Part 4 (2/2)
It is a delightful book to leave about, with its vellum binding, dainty ribbons, and the hallmark of a great publisher's name. But when we seek within we find love with its thousand voices and wayward moods, its shy graces and seemly reticences, love which has its throne and robe of state as well as the garment of the beggar maid, love which is before time was, which knew the world when the stars took up their courses, presented to us in gus.h.i.+ng outpourings, the appropriate language of a woman's heart to the boor she delights to honour.
”It is woman who is the glory of man,” says the author of 'The House of Wisdom and Love,' ”_Regina mundi_, greater, because so far the less; and man is her head, but only as he serves his queen.” Set this sober aphorism against the school girl love-making which kisses a man's feet and gaily refuses him the barren honour of having loved her first.
There is scant need for the apologia which precedes the letters; a few pages dispels the fear that we are prying into another's soul. As for the authors.h.i.+p, there is a woman's influence, an artist's poorly concealed bias in the foreign letters; and for the rest a man's blunders-so much easier to see in another than to avoid oneself-writ large from cover to cover. King Cophetua, who sends ”profoundly grateful remembrances,” has most surely written the letters he would wish to receive.
”Mrs Meynell!” cries one reviewer, triumphantly. Nay, the saints be good to us, what has Mrs Meynell in common with the ”Englishwoman's” language, style, or most unconvincing pa.s.sion? Men can write as from a woman's heart when they are minded to do so in desperate earnestness-there is Clarissa Harlowe and Stevenson's Kirstie, and many more to prove it; but when a man writes as the author of the ”Love Letters” writes, I feel, as did the painter of the frieze, that pattern-making has gone too far and included that which, like the gra.s.s, should be spared such a convention.
”I quite agree with you,” said the d.u.c.h.ess, ”and the moral of that is-'Be what you would seem to be'-or, if you'd like to put it more simply-'never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'” And so by way of the Queen's garden I come back to my room again.
My heart's affections are still centred on my old attic, with boarded floor and white-washed walls, where the sun blazoned a frieze of red and gold until he travelled too far towards the north, the moon streamed in to paint the trees in inky wavering shadows, and the stars flashed their glory to me across the years. But now sun and moon greet me only indirectly, and under the red roses hang pictures, some of them the dear companions of my days. Opposite me is the Arundel print of the Presentation, painted by the gentle ”Brother of the Angels.” Priest Simeon, a stately figure in green and gold, great with prophecy, gazes adoringly at the Bambino he holds with fatherly care. Our Lady, in robe of red and veil of shadowed purple, is instinct with light despite the sombre colouring, as she stretches out hungering, awe-struck hands for her soul's delight. St Joseph, dignified guardian and servitor, stands behind, holding the Sacrifice of the Poor to redeem the First-begotten.
St Peter Martyr and the Dominican nun, gazing in rapt contemplation at the scene, are not one whit surprised to find themselves in the presence of eternal mysteries. In the Entombment, which hangs on the opposite wall, St Dominic comes round the corner full of grievous amaze and tenderest sympathy, but with no sense of shock or intrusion, for was he not ”famigliar di Cristo”? And so he takes it all in; the stone bed empty and waiting; the Beloved cradled for the last time on His mother's knees to be washed, lapped round, and laid to rest as if He were again the Babe of Bethlehem. He sees the Magdalen anointing the Sacred Feet; Blessed John caring for the living and the Dead; and he, Dominic-hound of the Lord-having his real, living share in the anguish and hope, the bedding of the dearest Dead, who did but leave this earth that He might manifest Himself more completely.
Underneath, with a leap across the centuries, is Rossetti's picture; Dante this time the onlooker, Beatrice, in her pale beauty, the death-kissed one. The same idea under different representations; the one conceived in childlike simplicity, the other recalling, even in the photograph, its wealth of colour and imagining; the one a world-wide ideal, the other an individual expression of it.
Beatrice was to Dante the inclusion of belief. She was more to him than he himself knew, far more to him after her death than before. And, therefore, the a.n.a.logy between the pictures has at core a common reality.
”It is expedient for you that I go away,” is constantly being said to us as we cling earthlike to the outward expression, rather than to the inward manifestation-and blessed are those who hear and understand, for it is spoken only to such as have been with Him from the beginning. The eternal mysteries come into time for us individually under widely differing forms. The tiny child mothers its doll, croons to it, spends herself upon it, why she cannot tell you; and we who are here in our extreme youth, never to be men and women grown in this world, nurse our ideal, exchange it, refas.h.i.+on it, call it by many names; and at last in here or hereafter we find in its naked truth the Child in the manger, even as the Wise Men found Him when they came from the East to seek a great King. There is but one necessary condition of this finding; we must follow the particular manifestation of light given us, never resting until it rests-over the place of the Child. And there is but one insurmountable hindrance, the extinction of or drawing back from the light truly apprehended by us. We forget this, and judge other men by the light of our own soul.
I think the old bishop must have understood it. He is my friend of friends as he lies opposite my window in his alabaster sleep, clad in pontifical robes, with unshod feet, a little island of white peace in a many-coloured marble sea. The faithful sculptor has given every line and wrinkle, the heavy eyelids and sunken face of tired old age, but withal the smile of a contented child.
I do not even know my bishop's name, only that the work is of the thirteenth century; but he is good to company with through the day, for he has known darkness and light and the minds of many men; most surely, too, he has known that G.o.d fulfils Himself in strange ways, so with the shadow of his feet upon the polished floor he rests in peace.
CHAPTER IV
ON Sunday my little tree was limned in white and the sparrows were craving shelter at my window from the blizzard. Now the mild thin air brings a breath of spring in its wake and the daffodils in the garden wait the kisses of the sun. Hand-in-hand with memory I slip away down the years, and remember a day when I awoke at earliest dawn, for across my sleep I had heard the l.u.s.ty golden-throated trumpeters heralding the spring.
The air was sharp-set; a delicate rime frosted roof and road; the sea lay hazy and still like a great pearl. Then as the sky stirred with flush upon flush of warm rosy light, it pa.s.sed from misty pearl to opal with heart of flame, from opal to gleaming sapphire. The earth called, the fields called, the river called-that pied piper to whose music a man cannot stop his ears. It was with me as with the Canterbury pilgrims:-
”So priketh hem nature in hir corages; Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.”
Half an hour later I was away by the early train that carries the branch mails and a few workmen, and was delivered at the little wayside station with the letters. The kind air went singing past as I swung along the reverberating road between the high tree-crowned banks which we call hedges in merry Devon, with all the world to myself and the Brethren. A great blackbird flew out with a loud ”chook, chook,” and the red of the haw on his yellow bill. A robin trilled from a low rose-bush; two wrens searched diligently on a fallen tree for breakfast, quite unconcerned when I rested a moment beside them; and a shrewmouse slipped across the road followed directly by its mate. March violets bloomed under the sheltered hedge with here and there a pale primrose; a frosted bramble spray still held its autumn tints clinging to the semblance of the past; and great branches of snowy blackthorn broke the barren hedgeway as if spring made a mock of winter's snows.
Light of heart and foot with the new wine of the year I sped on again, stray daffodils lighting the wayside, until I heard the voice of the stream and reached the field gate which leads to the lower meadows.
There before me lay spring's pageant; green pennons waving, dainty maids curtseying, and a host of joyous yellow trumpeters proclaiming 'Victory'
to an awakened earth. They range in serried ranks right down to the river, so that a man must walk warily to reach the water's edge where they stand gazing down at themselves in fairest semblance like their most tragic progenitor, and, rising from the bright gra.s.s in their thousands, stretch away until they melt in a golden cloud at the far end of the misty mead. Through the field gate and across the road I see them, starring the steep earth bank that leads to the upper copse, gleaming like pale flames against the dark tree-boles. There they have but frail tenure; here, in the meadows, they reign supreme.
At the upper end of the field the river provides yet closer sanctuary for these children of the spring. Held in its embracing arms lies an island long and narrow, some thirty feet by twelve, a veritable untrod Eldorado, glorious in gold from end to end, a fringe of reeds by the water's edge, and save for that-daffodils. A great oak stands at the meadow's neck, an oak with gnarled and wandering roots where a man may rest, for it is bare of daffodils save for a group of three, and a solitary one apart growing close to the old tree's side. I sat down by my lonely little sister, blue sky overhead, green gra.s.s at my feet decked, like the pastures of the Blessed, in glorious sheen; a sea of triumphant, golden heads tossing blithely back as the wind swept down to play with them at his pleasure.
It was all mine to have and to hold without severing a single slender stem or harbouring a thought of covetousness; mine, as the whole earth was mine, to appropriate to myself without the burden and bane of worldly possession. ”Thou sayest that I am-a King,” said the Lord before Pilate, and ”My kingdom is not of this world.” We who are made kings after His likeness possess all things, not after this world's fas.h.i.+on but in proportion to our poverty; and when we cease to toil and spin, are arrayed as the lilies, in a glory transcending Solomon's. Bride Poverty-she who climbed the Cross with Christ-stretched out eager hands to free us from our chains, but we flee from her, and lay up treasure against her importunity, while Amytas on his seaweed bed weeps tears of pure pity for crave-mouth Caesar of great possessions.
Presently another of spring's lovers cried across the water ”Cuckoo, cuckoo,” and the voice of the stream sang joyously in unison. It is free from burden, this merry little river, and neither weir nor mill bars its quick way to the sea as it completes the eternal circle, lavis.h.i.+ng gifts of coolness and refreshment on the children of the meadows.
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