Peter Ibbetson by George du Maurier et al (page 3)

des petits pâtés sur la tête–comme Madame Seraskier!”

And oh, how thou beatest them all for beauty! In _my_ estimation, at least–like–like Madame Seraskier again!

And hast thou done growing at last?

Nay, indeed; thou art not even yet a bread-and-butter miss–thou art but a sweet baby, one year old, and seven feet high, tottering midway between some blessed heaven thou hast only just left and the dull home of us poor mortals.

The sweet one-year-old baby of our kin puts its hands upon our knees and looks up into our eyes with eyes full of unutterable meaning. It has so much to say! It can only say “ga-ga” and “ba-ba”; but with oh! how searching a voice, how touching a look–that is, if one is fond of babies! We are moved to the very core; we want to understand, for it concerns us all; we were once like that ourselves–the individual and the race–but for the life of us we cannot _remember_.

And what canst _thou_ say to us yet, Euterpe, but thy “ga-ga” and thy “ba-ba,” the inarticulate sweetness whereof we feel and cannot comprehend? But how beautiful it is–and what a look thou hast, and what a voice–that is, if one is fond of music!

“Je suis las des mois–je suis d’entendre Ce qui peut mentir;
J’aime mieux les sons, qu’au lieu de comprendre je n’ai qu’à sentir.”

Next day I would buy or beg or borrow the music that had filled me with such emotion and delight, and take it home to my little square piano, and try to finger it all out for myself. But I had begun too late in life.

To sit, longing and helpless, before an instrument one cannot play, with a lovely score one cannot read! Even Tantalus was spared such an ordeal as that.

It seemed hard that my dear father and mother, so accomplished in music themselves, should not even have taught me the musical notes, at an age when it was so easy to learn them; and thus have made me free of that wonder-world of sound in which I took such an extraordinary delight, and might have achieved distinction–perhaps.

But no, my father had dedicated me to the Goddess of Science from before my very birth; that I might some day be better equipped than he for the pursuit, capture, and utilization of Nature’s sterner secrets. There must be no dallying with light Muses. Alas! I have fallen between two stools!

And thus, Euterpe absent, her enchantment would pass away; her handwriting was before me, but I had not learned how to decipher it, and my weary self would creep back into its old prison–my soul.

[Illustration: (no caption)]

Self-sickness-_selbstschmerz, le mal do soi!_ What a disease! It is not to be found in any dictionary, medical or otherwise.

I ought to have been whipped for it, I know; but nobody was big enough, or kind enough, to whip me!

* * * * *

At length there came a day when that weary, weak, and most ridiculous self of mine was driven out–and exorcised for good–by a still more potent enchanter than even Handel or Beethoven or Schubert!

There was a certain Lord Cray, for whom Lintot had built some laborers’ cottages in Hertfordshire, and I sometimes went there to superintend the workmen. When the cottages were finished, Lord Cray and his wife (a very charming, middle-aged lady) came to see them, and were much pleased with all that had been done, and also seemed to be much interested in _me_, of all people in the world! and a few days later I received a card of invitation to their house in town for a concert.

At first I felt much too shy to go; but Mr. Lintot insisted that it was my duty to do so, as it might lead to business; so that when the night came, I screwed up my courage to the sticking-place, and went.

That evening was all enchantment, or would have been but for the somewhat painful feeling that I was such an outsider.

But I was always well content to be the least observed of all observers, and felt happy in the security that here I should at least be left alone; that no perfect stranger would attempt to put me at my ease by making me the butt of his friendly and familiar banter; that no gartered duke, or belted earl (I have no doubt they were as plentiful there as blackberries, though they did not wear their insignia) would pat me on the back and ask me if I would sooner look a bigger fool than I was, or be a bigger fool than I looked. (I have not found a repartee for that insidious question yet; that is why it rankles so.)

I had always heard that the English were a stiff people. There seemed to be no stiffness at Lady Cray’s; nor was there any facetiousness; it put one at one’s ease merely to look at them. They were mostly big, and strong, and healthy, and quiet, and good-humored, with soft and pleasantly-modulated voices. The large, well-lighted rooms were neither hot nor cold; there were beautiful pictures on the walls, and an exquisite scent of flowers came from an immense conservatory. I had never been to such a gathering before; all was new and a surprise, and very much to my taste, I confess. It was my first glimpse of “Society;” and last–but one!

There were crowds of people–but no crowd; everybody seemed to know everybody else quite intimately, and to resume conversations begun an hour ago somewhere else.

Presently these conversations were hushed, and Grisi and Mario sang! It was as much as I could do to restrain my enthusiasm and delight. I could have shouted out loud–I could almost have sung myself!

In the midst of the applause that followed that heavenly duet, a lady and gentleman came into the room, and at the sight of that lady a new interest came into my life; and all the old half-forgotten sensations of mute pain and rapture that the beauty of Madame Seraskier used to make me feel as a child were revived once more; but with a depth and intensity, in comparison, that were as a strong man’s barytone to a small boy’s treble.

It was the quick, sharp, cruel blow, the _coup de poignard_, that beauty of the most obvious, yet subtle, consummate, and highly-organized order can deal to a thoroughly prepared victim.

And what a thoroughly prepared victim was I! A poor, shy, over-susceptible, virginal savage–Uncas, the son of Chingachgook, astray for the first time in a fashionable London drawing-room.

A chaste mediaeval knight, born out of his due time, ascetic both from reverence and disgust, to whom woman in the abstract was the one religion; in the concrete, the cause of fifty disenchantments a day!

A lusty, love-famished, warm-blooded pagan, stranded in the middle of the nineteenth century; in whom some strange inherited instinct had planted a definite, complete, and elaborately-finished conception of what the ever-beloved shape of woman should be–from the way the hair should grow on her brow and her temples and the nape of her neck, down to the very rhythm that should regulate the length and curve and position of every single individual toe! and who had found, to his pride and delight, that his preconceived ideal was as near to that of Phidias as if he had lived in the time of Pericles and Aspasia.

For such was this poor scribe, and such he had been from a child, until this beautiful lady first swam into his ken.

She was so tall that her eyes seemed almost on a level with mine, but she moved with the alert lightness and grace of a small person. Her thick, heavy hair was of a dark coppery brown, her complexion clear and pale, her eyebrows and eyelashes black, her eyes a light bluish gray. Her nose was short and sharp, and rather tilted at the tip, and her red mouth large and very mobile; and here, deviating from my preconceived ideal, she showed me how tame a preconceived ideal can be. Her perfect head was small, and round her long, thick throat two slight creases went parallel, to make what French sculptors call _le collier de Vénus;_ the skin of her neck was like a white camellia, and slender and square-shouldered as she was, she did not show a bone. She was that beautiful type the French define as _la fausse maigre_, which does not mean a “false, thin woman.”

She seemed both thoughtful and mirthful at once, and genial as I had never seen any one genial before–a person to confide in, to tell all one’s troubles to, without even an introduction! When she laughed she showed both top and bottom teeth, which were perfect, and her eyes nearly closed, so that they could no longer be seen for the thick lashes that fringed both upper and under eyelids; at which time the expression of her face was so keenly, cruelly sweet that it went through one like a knife. And then the laugh would suddenly cease, her full lips would meet, and her eyes beam out again like two mild gray suns, benevolently humorous and kindly inquisitive, and full of interest in everything and everybody around her. But there–I cannot describe her any more than one can describe a beautiful tune.

Out of those magnificent orbs kindness, kindness, kindness was shed like a balm; and after a while, by chance, that balm was shed for a few moments on me, to my sweet but terrible confusion. Then I saw that she asked my hostess who I was, and received the answer; on which she shed her balm on me for one moment more, and dismissed me from her thoughts.

Madame Grisi sang again–Desdemona’s song from _Othello_–and the beautiful lady thanked the divine singer, whom she seemed to know quite intimately; and I thought her thanks–Italian thanks–even diviner than the song–not that I could quite understand them or even hear them well–I was too far; but she thanked with eyes and hands and shoulders– slight, happy movements–as well as words; surely the sweetest and sincerest words ever spoken.

She was much surrounded and made up to–evidently a person of great importance; and I ventured to ask another shy man standing in my corner who she was, and he answered–

“The Duchess of Towers.”

She did not stay long, and when she departed all turned dull and commonplace that had seemed so bright before she came; and seeing that it was not necessary to bid my hostess good-night and thank her for a pleasant evening, as we did in Pentonville, I got myself out of the house and walked back to my lodgings an altered man.

I should probably never meet that lovely young duchess again, and certainly never know her; but her shaft had gone straight and true into my very heart, and I felt how well barbed it was, beyond all possibility of its ever being torn out of that blessed wound; might this never heal; might it bleed on forever!

She would be an ideal in my lonely life, to live up to in thought and word and deed. An instinct which I felt to be infallible told me she was as good as she was fair–

_”Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love.”_

[Illustration: THE DUCHESS OP TOWERS.]

And just as Madame Seraskier’s image was fading away, this new star had arisen to guide me by its light, though seen but for a moment; breaking once, through a parted cloud, I knew in which portion of the heavens it dwelt and shone apart, among the fairest constellations; and ever after turned my face that way. Nevermore in my life would I do or say or think a mean thing, or an impure, or an unkind one, if I could help it.

* * * * *

Next day, as we walked to the Foundling Hospital for divine service, Mrs. Lintot severely deigned–under protest, as it were–to cross-examine me on the adventures of the evening.

I did not mention the Duchess of Towers, nor was I able to describe the different ladies’ dresses; but I described everything else in a manner I thought calculated to interest her deeply–the flowers, the splendid pictures and curtains and cabinets, the beautiful music, the many lords and ladies gay.

She disapproved of them all.

Existence on such an opulent scale was unconducive to any qualities of real sterling value, either moral or intellectual. Give _her_, for one, plain living and high thinking!

“By-the-way,” she asked, “what kind of supper did they give you? Something extremely _recherché_, I have no doubt. Ortolans, nightingales’ tongues, pearls dissolved in wine?”

Candor obliged me to confess there had been no supper, or that if there had I had managed to miss it. I suggested that perhaps everybody had dined late; and all the pearls, I told her, were on the ladies’ necks and in their hair; and not feeling hungry, I could not wish them anywhere else; and the nightingales’ tongues were in their throats to sing heavenly Italian duets with.

“And they call that hospitality!” exclaimed Lintot, who loved his supper; and then, as he was fond of summing up and laying down the law when once his wife had given him the lead, he did so to the effect that though the great were all very well in their superficial way, and might possess many external charms for each other, and for all who were so deplorably weak as to fall within the sphere of their attraction, there was a gulf between the likes of them and the likes of us, which it would be better not to try and bridge if one wished to preserve one’s independence and one’s self-respect; unless, of course, it led to business; and this, he feared, it would never do with me.

“They take you up one day and they drop you like a ‘ot potato the next; and, moreover, my dear Peter,” he concluded, affectionately linking his arm in mine, as was often his way when we walked together (although he was twelve good inches shorter than myself), “inequality of social condition is a bar to any real intimacy. It is something like disparity of physical stature. One can walk arm in arm only with a man of about one’s own size.”

This summing up seemed so judicious, so incontrovertible, that feeling quite deplorably weak enough to fall within the sphere of Lady Cray’s attraction if I saw much of her, and thereby losing my self-respect, I was deplorably weak enough not to leave a card on her after the happy evening I had spent at her house.

Snob that I was, I dropped her–“like a ‘ot potato” for fear of her dropping me.

Besides which I had on my conscience a guilty, snobby feeling that in merely external charms at least these fine people were more to my taste than the charmed circle of my kind old friends the Lintots, however inferior they might be to these (for all that I knew) in sterling qualities of the heart and head–just as I found the outer aspect of Park Lane and Piccadilly more attractive than that of Pentonville, though possibly the latter may have been the more wholesome for such as I to live in.

But people who can get Mario and Grisi to come and sing for them (and the Duchess of Towers to come and listen); people whose walls are covered with beautiful pictures; people for whom the smooth and harmonious ordering of all the little external things of social life has become a habit and a profession–such people are not to be dropped without a pang.

So with a pang I went back to my usual round as though nothing had happened; but night and day the face of the Duchess of Towers was ever present to me, like a fixed idea that dominates a life.

* * * * *

On reading and rereading these past pages, I find that I have been unpardonably egotistic, unconscionably prolix and diffuse; and with such small beer to chronicle!

And yet I feel that if I strike out this, I must also strike out that; which would lead to my striking out all, in sheer discouragement; and I have a tale to tell which is more than worth the telling!

Once having got into the way of it, I suppose, I must have found the temptation to talk about myself irresistible.

It is evidently a habit easy to acquire, even in old age–perhaps especially in old age, for it has never been my habit through life. I would sooner have talked to you about yourself, reader, or about you to somebody else–your friend, or even your enemy; or about them to you.

But, indeed, at present, and until I die, I am without a soul to talk to about anybody or anything worth speaking of, so that most of my talking is done in pen and ink–a one-sided conversation, O patient reader, with yourself. I am the most lonely old man in the world, although perhaps the happiest.

Still, it is not always amusing where I live, cheerfully awaiting my translation to another sphere.

There is the good chaplain, it is true, and the good priest; who talk to me about myself a little too much, methinks; and the doctor, who talks to me about the priest and the chaplain, which is better. He does not seem to like them. He is a very witty man.

But, my brother maniacs!

They are lamentably _comme tout le monde_, after all. They are only interesting when the mad fit seizes them. When free from their awful complaint they are for the most part very common mortals: conventional Philistines, dull dogs like myself, and dull dogs do not like each other.

Two of the most sensible (one a forger, the other a kleptomaniac on an important scale) are friends of mine. They are fairly well educated, respectable city men, clean, solemn, stodgy, punctilious, and resigned, but they are both unhappy; not because they are cursed with the double brand of madness and crime, and have forfeited their freedom in consequence; but because they find there are so few “ladies and gentlemen” in a criminal lunatic asylum, and they have always been used to “the society of ladies and gentlemen.” Were it not for this, they would be well content to live here. And each is in the habit of confiding to me that he considers the other a very high-minded, trustworthy fellow, and all that, but not altogether “quite a gentleman.” I do not know what they consider me; they probably confide that to each other.

Can anything be less odd, less eccentric or interesting?

Another, when quite sane, speaks English with a French accent and demonstrative French gestures, and laments the lost glories of the old French régime, and affects to forget the simplest English words. He doesn’t know a word of French, however. But when his madness comes on, and he is put into a strait-waistcoat, all his English comes back, and very strong, fluent, idiomatic English it is, of the cockneyest kind, with all its “h’s” duly transposed.

Another (the most unpleasant and ugliest person here) has chosen me for the confidant of his past amours; he gives me the names and dates and all. The less I listen the more he confides. He makes me sick. What can I do to prevent his believing that I believe him? I am tired of killing people for lying about women. If I call him a liar and a cad, it may wake in him Heaven knows what dormant frenzy–for I am quite in the dark as to the nature of his mental infirmity.

Another, a weak but amiable and well-intentioned youth, tries to think that he is passionately fond of music; but he is so exclusive, if you please, that he can only endure Bach and Beethoven, and when he hears Mendelssohn or Chopin, is obliged to leave the room. If I want to please him I whistle “Le Bon Roi Dagobert,” and tell him it is the _motif_ of one of Bach’s fugues; and to get rid of him I whistle it again and tell him it is one of Chopin’s impromptus. What his madness is I can never be quite sure, for he is very close, but have heard that he is fond of roasting cats alive; and that the mere sight of a cat is enough to rouse his terrible propensity, and drive all wholesome, innocent, harmless, natural affectation out of his head.

There is a painter here who (like others one has met outside) believes himself the one living painter worthy of the name. Indeed, he has forgotten the names of all the others, and can only despise and abuse them in the lump. He triumphantly shows you his own work, which consists of just the kind of crude, half-clever, irresponsible, impressionist daubs you would expect from an amateur who talks in that way; and you wonder why on earth he should be in a lunatic asylum, of all places in the world. And (just as would happen outside, again) some of his fellow-sufferers take him at his own valuation and believe him a great genius; some of them want to kick him for an impudent impostor (but that he is so small); and the majority do not care.

His mania is arson, poor fellow; and when the terrible wish comes over him to set the place on fire he forgets his artistic conceit, and his mean, weak, silly face becomes almost grand.

And with the female inmates it is just the same. There is a lady who has spent twenty years of her life here. Her father was a small country doctor, called Snogget; her husband an obscure, hard-working curate; and she is absolutely normal, common-place, and even vulgar. For her hobby is to discourse of well-born and titled people and county families, with whom (and with no others) it has always been her hope and desire to mix; and is still, though her hair is nearly white, and she is still here. She thinks and talks and cares about nothing else but “smart people,” and has conceived a very warm regard for me, on account of Lieutenant-colonel Ibbetson, of Ibbetson Hall, Hopshire; not because I killed him and was sentenced to be hanged for it, or because he was a greater criminal than I (all of which is interesting enough); but because he was my relative, and that through him I must be distantly connected, she thinks, with the Ibbetsons of Lechmere–whoever they may be, and whom neither she nor I have ever met (indeed, I had never heard of them), but whose family history she knows almost by heart. What can be tamer, duller, more prosaic, more sordidly humdrum, more hopelessly sane, more characteristic of common, under-bred, provincial feminine cackle?

And yet this woman, in a fit of conjugal jealousy, murdered her own children; and her father went mad in consequence, and her husband cut his throat.

In fact, during their lucid intervals it would never enter one’s mind that they were mad at all, they are so absolutely like the people one meets every day in the world–such narrow-minded idiots, such deadly bores! One might as well be back in Pentonville or Hopshire again, or live in Passionate Brompton (as I am told it is called); or even in Belgravia, for that matter!

For we have a young lord and a middle-aged baronet–a shocking pair, who should not be allowed to live; but for family influence they would be doing their twenty years’ penal servitude in jail, instead of living comfortably sequestered here. Like Ouida’s high-born heroes, they “stick to their order,” and do not mingle with the rest of us. They ignore us so completely that we cannot help looking up to them in spite of their vices–just as we should do outside.

And we, of the middle class, we stick to our order, too, and do not mingle with the small shop-keepers–who do not mingle with the laborers, artisans, and mechanics–who (alas, for them!) have nobody to look down upon but each other–but they do not; and are the best-bred people in the place.

Such are we! It is only when our madness is upon us that we cease to be commonplace, and wax tragical and great, or else original and grotesque and humorous, with that true deep humor that compels both our laughter and our tears, and leaves us older, sadder, and wiser than it found us.

“_Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt_.”

(So much, if little more, can I recall of the benign Virgil.)

And now to my small beer again, which will have more of a head to it henceforward.

* * * * *

Thus did I pursue my solitary way, like Bryant’s Water-fowl, only with a less definite purpose before me–till at last there dawned for me an ever-memorable Saturday in June.

I had again saved up enough money to carry my long longed-for journey to Paris into execution. The _Seine’s_ boiler got up its steam, the _Seine’s_ white awning was put up for me as well as others; and on a beautiful cloudless English morning I stood by the man at the wheel, and saw St. Paul’s and London Bridge and the Tower fade out of sight; with what hope and joy I cannot describe. I almost forgot that I was me!

And next morning (a beautiful French morning) how I exulted as I went up the Champs Elysées and passed under the familiar Arc de Triomphe on my way to the Rue de la Pompe, Passy, and heard all around the familiar tongue that I still knew so well, and rebreathed the long-lost and half-forgotten, but now keenly remembered, fragrance of the _genius loci_; that vague, light, indescribable, almost imperceptible scent of a place, that is so heavenly laden with the past for those who have lived there long ago–the most subtly intoxicating ether that can be!

When I came to the meeting of the Rue de la Tour and the Rue de la Pompe, and, looking in at the grocer’s shop at the corner, I recognized the handsome mustachioed groceress, Madame Liard (whose mustache twelve prosperous years had turned gray), I was almost faint with emotion. Had any youth been ever so moved by that face before?

There, behind the window (which was now of plate-glass), and among splendid Napoleonic wares of a later day, were the same old India-rubber balls in colored net-work; the same quivering lumps of fresh paste in brown paper, that looked so cool and tempting; the same three-sou boxes of water-colors (now marked seventy-five centimes), of which I had consumed so many in the service of Mimsey Seraskier! I went in and bought one, and resmelt with delight the smell of all my by-gone dealings there, and received her familiar sounding–

“Merci, monsieur! faudrait-il autre chose?” as if it had been a blessing; but I was too shy to throw myself into her arms and tell her that I was the “lone, wandering, but not lost” Gogo Pasquier. She might have said–

“Eh bien, et après?”

The day had begun well.

Like an epicure, I deliberated whether I should walk to the old gate in the Rue de la Pompe, and up the avenue and back to our old garden, or make my way round to the gap in the park hedge that we had worn of old by our frequent passage in and out, to and from the Bois de Boulogne.

I chose the latter as, on the whole, the more promising in exquisite gradations of delight.

The gap in the park hedge, indeed! The park hedge had disappeared, the very park itself was gone, cut up, demolished, all parcelled out into small gardens, with trim white villas, except where a railway ran through a deep cutting in the chalk. A train actually roared and panted by, and choked me with its filthy steam as I looked round in stupefaction on the ruins of my long-cherished hope.

If that train had run over me and I had survived it, it could not have given me a greater shock; it all seemed too cruel and brutal an outrage.

A winding carriage-road had been pierced through the very heart of the wilderness; and on this, neatly-paled little brand-new gardens abutted, and in these I would recognize, here and there, an old friend in the shape of some well-remembered tree that I had often climbed as a boy, and which had been left standing out of so many, but so changed by the loss of its old surroundings that it had a tame, caged, transplanted look–almost apologetic, and as if ashamed of being found out at last!

Nothing else remained. Little hills and cliffs and valleys and chalk-pits that had once seemed big had been levelled up, or away, and I lost my bearings altogether, and felt a strange, creeping chill of blankness and bereavement.

But how about the avenue and my old home? I hastened back to the Rue de la Pompe with the quick step of aroused anxiety. The avenue was gone–blocked within a dozen yards of the gate by a huge brick building covered with newly-painted trellis-work! My old house was no more, but in its place a much larger and smarter edifice of sculptured stone. The old gate at least had not disappeared, nor the porter’s lodge; and I feasted my sorrowful eyes on these poor remains, that looked snubbed and shabby and out of place in the midst of all this new splendor.

[Illustration]

Presently a smart concierge, with a beautiful pink ribboned cap, came out and stared at me for a while, and inquired if monsieur desired anything.

I could not speak.

“Est-ce que monsieur est indisposé? Cette chaleur! Monsieur ne parle pas le Français, peut-être?”

When I found my tongue I explained to her that I had once lived there in a modest house overlooking the street, but which had been replaced by this much more palatial abode.

“O, oui, monsieur–on a balayé tout ça!” she replied.

“Balayé!” What an expression for _me_ to hear!

And she explained how the changes had taken place, and how valuable the property had become. She showed me a small plot of garden, a fragment of my old garden, that still remained, and where the old apple-tree might still have been, but that it had been sawed away. I saw the stump; that did duty for a rustic table.

Presently, looking over a new wall, I saw another small garden, and in it the ruins of the old shed where I had found the toy wheelbarrow–soon to disappear, as they were building there too.

I asked after all the people I could think of, beginning with those of least interest–the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.

Some were dead; some had retired and had left their “commerce” to their children and children-in-law. Three different school-masters had kept the school since I had left. Thank Heaven, there was still the school–much altered, it is true. I had forgotten to look for it.

[Illustration: THE OLD APPLE-TREE.]

She had no remembrance of my name, or the Seraskiers’–I asked, with a beating heart. We had left no trace. Twelve short years had effaced all memory of us! But she told me that a gentleman, _décoré, mais tombé en enfance_, lived at a _maison de santé_ in the Chaussée de la Muette, close by, and that his name was le Major Duquesnois; and thither I went, after rewarding and warmly thanking her.

I inquired for le Major Duquesnois, and I was told he was out for a walk, and I soon found him, much aged and bent, and leaning on the arm of a Sister of Charity. I was so touched that I had to pass him two or three times before I could speak. He was so small–so pathetically small!

[Illustration: M. LE MAJOR.]

It was a long time before I could give him an idea of who I was–Gogo Pasquier!

Then after a while he seemed to recall the past a little.

“Ha, ha! Gogo–gentil petit Gogo!–oui–oui–l’exercice? Portez … arrrmes! arrmes … bras? Et Mimsé? bonne petite Mimsé! toujours mal à la tête?”

He could just remember Madame Seraskier; and repeated her name several times and said, “Ah! elle était bien belle, Madame Seraskier!”

In the old days of fairy-tale telling, when he used to get tired and I still wanted him to go on, he had arranged that if, in the course of the story, he suddenly brought in the word “Cric,” and I failed to immediately answer “Crac,” the story would be put off till our next walk (to be continued in our next!) and he was so ingenious in the way he brought in the terrible word that I often fell into the trap, and had to forego my delight for that afternoon.

I suddenly thought of saying “Cric!” and he immediately said “Crac!” and laughed in a touching, senile way–“Cric!–Crac! c’est bien ça!” and then he became quite serious and said–

“Et la suite au prochain numéro!”

After this he began to cough, and the good Sister said–

“Je crains que monsieur ne le fatigue un peu!”

So I had to bid him good-bye; and after I had squeezed and kissed his hand, he made me a most courtly bow, as though I had been a complete stranger.

I rushed away, tossing up my arms like a madman in my pity and sorrow for my dear old friend, and my general regret and disenchantment. I made for the Bois de Boulogne, there to find, instead of the old rabbit-and-roebuck-haunted thickets and ferneries and impenetrable growth, a huge artificial lake, with row-boats and skiffs, and a rockery that would have held its own in Rosherville gardens. And on the way thither, near the iron gates in the fortifications, whom should I meet but one of my friends the couriers, on his way from St. Cloud to the Tuileries! There he rode with his arms jogging up and down, and his low glazed hat, and his immense jack-boots, just the same as ever, never rising in his stirrups, as his horse trotted to the jingle of the sweet little chime round its neck.

[Illustration: GREEN AND GOLD]

Alas! his coat was no longer the innocent, unsophisticated blue and silver livery of the bourgeois king, but the hateful green and gold of another régime.

Farther on the Mare d’Auteuil itself had suffered change and become respectable–imperially respectable. No more frogs or newts or water-beetles, I felt sure; but gold and silver fish in vulgar Napoleonic profusion.

No words that I can find would give any idea of the sadness and longing that filled me as I trod once more that sunlit grassy brink–the goal of my fond ambition for twelve long years.

It was Sunday, and many people were about–many children, in their best Sunday clothes and on their best behavior, discreetly throwing crumbs to the fish. A new generation, much quieter and better dressed than my cousins and I, who had once so filled the solitude with the splashing of our nets, and the excited din of our English voices.

As I sat down on a bench by the old willow (where the rat lived), and gazed and gazed, it almost surprised me that the very intensity of my desire did not of itself suffice to call up the old familiar faces and forms, and conjure away these modern intruders. The power to do this seemed almost within my reach; I willed and willed and willed with all my might, but in vain; I could not cheat my sight or hearing for a moment. There they remained, unconscious and undisturbed, those happy, well-mannered, well-appointed little French people, and fed the gold and silver fish; and there, with an aching heart, I left them.

Oh, surely, surely, I cried to myself, we ought to find some means of possessing the past more fully and completely than we do. Life is not worth living for many of us if a want so desperate and yet so natural can never be satisfied. Memory is but a poor, rudimentary thing that we had better be without, if it can only lead us to the verge of consummation like this, and madden us with a desire it cannot slake. The touch of a vanished hand, the sound of a voice that is still, the tender grace of a day that is dead, should be ours forever, at out beck and call, by some exquisite and quite conceivable illusion of the senses.

Alas! alas! I have hardly the hope of ever meeting my beloved ones again in another life. Oh, to meet their too dimly remembered forms in _this_, just as they once were, by some trick of my own brain! To see them with the eye, and hear them with the ear, and tread with them the old obliterated ways as in a waking dream! It would be well worth going mad to become such a self-conjurer as that.

Thus musing sadly, I reached St. Cloud, and _that_, at least, and the Boulogne that led me to it, had not been very perceptibly altered, and looked as though I had only left them a week ago. The sweet aspect from the bridge, on either side and beyond, filled me with the old enchantment. There, at least, the glory had not departed.

I hastened through the gilded gates and up the broad walk to the grand cascade. There, among the lovely wreathed urns and jars of geranium, still sat or reclined or gesticulated, the old, unalterable gods; there squatted the grimly genial monsters in granite and marble and bronze, still spouting their endless gallons for the delectation of hot Parisian eyes. Unchanged, and to all appearance unchangeable (save that they were not nearly so big as I had imagined), their cold, smooth, ironical patience shamed and braced me into better cheer. Beautiful, hideous, whatever you please, they seemed to revel in the very sense of their insensibility of their eternal stability–their stony scorn of time and wind and weather, and the peevish, weak-kneed, short-lived discontent of man. It was good to fondly pat them on the back once more–when one could reach them–and cling to them for a little while, after all the dust and drift and ruin I had been tramping through all day.

Indeed, they woke in me a healthy craving for all but forgotten earthly joys–even for wretched meat and drink–so I went and ordered a sumptuous repast at the Tête Noire–a brand-new Tête Noire, alas! quite white, all in stone and stucco, and without a history!

It was a beautiful sunset. Waiting for my dinner, I gazed out of the first-floor window, and found balm for my disappointed and regretful spirit in all that democratic joyousness of French Sunday life. I had seen it over and over again just like that in the old days; _this_, at least, was like coming back home to something I had known and loved.

The cafés on the little “Place” between the bridge and the park were full to overflowing. People chatting over their _consommations_ sat right out, almost into the middle of the square, so thickly packed that there was scarcely room for the busy, lively, white-aproned waiters to move between them. The air was full of the scent of trodden grass and macaroons and French tobacco, blown from the park; of gay French laughter and the music of _mirlitons_; of a light dusty haze, shot with purple and gold by the setting sun. The river, alive with boats and canoes, repeated the glory of the sky, and the well-remembered, thickly-wooded hills rose before me, culminating in the Lanterne de Diogène.

I could have threaded all that maze of trees blindfolded.

Two Roman pifferari came on to the Place and began to play an extraordinary and most exciting melody that almost drew me out of the window; it seemed to have no particular form, no beginning or middle or end; it went soaring higher and higher, like the song of a lark, with never a pause for breath, to the time of a maddening jig–a tarantella, perhaps–always on the strain and stress, always getting nearer and nearer to some shrill climax of ecstasy quite high up and away, beyond the scope of earthly music; while the persistent drone kept buzzing of the earth and the impossibility to escape. All so gay, so sad, there is no name for it!

Two little deformed and discarded-looking dwarfs, beggars, brother and sister, with large toothless gaps for mouths and no upper lip, began to dance; and the crowd laughed and applauded. Higher and higher, nearer and nearer to the impossible, rose the quick, piercing notes of the piffero. Heaven seemed almost within reach–the nirvana of music after its quick madness–the region of the ultra-treble that lies beyond the ken of ordinary human ears!

[Illustration]

A carriage and four, with postilions and “guides,” came clattering royally down the road from the palace, and dispersed the crowd as it bowled on its way to the bridge. In it were two ladies and two gentlemen. One of the ladies was the young Empress of the French; the other looked up at my window–for a moment, as in a soft flash of summer lightning, her face seemed ablaze with friendly recognition–with a sweet glance of kindness and interest and surprise–a glance that pierced me like a sudden shaft of light from heaven.

It was the Duchess of Towers!

I felt as though the bagpipes had been leading up to this! In a moment more the carriage was out of sight, the sun had quite gone down, the pifferari had ceased to play and were walking round with the hat, and all was over.

I dined, and made my way back to Paris on foot through the Bois de Boulogne, and by the Mare d’Auteuil, and saw my old friend the water-rat swim across it, trailing the gleam of his wake after him like a silver comet’s tail.

“Allons-nous-en, gens de la nous!
Allons-nous-en chacun chez nous!”

So sang a festive wedding-party as it went merrily arm in arm through the long high street of Passy, with a gleeful trust that would have filled the heart with envy but for sad experience of the vanity of human wishes.

_Chacun chez nous!_ How charming it sounds!

Was each so sure that when he reached his home he would find his heart’s desire? Was the bridegroom himself so very sure?

[Illustration: THE OLD WATER-RAT.]

The heart’s desire–the heart’s regret! I flattered myself that I had pretty well sounded the uttermost depths of both on that eventful Sunday!

Part Four

[Illustration]

I got back to my hotel in the Rue de la Michodière.

Prostrate with emotion and fatigue, the tarantella still jingling in my ears, and that haunting, beloved face, with its ineffable smile still printed on the retina of my closed eyes, I fell asleep.

And then I dreamed a dream, and the first phase of my real, inner life began!

All the events of the day, distorted and exaggerated and jumbled together after the usual manner of dreams, wove themselves into a kind of nightmare and oppression. I was on my way to my old abode: everything that I met or saw was grotesque and impossible, yet had now the strange, vague charm of association and reminiscence, now the distressing sense of change and loss and desolation.

As I got near to the avenue gate, instead of the school on my left there was a prison; and at the door a little thick-set jailer, three feet high and much deformed, and a little deformed jaileress no bigger than himself, were cunningly watching me out of the corners of their eyes, and toothlessly smiling. Presently they began to waltz together to an old, familiar tune, with their enormous keys dangling at their sides; and they looked so funny that I laughed and applauded. But soon I perceived that their crooked faces were not really funny; indeed, they were fatal and terrible in the extreme, and I was soon conscious that these deadly dwarfs were trying to waltz between me and the avenue gate for which I was bound–to cut me off, that they might run me into the prison, where it was their custom to hang people of a Monday morning.

In an agony of terror I made a rush for the avenue gate, and there stood the Duchess of Towers, with mild surprise in her eyes and a kind smile–a heavenly vision of strength and reality.

“You are not dreaming true!” she said. “Don’t be afraid–those little people don’t exist! Give me your hand and come in here.”

And as I did so she waved the troglodytes away, and they vanished; and I felt that this was no longer a dream, but something else–some strange thing that had happened to me, some new life that I had woke up to.

For at the touch of her hand my consciousness, my sense of being I, myself, which hitherto in my dream (as in all previous dreams up to then) had been only partial, intermittent, and vague, suddenly blazed into full, consistent, practical activity–just as it is in life, when one is well awake and much interested in what is going on–only with perceptions far keener and more alert.

I knew perfectly who I was and what I was, and remembered all the events of the previous day. I was conscious that my real body, undressed and in bed, now lay fast asleep in a small room on the fourth floor of an _hôtel garni_ in the Rue de la Michodière. I knew this perfectly; and yet here was my body, too, just as substantial, with all my clothes on; my boots rather dusty, my shirt-collar damp with the heat, for it was hot. With my disengaged hand I felt in my trousers-pocket; there were my London latch-keys, my purse, my penknife; my handkerchief in the breastpocket of my coat, and in its tail-pockets my gloves and pipe-case, and the little water-color box I had bought that morning. I looked at my watch; it was going, and marked eleven. I pinched myself, I coughed, I did all one usually does under the pressure of some immense surprise, to assure myself that I was awake; and I _was_, and yet here I stood, actually hand in hand with a great lady to whom I had never been introduced (and who seemed much tickled at my confusion); and staring now at her, now at my old school.

The prison had tumbled down like a house of cards, and loi! in its place was M. Saindou’s _maison d’éducation_, just as it had been of old. I even recognized on the yellow wall the stamp of a hand in dry mud, made fifteen years ago by a day boy called Parisot, who had fallen down in the gutter close by, and thus left his mark on getting up again; and it had remained there for months, till it had been whitewashed away in the holidays. Here it was anew, after fifteen years.

The swallows were flying and twittering. A yellow omnibus was drawn up to the gates of the school; the horses stamped and neighed, and bit each other, as French horses always did in those days. The driver swore at them perfunctorily.

A crowd was looking on–le Père et la Mère François, Madame Liard, the grocer’s wife, and other people, whom I remembered at once with delight. Just in front of us a small boy and girl were looking on, like the rest, and I recognized the back and the cropped head and thin legs of Mimsey Seraskier.

A barrel-organ was playing a pretty tune I knew quite well, and had forgotten.

The school gates opened, and M. Saindou, proud and full of self-importance (as he always was), and half a dozen boys whose faces and names were quite familiar to me, in smart white trousers and shining boots, and silken white bands round their left arms, got into the omnibus, and were driven away in a glorified manner–as it seemed–to heaven in a golden chariot. It was beautiful to see and hear.

I was still holding the duchess’s hand, and felt the warmth of it through her glove; it stole up my arm like a magnetic current. I was in Elysium; a heavenly sense had come over me that at last my periphery had been victoriously invaded by a spirit other than mine–a most powerful and beneficent spirit. There was a blessed fault in my impenetrable armor of self, after all, and the genius of strength and charity and loving-kindness had found it out.

“Now you’re dreaming true,” she said. “Where are those boys going?”

“To church, to make their _première communion_,” I replied.

“That’s right. You’re dreaming true because I’ve got you by the hand. Do you know that tune?”

I listened, and the words belonging to it came out of the past and I said them to her, and she laughed again, with her eyes screwed up deliciously.

“Quite right–quite!” she exclaimed. “How odd that you should know them! How well you pronounce French for an Englishman! For you are Mr. Ibbetson, Lady Cray’s architect?”

I assented, and she let go my hand.

The street was full of people–familiar forms and faces and voices, chatting together and looking down the road after the yellow omnibus; old attitudes, old tricks of gait and manner, old forgotten French ways of speech–all as it was long ago. Nobody noticed us, and we walked up the now deserted avenue.

The happiness, the enchantment of it all! Could it be that I was dead, that I had died suddenly in my sleep, at the hotel in the Rue de la Michodière! Could it be that the Duchess of Towers was dead too–had been killed by some accident on her way from St. Cloud to Paris? and that, both having died so near each other, we had begun our eternal afterlife in this heavenly fashion?

That was too good to be true, I reflected; some instinct told me that this was not death, but transcendent earthly life–and also, alas! that it would not endure forever!

I was deeply conscious of every feature in her face, every movement of her body, every detail of her dress–more so then I could have been in actual life–and said to myself, “Whatever this is, it is no dream.” But I felt there was about me the unspeakable elation which can come to us only in our waking moments when we are at our very best; and then only feebly, in comparison with this, and to many of us never, ft never had to me, since that morning when I had found the little wheelbarrow.

I was also conscious, however, that the avenue itself had a slight touch of the dream in it. It was no longer quite right, and was getting out of drawing and perspective, so to speak. I had lost my stay–the touch of her hand.

“Are you still dreaming true, Mr. Ibbetson?”

“I am afraid not quite,” I replied.

“You must try by yourself a little–try hard. Look at this house; what is written on the portico?”

I saw written in gold letters the words, “Tête Noire,” and said so.

[Illustration]

She rippled with laughter, and said, “No; try again”; and just touched me with the tip of her finger for a moment.

I tried again and said, “Parvis Notre Dame.”

“That’s rather better,” she said, and touched me again; and I read, “Parva sed Apta,” as I had so often read there before in old days.

“And now look at that old house over there,” pointing to my old home; “how many windows are there in the top story?”

I said seven.

“No; there are five. Look again!” and there were five; and the whole house was exactly, down to its minutest detail, as it had been once upon a time. I could see Thérèse through one of the windows, making my bed.

“That’s better,” said the duchess; “you will soon do it–it’s very easy–_ce n’est que le premier pas!_ My father taught me; you must always sleep on your back with your arms above your head, your hands clasped under it and your feet crossed, the right one over the left, unless you are left-handed; and you must never for a moment cease thinking of where you want to be in your dream till you are asleep and get there; and you must never forget in your dream where and what you were when awake. You must join the dream on to reality. Don’t forget. And now I will say good-bye; but before I go give me both hands and look round everywhere as far as your eyes can see.”

It was hard to look away from her; her face drew my eyes, and through them all my heart; but I did as she told me, and took in the whole familiar scene, even to the distant woods of Ville d’Avray, a glimpse of which was visible through an opening in the trees; even to the smoke of a train making its way to Versailles, miles off; and the old telegraph, working its black arms on the top of Mont Valérien.

[Illustration: “It was hard to look away from her.”]

“Is it all right?” she asked. “That’s well. Henceforward, whenever you come here, you will be safe as far as your sight can reach–from this spot–all through my introduction. See what it is to have a friend at court! No more little dancing jailers! And then you can gradually get farther by yourself.

“Out there, through that park, leads to the Bois de Boulogne–there’s a gap in the hedge you can get through; but mind and make everything plain in front of you–_true_, before you go a step farther, or else you’ll have to wake and begin it all over again. You have only to will it, and think of yourself as awake, and it will come–on condition, of course, that you have been there before. And mind, also, you must take care how you touch things or people–you may hear, and see, and smell; but you mustn’t touch, nor pick flowers or leaves, nor move things about. It blurs the dream, like breathing on a window-pane. I don’t know why, but it does. You must remember that everything here is dead and gone by. With you and me it is different; we’re alive and real–that is, _I_ am; and there would seem to be no mistake about your being real too, Mr. Ibbetson, by the grasp of your hands. But you’re _not_; and why you are here, and what business you have in this, my particular dream, I cannot understand; no living person has ever come into it before. I can’t make it out. I suppose it’s because I saw your reality this afternoon, looking out of the window at the ‘Tête Noire,’ and you are just a stray figment of my overtired brain–a very agreeable figment, I admit; but you don’t exist here just now–you can’t possibly; you are somewhere else, Mr. Ibbetson; dancing at Mabille, perhaps, or fast asleep somewhere, and dreaming of French churches and palaces, and public fountains, like a good young British architect–otherwise I shouldn’t talk to you like this, you may be sure!

“Never mind. I am very glad to dream that I have been of use to you, and you are very welcome here, if it amuses you to come–especially as you are only a false dream of mine, for what else _can_ you be? And now I must leave you, so good-bye.”

She disengaged her hands, and laughed her angelic laugh, and then turned towards the park. I watched her tall, straight figure and blowing skirts, and saw her follow some ladies and children into a thicket that I remembered well, and she was soon out of sight.

I felt as if all warmth had gone out of my life; as if a joy had taken flight; as if a precious something had withdrawn itself from my possession, and the gap in my periphery had closed again.

Long I stood in thought, with my eyes fixed on the spot where she had disappeared; and I felt inclined to follow, but then considered this would not have been discreet. For although she was only a false dream of mine, a mere recollection of the exciting and eventful day, a stray figment of my overtired and excited brain–a _more_ than agreeable figment (what else _could_ she be!)–she was also a great lady, and had treated me, a perfect stranger and a perfect nobody, with singular courtesy and kindness; which I repaid, it is true, with a love so deep and strong that my very life was hers, to do what she liked with, and always had been since I first saw her, and always would be as long as there was breath in my body! But this did not constitute an acquaintance without a proper introduction, even in France–even in a dream. Even in dreams one must be polite, even to stray figments of one’s tired, sleeping brain.

And then what business had _she_, in _this_, _my_ particular dream–as she herself had asked of me?

But _was_ it a dream? I remembered my lodgings at Pentonville, that I had left yesterday morning. I remembered what I was–why I came to Paris; I remembered the very bedroom at the Paris hotel where I was now fast asleep, its loudly-ticking clock, and all the meagre furniture. And here was I, broad awake and conscious, in the middle of an old avenue that had long ceased to exist–that had been built over by a huge brick edifice covered with newly-painted trellis-work. I saw it, this edifice, myself, only twelve hours ago. And yet here was everything as it had been when I was a child; and all through the agency of this solid phantom of a lovely young English duchess, whose warm gloved hands I had only this minute been holding in mine! The scent of her gloves was still in my palm. I looked at my watch; it marked twenty-three minutes to twelve. All this had happened in less than three-quarters of an hour!

Pondering over all this in hopeless bewilderment, I turned my steps towards my old home, and, to my surprise, was just able to look over the garden wall, which I had once thought about ten feet high.

Under the old apple-tree in full bloom sat my mother, darning small socks; with her flaxen side-curls (as it was her fashion to wear them) half-concealing her face. My emotion and astonishment were immense. My heart beat fast. I felt its pulse in my temples, and my breath was short.

At a little green table that I remembered well sat a small boy, rather quaintly dressed in a by-gone fashion, with a frill round his wide shirt-collar, and his golden hair cut quite close at the top, and rather long at the sides and back. It was Gogo Pasquier. He seemed a very nice little boy. He had pen and ink and copy-book before him, and a gilt-edged volume bound in red morocco. I knew it at a glance; it was _Elegant Extracts_. The dog Médor lay asleep in the shade. The bees were droning among the nasturtiums and convolvulus.

A little girl ran up the avenue from the porter’s lodge and pushed the garden gate, which rang the bell as it opened, and she went into the garden, and I followed her; but she took no notice of me, nor did the others. It was Mimsey Seraskier.

I went out and sat at my mother’s feet, and looked long in her face.

I must not speak to her, nor touch her–not even touch her busy hand with my lips, or I should “blur the dream.”

I got up and looked over the boy Gogo’s shoulder. He was translating Gray’s _Elegy_ into French; he had not got very far, and seemed to be stumped by the line–

_”And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”_

Mimsey was silently looking over his other shoulder, her thumb in her mouth, one arm on the back of his chair. She seemed to be stumped also: it was an awkward line to translate.

I stooped and put my hand to Médor’s nose, and felt his warm breath. He wagged his rudiment of a tail, and whimpered in his sleep. Mimsey said–

“Regarde Médor, comme il remue la queue! _C’est le Prince Charmant qui lui chatouille le bout du nez._”

Said my mother, who had not spoken hitherto: “Do speak English, Mimsey, please.”

Oh, my God! My mother’s voice, so forgotten, yet so familiar, so unutterably dear! I rushed to her, and threw myself on my knees at her feet, and seized her hand and kissed it, crying, “Mother, mother!”

A strange blur came over everything; the sense of reality was lost. All became as a dream–a beautiful dream–but only a dream; and I woke.

* * * * *

I woke in my small hotel bedroom, and saw all the furniture, and my hat and clothes, by the light of a lamp outside, and heard the ticking of the clock on the mantel-piece, and the rumbling of a cart and cracking of a whip in the street, and yet felt I was not a bit more awake than I had been a minute ago in my strange vision–not so much!

I heard my watch ticking its little tick on the mantel-piece by the side of the clock, like a pony trotting by a big horse. The clock struck twelve, I got up and looked at my watch by the light of the gas-lit streets; it marked the same. My dream had lasted an hour–I had gone to bed at half-past ten.

I tried to recall it all, and did so to the smallest particular–all except the tune the organ had played, and the words belonging to it; they were on the tip of my tongue, and refused to come further, I got up again and walked about the room, and felt that it had not been like a dream at all; it was more “recollectable” than all my real adventures of the previous day. It had ceased to be like a dream, and had become an actuality from the moment I first touched the duchess’s hand to the moment I kissed my mother’s, and the blur came. It was an entirely new and utterly bewildering experience that I had gone through.

In a dream there are always breaks, inconsistencies, lapses, incoherence, breaches of continuity, many links missing in the chain; only at points is the impression vivid enough to stamp itself afterwards on the waking mind, and even then it is never so really vivid as the impression of real life, although it ought to have seemed so in the dream: One remembers it well on awaking, but soon it fades, and then it is only one’s remembrance of it that one remembers.

[Illustration: “MOTHER, MOTHER!”]

There was nothing of this in my dream.

It was something like the “camera-obscura” on Ramsgate pier: one goes in and finds one’s self in total darkness; the eye is prepared; one is thoroughly expectant and wide-awake.

Suddenly there flashes on the sight the moving picture of the port and all the life therein, and the houses and cliffs beyond; and farther still the green hills, the white clouds, and blue sky.

Little green waves chase each other in the harbor, breaking into crisp white foam. Sea-gulls wheel and dash and dip behind masts and ropes and pulleys; shiny brass fittings on gangway and compass flash in the sun without dazzling the eye; gay Liliputians walk and talk, their white teeth, no bigger than a pin’s point, gleam in laughter, with never a sound; a steamboat laden with excursionists comes in, its paddles churning the water, and you cannot hear them. Not a detail is missed–not a button on a sailor’s jacket, not a hair on his face. All the light and color of sea and earth and sky, that serve for many a mile, are here concentrated within a few square feet. And what color it is! A painter’s despair! It is light itself, more beautiful than that which streams through old church windows of stained glass. And all is framed in utter darkness, so that the fully dilated pupils can see their very utmost. It seems as though all had been painted life-size and then shrunk, like a Japanese picture on crape, to a millionth of its natural size, so as to intensify and mellow the effect.

It is all over: you come out into the open sunshine, and all seems garish and bare and bald and commonplace. All magic has faded out of the scene; everything is too far away from everything else; everybody one meets seems coarse and Brobdingnagian and too near. And one has been looking at the like of it all one’s life!

Thus with my dream, compared to common, waking, every-day experience; only instead of being mere flat, silent little images moving on a dozen square feet of Bristol-board, and appealing to the eye alone, the things and people in my dream had the same roundness and relief as in life, and were life-size; one could move among them and behind them, and feel as if one could touch and clasp and embrace them if one dared. And the ear, as well as the eye, was made free of this dark chamber of the brain: one heard their speech and laughter as in life. And that was not all, for soft breezes fanned the cheek, the sparrows twittered, the sun gave out its warmth, and the scent of many flowers made the illusion complete.

And then the Duchess of Towers! She had been not only visible and audible like the rest, but tangible as well, to the fullest extent of the sensibility that lay in my nerves of touch; when my hands held hers I felt as though I were drawing all her life into mine.

With the exception of that one figure, all had evidently been as it _had_ been in _reality_ a few years ago, to the very droning of an insect, to the very fall of a blossom!

Had I gone mad by any chance? I had possessed the past, as I had longed to do a few hours before.

What are sight and hearing and touch and the rest?

Five senses in all.

The stars, worlds upon worlds, so many billions of miles away, what are they for us but mere shiny specks on a net-work of nerves behind the eye? How does one _feel_ them there?

The sound of my friend’s voice, what is it? The clasp of his hand, the pleasant sight of his face, the scent of his pipe and mine, the taste of the bread and cheese and beer we eat and drink together, what are they but figments (stray figments, perhaps) of the brain–little thrills through nerves made on purpose, and without which there would be no stars, no pipe, no bread and cheese and beer, no voice, no friend, no me?

And is there, perchance, some sixth sense embedded somewhere in the thickness of the flesh–some survival of the past, of the race, of our own childhood even, etiolated by disuse? or some rudiment, some effort to begin, some priceless hidden faculty to be developed into a future source of bliss and consolation for our descendants? some nerve that now can only be made to thrill and vibrate in a dream, too delicate as yet to ply its function in the light of common day?

And was I, of all people in the world–I, Peter Ibbetson, architect and surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville–most futile, desultory, and uneducated dreamer of dreams–destined to make some great psychical discovery?

Pondering deeply over these solemn things, I sent myself to sleep again, as was natural enough–but no more to dream. I slept soundly until late in the morning, and breakfasted at the Bains Deligny, a delightful swimming-bath near the Pont de la Concorde (on the other side), and spent most of the day there, alternately swimming, and dozing, and smoking cigarettes, and thinking of the wonders of the night before, and hoping for their repetition on the night to follow.

[Illustration]

I remained a week in Paris, loafing about by day among old haunts of my childhood–a melancholy pleasure–and at night trying to “dream true” as my dream duchess had called it. Only once did I succeed.

I had gone to bed thinking most persistently of the “Mare d’Auteuil,” and it seemed to me that as soon as I was fairly asleep I woke up there, and knew directly that I had come into a “true dream” again, by the reality and the bliss. It was transcendent _life_ once more–a very ecstasy of remembrance made actual, and _such_ an exquisite surprise!

There was M. le Major, in his green frock-coat, on his knees near a little hawthorn-tree by the brink, among the water-logged roots of which there dwelt a cunning old dytiscus as big as the bowl of a table-spoon–a prize we had often tried to catch in vain.

M. le Major had a net in his hand, and was watching the water intently; the perspiration was trickling down his nose; and around him, in silent expectation and suspense, were grouped Gogo and Mimsey and my three cousins, and a good-humored freckled Irish boy I had quite forgotten, and I suddenly remembered that his name was Johnstone, that he was very combative, and that he lived in the Rue Basse (now Rue Raynouard).

On the other side of the pond my mother was keeping Médor from the water, for fear of his spoiling the sport, and on the bench by the willow sat Madame Seraskier–lovely Madame Seraskier–deeply interested. I sat down by her side and gazed at her with a joy there is no telling.

An old woman came by, selling conical wafer-cakes, and singing–“_V’lâ l’plaisir, mesdames–V’lâ l’plaisir!_” Madame Seraskier bought ten sous’ worth–a mountain!

M. le Major made a dash with his net–unsuccessfully, as usual. Médor was let loose, and plunged with a plunge that made big waves all round the mare, and dived after an imaginary stone, amid general shouts and shrieks of excitement. Oh, the familiar voices! I almost wept.

Médor came out of the water without his stone and shook himself, twisting and barking and grinning and gyrating, as was his way, quite close to me. In my delight and sympathy I was ill-advised enough to try and stroke him, and straight the dream was “blurred”–changed to an ordinary dream, where all things were jumbled up and incomprehensible; a dream pleasant enough, but different in kind and degree–an ordinary dream; and in my distress thereat I woke, and failed to dream again (as I wished to dream) that night.

Next morning (after an early swim) I went to the Louvre, and stood spellbound before Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lisa Gioconda,” trying hard to find where the wondrous beauty lay that I had heard so extravagantly extolled; and not trying very successfully, for I had seen Madame Seraskier once more, and felt that “Gioconda” was a fraud.

Presently I was conscious of a group just behind me, and heard a pleasant male English voice exclaim–

[Illustration: “Lisa Giaconda”]

“And now, duchess, let me present to you my first and last and only love, Mona Lisa.” I turned round, and there stood a soldier-like old gentleman and two ladies (one of whom was the Duchess of Towers), staring at the picture.

As I made way for them I caught her eye, and in it again, as I felt sure, a kindly look of recognition–just for half a second. She evidently recollected having seen me at Lady Cray’s, where I had stood all the evening alone in a rather conspicuous corner. I was so exceptionally tall (in those days of not such tall people as now) that it was easy to notice and remember me, especially as I wore my beard, which it was unusual to do then among Englishmen.

She little guessed how _I_ remembered _her_; she little knew all she was and had been to me–in life and in a dream!

My emotion was so great that I felt it in my very knees; I could scarcely walk; I was as weak as water. My worship for the beautiful stranger was becoming almost a madness. She was even more lovely than Madame Seraskier. It was cruel to be like that.

It seems that I was fated to fall down and prostrate myself before very tall, slender women, with dark hair and lily skins and light angelic eyes. The fair damsel who sold tripe and pigs’ feet in Clerkenwell was also of that type, I remembered; and so was Mrs. Deane. Fortunately for me it is not a common one!

All that day I spent on quays and bridges, leaning over parapets, and looking at the Seine, and nursing my sweet despair, and calling myself the biggest fool in Paris, and recalling over and over again that gray-blue kindly glance–my only light, the Light of the World for ME!

* * * * *

My brief holiday over, I went back to London–to Pentonville–and resumed my old occupations; but the whole tenor of my existence was changed.

The day, the working-day (and I worked harder than ever, to Lintot’s great satisfaction), passed as in an unimportant dream of mild content and cheerful acquiescence in everything, work or play.

There was no more quarrelling with my destiny, nor wish to escape from myself for a moment. My whole being, as I went about on business or recreation bent, was suffused with the memory of the Duchess of Towers as with a warm inner glow that kept me at peace with all mankind and myself, and thrilled by the hope, the enchanting hope, of once more meeting her image at night in a dream, in or about my old home at Passy, and perhaps even feeling once more that ineffable bliss of touching her hand. Though why should she be there?

When the blessed hour came round for sleep, the real business of my life began. I practised “dreaming true” as one practises a fine art, and after many failures I became a professed expert–a master.

I lay straight on my back, with my feet crossed, and my hands clasped above my head in a symmetrical position; I would fix my will intently and persistently on a certain point in space and time that was within my memory–for instance, the avenue gate on a certain Christmas afternoon, when I remembered waiting for M. le Major to go for a walk–at the same time never losing touch of my own present identity as Peter Ibbetson, architect, Wharton Street, Pentonville; all of which is not so easy to manage as one might think, although the dream duchess had said, “Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte;” and finally one night, instead of dreaming the ordinary dreams I had dreamed all my life (but twice), I had the rapture of _waking up_, the minute I was fairly asleep, by the avenue gate, and of seeing Gogo Pasquier sitting on one of the stone posts and looking up the snowy street for the major. Presently he jumped up to meet his old friend, whose bottle-green-clad figure had just appeared in the distance. I saw and heard their warm and friendly greeting, and walked unperceived by their side through Auteuil to the _mare_, and back by the fortifications, and listened to the thrilling adventures of one Fier-à-bras, which, I confess, I had completely forgotten.

[Illustration: THE STORY OF THE GIANT FIER-A-BRAS.]

As we passed all three together through the “Porte de la Muette,” M. le Major’s powers of memory (or invention) began to flag a little–for he suddenly said, “_Cric!_” But Gogo pitilessly answered, “_Crac!_” and the story had to go on, till we reached at dusk the gate of the Pasquiers’ house, where these two most affectionately parted, after making an appointment for the morrow; and I went in with Gogo, and sat in the school-room while Thérèse gave him his tea, and heard her tell him all that had happened in Passy that afternoon. Then he read and summed and translated with his mother till it was time to go up to bed, and I sat by his bedside as he was lulled asleep by his mother’s harp… how I listened with all my ears and heart, till the sweet strain ceased for the night! Then out of the hushed house I stole, thinking unutterable things–through the snow-clad garden, where Médor was baying the moon–through the silent avenue and park–through the deserted streets of Passy–and on by desolate quays and bridges to dark quarters of Paris; till I fell awake in my tracks and found that another dreary and commonplace day had dawned over London–but no longer dreary and commonplace for me, with such experiences to look back and forward to–such a strange inheritance of wonder and delight!

I had a few more occasional failures, such as, for instance, when the thread between my waking and sleeping life was snapped by a moment’s carelessness, or possibly by some movement of my body in bed, in which case the vision would suddenly get blurred, the reality of it destroyed, and an ordinary dream rise in its place. My immediate consciousness of this was enough to wake me on the spot, and I would begin again, _da capo_ till all went as I wished.

Evidently our brain contains something akin both to a photographic plate and a phonographic cylinder, and many other things of the same kind not yet discovered; not a sight or a sound or a smell is lost; not a taste or a feeling or an emotion. Unconscious memory records them all, without our even heeding what goes on around us beyond the things that attract our immediate interest or attention.

Thus night after night I saw reacted before me scenes not only fairly remembered, but scenes utterly forgotten, and yet as unmistakably true as the remembered ones, and all bathed in that ineffable light, the light of other days–the light that never was on sea or land, and yet the light of absolute truth.

How it transcends in value as well as in beauty the garish light of common day, by which poor humanity has hitherto been content to live and die, disdaining through lack of knowledge the shadow for the substance, the spirit for the matter! I verified the truth of these sleeping experiences in every detail: old family letters I had preserved, and which I studied on awaking, confirmed what I had seen and heard in my dream; old stories explained themselves. It was all by-gone truth, garnered in some remote corner of the brain, and brought out of the dim past as I willed, and made actual once more.

And strange to say, and most inexplicable, I saw it all as an independent spectator, an outsider, not as an actor going again through scenes in which he has played a part before!

Yet many things perplexed and puzzled me.

For instance, Gogo’s back, and the back of his head, when I stood behind him, were as visible and apparently as true to life as his face, and I had never seen his back or the back of his head; it was much later in life that I learned the secret of two mirrors. And then, when Gogo went out of the room, sometimes apparently passing through me as he did so and coming out at the other side (with a momentary blurring of the dream), the rest would go on talking just as reasonably, as naturally, as before. Could the trees and walls and furniture have had ears and eyes, those long-vanished trees and walls and furniture that existed now only in my sleeping brain, and have retained the sound and shape and meaning of all that passed when Gogo, my only conceivable remembrancer, was away?

Françoise, the cook, would come into the drawing-room to discuss the dinner with my mother when Gogo was at school; and I would hear the orders given, and later I would assist at the eating of the meal (to which Gogo would invariably do ample justice), and it was just as my mother had ordered. Mystery of mysteries!

What a pleasant life it was they led together, these ghosts of a by-gone time! Such a genial, smooth, easygoing, happy-go-lucky state of things–half bourgeois, half Bohemian, and yet with a well-marked simplicity, refinement, and distinction of bearing and speech that were quite aristocratic.

The servants (only three–Thérèse the house-maid, Françoise the cook, and English Sarah, who had been my nurse and was now my mother’s maid) were on the kindliest and most familiar terms with us, and talked to us like friends, and interested themselves in our concerns, and we in theirs; I noticed that they always wished us each good-morning and good-night–a pretty French fashion of the Passy bourgeoisie in Louis Philippe’s time (he was a bourgeois king).

Our cuisine was bourgeoise also. Peter Ibbetson’s mouth watered (after his tenpenny London dinner) to see and smell the steam of “soupe à la bonne femme,” “soupe aux choux,” “pot au feu,” “blanquette de veau,” “boeuf à la mode,” “cotelettes de porc à la sauce piquante,” “vinaigrette de boeuf bouilli”–that endless variety of good things on which French people grow fat so young–and most excellent claret (at one franc a bottle in those happy days): its bouquet seemed to fill the room as soon as the cork was drawn!

Sometimes, such a repast ended, “le beau Pasquier,” in the fulness of his heart, would suddenly let off impossible fireworks of vocalization, ascending rockets of chromatic notes which would explode softly very high up and come down in full cadences, trills, roulades, like beautiful colored stars; and Thérèse would exclaim, “Ah, q’c’est beau!” as if she had been present at a real pyrotechnic display; and Thérèse was quite right. I have never heard the like from any human throat, and should not have believed it possible. Only Joachim’s violin can do such beautiful things so beautifully.

Or else he would tell us of wolves he had shot in Brittany, or wild-boars in Burgundy–for he was a great sportsman–or of his adventures as a _garde du corps_ of Charles Dix, or of the wonderful inventions that were so soon to bring us fame and fortune; and he would loyally drink to Henri Cinq; and he was so droll and buoyant and witty that it was as good to hear him speak as to hear him sing.

But there was another and a sad side to all this strange comedy of vanished lives.

They built castles in the air, and made plans, and talked of all the wealth and happiness that would be theirs when my father’s ship came home, and of all the good they would do, pathetically unconscious of the near future; which, of course, was all past history to their loving audience of one.

And then my tears would flow with the unbearable ache of love and pity combined; they would fall and dry on the waxed floors of my old home in Passy, and I would find them still wet on my pillow in Pentonville when I woke.

* * * * *

Soon I discovered by practice that I was able for a second or two to be more than a mere spectator–to be an actor once more; to turn myself (Ibbetson) into my old self (Gogo), and thus be touched and caressed by those I had so loved. My mother kissed me and I felt it; just as long as I could hold my breath I could walk hand in hand with Madame Seraskier, or feel Mimsey’s small weight on my back and her arms round my neck for four or five yards as I walked, before blurring the dream; and the blur would soon pass away, if it did not wake me, and I was Peter Ibbetson once more, walking and sitting among them, hearing them talk and laugh, watching them at their meals, in their walks; listening to my father’s songs, my mother’s sweet playing, and always unseen and unheeded by them. Moreover, I soon learned to touch things without sensibly blurring the dream. I would cull a rose, and stick it in my buttonhole, and there it remained–but lo! the very rose I had just culled was still on the rose-bush also! I would pick up a stone and throw it at the wall, where it disappeared without a sound–and the very same stone still lay at my feet, however often I might pick it up and throw it!

[Illustration]

No waking joy in the world can give, can equal in intensity, these complex joys I had when asleep; waking joys seem so slight, so vague in comparison–so much escapes the senses through lack of concentration and undivided attention–the waking perceptions are so blunt.

It was a life within a life–an intenser life–in which the fresh perceptions of childhood combined with the magic of dream-land, and in which there was but one unsatisfied longing; but its name was Lion.

It was the passionate longing to meet the Duchess of Towers once more in that land of dreams.

* * * * *

Thus for a time I went on, more solitary than ever, but well compensated for all my loneliness by this strange new life that had opened itself to me, and never ceasing to marvel and rejoice–when one morning I received a note from Lady Cray, who wanted some stables built at Cray, their country-seat in Hertfordshire, and begged I would go there for the day and night.

I was bound to accept this invitation, as a mere matter of business, of course; as a friend, Lady Cray seemed to have dropped me long ago, “like a ‘ot potato,” blissfully unconscious that it was I who had dropped her.

But she received me as a friend–an old friend. All my shyness and snobbery fell from me at the mere touch of her hand.

I had arrived at Cray early in the afternoon, and had immediately set about my work, which took several hours, so that I got to the house only just in time to dress for dinner.

When I came into the drawing-room there were several people there, and Lady Cray presented me to a young lady, the vicar’s daughter, whom I was to take in to dinner.

I was very much impressed on being told by her that the company assembled in the drawing-room included no less a person than Sir Edwin Landseer. Many years ago I had copied an engraving of one of his pictures for Mimsey Seraskier. It was called “The Challenge,” or “Coming Events cast their Shadows before Them.” I feasted my eyes on the wondrous little man, who seemed extremely chatty and genial, and quite unembarrassed by his fame.

A guest was late, and Lord Cray, who seemed somewhat peevishly impatient for his food, exclaimed–

“Mary wouldn’t be Mary if she were punctual!”

Just then Mary came in–and Mary was no less a person than the Duchess of Towers!

My knees trembled under me; but there was no time to give way to any such tender weakness. Lord Cray walked away with her; the procession filed into the dining room, and somewhere at the end of it my young vicaress and myself.

The duchess sat a long way from me, but I met her glance for a moment, and fancied I saw again in it that glimmer of kindly recognition.

My neighbor, who was charming, asked me if I did not think the Duchess of Towers the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

I assented with right good-will, and was told that she was as good as she was beautiful, and as clever as she was good (as if I did not know it); that she would give away the very clothes off her back; that there was no trouble she would not take for others; that she did not get on well with her husband, who drank, and was altogether bad and vile; that she had a great sorrow–an only child, an idiot, to whom she was devoted, and who would some day be the Duke of Towers; that she was highly accomplished, a great linguist, a great musician, and about the most popular woman in all English society.

Ah! Who loved the Duchess of Towers better than this poor scribe, in whose soul she lived and shone like a bright particular star–like the sun; and who, without his knowing, was being rapidly drawn into the sphere of her attraction, as Lintot called it; one day to be finally absorbed, I trust, forever!

“And who was this wonderful Duchess of Towers before she married?” I asked.

“She was a Miss Seraskier. Her father was a Hungarian, a physician, and a political reformer–a most charming person; that’s where she gets her manners. Her mother, whom she lost when she was quite a child, was a very beautiful Irish girl of good family, a first cousin of Lord Cray’s–a Miss Desmond, who ran away with the interesting patriot. They lived somewhere near Paris. It was there that Madame Seraskier died of cholera–… What is the matter–are you ill?”

[Illustration]

I made out that I was faint from the heat, and concealed as well as I could the flood of emotion and bewilderment that overwhelmed me.

I dared not look again at the Duchess of Towers.

“Oh! little Mimsey dear, with your poor thin arms round my neck, and your cold, pale cheek against mine. I felt them there only last night! To have grown into such a splendid vision of female health and strength and beauty as this–with that enchanting, ever-ready laugh and smile! Why, of course, those eyes, so lashless then, so thickly fringed to-day!–how could I have mistaken them? Ah, Mimsey, you never smiled or laughed in those days, or I should have known your eyes again! Is it possible–is it possible?”

Thus I went on to myself till the ladies left, my fair young companion expressing her kind anxiety and polite hope that I would soon be myself again.

I sat silent till it was time to join the ladies (I could not even follow the witty and brilliant anecdotes of the great painter, who held the table); and then I went up to my room. I could not face _her_ again so soon after what I had heard.

The good Lord Cray came to make kind inquiries, but I soon satisfied him that my indisposition was nothing. He stayed on, however, and talked; his dinner seemed to have done him a great deal of good, and he wanted to smoke (and somebody to smoke with), which he had not been able to do in the dining-room on account of some reverend old bishop who was present. So he rolled himself a little cigarette, like a Frenchman, and puffed away to his heart’s content.

He little guessed how his humble architect wished him away, until he began to talk of the Duchess of Towers–“Mary Towers,” as he called her–and to tell me how “Towers” deserved to be kicked, and whipped at the cart’s tail. “Why, she’s the best and most beautiful woman in England, and as sharp as a needle! If it hadn’t been for her, he’d have been in the bankruptcy court long ago,” etc. “There’s not a duchess in England that’s fit to hold the candle to her, either for looks or brains, or breedin’ either. Her mother (the loveliest woman that ever lived, except Mary) was a connection of mine; that’s where she gets her manners!” etc.

Thus did this noble earl make music for me–sweet and bitter music.

Mary! It is a heavenly name, especially on English lips, and spelled in the English mode with the adorable _y_! Great men have had a passion for it–Byron, Shelley, Burns. But none, methinks, a greater passion than I, nor with such good cause.

And yet there must be a bad Mary now and then, here or there, and even an ugly one. Indeed, there was once a Bloody Mary who was both! It seems incredible!

Mary, indeed! Why not Hecuba? For what was I to the Duchess of Towers?

When I was alone again I went to bed, and tried to sleep on my back, with my arms up, in the hope of a true dream; but sleep would not come, and I passed a white night, as the French say. I rose early and walked about the park, and tried to interest my self in the stables till it was breakfast-time. Nobody was up, and I breakfasted alone with Lady Cray, who was as kind as she could be. I do not think she could have found me a very witty companion. And then I went back to the stables to think, and fell into a doze.

At about twelve I heard the sound of wooden balls, and found a lawn where some people were playing “croquet.” It was quite a new game, and a few years later became the fashion.

[Illustration: SWEET AND BITTER MUSIC.]

I sat down under a large weeping-ash close to the lawn; it was like a tent, with chairs and tables underneath.

Presently Lady Cray came there with the Duchess of Towers. I wanted to fly, but was rooted to the spot.

[Illustration: The Introduction.]

Lady Cray presented me, and almost immediately a servant came with a message for her, and I was left with the One Woman in the World! My heart was in my mouth, my throat was dry, my pulse was beating in my temples.

She asked me, in the most natural manner, if I played “croquet.”

“Yes–no–at least, sometimes–that is, I never of it–oh–I forget!” I groaned at my idiocy and hid my face in my hands. She asked if I were still unwell, and I said no; and then she began to talk quite easily about anything, everything, till I felt more at my ease.

Her voice! I had never heard it well but in a dream, and it was the same–a very rich and modulated voice–low–contralto, with many varied and delightful inflexions; and she used more action in speaking than the generality of Englishwomen, thereby reminding me of Madame Seraskier. I noticed that her hands were long and very narrow, and also her feet, and remembered that Mimsey’s were like that–they were considered poor Mimsey’s only beauty. I also noticed an almost imperceptible scar on her left temple, and remembered with a thrill that I had noticed it in my dream as we walked up the avenue together. In waking life I had never been near enough to her to notice a small scar, and Mimsey had no scar of the kind in the old days–of that I felt sure, for I had seen much of Mimsey lately.

I grew more accustomed to the situation, and ventured to say that I had once met her at Lady Cray’s in London.

“Oh yes; I remember. Giulia Grisi sand the ‘Willow Song.'” And then she crinkled up her eyes, and laughed, and blushed, and went on: “I noticed you standing in a corner, under the famous Gainsborough. You reminded me of a dear little French boy I once knew who was very kind to me when I was a little girl in France, and whose father you happen to be like. But I found that you were Mr. Ibbetson, an English architect, and, Lady Cray tells me, a very rising one”

“I _was_ a little French boy once. I had to change my name to please a relative, and become English–that is, I was always _really_ English, you know.”

“Good Heavens, what an extraordinary thing! What _was_ your name, then?”

“Pasquier-Gogo Pasquier!” I groaned, and the tears came into my eyes, and I looked away. The duchess made no answer, and when I turned and looked at her she was looking at me, very pale, her lips quite white, her hands tightly clasped in her lap, and trembling all over.

I said, “You used to be little Mimsey Seraskier, and I used to carry you pickaback!”

“Oh don’t! oh don’t!” she said, and began to cry.

I got up and walked about under the ash-tree till she had dried her eyes. The croquet-players were intent upon their game.

I again sat down beside her; she had dried her eyes, and at length she said–

“What a dreadful thing it was about your poor father and mother, and _my_ dear mother! Do you remember her? She died a week after you left. I went to Russia with papa–Dr. Seraskier. What a terrible break-up it all was!”

And then we gradually fell to talking quite naturally about old times, and dear dead people. She never took her eyes off mine. After a while I said–

“I went to Passy, and found everything changed and built over. It nearly drove me mad to see. I went to St. Cloud, and saw you driving with the Empress of the French. That night I had such an extraordinary dream! I dreamed I was floundering about the Rue de la Pompe, and had just got to the avenue gate, and you were there.”

“Good heavens!” she whispered, and turned white again, and trembled all over, “what do you mean?”

“Yes,” I said, “you came to my rescue. I was pursued by gnomes and horrors.”

_She._ “Good heavens! by–by two little jailers, a man and his wife, who danced and were trying to hem you in?”

It was now my turn to ejaculate “Good heavens!” We both shook and trembled together.

I said: “You gave me your hand, and all came straight at once. My old school rose in place of the jail.”

_She._ “With a yellow omnibus? And boys going off to their _première communion?_”

_I._ “Yes; and there was a crowd–le Père et la Mère François, and Madame Liard, the grocer’s wife, and–and Mimsey Seraskier, with her cropped head. And an organ was playing a tune I knew quite well, but cannot now recall.” …

_She._ “Wasn’t it ‘Maman, les p’tits bateaux?'”

_I._ Oh, of _course!_

_”‘Maman, les p’tits bateaux
Qui vont sur l’eau,
Ont-ils des jambes?'”_

_She_. “That’s it!”

_”‘Eh oui, petit bêta!
S’ils n’avaient pas
Ils n’march’raient pas!'”_

She sank back in her chair, pale and prostrate. After a while–

_She_. “And then I gave you good advice about how to dream true, and we got to my old house, and I tried to make you read the letters on the portico, and you read them wrong, and I laughed.”

_I_. “Yes; I read ‘Tête Noire.’ Wasn’t it idiotic?”

_She_. “And then I touched you again and you read ‘Parvis Notre Dame.'”

_I_. “Yes! and you touched me _again_, and I read ‘Parva sed Apta’–small but fit.”

_She_. “Is _that_ what it means? Why, when you were a boy, you told me _sed apta_ was all one word, and was the Latin for ‘Pavilion.’ I believed it ever since, and thought ‘Parva sed Apta’ meant _petit pavillon_!”

_I_. “I blush for my bad Latin! After this you gave me good advice again, about not touching anything or picking flowers. I never have. And then you went away into the park–the light went out of my life, sleeping or waking. I have never been able to dream of you since. I don’t suppose I shall ever meet you again after to-day!”

After this we were silent for a long time, though I hummed and hawed now and then, and tried to speak. I was sick with the conflict of my feelings. At length she said–

“Dear Mr. Ibbetson, this is all so extraordinary that I must go away and think it all over. I cannot tell you what it has been to me to meet you once more. And that double dream, common to us both! Oh, I am dazed beyond expression, and feel as if I were dreaming now–except that this all seems so unreal and impossible–so untrue! We had better part now. I don’t know if I shall ever meet you again. You will be often in my thoughts, but never in my dreams again–that, at least, I can command–nor I in yours; it must not be. My poor father taught me how to dream before he died, that I might find innocent consolation in dreams for my waking troubles, which are many and great, as his were. If I can see that any good may come of it, I will write–but no–you must not expect a letter. I will now say good-bye and leave you. You go to-day, do you not? That is best. I think this had better be a final adieu. I cannot tell you of what interest you are to me and always have been. I thought you had died long ago. We shall often think of each other–that is inevitable–_but never, never dream. That will not do._

“Dear Mr. Ibbetson, I wish you all the good that one human being can wish another. And now goodbye, and may God in heaven bless you!”

She rose, trembling and white, and her eyes wet with tears, and wrung both my hands, and left me as she had left me in the dream.

The light went out of my life, and I was once more alone–more wretchedly and miserably alone than if I had never met her.

I went back to Pentonville, and outwardly took up the thread of my monotonous existence, and ate, drank, and worked, and went about as usual, but as one in an ordinary dream. For now dreams–true dreams–had become the only reality for me.

[Illustration: A FAREWELL.]

So great, so inconceivable and unexampled a wonder had been wrought in a dream that all the conditions of life had been altered and reversed.

I and another human being had met–actually and really met–in a double dream, a dream common to us both, and clasped each other’s hands! And each had spoken words to the other which neither ever would or ever could forget.

And this other human being and I had been enshrined in each other’s memory for years–since childhood–and were now linked together by a tie so marvellous, an experience so unprecedented, that neither could ever well be out of the other’s thoughts as long as life and sense and memory lasted.

Her very self, as we talked to each other under the ash-tree at Cray, was less vividly present to me than that other and still dearer self of hers with whom I had walked up the avenue in that balmy dream atmosphere, where we had lived and moved and had our being together for a few short moments, yet each believing the other at the time to be a mere figment of his own (and her) sleeping imagination; such stuff as dreams are made of!

And lo! it was all true–as true as the common experience of every-day life–more (ten times more), because through our keener and more exalted sense perceptions, and less divided attention, we were more conscious of each other’s real inner being–linked closer together for a space–than two mortals had probably ever been since the world began.

That clasp of the hands in the dream–how infinitely more it had conveyed of one to the other than even that sad farewell clasp at Cray!

In my poor outer life I waited in vain for a letter; in vain I haunted the parks and streets–the street where she lived–in the hope of seeing her once more. The house was shut; she was away–in America, as I afterwards learned–with her husband and child.

At night, in the familiar scenes I had learned so well to conjure up, I explored every nook and corner with the same yearning desire to find a trace of her. I was hardly ever away from “Parva sed Apta.” There were Madame Seraskier and Mimsey and the major, and my mother and Gogo, at all times, in and out, and of course as unconscious of my solid presence as though I had never existed. And as I looked at Mimsey and her mother I wondered at my obtuseness in not recognizing at the very first glance who the Duchess of Towers had been, and whose daughter. The height, the voice, the eyes, certain tricks of gait and gesture–how could I have failed to know her again after such recent dream opportunities?

And Seraskier, towering among them all, as his daughter now towered among women. I saw that he lived again in his daughter; _his_ was the smile that closed up the eyes, as hers did; had Mimsey ever smiled in those days, I should have known her again by this very characteristic trait.

Of this daughter of his (the Mimsey of the past years, not the duchess of to-day) I never now could have enough, and made her go through again and again all the scenes with Gogo, so dear to my remembrance, and to hers. I was, in fact, the Prince Charmant, of whose unseen attendance she had been conscious in some inconceivable way. What a strange foresight! But where was the fée Tarapatapoum? Never there during this year of unutterable longing; she had said it; never, never again should I be in her dream, or she in mine, however constantly we might dwell in each other’s thoughts.

So sped a twelvemonth after that last meeting in the flesh at Gray.

* * * * *

And now with an unwilling heart and most reluctant pen, I must come to the great calamity of my life which I will endeavor to tell in as few words as possible.

The reader, if he has been good enough to read without skipping, will remember the handsome Mrs. Deane, to whom I fancied I lost my heart, in Hopshire, a few years back.

I had not seen her since–had, indeed, almost forgotten her–but had heard vaguely that she had left Hopshire, and come to London, and married a wealthy man much older than herself.

Well, one day I was in Hyde Park, gazing at the people in the drive, when a spick-and-span and very brand-new open carriage went by, and in it sad Mrs. Deane (that was), all alone in her glory, and looking very sulky indeed. She recognized me and bowed, and I bowed back again, with just a moment’s little flutter of the heart–an involuntary tribute to auld lang syne–and went on my way, wondering that I could ever had admired her so.

Presently, to my surprise, I was touched on the elbow. It was Mrs. Deane again–I will call her Mrs. Deane still. She had got out and followed me on foot. It was her wish that I should drive round the park with her and talk of old times. I obeyed, and for the first and last time found myself forming part of that proud and gay procession I had so often watched with curious eyes.

She seemed anxious to know whether I had ever made it up with Colonel Ibbetson, and pleased to hear that I had not, and that I probably never should, and that my feeling against him was strong and bitter and likely to last.

She appeared to hate him very much.

She inquired kindly after myself and my prospects in life, but did not seem deeply interested in my answers–until later, when I talked of my French life, and my dear father and mother, when she listened with eager sympathy, and I was much touched. She asked if I had portraits of them; I had–most excellent miniatures; and when we parted I had promised to call upon her next afternoon, and bring these miniatures with me.

She seemed a languid woman, much ennuyée, and evidently without a large circle of acquaintance. She told me I was the only person in the whole park whom she had bowed to that day. Her husband was in Hamburg, and she