“But that is only half the picture,” I said. “Besides working for oneself, may there not be the helping of others?”
“Surely, surely!” Lady Muriel exclaimed in a tone of relief, looking at her father with sparkling eyes.
“Yes,” said the Earl, “so long as there were any others needing help. But, given ages and ages more, surely all created reasons would at length reach the same dead level of satiety. And then what is there to look forward to?”
“I know that weary feeling,” said the young Doctor. “I have gone through it all, more than once. Now let me tell you how I have put it to myself. I have imagined a little child, playing with toys on his nursery-floor, and yet able to reason, and to look on, thirty years ahead. Might he not say to himself ‘By that time I shall have had enough of bricks and ninepins. How weary Life will be!’ Yet, if we look forward through those thirty years, we find him a great statesman, full of interests and joys far more intense than his baby-life could give—joys wholly inconceivable to his baby-mind—joys such as no baby-language could in the faintest degree describe. Now, may not our life, a million years hence, have the same relation, to our life now, that the man’s life has to the child’s? And, just as one might try, all in vain, to express to that child, in the language of bricks and ninepins, the meaning of ‘politics,’ so perhaps all those descriptions of Heaven, with its music, and its feasts, and its streets of gold, may be only attempts to describe, in our words, things for which we really have no words at all. Don’t you think that, in your picture of another life, you are in fact transplanting that child into political life, without making any allowance for his growing up?”
“I think I understand you,” said the Earl. “The music of Heaven may be something beyond our powers of thought. Yet the music of Earth is sweet! Muriel, my child, sing us something before we go to bed!”
“Do,” said Arthur, as he rose and lit the candles on the cottage-piano, lately banished from the drawing-room to make room for a “semi-grand.” “There is a song here, that I have never heard you sing.
‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart!’ ”
he read from the page he had spread open before her.
“And our little life here,” the Earl went on, “is, to that grand time, like a child’s summer-day! One gets tired as night draws on,” he added, with a touch of sadness in his voice, “and one gets to long for bed! For those welcome words ‘Come, child, ’tis bedtime!’ ”
XVII
To the Rescue!
“It isn’t bedtime!” said a sleepy little voice. “The owls hasn’t gone to bed, and I s’a’n’t go to seep wizout oo sings to me!”
“Oh, Bruno!” cried Sylvie. “Don’t you know the owls have only just got up? But the frogs have gone to bed, ages ago.”
“Well, I aren’t a frog,” said Bruno.
“What shall I sing?” said Sylvie, skilfully avoiding the argument.
“Ask Mister Sir,” Bruno lazily replied, clasping his hands behind his curly head, and lying back on his fern-leaf, till it almost bent over with his weight. “This aren’t a comfable leaf, Sylvie. Find me a comfabler—please!” he added, as an afterthought, in obedience to a warning finger held up by Sylvie. “I doosn’t like being feet-upwards!”
It was a pretty sight to see—the motherly way in which the fairy-child gathered up her little brother in her arms, and laid him on a stronger leaf. She gave it just a touch to set it rocking, and it went on vigorously by itself, as if it contained some hidden machinery. It certainly wasn’t the wind, for the evening-breeze had quite died away again, and not a leaf was stirring over our heads.
“Why does that one leaf rock so, without the others?” I asked Sylvie. She only smiled sweetly and shook her head. “I don’t know why,” she said. “It always does, if it’s got a fairy-child on it. It has to, you know.”
“And can people see the leaf rock, who can’t see the Fairy on it?”
“Why, of course!” cried Sylvie. “A leaf’s a leaf, and everybody can see it; but Bruno’s Bruno, and they can’t see him, unless they’re eerie, like you.”
Then I understood how it was that one sometimes sees—going through the woods in a still evening—one fern-leaf rocking steadily on, all by itself. Haven’t you ever seen that? Try if you can see the fairy-sleeper on it, next time; but don’t pick the leaf, whatever you do; let the little one sleep on!
But all this time Bruno was getting sleepier and sleepier. “Sing, sing!” he murmured fretfully. Sylvie looked to me for instructions. “What shall it be?” she said.
“Could you sing him the nursery-song you once told me of?” I suggested. “The one that had been put through the mind-mangle, you know. ‘The little man that had a little gun,’ I think it was.”
“Why, that are one of the Professor’s songs!” cried Bruno. “I likes the little man; and I likes the way they spinned him—like a teetle-totle-tum.” And he turned a loving look on the gentle old man who was sitting at the other side of his leaf-bed, and who instantly began to sing, accompanying himself on his Outlandish guitar, while the snail, on which he sat, waved its horns in time to the music.
In stature the Manlet was dwarfish—
No burly big Blunderbore he:
And he wearily
