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_ How many times do I love thee, dear?
Tell me how many thoughts there be
In the atmosphere
Of a new fall'n year,
Whose white and sable hours appear
The latest flake of Eternity:--
So many times do I love thee, dear.
How many times do I love again?
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unravelled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star:--
So many times do I love again.
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES.
A curious deep shyness settled upon Henry Rogers as they all trooped
over to the Den. The others gabbled noisily, but to him words came
with difficulty. He felt like a boy going up for some great test,
examination, almost for judgment. There was an idea in him that he
must run and hide somewhere. He saw the huge outline of Orion tilting
up above the Alps, slanting with the speed of his eternal hunt to
seize the Pleiades who sailed ever calmly just beyond his giant arms.
Yet what that old Hunter sought was at last within his reach. He knew
it, and felt the awe of capture rise upon him.
'You've eaten so much supper you can't speak,' said Monkey, whose hand
was in his coat-pocket for loose chicken-feed, as she called centimes.
'The Little Countess will _regler ton affaire_ all right. Just wait
till she gets at you.'
'You love her?' he asked gently, feeling little disposed to play.
The child's reply was cryptic, yet uncommonly revealing:--
'She's just like a relation. It's so funny she didn't know us long,
long ago--find us out, I mean.'
'Mother likes her awfully,' added Jimbo, as though that established
the matter of her charm for ever. 'It's a pity she's not a man'--just
to show that Cousinenry's position was not endangered.
They chattered on. Rogers hardly remembers how he climbed the long
stone steps. He found himself in the Den. It came about with a sudden
jump as in dreams. _She_ was among them before the courtyard was
crossed; she had gone up the steps immediately in front of him....
Jinny was bringing in the lamp, while Daddy struggled with a load of
peat for the fire, getting in everybody's way. Riquette stood
silhouetted against the sky upon the window sill. Jimbo used the
bellows. A glow spread softly through the room. He caught sight of
Minks standing rather helplessly beside the sofa talking to Jane Anne,
and picking at his ear as he always did when nervous or slightly ill
at ease. He wondered vaguely what she was saying to him. He looked
everywhere but at the one person for whose comfort the others were so
energetic.
His eyes did not once turn in her direction, yet he knew exactly how
she was dressed, what movements she made, where she stood, the very
words, indeed, she used, and in particular the expression of her face
to each in turn. For he was guilty of a searching inner scrutiny he
could not control. And, above all, he was aware, with a divine,
tumultuous thrill, that she, for her part, also neither looked at him
nor uttered one sentence that he could take as intended for himself.
Because, of course, all she said and did and looked _were_ meant for
him, and her scrutiny was even closer and more searching than his own.
In the Den that evening there was one world within another, though
only these two, and probably the intuitive and diabolically observant
Minks, perceived it. The deep furnaces of this man's inner being,
banked now so long that mere little flames had forgotten their way
out, lay open at last to that mighty draught before whose fusing power
the molten, fluid state becomes inevitable.
'You must come up to me' rang on in his head like a chime of bells. 'O
think Beauty: it's your duty....'
The chairs were already round the open fireplace, when Monkey pushed
him into the big one with the broken springs he always used, and
established herself upon his knee. Jimbo was on the other in a
twinkling. Jane Anne plumped down upon the floor against him. Her hair
was up, and grown-ups might sit as they pleased. Minks in a hard,
straight-backed chair, firmly assured everybody that he was
exceedingly comfortable and really preferred stiff chairs. He found
safety next to Mother who, pleased and contented, filled one corner of
the sofa and looked as though she occupied a pedestal. Beyond her
perched Daddy, on the music stool, leaning his back against the
unlighted fourneau. The Wumble Book was balanced on his knees, and
beside him sat the little figure of the visitor who, though at the
end, was yet somehow the true centre of the circle. Rogers saw her
slip into her unimportant place. She took her seat, he thought, as
softly as a mouse. For no one seemed to notice her. She was so
perfectly at home among them. In her little folded hands the Den and
all its occupants seemed cared for beyond the need of words or
definite action. And, although her place was the furthest possible
remove from his own, he felt her closer to him than the very children
who nestled upon his knees.
Riquette then finally, when all were settled, stole in to complete the
circle. She planted herself in the middle of the hearth before them
all, looked up into their faces, decided that all was well, and began
placidly to wash her face and back. A leg shot up, from the middle of
her back apparently, as a signal that they might talk. A moment later
she composed herself into that attitude of dignified security possible
only to the feline species. She made the fourth that inhabited this
world within a world. Rogers, glancing up suddenly from observing her,
caught---for the merest fraction of an instant--a flash of starfire in
the air. It darted across to him from the opposite end of the horse-
shoe. Behind it flickered the tiniest smile a human countenance could
possibly produce.
'Little mouse who, lost in wonder,
Flicks its whiskers at the thunder.'
It was Jane Anne repeating the rhyme for Minks's benefit. How
appropriately it came in, he thought. And voices were set instantly in
motion; it seemed that every one began to speak at once.
Who finally led the conversation, or what was actually said at first,
he has no more recollection than the man in the moon, for he only
heard the silvery music of a single voice. And that came rarely. He
felt washed in glory from head to foot. In a dream of happy starlight
he swam and floated. He hid his face behind the chair of Monkey, and
his eyes were screened below the welcome shelter of Jimbo's shoulder.
The talk meanwhile flowed round the horse-shoe like a river that
curves downhill. Life ran past him, while he stood on the banks and
watched. He reconstructed all that happened, all that was said and
done, each little movement, every little glance of the eye. These
common things he recreated. For, while his body sat in the Den before
a fire of peat, with children, a cat, a private secretary, three very
ordinary people and a little foreign visitor, his spirit floated high
above the world among the immensities of suns and starfields. He was
in the Den, but the Den was in the universe, and to the scale of the
universe he set the little homely, commonplace picture. Life, he
realised, _is_ thought and feeling; and just then he thought and felt
like a god. He was Orion, and Orion had at last overtaken the
Pleiades. The fairest of the cluster lay caught within his giant arms.
The Enormous Thing that so long had haunted him with hints of its
approach, rose up from his under-self, and possessed him utterly. And,
oh, the glory of it, the splendour, the intoxication!
In the dim corner where _she_ sat, the firelight scarcely showed her
face, yet every shade of expression that flitted across her features
he saw unobscured. The sparkling, silvery sentences she spoke from
time to time were volumes that interpreted life anew. For years he had
pored over these thick tomes, but heavily and without understanding.
The little things she said now supplied the key. Mind and brain played
no part in this. It was simply that he heard--and knew. He re-
discovered her from their fragments, piece by piece....
The general talk flowed past him in a stream of sound, cut up into
lengths by interrupting consonants, and half ruined by this arbitrary
division; but what _she_ said always seemed the living idea that lay
behind the sound. He could not explain it otherwise. With herself,
and with Riquette, and possibly with little, dreaming Minks, he sat
firmly at the centre of this inner world. The others, even the
children, hovered about its edges, trying to get in. That tiny smile
had flashed its secret, ineffable explanation into him. Starlight was
in his blood....
Mother, for instance, he vaguely knew, was speaking of the years they
all had lived in Bourcelles, of the exquisite springs, of the fairy,
gorgeous summers. It was the most ordinary talk imaginable, though it
came sincerely from her heart.
'If only you had come here earlier,' she said, 'when the forest was so
thick with flowers.' She enumerated them one by one. 'Now, in the
autumn, there are so few!'
The little sparkling answer lit the forest glades afresh with colour,
perfume, wonder:--
'But the autumn flowers, I think, are the sweetest; for they have the
beauty of all the summer in them.'
A slight pause followed, and then all fell to explaining the shining
little sentence until its lustre dimmed and disappeared beneath the
smother of their words. In himself, however, who heard them not, a new
constellation swam above the horizon of his inner world. Riquette
looked slyly up and blinked. She purred more deeply, but she made no
stupid sign....
And Daddy mentioned then the forest spell that captured the entire
village with its peace and softness--'all so rough and big and
tumbled, and yet every detail so exquisitely finished and thought out,
you know.'
Out slipped the softest little fairy phrase imaginable from her dim
corner then:--
'Yes, like hand-made things--you can almost see the hand that made
them.'
And Rogers started so perceptibly that Jimbo shifted his weight a
little, thinking he must be uncomfortable. He had surely used that
very phrase himself! It was familiar. Even when using it he remembered
wondering whence its sweetness had dropped into his clumsier mind.
Minks uncrossed his legs, glanced up at him a moment, then crossed
them again. He made this sign, but, like Riquette, he said nothing....
The stream flowed on and on. Some one told a story. There was hushed
attentive listening, followed suddenly by bursts of laughter and
delight. Who told it, or what it was about, Rogers had no notion.
Monkey dug him in the ribs once because apparently he grunted at the
wrong moment, and Jimbo chided her beneath his breath--'Let him have a
nap if he wants to; a man's always tired after a long journey like
that...!' Some one followed with another story--Minks, was it, this
time?--for Rogers caught his face, as through a mist, turning
constantly to Mother for approval. It had to do with a vision of great
things that had come to a little insignificant woman on a bed of
sickness. He recognised the teller because he knew the tale of old.
The woman, he remembered, was Albinia's grandmother, and Minks was
very proud of it.
'That's a _very_ nice story,' rippled from the dim corner when it was
over. 'For I like everything so tiny that you can find it inside a
shell. That's the way to understand big things and to do them.'
And again the phrase was as familiar to him as though he had said it
himself--heard it, read it, dreamed it, even. Whatever its fairy
source, he knew it. His bewilderment increased absurdly. The things
she said were so ordinary, yet so illuminating, though never quite
betraying their secret source. Where had he heard them? Where had he
met this little foreign visitor? Whence came the singular certainty
that she shared this knowledge with him, and might presently explain
it, all clear as daylight and as simple? He had the odd impression
that she played with him, delayed purposely the moment of revelation,
even expected that _he_ would be the first to make it known. The
disclosure was to come from himself! She provided him with
opportunities--these little sparkling sentences! But he hid in his
corner, silent and magically excited, afraid to take the lead. These
sentences were addressed to him. There was conversation thus between
the two of them; but his replies remained inaudible. Thought makes no
sound; its complete delivery is ever wordless.... He felt very big,
and absurdly shy.
It was gesture, however, that infallible shorthand of the mind, which
seemed the surest medium of this mute delightful intercourse. For each
little gesture that she made--unconsciously, of course--expressed more
than the swiftest language could have compassed in an hour. And he
noted every one: the occasional flourish of the little hands, the
bending of the graceful neck, the shadowy head turned sideways, the
lift of one shoulder, almost imperceptible, and sometimes the attitude
of the entire body. To him they were, one and all, eloquently
revealing. Behind each little gesture loomed a yet larger one, the
scale increasing strangely, till his thoughts climbed up them as up a
ladder into the region where her ideas lay naked before casual
interpretation clothed them. Those, he reflected, who are rich in
ideas, but find words difficult, may reveal themselves prodigally in
gesture. Expression of one kind or another there must be; yet lavish
action, the language of big souls, seems a man's expression rather
than a woman's.... He built up swiftly, surely, solidly his
interpretation of this little foreign visitor who came to him thus
suddenly from the stars, whispering to his inmost thought, 'You must
come up to me.' The whole experience dazed him. He sat in utter
dumbness, shyer than a boy, but happier than a singing star!... The
Joy in his heart was marvellous.
Yet how could he know all this?
In the intervals that came to him like breathing spaces he asked
himself this childish question. How could he tell that this little
soft being with the quiet unobtrusive manners had noble and great
beauty of action in her anywhere? A few pretty phrases, a few
significant gestures, these were surely a slight foundation to build
so much upon! Was there, then, some absolute communion of thought
between the two of them such as his cousin's story tried to show? And
had their intercourse been running on for years, neither of them aware
of it in the daytime? Was this intimate knowledge due to long
acquaintance? Had her thought been feeding him perhaps since childhood
even?
In the pause of his temporary lunacy he asked himself a dozen similar
questions, but before the sign of any answer came he was off again,
sweeping on outstretched wings among the stars. He drank her in. He
knew. What was the good of questions? A thirsty man does not stop
midway in his draught to ask when his thirst began, its cause, or why
the rush of liquid down his throat is satisfying. He knows, and
drinks. It seemed to Henry Rogers, ordinary man of business and
practical affairs, that some deep river which so long had flowed deep
out of sight, hidden below his daily existence, rose now grandly at
the flood. He had heard its subterranean murmurs often. Here, in the
Den, it had reached his lips at last. And he quenched his thirst....
His thought played round her without ceasing, like flowing water....
This idea of flux grew everywhere about him. There was fluid movement
in this world within a world. All life was a flowing past of ceaseless
beauty, wonder, splendour; it was doubt and question that dammed the
rush, causing that stoppage which is ugly, petty, rigid. His being
flowed out to mingle with her own. It was all inevitable, and he never
really doubted once. Only before long he would be compelled to act--to
speak--to tell her what he felt, and hear her dear, dear answer....
The excitement in him became more and more difficult to control.
Already there was strain and tension below his apparent outer
calmness. Life in him burst forward to a yet greater life than he had
ever known....
The others--it was his cousin's voice this time--were speaking of the
Story, and of his proposed treatment of it in its larger version as a
book. Daddy was saying, apparently, that it must fail because he saw
no climax for it. The public demanded a cumulative interest that
worked up to some kind of thrilling denouement that they called a
climax, whereas his tale was but a stretch of life, and of very
ordinary life. And Life, for the majority, knew no such climax. How
could he manage one without inventing something artificial?
'But the climax of life comes every day and every minute,' he heard
her answer--and how her little voice rang out above the others like a
bell!--'when you deny yourself for another, and that other does not
even know it. A day is lost that does not pin at least one sweet
thought against each passing hour.'
And his inner construction took a further prodigious leap, as the
sentence showed him the grand and simple motive of her being. It had
been his own as well, though he had stupidly bungled it in his search
to find something big enough to seem worth doing. She, he divined,
found neighbours everywhere, losing no time. He had known a few rare,
exquisite souls who lived for others, but here, close beside him at
last, was one of those still rarer souls who seem born to--die for
others.... They give so unsparingly of their best.... To his
imaginative interpretation of her he gave full rein.... And it was
instantaneous as creation....
The voices of Minks and Mother renewed the stream of sound that swept
by him then, though he caught no words that were comparable in value
to these little singing phrases that she used from time to time.
Jimbo, bored by the grown-up talk that took the place of expected
stories, had fallen asleep upon his shoulder; Monkey's hair, as usual,
was in his eyes; he sat there listening and waiting with a heart that
beat so loudly he thought the children must feel it and ask him what
was the matter. Jinny stirred the peat from time to time. The room was
full of shadows. But, for him, the air grew brighter every minute, and
in this steady brilliance he saw the little figure rise and grow in
grandeur till she filled all space.
'You called it "getting out" while the body is asleep,' came floating
through the air through the sound of Jimbo's breathing, 'whereas
_I_ called it getting away from self while personal desire is asleep.
But the idea is the same....'
His cousin's words that called forth this criticism he had not heard.
It was only her sentence that seemed to reach him.
From the river of words and actions men call life she detained, it
seemed to him, certain that were vital and important in some
symbolical sense; she italicised them, made them her own--then let
them go to join the main stream again. This selection was a kind of
genius. The river did not overwhelm her as it overwhelms most, because
the part of it she did not need for present action she ignored, while
yet she swam in the whole of it, shirking nothing.
This was the way he saw her--immediately. And, whether it was his own
invention, or whether it was the divination of a man in the ecstasy of
sudden love, it was vital because he felt it, and it was real because
he believed it. Then why seek to explain the amazing sense of
intimacy, the certainty that he had known her always? The thing was
_there_; explanation could bring it no nearer. He let the explanations
go their way; they floated everywhere within reach; he had only to
pocket them and take them home for study at his leisure afterwards--
with her.
'But, we _shall_ come to it in time,' he caught another flying
sentence that reached him through the brown tangle of Monkey's hair.
It was spoken with eager emphasis. 'Does not every letter you write
begin with _dear_?....'
All that she said added something to life, it seemed, like poetry
which, he remembered, 'enriches the blood of the world.' The
selections were not idle, due to chance, but belonged to some great
Scheme, some fairy edifice she built out of the very stuff of her own
life. Oh, how utterly he understood and knew her. The poison of
intellectuality, thank heaven, was not in her, yet she created
somehow; for all she touched, with word or thought or gesture, turned
suddenly alive in a way he had never known before. The world turned
beautiful and simple at her touch....
Even the commonest things! It was miraculous, at least in its effect
upon himself. Her simplicity escaped all signs of wumbling. She had no
favourite and particular Scheme for doing good, but did merely what
was next her at the moment to be done. She _was_ good. In her little
person glowed a great enthusiasm for life. She created neighbours.
And, as the grandeur of her insignificance rose before him, his own
great Scheme for Disabled Thingumabobs that once had filled the
heavens, shrank down into the size of a mere mouse-trap that would go
into his pocket. In its place loomed up another that held the beauty
of the Stars. How little, when announcing it to Minks weeks and weeks
ago, had he dreamed the form it was to take!
And so, wrapped in this glory of the stars, he dreamed on in his
corner, fashioning this marvellous interpretation of a woman he had
never seen before, and never spoken with. It was all so different to
ordinary falling in love at sight, that the phrase never once occurred
to him. It was consummated in a moment--out there, beside the fountain
when he saw her first, shadowy, with brilliant, peering eyes. It
seemed perfect instantly, a recovery of something he had always known.
And who shall challenge the accuracy of his vision, or call its sudden
maturity impossible? For where one sees the surface only, another sees
the potentialities below. To believe in these is to summon them into
activity, just as to think the best of a person ever brings out that
best. Are we not all potential splendours?
Swiftly, in a second, he reviewed the shining sentences that revealed
her to him: The 'autumn flowers'--she lived, then, in the Present,
without that waste of energy which is regret! In 'a little shell' lay
the pattern of all life,--she saw the universe in herself and lived,
thus, in the Whole! To be 'out' meant forgetting self; and life's
climax is at every minute of the day--she understood, that is, the
growth of the soul, due to acceptance of what every minute brings,
however practical, dull, uninteresting. By recreating the commonest
things, she found a star in each. And her world was made up of
neighbours--for 'every letter that one writes begins with
_dear_!'
The Pattern matured marvellously before his eyes; and its delicate
embroideries, far out of sight, seemed the arabesques that yearnings,
hitherto unfulfilled, had traced long long ago with the brush of
tender thinking. Together, though at opposite ends of the world, these
two had woven the great Net of sympathy, thought, and longing in which
at last they both were prisoners ... and with them all the earth.
The figure of Jane Anne loomed before him like an ogress suddenly.
'Cousinenry, _will_ you answer or will you _not_? Daddy's already
asked you twenty times at least!' Then, below her breath, as she bent
over him, 'The Little Countess will think you awf'ly rude if you go to
sleep and snore like this.'
He looked up. He felt a trifle dazed. For a moment he had forgotten
where he was. How dark the room had grown! Only--he was sure he had
not snored.
'I beg your pardon,' he stammered, 'but I was only thinking--how
wonderful you--how wonderful it all is, isn't it? I was listening. I
heard perfectly.'
'You were dozing,' whispered Monkey. 'Daddy wants the Countess to tell
you how she knew the story long ago, or something. _Ecoute un peu, man
vieux_!'
'I should love to hear it,' he said, louder, sitting up so abruptly in
his chair that Jimbo tilted at a dangerous angle, though still without
waking. 'Please, please go on.'
And he listened then to the quiet, silvery language in which the
little visitor described the scenery of her childhood, when, without
brothers or sisters, she was forced to play alone, and had amused
herself by imagining a Net of Constellations which she nailed by
shooting stars to four enormous pine trees that grew across the
torrent. She described the great mountains that enclosed her father's
estate, her loneliness in this giant garden, due to his morose
severity of character, her yearnings to escape and see the big world
beyond the ridges. All her thought and longing went to the fashioning
of this Net, and every night she flung it far across the peaks and
valleys to catch companions with whom she might play. The characters
in her fairy books came out of the pages to help her, and sometimes
when they drew it in, it was so heavy with the people entangled in its
meshes that they could scarcely move it. But the moment all were out,
the giant Net, relieved of their weight, flew back into the sky. The
Pleiades were its centre, because she loved the Pleiades best of all,
and Orion pursued its bright shape with passion, yet could never quite
come up with it.
'And these people whom you caught,' whispered Rogers from his corner,
listening to a tale he knew as well as she did, 'you kept them
prisoners?'
'I first put into them all the things I longed to do myself in the big
world, and then flung them back again into their homes and towns and
villages---'
'Excepting one,' he murmured.
'Who was so big and clumsy that he broke the meshes and so never got
away.' She laughed, while the children stared at their cousin,
wondering how he knew as much as she did. 'He stayed with me, and
showed me how to make our prisoners useful afterwards by painting them
all over with starlight which we collected in a cave. Then they went
back and dazzled others everywhere by their strange, alluring
brilliance. We made the whole world over in this way---'
'Until you lost him.'
'One cloudy night he disappeared, yes, and I never found him again.
There was a big gap between the Pleiades and Orion where he had
tumbled through. I named him Orion after that; and I would stand at
night beneath the four great pine trees and call and call, but in
vain. "You must come up to me! You must come up to me!" I called, but
got no answer---'
'Though you knew quite well where he had fallen to, and that he was
only hiding---'
'Excuse me, but _how_ did she know?' inquired Jinny abruptly.
The Little Countess laughed. 'I suppose--because the threads of the
Net were so sensitive that they went on quivering long after he
tumbled out, and so betrayed the direction---'
'And afterwards, when you got older, Grafin,' interrupted Daddy, who
wished his cousin to hear the details of the extraordinary
coincidence, 'you elaborated your idea---'
'Yes, that thought and yearning always fulfil themselves somewhere,
somehow, sooner or later,' she continued. 'But I kept the imagery of
my Star Net in which all the world lies caught, and I used starlight
as the symbol of that sympathy which binds every heart to every other
heart. At my father's death, you see, I inherited his property. I
escaped from the garden which had been so long my prison, and I tried
to carry out in practical life what I had dreamed there as a child. I
got people together, where I could, and formed Thinkers' Guilds--
people, that is, who agreed to think beauty, love, and tolerance at
given hours in the day, until the habit, once formed, would run
through all their lives, and they should go about as centres of light,
sweetening the world. Few have riches, fewer still have talent, but
all can think. At least, one would _think_ so, wouldn't one?'--with a
smile and a fling of her little hands.
She paused a moment, and then went on to describe her failure. She
told it to them with laughter between her sentences, but among her
listeners was one at least who caught the undertone of sadness in the
voice.
'For, you see, that was where I made my mistake. People would do
anything in the world rather than think. They would work, give money,
build schools and hospitals, make all manner of sacrifices--only--they
would not think; because, they said, there was no visible result.' She
burst out laughing, and the children all laughed too.
'I should think not indeed,' ventured Monkey, but so low that no one
heard her.
'And so you went on thinking it all alone,' said Rogers in a low
voice.
'I tried to write it first as a story,' she answered softly, 'but
found that was beyond me; so I went on thinking it all alone, as you
say---'
'Until the Pattern of your thought floated across the world to me,'
said Daddy proudly. 'I imagined I was inspired; instead I was a
common, unoriginal plagiarist!'
'Like all the rest of us,' she laughed.
'Mummie, what _is_ a plagiarist?' asked Jinny instantly; and as
Rogers, her husband, and even Minks came hurriedly to her aid, the
spell of the strange recital was broken, and out of the turmoil of
voices the only thing distinctly heard was Mother exclaiming with
shocked surprise:--
'Why, it's ten o'clock! Jimbo, Monkey, please plagiarise off to bed at
once!'--in a tone that admitted of no rejoinder or excuses.
'A most singular thing, isn't it, Henry?' remarked the author, coming
across to his side when the lamp was lit and the children had said
their good-nights.
'I really think we ought to report it to the Psychical Society as a
genuine case of thought-transference. You see, what people never
properly realise is---'
But Henry Rogers lost the remainder of the sentence even if he heard
the beginning, for his world was in a state of indescribable turmoil,
one emotion tumbling wildly upon the heels of another. He was elated
to intoxication. The room spun round him. The next second his heart
sank down into his boots. He only caught the end of the words she was
saying to Mother across the room:--
'... but I must positively go to-morrow, I've already stayed too long.
So many things are waiting at home for me to do. I must send a
telegram and....'
His cousin's wumbling drowned the rest. He was quite aware that Rogers
was not listening to him.
'... your great kindness in writing to him, and then coming yourself,'
Mother was saying. 'It's such an encouragement. I can't tell you how
much he--we---'
'And you'll let me write to you about the children,' she interrupted,
'the plans we discussed, you know....'
Rogers broke away from his cousin with a leap. It felt at least like a
leap. But he knew not where to go or what to say. He saw Minks
standing with Jane Anne again by the fourneau, picking at his ear. By
the open window with Mother stood the little visitor. She was leaving
to-morrow. A torturing pain like twisting knives went through him. The
universe was going out!... He saw the starry sky behind her. Daddy
went up and joined them, and he was aware that the three of them
talked all at once for what seemed an interminable time, though all he
heard was his cousin's voice repeating at intervals, 'But you _can't_
send a telegram before eight o'clock to-morrow morning in any case;
the post is closed....'
And then, suddenly, the puzzle reeled and danced before his eyes. It
dissolved into a new and startling shape that brought him to his
senses with a shock. There had been a swift shuffling of the figures.
Minks and his cousin were helping her into her cloak. She _was_ going.
One of them--he knew not which--was offering politely to escort her
through the village.
It sounded like his own sentence of exile, almost of death. Was he
forty years of age, or only fifteen? He felt awkward, tongue-tied,
terrified.
They were already in the passage. Mother had opened the door into the
yard.
'But your way home lies down the hill,' he heard the silver voice,
'and to go with me you must come up. I can easily---'
Above the leaves of the plane tree he saw the stars. He saw Orion and
the Pleiades. The Fairy Net flung in and caught him. He found his
voice.
In a single stride he was beside her. Minks started at his sudden
vehemence and stepped aside.
'_I_ will take you home, Countess, if I may,' and his tone was so
unnecessarily loud and commanding that Mother turned and stared. 'Our
direction lies together. I will come up--with you.'
She did not even look at him. He saw that tiny smile that was like the
flicker of a star--no more. But he heard her answer. It seemed to fill
the sky.
'Thank you. I might lose my way alone.'
And, before he realised how she managed it, they had crossed the
cobbled yard, Daddy was swinging away downhill towards the
carpenter's, and Minks behind them, at the top of the stone steps, was
saying his last good-night to Mother. With the little visitor beside
him, he passed the singing fountain and led her down the deserted
village street beneath the autumn stars.
Three minutes later they were out of sight... when Minks came down the
steps and picked his way among the shadows after Daddy, who had the
latch-key of the carpenter's house. He ran to overtake him.
And he ran upon his toes
As softly as a saying does,
For so the saying goes!
His thoughts were very active, but as clear as day. He was thinking
whether German was a difficult language to acquire, and wondering
whether a best man at a wedding ought to wear white gloves or not. He
decided to ask Albinia. He wrote the letter that very night before he
went to sleep.
And, while he slept, Orion pursued the Pleiades across the sky, and
numerous shooting stars fastened the great Net of thought and sympathy
close over little Bourcelles.
THE END
A Prisoner in Fairyland, by Algernon Blackwood. _
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