I threw myself on the bed, and began to turn over in my mind the tale she had told me. She had forgotten herself, and, by a single incautious word, removed one perplexity as to the condition in which I found her in the forest! The leopardess BOUNDED over; the princess lay prostrate on the bank: the running stream had dissolved her self-enchantment! Her own account of the object of her journey revealed the danger of the Little Ones then imminent: I had saved the life of their one fearful enemy!
I had but reached this conclusion when I fell asleep. The lovely wine may not have been quite innocent.
When I opened my eyes, it was night. A lamp, suspended from the ceiling, cast a clear, although soft light through the chamber. A delicious languor infolded me. I seemed floating, far from land, upon the bosom of a twilight sea. Existence was in itself pleasure. I had no pain. Surely I was dying!
No pain!—ah, what a shoot of mortal pain was that! what a sickening sting! It went right through my heart! Again! That was sharpness itself!—and so sickening! I could not move my hand to lay it on my heart; something kept it down!
The pain was dying away, but my whole body seemed paralysed. Some evil thing was upon me!—something hateful! I would have struggled, but could not reach a struggle. My will agonised, but in vain, to assert itself. I desisted, and lay passive. Then I became aware of a soft hand on my face, pressing my head into the pillow, and of a heavy weight lying across me.
I began to breathe more freely; the weight was gone from my chest; I opened my eyes.
The princess was standing above me on the bed, looking out into the room, with the air of one who dreamed. Her great eyes were clear and calm. Her mouth wore a look of satisfied passion; she wiped from it a streak of red.
She caught my gaze, bent down, and struck me on the eyes with the handkerchief in her hand: it was like drawing the edge of a knife across them, and for a moment or two I was blind.
I heard a dull heavy sound, as of a large soft-footed animal alighting from a little jump. I opened my eyes, and saw the great swing of a long tail as it disappeared through the half-open doorway. I sprang after it.
The creature had vanished quite. I shot down the stair, and into the hall of alabaster. The moon was high, and the place like the inside of a faint, sun-blanched moon. The princess was not there. I must find her: in her presence I might protect myself; out of it I could not! I was a tame animal for her to feed upon; a human fountain for a thirst demoniac! She showed me favour the more easily to use me! My waking eyes did not fear her, but they would close, and she would come! Not seeing her, I felt her everywhere, for she might be anywhere—might even now be waiting me in some secret cavern of sleep! Only with my eyes upon her could I feel safe from her!
Outside the alabaster hall it was pitch-dark, and I had to grope my way along with hands and feet. At last I felt a curtain, put it aside, and entered the black hall. There I found a great silent assembly. How it was visible I neither saw nor could imagine, for the walls, the floor, the roof, were shrouded in what seemed an infinite blackness, blacker than the blackest of moonless, starless nights; yet my eyes could separate, although vaguely, not a few of the individuals in the mass interpenetrated and divided, as well as surrounded, by the darkness. It seemed as if my eyes would never come quite to themselves. I pressed their balls and looked and looked again, but what I saw would not grow distinct. Blackness mingled with form, silence and undefined motion possessed the wide space. All was a dim, confused dance, filled with recurrent glimpses of shapes not unknown to me. Now appeared a woman, with glorious eyes looking out of a skull; now an armed figure on a skeleton horse; now one now another of the hideous burrowing phantasms. I could trace no order and little relation in the mingling and crossing currents and eddies. If I seemed to catch the shape and rhythm of a dance, it was but to see it break, and confusion prevail. With the shifting colours of the seemingly more solid shapes, mingled a multitude of shadows, independent apparently of originals, each moving after its own free shadow-will. I looked everywhere for the princess, but throughout the wildly changing kaleidoscopic scene, could not see her nor discover indication of her presence. Where was she? What might she not be doing? No one took the least notice of me as I wandered hither and thither seeking her. At length losing hope, I turned away to look elsewhere. Finding the wall, and keeping to it with my hand, for even then I could not see it, I came, groping along, to a curtained opening into the vestibule.
Dimly moonlighted, the cage of the leopardess was the arena of what seemed a desperate although silent struggle. Two vastly differing forms, human and bestial, with entangled confusion of mingling bodies and limbs, writhed and wrestled in closest embrace. It had lasted but an instant when I saw the leopardess out of the cage, walking quietly to the open door. As I hastened after her I threw a glance behind me: there was the leopardess in the cage, couching motionless as when I saw her first.
The moon, half-way up the sky, was shining round and clear; the bodiless shadow I had seen the night before, was walking through the trees toward the gate; and after him went the leopardess, swinging her tail. I followed, a little way off, as silently as they, and neither of them once looked round. Through the open gate we went down to the city, lying quiet as the moonshine upon it. The face of the moon was very still, and its stillness looked like that of expectation.
The Shadow took his way straight to the stair at the top of which I had lain the night before. Without a pause he went up, and the leopardess followed. I quickened my pace, but, a moment after, heard a cry of horror. Then came the fall of something soft and heavy between me and the stair, and at my feet lay a body, frightfully blackened and crushed, but still recognisable as that of the woman who had led me home and shut me out. As I stood petrified, the spotted leopardess came bounding down the stair with a baby in her mouth. I darted to seize her ere she could turn at the foot; but that instant, from behind me, the white leopardess, like a great bar of glowing silver, shot through the moonlight, and had her by the neck. She dropped the child; I caught it up, and stood to watch the battle between them.
What a sight it was—now the one, now the other uppermost, both too intent for any noise beyond a low growl, a whimpered cry, or a snarl of hate—followed by a quicker scrambling of claws, as each, worrying and pushing and dragging, struggled for foothold on the pavement! The spotted leopardess was larger than the white, and I was anxious for my friend; but I soon saw that, though neither stronger nor more active, the white leopardess had the greater endurance. Not once did she lose her hold on the neck of the other. From the spotted throat at length issued a howl of agony, changing, by swift-crowded gradations, into the long-drawn CRESCENDO of a woman’s uttermost wail. The white one relaxed her jaws; the spotted one drew herself away, and rose on her hind legs. Erect in the moonlight stood the princess, a confused rush of shadows careering over her whiteness—the spots of the leopard crowding, hurrying, fleeing to the refuge of her eyes, where merging they vanished. The last few, outsped and belated, mingled with the cloud of her streamy hair, leaving her radiant as the moon when a legion of little vapours has flown, wind-hunted, off her silvery disc—save that, adown the white column of her throat, a thread of blood still trickled from every wound of her adversary’s terrible teeth. She turned away, took a few steps with the gait of a Hecate, fell, covered afresh with her spots, and fled at a long, stretching gallop.
The white leopardess turned also, sprang upon me, pulled my arms asunder, caught the baby as it fell, and flew with it along the street toward the gate.
I turned and followed the spotted leopardess, catching but one glimpse of her as she tore up the brow of the hill to the gate of the palace. When I reached the entrance-hall, the princess was just throwing the robe around her which she had left on the floor. The blood had ceased to flow from her wounds, and had dried in the wind of her flight.
When she saw me, a flash of anger crossed her face, and she turned her head aside. Then, with an attempted smile, she looked at me, and said,
“I have met with a small accident! Happening to hear that the cat-woman was again in the city, I went down to send her away. But she had one of her horrid creatures with her: it sprang upon me, and had its claws in my neck before I could strike it!”
She gave a shiver, and I could not help pitying her, although I knew she lied, for her wounds were real, and her face reminded me of how she looked in the cave. My heart began to reproach me that I had let her fight unaided, and I suppose I looked the compassion I felt.
“Child of folly!” she said, with another attempted smile, “—not crying, surely!—Wait for me here; I am going into the black hall for a moment. I want you to get me something for my scratches.”
But I followed her close. Out of my sight I feared her.
The instant the princess entered, I heard a buzzing sound as of many low voices, and, one portion after another, the assembly began to be shiftingly illuminated, as by a ray that went travelling from spot to spot. Group after group would shine out for a space, then sink back into the general vagueness, while another part of the vast company would grow momently bright.
Some of the actions going on when thus illuminated, were not unknown to me; I had been in them, or had looked on them, and so had the princess: present with every one of them I now saw her. The skull-headed dancers footed the grass in the forest-hall: there was the princess looking in at the door! The fight went on in the Evil Wood: there was the princess urging it! Yet I was close behind her all the time, she standing motionless, her head sunk on her bosom. The confused murmur continued, the confused commotion of colours and shapes; and still the ray went shifting and showing. It settled at last on the hollow in the heath, and there was the princess, walking up and down, and trying in vain to wrap the vapour around her! Then first I was startled at what I saw: the old librarian walked up to her, and stood for a moment regarding her; she fell; her limbs forsook her and fled; her body vanished.
A wild shriek rang through the echoing place, and with the fall of her eidolon, the princess herself, till then standing like a statue in front of me, fell heavily, and lay still. I turned at once and went out: not again would I seek to restore her! As I stood trembling beside the cage, I knew that in the black ellipsoid I had been in the brain of the princess!—I saw the tail of the leopardess quiver once.
While still endeavouring to compose myself, I heard the voice of the princess beside me.
“Come now,” she said; “I will show you what I want you to do for me.”
She led the way into the court. I followed in dazed compliance.
The moon was near the zenith, and her present silver seemed brighter than the gold of the absent sun. She brought me through the trees to the tallest of them, the one in the centre. It was not quite like the rest, for its branches, drawing their ends together at the top, made a clump that looked from beneath like a fir-cone. The princess stood close under it, gazing up, and said, as if talking to herself,
“On the summit of that tree grows a tiny blossom which would at once heal my scratches! I might be a dove for a moment and fetch it, but I see a little snake in the leaves whose bite would be worse to a dove than the bite of a tiger to me!—How I hate that cat-woman!”
She turned to me quickly, saying with one of her sweetest smiles,
“Can you climb?”
The smile vanished with the brief question, and her face changed to a look of sadness and suffering. I ought to have left her to suffer, but the way she put her hand to her wounded neck went to my heart.
I considered the tree. All the way up to the branches, were projections on the stem like the remnants on a palm of its fallen leaves.
“I can climb that tree,” I answered.
“Not with bare feet!” she returned.
In my haste to follow the leopardess disappearing, I had left my sandals in my room.
“It is no matter,” I said; “I have long gone barefoot!”
Again I looked at the tree, and my eyes went wandering up the stem until my sight lost itself in the branches. The moon shone like silvery foam here and there on the rugged bole, and a little rush of wind went through the top with a murmurous sound as of water falling softly into water. I approached the tree to begin my ascent of it. The princess stopped me.
“I cannot let you attempt it with your feet bare!” she insisted. “A fall from the top would kill you!”
“So would a bite from the snake!” I answered—not believing, I confess, that there was any snake.
“It would not hurt YOU!” she replied. “—Wait a moment.”
She tore from her garment the two wide borders that met in front, and kneeling on one knee, made me put first my left foot, then my right on the other, and bound them about with the thick embroidered strips.
“You have left the ends hanging, princess!” I said.
“I have nothing to cut them off with; but they are not long enough to get entangled,” she replied.
I turned to the tree, and began to climb.
Now in Bulika the cold after sundown was not so great as in certain other parts of the country—especially about the sexton’s cottage; yet when I had climbed a little way, I began to feel very cold, grew still colder as I ascended, and became coldest of all when I got among the branches. Then I shivered, and seemed to have lost my hands and feet.
There was hardly any wind, and the branches did not sway in the least, yet, as I approached the summit, I became aware of a peculiar unsteadiness: every branch on which I placed foot or laid hold, seemed on the point of giving way. When my head rose above the branches near the top, and in the open moonlight I began to look about for the blossom, that instant I found myself drenched from head to foot. The next, as if plunged in a stormy water, I was flung about wildly, and felt myself sinking. Tossed up and down, tossed this way and tossed that way, rolled over and over, checked, rolled the other way and tossed up again, I was sinking lower and lower. Gasping and gurgling and choking, I fell at last upon a solid bottom.
“I told you so!” croaked a voice in my ear.
I rubbed the water out of my eyes, and saw the raven on the edge of a huge stone basin. With the cold light of the dawn reflected from his glossy plumage, he stood calmly looking down upon me. I lay on my back in water, above which, leaning on my elbows, I just lifted my face. I was in the basin of the large fountain constructed by my father in the middle of the lawn. High over me glimmered the thick, steel-shiny stalk, shooting, with a torrent uprush, a hundred feet into the air, to spread in a blossom of foam.
Nettled at the coolness of the raven’s remark,
“You told me nothing!” I said.
“I told you to do nothing any one you distrusted asked you!”
“Tut! how was mortal to remember that?”
“You will not forget the consequences of having forgotten it!” replied Mr. Raven, who stood leaning over the margin of the basin, and stretched his hand across to me.
I took it, and was immediately beside him on the lawn, dripping and streaming.
“You must change your clothes at once!” he said. “A wetting does not signify where you come from—though at present such an accident is unusual; here it has its inconveniences!”
He was again a raven, walking, with something stately in his step, toward the house, the door of which stood open.
“I have not much to change!” I laughed; for I had flung aside my robe to climb the tree.
“It is a long time since I moulted a feather!” said the raven.
In the house no one seemed awake. I went to my room, found a dressing-gown, and descended to the library.
As I entered, the librarian came from the closet. I threw myself on a couch. Mr. Raven drew a chair to my side and sat down. For a minute or two neither spoke. I was the first to break the silence.
“What does it all mean?” I said.
“A good question!” he rejoined: “nobody knows what anything is; a man can learn only what a thing means! Whether he do, depends on the use he is making of it.”
“I have made no use of anything yet!”
“Not much; but you know the fact, and that is something! Most people take more than a lifetime to learn that they have learned nothing, and done less! At least you have not been without the desire to be of use!”
“I did want to do something for the children—the precious Little Ones, I mean.”
“I know you did—and started the wrong way!”
“I did not know the right way.”
“That is true also—but you are to blame that you did not.”
“I am ready to believe whatever you tell me—as soon as I understand what it means.”
“Had you accepted our invitation, you would have known the right way. When a man will not act where he is, he must go far to find his work.”
“Indeed I have gone far, and got nowhere, for I have not found my work! I left the children to learn how to serve them, and have only learned the danger they are in.”
“When you were with them, you were where you could help them: you left your work to look for it! It takes a wise man to know when to go away; a fool may learn to go back at once!”
“Do you mean, sir, I could have done something for the Little Ones by staying with them?”
“Could you teach them anything by leaving them?”
“No; but how could I teach them? I did not know how to begin. Besides, they were far ahead of me!”
“That is true. But you were not a rod to measure them with! Certainly, if they knew what you know, not to say what you might have known, they would be ahead of you—out of sight ahead! but you saw they were not growing—or growing so slowly that they had not yet developed the idea of growing! they were even afraid of growing!—You had never seen children remain children!”
“But surely I had no power to make them grow!”
“You might have removed some of the hindrances to their growing!”
“What are they? I do not know them. I did think perhaps it was the want of water!”
“Of course it is! they have none to cry with!”
“I would gladly have kept them from requiring any for that purpose!”
“No doubt you would—the aim of all stupid philanthropists! Why, Mr. Vane, but for the weeping in it, your world would never have become worth saving! You confess you thought it might be water they wanted: why did not you dig them a well or two?”
“That never entered my mind!”
“Not when the sounds of the waters under the earth entered your ears?”
“I believe it did once. But I was afraid of the giants for them. That was what made me bear so much from the brutes myself!”
“Indeed you almost taught the noble little creatures to be afraid of the stupid Bags! While they fed and comforted and worshipped you, all the time you submitted to be the slave of bestial men! You gave the darlings a seeming coward for their hero! A worse wrong you could hardly have done them. They gave you their hearts; you owed them your soul!—You might by this time have made the Bags hewers of wood and drawers of water to the Little Ones!”
“I fear what you say is true, Mr. Raven! But indeed I was afraid that more knowledge might prove an injury to them—render them less innocent, less lovely.”
“They had given you no reason to harbour such a fear!”
“Is not a little knowledge a dangerous thing?”
“That is one of the pet falsehoods of your world! Is man’s greatest knowledge more than a little? or is it therefore dangerous? The fancy that knowledge is in itself a great thing, would make any degree of knowledge more dangerous than any amount of ignorance. To know all things would not be greatness.”
“At least it was for love of them, not from cowardice that I served the giants!”
“Granted. But you ought to have served the Little Ones, not the giants! You ought to have given the Little Ones water; then they would soon have taught the giants their true position. In the meantime you could yourself have made the giants cut down two-thirds of their coarse fruit-trees to give room to the little delicate ones! You lost your chance with the Lovers, Mr. Vane! You speculated about them instead of helping them!”
I sat in silence and shame. What he said was true: I had not been a wise neighbour to the Little Ones!
Mr. Raven resumed:
“You wronged at the same time the stupid creatures themselves. For them slavery would have been progress. To them a few such lessons as you could have given them with a stick from one of their own trees, would have been invaluable.”
“I did not know they were cowards!”
“What difference does that make? The man who grounds his action on another’s cowardice, is essentially a coward himself.—I fear worse will come of it! By this time the Little Ones might have been able to protect themselves from the princess, not to say the giants—they were always fit enough for that; as it was they laughed at them! but now, through your relations with her,——”
“I hate her!” I cried.
“Did you let her know you hated her?”
Again I was silent.
“Not even to her have you been faithful!—But hush! we were followed from the fountain, I fear!”
“No living creature did I see!—except a disreputable-looking cat that bolted into the shrubbery.”
“It was a magnificent Persian—so wet and draggled, though, as to look what she was—worse than disreputable!”
“What do you mean, Mr. Raven?” I cried, a fresh horror taking me by the throat. “—There was a beautiful blue Persian about the house, but she fled at the very sound of water!—Could she have been after the goldfish?”
“We shall see!” returned the librarian. “I know a little about cats of several sorts, and there is that in the room which will unmask this one, or I am mistaken in her.”
He rose, went to the door of the closet, brought from it the mutilated volume, and sat down again beside me. I stared at the book in his hand: it was a whole book, entire and sound!
“Where was the other half of it?” I gasped.
“Sticking through into my library,” he answered.
I held my peace. A single question more would have been a plunge into a bottomless sea, and there might be no time!
“Listen,” he said: “I am going to read a stanza or two. There is one present who, I imagine, will hardly enjoy the reading!”
He opened the vellum cover, and turned a leaf or two. The parchment was discoloured with age, and one leaf showed a dark stain over two-thirds of it. He slowly turned this also, and seemed looking for a certain passage in what appeared a continuous poem. Somewhere about the middle of the book he began to read.
But what follows represents—not what he read, only the impression it made upon me. The poem seemed in a language I had never before heard, which yet I understood perfectly, although I could not write the words, or give their meaning save in poor approximation. These fragments, then, are the shapes which those he read have finally taken in passing again through my brain:—
“But if I found a man that could believeIn what he saw not, felt not, and yet knew,From him I should take substance, and receiveFirmness and form relate to touch and view;Then should I clothe me in the likeness trueOf that idea where his soul did cleave!”
He turned a leaf and read again:—
“In me was every woman. I had powerOver the soul of every living man,Such as no woman ever had in dower—Could what no woman ever could, or can;All women, I, the woman, still outran,Outsoared, outsank, outreigned, in hall or bower.“For I, though me he neither saw nor heard,Nor with his hand could touch finger of mine,Although not once my breath had ever stirredA hair of him, could trammel brain and spineWith rooted bonds which Death could not untwine—Or life, though hope were evermore deferred.”
Again he paused, again turned a leaf, and again began:—
“For by his side I lay, a bodiless thing;I breathed not, saw not, felt not, only thought,And made him love me—with a hungeringAfter he knew not what—if it was aughtOr but a nameless something that was wroughtBy him out of himself; for I did sing“A song that had no sound into his soul;I lay a heartless thing against his heart,Giving him nothing where he gave his wholeBeing to clothe me human, every part:That I at last into his sense might dart,Thus first into his living mind I stole.“Ah, who was ever conquering Love but I!Who else did ever throne in heart of man!To visible being, with a gladsome cryWaking, life’s tremor through me throbbing ran!”
A strange, repulsive feline wail arose somewhere in the room. I started up on my elbow and stared about me, but could see nothing.
Mr. Raven turned several leaves, and went on:—
“Sudden I woke, nor knew the ghastly fearThat held me—not like serpent coiled about,But like a vapour moist, corrupt, and drear,Filling heart, soul, and breast and brain throughout;My being lay motionless in sickening doubt,Nor dared to ask how came the horror here.“My past entire I knew, but not my now;I understood nor what I was, nor where;I knew what I had been: still on my browI felt the touch of what no more was there!I was a fainting, dead, yet live Despair;A life that flouted life with mop and mow!“That I was a queen I knew right well,And sometimes wore a splendour on my headWhose flashing even dead darkness could not quell—The like on neck and arms and girdle-stead;And men declared a light my closed eyes shedThat killed the diamond in its silver cell.”
Again I heard the ugly cry of feline pain. Again I looked, but saw neither shape nor motion. Mr. Raven seemed to listen a moment, but again turned several pages, and resumed:—
“Hideously wet, my hair of golden hueFouled my fair hands: to have it swiftly shornI had given my rubies, all for me dug new—No eyes had seen, and such no waist had worn!For a draught of water from a drinking horn,For one blue breath, I had given my sapphires blue!“Nay, I had given my opals for a smock,A peasant-maiden’s garment, coarse and clean:My shroud was rotting! Once I heard a cockLustily crow upon the hillock greenOver my coffin. Dulled by space between,Came back an answer like a ghostly mock.”
Once more arose the bestial wail.
“I thought some foul thing was in the room!” said the librarian, casting a glance around him; but instantly he turned a leaf or two, and again read:—
“For I had bathed in milk and honey-dew,In rain from roses shook, that ne’er touched earth,And ointed me with nard of amber hue;Never had spot me spotted from my birth,Or mole, or scar of hurt, or fret of dearth;Never one hair superfluous on me grew.“Fleeing cold whiteness, I would sit alone—Not in the sun—I feared his bronzing light,But in his radiance back around me thrownBy fulgent mirrors tempering his might;Thus bathing in a moon-bath not too bright,My skin I tinted slow to ivory tone.“But now, all round was dark, dark all within!My eyes not even gave out a phantom-flash;My fingers sank in pulp through pulpy skin;My body lay death-weltered in a mashOf slimy horrors——”
With a fearsome yell, her clammy fur staring in clumps, her tail thick as a cable, her eyes flashing green as a chrysoprase, her distended claws entangling themselves so that she floundered across the carpet, a huge white cat rushed from somewhere, and made for the chimney. Quick as thought the librarian threw the manuscript between her and the hearth. She crouched instantly, her eyes fixed on the book. But his voice went on as if still he read, and his eyes seemed also fixed on the book:—
“Ah, the two worlds! so strangely are they one,And yet so measurelessly wide apart!Oh, had I lived the bodiless aloneAnd from defiling sense held safe my heart,Then had I scaped the canker and the smart,Scaped life-in-death, scaped misery’s endless moan!”
At these words such a howling, such a prolonged yell of agony burst from the cat, that we both stopped our ears. When it ceased, Mr. Raven walked to the fire-place, took up the book, and, standing between the creature and the chimney, pointed his finger at her for a moment. She lay perfectly still. He took a half-burnt stick from the hearth, drew with it some sign on the floor, put the manuscript back in its place, with a look that seemed to say, “Now we have her, I think!” and, returning to the cat, stood over her and said, in a still, solemn voice:—
“Lilith, when you came here on the way to your evil will, you little thought into whose hands you were delivering yourself!—Mr. Vane, when God created me,—not out of Nothing, as say the unwise, but out of His own endless glory—He brought me an angelic splendour to be my wife: there she lies! For her first thought was POWER; she counted it slavery to be one with me, and bear children for Him who gave her being. One child, indeed, she bore; then, puffed with the fancy that she had created her, would have me fall down and worship her! Finding, however, that I would but love and honour, never obey and worship her, she poured out her blood to escape me, fled to the army of the aliens, and soon had so ensnared the heart of the great Shadow, that he became her slave, wrought her will, and made her queen of Hell. How it is with her now, she best knows, but I know also. The one child of her body she fears and hates, and would kill, asserting a right, which is a lie, over what God sent through her into His new world. Of creating, she knows no more than the crystal that takes its allotted shape, or the worm that makes two worms when it is cloven asunder. Vilest of God’s creatures, she lives by the blood and lives and souls of men. She consumes and slays, but is powerless to destroy as to create.”
The animal lay motionless, its beryl eyes fixed flaming on the man: his eyes on hers held them fixed that they could not move from his.
“Then God gave me another wife—not an angel but a woman—who is to this as light is to darkness.”
The cat gave a horrible screech, and began to grow bigger. She went on growing and growing. At last the spotted leopardess uttered a roar that made the house tremble. I sprang to my feet. I do not think Mr. Raven started even with his eyelids.
“It is but her jealousy that speaks,” he said, “jealousy self-kindled, foiled and fruitless; for here I am, her master now whom she, would not have for her husband! while my beautiful Eve yet lives, hoping immortally! Her hated daughter lives also, but beyond her evil ken, one day to be what she counts her destruction—for even Lilith shall be saved by her childbearing. Meanwhile she exults that my human wife plunged herself and me in despair, and has borne me a countless race of miserables; but my Eve repented, and is now beautiful as never was woman or angel, while her groaning, travailing world is the nursery of our Father’s children. I too have repented, and am blessed.—Thou, Lilith, hast not yet repented; but thou must.—Tell me, is the great Shadow beautiful? Knowest thou how long thou wilt thyself remain beautiful?—Answer me, if thou knowest.”
Then at last I understood that Mr. Raven was indeed Adam, the old and the new man; and that his wife, ministering in the house of the dead, was Eve, the mother of us all, the lady of the New Jerusalem.
The leopardess reared; the flickering and fleeing of her spots began; the princess at length stood radiant in her perfect shape.
“I AM beautiful—and immortal!” she said—and she looked the goddess she would be.
“As a bush that burns, and is consumed,” answered he who had been her husband. “—What is that under thy right hand?”
For her arm lay across her bosom, and her hand was pressed to her side.
A swift pang contorted her beautiful face, and passed.
“It is but a leopard-spot that lingers! it will quickly follow those I have dismissed,” she answered.
“Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art the slave of sin: take thy hand from thy side.”
Her hand sank away, and as it dropt she looked him in the eyes with a quailing fierceness that had in it no surrender.
He gazed a moment at the spot.
“It is not on the leopard; it is in the woman!” he said. “Nor will it leave thee until it hath eaten to thy heart, and thy beauty hath flowed from thee through the open wound!”
She gave a glance downward, and shivered.
“Lilith,” said Adam, and his tone had changed to a tender beseeching, “hear me, and repent, and He who made thee will cleanse thee!”
Her hand returned quivering to her side. Her face grew dark. She gave the cry of one from whom hope is vanishing. The cry passed into a howl. She lay writhing on the floor, a leopardess covered with spots.
“The evil thou meditatest,” Adam resumed, “thou shalt never compass, Lilith, for Good and not Evil is the Universe. The battle between them may last for countless ages, but it must end: how will it fare with thee when Time hath vanished in the dawn of the eternal morn? Repent, I beseech thee; repent, and be again an angel of God!”
She rose, she stood upright, a woman once more, and said,
“I will not repent. I will drink the blood of thy child.” My eyes were fastened on the princess; but when Adam spoke, I turned to him: he stood towering above her; the form of his visage was altered, and his voice was terrible.
“Down!” he cried; “or by the power given me I will melt thy very bones.”
She flung herself on the floor, dwindled and dwindled, and was again a gray cat. Adam caught her up by the skin of her neck, bore her to the closet, and threw her in. He described a strange figure on the threshold, and closing the door, locked it.
Then he returned to my side the old librarian, looking sad and worn, and furtively wiping tears from his eyes.
“We must be on our guard,” he said, “or she will again outwit us. She would befool the very elect!”
“How are we to be on our guard?” I asked.
“Every way,” he answered. “She fears, therefore hates her child, and is in this house on her way to destroy her. The birth of children is in her eyes the death of their parents, and every new generation the enemy of the last. Her daughter appears to her an open channel through which her immortality—which yet she counts self-inherent—is flowing fast away: to fill it up, almost from her birth she has pursued her with an utter enmity. But the result of her machinations hitherto is, that in the region she claims as her own, has appeared a colony of children, to which that daughter is heart and head and sheltering wings. My Eve longed after the child, and would have been to her as a mother to her first-born, but we were then unfit to train her: she was carried into the wilderness, and for ages we knew nothing of her fate. But she was divinely fostered, and had young angels for her playmates; nor did she ever know care until she found a baby in the wood, and the mother-heart in her awoke. One by one she has found many children since, and that heart is not yet full. Her family is her absorbing charge, and never children were better mothered. Her authority over them is without appeal, but it is unknown to herself, and never comes to the surface except in watchfulness and service. She has forgotten the time when she lived without them, and thinks she came herself from the wood, the first of the family.
“You have saved the life of her and their enemy; therefore your life belongs to her and them. The princess was on her way to destroy them, but as she crossed that stream, vengeance overtook her, and she would have died had you not come to her aid. You did; and ere now she would have been raging among the Little Ones, had she dared again cross the stream. But there was yet a way to the blessed little colony through the world of the three dimensions; only, from that, by the slaying of her former body, she had excluded herself, and except in personal contact with one belonging to it, could not re-enter it. You provided the opportunity: never, in all her long years, had she had one before. Her hand, with lightest touch, was on one or other of your muffled feet, every step as you climbed. In that little chamber, she is now watching to leave it as soon as ever she may.”
“She cannot know anything about the door!—she cannot at least know how to open it!” I said; but my heart was not so confident as my words.
“Hush, hush!” whispered the librarian, with uplifted hand; “she can hear through anything!—You must go at once, and make your way to my wife’s cottage. I will remain to keep guard over her.”
“Let me go to the Little Ones!” I cried.
“Beware of that, Mr. Vane. Go to my wife, and do as she tells you.”
His advice did not recommend itself: why haste to encounter measureless delay? If not to protect the children, why go at all? Alas, even now I believed him only enough to ask him questions, not to obey him!
“Tell me first, Mr. Raven,” I said, “why, of all places, you have shut her up there! The night I ran from your house, it was immediately into that closet!”
“The closet is no nearer our cottage, and no farther from it, than any or every other place.”
“But,” I returned, hard to persuade where I could not understand, “how is it then that, when you please, you take from that same door a whole book where I saw and felt only a part of one? The other part, you have just told me, stuck through into your library: when you put it again on the shelf, will it not again stick through into that? Must not then the two places, in which parts of the same volume can at the same moment exist, lie close together? Or can one part of the book be in space, or SOMEWHERE, and the other out of space, or NOWHERE?”
“I am sorry I cannot explain the thing to you,” he answered; “but there is no provision in you for understanding it. Not merely, therefore, is the phenomenon inexplicable to you, but the very nature of it is inapprehensible by you. Indeed I but partially apprehend it myself. At the same time you are constantly experiencing things which you not only do not, but cannot understand. You think you understand them, but your understanding of them is only your being used to them, and therefore not surprised at them. You accept them, not because you understand them, but because you must accept them: they are there, and have unavoidable relations with you! The fact is, no man understands anything; when he knows he does not understand, that is his first tottering step—not toward understanding, but toward the capability of one day understanding. To such things as these you are not used, therefore you do not fancy you understand them. Neither I nor any man can here help you to understand; but I may, perhaps, help you a little to believe!”
He went to the door of the closet, gave a low whistle, and stood listening. A moment after, I heard, or seemed to hear, a soft whir of wings, and, looking up, saw a white dove perch for an instant on the top of the shelves over the portrait, thence drop to Mr. Raven’s shoulder, and lay her head against his cheek. Only by the motions of their two heads could I tell that they were talking together; I heard nothing. Neither had I moved my eyes from them, when suddenly she was not there, and Mr. Raven came back to his seat.
“Why did you whistle?” I asked. “Surely sound here is not sound there!”
“You are right,” he answered. “I whistled that you might know I called her. Not the whistle, but what the whistle meant reached her.—There is not a minute to lose: you must go!”
“I will at once!” I replied, and moved for the door.
“You will sleep to-night at my hostelry!” he said—not as a question, but in a tone of mild authority.
“My heart is with the children,” I replied. “But if you insist——”
“I do insist. You can otherwise effect nothing.—I will go with you as far as the mirror, and see you off.”
He rose. There came a sudden shock in the closet. Apparently the leopardess had flung herself against the heavy door. I looked at my companion.
“Come; come!” he said.
Ere we reached the door of the library, a howling yell came after us, mingled with the noise of claws that scored at the hard oak. I hesitated, and half turned.
“To think of her lying there alone,” I murmured, “—with that terrible wound!”
“Nothing will ever close that wound,” he answered, with a sigh. “It must eat into her heart! Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”
I held my peace until a sound I did not understand overtook us.
“If she should break loose!” I cried.
“Make haste!” he rejoined. “I shall hurry down the moment you are gone, and I have disarranged the mirrors.”
We ran, and reached the wooden chamber breathless. Mr. Raven seized the chains and adjusted the hood. Then he set the mirrors in their proper relation, and came beside me in front of the standing one. Already I saw the mountain range emerging from the mist.
Between us, wedging us asunder, darted, with the yell of a demon, the huge bulk of the spotted leopardess. She leaped through the mirror as through an open window, and settled at once into a low, even, swift gallop.
I cast a look of dismay at my companion, and sprang through to follow her. He came after me leisurely.
“You need not run,” he called; “you cannot overtake her. This is our way.”
As he spoke he turned in the opposite direction.
“She has more magic at her finger-tips than I care to know!” he added quietly.
“We must do what we can!” I said, and ran on, but sickening as I saw her dwindle in the distance, stopped, and went back to him.
“Doubtless we must,” he answered. “But my wife has warned Mara, and she will do her part; you must sleep first: you have given me your word!”
“Nor do I mean to break it. But surely sleep is not the first thing! Surely, surely, action takes precedence of repose!”
“A man can do nothing he is not fit to do.—See! did I not tell you Mara would do her part?”
I looked whither he pointed, and saw a white spot moving at an acute angle with the line taken by the leopardess.
“There she is!” he cried. “The spotted leopardess is strong, but the white is stronger!”
“I have seen them fight: the combat did not appear decisive as to that.”
“How should such eyes tell which have never slept? The princess did not confess herself beaten—that she never does—but she fled! When she confesses her last hope gone, that it is indeed hard to kick against the goad, then will her day begin to dawn! Come; come! He who cannot act must make haste to sleep!”