A Midnight Fantasy

“One of them.”

“She has others?”

“Enough to make a squadron; only the blind and aged are exempt.”

Here the music ceased and the dancers dispersed. Hamlet followed the lady with his eyes, and, seeing her left alone a moment, approached her. She received him graciously, as a mask receives a mask, and the two fell to talking, as people do who—have nothing to say to each other and possess the art of saying it. Presently something in his voice struck on her ear, a new note, an intonation sweet and strange, that made her curious. Who was it? It could not be Valentine, nor Anselmo; he was too tall for Signior Placentio, not stout enough for Lucio; it was not her cousin Tybalt. Could it be that rash Montague who—Would he dare? Here, on the very points of their swords? The stream of maskers ebbed and flowed and surged around them, and the music began again, and Juliet listened and listened.

“Who are you, sir,” she cried, at last, “that speak our tongue with feigned accent?”

“A stranger; an idler in Verona, though not a gay one—a black butterfly.”

“Our Italian sun will gild your wings for you. Black edged with gilt goes gay.”

“I am already not so sad-colored as I was.”

“I would fain see your face, sir; if it match your voice, it needs must be a kindly one.”

“I would we could change faces.”

“So we shall at supper!”

“And hearts, too?”

“Nay, I would not give a merry heart for a sorrowful one; but I will quit my mask, and you yours; yet,” and she spoke under her breath, “if you are, as I think, a gentleman of Verona—a Montague—do not unmask.”

“I am not of Verona, lady; no one knows me here;” and Hamlet threw back the hood of his domino. Juliet held her mask aside for a moment, and the two stood looking into each other’s eyes.

“Lady, we have in faith changed faces, at least as I shall carry yours forever in my memory.”

“And I yours, sir,” said Juliet, softly, “wishing it looked not so pale and melancholy.”

“Hamlet,” whispered Mercutio, plucking at his friend’s skirt, “the fellow there, talking with old Capulet—his wife’s nephew, Tybalt, a quarrelsome dog—suspects we are Montagues. Let us get out of this peaceably, like soldiers who are too much gentlemen to cause a brawl under a host’s roof.”

With this Mercutio pushed Hamlet to the door, where they were joined by Benvolio.

Juliet, with her eyes fixed upon the retreating maskers, stretched out her hand and grasped the arm of an ancient serving-woman who happened to be passing.

“Quick, good Nurse! go ask his name of yonder gentleman. Nay, not the one in green, dear! but he that hath the black domino and purple mask. What, did I touch your poor rheumatic arm? Ah, go now, sweet Nurse!”

As the Nurse hobbled off querulously on her errand, Juliet murmured to herself an old rhyme she knew:—

“If he be married,
My grave is like to be my wedding bed!”

When Hamlet got back to his own chambers he sat on the edge of his couch in a brown study. The silvery moonlight, struggling through the swaying branches of a tree outside the window, drifted doubtfully into the room, and made a parody of that fleecy veil which erewhile had floated about the lissome form of the lovely Capulet. That he loved her, and must tell her that he loved her, was a foregone conclusion; but how should he contrive to see Juliet again? No one knew him in Verona; he had carefully preserved his incognito; even Mercutio regarded him as simply a young gentleman from Denmark, taking his ease in a foreign city. Presented, by Mercutio, as a rich Danish tourist, the Capulets would receive him courteously, of course; as a visitor, but not as a suitor. It was in another character that he must be presented—his own.

He was pondering what steps he could take to establish his identity, when he remembered the two or three letters which he had stuffed into his wallet on quitting Elsi-nore. He lighted a taper, and began examining the papers. Among them were the half dozen billet-doux which Ophelia had returned to him the night before his departure. They were, neatly tied together by a length of black ribbon, to which was attached a sprig of rosemary.

“That was just like Ophelia!” muttered the young man, tossing the package into the wallet again; “she was always having cheerful ideas like that.”

How long ago seemed the night she had handed him these love-letters, in her demure little way! How misty and remote seemed everything connected with the old life at Elsinore! His father’s death, his mother’s marriage, his anguish and isolation—they were like things that had befallen somebody else. There was something incredible, too, in his present situation. Was he dreaming? Was he really in Italy, and in love?

He hastily bent forward and picked up a square folded paper lying half concealed under the others.

“How could I have forgotten it!” he exclaimed.

It was a missive addressed, in Horatio’s angular hand, to the Signior Capulet of Verona, containing a few lines of introduction from Horatio, whose father had dealings with some of the rich Lombardy merchants and knew many of the leading families in the city. With this and several epistles, preserved by chance, written to him by Queen Gertrude while he was at the university, Hamlet saw that he would have no difficulty in proving to the Capulets that he was the Prince of Denmark.

At an unseemly hour the next morning Mercutio was roused from his slumbers by Hamlet, who counted every minute a hundred years until he saw Juliet. Mercutio did not take this interruption too patiently, for the honest humorist was very serious as a sleeper; but his equilibrium was quickly restored by Hamlet’s revelation.

The friends were long closeted together, and at the proper, ceremonious hour for visitors they repaired to the house of Capulet, who did not hide his sense of the honor done him by the prince. With scarcely any prelude Hamlet unfolded the motive of his visit, and was listened to with rapt attention by old Capulet, who inwardly blessed his stars that he had not given his daughter’s hand to the County Paris, as he was on the point of doing. The ladies were not visible on this occasion; the fatigues of the ball overnight, etc.; but that same evening Hamlet was accorded an interview with Juliet and Lady Capulet, and a few days subsequently all Verona was talking of nothing but the new engagement.

The destructive Tybalt scowled at first, and twirled his fierce mustache, and young Paris took to writing dejected poetry; but they both soon recovered their serenity, seeing that nobody minded them, and went together arm in arm to pay their respects to Hamlet.

A new life began now for Hamlet–he shed his inky cloak, and came out in a doublet of insolent splendor, looking like a dagger-handle newly gilt. With his funereal gear he appeared to have thrown off something of his sepulchral gloom. It was impossible to be gloomy with Juliet, in whom each day developed some sunny charm un-guessed before. Her freshness and coquettish candor were constant surprises. She had had many lovers, and she confessed them to Hamlet in the prettiest way. “Perhaps, my dear,” she said to him one evening, with an ineffable smile, “I might have liked young Romeo very well, but the family were so opposed to it from the very first. And then he was so—so demonstrative, don’t you know?”

Hamlet had known of Romeo’s futile passion, but he had not been aware until then that his betrothed was the heroine of the balcony adventure. On leaving Juliet he-went to look up the Montague; not for the purpose of crossing rapiers with him, as another man might have done, but to compliment him on his unexceptionable taste in admiring so rare a lady.

But Romeo had disappeared in a most unaccountable manner, and his family were in great tribulation concerning him. It was thought that perhaps the unrelenting Rosaline (who had been Juliet’s frigid predecessor) had relented, and Montague’s man Abram was dispatched to seek Romeo at her residence; but the Lady Rosaline, who was embroidering on her piazza, placidly denied all knowledge of him. It was then feared that he had fallen in one of the customary encounters; but there had been no fight, and nobody had been killed on either side for nearly twelve hours. Nevertheless, his exit had the appearance of being final. When Hamlet questioned Mercutio, the honest soldier laughed and stroked his blonde mustache.

“The boy has gone off in a heat, I don’t know where—to the icy ends of the earth, I believe, to cool himself.”

Hamlet regretted that Romeo should have had any feeling in the matter; but regret was a bitter weed that did not thrive well in the atmosphere in which the fortunate lover was moving. He saw Juliet every day, and there was not a fleck upon his happiness, unless it was the garrulous Nurse, against whom Hamlet had taken a singular prejudice. He considered her a tiresome old person, not too decent in her discourse at times, and advised Juliet to get rid of her; but the ancient serving-woman had been in the family for years, and it was not quite expedient to discharge her at that late day.

With the subtile penetration of old age the Nurse instantly detected Hamlet’s dislike, and returned it heartily.

“Ah, ladybird,” she cried one night, “ah, well-a-day! you know not how to choose a man. An I could choose for you, Jule! By God’s lady, there’s Signior Mercutio, a brave gentleman, a merry gentleman, and a virtuous, I warrant ye, whose little finger-joint is worth all the body of this blackbird prince, dropping down from Lord knows where to fly off with the sweetest bit of flesh in Verona. Marry, come up!”

But this was only a ripple on the stream that flowed so smoothly. Now and then, indeed, Hamlet felt called upon playfully to chide Juliet for her extravagance of language, as when, for instance, she prayed that when he died he might be cut out in little stars to deck the face of night. Hamlet objected, under any circumstances, to being cut out in little stars for any illuminating purposes whatsoever. Once she suggested to her lover that he should come to the garden after the family retired, and she would speak with him a moment from the balcony. Now, as there was no obstacle to their seeing each other whenever they pleased, and as Hamlet was of a nice sense of honor, and since his engagement a most exquisite practicer of propriety, he did not encourage Juliet in her thoughtlessness.

“What!” he cried, lifting his finger at her reprovingly, “romantic again!”

This was their nearest approach to a lovers’ quarrel. The next day Hamlet brought her, as peace-offering, a slender gold flask curiously wrought in niello, which he had had filled with a costly odor at an apothecary’s as he came along.

“I never saw so lean a thing as that same culler of simples,” said Hamlet, laughing; “a matter of ribs and shanks, a mere skeleton painted black. It is a rare essence, though. He told me its barbaric botanical name, but it escapes me.”

“That which we call a rose,” said Juliet, holding the perfumery to her nostrils and inclining herself prettily towards him, “would smell as sweet by any other name.”

O Youth and Love! O fortunate Time!

There was a banquet almost every night at the Capulets’, and the Montagues, up the street, kept their blinds drawn down, and Lady Montague, who had four marriageable, tawny daughters on her hands, was livid with envy at her neighbor’s success. She would rather have had two or three Montagues prodded through the body than that the prince should have gone to the rival house.

Happy Prince!

If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Laertes, and the rest of the dismal people at Elsinore, could have seen him now, they would not have known him. Where were his wan looks and biting speeches? His eyes were no longer filled with mournful speculation. He went in glad apparel, and took the sunshine as his natural inheritance. If he ever fell into moodiness—it was partly constitutional with him—the shadow fled away at the first approach of that “loveliest weight on lightest foot.” The sweet Veronese had nestled in his empty heart, and filled it with music. The ghosts and visions that used to haunt him were laid forever by Juliet’s magic.

Happy Juliet!

Her beauty had taken a new gloss. The bud bad grown into a flower, redeeming the promises of the bud. If her heart beat less wildly, it throbbed more strongly. If she had given Hamlet of her superabundance of spirits, he had given her of his wisdom and discretion. She had always been a great favorite in society; but Verona thought her ravishing now. The mantua-makers cut their dresses by her patterns, and when she wore turquoise, garnets went ont of style. Instead of the groans and tears, and all those distressing events which might possibly have happened if Juliet had persisted in loving Romeo—listen to her laugh and behold her merry eyes!