“The sunset is like the autumn,” sighed the young girl. “The saddest time of the day, and the saddest time of all the year. It must be like dying. The light will go out some day, and leave us in a world we do not know, through which we cannot find our way.”
“Were there no other spring, nor any other rising of the sun, death would be dreadful indeed. But you are young to think of such things.”
“Yes,” answered Diana, smiling a little. “Besides, if we were logical we should look at things differently. We ought to consider the condemned criminal, who is told that he is to die on a certain day of the month at a certain hour, as the happiest of mortals. He, at least, knows exactly how long he has to live, whereas I may go on for sixty years, or die to-night. What a lottery!”
“Ah, my dear lady, we must not be discontented with the beginning. There is peace yet to come. All life is but a step towards peace. Sometimes when men live to be very old, peace begins for them before they have crossed the threshold. To others it comes later, but to all good men and women it comes at last.”
“How strange those moralities sound — when you utter them! What are you? I see you and talk with you. I have touched your hand and heard your voice. I know you as I know the others — what are you?”
“We do not know what we are,” answered the venerable artist very gravely. “We know only that we are still ourselves, and shall be for ever. And somewhere, too, are all the million, million selves that have played parts in this little corner of the universe since the beginning. That is all we know. Good-bye — we shall meet again this evening.”
“Good-bye,” said Diana, taking his cold hand fearlessly in hers, and gazing for a few seconds into his deep, liquid eyes.
Lionardo left her, and she hastened homeward through the deepening twilight. What he had said had produced a profound impression upon her, the stronger for its extreme simplicity. She wondered whether it were true, and whether, even when her last sun had set and her last breath had trembled upon the air of a mortal world, she should still not know the great secret. In youth death often seems very near because we fear it, in old age it is nearer still, because men desire peace when they are weary, and have little joy of life when the strength is gone from them.
CHAPTER XIV.
THAT EVENING AT dinner there was less conversation than usual. The strange life which the party at the Castello del Gaudio had been leading for some time was beginning to produce its inevitable effect. They all grew silent and were often preoccupied with one common thought, wondering constantly what was to happen next. Every one wore a look in which a question was expressed and an uncertainty, for they had been trespassing in dreamland, or shadow-land, whichever is the name given to that misty country, by the shades that dwell there.
“Why should it not last for ever?” exclaimed Diana, suddenly.
“Oh! I should go mad, if it did!” said Lady Brenda. “Not but that it has been most delightful of course. But it is so weird, and altogether — I cannot explain it at all.”
“No,” answered Augustus. “I believe you cannot, nor I either, nor any of us. But I am not sure that I would like it to go on for ever. This sort of life makes one unfit for anything but loafing. Slang? Yes, you must forgive me. Only dead men are quite above slang.”
“I think,” said Gwendoline, “that people will find us dreadfully changed when we go home. But I would not give up all we have had here for anything in the world.”
No one spoke again for some minutes, for Gwendoline had expressed what was passing in the minds of the others. They would not willingly have forfeited such memories.
“It may change our way of thinking,” said Augustus, at last. “But I am not sure that we should any of us care to think differently about most things.”
“We should not be ourselves if we did,” answered Gwendoline. “I know we should not be happier. ‘Ourselves’ means what we think we are.”
“Together with what other people think of us,” added Diana.
“When I say ‘myself,’ I mean what I am,” put in Lady Brenda. “What other people think about me does not change me.”
“I do not know,” said Augustus. “But even if it does not, do you know what you are?”
“I suppose I could describe myself, if I tried — and if nobody were there to hear the description,” answered his mother-in-law.
“That would only be telling what you think of yourself. You might be mistaken. It is commonly said that we should know the truth if we could see ourselves as others see us.”
“I do not believe that is true. Other people will generally over-estimate or undervalue us. No one can know what I am, but I myself.”
“But even you yourself do not quite know,” objected Diana.
“Then nobody knows. What difference does it make?” retorted Lady Brenda, laughing. “And if nobody knows how can any one know that I am changed after talking to a dozen or so of intelligent ghosts for a month, more or less?”
“It has been more like a dream than a reality,” said Diana, with a little sigh. “Sometimes dreams do affect our lives, for a little while. I think it is strange that we should feel as we do about these spirits, or manifestations, or whatever they are. We all feel their unreality when they are gone, and yet they are so much like living people that they do not startle us when they appear.”
“It is certainly very odd,” Gwendoline remarked. “And I wonder how they all chance to be together. Do you remember our first dinner here? We each named some one whom we would like to see, and most of them have come. Perhaps it is only a creation of our brains.”
“I was going to propose a moonlight sail this evening,” said Augustus. “What do you all think of it? We can sail round the Galli, or the isles of the Sirens — whichever they are — and if all these ghosts have been the creation of our brains, why then—”
“We might see the Sirens themselves!” exclaimed Gwendoline.
“I wish we could hear them,” answered Diana.
“If we do — really, we shall have to send for keepers and turn your castle into a lunatic asylum!” said Lady Brenda.
“I have had everything got ready for this evening,” replied Augustus. “We have only to go on board. The sea is like glass and this queer breeze from the rocks will carry us as far as we like to go — all night if we please. The natives call it the puizza. The other night a boat was nearly capsized by it, though the water was like oil.”
The party left the room and ‘soon afterwards reassembled on the terrace whence a flight of steps led to the descent to the beach. They all stood together for a moment and looked out at the quiet sea. The moon was not yet full, but the light was strong and clear, already high and casting few shadows.
As they went down to the shore, walking carefully over the rough path, they began to feel the cool air that pours over the edge of the land in a continuous stream from sunset to sunrise, rushing over the water, swiftly at first and then more slowly, till it floats out silently into the night, tempering the heated surface of the calm southern sea with a restful freshness. The yacht lay less than fifty yards from the beach, mainsail and topsail hoisted, only waiting for her passengers, ready to slip her moorings from the buoy and glide away through the silent moonlight. She was a large and beautiful cutter, winner of many a race, and famous for her doings on rougher seas than the Gulf of Salerno or the Bay of Naples. A neat gig, manned by four men, was waiting by a projecting rock that served as a landing, and in a few minutes the whole party was on board. Augustus took the helm himself and the three ladies established themselves upon chairs near him. The men went forward and in a few minutes the yacht was moving swiftly along, westward, towards the Campanella and Capri.
Presently there were other forms upon the white deck. One by one, the strange companions who had become so familiar to the inhabitants of the Castello del Gaudio, became visible, standing and sitting in various attitudes, all grouped about the four living people at the stern of the yacht.
�
��This is the river Stvx, and I am Charon!” exclaimed Augustus. “Whither shall I ferry you? Are the Isles of the Blessed near?”
Then Augustus and his three companions heard a sound that was not the rushing of the night wind through the rigging, nor the swirl of the deep dark water under the raking stern. It was a deep, mysterious breath, more felt than heard, full of human sadness, but without the reality a sigh takes from human suffering. It came from the breasts of those shadowy beings who had learned the great secret, but could not impart it to the living with whom they lingered. There was an infinite pathos in the expression of it that deeply moved those who heard it. It floated away into the night and was lost in the breeze, like a last farewell, that echoes and is gone, while the responsive heart-strings still quiver and repeat the bitter music roused by that dear voice.
“The Isles of the Blessed!” said Heine, at last. “No, they are not near. Your ship cannot sail to them.”
“I wish we could all sail there together,” said Diana. “It would be so simple.”
“Who knows?” returned the poet, who was standing beside her. “Only what we know is simple.”
“And we know nothing,” answered the young girl, sadly. “I do not know certainly that you are not one of my dreams. When I touch your hand and find it cold, I may be asleep on the terrace at the castle and my fingers may have fallen upon the marble balustrade, or against a glass of cold water.”
“Of course. And for all I know, I may be alive still, dreaming that I am dead.”
“That is impossible,” replied Diana, quickly, “for I have read of your death.”
“You may have read it in your dream, or I may be dreaming that you have dreamt it. But it has been a very long dream!”
“Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “I will not permit you to consider me a mere morsel of your dreams. The unconscious ratiocination of your brain cannot have the power to call into existence the personality, and the sequences of memory and thought, by which I know myself to be an individual being. If it could, sir, I should talk like you.”
“But I know something of your works and I could very well imagine how you would talk. Nothing proves to me that you are not my dream. Nothing can prove to our living friends here that we are not their dreams, especially if we should chance to send them to sleep, so that on waking they should find us gone.”
“Ay, the waking, sir, the waking!” repeated Johnson, shaking his head violently from side to side.
Again that melancholy sigh trembled on the air and then died away in the sound of the breeze.
“Why are you all so sad to-night?” asked Lady Brenda, who hated anything approaching to melancholy.
“Indeed, madam, we have reason for sadness,” answered Francis, at last. “When you speak of such things, I wish I were Bayard. Unfortunately—” he stopped short.
“You never could have been,” said the lady, with a smile. “Perhaps you would not if you could, or it may be that you could not, if you had had the will.”
“I do not know why your majesty should wish to exchange with me.” It was Bayard who spoke.
“A man would sacrifice much to leave behind him such a name as yours,” said Augustus, “a man without fear and without reproach.”
“Reproach had a different meaning in my time,” replied the knight, calmly. “I was no saint. I should perhaps scarcely pass muster in your modern society. I went through life with one idea, or motto.”
“What was that?” asked Gwendoline, quickly.
“Always do what you are afraid of doing — it is a good motto, I think.”
“Yes — provided it is not a wrong thing.”
“The thing one fears to do is seldom bad,” answered Bayard. “Fear is the devil’s barrier between man and good deeds.”
“What a part in your life of to-day is played by those ideas of right and wrong!” exclaimed Cæsar, suddenly joining in the conversation. “When I lived, the question was, whether an act was legal or illegal. No man’s conscience asked more than that.”
“What did Horace mean, then, by his integer vitae?” asked Augustus.
“An honest man,” replied Cæsar. “That is, a man who lived according to the laws. He adds sceleris-que purus, innocent of crime. The conjunction of epithets explains everything. If one of your contemporaries spoke of you as ‘an honest man,’ he would hardly think it necessary to add that you were ‘innocent of crime.’ The one term is now supposed to contain the other.”
“But you had also the religious idea. Fas and nefas expressed it, as ah equivalent to our right and wrong.”
“Our religion, or our fifty religions, had very little hold upon anybody in the higher classes. Fas came to mean, generally, what you would call unwritten law; that is, it meant the verdict of educated public opinion, and included every kind of superstition as well as every idea of social propriety. But what does it matter how we thought? Thoughts may go on and change, but the end of life is the end of action, and inaction is torment.”
The calm intonations of his voice trembled a little, as he spoke the last words, and he turned his face away from the moonlight.
“And must inaction last for ever?” asked Gwendoline, softly.
“For ever, perhaps. Perhaps only until to-morrow’s dawn. Who knows? Not we, who walk between three worlds, shadows, and less than shadows, memories, and yet more than memories. Nor can you know, you, who live, and can still find something to do that has not yet been done.”
“But where are the rest?” asked Diana, after a pause. “Where are the shadows of old time, and the shadows of yesterday? Where is Achilles? Where are the Sirens? Where is the king who died last year, the beggar who died last night?”
“With yesterday, as we are — you only are with to-day, and the world may never see to-morrow.”
“But that yesterday — what is it? where is it?”
“It is not. It has no reality, though it was once real. It is a memory with those who knew it. For those who knew it not, it is nothing, no more than the shadow of a cloud that lingered a moment on the hillside to-day.”
“As for the Sirens, their music is as sweet as ever,” said Chopin, gazing through the dreamy moonlight at the islets, now far astern of the yacht but still clearly visible.
“If we could only hear them!” sighed Gwendoline. Then she laughed at the idea.
“Why not? It is just such a night as they love.”
“If anything could make the night more beautiful, it would be music,” said Lady Brenda. “But I am afraid you are quite, quite mad, Gwendoline. Of course the Sirens never really existed.”
“Then why did people write so much about them?”
“Madam,” said Dr. Johnson, “that which is beautiful has a permanent existence, but those things which are in contradiction to the nature of beauty, are destined to perish and decay. Those who seek to resuscitate, by the active exertion of their imaginations, the noble and elevating thoughts of forgotten ages, will certainly obtain success in a measure proportional to their ability and industry; but such persons as lack the originality necessary to conceive great works, the application which is indispensable for their execution, and the faith in beauty, through which alone the poetic inspiration can be conveyed, are by nature unable either to revivificate the glories of the past, or to contribute anything new to that assemblage of eminently excellent things with which mankind are already acquainted.”
“But where there is the faith alone, there is always the capacity for enjoying the beautiful,” suggested Gwendoline.
“Ah, my dear lady, you have it there!” answered the doctor. “The faith is the thing.”
“Then we might hear the Sirens after all. If they were bad and cruel their songs were divine. We might hear the song, even if we could not see the women.”
“I will go about when we are abreast of the cape, my dear,” said Augustus. “This breeze will end there, and in coming back we will run under the islands.”
“Oh, do!” cried the two younger lad
ies in a breath.
“It would be worth while to hear the Sirens and live to tell of it,” said Heine. “How often I longed to listen to the pixies and water-sprites! I was always sure that they lived somewhere in the green depths.”
“But of course it is quite impossible,” said Lady Brenda, who was still incredulous.
“Nothing is impossible,” answered the earnest voice of Pascal. He was sitting at a distance from the rest, apparently lost in a reverie, a look of wonderful peace upon his face.
“Really,” returned Lady Brenda, “I always thought everybody knew that a great many things are altogether out of the question.”
“Unusual things seem impossible until they happen,” answered the man of learning. “What could seem more impossible to a human mind than the creation of this world? What more impossible than its destruction?”
“That is true. But we have grown used to the world as we see it and know it. There are changes imaginable in the world which look far less probable than the final catastrophe — the last day, as people call it.”
“There are things beyond this earth which none of you can even imagine, and yet they have a very real existence.”
“The creations of the mind are as real as the manifestations of matter,” said Lionardo.
“Yes,” assented Lady Brenda, “because they can be printed in books, painted on canvas, or carved in stone. Then they become real things.”
“Pardon me. That is not what makes them real. Many great books were handed down for centuries before even writing was invented, and they had a tremendous influence over the human race.”
“But words are almost things, after all, and if one learns them by heart they are just like books.”
“What are words?” asked the artist. “They are symbols of thought. Letters only represent words by convention, and are symbols of symbols. The reality lies in the ideas which all these symbols call up to countless generations of men who hear the words or see the letters. The idea is then the reality, and the material part of a picture or a book is the vehicle, not affecting the idea but communicating it more or less correctly and completely to men.”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 319