Remember Me by David Stacton Page B

sort of silence between them was the kind that comes at the end of a love affair, not at the beginning of one.
    He had brought her a portrait of Maria Stuart on porcelain. He had thought that he should bring her something that meant something to him, but not anything that meant too much. He wanted to see if she felt about Maria Stuart as he did, for Maria Stuart was one of the martyr queens.
    Sophie was not interested in martyr queens. She only said it was pretty but much too large to make into a brooch. Her voice was as irritating as the bell at Mass, always tinkling away when you were thinking of something else.
    She did not understand; and that, unconsciously, must have been the moment when he began to back away.
    He glanced at the miniature, longing to put it back in his pocket. Profane people should not be allowed to look at sacred things. Sophie had no more intelligence than the small dogs who surrounded her, and who were no doubt chosen to match her muffs. It was as though he had given a piece of himself away. She would never give it back. It did not matter to her what it was, but it did matter that it was a gift. In the mind of a fiancée, tributebulks as large as ever it did to the consciousness of any emperor.
    He could not stay in the same room with her any longer. He left abruptly. That night, from Berg, he tried to write her a letter. He tried to explain what Maria Stuart meant. She read slowly: perhaps she would understand. He felt a dreadful sense of loss.
    There was a strong gale outside that night. The wind whipped the waves of the lake. It was good to get away from the small world of Munich to the big world of the elements. Unfortunately it only made the marital world ahead of him the smaller. The world dashed around his tower. Suddenly he felt himself transported to Scotland. Maria Stuart and all his dream friends stood on the hard rock shore of that impossible country of the mind. Bavaria is higher up. Scotland is farther to the north. But the land of each is holy, for it is figured forth as the faith of its people. The vast landscapes of Scotland are one of the noblest ideas of Man. They extend into the absolute.
    He had retreated to fantasy. The waters of Berg became the waters of some loch. Far off, across the water, at Possenhofen, a boat put out from a dock for the last time. It carried away Maria Stuart, from the heroine she might have been, to a French world of casuistry.
    He thought he understood Scotland very well. It was an immense tilted landscape where despair was not a pejorative emotion, but a cloaked companion on an endless voyage. In the distance, as it must always sound, he heard the thin and subtle music of the Skye Boat Song. Whether a song of arrival or of departure, it was one of the great laments. The Scots are ennobled by loss. Only the cry, Great Pan is dead, echoing across the tideless sea, rang down the mind in the same way.
    He could never take Sophie with him into the world ofthe ideal. Look though he would through the shadows of the gale and the whip of the sea mist, he could not see her figure there. Nor would she ever allow him to take that voyage alone.
    The wind drew chains around the tower. Maria Stuart left Scotland for the last time. And far ahead of her, as she travelled down into England, far in the distance of the future, came the wavering notes of another coronach.
    It did not matter. Just for that hour, while the candle guttered beside him and the wind rattled round the tower, he was secure once more in something larger than himself. Alone, like Macbeth, he sat to consult the shadows of enormous kings.
    With each page he read, for he was reading court memoirs, he saw more clearly that Sophie had taken him in, not because she wished to do so, but because she was a woman of a certain time and place. The woman he would never trust. There remained that figment of his own desires, the Queen. Actors must be chosen to match their parts. He made a note to order Baron von