How Harlequin First Saw Columbine
A day or two later, while Harlequin sat chatting with Scaramouche, he heard Violetta calling him.
“Harlequin!” she cried. “Come here to the window. Quick!”
“What is it?” he asked.
“Pantaloon and Columbine are passing.”
Harlequin hurried to the window.
“There they go,” said Violetta. “Isn’t she lovely?”
She certainly was very lovely, Harlequin thought. He had never seen any one like her. Violetta was pretty; Isabella was handsome; but Columbine was adorable. There was no other word for her. She was rather small, but perfectly proportioned; every limb and feature were most exquisitely made; her complexion was of the daintiest rose and cream; her hair, a great golden coil round her beautiful little head, glinted in the sunshine. Except for the rosebuds in her tiny straw hat, she was dressed all in white, and her skirt was of some light gossamer stuff which seemed to float its wearer through the air.
Harlequin remembered that Violetta had said that Columbine would be worthy to dance even with him. “I should just think she would,” he thought. “Why, she would make me look a clodhopper. She is lighter-footed even than my mother. She hardly touches the ground at all.”
Watching her till she was out of sight, he had no eyes for her companion. Yet Pantaloon, in his own way, was well worth looking at, for he was as ugly as his daughter was beautiful, as ungainly as she was graceful. Wrapped in his rusty doctor’s cloak, with his great spectacles on his great beak of a nose, he stumped goutily along at her side, leaning heavily upon his silver-headed cane.
“Well,” said Violetta, “what do you think of her?”
“She is quite a pretty little thing,” said Harlequin carelessly.
Violetta laughed.
“My dear Harlequin,” she cried, “you can’t take me in so easily as that. I saw the way you looked at her.” And away she went to her work in the kitchen, humming a merry little tune.
There was not a grain of jealousy in Violetta’s nature. Besides, Harlequin was by no means the only string to her bow. She was not even annoyed when, that evening, he forgot to kiss her good-night.
He forgot to kiss Violetta because, as she had foretold, he could think of nothing but Columbine. Scaramouche noticed his absent-mindedness.
“What is the matter, Harlequin?” he said. “I believe you are in love.”
“Of course I am,” replied Harlequin quickly. “With Violetta.”
“Rubbish!” Scaramouche retorted. “That isn’t the way one loves Violetta. You have been seeing Columbine.”
“How on earth did you guess?” cried Harlequin.
“I know the symptoms,” said Scaramouche. “But you would do far better to stick to Violetta, my dear fellow. Columbine is not for you.”
“Don’t you make too sure of that,” said Harlequin, and fell to musing again.
Scaramouche went to sleep, but presently he was awakened by a prod from Harlequin’s long finger.
“Listen to this, Scaramouche,” said the dancer:
You didn’t know I was a poet, did you?”
“I am not sure that I know it now,” replied Scaramouche. “Any way, what is the use of a poem without an ending?”
“I can’t think of the last line,” said Harlequin.
Scaramouche chanted, after a moment’s reflection, “How would that do?”
“It wouldn’t do at all,” Harlequin said. “You are a base old materialist.”
“That is a very comfortable thing to be,” replied Scaramouche. “Far better than being in love.” And he went off to bed.
Harlequin sat up for some time longer, racking his brains for an ending to his poem. But all he could think of was:
which, if anything, was worse than Scaramouche’s suggestion.
“Perhaps I am not a poet, after all,” he said to himself, as he lighted his candle and made his way upstairs, hoping to dream of Columbine.