"Never took place at all!" lisped Aladdin's lamp in magic syllables. "Pray, what do you mean? It certainly took place in your experience, and in the opinion of your learned master who is writing a history of the world in forty volumes, that is the only thing that matters."
A flash of the talisman was soon to raise a bottle of ink and a quire of foolscap. Therefore one evening after supper, Mr. Rudge, still at Charles XII of Sweden, was startled painfully when "The Adventures of Dick Smith on the High Seas," by Henry Harper, Chapter One, was shown to him. It was a fall, but his master was too kind to say so. These misspent hours could have been used for a further enrichment of the mind. He might have added to his knowledge of grammar. He might have ventured upon the study of shorthand itself, a science of which Mr. Rudge never ceased to deplore his own ignorance. However, he said nothing, and went on with the great work.
Thus, not realizing the true feelings of his master, the young man continued to supplement the entrancing but incomplete "Adventures of George Gregory" with his own experience. The strange tale grew at the back of the genie who tended the lamp, and with it grew the soul of Henry Harper. In this new and wonderful realm he had entered it seemed that the Sailor had surely found his kingdom. Deep down in himself were latent faculties which he had not known were there. They were now springing forth gloriously into the light.
All his life he had been a dreamer of dreams; now the power was his of making them come true, he had a world of his own in which to live. He was only half awake as yet to the world around him; and this arrest of growth was for a time his weakness and his strength. It is impossible, it is said, to touch pitch and not be defiled. The worth of that aphorism was about to be tried by the clairvoyant soul of Henry Harper.
At this time, while he was drawing very painfully and yet rapturously upon his inner life, he was like an expanding flower. All his leisure was not spent in the back parlor at No. 249, Charing Cross Road. There were hours when he walked abroad into the streets of the great city.
Much was hidden from his eyes as yet. The truth was it was not his own great city in which he walked. He gazed and saw, listened and heard in a mirage of fanciful ignorance. A life of unimaginable squalor and hardship had not been able to slay the genie sleeping in that elemental soul. But it had yet to get its range of values in the many worlds around it.
One Sunday morning in the spring, in one of his enchanted walks about the city in the pursuit of knowledge, he chanced to enter Hyde Park. It was the hour when the churches of the neighborhood disgorged their fashionable congregations. Here, as he sat near the statue of Achilles and watched the brilliant throng pass by, a feeling of awe and bewilderment overcame him. He had never realized before that his fellow occupants of the planet could be so wonderful. Here was a significance, a beauty, a harmony of aspect beyond anything he had imagined to be possible. The fine-ladyhood of Miss Foldal was nothing in comparison with that queening it all around him. Even the quality of Mr. Esme Horrobin paled in luster. This was a very remarkable world into which he had strayed. He had almost a sense of guilt at finding himself there. With such clothes as he wore and such a humility of heart as he had, he had clearly no right of entry to this paradise. But there he was with every nerve alive, and the scene burned itself vividly into his heart and brain.
These gorgeous beings with their kingliness of mien, these children of the sun who spoke with the accent of the gods meant much more to the primitive soul of Henry Harper than as yet it could understand. In the intoxication of the hour, with the sun and the birds, the trees, the green earth, the bright flowers paying their homage to the grace and beauty of his countrywomen, he felt like an angel who has fallen out of heaven, who after aeons of time in a bottomless hell is permitted to see again a fair heritage that once was his.
The genie had unlocked another door. Henry Harper was now in a world of romance. In order to know what these wonderful beings truly were he listened eagerly for fragments of their talk as they passed by. All of a sudden there came miraculously a voice that had a tang of ocean in it. There and then was he flung out of Hyde Park to the deck of the Margaret Carey.
Leaping at the sound of a laugh, a full-chested music the Sailor could never forget, he saw, a few yards off, the oncoming figures of a man and a girl. Both were tall and young and splendid; both seemed to be dressed in the last cry of fashion. Moreover they bore themselves with the assured grace of a sweet ship under canvas.