the prelate continued. “I ought to have said earlier perhaps that I read _Men Who Loved Alison_ with great interest and enjoyment. It is a notable book. Yet in dealing with the sigil of Scoteia—or so at least it seemed to me—you touched upon subjects which had better be left undisturbed. There are drugs, my son, which work much good in the hands of the skilled physician, but cannot be intrusted without danger to the vulgar.”

He spoke gently; yet it appeared to Kennaston a threat was voiced.

“Sir,” Kennaston began, “I must tell you that in writing of the sigil—as I called it—I designed to employ only such general terms as romance ordinarily accords to talismans. All I wrote—I thought—was sheer invention. It is true I found by accident a bit of metal, from which I derived the idea of my so-called sigil’s appearance. That bit of metal was to me then just a bit of metal; nor have I any notion, even to-day, as to how it came to be lying in one of my own garden-paths.”

He paused. The prelate nodded. “It is always interesting to hear whence makers of creative literature draw their material,” he stated.

“Since then, sir, by the drollest of coincidences, a famous personage has spoken to me in almost the identical words you employed this evening, as to the sigil of Scoteia. The coincidence, sir, lay less in what was said than in the apparently irrelevant allusion to white pigeons which the personage too made, and the little mirror which he too held as he spoke. Can you not see, sir,” Kennaston asked gaily, “to what wild imaginings the coincidence tempts a weaver of romance? I could find it in my heart to believe it the cream of an ironic jest that you great ones of the earth have tested me with a password, mistakenly supposing that I, also, was initiate. I am tempted to imagine some secret understanding, some hidden co-operancy, by which you strengthen or, possibly, have attained your power. Confess, sir, is not the coincidence a droll one?”

He spoke lightly, but his heart was beating fast.

“It is remarkable enough,” the prelate conceded, smiling. He asked the name of the personage whom coincidence linked with him, and being told it, chuckled. “I do not think it very odd he carried a mirror,” the prelate considered. “He lives before a mirror, and behind a megaphone. I confess—_mea culpa!_—I often find my little looking-glass a convenience, in making sure all is right before I go into the pulpit. Not a few men in public life, I believe, carry such mirrors,” he said, slowly. “But you, I take it, have no taste for public life?”

“I can assure you—” Kennaston began.

“Think well, my son! Suppose, for one mad instant, that your wild imaginings were not wholly insane? suppose that you had accidentally stumbled upon enough of a certain secret to make it simpler to tell you the whole mystery? Cannot a trained romancer conceive what you might hope for then?”

Very still it was in the dark room....

Kennaston was horribly frightened. “I can assure you, sir, that even then I would prefer my peaceful lazy life and my dreams. I have not any aptitude for action.”

“Ah, well,” the prelate estimated; “it is scarcely a churchman’s part to play _advocatus mundi_. Believe me, I would not tempt you from your books. And for our dreams, I have always held heretically, we are more responsible than for our actions, since it is what we are, uninfluenced, that determines our dreams.” He seemed to meditate. “I will not tempt you, therefore, to tell me the whole truth concerning that bit of metal. I suspect, quite candidly, you are keeping something back, my son. But you exercise a privilege common to all of us.”

“At least,” said Kennaston, “we will hope my poor wits may not be shaken by any more—coincidences.”

“I am tolerably certain,” quoth the prelate, with an indulgent smile, “that there will be no more coincidences.”

Then he gave Kennaston his stately blessing; and Kennaston went back to his life of dreams.

IV

Local Laws of Nephelococcygia

THERE was no continuity in these dreams save that Ettarre was in each of them. A dream would usually begin with some lightheaded topsyturviness, as when Kennaston found himself gazing forlornly down at his remote feet—having grown so tall that they were yards away from him and he was afraid to stand up—or lean strangers carefully and gruesomely explained the importance of the task, set him by quoting fragments of the multiplication tables, or a mad bull who happened to be the King of Spain was pursuing him through a city of blind people. But presently, as dregs settle a little by a little in a glass of water and leave it clear, his dream-world would become rational and compliant with familiar natural laws, and Ettarre would be there—desirable above all other contents of the universe, and not to be touched under penalty of ending all.

Sometimes they would be alone in places which he did not recognize, sometimes they would be living, under the Stuarts or the Valois or the Cæsars, or other dynasties long since unkingdomed, human lives whose obligations and imbroglios affected Horvendile and Ettarre to much that half-serious concern with which one follows the action of a romance or a well-acted play; for it was perfectly understood between Horvendile and Ettarre that they were involved in the affairs of a dream.

Ettarre seemed to remember nothing of the happenings Kennaston had invented in his book. And Guiron and Maugis d’Aigremont and Count Emmerick and the other people in _The Audit at Storisende_—once more to give _Men Who Loved Alison_ its original title—were names that rang familiar to her somehow, she confessed, but without her knowing why. And so, Kennaston came at last to comprehend that perhaps the Ettarre he loved was not the heroine of his book inexplicably vivified; but, rather, that in the book he had, just as inexplicably, drawn a blurred portrait of the Ettarre he loved, that ageless lovable and loving woman of whom all poets had been granted fitful broken glimpses—dimly prefiguring her advent into his life too, with pallid and feeble visionings. But of this he was not ever sure; nor did he greatly care, now that he had his dreams.