Part 5 (2/2)
”You forget,” she said; ”he only promised to come to you when you were happy, if his old master was not happier still: and perhaps--”
”I remember that you always disagree with me,” said the young man, impatiently. ”You always did so. Tears on our wedding-day, too! I suppose the truth is, that no one is happy.”
Aldegunda made no answer, for it is not from those one loves that he will willingly learn that with a selfish and imperious temper happiness never dwells.
The ”Blind Man” was inserted in the Magazine as an ”Old-Fas.h.i.+oned Fairy Tale,” and Julie wrote another this year (1876) under the same heading, which was called ”I Won't.”
She also wrote a delightfully funny Legend, ”The Kyrkegrim turned Preacher,” about a Norwegian Brownie, or Niss, whose duty was ”to keep the church clean, and to scatter the marsh marigolds on the floor before service,” but, like other church-sweepers, his soul was troubled by seeing the congregation neglect to listen to the preacher, and fall asleep during his sermons. Then the Kyrkegrim, feeling sure that he could make more impression on their hardened hearts than the priest did, ascended from the floor to the pulpit, and tried to set the world to rights; but eventually he was glad to return to his broom, and leave ”heavier responsibilities in higher hands.”
She contributed ”Hints for Private Theatricals. In Letters from Burnt Cork to Rouge Pot,” which were probably suggested by the private theatricals in which she was helping at Aldershot; and she wrote four of her best Verses for Children: ”Big Smith,” ”House-building and Repairs,” ”An Only Child's Tea-party,” and ”Papa Poodle.”
”The Adventures of an Elf” is a poem to some clever silhouette pictures of Fedor Flinzer's, which she freely adapted from the German.
”The Snarling Princess” is a fairy tale also adapted from the German; but neither of these contributions was so well worth the trouble of translation as a fine dialogue from the French of Jean Mace called ”War and the Dead,” which Julie gave to the number of _Aunt Judy_ for October 1866.[29] ”The Princes of Vegetation” (April 1876) is an article on Palm-trees, to which family Linnaeus had given this n.o.ble t.i.tle.
[Footnote 29: These translations are included in ”Miscellanea,” vol.
xvii.]
The last contribution, in 1876, which remains to be mentioned is ”Dandelion Clocks,” a short tale; but it will need rather a long introduction, as it opens out into a fresh trait of my sister's character, namely, her love for flowers.
It need scarcely be said that she wrote as accurately about them as about everything else; and, in addition to this, she enveloped them in such an atmosphere of sentiment as served to give life and individuality to their inanimate forms. The habit of weaving stories round them began in girlhood, when she was devoted to reading Mr. J.G.
Wood's graceful translation of Alphonse Karr's _Voyage autour de mon Jardin_. The book was given to her in 1856 by her father, and it exercised a strong influence upon her mind. What else made the ungraceful Buddlaea lovely in her eyes? I confess that when she pointed out the shrub to me, for the first time, in Mr. Ellacombe's garden, it looked so like the ”Plum-pudding tree” in the ”Willow pattern,” and fell so far short of my expectation of the plant over which the two florists had squabbled, that I almost wished that I had not seen it!
Still I did not share their discomfiture so fully as to think ”it no longer good for anything but firewood!”
Karr's fifty-eighth ”Letter” nearly sufficed to enclose a declaration of love in every bunch of ”yellow roses” which Julie tied together; and to plant an ”Incognito” for discovery in every bed of tulips she looked at; whilst her favourite Letter XL., on the result produced by inhaling the odour of bean flowers, embodies the spirit of the ideal existence which she pa.s.sed, as she walked through the fields of our work-a-day world:
The beans were in full blossom. But a truce to this cold-hearted pleasantry. No, it is not a folly to be under the empire of the most beautiful--the most n.o.ble feelings; it is no folly to feel oneself great, strong, invincible; it is not a folly to have a good, honest, and generous heart; it is no folly to be filled with good faith; it is not a folly to devote oneself for the good of others; it is not a folly to live thus out of real life.
No, no; that cold wisdom which p.r.o.nounces so severe a judgment upon all it cannot do; that wisdom which owes its birth to the death of so many great, n.o.ble, and sweet things; that wisdom which only comes with infirmities, and which decorates them with such fine names--which calls decay of the powers of the stomach and loss of appet.i.te sobriety; the cooling of the heart and the stagnation of the blood a return to reason; envious impotence a disdain for futile things;--this wisdom would be the greatest, the most melancholy of follies, if it were not the commencement of the death of the heart and the senses.
”Dandelion Clocks” resembles one of Karr's ”Letters” in containing the germs of a three volumed romance, but they _are_ the germs only--and the ”proportions” of the picture are consequently well preserved.
Indeed, the tale always reminds me of a series of peaceful scenes by Cuyp, with low horizons, sleek cattle, and a glow in the sky betokening the approach of sunset. First we have ”Peter Paul and his two sisters playing in the pastures” at blowing dandelion clocks:
Rich, green, Dutch pastures, unbroken by hedge or wall, which stretched--like an emerald ocean--to the horizon and met the sky.
The cows stood ankle-deep in it and chewed the cud, the clouds sailed slowly over it to the sea, and on a dry hillock sat Mother, in her broad sun-hat, with one eye to the cows, and one to the linen she was bleaching, thinking of her farm.
The actual _outlines_ of this scene may be traced in the German woodcut to which the tale was written, but the _colouring_ is Julie's!
The only disturbing element in this quiet picture is Peter Paul's restless, inquiring heart. What wonder that when his bulb-growing uncle fails to solve the riddle of life, Peter Paul should go out into the wider world and try to find a solution for himself? But the answers to our life problems full often are to be found within, for those who will look, and so Peter Paul comes back after some years to find that:
The elder sister was married and had two children. She had grown up very pretty--a fair woman, with liquid misleading eyes. They looked as if they were gazing into the far future, but they did not see an inch beyond the farm. Anna was a very plain copy of her in body; in mind she was the elder sister's echo. They were very fond of each other, and the prettiest thing about them was their faithful love for their mother, whose memory was kept as green as pastures after rain.
Peter Paul's temperament, however, was not one that could adapt itself to a stagnant existence; so when his three weeks on sh.o.r.e are ended, we see him on his way from the Home Farm to join his s.h.i.+p:
Leena walked far over the pastures with Peter Paul. She was very fond of him, and she had a woman's perception that they would miss him more than he could miss them.
”I am very sorry you could not settle down with us,” she said, and her eyes brimmed over.
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