The Cream of the Jest

As he considered the future, in the man's face showed only puzzled lassitude; and you saw therein a quaint resemblance to Maugis d'Aigremont. "I find my country an inadequate place in which to live," says Horvendile. "Oh, many persons live there happily enough! or, at worst, they seem to find the prizes and the applause of my country worth striving for whole-heartedly. But there is that in some of us which gets no exercise there; and we struggle blindly, with impotent yearning, to gain outlet for great powers which we know that we possess, even though we do not know their names. And so, we dreamers wander at adventure to Storisende – oh, and into more perilous realms sometimes! – in search of a life that will find employment for every faculty we have. For life in my country does not engross us utterly. We dreamers waste there at loose ends, waste futilely. All which we can ever see and hear and touch there, we dreamers dimly know, is at best but a portion of the truth, and is possibly not true at all. Oh, yes! it may be that we are not sane; could we be sure of that, it would be a comfort. But, as it is, we dreamers only know that life in my country does not content us, and never can content us. So we struggle, for a tiny dear-bought while, into other and fairer-seeming lands in search of – we know not what! And, after a little"- he relinquished the maiden's hands, spread out his own hands, shrugging -"after a little, we must go back into my country and live there as best we may."

A whimsical wise smile now visited Ettarre's lips. Her hands went to her breast, and presently one half the broken sigil of Scoteia lay in Horvendile's hand. "You will not always abide in your own country, Horvendile. Some day you will return to us at Storisende. The sign of the Dark Goddess will prove your safe-conduct then if Guiron and I be yet alive."

Horvendile raised to his mouth the talisman warmed by contact with her sweet flesh. "It may be you will not live for a great while," he says; "but that will befall through no lack of loving pains on your creator's part."

Then Horvendile left them. In the dark passage-way he paused, looking back at Guiron and Ettarre for a heart-beat. Guiron and Ettarre had already forgotten his existence. Hand-in-hand they stood in the bright room, young, beautiful and glad. Silently their lips met.

Horvendile closed the door, and so left Storisende forever. Without he came into a lonely quiet-colored world already expectant of dawn's occupancy. Already the tree-trunks eastward showed like the black bars of a grate. Thus he walked in twilight, carrying half the sigil of Scoteia…

Book Second

"Whate'er she be –

That inaccessible She

That doth command my heart and me:

"Till that divine

Idea take a shrine

Of crystal flesh, through which to shine:

"Let her full glory,

My fancies, fly before ye;

Be ye my fictions – but her story."

I

Of a Trifle Found in Twilight

THUS he walked in twilight, regretful that he must return to his own country, and live another life, and bear another name than that of Horvendile… It was droll that in his own country folk should call him Felix, since Felix meant "happy"; and assuredly he was not pre-eminently happy there.

At least he had ended the love-business of Ettarre and Guiron happily, however droll the necessitated makeshifts might have been… He had very certainly introduced the god in the car, against Horatian admonition, had wound up affairs with a sort of transformation scene… It was, perhaps, at once too hackneyed and too odd an ending to be æsthetically satisfactory, after all… Why, beyond doubt it was. He shrugged his impatience.

"Yet – what a true ending it would be!" he reflected. He was still walking in twilight – for the time was approaching sunset – in the gardens of Alcluid. He must devise another ending for this high-hearted story of Guiron and Ettarre.

Felix Kennaston smiled a little over the thought of ending the romance with such topsy-turvy anti-climaxes as his woolgathering wits had blundered into; and, stooping, picked up a shining bit of metal that lay beside the pathway. He was conscious of a vague notion he had just dropped this bit of metal.