CHAPTER V
That afternoon we went to the city and Moonbeam with us.
There is no doubt we made a very happy party, and the journey, though long as regards distance, was very quickly accomplished in a light and comfortable vehicle borne by six horses swift as the wind, and beautiful as perfect strength and freedom make them.
Mountains and valleys, level roads and shining rivers, we crossed and passed. In itself this drive was exhilarating, and the beauty of the scenes through which we journeyed was unrivalled.
When we first came in sight of the city it was from the brow of a steep hill our horses had climbed with perfect ease and freshness. The sun was setting as we came there, and what is sunset but the beauty of variety to those whose sun can never set?
How magnificent it was only the eye of pure thought can ever truly see, yet with almost marvellous exactness it resembled hell.
When we came to the city twilight had fallen, and cheerful lights shone from each curtained window.
A few of their more intimate friends were there to greet us at the door, and among the number Philemon, Moonbeam’s brother.
Now, had Philemon lived on this earth he would have been called a little shrivel of a fellow, for he was no higher than five feet, and extremely thin. But there was about him the nameless strength and beauty which marked them all.
“That’s Philemon,” said Sunbeam to me as Moonbeam was kissing him, and to see their apparent delight at thus unexpectedly meeting was very pleasing. “Come along, let us go to them.” So we went.
“Hullo, Sunbeam, you’re not an inch taller since I saw you last. Follow my advice and keep little, and when you’re old enough I’ll marry you.”
“You see,” he explained, turning to me, “it’s hard on a fellow when his wife is taller than he is himself. Now, my ambition is to marry someone exactly six inches smaller than myself, but so far I have found nobody.”
“Your ambition is a very lofty one,” I put in.
“And like all such, impossible of accomplishment,” he sighed.
“This is my brother Philemon,” said Moonbeam.
“This is my brother Genius,” said Sunbeam.
“I’ve been telling him all about you,” she went on confidentially. “How good you are at making beds.”
“Making beds!” he cried. “Why don’t you use longer words? You should call me a celebrated physician, then people would respect me.”
“Well, I was only repeating what mother said.”
“She told you that a long time ago. It’s time you were advancing. Making beds! Well, I never thought you would have given me away like that, Sunbeam.”
She only laughed, as did Moonbeam, and they stood with their arms round each other lovingly.
“Well, now, tell me something of Genius that is plebeian and paltry. I feel such an undeniable jealousy rising within me that I shall not be able to battle with it long,” observed Philemon.
“I’ve only known him since yesterday, so I can’t tell you anything,” returned Sunbeam.
“You said he was your brother.”
“He’s my brother-in-law.”
“Vestasian?” said Philemon, and stepped back so quickly, and cast such a sharp, piercing eye on me, that I wondered, and then felt some explanation might be needed.
“It is a purely imaginary relationship,” I remarked. “I am neither Sunbeam’s brother nor her brother-in-law, neither am I Vestasian.”
“I did not catch your name,” he hinted.
“They call me Genius.”
“But what do you call yourself?”
“I don’t know that I ever gave two serious thoughts to it.”
“Indeed!” he exclaimed, and then moved away, taking Sunbeam and Moonbeam along with him. The antics of youth had evidently developed into the peculiarity of years, because during the remainder of the evening he watched me most attentively and persistently.
A little later I found him in earnest conversation with Virginius, in which he seemed to be trying to insist upon Virginius seeing things in the same light as himself, but the latter was listening with incredulous amusement, and left him laughing.
That night after dinner, when he and I were alone together, he began,—
“Philemon notices a strong resemblance between you and Vestasian—so strong that he persists in saying you are he.”
“Oh, Lord!” I groaned.
“What did you say?”
“I said ‘Oh, Lord!’ But by that I meant to convey the impression that it is very distasteful to be so mistaken. Surely in heaven there is peace from muddle.”
“I don’t know. You began it, so doubtless it may continue.”
“But I never let my ambition soar so high as to touch him. Moreover, till very recently I had never seen him.”
“Well,” said Virginius, “I don’t know, now that it has been mentioned to me, but that I can detect a likeness.”
“So can I detect one between you and Plucritus.”
He laughed. “Have a smoke,” he suggested, “You will find that pleasure counteracts irritation.”
After a pause he continued,—
“Did you see much of Vestasian whilst in hell?”
“Very little, till near the end.”
“And what was your opinion of him?”
“At the time I distrusted, yet liked him. Looking backward I regret I saw so little of him.”
“He took the trouble to be agreeable, then?”
“I don’t know that he put himself to any trouble. But he was so very fascinating that for once I forgot my own individuality in listening to his experience of life.”
“He spoke of himself?”
“Oh, yes, always. I never knew him refer much to any other—except his wife. He rarely mentioned the earth; he told me he did not find it interesting and rarely went there.”
“He found it interesting enough to go there and stir up feud sufficient for centuries, and having done that, tired of the game and tired of the plaything, he retired to hell.”
“Do you know him well?”
“In the long ages back, before the earth was peopled, we were friends. Since then,” and Virginius smiled, “he has become my son-in-law.”
“Yet now you are no longer friends.”
“On all points but one we would be friendly. Our bone of contention is the earth and planets peopled like it.”
“I did not know that his wife was one of your daughters.”
“She is my eldest daughter—Purity—the loveliest flower that even heaven ever grew. The gentlest and most innocent child that ever gladdened parents’ heart.”
He spoke of her with love and quiet pride, with no trace of the bitterness and sadness I had expected.
I looked at him.
“Could this capture not have been prevented? Was it not a very dangerous risk to let so young a creature out alone?”
He shook his head.
“Vestasian did not tell you all the story then? My daughter went by design and counsel of all in Heaven. She alone was free from anxiety or care, for she was innocent. But,” he continued, “I will tell you more of this another time. Let us walk out on the terrace and view the city.”
The beauty of a perfect night had invested all things. Clustering roses with delicious scent twined in rich trailing loveliness round the marble balustrade; and where the steps wound down about a pillar, lilies sprang up from base to cornice, pure and beautiful and large.
We came into the street. It was scarcely such a one as we know. From open windows floated the sound of music soft and far away. Fountains were still playing, and the water swayed slightly in the passing breeze. Here and there among the wild luxuriant flowers, where no weeds grew, a swift form was moving, surrounded by that faint, pure light that needs no sun to show the path they tread. Overhead, arches like faint rainbows, tingling with silvery light, spanned each street across the whole vast city.
Virginius led me on through many streets till we came to a simple bridge that crossed the river. In the middle of the bridge we stood and looked both down and up the river.
Its waters sparkled, and the cheerful ripple of the tiny waves, as they dashed against the pillars below, made such merry music that one almost thought to hear the fairy voices burst into some articulate song. There was no gurgle here, no deep, alluring blackness, no sad and heavy silence that drew the sad and heavy spirit down to its sadder depths.
“You need no wine-cellars here,” said I. “This water would intoxicate the strongest spirit, and give such happiness and delight that those on earth, once having and then missing it, would pine and die for lack of it.”
“I think not,” Virginius dissented. “It is the great medicine, the simple, harmless cure, whose effect is so sure that it lasts through life, even though it be but in the memory.”
Passage omitted
“One does not need to taste it once a week or once a month, as the case may be, its effects on the earth will last a lifetime. And here in heaven it becomes a pleasant, invigorating, everyday drink, surrounded by no false evaporation of mystery.”
“I have often wondered what Christ’s object was in instituting the Last Supper.”
“Christ or Jesus?”
“You recognise them as separate?”
“Yes,” he answered. “But the stronger power enveloped the lesser, so that the frailty of the simple man was hidden by the working of an untamable spirit, though they mingled.”
Then he took up the thread of our previous conversation.
“You asked as to His object in instituting His Last Supper. I think it was because He did not want to be forgotten. He simply wished to be remembered at His disciples’ meal times, not as a damper at the feast but as a loving friend, who had often sat with them before and shared the simple meal. He was hospitable and sociable, and even in His last meal showed His extreme simplicity. He said ‘Remember Me at meal times,’ and for my own part I think many tired folk get more of His spirit out of a cup of tea or milk or other refreshment that will invigorate them than ever they get from a formal cup of wine passed automatically from hand to hand.”
Virginius spoke softly, with a kind of sympathetic love, as if he understood the man of whom he spoke.
“But,” he continued, “on the other hand, was Christ, the Master Spirit of that age and others, showing the Spiritual Sacrifice by the bodily death this poor unerring carpenter underwent?”
Virginius stretched his arms over the wooden rail and leant against the bridge.
“Jesus, the Man, was the illustration in the object lesson of Christ the Teacher, and His Life was the picture that explained.”
“But very little of His life is known.”
Virginius laughed.
“The teacher became so worked up on His pet subject that He forgot His illustrations and pictures till too late. But He was a marvellous teacher for all that, and when He was gone the pupils turned to look at the pictures and the illustrations He had left, and they made a few slight mistakes in following them out, and some few pages He had carried along with Him into Silence.”
“Then you give two distinct spirits to the one man.”
“I will explain it later. What do you think of Heaven?”
“I cannot say. I thought once it was possible to express happiness and appreciation in words, but words fail me. I would have all feel what I myself have here experienced, for I could never explain it to the full, words are but idle repetition.”
“If you were put to it, do you not think you could write some explanation?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t think so. The task would be too difficult and delicate. Every note would fall flat, I can imagine nothing more hopeless.”
He laughed.
“Could you describe hell?”
“No. That would be as hopeless.”
“And you seem to have no power to describe the earth.”
“I am very profitless. Had you not had compassion I cannot tell what would have become of me.”
After that we went back again to the house. Our mother met us on the terrace, where she was walking slowly back and forwards waiting. Soon after we all retired for the night, but as we passed the room where Sunbeam and Moonbeam were sleeping she opened the door and went in.
They were fast asleep, and Sunbeam’s head was resting sweetly on the other’s shoulder. They looked most lovely lying thus, yet as our mother stopped to kiss them she was by far the loveliest of the three. The purest, rosiest light of love shone round her, giving her a radiant, heavenly loveliness full of wisdom and purity and strength. They looked like beautiful, delicate-tinted shadows of a future substance; she like a glorious reality radiating youth and freshness with every breath and movement.
With eyes shining in an ecstasy of love she turned to Virginius and put a hand on either shoulder, and drew him towards her, and kissed him too.
That night I slept, happy and peaceful. But one night was only as the others were, for never here did one lie down to sleep when the joyous day was over but one felt tired without being weary, sleepy without fatigue.