The Maker of Rainbows, and Other Fairy-tales and Fables

by Richard Le Gallienne

Only one gift had been denied him—the gift of sleep. By whatever means he might weary himself in the day—in study, in sport, in recreation, or in the business of the realm—night found him sleepless, and all the dark hours the lights burned in his bedchamber and in his library, as he would pace from one to the other, with eyes tragically awake and brain torturingly alert and clear.

Every means known to science by which to bring sleep to the eyes of sleepless men had been tried in vain. Learned physicians from all parts of the world had come to my lord's castle, and had gone thence, confessing that their skill had availed nothing. All strange and terrible drugs that have power over the spirit of man had failed to conquer those stubborn eyelids. My lord still paced from his bedchamber to his library, from his library to his bedchamber—sleepless.

A SUDDEN STRANGE NEW LIGHT WOULD SHINE OUT OF ITS PAGES

Sometimes in his anguish he had thrown himself on his knees in prayer before a God whom he had not always remembered—the God who giveth His beloved sleep—but his prayers had remained unanswered; and in his darkest moments he had dreamed of snatching by his own hands that sleep perpetual of which a great Latin poet he loved had sung. Often, as he paced his library, he would say over and over to himself, Nox est perpetua una dormienda—and in the still night the old words would often sound like soft dark voices calling him away into the endless night of the endless sleep. But he was not the man to take that way of escape. No; whatever the suffering might be, he would fight it out to the end, and so he continued sleepless, trying this resource and that, but, most of all, that first and last resource—courage. It is seldom that courage fails to wrest for us some recompense from the hardest situation, and the sleepless man, as night after night he fought with his fate, did not miss such hard-wrung rewards. Often, as in the deepest hush of the night he wearily took up some great old book of philosopher or poet familiar to him from his youth, a sudden strange new light would shine out of its pages, as of some inner radiance of truth which he had missed in his daylight reading. At such times an exaltation would come over him, and it would almost seem as though the curse upon him was really a blessing of initiation into the world of a deeper wisdom, the gate of which is hidden by the glare of the sun. In the daylight the eternal voices are lost in the transitory clamor of human business; it is only when the night falls, and the stars rise, and the noise of men dies down like the drone of some sleeping insect, that the solemn thoughts of God may be heard.

Other compensations he found when, weary of his books and despairing of sleep, he would leave his house and wander through the silent city, where the roaring thoroughfares of the daytime were silent as the pyramids, and the great warehouses seemed like deserted palaces haunted by the moon. Night-walkers like himself grew to find his figure familiar, and would say to themselves, or to each other, "There goes the lord who never sleeps"; and the watchmen on their rounds all knew and saluted the man whose eyelids never closed. Enforced as these nocturnal rambles were, they revealed to him much beautiful knowledge which those more fortunate ones asleep in their beds must ever miss. Thus he came in contact with all the vast nocturnal labor of the world, the toil of sleepless men who keep watch over the sleeping earth, and work through the night to make it ready for the new-born day; all that labor which is put away and forgotten with the rising of the sun, and of which the day asks no questions, so that the result be there. This brought him very near to humanity and taught him a deep pity for the grinding lot of man.

Then—was it no compensation for this sleepless one that he thus became a companion of all the ensorceled beauty of Night, walking by her side, a confidant of her mystic talk, as he gazed into her everlasting eyes? Was it nothing to be the intimate of all her sibylline moods, learned in every haunted murmur of her voice, intrusted with her lunar secrets, and a friend of all her stars?

Yes! it was much indeed, he often said to himself, as he turned homeward with the first flush of morning, and met the great sweet-smelling wains coming from the country, laden with fruits and flowers, and making their way like moving orchards and meadows through the city streets.

The big wagoners, too, were well acquainted with the great lord who never slept, and would always stop when they saw him, for it was his custom to buy from them a bunch of country flowers.