The Book-Bills of Narcissus | Page 9

by me as I write is a memorial of one of the pretty loves typical of that period. It is marked all through in black lead--not so gracefully as one would have expected from the 'taper fingers' which held the pencil, but rather, it would appear, more with regard to emphasis than grace. Narcissus had lent it to the queen of the hour with special instructions to that end, so that when it came to him again he might ravish his soul with the hugging assurance given by the thick lead to certain ecstatic lines of Endymion, such as--
'My soul doth melt For the unhappy youth;' 'He surely cannot now Thirst for another love;'
and luxuriate in a genial sense of godship where the tremulous pencil had left the record of a sigh against--
'Each tender maiden whom he once thought fair.'
But it was a magnanimous godship; and, after a moment's leaning back with closed eyes, to draw in all the sweet incense, how nobly would he act, in imaginative vignette, the King Cophetua to this poor suppliant of love; with what a generous waiving of his power--and with what a grace!--did he see himself raising her from her knees, and seating her at his right hand. Yet those pencil-marks, alas! mark but a secondary interest in that volume. A little sketch on the fly-leaf, 'by another hand,' witness the prettier memory. A sacred valley, guarded by smooth, green hills; in the midst a little lake, fed at one end by a singing stream, swallowed at the other by the roaring darkness of a mill; green rushes prosperous in the shallows, and along the other bank an old hedgerow; a little island in the midst, circled by silver lilies; and in the distance, rising from out a cloud of tangled green, above the little river, an old church tower. Below, though not 'in the picture,' a quaint country house, surrounded by a garden of fair fruit-trees and wonderful bowers, through which ran the stream, free once again, and singing for joy of the light. In the great lone house a solitary old man, cherished and ruled by--'The Miller's Daughter.' Was scene ever more in need of a fairy prince? Narcissus sighed, as he broke upon it one rosy evening, to think what little meaning all its beauty had, suffering that lack; but as he had come thither with the purpose, at once firm and vague, of giving it a memory, he could afford to sigh till morning's light brought, maybe, the opportunity of that transfiguring action. He was to spend an Easter fortnight there, as the guest of some farmer-relatives with whom he had stayed years before, in a period to which, being nineteen, he already alluded as his 'boyhood.'
And it is not quite accurate to say that it had no memory for him, for he brought with him one of that very miller's daughter, though, indeed, it was of the shadowiest silver. It had chanced at that early time that an influx of visitors to the farm had exceeded the sleeping room, and he and another little fellow had been provided with a bed in the miller's house. He had never quite forgotten that bedroom--its huge old-fashioned four-poster, slumbrous with great dark hangings, such as Queen Elizabeth seems always to have slept in; its walls dim with tapestry, and its screen of antique bead-work. But it was round the toilet table that memory grew brightest, for thereon was a crystal phial of a most marvellous perfume, and two great mother-of-pearl shells, shedding a mystical radiance--the most commonplace Rimmel's, without doubt, and the shells 'dreadful,' one may be sure. But to him, as he took a reverent breath of that phial, it seemed the very sweetbriar fragrance of her gown that caught his sense; and, surely, he never in all the world found scent like that again. Thus, long after, she would come to him in day-dreams, wafted on its strange sweetness, and clothed about with that mystical lustre of pearl.
There were five years between him and that memory as he stepped into that enchanted land for the second time. The sweet figure of young womanhood to which he had turned his boyish soul in hopeless worship, when it should have been busied rather with birds' nests and rabbit-snares, had, it is true, come to him in dimmer outline each Spring, but with magic the deeper for that. As the form faded from the silver halo, and passed more and more into mythology, it seemed, indeed, as if she had never lived for him at all, save in dreams, or on another star. Still, his memory held by those great shells, and he had come at last to the fabled country on the perilous quest--who of us dare venture such a one