Henry promptly locked up his reason for the moment, with apologies, and professed himself open to conviction.

"Well, mother sometimes helps this poor old woman, and, one day, when she happened to call, Alice and Edith and I were in the kitchen helping mother. 'G.o.d bless you, lady,' she said,--you know how they talk,--'you've got a kind heart; and how are all the young ladies? It's time, I'm thinking, they had their fortunes told.' 'Oh, yes,' we all said, 'tell us our fortunes, mother,'--we always called her mother.

'I'll tell you yours, my dear,' she said, taking hold of my hand. 'Your fortunes are too young yet, ladies,' she said to Alice and Edith; 'come to me in a year's time and, maybe, I'll tell you all about him.'"

"You dear!" said Henry, by way of interruption.

"Then," continued Angel, "she took me aside, and looked at my hand; and she told me first what had happened to me, and then what was to come.

What she told me of the past"--as if dear Angel, whose life was as yet all future, could as yet have had any past to speak of!--"was so true, that I couldn't help half believing in what she said of the future. Now you're laughing again!"

"No, indeed, I'm not," said Henry, perfectly solemn.

"She told me that just before I was twenty, I would meet a young man with dark hair and blue eyes, very unexpectedly,--I shall be twenty in six weeks,--and that he would be my fate. But the strangest is yet to come. 'Would you like to see his face?' she said. She made me a little frightened; but, of course, I said, 'Yes,' and then she brought out of her pocket a sort of gla.s.s egg, and told me to look in it, and tell her what I saw. So I looked, but for a long time I could see nothing; but suddenly there seemed to be something moving in the centre of the gla.s.s, like clouds breaking when the sun is coming out; and presently I could see a lamp burning on a table; and then round the lamp shelves of books began to grow out of the mist; then I saw a picture hanging in a recess, a bowed head with a strange sort of head-dress on it, a dark thin face, very sad-looking--"

"Why, that must have been my Dante!" said Henry, astonished in spite of himself.

The exclamation was a "score" for Angel; and she continued, with greater confidence, "And then I seemed to see some one sitting there; but, though I tried and tried, I couldn't catch sight of his face. I told the old woman what I saw. 'Wait a minute,' she said, 'then try again.' So I waited, and presently tried again. This time I hadn't so long to wait before I saw a room again; but it was quite different, a big desk ran along in front of a window, and there were two tall office-stools. 'Why, it's father's office,' I said. 'Go on looking,' said the old woman, 'and tell me what you see.' In a moment or two, I saw some one sitting on one of the stools, first dimly and then clearer and clearer. 'Why,' I almost cried out, for I felt more and more frightened, 'I see a young man sitting at a desk, with a pen behind his ear.' 'Can you see him clearly?' 'Yes,' I said; 'he's got dark curly hair and blue eyes.'

'You're sure you won't forget his face? You'd know him if you saw him again?' 'Indeed, I would,' I said. 'All right,' said the old woman, 'you can give me back the crystal. You keep a look out for that young man,--you will see him some day, mark my words, and that young man will be your fate.'

"Now, surely, you won't deny that was strange, will you?" asked Angel, in conclusion. "And I shall never forget the start it gave me that day when I came in, quite unsuspecting, with your lunch-tray, and saw you talking to father, with your pen behind your ear, and your blue eyes and dark hair. Now, isn't it strange? How can one help being superst.i.tious after a thing like that?"

"Are you quite sure it was I?" Henry asked, quizzically. "It appears to me that any presentable young man with a pen behind his ear would have answered nearly enough to the vision. You would hardly have been quite sure of the colour of the eyes, would you, now, if the old woman hadn't mentioned it first, as she looked at your hand?"

"You are horrid!" said Angel; "I wish I hadn't told you now. But it wasn't merely the colour of the eyes. It was the look in them."

"Look again, and see if you haven't made a mistake. Look very carefully," said Henry.

"I won't," said Angel; "I think you're cruel."

"Angel, if you'll only look, and say you are quite sure, I'll believe every word the old woman said."

At last Angel was persuaded to look, and to look again, and the old woman's credit rose at each look.

"Yes, Henry, whatever happens, I know it is true. My life is in your hands."

Those are solemn words for one human being to hear uttered by another; and a shiver of new responsibility involuntarily ran through Henry's veins.

"May the hands be always strong and clean enough to hold so precious a gift," he answered, gravely.

"Are you sad, dear?" asked Angel, presently, with a sort of divination.

"Not sad, dear, but serious," he answered.

"Have I turned to a responsibility so soon?"

"You strange, wise child, I believe you are a witch."

"Oh, I was right then."

"Right in one way, but perhaps wrong in another. Don't you know that some responsibilities are the most dearly coveted of mortal honours? But then we shouldn't be worthy of them, if they didn't make us feel a little serious. Can't you imagine that to hear another say that her life is in one's hands makes one feel just a little solemn?"

"But isn't your life in mine, Henry?" asked Angel, simply.

"Of course it is, dear," answered Henry.

And then the moon began to rise through the trees, pouring enchantment over the sleeping woods, and the meadows half-submerged in lakes of mist.

Angel drew close to Henry, and watched it with big eyes.

"What a wonderful world it is! How beautiful and how sad!" she said, half to herself.

"Yes; there is nothing in the world so sad as beauty," answered Henry.

"If only to-night could last forever! If only we could die now, sitting just like this, with the moon rising yonder."

"But we shall have many nights like this together," said Henry.

"No; we shall never have this night again. We may have other wonderful nights, but they will be different. This will never come again."

Henry instinctively realised that here was a mystical side to Angel's nature which, however it might charm him, was not to be indiscriminately encouraged, and he tried to rally her out of her sadness, but her feeling was too much his own for him to persist; and as the moonlight moved in its ascension from one beautiful change to another, now woven by branches and leaves into weird tapestries of light and darkness, now hanging like some golden fruit from the boughs, and now uplifted like a lamp in some window of s.p.a.ce, they sat together, alike held by the ancient spell; and, presently, Henry so far lost himself in it as to quote some lines entirely in Angel's mood:

"She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her sov'ran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung."

"What wonderful lines!" said Angel; "who wrote them? Are they your own?"

"Ah, Angel, what would I give if they were! No, they are by John Keats.

You must let me give you his poems."

Presently, the moonlight began to lose its l.u.s.tre. It grew pale, and, as it were, anxious; dark billows of clouds threatened to swallow up its silver coracle, and presently the world grew suddenly black with its submergence, the woods and meadows disappeared, and Henry and Angel began playfully to strike matches to see each other's faces. Thus they suddenly flared up to each other out of the darkness, like Rembrandts seen by lightning, and then they were lost again, and were only voices fumbling for each other in the dark.

Yet, even so, lips and arms found each other without much difficulty, and when they began to think of the last train, and fear they would miss it, but waited for just one last good-night kiss under their sacred tree, the world suddenly lit up again, for the moon had triumphed over its enemies, and come out just in time to give them its blessing.

CHAPTER XXVI

CONCERNING THE BEST KIND OF WIFE FOR A POET

We are apt sometimes to complain that so much of importance in our lives is at the dispensation of accident, yet how often too are we compelled to confess that some of the happiest and most fruitful circ.u.mstances of our lives are due to the far-seeing diplomacies of chance.

Among no set of circ.u.mstances is this more true than in the fateful relations of men and women. While, in a blind sort of way, we may be said to choose for ourselves the man or woman with whom we are to share the joys and sorrows of our years, yet the choice is only superficially ours. Frequently our brains, our antecedent plans, have no part in the decision. The woman we choose appears at the wrong time, in the wrong place, in an undesirable environment, with hair and eyes and general complexion different in colour from what we had predestined for ourselves, short when we had made up our minds for tall, and tall when we had hoped for short. Yet, in in spite of all our preconceptions, we choose her. This is not properly a choice in which the intelligence confessedly submits to violence. It is the compulsion of mysterious instincts that know better than our brains or our tastes.

Now had she been asked beforehand, Esther might not have sketched out a Mike as the ideal of her maiden dreams, nor indeed might Henry have described an Angelica, any more than perhaps Mike an Esther, or Angelica a Henry. Yet chance has only to place Esther and Mike, and Angelica and Henry in the same room together for less than a minute of time, and they fly into the arms of each other's souls with an instant recognition.

This is a mystery which it will take more than biology to explain.

A young man's dreams of the woman he will some day marry are apt to be meretricious, or at all events conventional. A young poet, especially, is likely to err in the direction of paragons of beauty, or fame, or romance. Perhaps he dreams of a great singer, or an ill.u.s.trious beauty, ignorant of the natural law which makes great singers and ill.u.s.trious beauties, in common with all artists, incapable of loving really any one but themselves. Or perhaps it will be some woman of great and exquisite culture. But chance knows that women of great and exquisite culture are usually beings lacking in those plastic elemental qualities which a poet, above all men, needs in the woman he shall love. Their very culture, while it may seem to broaden, really narrows them, limits them to a caste of mind, and, for an infinite suggestiveness, subst.i.tutes a few finite accomplishments.