Little Dinners With the Sphinx, and Other Prose Fancies

by Richard Le Gallienne

The temptation of the siren had been the gross one of the senses. The finer and subtler trial had yet to come. Rosamund had so far compromised with her original decree as to consent to limit Sid’s ordeal to one out of his nine muses. She would be content, she said, with his seeing Meriel, she, whom you may remember he was to love till Judgment Day; for Rosamund was right in thinking that, of all Sid’s previous feelings, his love for Meriel had been most serious. Indeed, it had been a feeling apart from all others, and it had always shone wistfully in Sid’s memory as a lost sacred thing that had come into his life too early, before his heart had been ready for it. A magic gift of loving it had been, but he had taken it carelessly with the rest, and realised all it had been only when it was far away. He recalled looks out of Meriel’s eyes which told him long after that she had known he was not ready for the love she could give him, and, unconsciously, the occasional thought of this old shortcoming of his had prepared him for—Rosamund, of whom Meriel came to seem in his mind a beautiful prophecy. Thus old love dies that new may live, or rather lives on in giving its life to the new. Certainly, Sid could never have loved Rosamund more had he not loved Meriel so much.

Yet, what if it should prove that Rosamund in her turn had only been developing him toward repossession of his old dream! Love moves in a mysterious way. How strange if this interval of experience had been meant to bring him back, at last worthy of them, to Meriel’s arms at last. He could not deny that his love for Rosamund had been haunted sometimes by moonlit memories of Meriel’s face, though he could with equal truth say that the new love was greater than the old one, because of its inclusion of stable human elements which his fairy dream of Meriel had lacked. Meriel had been a dream-woman, but hardly a human woman; but Rosamund was both. Yet, almost without his knowing it, there had been lurking in the background of his consciousness a vague curiosity—it was hardly more—as to what it would seem like to see Meriel again; what her face would seem like, how her voice would sound. He did not for a moment fear the result, yet he sometimes felt that he would like to try the experiment; but all these feelings had been of the very shadowiest, hardly rippling the surface of consciousness; so when Rosamund had suddenly made her odd proposal, they had seemed phantom nothings indeed compared with the aching reality of a month’s exile from her side.

All that had been Meriel had passed into Sid’s love for Rosamund. Meriel herself could only be a ghost, however beautifully visible and audible, a fair house of dreams from which the dreams had departed. Yet, for all that, it was not without some agitation that Sid found himself at length in the quaint little seaside town, whence a ferryboat would take him to a village across the bay, high over which Meriel and her mother lived, looking over the sea. Her ghost began to grow more and more luminous with memories, as a pale moon fills with silver as the night deepens. He stood on the deck of the little boat, and as it drew near to the landing-place he could see clearly on the hillside the old white house with its trellises and its terraced gardens descending the hill. He could see plainly the little bower where one summer evening they had sat together, and she had suddenly put her hand in his and said, “My life is in your hands.”

His heart beat fast as his memories crowded in upon him, and it made him almost frightened to think that in a few short moments he would really be looking at her again. He felt as though he were about to see someone who had been dead a long time, and had come to life again startlingly, as in dreams. Then there suddenly floated over the water from the village music very mournful and sweet, and he could see a long line of dark figures moving slowly up the tortuous village street. At the first strains of the music a great foreboding had swept through Sid’s heart. What if Meriel were dead, and, as in a fairy tale, he had come to meet her—carried through the streets to the tomb. The idea pleased his fancy, with its picturesque pathos; but no! that music was not for Meriel. It was a soldier’s death music, yet its solemn valedictory chords seemed to Sid’s ears to be playing the requiem of a great passion, fitly ushering him with their voluptuous melancholy to the grave of his beautiful love.

He took his way thoughtfully up through the climbing village, but there was a subdued excitement in his face which Rosamund might have construed as an undue eagerness to face his coming ordeal. At last he turned the well-known corner of the lane, and there was the house, facing the aery infinite of the sea. How poignantly familiar it all was; yet, why instantly did something tell him, something blank about the expression of the very windows, that—Meriel was not there.

Her mother met him as he turned into the garden, but Meriel was not there. She had been married—yesterday.

That is what the music had meant.

“So ‘Judgment Day’ is married!” said Rosamund, when Sid had once more returned to his cage to report himself. “It’s too bad of her,” she continued, “for she has quite spoiled my little plan. My test has been no test at all.”

“It was all I needed,” answered Sid. He was thinking of the siren, about whom, like a wise lover, he had kept silence. Too much confession is a dangerous weakness, and we are usually the best judges of our own actions. The siren had been but the process of an experiment. All that concerned Rosamund was the result.

“I wish I could have seen you, Sid, when you heard about ‘Judgment Day.’ I’d give anything to know what you really felt; but, of course, you’ll never tell me.”