In looking back, how different seem the dreams that were once ours. The present seems a daub, it has no perspective of its own, it is like the raw colours of the aspiring artist ere he spreads them on the canvas and the picture slowly shapes itself from his creating brain. How beautiful are the paintings of rosy horizons of To-morrows—how transfigured, how rare and beautiful are those wonderful masterpieces of—Sad Yesterdays.
Ah! Waylao, you are the embodied phantom of my dreams. To-day I sit in sorrow and mix my colours, and toil away as I paint you, both as you were and as you appear now. You are my impassioned mistress of the South. In dreams I gaze into your starlit eyes; I breathe through your dishevelled, scented tresses, and sing into your shell-like ears the songs that I loved.
Ah! Waylao, outcast of the mysterious South, our lips have met in comradeship as we wept together—not you and I alone, but with all your race.
You once loved the songs of my homeland, as I once loved and cherished the wild, impassioned songs of your sunny isles. Ambushed in your warm, impulsive clasp, I have heard the moaning waves wailing, breaking over the coral reefs, tossing their arms with laughter, like the dusky children of those wild shores. You have haunted me in long, long dreams through the night, as I slept by the banyans of the moonlit shore. Soft-footed you crept out of the shadows and sang your magical melodies into my sleeping ears. And Pauline would come too, the beloved maid of the Western Seas. Ah, how oft did she creep up the moonlit shores to lie in my arms as I slept, and sing the dear homeland songs through my dreams—dreams of England.
Do I speak in enigmas? Few may understand all that I mean, nor do I wish them to understand.
Ah! Pauline, how your eyes haunted me in those sleepless nights of the far-away years; and still they haunt me—yes, with all the songs that once you sang to me. I often wonder if I imagined that shadow of yourself, that ran singing beside me as I tramped, and sailed from isle to isle, on those knight-errant quests, searching for Waylao.
It seemed too vivid to be only a dream when I awoke in the lonely nights of the forest dark and heard you whisper in my ears, calling me back to Tai-o-hae.
I know that even Waylao was haunted by thoughts of you, of your pale, beautiful face; for did you not sing those songs to us as we three sat by the lagoon near your drunken English father’s home?
Where are those songs now—songs that made me feel the glorious romance of all that I dreamed long ago, ere I put out my hands to clutch the stars and plucked—dead leaves?