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Kate was not looking amiable; and scarce six feet from her there lay open on the ground a copy of the Laureate's works. "I hope I'm not disturbing you, Miss Bernard?" "Oh, no. You see, I am alone. Mr. Lane was here just now, but he's gone." "How's that?" asked Haddington, seating himself. "He got a telegram, read it, flung his book away, and rushed off." "Did he say what it was about?"
It is this instructive as well as skilled and dignified treatment, with the vast literary and deep personal interest in the life, that will commend the Memoir to all who are proud of the Laureate's fame, and wished to have nothing written that was unworthy of either the poet or the man, or that would in the least detract from his laurels.
All the other servants had been despatched by coach to her ladyship's favourite retreat in Westmoreland, within a few miles of the Laureate's home at Rydal Mount, and James Steadman was charged with the whole responsibility of her ladyship's travelling arrangements.
In the immediate interest of the moment, Sah-luma and his hot interference seemed to be almost forgotten, . . a few people, indeed, cast injured and indignant looks toward the corner where he dejectedly leaned, and once the wrinkled, malicious head of old Zabastes peered at him, with an expression of incredulous amazement, but otherwise no sympathy was manifested by any one for the popular Laureate's suffering and discomfiture.
Now and then, in the course of five years, she had been asked to read aloud or to write a copy of verses. But better readers might easily have been found: and her verses were worse than even the Poet Laureate's Birthday Odes. Perhaps that economy, which was among her Majesty's most conspicuous virtues, had something to do with her conduct on this occasion.
The punishment of what was false would have involved the public exposure of what was true. The official party realized the force of the laureate's dictum, not then propounded, that "A lie that is all a lie may be met with and fought outright, But a lie that is part of a truth is a harder matter to fight." They of course did not present the matter in this aspect to the world at large.
Yet the remembrance of all the tenderly witching loveliness that might have been his, had he slain Sah-luma at her bidding, now moved him neither to regret nor lover's passion, but only touched his spirit with a sense of bitter repulsion, . . while a strange pity for the Poet Laureate's infatuation awoke in him, pity that any man could he so reckless, blind, and desperate as to love a woman for her mere perishable beauty of body, and never care to know whether the graces of her mind were equal to the graces of her form.
There are portions of the work, it is true, in which the more vulgar strains of the conventional pastoral make themselves heard, as in the satires of the fourth and tenth Nymphals; but for the most part we are allowed to wander undisturbed among the woods and pastures of an earthly paradise, and revel in the fairy laureate's most imaginative work. There we meet Lirope, of whom
Nothing has been changed in this vein of humorous banter since Shakespeare died. One of the best pieces of Shakespeare criticism ever written is contained in four words of the present Poet Laureate's Ode for the Tercentenary of Shakespeare, 'London's laughter is thine'. The wit of our trenches in this war, especially perhaps among the Cockney and South country regiments, is pure Shakespeare.
And taking the clay-cold hands in his own, he kissed them reverently, and, with an unconscious memory not born of his recent adventures, folded them on the dead Laureate's breast in the fashion of a Cross. As he did this an icy spasm seemed to contract his heart, . . seized by a sudden insufferable anxiety, he stared like one spell-bound into Sah-luma's wide-open, fixed, and glassy eyes.
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