But her awareness of Nicolas, a man who was almost a stranger to her, was so acute that it frightened her. Her mingled love and ignorance made of his personality a thing so mysterious and wonderful that it filled her world. The very shadows lying across the grass seemed shadows of it, and the flowers were paintings drawn from the pattern of Nicolas.
And if these could give her news of him, the actual physical presence of Nicolas, eating lark pie beside her in the arbor, must surely be as the written pages of a book that tell of the spirit of it. Hating her ignorance, longing for knowledge of him, she looked almost hungrily at the hollow of his temple and the way the hair grew above it, the curve of his cheekbone and the golden down upon it, at the cleft in his chin and the line of his jaw and the way his head was set upon his neck. Then a wave of hot shame swept over her and she dropped her eyes in confusion; only to see his hand resting upon the table beside her, and to notice the shape of the fingers and the hollow in the wrist where she would have felt the pulse beating if she had put her finger on it. . . . The pulse. . . . Terror engulfed her. That beating pulse was such a tiny thing, yet if it were to stop he would be dead. The careless flight of an arrow, a slip on the stairs, a flash of lightning out of the noonday or the thrust of an angry sword in a tavern at midnight; such small things as these could still the even smaller pulse and the kindly body would be there no longer to give tidings of the spirit to its lovers.
“Nicolas! Nicolas!” she cried in terror.
He flung both arms round her and demanded what the matter was.
“You wouldn’t let any harm come to you, would you?” she whispered.
Nicolas roared with laughter, his head thrown back so that his throat showed like a strong pillar defying the fates. “Not yet,” he said. “Not till we’ve had time to love each other. . . . I promise.”
He took her out into the garden—the dimness of the arbor, he thought, must be conducive to melancholia—and she was soon a child again, poking her fingers into the canterbury bells, rubbing the sweet scented eglantine leaves between the palms of her hands, and laughing at the drunken bumble bees who reeled from woodbine trumpet to yellow rose and from there fell heavily to lie upside down and protesting on the purple pansies growing in the bed below.
7.
But she had been a child for only a little while when a pealing bell and the fading sky over her head warned her that time passes.
“I must go,” she whispered, her head drooping. She was sad now, for to the happy the bell that marks the passing of the hours brings bad news. Nicolas was sad too as he led her into the house to say good-by to Mistress Tattleton, and out in the street again, going home, they could find nothing to say. He led her silently, holding her hand, and only her silken skirts whispered softly as they walked.
At the Fair Gate they stopped and tried to say good night, but they couldn’t. Although the sun had set it had left its warmth behind with them. There was a flame burning in them both that made it impossible to part; they were fused by it, bound together as though it created a tiny world of warmth for the two of them outside of which it was impossible to live.
“Joyeuce,” whispered Nicolas, “it is Midsummer Eve and the fairies will be dancing in the meadows.”
Joyeuce nodded her head. It did not matter to her where they went as long as they were together, and where the fairies are dancing is the place for lovers on Midsummer Eve. . . . She believed in fairies.
They went on down Fish Street and turned into an alleyway beside the South Gate that led through into the Meadows. Joyeuce had never yet been there so late and she caught her breath, for they did not seem the same fields that she knew in the sunshine.
They had left the sun behind them and walked into the country of the moon. It hung in a deep green sky and low on the horizon Jupiter burned like a lamp. The trees, heavy with their June foliage, stood up motionless and almost black against that strange sky and below them the grass had changed its color, had become a cold blue-green under the light of the moon. The flowers were visible, the tall daisies in the grass and the wild roses on the bushes, but all color had been drained from them, even from the yellow eyes of the daisies that by day ogled the sun. They looked like fragile motionless butterflies, or pale ghosts of the moon and the stars above them.
They went slowly on under the trees, hand in hand, and even Nicolas did not feel himself, for the green light and the absolute stillness of this moon country were so strange. This was an old country, the country of legend, where the spirits of dead lovers hid beneath the trees and the ghosts of their songs sighed and whispered over the grass. When he had asked Joyeuce to come with him into the Meadows the hot magic of the sun had been racing in his veins and he had been ready for he knew not what midsummer madness; but now he felt differently. Joyeuce’s hand in his, that had before been warm with excitement, was now cool, and looking at her he saw that the moon had taken the red from her lips and the color from the poppies on her dress; she was all green and silver, like a naiad. She was innocent as the moon and he could not hurt her.
And Joyeuce, too, her feeling born of his, felt different. Her painful awareness of his physical presence, that had made her feel ashamed, was gone. In the dim shadowy figure strolling beside her she was only conscious of the spirit of the man, and rejoiced in the sense of peace that it brought her. When he stopped under a tree and slipped his arms round her she was not afraid. There was no passion in them and his face against hers was cool. Love the creator had them in its merciless grip but the vestal moon had made it urbane and pitiful and it chose that night to ignore their bodies and work upon their souls. Yet the virtue was not only in the moon; Nicolas could lay claim to a little. Part of him was at the mercy of the time and the place and the magic of the night but another part of him was conscious of desire, and refusal, and increase of strength following hard on the heels of it.
A familiar scent reached Joyeuce and she lifted her head and sniffed. Then she saw that a hundred white moons, larger than those that sprinkled the bushes and the grass, were hanging low over their heads.
“Nicolas!” she whispered, “we’re standing under an elder tree! Just sniff!”
“What of it?” asked Nicolas, sniffing.
“If you stand under an elder tree on Midsummer Eve you see the King of the Elves,” whispered Joyeuce.
Nicolas looked down into her face and laughed. Her eyes were round as a frightened child’s and she was trembling. There was nothing of the woman in her at this moment, and as he kissed her on her pointed chin and her shadowed eyelids he smiled to think that the woman who could grapple so courageously with the sorrows and the labor of her life should be such a little girl that she could tremble like an aspen leaf at an old wives’ tale.
“You babe!” he laughed, “you absurd, adorable babe!” And then he happened to glance ahead over her shoulder and his jaw dropped and his eyes grew even rounder than hers.
“What is it?” she whispered.
Nicolas was incapable of speech but keeping his arms tightly round her, lest she should scream with fright when she saw what he saw, he swung her round a little way.
Clinging together under the magic elder tree they stood and stared. Not far away from them a tiny green figure was treading out a circle on the grass. He was a figure not of this world; ethereal, airy, and ready at any moment to vanish into thin air. Whether he trod a circle that was already there, or whether he was deliberately tracing one out with his small feet, it was impossible to say, but he moved on and on, slowly but rhythmically, half-dancing and half-walking, and crooning a little song to himself, but so low that it reached them as only the ghost of a sound and not sound itself. His head was down, watching his moving feet, and they could not see his face, but Joyeuce could distinctly see his little white ears with their pointed tips. . . . He was dressed all in fairy green and from the cap upon his head there drooped a long peacock’s feather.
&nbs
p; The lovers under the elder tree were speechless, stupefied and trembling. They were mesmerized by that low crooning song and the ceaselessly moving figure. It was a long time before that peacock’s feather forced itself upon Joyeuce’s consciousness, and when it did she could scarcely believe the evidence of her own brain and eyes.
“Diccon!” she gasped stupidly. “Diccon!”
“Diccon?” queried Nicolas. “Diccon?” He stared again and then dropped his arms from Joyeuce and blushed rosily. . . . For full five minutes had he, Nicolas de Worde, an enlightened man of the world, thought that he beheld a fairy creature. . . . He would have liked to have spanked young Diccon, for he was much discomfited.
“The little devil!” he said in heartfelt tones.
But Joyeuce had flown over the grass and was kneeling in the center of the circle that Diccon trod, her arms stretched out.
“Diccon!” she cried. “Baby!”
But Diccon took no notice of her at all. He moved on and on, still crooning his song, and his green eyes shone like emeralds in the light of the moon. Now that she could hear it clearly it seemed to Joyeuce that his song reminded her of something, though she did not know what.
“Diccon!” she cried again. “Diccon!” and leaning forward she clasped him in her arms. For a moment she felt that she had clasped thin air, and had a moment of terror, but then as she pulled him closer, she felt the round stolidity of him, and the delicious warmth of his baby humanity.
“Sweetheart,” she cried, “how did you get here, all by yourself?”
“I was lonely,” said Diccon. “I was lonely in the big bed.”
Joyeuce picked him up and clasped him to her in an agony of reproach. He had waked up in the dead of night, the poor lamb, stretched out his hand and found her not there. She would never forgive herself, and she kissed him with such passion that Nicolas was jealous and strode towards them over the grass.
“Don’t waste your kisses on such a wicked little elf,” he mocked, standing beside her where she knelt with Diccon in her arms. “Look what he’s been writing,” and he pointed to a ring of flowers that surrounded them, daisies, purple milkwort and yellow lady’s-slipper forming a perfect circle on the grass.
Joyeuce gasped and stood up, still clutching Diccon to her. She knew, as Nicolas did, though she believed it and he did not, that when the fairies have a message for mortals they are said to write it upon the grass with flowers; if mortals cannot read it the more fools they.
“What is it?” she whispered. “Is it for us?”
“What is it, Diccon?” asked Nicolas, and look the little green creature out of her arms that they might not ache with his weight.
But if Diccon knew he wasn’t going to say. He smiled a secret smile and lolled his leathered head against Nicolas’s shoulder.
“News from a far country,” said Nicolas dreamily. “But we cannot read it.”
They were suddenly sad, conscious of the restrictions of their mortality. Such mysterious worlds within worlds surrounded them and they could know no more of them than a faint echo now and again, or a flickering outline, like the shadow on a curtain of a great host passing by. They felt strangers in this country of the moon and held tightly to each other, scared by the silence and the eerie green light.
“Now then, Mistress! Come now, Master! Can you not tell the time by the stars in the sky and the dew on the grass? No time to be out and about.” A cheery voice came booming through the shadows and a swinging yellow lantern illumined a large red beard and a pair of striding legs behind which skulked a black plumy creature whose eyes were like lamps in the gloom. . . . Heatherthwayte was on their tracks. . . . Bewildered by the light of his lantern they stood blinking at him like owls, they inside and he outside the fairy ring.
Heatherthwayte, too, was bewildered. He had seen them come together to the Fair Gate, try to say good night, fail, and pass on down to the Meadows. When they had not come back he had worried about them, scratching his head and making unusual noises in his throat that Satan found perplexing. Finally he had got up, lit his lantern, whistled to Satan and stumped off down Fish Street to find them. . . . These motherless maidens needed an eye kept upon them and he, Heatherthwayte, would keep it.
But now that he had found them within their fairy ring he hardly knew them. Nicolas standing tall and straight in his scarlet doublet, holding a little green elf in his arms, was a figure of legend, and Joyeuce in her green gown was surely a naiad who had drifted up with the mist through the water meadows from the river beyond. Heatherthwayte stared at them in stupefaction and Satan, used to greeting them with boisterous barks, lowered his tail and was silent.
But the light of the lantern soon brought them all to themselves. It banished the moonlight and with it flowed in remembrance of time and place. Satan barked and Heatherthwayte, though too superstitious to step inside the fairy ring on Midsummer Eve, stretched out a hairy hand and clawed the three towards him.
“A nice to-do there’d be over this if I was not to ’ush it up,” he scolded. “And the child, too, out in the dew and the moonlight. . . . Moonlight’s not ’olesome. . . . Come along, mistress. Come, master. A couple of children you are, and should be whipped according.” He turned an outraged back upon them and led the way homewards, Nicolas following. Joyeuce, running after them, and seeing the little green figure of the child clinging to the striding figure of the man in his scarlet doublet—not even the moonlight had been able to take the color out of that doublet—had one last magic moment. They made her think of a holly bush, that brings romance in midwinter, and the two together, she thought, would be the joy and the warmth of her life until the end.
Joyeuce, when she returned from Mistress Flowerdew’s, always came in the back way, along the cobbled lane that led from Fish Street to the stables, and from there to the garden, so Nicolas parted from her and Diccon in the lane, with loving but rather hasty kisses, and then followed Heatherthwayte towards the Fair Gate, feeling in his wallet as he went for the wherewithal to reward a man who had rescued two lovers adrift on the perilous sea of fairyland and towed them back safe to the shore. The last Joyeuce heard of him was his voice singing,
Greensleeves, now farewell! adieu!
God I pray to prosper thee;
For I am still thy lover true.
Come once again and love me.
Greensleeves was all my joy,
Greensleeves was my delight;
Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
And who but Lady Greensleeves.
8.
In their big bedroom Joyeuce undressed Diccon by moonlight. When they had come in they had found the little girls and the dogs fast asleep, and quite unaware that there had been any unusual goings on. But not so Tinker. He knew all about it and was sitting very upright and severe on the pillow, lashing his tail. He was wide awake and his eyes shone like fire and were fixed on Joyeuce in an unblinking stare all the time she was putting Diccon to bed. . . . She felt most uncomfortable. . . . No one in this world, she had discovered long ago, can make one feel more uncomfortable than an indignant cat.
Diccon offered no explanation of his strange behavior. She did not know why, when he had waked up lonely in the big bed, he had dressed himself up in his fairy green and gone out into the Meadows, nor why he had been treading out that fairy ring and crooning that strange song. He was too sleepy to be asked questions, his curly head swaying on his shoulders with its weight of dreams, and in any case she did not want to know. . . . It was altogether too queer.
It was not until she herself was in bed, and Diccon was lying fast asleep beside her with the now somnolent Tinker clasped in his arms, that she remembered why his crooning song was familiar to her. . . . His gypsy foster-mother had sung something like it to the two tiny babies who lay in her arms.
She sat bolt upright in terror.
She had forgotten to dr
aw the curtains and by the light of the moon she bent over and examined the face of her best-beloved. . . . It seemed he was still her best-beloved, for in her fear for him she had for the moment forgotten Nicolas. . . . His green eyes were hidden by his shut lids but their look of mischief seemed to have been transferred to the long eyelashes that were almost aggressive in their curl. His freckles seemed to have cast a shadow over his face and robbed it of that look of pearly innocence that makes the faces of sleeping children, however erroneously, as those of the cherubs in heaven. His red mouth, relaxed in sleep, was like a poppy. . . . How red his mouth was, Joyeuce thought. None of the other children had lips as red as his. . . . How unlike he was to all the rest of them. . . . How utterly unlike . . . Was he, could he be, a changeling? If she had not seized hold of him, as he trod his fairy ring on Midsummer Eve, would he have vanished away altogether?
Joyeuce lay flat on her back, her hands at her sides, staring out at that strange green sky outside the window and shivering a little with love, and happiness, and an eerie fear. Now and then she shut her eyes and tried to sleep but always, when she did that, she saw, between sleeping and waking, Nicolas and Diccon, dressed in scarlet and green, moving together through the moonlit trees towards the gates of fairyland while she, Joyeuce Leigh the stay-at-home toiling mouse, ran after them, desperately trying to keep up with their striding figures and to keep in her sight the portals of those gates that led into the country for which she longed.