Complete Short Works of George Meredith

‘You pardon me, Margarita? I may call you my beloved? strive, wait, pray, hope, for you, my star of life?’

Her face was so sweet a charity!

‘Dear love! one word!—or say nothing, but remain, and move not. So beautiful you are! Oh, might I kneel to you here; dote on you; worship this white hand for ever.’

The colour had passed out of her cheeks like a blissful western red leaving rich paleness in the sky; and with her clear brows levelled at him, her bosom lifting more and more rapidly, she struggled against the charm that was on her, and at last released her hand.

‘I must go. I cannot stay. Pardon you? Who might not be proud of your love!—Farewell!’

She turned to move away, but lingered a step from him, hastily touching her bosom and either hand, as if to feel for a brooch or a ring. Then she blushed, drew the silver arrow from the gathered gold-shot braids above her neck, held it out to him, and was gone.

Farina clutched the treasure, and reeled into the street. Half a dozen neighbours were grouped by the door.

‘What ‘s the matter in Master Groschen’s house now?’ one asked, as he plunged into the midst of them.

‘Matter?’ quoth the joy-drunken youth, catching at the word, and mused off into raptures; ‘There never was such happiness! ‘Tis paradise within, exile without. But what exile! A star ever in the heavens to lighten the road and cheer the path of the banished one’; and he loosened his vest and hugged the cold shaft on his breast.

‘What are you talking and capering at, fellow?’ exclaimed another: ‘Can’t you answer about those shrieks, like a Christian, you that have just come out of the house? Why, there’s shrieking now! It ‘s a woman. Thousand thunders! it sounds like the Frau Lisbeth’s voice. What can be happening to her?’

‘Perhaps she’s on fire,’ was coolly suggested between two or three.

‘Pity to see the old house burnt,’ remarked one.

‘House! The woman, man! the woman!’

‘Ah!’ replied the other, an ancient inhabitant of Cologne, shaking his head, ‘the house is oldest!’

Farina, now recovering his senses, heard shrieks that he recognized as possible in the case of Aunt Lisbeth dreading the wickedness of an opposing sex, and alarmed by the inrush of old Gottlieb’s numerous guests. To confirm him, she soon appeared, and hung herself halfway out of one of the upper windows, calling desperately to St. Ursula for aid. He thanked the old lady in his heart for giving him a pretext to enter Paradise again; but before even love could speed him, Frau Lisbeth was seized and dragged remorselessly out of sight, and he and the rosy room darkened together.

Farina twice strode off to the Rhine-stream; as many times he returned. It was hard to be away from her. It was harder to be near and not close. His heart flamed into jealousy of the stranger. Everything threatened to overturn his slight but lofty structure of bliss so suddenly shot into the heavens. He had but to remember that his hand was on the silver arrow, and a radiance broke upon his countenance, and a calm fell upon his breast. ‘It was a plight of her troth to me,’ mused the youth. ‘She loves me! She would not trust her frank heart to speak. Oh, generous young girl! what am I to dare hope for such a prize? for I never can be worthy. And she is one who, giving her heart, gives it all. Do I not know her? How lovely she looked thanking the stranger! The blue of her eyes, the warm-lighted blue, seemed to grow full on the closing lids, like heaven’s gratitude. Her beauty is wonderful. What wonder, then, if he loves her? I should think him a squire in his degree. There are squires of high birth and low.’

So mused Farina with his arms folded and his legs crossed in the shadow of Margarita’s chamber. Gradually he fell into a kind of hazy doze. The houses became branded with silver arrows. All up the Cathedral stone was a glitter, and dance, and quiver of them. In the sky mazed confusion of arrowy flights and falls. Farina beheld himself in the service of the Emperor watching these signs, and expecting on the morrow to win glory and a name for Margarita. Glory and the name now won, old Gottlieb was just on the point of paternally blessing them, when a rude pat aroused him from the delicious moon-dream.

‘Hero by day! house-guard by night! That tells a tale,’ said a cheerful voice.

The moon was shining down the Cathedral square and street, and Farina saw the stranger standing solid and ruddy before him. He was at first prompted to resent such familiar handling, but the stranger’s face was of that bland honest nature which, like the sun, wins everywhere back a reflection of its own kindliness.

‘You are right,’ replied Farina; ‘so it is!’

‘Pretty wines inside there, and a rare young maiden. She has a throat like a nightingale, and more ballads at command than a piper’s wallet. Now, if I hadn’t a wife at home.’

‘You’re married?’ cried Farina, seizing the stranger’s hand.

‘Surely; and my lass can say something for herself on the score of brave looks, as well as the best of your German maids here, trust me.’

Farina repressed an inclination to perform a few of those antics which violent joy excites, and after rushing away and back, determined to give his secret to the stranger.

‘Look,’ said he in a whisper, that opens the private doors of a confidence.

But the stranger repeated the same word still more earnestly, and brought Farina’s eyes on a couple of dark figures moving under the Cathedral.

‘Some lamb’s at stake when the wolves are prowling,’ he added: ‘‘Tis now two hours to the midnight. I doubt if our day’s work be over till we hear the chime, friend.’

‘What interest do you take in the people of this house that you watch over them thus?’ asked Farina.

The stranger muffled a laugh in his beard.

‘An odd question, good sooth. Why, in the first place, we like well whatso we have done good work for. That goes for something. In the second, I’ve broken bread in this house. Put down that in the reckoning. In the third; well! in the third, add up all together, and the sum total’s at your service, young sir.’

Farina marked him closely. There was not a spot on his face for guile to lurk in, or suspicion to fasten on. He caught the stranger’s hand.

‘You called me friend just now. Make me your friend. Look, I was going to say: I love this maiden! I would die for her. I have loved her long. This night she has given me a witness that my love is not vain. I am poor. She is rich. I am poor, I said, and feel richer than the Kaiser with this she has given me! Look, it is what our German girls slide in their back-hair, this silver arrow!’

‘A very pretty piece of heathenish wear!’ exclaimed the stranger.

‘Then, I was going to say—tell me, friend, of a way to win honour and wealth quickly; I care not at how rare a risk. Only to wealth, or high baronry, will her father give her!’

The stranger buzzed on his moustache in a pause of cool pity, such as elders assume when young men talk of conquering the world for their mistresses: and in truth it is a calm of mind well won!

‘Things look so brisk at home here in the matter of the maiden, that I should say, wait a while and watch your chance. But you’re a boy of pluck: I serve in the Kaiser’s army, under my lord: the Kaiser will be here in three days. If you ‘re of that mind then, I doubt little you may get posted well: but, look again! there’s a ripe brew yonder. Marry, you may win your spurs this night even; who knows?—‘S life! there’s a tall fellow joining those two lurkers.’

‘Can you see into the murk shadow, Sir Squire?’

‘Ay! thanks to your Styrian dungeons, where I passed a year’s apprenticeship:

       “I learnt to watch the rats and mice         At play, with never a candle-end.        They play’d so well; they sang so nice;         They dubb’d me comrade; called me friend!”

So says the ballad of our red-beard king’s captivity. All evil has a good:

       “When our toes and chins are up,        Poison plants make sweetest cup”

as the old wives mumble to us when we’re sick. Heigho! would I were in the little island well home again, though that were just their song of welcome to me, as I am a Christian.’

‘Tell me your name, friend,’ said Farina.

‘Guy’s my name, young man: Goshawk’s my title. Guy the Goshawk! so they called me in my merry land. The cap sticks when it no longer fits. Then I drove the arrow, and was down on my enemy ere he could ruffle a feather. Now, what would be my nickname?

       “A change so sad, and a change so bad,         Might set both Christian and heathen a sighing:        Change is a curse, for it’s all for the worse:         Age creeps up, and youth is flying!”

and so on, with the old song. But here am I, and yonder’s a game that wants harrying; so we’ll just begin to nose about them a bit.’

He crossed to the other side of the street, and Farina followed out of the moonlight. The two figures and the taller one were evidently observing them; for they also changed their position and passed behind an angle of the Cathedral.

‘Tell me how the streets cross all round the Cathedral you know the city,’ said the stranger, holding out his hand.

Farina traced with his finger a rough map of the streets on the stranger’s hand.

‘Good! that’s how my lord always marks the battlefield, and makes me show him the enemy’s posts. Forward, this way!’

He turned from the Cathedral, and both slid along close under the eaves and front hangings of the houses. Neither spoke. Farina felt that he was in the hands of a skilful captain, and only regretted the want of a weapon to make harvest of the intended surprise; for he judged clearly that those were fellows of Werner’s band on the look-out. They wound down numberless intersections of narrow streets with irregular-built houses standing or leaning wry-faced in row, here a quaint-beamed cottage, there almost a mansion with gilt arms, brackets, and devices. Oil-lamps unlit hung at intervals by the corners, near a pale Christ on crucifix. Across the passages they hung alight. The passages and alleys were too dusky and close for the moon in her brightest ardour to penetrate; down the streets a slender lane of white beams could steal: ‘In all conscience,’ as the good citizens of Cologne declared, ‘enough for those heathen hounds and sons of the sinful who are abroad when God’s own blessed lamp is out.’ So, when there was a moon, the expense of oil was saved to the Cologne treasury, thereby satisfying the virtuous.

After incessant doubling here and there, listening to footfalls, and themselves eluding a chase which their suspicious movements aroused, they came upon the Rhine. A full flood of moonlight burnished the knightly river in glittering scales, and plates, and rings, as headlong it rolled seaward on from under crag and banner of old chivalry and rapine. Both greeted the scene with a burst of pleasure. The grey mist of flats on the south side glimmered delightful to their sight, coming from that drowsy crowd and press of habitations; but the solemn glory of the river, delaying not, heedless, impassioned-pouring on in some sublime conference between it and heaven to the great marriage of waters, deeply shook Farina’s enamoured heart. The youth could not restrain his tears, as if a magic wand had touched him. He trembled with love; and that delicate bliss which maiden hope first showers upon us like a silver rain when she has taken the shape of some young beauty and plighted us her fair fleeting hand, tenderly embraced him.

As they were emerging into the spaces of the moon, a cheer from the stranger arrested Farina.

‘Seest thou? on the wharf there! that is the very one, the tallest of the three. Lakin! but we shall have him.’

Wrapt in a long cloak, with low pointed cap and feather, stood the person indicated. He appeared to be meditating on the flow of the water, unaware of hostile presences, or quite regardless of them. There was a majesty in his height and air, which made the advance of the two upon him more wary and respectful than their first impulse had counselled. They could not read his features, which were mantled behind voluminous folds: all save a pair of very strange eyes, that, even as they gazed directly downward, seemed charged with restless fiery liquid.

The two were close behind him: Guy the Goshawk prepared for one of those fatal pounces on the foe that had won him his title. He consulted Farina mutely, who Nodded readiness; but the instant after, a cry of anguish escaped from the youth:

‘Lost! gone! lost! Where is it? where! the arrow! The Silver Arrow! My Margarita!’

Ere the echoes of his voice had ceased lamenting into the distance, they found themselves alone on the wharf.

THE LILIES OF THE VALLEY

‘He opened like a bat!’ said the stranger

‘His shadow was red!’ said Farina.

‘He was off like an arrow!’ said the stranger.

‘Oh! pledge of my young love, how could I lose thee!’ exclaimed the youth, and his eyes were misted with tears.

Guy the Goshawk shook his brown locks gravely.

‘Bring me a man, and I ‘ll stand up against him, whoever he be, like a man; but this fellow has an ill scent and foreign ways about him, that he has! His eye boils all down my backbone and tingles at my finger-tips. Jesu, save us!’

‘Save us!’ repeated Farina, with the echo of a deadened soul.

They made the sign of the Cross, and purified the place with holy ejaculations.

‘I ‘ve seen him at last; grant it be for the last time! That’s my prayer, in the name of the Virgin and Trinity,’ said Guy. ‘And now let’s retrace our steps: perchance we shall hunt up that bauble of yours, but I’m not fit for mortal work this night longer.’

Burdened by their black encounter, the two passed again behind the Cathedral. Farina’s hungry glances devoured each footmark of their track. Where the moon held no lantern for him, he went on his knees, and groped for his lost treasure with a miser’s eager patience of agony, drawing his hand slowly over the stony kerb and between the interstices of the thick-sown flints, like an acute-feeling worm. Despair grew heavy in his breast. At every turning he invoked some good new saint to aid him, and ran over all the propitiations his fancy could suggest and his religious lore inspire. By-and-by they reached the head of the street where Margarita dwelt. The moon was dipping down, and paler, as if touched with a warning of dawn. Chill sighs from the open land passed through the spaces of the city. On certain coloured gables and wood-crossed fronts, the white light lingered; but mostly the houses were veiled in dusk, and Gottlieb’s house was confused in the twilight with those of his neighbours, notwithstanding its greater stateliness and the old grandeur of its timbered bulk. They determined to take up their position there again, and paced on, Farina with his head below his shoulders, and Guy nostril in air, as if uneasy in his sense of smell.

On the window-ledge of a fair-fitted domicile stood a flower-pot, a rude earthen construction in the form of a river-barge, wherein grew some valley lilies that drooped their white bells over the sides.

The Goshawk eyed them wistfully.

‘I must smell those blessed flowers if I wish to be saved!’ and he stamped resolve with his staff.

Moved by this exclamation, Farina gazed up at them.

‘How like a company of maidens they look floating in the vessel of life!’ he said.

Guy curiously inspected Farina and the flower-pot, shrugged, and with his comrade’s aid, mounted to a level with it, seized the prize and redescended.

‘There,’ he cried, between long luxurious sniffs, ‘that chases him out of the nostril sooner than aught else, the breath of a fresh lass-like flower! I was tormented till now by the reek of the damned rising from under me. This is heaven’s own incense, I think!’

And Guy inhaled the flowers and spake prettily to them.

‘They have a melancholy sweetness, friend,’ said Farina. ‘I think of whispering Fays, and Elf, and Erl, when their odour steals through me. Do not you?’

‘Nay, nor hope to till my wits are clean gone,’ was the Goshawk’s reply. ‘To my mind, ‘tis an honest flower, and could I do good service by the young maiden who there set it, I should be rendering back good service done; for if that flower has not battled the devil in my nose this night, and beaten him, my head’s a medlar!’

‘I scarce know whether as a devout Christian I should listen to that, friend,’ Farina mildly remonstrated. ‘Lilies are indeed emblems of the saints; but then they are not poor flowers of earth, being transfigured, lustrous unfadingly. Oh, Cross and Passion! with what silver serenity thy glory enwraps me, gazing on these fair bells! I look on the white sea of the saints. I am enamoured of fleshly anguish and martyrdom. All beauty is that worn by wan-smiling faces wherein Hope sits as a crown on Sorrow, and the pale ebb of mortal life is the twilight of joy everlasting. Colourless peace! Oh, my beloved! So walkest thou for my soul on the white sea ever at night, clad in the straight fall of thy spotless virgin linen; bearing in thy hand the lily, and leaning thy cheek to it, where the human rose is softened to a milky bloom of red, the espousals of heaven with earth; over thee, moving with thee, a wreath of sapphire stars, and the solitude of purity around!’

‘Ah!’ sighed the Goshawk, dandling his flower-pot; ‘the moon gives strokes as well’s the sun. I’ faith, moon-struck and maid-struck in one! He’ll be asking for his head soon. This dash of the monk and the minstrel is a sure sign. That ‘s their way of loving in this land: they all go mad, straight off. I never heard such talk.’

Guy accompanied these remarks with a pitiful glance at his companion.

‘Come, Sir Lover! lend me a help to give back what we’ve borrowed to its rightful owner. ‘S blood! but I feel an appetite. This night-air takes me in the wind like a battering ram. I thought I had laid in a stout four-and-twenty hours’ stock of Westphalian Wurst at Master Groschen’s supper-table. Good stuff, washed down with superior Rhine wine; say your Liebfrauenmilch for my taste; though, when I first tried it, I grimaced like a Merry-Andrew, and remembered roast beef and Glo’ster ale in my prayers.’

The Goshawk was in the act of replacing the pot of lilies, when a blow from a short truncheon, skilfully flung, struck him on the neck and brought him to the ground. With him fell the lilies. He glared to the right and left, and grasped the broken flower-pot for a return missile; but no enemy was in view to test his accuracy of aim.

The deep-arched doorways showed their empty recesses the windows slept.

‘Has that youth played me false?’ thought the discomfited squire, as he leaned quietly on his arm. Farina was nowhere near.

Guy was quickly reassured.

‘By my fay, now! that’s a fine thing! and a fine fellow! and a fleet foot! That lad ‘ll rise! He’ll be a squire some day. Look at him. Bowels of a’Becket! ‘tis a sight! I’d rather see that, now, than old Groschen ‘s supper-table groaning with Wurst again, and running a river of Rudesheimer! Tussle on! I’ll lend a hand if there’s occasion; but you shall have the honour, boy, an you can win it.’

This crying on of the hound was called forth by a chase up the street, in which the Goshawk beheld Farina pursue and capture a stalwart runaway, who refused with all his might to be brought back, striving every two and three of his tiptoe steps to turn against the impulse Farina had got on his neck and nether garments.

‘Who ‘d have thought the lad was so wiry and mettlesome, with his soft face, blue eyes, and lank locks? but a green mead has more in it than many a black mountain. Hail, and well done! if I could dub you knight, I would: trust me!’ and he shook Farina by the hand.

Farina modestly stood aside, and allowed the Goshawk to confront his prisoner.

‘So, Sir Shy-i’the-dark! gallant Stick-i’the-back! Squire Truncheon, and Knight of the noble order of Quicksilver Legs! just take your stand at the distance you were off me when you discharged this instrument at my head. By ‘r lady! I smart a scratch to pay you in coin, and it’s lucky for you the coin is small, or you might reckon on it the same, trust me. Now, back!’

The Goshawk lunged out with the truncheon, but the prisoner displayed no hesitation in complying, and fell back about a space of fifteen yards.

‘I suppose he guesses I’ve never done the stupid trick before,’ mused Guy, ‘or he would not be so sharp.’ Observing that Farina had also fallen back in a line as guard, Guy motioned him to edge off to the right more, bawling, ‘Never mind why!’

‘Now,’ thought Guy, ‘if I were sure of notching him, I’d do the speech part first; but as I’m not—throwing truncheons being no honourable profession anywhere—I’ll reserve that. The rascal don’t quail. We’ll see how long he stands firm.’

The Goshawk cleared his wrist, fixed his eye, and swung the truncheon meditatively to and fro by one end. He then launched off the shoulder a mighty down-fling, calmly, watching it strike the prisoner to earth, like an ox under the hammer.

‘A hit!’ said he, and smoothed his wrist.

Farina knelt by the body, and lifted the head on his breast. ‘Berthold! Berthold!’ he cried; ‘no further harm shall hap to you, man! Speak!’

‘You ken the scapegrace?’ said Guy, sauntering up.

‘‘Tis Berthold Schmidt, son of old Schmidt, the great goldsmith of Cologne.’

‘St. Dunstan was not at his elbow this time!’

‘A rival of mine,’ whispered Farina.

‘Oho!’ and the Goshawk wound a low hiss at his tongue’s tip. ‘Well! as I should have spoken if his ears had been open: Justice struck the blow; and a gentle one. This comes of taking a flying shot, and not standing up fair. And that seems all that can be said. Where lives he?’

Farina pointed to the house of the Lilies.

‘Beshrew me! the dog has some right on his side. Whew! yonder he lives? He took us for some night-prowlers. Why not come up fairly, and ask my business?

Smelling a flower is not worth a broken neck, nor defending your premises quite deserving a hole in the pate. Now, my lad, you see what comes of dealing with cut and run blows; and let this be a warning to you.’

They took the body by head and feet, and laid him at the door of his father’s house. Here the colour came to his cheek, and they wiped off the streaks of blood that stained him. Guy proved he could be tender with a fallen foe, and Farina with an ill-fated rival. It was who could suggest the soundest remedies, or easiest postures. One lent a kerchief and nursed him; another ran to the city fountain and fetched him water. Meantime the moon had dropped, and morning, grey and beamless, looked on the house-peaks and along the streets with steadier eye. They now both discerned a body of men, far down, fronting Gottlieb’s house, and drawn up in some degree of order. All their charity forsook them at once.

‘Possess thyself of the truncheon,’ said Guy: ‘You see it can damage. More work before breakfast, and a fine account I must give of myself to my hostess of the Three Holy Kings!’

Farina recovered the destructive little instrument.

‘I am ready,’ said he. ‘But hark! there’s little work for us there, I fancy. Those be lads of Cologne, no grunters of the wild. ‘Tis the White Rose Club. Always too late for service.’

Voices singing a hunting glee, popular in that age, swelled up the clear morning air; and gradually the words became distinct.

             The Kaiser went a-hunting,               A-hunting, tra-ra:          With his bugle-horn at springing morn,          The Kaiser trampled bud and thorn:                    Tra-ra!        And the dew shakes green as the horsemen rear,        And a thousand feathers they flutter with fear;        And a pang drives quick to the heart of the deer;          For the Kaiser’s out a-hunting,                  Tra-ra!             Ta, ta, ta, ta,             Tra-ra, tra-ra,             Ta-ta, tra-ra, tra-ra!

the owner of the truncheon awoke to these reviving tones, and uttered a faint responsive ‘Tra-ra!’

‘Hark again!’ said Farina, in reply to the commendation of the Goshawk, whose face was dimpled over with the harmony.

          The wild boar lay a-grunting,             A-grunting, tra-ra!        And, boom! comes the Kaiser to hunt up me?        Or, queak! the small birdie that hops on the tree?                  Tra-ra!        O birdie, and boar, and deer, lie tame!        For a maiden in bloom, or a full-blown dame,        Are the daintiest prey, and the windingest game,          When Kaisers go a-hunting,                  Tra-ra!             Ha, ha, ha, ha,               Tra-ra, tra-ra,             Ha-ha, tra-ra, tra-ra!

The voices held long on the last note, and let it die in a forest cadence.