Book: Dreamthorp

A >> Alexander Smith >> Dreamthorp




The Man of Law's tale runs in this wise:

"There dwelt in Syria once a company of merchants, who scented every
land with their spices. They dealt in jewels, and cloth of gold, and
sheeny satins. It so happened that while some of them were dwelling in
Rome for traffic, the people talked of nothing save the wonderful
beauty of Constance, the daughter of the emperor. She was so fair that
every one who looked upon her face fell in love with her. In a short
time the ships of the merchants, laden with rich wares, were furrowing
the green sea, going home. When they came to their native city they
could talk of nothing but the marvellous beauty of Constance. Their
words being reported to the Sultan, he determined that none other
should be his wife; and for this purpose he abandoned the religion of
the false prophet, and was baptised in the Christian faith.
Ambassadors passed between the courts, and the day came at length when
Constance was to leave Rome for her husband's palace in Syria. What
kisses and tears and lingering embraces! What blessings on the little
golden head which was so soon to lie in the bosom of a stranger! What
state and solemnity in the procession which wound down from the shore
to the ship! At last it was Syria. Crowds of people were standing on
the beach. The mother of the Sultan was there; and when Constance
stepped ashore, she took her in her arms and kissed her as if she had
been her own child. Soon after, with trumpets and melody and the
trampling of innumerable horses, the Sultan came. Everything was joy
and happiness. But the smiling demoness, his mother, could not forgive
him for changing his faith, and she resolved to slay him that very
night, and seize the government of the kingdom. He and all his lords
were stabbed in the rich hall while they were sitting at their wine.
Constance alone escaped. She was then put into a ship alone, with food
and clothes, and told that she might find her way back to Italy. She
sailed away, and was never seen by that people. For five years she
wandered to and fro upon the sea. Do you ask who preserved her? The
same God who fed Elijah with ravens, and saved Daniel in the horrible
den. At last she floated into the English seas, and was thrown by the
waves on the Northumberland shore, near which stood a great castle.
The constable of the castle came down in the morning to see the woful
woman. She spoke a kind of corrupt Latin, and could neither tell her
name nor the name of the country of which she was a native. She said
she was so bewildered in the sea that she remembered nothing. The man
could not help loving her, and so took her home to live with himself
and his wife. Now, through the example and teaching of Constance, Dame
Hermigild was converted to Christianity. It happened also that three
aged Christian Britons were living near that place in great fear of
their pagan neighbours, and one of these men was blind. One day, as
the constable, his wife, and Constance were walking along the
sea-shore, they were met by the blind man, who called out, 'In the name
of Christ, give me my sight, Dame Hermigild!' At this, on account of
her husband, she was sore afraid; but, encouraged by Constance, she
wrought a great miracle, and gave the blind man his sight. But Satan,
the enemy of all, wanted to destroy Constance, and he employed a young
knight for that purpose. This knight had loved her with a foul
affection, to which she could give no return. At last, wild for
revenge, he crept at night into Hermigild's chamber, slew her, and laid
the bloody knife on the innocent pillow of Constance. The next morning
there was woe and dolour in the house. She was brought before Alla,
the king, charged with the murder. The people could not believe that
she had done this thing; they knew she loved Hermigild so. Constance
fell down on her knees and prayed to God for succour. Have you ever
been in a crowd in which a man is being led to death, and, seeing a
wild, pale face, know by that sign that you are looking upon the doomed
creature?--so wild, so pale looked Constance when she stood before the
king and people. The tears ran down Alla's face. 'Go fetch a book,'
cried he; 'and if this knight swears that the woman is guilty, she
shall surely die.' The book was brought, the knight took the oath, and
that moment an unseen hand smote him on the neck, so that he fell down
on the floor, his eyes bursting out of his head. Then a celestial
voice was heard in the midst, crying, 'Thou hast slandered a daughter
of Holy Church in high presence, and yet I hold my peace.' A great awe
fell on all who heard, and the king and multitudes of his people were
converted. Shortly after this, Alla wedded Constance with great
richness and solemnity. At length he was called to defend his border
against the predatory Scots, and in his absence a man-child was born.
A messenger was sent with the blissful tidings to the king's camp; but,
on his way, the messenger turned aside to the dwelling of Donegild, the
king's mother, and said, 'Be blithe, madam; the queen has given birth
to a son, and joy is in the land. Here is the letter I bear to the
king.' The wicked Donegild said, 'You must be already tired; here are
refreshments.' And while the simple man drank ale and wine, she forged
a letter, saying that the queen had been delivered of a creature so
fiendish and horrible that no one in the castle could bear to look upon
it. This letter the messenger gave to the king; and who can tell his
grief! But he wrote in reply, 'Welcome be the child that Christ sends!
Welcome, O Lord, be thy pleasure! Be careful of my wife and child till
my return.' The messenger on his return slept at Donegild's court,
with the letter under his girdle. It was stolen while in his drunken
sleep, and another put in its place, charging the constable not to let
Constance remain three days in the kingdom, but to send her and her
child away in the same ship in which she had come. The constable could
not help himself. Thousands are gathered on the shore. With a face
wild and pale as when she came from the sea, and bearing her crying
infant in her arms, she comes through the crowd, which shrinks back,
leaving a lane for her sorrow. She takes her seat in the little boat;
and while the cruel people gaze hour by hour from the shore, she passes
into the sunset, and away out into the night under the stars. When
Alla returned from the war, and found how he had been deceived, he slew
his mother, in the bitterness of his heart.

"News had come to Rome of the cruelty of the Sultan's mother to
Constance, and an army was sent to waste her country. After the land
had been burned and desolated, the commander was crossing the seas in
triumph, when he met the ship sailing in which sat Constance and her
little boy. They were both brought to Rome, and although the
commander's wife and Constance were cousins, the one did not know the
other. By this time, remorse for the slaying of his mother had seized
Alla's mind, and he could find no rest. He resolved to make a
pilgrimage to Rome in search of peace. He crossed the Alps with his
train, and entered the city with great glory and magnificence. One day
he feasted at the commander's house, at which Constance dwelt; and at
her request her little son was admitted, and during the progress of the
feast the child went and stood looking in the king's face. 'What fair
child is that standing yonder?' said the king. 'By St. John; I know
not!' quoth the commander; 'he has a mother, but no father that I know
of.' And then he told the king--who seemed all the while like a man
stunned--how he had found the mother and child floating about on the
sea. The king rose from the table and sent for Constance; and when he
saw her, and thought on all her wrongs, he could not refrain from
tears. 'This is your little son, Maurice,' she said, as she led him in
by the hand. Next day she met the emperor her father in the street,
and, falling down on her knees before him, said, 'Father, has the
remembrance of your young child Constance gone out of your mind? I am
that Constance whom you sent to Syria, and who was thought to be lost
in the sea.' That day there was great joy in Rome; and soon afterwards
Alla, with his wife and child, returned to England, where they lived in
great prosperity till he died."




BOOKS AND GARDENS

Most men seek solitude from wounded vanity, from disappointed ambition,
from a miscarriage in the passions; but some others from native
instinct, as a duckling seeks water. I have taken to my solitude, such
as it is, from an indolent turn of mind, and this solitude I sweeten by
an imaginative sympathy which re-creates the past for me,--the past of
the world, as well as the past which belongs to me as an
individual,--and which makes me independent of the passing moment. I
see every one struggling after the unattainable, but I struggle not,
and so spare myself the pangs of disappointment and disgust. I have no
ventures at sea, and, consequently, do not fear the arrival of evil
tidings. I have no desire to act any prominent part in the world, but
I am devoured by an unappeasable curiosity as to the men who do act. I
am not an actor, I am a spectator only. My sole occupation is
sight-seeing. In a certain imperial idleness, I amuse myself with the
world. Ambition! What do I care for ambition? The oyster with much
pain produces its pearl. I take the pearl. Why should I produce one
after this miserable, painful fashion? It would be but a flawed one,
at best. These pearls I can pick up by the dozen. The production of
them is going on all around me, and there will be a nice crop for the
solitary man of the next century. Look at a certain silent emperor,
for instance: a hundred years hence _his_ pearl will be handed about
from hand to hand; will be curiously scrutinised and valued; will be
set in its place in the world's cabinet. I confess I should like to
see the completion of that filmy orb. Will it be pure in colour? Will
its purity be marred by an ominous bloody streak? Of this I am
certain, that in the cabinet in which the world keeps these peculiar
treasures, no one will be looked at more frequently, or will provoke a
greater variety of opinions as to its intrinsic worth. Why should I be
ambitious? Shall I write verses? I am not likely to surpass Mr.
Tennyson or Mr. Browning in that walk. Shall I be a musician? The
blackbird singing this moment somewhere in my garden shrubbery puts me
to instant shame. Shall I paint? The intensest scarlet on an artist's
palette is but ochre to that I saw this morning at sunrise. No, no,
let me enjoy Mr. Tennyson's verse, and the blackbird's song, and the
colours of sunrise, but do not let me emulate them. I am happier as it
is. I do not need to make history,--there are plenty of people willing
to save me trouble on that score. The cook makes the dinner, the guest
eats it; and the last, not without reason, is considered the happier
man.

In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. My
interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the
flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past. I go into
my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning
air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it,
while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and
to the laugh of Eve. I see the Pyramids building; I hear the shoutings
of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march
of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre,--the stage is time, the play is
the play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what
processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of
captives are dragged at the chariot-wheels of conquerors! I hiss, or
cry "Bravo," when the great actors come on the shaking stage. I am a
Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout
with Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Syrian
plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham and
Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's
guile, Esau's face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid
funeral procession,--all these things I find within the boards of my
Old Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled
world; what bleating of flocks; what green pastoral rest; what
indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and
war I hear the bleating of Abraham's flocks, the tinkling of the bells
of Rebekah's camels. O men and women so far separated yet so near, so
strange yet so well known, by what miraculous power do I know ye all!
Books are the true Elysian fields, where the spirits of the dead
converse; and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What
king's court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such
wisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there.
There is Pan's pipe, there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my
library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am
occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are
not collections of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down,
and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men
and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a
solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more
company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than ever
did Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in
my library, but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.

The house I dwell in stands apart from the little town, and relates
itself to the houses as I do to the inhabitants. It sees everything,
but is itself unseen, or, at all events, unregarded. My study-window
looks down upon Dreamthorp like a meditative eye. Without meaning it,
I feel I am a spy on the on-goings of the quiet place. Around my house
there is an old-fashioned rambling garden, with close-shaven grassy
plots, and fantastically clipped yews which have gathered their
darkness from a hundred summers and winters; and sun-dials in which the
sun is constantly telling his age; and statues green with neglect and
the stains of the weather. The garden I love more than any place on
earth; it is a better study than the room inside the house which is
dignified by that name. I like to pace its gravelled walks, to sit in
the moss-house, which is warm and cosey as a bird's nest, and wherein
twilight dwells at noonday; to enjoy the feast of colour spread for me
in the curiously shaped floral spaces. My garden, with its silence and
the pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations,
affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me
wistfully through the bars. Among my flowers and trees Nature takes me
into her own hands, and I breathe freely as the first man. It is
curious, pathetic almost, I sometimes think, how deeply seated in the
human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening. The sickly
seamstress in the narrow city lane tends her box of sicklier
mignonette. The retired merchant is as fond of tulips as ever was
Dutchman during the famous mania. The author finds a garden the best
place to think out his thought. In the disabled statesman every
restless throb of regret or ambition is stilled when he looks upon his
blossomed apple-trees. Is the fancy too far brought that this love for
gardens is a reminiscence haunting the race of that remote time in the
world's dawn when but two persons existed,--a gardener named Adam, and
a gardener's wife called Eve?

When I walk out of my house into my garden I walk out of my habitual
self, my every-day thoughts, my customariness of joy or sorrow by which
I recognise and assure myself of my own identity. These I leave behind
me for a time, as the bather leaves his garments on the beach. This
piece of garden-ground, in extent barely a square acre, is a kingdom
with its own interests, annals, and incidents. Something is always
happening in it. To-day is always different from yesterday. This
spring a chaffinch built a nest in one of my yew-trees. The particular
yew which the bird did me the honour to select had been clipped long
ago into a similitude of Adam, and, in fact, went by his name. The
resemblance to a human figure was, of course, remote, but the intention
was evident. In the black shock head of our first parent did the birds
establish their habitation. A prettier, rounder, more comfortable nest
I never saw, and many a wild swing it got when Adam bent his back, and
bobbed and shook his head when the bitter east wind was blowing. The
nest interested me, and I visited it every day from the time the first
stained turquoise sphere was laid in the warm lining of moss and
horse-hair, till, when I chirped, four red hungry throats, eager for
worm or slug, opened out of a confused mass of feathery down. What a
hungry brood it was, to be sure, and how often father and mother were
put to it to provide them sustenance! I went but the other day to have
a peep, and, behold! brood and parent-birds were gone, the nest was
empty, Adam's visitors had departed. In the corners of my bedroom
window I have a couple of swallows' nests, and nothing can be
pleasanter in these summer mornings than to lie in a kind of
half-dream, conscious all the time of the chatterings and endearments
of the man-loving creatures. They are beautifully restless, and are
continually darting around their nests in the window-corners. All at
once there is a great twittering and noise; something of moment has
been witnessed, something of importance has occurred in the
swallow-world,--perhaps a fly of unusual size or savour has been
bolted. Clinging with their feet, and with heads turned charmingly
aside, they chatter away with voluble sweetness, then with a gleam of
silver they are gone, and in a trice one is poising itself in the wind
above my tree-tops, while the other dips her wing as she darts after a
fly through the arches of the bridge which lets the slow stream down to
the sea. I go to the southern wall, against which I have trained my
fruit-trees, and find it a sheet of white and vermeil blossom; and as I
know it by heart, I can notice what changes take place on it day by
day, what later clumps of buds have burst into colour and odour. What
beauty in that blooming wall! the wedding-presents of a princess ranged
for admiration would not please me half so much; what delicate
colouring! what fragrance the thievish winds steal from it, without
making it one odour the poorer! with what a complacent hum the bee goes
past! My chaffinch's nest, my swallows,--twittering but a few months
ago around the kraal of the Hottentot, or chasing flies around the six
solitary pillars of Baalbec,--with their nests in the corners of my
bed-room windows, my long-armed fruit-trees flowering against my sunny
wall, are not mighty pleasures, but then they are my own, and I have
not to go in search of them. And so, like a wise man, I am content
with what I have, and make it richer by my fancy, which is as cheap as
sunlight, and gilds objects quite as prettily. It is the coins in my
own pocket, not the coins in the pockets of my neighbour, that are of
use to me. Discontent has never a doit in her purse, and envy is the
most poverty stricken of the passions.

His own children, and the children he happens to meet on the country
road, a man regards with quite different eyes. The strange, sunburnt
brats returning from a primrose-hunt and laden with floral spoils, may
be as healthy looking, as pretty, as well-behaved, as sweet-tempered,
as neatly dressed as those that bear his name,--may be in every respect
as worthy of love and admiration; but then they have the misfortune not
to belong to him. That little fact makes a great difference. He knows
nothing about them; his acquaintance with them is born and dead in a
moment. I like my garden better than any other garden, for the same
reason. It is my own. And ownership in such a matter implies a great
deal. When I first settled here, the ground around the house was sour
moorland. I made the walk, planted the trees, built the moss-house,
erected the sun-dial, brought home the rhododendrons and fed them with
the mould which they love so well. I am the creator of every blossom,
of every odour that comes and goes in the wind. The rustle of my trees
is to my ear what his child's voice is to my friends the village doctor
or the village clergyman. I know the genealogy of every tree and plant
in my garden. I watch their growth as a father watches the growth of
his children. It is curious enough, as showing from what sources
objects derive their importance, that if you have once planted a tree
for other than commercial purposes,--and in that case it is usually
done by your orders and by the hands of hirelings,--you have always in
it a peculiar interest. You care more for it than you care for all the
forests of Norway or America. _You_ have planted it, and that is
sufficient to make it peculiar amongst the trees of the world. This
personal interest I take in every inmate of my garden, and this
interest I have increased by sedulous watching. But, really, trees and
plants resemble human beings in many ways. You shake a packet of seed
into your forcing-frame; and while some grow, others pine and die, or
struggle on under hereditary defect, showing indifferent blossoms late
in the season, and succumb at length. So far as one could discover,
the seeds were originally alike,--they received the same care, they
were fed by the same moisture and sunlight; but of no two of them are
the issues the same. Do I not see something of this kind in the world
of men, and can I not please myself with quaint analogies? These
plants and trees have their seasons of illness and their sudden deaths.
Your best rose-tree, whose fame has spread for twenty miles, is smitten
by some fell disease; its leaves take an unhealthy hue, and in a day or
so it is sapless,--dead. A tree of mine, the first last spring to put
out its leaves, and which wore them till November, made this spring no
green response to the call of the sunshine. Marvelling what ailed it,
I went to examine, and found it had been dead for months; and yet
during the winter there had been no frost to speak of, and more than
its brothers and sisters it was in no way exposed. These are the
tragedies of the garden, and they shadow forth other tragedies nearer
us. In everything we find a kind of dim mirror of ourselves. Sterne,
if placed in a desert, said he would love a tree; and I can fancy such
a love would not be altogether unsatisfying. Love of trees and plants
is safe. You do not run risk in your affections. They are my
children, silent and beautiful, untouched by any passion, unpolluted by
evil tempers; for me they leaf and flower themselves. In autumn they
put off their rich apparel, but next year they are back again, with
dresses fair as ever; and--one can extract a kind of fanciful
bitterness from the thought--should I be laid in my grave in winter,
they would all in spring be back again, with faces a bright and with
breaths as sweet, missing me not at all. Ungrateful, the one I am
fondest of would blossom very prettily if planted on the soil that
covers me,--where my dog would die, where my best friend would perhaps
raise an inscription!

I like flowering plants, but I like trees more,--for the reason, I
suppose, that they are slower in coming to maturity, are longer lived,
that you can become better acquainted with them, and that in the course
of years memories and associations hang as thickly on their boughs as
do leaves in summer or fruits in autumn. I do not wonder that great
earls value their trees, and never, save in direst extremity, lift upon
them the axe. Ancient descent and glory are made audible in the proud
murmur of immemorial woods. There are forests in England whose leafy
noises may be shaped into Agincourt and the names of the battle-fields
of the Roses; oaks that dropped their acorns in the year that Henry
VIII. held his Field of the Cloth of Gold, and beeches that gave
shelter to the deer when Shakspeare was a boy. There they stand, in
sun and shower, the broad-armed witnesses of perished centuries; and
sore must his need be who commands a woodland massacre. A great
English tree, the rings of a century in its boll, is one of the noblest
of natural objects; and it touches the imagination no less than the
eye, for it grows out of tradition and a past order of things, and is
pathetic with the suggestions of dead generations. Trees waving a
colony of rooks in the wind to-day, are older than historic lines.
Trees are your best antiques. There are cedars on Lebanon which the
axes of Solomon spared, they say, when he was busy with his Temple;
there are olives on Olivet that might have rustled in the ears of the
Master and the Twelve; there are oaks in Sherwood which have tingled to
the horn of Robin Hood, and have listened to Maid Marian's laugh.
Think of an existing Syrian cedar which is nearly as old as history,
which was middle-aged before the wolf suckled Romulus! Think of an
existing English elm in whose branches the heron was reared which the
hawks of Saxon Harold killed! If you are a notable, and wish to be
remembered, better plant a tree than build a city or strike a medal; it
will outlast both.

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