I who write this am called Moâ the Bonze. What I write of I witnessed in a walled city of Judea. I travelled there attracted by the report of miraculous happenings brought about by the magic art of a youthful barbarian called Ieshua. The day I arrived in the city they had sentenced the wise man to death by crucifixion. I was disappointed. I had come many moons and many leagues from the Yellow Kingdom to see something rare. I was too late. The magician, whom his disciples called a god, had been executed. I tarried a few days in the city. After many questions put to beggars and outcasts, I heard that a certain woman of rank had a portrait of Ieshua. I called and without hesitation asked her to show me this picture. She was an exalted soul. She wept bitter tears as she drewfrom a secret cabinet a scarf upon which was imprinted a bloody image. She continued to weep as I made a copy of the head. I confess I was not impressed. The face was bearded and ugly. The new god was said to have been as fair as the sun. And I told the woman this. She only wept the more."If he were a god," I asked, "where are outward evidences?" She became frantic."The real man!" she cried; "thisone died for the man he betrayed," and again fell to lamenting. Seeing I could gain nothing more from her, I left, wondering at the strange heretics I had encountered. I went back to my country and after weaving this tale and painting the head, there awaited the fifth Buddha, the successor to Siddartha, whose coming has been predicted.
I who write this am called Moâ the Bonze. What I write of I witnessed in a walled city of Judea. I travelled there attracted by the report of miraculous happenings brought about by the magic art of a youthful barbarian called Ieshua. The day I arrived in the city they had sentenced the wise man to death by crucifixion. I was disappointed. I had come many moons and many leagues from the Yellow Kingdom to see something rare. I was too late. The magician, whom his disciples called a god, had been executed. I tarried a few days in the city. After many questions put to beggars and outcasts, I heard that a certain woman of rank had a portrait of Ieshua. I called and without hesitation asked her to show me this picture. She was an exalted soul. She wept bitter tears as she drewfrom a secret cabinet a scarf upon which was imprinted a bloody image. She continued to weep as I made a copy of the head. I confess I was not impressed. The face was bearded and ugly. The new god was said to have been as fair as the sun. And I told the woman this. She only wept the more.
"If he were a god," I asked, "where are outward evidences?" She became frantic.
"The real man!" she cried; "thisone died for the man he betrayed," and again fell to lamenting. Seeing I could gain nothing more from her, I left, wondering at the strange heretics I had encountered. I went back to my country and after weaving this tale and painting the head, there awaited the fifth Buddha, the successor to Siddartha, whose coming has been predicted.
Arn's voice ceased. There was silence in the chamber. Then Effinghame started up and fiercely growled:—
"What doyoumake of it, Arn?"
"Isn't it clear enough? There's been a frightful error somewhere, one of incalculable consequences. A tremendous act of heroism has been committed by a man whose name has been universally execrated through the ages. Perhaps he repented at the eleventh hour and by some means impersonated his betrayed friend; perhaps—"
"But thatotherbody found in the blastedfield of Aceldama!" demanded the agitated Effinghame. Dr. Arn did not answer.
After a lugubrious pause, he whispered:—
"There's more to follow. You haven't heard the worst."
"What—more! I thought your damnable old Bonze died in the odour of sanctity over there in his Yellow Kingdom."
"True. He died. But before he died he recorded a vision he had. It is inscribed on the other side of the fan."
Effinghame's features lengthened.
"Still the same fan."
"The same. Here is what it prophesies." Reversing the clumsy fan, Arn again read:—
Before I pass over into Nirvana I must relate what I saw in the country of the Christians. It was not a dream. It was too real. And yet it is to be, for it has not yet happened. The Campagna was now become a shallow lake from the sea almost to the Sabine Mountains. What had been Rome was a black waste spot, full of stones and weeds. And no two stones stood together. Ah! our war with the white races had been successful. We had not used their fighting machines, as did that nation of little brown men, the Japanese. The Chinese were too sage. They allowed the Christians to exterminate the Japanese; but when they attacked us and attempted to rob us of our land, we merely resorted to our old-time weapon—the Odour-Death.With it we smothered their armies, sunk their navies, swept through their countries like the simoon. The awful secret of the Odour-Death is one that has been ours from the beginning of time. Known only to the College of Bonzes, it was never used except in extreme peril. Its smell is more revolting in its consequences than the Black Plague. It ravaged the earth.I sat in a flat-bottomed boat, enjoying the soft melancholy Italian evening. Not a human did I see; nor had I encountered one on my slow voyage from the Middle Seas. In meditation I pondered the ultimate wisdom of Confucius and smiled at the folly of the white barbarians who had tried to show us a new god, a new religion. At last they, too, had succumbed like the nations before their era. The temple of Jupiter on the Capitol had fallen, so had the holy temple of Jerusalem. And now St. Peter's. Their central religion had been destroyed, and yet prophecies of the second coming of their divinity had not been accomplished. When the last Pope of Rome dies, so it was said, then time would be accomplished. The last Popehaddied. Their basilica with its mighty dome was a desert where scorpions and snakes abounded. The fifth Buddha would appear, not the second Christos. Suddenly I saw before me in a puny boat a beautiful beardless youth. He was attired in some symbolical garments and upon his head a triple tiara. I could not believe my aged eyes. He sat upright. His attitude washieratic. His eyes were lifted heavenwards. He clasped his hands and prayed:—"O Lord, remove thy servant. The time is at hand foretold by thy slaughtered saints. I am the last Pope and the humblest of thy servants. Though the heathen hath triumphed upon the earth, I go to thy bosom, for all things are now accomplished." And he tumbled forward, dead. The last Pope! I had seen him. Nothing could happen after that.And as I turned my boat in the direction of the sea a moaning came upon the waters. The sky became as brass. A roar, like the rending asunder of the firmament, caused my soul to expand with horror and joy. Yes, timewasaccomplished. The last Pope had uttered the truth. Eternity was nigh. But the Buddha would now prove to the multitudes awakened from their long sleep thatHe, not other gods, was the true, the only God. In a flare of light sounded the trumpets of destiny; eternity unrolled before me, and on the vast plain I saw the bones of the buried dead uniting, as men and women from time's beginnings arose in an army, the number whereof is unthinkable. And oh! abomination of desolation, the White Horse, notKalkithe tenth incarnation of Vishnu, but the animal foretold intheirApocalypse, came through the lightnings, and in the whirlwinds of flame and thunder I saw the shining face of Him, the Son of Man! Where our Buddha? Alas! the last Pope spake truth. I, Moâ the Bonze, tellyou this ere it be too late to repent your sins and forswear your false gods. The Galilean is our master....
Before I pass over into Nirvana I must relate what I saw in the country of the Christians. It was not a dream. It was too real. And yet it is to be, for it has not yet happened. The Campagna was now become a shallow lake from the sea almost to the Sabine Mountains. What had been Rome was a black waste spot, full of stones and weeds. And no two stones stood together. Ah! our war with the white races had been successful. We had not used their fighting machines, as did that nation of little brown men, the Japanese. The Chinese were too sage. They allowed the Christians to exterminate the Japanese; but when they attacked us and attempted to rob us of our land, we merely resorted to our old-time weapon—the Odour-Death.With it we smothered their armies, sunk their navies, swept through their countries like the simoon. The awful secret of the Odour-Death is one that has been ours from the beginning of time. Known only to the College of Bonzes, it was never used except in extreme peril. Its smell is more revolting in its consequences than the Black Plague. It ravaged the earth.
I sat in a flat-bottomed boat, enjoying the soft melancholy Italian evening. Not a human did I see; nor had I encountered one on my slow voyage from the Middle Seas. In meditation I pondered the ultimate wisdom of Confucius and smiled at the folly of the white barbarians who had tried to show us a new god, a new religion. At last they, too, had succumbed like the nations before their era. The temple of Jupiter on the Capitol had fallen, so had the holy temple of Jerusalem. And now St. Peter's. Their central religion had been destroyed, and yet prophecies of the second coming of their divinity had not been accomplished. When the last Pope of Rome dies, so it was said, then time would be accomplished. The last Popehaddied. Their basilica with its mighty dome was a desert where scorpions and snakes abounded. The fifth Buddha would appear, not the second Christos. Suddenly I saw before me in a puny boat a beautiful beardless youth. He was attired in some symbolical garments and upon his head a triple tiara. I could not believe my aged eyes. He sat upright. His attitude washieratic. His eyes were lifted heavenwards. He clasped his hands and prayed:—
"O Lord, remove thy servant. The time is at hand foretold by thy slaughtered saints. I am the last Pope and the humblest of thy servants. Though the heathen hath triumphed upon the earth, I go to thy bosom, for all things are now accomplished." And he tumbled forward, dead. The last Pope! I had seen him. Nothing could happen after that.
And as I turned my boat in the direction of the sea a moaning came upon the waters. The sky became as brass. A roar, like the rending asunder of the firmament, caused my soul to expand with horror and joy. Yes, timewasaccomplished. The last Pope had uttered the truth. Eternity was nigh. But the Buddha would now prove to the multitudes awakened from their long sleep thatHe, not other gods, was the true, the only God. In a flare of light sounded the trumpets of destiny; eternity unrolled before me, and on the vast plain I saw the bones of the buried dead uniting, as men and women from time's beginnings arose in an army, the number whereof is unthinkable. And oh! abomination of desolation, the White Horse, notKalkithe tenth incarnation of Vishnu, but the animal foretold intheirApocalypse, came through the lightnings, and in the whirlwinds of flame and thunder I saw the shining face of Him, the Son of Man! Where our Buddha? Alas! the last Pope spake truth. I, Moâ the Bonze, tellyou this ere it be too late to repent your sins and forswear your false gods. The Galilean is our master....
"Farceur!Do you know what I would do with that accursed fan? I'd destroy it, sell it, get rid of it somehow. Or else—" Effinghame scrutinized the doctor, whose eyes were closed—"or else I would return to the pious practices of my old religion." No smile crossed the face of his friend as he firmly held the fighting fan, the iron and mystical fan of theSamurai.
When Marco Davos left Ischl on the midday train, that picturesque, huddled Austrian watering-place was stuffy. He was surprised then most pleasantly by the coolness of Aussee, further down the line in the direction of Vienna. Ischl is not a bad place, but it lies, as the natives say, smothered in a kettle. He rode over from the station to the stadt park, where the band was playing. There he dismounted, for he was going further—Aussee is not very interesting, but it principally serves as a good starting-point for trips to many of the charming lakes with which Styria is dotted. After asking his way, Davos passed the swimming baths, and keeping on the left bank of a tiny stream, he presently found himself walking through an earthly paradise. Since his advent in Ischl, where he drank the waters and endeavoured to quiet his overtaxed nerves, he had made up his mind to visit Alt-Aussee; several Viennese friends had assured him that this hamlet, beneath a terrific precipiceand on the borders of a fairy-like lake, would be well worth the while.
It was a relief to breathe the thinner mountain air, and the young artist inhaled it with satisfaction, his big hat in hand, his long curly black hair flowing in the gentle breeze. He found himself in tunnels of verdure, the sunlight shut off by the heavy leafage; then the path debouched into the open and, skirting closely the rocky wall, it widened into an island of green where a shady pagoda invited. He sat down for a few minutes and congratulated himself that he had escaped the intimate discomforts of the omnibus he discerned on the opposite bank, packed with stout people. This was the third week of his vacation, one enforced by a nerve specialist in the Austrian capital, and for the first time Davos felt almost cheerful. Perhaps the absolute hush of the country and the purity of the atmosphere, with its suggestion of recent rain,—the skies weep at least once a day in the Salzkammergut region,—proved a welcome foil to fashionable Ischl, with its crowds, its stiffness, its court ceremonial—for the emperor enjoys hisvillegiaturathere. And Davos was sick and irritable after a prolonged musical season. He had studied the pianoforte with Rosenthal, and his success, from his début, had been so unequivocal that he played too much in public. There was a fiery particle in his interpretations of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt that proclaimed the temperament, if not the actualpossession, of genius. Still in his early manhood—he was only twenty—the maturity of his musical intelligence and the poetry of his style created havoc in impressionable hearts. With his mixed blood, Hungarian and Italian, Marco Davos' performance of romantic composers was irresistible; in it there was something of Pachmann's wayward grace and Paderewski's plangency, but with an added infusion of gypsy wildness which evoked for old concert-goers memories of Liszt the brilliant rhapsodist.
But he soon overpaid the score presented by the goddess Fortune—his nerves were sadly jangled. A horror of the human face obsessed his waking and sleeping hours; he dreamed of colossal countenances with threatening eyes, a vast composite of the audiences he nightly faced. As his popularity increased the waning of his self-respect told him that he must go into retreat, anywhere out of the musical world—else would his art suffer. It did suffer. The nervous diffidence, called stage-fright, which had never assailed his supreme self-balance, intruded its unwelcome presence. Marco, several months after he had discovered all these mischievous symptoms, the maladies of artistic adolescence, was not assured when the critics hinted of them—the public would surely follow suit in a few weeks. Then came the visit to the learned Viennese doctor and the trip to Ischl. A few more months of this appalling absorption in his own personality, this morbid marriage of man tohis own image, and he suspected that his brain would be irretrievably injured.
He was a curious student of matters psychologic as well as musical. A friendly laboratory had inducted him into many biologic mysteries. Particularly fascinating to him was the tactile sense, that sense of touch wherewith man acquaints himself with this earth-clot swimming in space. Davos contemplated the tips of his fingers as he sat in the grateful cool, his ten voices as he named them. With them he sang, thundered, and thought upon the keyboard of his grand piano-forte. A miracle, indeed, these slender cushions of fat, ramified by a network of nerves, sinews, and bones as exquisite in their mechanism as the motion of the planets. If hearing is a miracle, so is touch; the ear is not a resonator, as has been so long maintained, but an apparatus which records variations of pressure. This makes it subservient to the laws of sensation; touch and hearing are akin. It aroused the pride of Davos after he had read the revolutionary theories of Pierre Bounier regarding the touch. So subtle could the art of touch be cultivated, the pianist believed, that the blind couldfeelcolour on the canvas of the painter. He spent weeks experimenting with a sensitive manometer, gauging all the scale of dynamics. No doubt these fumblings on the edge of a new science temporarily hurt his play. With a dangerous joy he pressed the keys of his instrument, endeavouring to achieve more delicate shadings. He quarrelled with the piano manufacturers for their obstinate adherence to the old-fashioned clumsy action; everything had been improved but the keyboard—that alone was as coldly unresponsive and inelastic as a half-century ago. He had fugitive dreams of wires that would vibrate like a violin. The sounding-board of a pianoforte is too far from the pianist, while the violinist presses his strings as one kisses the beloved. Little wonder it is the musical monarch. A new pianoforte, with passionately coloured overtones, that could sob like a violoncello, sing like a violin, and resound with the brazen clangours of the orchestra—Liszt had conceived this synthesis, had by the sheer force of his audacious genius compelled from his instrument ravishing tones that were never heard before or—alas!—since.
Even the antique harpsichord had its compensations; not so powerful in its tonal capacity, it nevertheless gave forth a pleading, human quality like the still small angelic voice. Davos pondered these problems, pondered Chopin's celestial touch and the weaving magic of his many-hued poems; Chopin—Keats, Shelley, and Heine battling within the walls of a frail tender soul.
The sound of footsteps and voices aroused him. He shivered with disgust. More people! Two men, well advanced in life, followed by two women, barely attracted his notice, until he sawthat the little creature who waddled at the rear of the party was a Japanese in European clothes. Notwithstanding her western garb, she resembled a print of Utamaro. Beside her walked a tall, grave girl, with dark hair and gray eyes, attired in the quaint garb of some early nineteenth-century epoch—1840 or thereabouts. As old-fashioned as she looked, a delicate girlish beauty was hers, and when she indifferently gazed at Davos, straightway he heard humming in his head the "glance motive" from Tristan and Isolde. They passed on, but not leaving him as he was before; a voice whispered in the secret recesses of his being: "You love! Follow! Seek her!" And under the sudden impulsion of this passion he arose and made a few steps toward the curve of the path around which the girl and her companions had disappeared. The absurdity of this hasty translation into action of his desire halted him. Yes, his nerves must be in a bad way if a casual encounter with a pretty woman—but was she pretty? He did not return to his seat. He continued his stroll leisurely. Pretty! Not exactly pretty—distinguished! Noble! Lovely! Beautiful! He smiled. Here he was playing the praises of the unknown in double octaves. He did not overtake her. She had vanished on the other side of the bridge, and in a few minutes he found himself entering Alt-Aussee. It wore a bright appearance, with its various-coloured villas on the lake shores, and its churchand inn for a core. The garden of this hotel he found to be larger than he had imagined; it stretched along the bank and only stopped as if stone and mortar had been too lazy to go farther.
Again he hesitated. The garden, therestauration—full of people: women knitting, children bawling, men reading; and all sipping coffee to a background of gossip. He remembered that it was the sacred hour ofKaffeeklatsch, and he would have escaped by a flight of steps that led down to the beach, but he was hailed. A company of a half-dozen sat at a large table under the trees, and the host was an orchestral conductor well known to Davos. There was no alternative. He took a chair. He was introduced as the celebrated pianoforte-virtuoso to men and women he had never seen before, and hoped—so rancorous was his mood—never to see again. A red-headed girl from Brooklyn, who confessed that she thought Maeterlinck the name of some new Parisian wickedness, further bothered him with questions about piano teachers. No, he didn't give lessons! He never would! She dropped out of the conversation. Finally by an effort he swore that his head was splitting, that he must return to Ischl. He broke away. When he discovered that the crowd was also bound for the same place, he abruptly disappeared. It took him just two hours to traverse the irregular curves of the lake on the Franz Carl Promenade, and he ate hisdinner in peace at the inn upon a balcony that projected over the icy waters.
Davos decided, as he smoked a mild cigarette, that he would remain at Alt-Aussee for the night. The peace of the landscape purified his soul of its irritability, though he wished that the Dachstein would not dominate so persistently the sky-line—it was difficult to avoid the view of this solitary and egotistic peak, the highest in Styria. He was assigned a comfortable chamber, but the night was too fine for bed. He did not feel sleepy, and he went along the road he had come by; the church was an opaque mass, the spire alone showing in the violet twilight, like some supernatural spar on a ship far out at sea. He attempted to conjure to his tired brain the features, the expression, of the girl. They would not reappear; his memory was traitorous.
The murmur of faint music, piano music, made his ears wince—how he hated music! But afar as were these tonal silhouettes, traced against the evening air, his practised hearing told him that they were made by an artist. He languidly followed the clue, and soon he was at the gate of a villa, almost buried in the bosk, and listening with all his critical attention to a thrilling performance—yes, thrilling was the word—of Chopin's music. What! The last movement of the B flat minor sonata, the funeral march sonata, but no more like the interpretation he had heard from others—from himself—than—than....
But, good heavens!Whowas playing! The unison passages that mount and recede were iridescent columns of mist painted by the moonlight and swaying rhythmically in the breeze. Here was something rare. No longer conscious of the technical side of the playing, so spiritualized was it, so crystalline the touch, Davos forgot his manners and slipped through the gateway, through the dark garden, toward an open window in which burned a solitary candle. The mystery of this window and the quicksilver dartings of the music—gods, what a touch, what gossamer delicacy!—set his heart throbbing. He forgot his sick nerves. When the trumpet blows, the war-horse lusts for action—and this was not a trumpet, but a horn of elf-land. He moved as closely as he dared to the window, and the music ceased—naturally enough, the movement had concluded. His ears burned with the silence.Shecame to the window. Arrested by the vision—the casement framed her in a delicious manner—he did not stir. She could not help seeing this intruder, the light struck him full in the face. She spoke:—
"Dear Mr. Davos, won't you come into the house? My father and my uncle will be most happy to receive you."
She knew him! Stunned by his overstrung emotions, he could only bow his head.
He received the welcome of a king. The two men he had seen earlier in the day advanced ceremoniously and informed him that the honour of his presence was something they had never hoped for; that—as news flies swiftly in villages—they had heard he was at Alt-Aussee; they had recognized thegreatMarco Davos on the road. These statements were delivered with exaggerated courtesy, though possibly sincere. The elder of the pair was white-whiskered, very tall and spare, his expression a sadly vague one. It was her father. The other an antique person, a roly-poly fellow who chuckled and quavered, was her uncle. Davos sat in a drawing-room containing a grand pianoforte, a few chairs, and couches. The floor was stained, and when a cluster of lights was brought by the uncle, he noticed that only Chopin portraits hung on the walls. He apologized for his intrusion—the music had lured him from the highroad.
"We are very musical," said the father.
"I should say so," reiterated his brother-in-law.
"Musical!" echoed Davos. "Do you call it by such an everyday phrase? I heard the playing of a marvellous poet a moment ago." The two men looked shyly at each other. She entered. He was formally presented.
"Monsieur Davos, this is Constantia Grabowska, my daughter. My name is JosephGrabowski; my late wife's brother, Monsieur Pelletier." Davos was puzzled by the name, Constantia Grabowska! She sat before him, dressed in black silk with crinoline; two dainty curls hung over her ears; her profile, her colouring, were slightly Oriental, and in her nebulous gray eyes with their greenish light there was eternal youth. Constantia! Polish. And how she played Chopin—ah! it came to him before he had finished his apologies.
"You are named after Chopin's first love," he ejaculated. "Pardon the liberty." She answered him in her grave, measured contralto.
"Constantia Gladowska was my grandmother." The playing, the portraits, were now explained. A lover of the Polish composer, Davos knew every incident of his biography.
"I am the son of that Joseph Grabowski, the Warsaw merchant who married the soprano singer, Constantia Gladowska, in 1832," said the father, smilingly. "My father became blind."
"Chopin'sIdeal!" exclaimed Marco. He was under the spell of the girl's beauty and music. He almost stared at her, for the knowledge that she was a great artiste, perhaps greater than himself, rather dampened his passion. She was adorable as she returned without coquetry his ardent gaze; but she was—he had to admit it—a rival. This composite feeling he inwardly wrestled with as the conversation placidly proceeded. They only spoke ofPoland, of Chopin. Once the name of Emilia Plater, the Polish Joan of Arc, was mentioned—she, too, was a distant connection. The young pianist hinted that more music would be agreeable, but there was no response. He was quite alone with Constantia, and they talked of Poland's tone-poet. She knew much more of Chopin than he did, and she recited Mickïewicz's patriotic poems with incomparable verve.
"Do you believe in heredity?" he cried, as the father entered with the tea. "Do you believe that your love of Chopin is inherited? Chopin composed that wonderful slow movement of the F minor concerto because of his love for your grandmother. How I wish I could have seen her, heard her."
The girl, without answering him, detached from her neck a large brooch and chain. Davos took it and amazedly compared the portrait with the living woman.
"YouareConstantia Gladowska." She smiled.
"Her love of Chopin—she must have loved her youthful adorer—has been transmitted to you. Oh, please play me that movement again, the one Rubinstein called 'the night wind sweeping over the churchyard graves.'" Constantia blushed so deeply that he knew he had offended her. She had for him something of the pathos of old dance music—its stately sweetness, its measured rhythms. Afterdrinking a cup of tea he drifted to the instrument—flies do not hanker after honey as strongly as do pianists in the presence of an open keyboard. A tactful silence ensued. He began playing, and, as if exasperated at the challenge implied by her refusal, he played in his old form. Then he took the theme of Chopin's E flat minor Scherzo, and he juggled with it, spun it into fine fibres of tone, dashed it down yawning and serried harmonic abysses. He was magnificent as he put forth all the varied resources of his art. Constantia, her cheeks ablaze, her lips parted, interposed a fan between her eyes and the light. There was something dangerous and passionate in her regard. In all the fury of his play he knew that he had touched her. Once, during a pause, he heard her sigh. As he finished in a thunderous crash he saw in the doorway the figure of the Japanese maid—an ugly, gnarled idol with slitted eyes. She withdrew when he arose to receive the unaffected homage of his hosts. He was curious. Monsieur Pelletier, who looked like a Brazilian parrot in beak and hue, cackled:—
"That's Cilli, our Japanese. She was born in Germany, and is my niece's governess. Quite musical, too, I should say so. Just look at my two Maltese cats! I call them Tristan and Isolde because they make noises in the night. Don't youloatheWagner?"
It was time to go. Enamoured, Davos tookhis leave, promising to call the next forenoon before he went back to Ischl. He held her fingers for a brief moment and longed to examine their tips,—the artist still struggled to subdue the man,—but the pressure he received was so unmistakable that he hurried away, fearing to betray his emotion. He hovered in the vicinity of the house, longing for more music. He was disappointed. For a full hour he wandered through the dusty lanes in the faded light of an old moon. When he reached his chamber, it was long past one o'clock; undaunted, his romantic fervour forced him to the window, and he watched the shining lake. He fell asleep thinking of Constantia. But he dreamed of Cilli, the Japanese maid with the hideous eyes.
Not only that morning, but every morning for two weeks, did Marco Davos visit Alt-Aussee. He came down from Ischl on the earliest train, and some nights he stopped at the hotel near his new friends. After a few visits he saw little of the father and uncle, and he was not sorry—they were old bores with their archaic anecdotes of dead pianists. Two maniacs on the subject of music, Davos wished them to the devil after he had known them twenty-four hours. His passion had reached the acute key. He could not eat or drink in normal fashion, and no sooner had he left the girl than the sky became sombre,his pulse weakened, and he longed to return to her side to tell her something he had forgotten. He did this several times, and hesitated in his speech, reddened, and left her, stumbling over the grass like a lame man. Never such a crazy wooer, never a calmer maiden. She looked unutterable sentiment, but spoke it not.
When he teased her about her music, she became a statue. She was too timid to play before artists; her only master had been her father. Once more he had heard the piano as he returned unexpectedly, and almost caught her; he saw her at the instrument, but some instinct must have warned her that she was being spied upon. She stopped in the middle of a phrase from a Mendelssohn song, and even to his prejudiced ears her touch had seemed commonplace. Yet he loved her all the more despite her flat refusal to play. The temptation to his excited artistic temperament was removed. He played, often, gloriously. His nerves were steel. This was a cure his doctor had not foreseen. What did it matter, anyhow?—he was near Constantia daily, and the sunshine was royal. Only—why did her relatives absent themselves so obstinately! She told him, with her secret smile, that she had scolded them for talking so much; but when he played they were never far away, she assured him. Nor was the Japanese woman, Cilli—what a name! A nickname given by Constantia in her babyhood. Cilli was a good soul. He hoped so—her goodness was not apparent. She had a sneering expression as he played. He never looked up from the keyboard that he did not encounter her ironical gaze. She was undoubtedly interested. Her intensity of pose proved it; but there was no sympathy in her eyes. And she had a habit of suddenly appearing in door or window, and always behind her mistress. She ended by seriously annoying him, though he did not complain. It was too trivial.
One afternoon he unfolded his novel views on touch. If the action of the modern pianoforte could be made as sensitive in its response as the fingerboard of a fiddle.... Constantia listened with her habitual gravity, but he knew that she was bored. Then he shifted to the subject of fingers. He begged to be allowed the privilege of examining hers. At first she held back, burying her hand in the old Mechlin lace flounce of her sleeves. He coaxed. He did not attempt to conceal his chagrin when he finally saw her fingers. They were pudgy, good-humoured, fit to lift a knife and fork, or to mend linen. They did not match her cameo-like face, and above all they did not reveal the musical soul he knew her to possess. For the first time since he met her she gave evidence of ill humour. She sharply withdrew her hand from his, and as she did so a barbaric croon was heard, a sort of triumphant wailing, and Constantia, without making an excuse, hurriedly left the room. The singing stopped.
"It's that devil of a Japanese woman," he muttered testily. He waited for nearly an hour, and in a vile temper took up his hat and stick and went away. Decidedly this was his unlucky day, he grumbled, as he reached the water. He saw Grabowski and Pelletier, arm in arm, trudging toward the villa, but contrived to evade them. In ten minutes he found himself spying on the house he had quitted. He skirted a little private way back of the villa, and to his amazement father, uncle, and Constantia came out and hailed the omnibus which travelled hourly to Aussee. Davos was furious. He did not risk following them, for he realized he had been treated shabbily. His wrath softened as he reflected; perhaps Constantia, agitated by his rudeness,—had he been rude?—persuaded her family to follow him to Ischl. The sky cleared. That was the solution—Marco Davos straightened himself—his pride was no longer up in arms. Poor child—she was so easily wounded! How he loved her!
His body trembled. He could not believe he was awake. Incredible music was issuing from behind the closed blinds of the villa. Music! And the music he had overheard that first night. But Constantia had just gone away; he had seen her. There must be some mistake, some joke. No, no, by another path she had managed to get back to the house. Ay! but what playing. Again came that purling rush of notes, those unison passages, as if one gigantic hand graspedthem—so perfect was the tonal accord. He did not hesitate. At a bound he was in the corridor and pushed open the door of the drawing-room....
At first the twilighted room blinded him. Then to his disgust and terror he saw the apelike features of the squat Japanese governess. She sat at the piano, her bilious skin flushed by the exertion of playing.
"You—you!" he barely managed to stammer. She did not reply, but preserved the immobility of a carved idol.
"You are a wonderful artiste," he blurted, going to her. She stolidly answered:—
"The Japanese have the finest sense of touch in the world. I was once a pupil of Karl Tausig." Involuntarily he bowed his head to the revered name of the one man he had longed to hear. Then his feelings almost strangled him; his master passion asserted itself.
"Your fingers, your fingers—let me see them," he hoarsely demanded. With a malicious grin she extended her hands—he groaned enviously. Yes, they were miracles of sculpture, miracles of colour and delicacy, the slender tips well-nigh prehensile in their cunning power. And the fingers of Constantia, of his love, of the woman who loved Chopin—that Chopin whose first passion was for her grandmother, the opera singer Constantia Gladowska!
The knowledge of her cruel deception crept into his consciousness. He was chilled forseveral seconds. Grief at his lost love, implacable anger at her trickery, crowded into his unhappy brain. But he only bowed to Cilli, and summoning all his will he politely said:—
"It is quite true that when the Japanese choose to play the piano, we Europeans must shut up shop." He hurried out to the road and walked desperately....
The next morning, as he nervously paced the platform of the Ischl railway station, he encountered his old friend Alfred Brünfeld, the jovial Viennese pianist.
"Hullo!"
"Hullo!"
"Not going back to Vienna?"
"Yes—I'm tired of the country."
"But, man, you are pale and tired. Have you been studying up here after your doctor bade you rest?" The concern in Brünfeld's voice touched Davos. He shook his head, then bethought himself of something.
"Alfred, you are acquainted with everybody in Europe. How is it you never told me about that strange Grabowski crowd—you know, the granddaughter of Chopin's first love?" Brünfeld looked at him with instant curiosity.
"You also?" he said. The young man blushed. Afterthathe could never forgive! The other continued:—
"Granddaughter, fiddlesticks! They are not Poles, those Grabowskis, but impostors. Their real name is—is—" Davos started.
"What, you have met them?"
"Yes, the stupid father, the odious uncle, the fair Constantia—what a meek saint!—and that diabolical Japanese, who plays the piano like a house on fire." Tears came to the eyes of Marco Davos.
"Did they—I mean, didshetake you in, too?"
"Here, at Ischl, last summer," was the grim reply.
Ferval returned to Rouen after a fatiguing trip down the Seine as far as Croisset, the old home of Gustave Flaubert. Here he viewed, not without a dismal sense of fame and its futility, the little garden-house in which the masterpieces of the great Frenchman had been conceived in joy and executed in sorrow. He met the faithful Colange, one-time attendant of Flaubert, and from him learned exacerbating details of the novelist's lonesome years; so he was in a mood of irritation as he went ashore near the Boïeldieu Bridge and slowly paced toward his hotel. He loved this Norman Rouen, loved the battered splendour of Nôtre-Dame Cathedral, loved the church of Saint-Ouen—that miracle of the Gothic, with its upspringing turrets, its portal as perfect as a Bach fugue. And in the Solferino Garden he paid his tribute of flowers at the monuments of Maupassant and Flaubert. Ferval was modern in his tastes; he believed nothing in art was worth the while which did not date from the nineteenth century.
Deplorably bored, he passed his hotel on theQuai and turned into the Rue Jeanne d'Arc, which led by the façade of the Palais de Justice. He had studied it carefully, and it did not, this dull afternoon in September, hold his interest long; he sauntered on, not feeling strong enough to light a cigarette. Decidedly, Rouen was become tiresome. He would go back to Paris by the evening train—or to Dieppe, thence to London, on the morning boat. Presently he found himself nearing the Porte de la Grosse Horloge. Through its opening poured vivacious working girls and men in blouse and cap, smoking, chattering, gesticulating. It was all very animated, and the wanderer tried to enjoy the picture. Then over against the crenellated wall, under the tablet bearing the quaint inscription picked out in choice Latin, Ferval saw a tall girl. Her bare head would not have marked her in a crowd where motley prevailed; it was her pose that attracted him,—above all, her mediæval face, with its long, drooping nose which recalled some graven image of Jean Goujon. Her skin was tanned; her hair, flame-coloured, was confined by a classic fillet; her eyes, Oriental in fulness, were light blue—Ferval had crossed to the apparition and noted these things. She did not return his stare, but continued to gaze at the archway as if expecting some one. Young, robust, her very attitude suggested absolute health; yet her expression was so despairing, her eyes so charged with misery, that involuntarily he felt in his pocketfor money. And then he saw that in her hand she held a tambourine. She wore a faded uniform of the Salvation Army.
Suddenly an extraordinary noise was heard; music, but of such a peculiar and excruciating quality that the young man forgot his neighbour and wondered what new pain was in store for his already taut nerves. The shops emptied, children stopped their games, and the Quarter suspended its affairs to welcome the music. Ferval heard rapturous and mocking remarks. "Baki, Baki, the human orchestra!" cried one gossip to another. And the reverberating music swelled, multifarious and amazing as if a military band from piccolo to drum were about to descend the highway. A clatter and bang, a sweet droning and shrill scraping, and then an old man proudly limped through the gateway of the Great Clock. This was the conjurer, this white-haired fellow, who, with fife, cymbals, bells, concertinas,—he wore two strapped under either arm,—at times fiddler, made epileptic music as he quivered and danced, wriggled, and shook his venerable skull. The big drum was fastened to his back, upon its top were placed cymbals. On his head he wore a pavilion hung with bells that pealed when he twisted or nodded his long, yellow neck. He carried a weather-worn fiddle with a string or two missing, while a pipe that might have been a clarinet years before, now emitted but cackling tones from his thin lips, through which shone a few fanglike teeth. By some incomprehensible coördination of muscular movements he contrived to make sound simultaneously his curious armoury of instruments, and the whistling, screeching, scratching, drumming, wheezing, and tinkling of metal were appalling. But it was rhythmic, and at intervals the edge of a tune could be discerned, cutting sharply through the dense cloud of vibrations, like the prow of a boat cleaving the fog. Baki, his face red and swollen by his exertions, moved to the spot where waited the girl.
"Ai, Debora!" cried a boy, "here's the old man. Pass the plate, pass the plate!" To his amazement, though he could give no reason for the feeling, Ferval saw the girl go from group to group, her tambourine outstretched, begging for coppers. Once she struck an insulting youth across the face, but when she reached Ferval and met his inquiring look, she dropped her eyes and did not ask for alms. A red-headed Sibyl, he thought discontentedly, a street beggar, the daughter of an old ruffian. And as he walked away rapidly he remembered her glance, in which there lurked some touch of antique pride and wrath.
Rouen lay below him, a violet haze obscuring all but the pinnacles of its churches. The sinking sun had no longer power to pierce thismisty gulf, at the bottom of which hummed the busy city; but Ferval saw through rents in the twirling, heat-laden atmosphere the dim shapes of bridges mirrored by the water beneath him; and once the two islands apparently swept toward him, a blur of green; while at the end of the valley, framed by hills, he seemed to discern the odd-looking Transbordeur spanning the Seine.
For twenty-four hours he had not ceased thinking of the girl with the tambourine, of her savage, sullen grace, her magnificent poise and strange glance. He had learned at his hotel that she was called "Debora la folle," and that she was the daughter of the still crazier Baki. Was she some sort of a gypsy, or a Continental version of Salvation Army lass? No one knew. Each year, at the beginning of autumn, the pair wandered into Rouen, remained a few weeks, and disappeared. Where? Paris, perhaps, or Italy or—là bas!The shoulder-shrugging proved that Baki and his daughter were not highly regarded by reputable citizens of Rouen, though the street people followed their music and singing as long as it lasted. Singing? queried Ferval; does the woman sing?
He became more interested. His visits to the country where Pissarro painted and Flaubert wrote revealed other possibilities besides those purely artistic ones in which this amateur of fine shades and sensations delighted. He did not deny, on the esplanade where behind himstood Bonsecours and the monument of Jeanne d'Arc, that souvenirs of the girl had kept his eyelids from closing during the major portion of the night. To cool his brain after the midday breakfast he had climbed the white, dusty, and winding road leading to the Monumental Cemetery wherein, true Flaubertian, he had remained some moments uncovered at the tomb of the master. Now he rested, and the shade of the trees mellowed the slow dusk of a Rouen evening.
A deep contralto voice boomed in his ears. As he had seen but a scant half-dozen persons during the afternoon on the heights, Ferval was startled from his dreams. He turned. Sitting on a bank of green was the girl. Her hands were clasped and she spoke carelessly to her father, who, unharnessed from his orchestra, appeared another man. Rapidly Ferval observed his striking front, his massive head with the long, white curls, the head of an Elijah disillusioned of his mission. He, too, was sitting, but upright, and his arm was raised with a threatening gesture as if in his desolating anger he were about to pronounce a malediction upon the vanishing twilighted town. Ferval moved immediately, as he did not care to be caught spying upon his queer neighbours. He was halted by their speech. It was English. His surprise was so unaffected that he turned back and went up to the two and bade them good-day. At once he saw that the girl recognized him;the father dropped his air of grandeur and put on the beggar's mask. What an actor! thought Ferval, at the transformation. "Would the good gentleman please—?"
The girl plucked at her father's arm imploringly. With her grave, cold expression she answered the other's salutation and fixed him with her wonderful eyes so inquiringly that Ferval began a hasty explanation. "English was rarely spoken here ... and then the pleasure of the music!" The old man burst into scornful laughter.
"The music!" he exclaimed. "The music!" echoed his daughter. Ferval wished himself down in Rouen. But he held his position.
"Yes," he continued, "your music. It interested me. And now I find you speaking my own tongue. I must confess that I am curious, that my curiosity has warrant." Thus was he talking to beggars as if they were his social equals. Unconsciously the tone he adopted had been forced upon him by the bearing of his companions, above all by their accent, that of cultivated folk. Who and what were they? The musician no longer smiled.
"You are a music-lover, monsieur?" he asked in a marked Frenchpatois.
"I love music, and I am extremely engaged by your remarkable combination of instruments," answered Ferval. Baki regarded his wretched orchestra on the grass, then spoke to his daughter.
"Debora," he said in English, and his listener wondered if it were Celtic or Scotch in its unusual intonations, "Debora, you must sing something for the gentleman. He loves our art,"—there was indescribable pathos in this phrase,—"so sing something from Purcell, Brahms, or Richard Strauss."
These words were like the sting of hail; they seemed to drop from the sky, so out of key were they with the speaker's ragged clothes and the outlandish garb of his daughter. Purcell! Brahms! Strauss! What could these three composers mean to such outcasts? Believing that he was the victim of a mystification, Ferval waited, his pulses beating as if he had been running too hard. The girl slowly moved her glorious eyes in his direction; light as they were in hue, their heavy, dark lashes gave them a fantastic expression—bright flame seen through the shadow of smoke. He felt his own dilating as she opened her throat and poured out a broad, sonorous stream of sound that resolved into Von ewiger Liebe by Brahms. He had always loved deep-voiced women. Had he not read in the Talmud that Lilith, Adam's first wife, was low of voice? And this beggar-maid? Maybe a masquerading singer with a crazy father! What else could mean such art wasted on the roads, thrown in the faces of a rabble! Ferval kindled with emotion. Here was romance. Brahms and his dark song under the bowl of the troubled blue sky strongly affected him. He took the lean,brown hand of the singer and kissed it fervently. She drew back nervously, but her father struck her on the shoulder chidingly.
"A trifle too dreary," he rumbled in his heavy bass. "Now, Purcell for the gentleman, and may he open his heart and his purse for the poor."
"Father," she cried warningly, "we are not beggars,now!" She turned supplicatingly to the young man and made a gesture of dismissal. He gently shook his head and pretended that he was about to leave, though he felt that his feet were rooted in the earth, his power of willing gone.
"Ay, ay, my girl!" continued the musician, "you can sing as well as the best of them, only you love your sinful old father so much that you have laid aside your ambitions, to follow him in his pilgrimage of expiation about this wicked globe. Ah, sir, if you but knew—Iwillspeak, Debora, for he is a gentleman and a lover of music! If you but knew our history, you would not be surprised at us. Have ye ever been in Wales?"
Ferval stumbled in his answer. It was overlooked; the old man continued: "If ye have, ye must have heard of the sin-eaters. I am one of them, I am an eater of sin—"
Again the girl exclaimed, this time piteously, "Oh, father, remember your vow!"
"Poor lass! Yes, I was a doer of evil, and I became an eater of sin. Some day my sins willbe forgiven—this is my penance." He pointed to his instruments. Ferval kept silence. He feared a word would blow away the cobweb foundations of the narrative. The girl had turned and was watching a young tilted moon which with a single star made silvery dents low in the western horizon.
"I am an eater of sin. We still have a few such in Wales. They put a piece of bread and cheese on the breast of a dead man and when the sin-eater eats it, the sins of the dead are passed into the bread and cheese and the soul of the dead is shrived of them. Ay, ay, but it's a grave duty, my friend, to take upon your own soul the crime of another. If you are free from sin yourself, you may walk through life a brave creature; but ... I took his sins, sins, the sins of the wickedest composer of our century, God rest his soul. And for the wicked things he put into his symphonies I must march through life playing on this terrible collection of instruments the Tune of Time—" His daughter faced him.
"Father, we must go; you are only keeping the gentleman." Again she signalled Ferval, but he disregarded her warning. He would not stir. The story and the man who told it, a prophet shorn of his heaven-storming powers, fascinated him.
"I took his sins to myself and they were awful. Once every night I play the Tune of Time in which the wickedness of the dead manis spread out like dry rot in a green field. This man kept his genius so long stagnant that it decayed on his hands, and then into his pestilential music he poured his poison, and would have made the world sick. Oh, for delivery from the crushing transgressions of another! His name? Ah, but that is my secret! I ate his sin, and truth, my son, is stranger than theology! Listen!"
Before his daughter could check him he had hastily donned his armament of instruments and, tramping slowly the broad, smooth path, began playing. Ferval, much disappointed, was about to disappear, for he remembered the racking noises of the previous day. But this music, this Tune of Time!...
It was like the flare of lightning which illuminates strange regions beyond the borders of the soul. Ferval no longer heard, he felt; he felt no more, he saw. The white veil was torn asunder, and it showed him a melodious thunder-pool wherein tapering tiny bodies swam, whose eyes were the eyes of Debora. They split and coalesced into other creatures, and to the drummings of spheric harmonies resolved themselves scaly and monstrous. Never did they cease changing. As the music buzzed he saw the great ladder of life, the lowermost rungs resting in lakes of melted amber, the top threatening the remotest rims of the universe. And still the Tune of Time whirred on, as facet after facet of the Infinite wheeled toward creation. Numberless legions of crumpled nightmare shapes modulated into new, familiar forms. Ferval saw plasmic dew become anthropoidal apes, fiercely roaming primeval forests in search of prey. The music mounted ever upward, for the Tune of Time is the Tune of Love—love and its inseparable shadow, hate, fashion the firmament. The solid, circular earth shivered like a mighty harp under this lyric burden of love. The very stars sported in their orbits; and from the fulgurating ovens of the Milky Way there shot forth streams of audible light that touched the heart-strings of the hairy, erect primates and set them chanting; thus were the souls born which crowned them men. This space-bridging music ranged from sun to sun, and its supernatural symphony had no beginning and never shall end.
But the magician or devil who revealed this phantasmagoria of the Cosmos—how had he wrested from the Inane the Tune of Time that in a sequence of chromatic chords pictured the processes of the eternal energy? Was this his sin, the true sin against the Holy Ghost? How had he blundered upon the secret of the rhythmic engine which spun souls through the ages? No man could live after this terrific peep at the Ancient of Days. Debora's eyes peered into Ferval's, filled with the music that enmeshes.And now sounded the apocalyptic trumpets even unto the glittering edges of eternity....
Amid this vertiginous tempest of tones Debora danced the Dance of Space. She revolved in lenten movement to the lilt of the music, her eyes staring and full of broken lights. As her gaze collided with her companion's he saw a disk of many-coloured fire; and then her languorous gestures were transformed into shivering intensities. She danced like the wine-steeped Noah; she danced as danced David before the Ark of the Covenant. And she was Herodias pirouetting for the price of John's head, and her brow was wreathed with serpents. Followed the convulsive curvings of the Nautch and the opaque splendours of stately Moorish slaves. Debora threw her watcher into a frenzy of fear. He crouched under a sky that roofed him in with its menacing blackness; the orbs of the girl were shot with crescent lightnings. Alien in his desolation, he wondered if her solemn leaps, as the music dashed with frantic speed upon his ear-drums, signified the incarnation of Devi, dread slayer of men! The primal charmers affrighted his vision: Lilith, Ourania, Astarté, Ashtaroth, Belkis, Ishtar, Mylitta, Cotytto, and many immemorial figures from before the Flood streamed by and melted into the woven paces of Debora—this new Jephtha's daughter dancing to her doom as her father fingered the Tune of Time. In the whirling patterns of her dance, Ferval discerned, though dimly, the Veilof Maya, the veil of illusion called Space, on the thither side of which are embroidered the fugacious symbols of Time....
... As the delirious music faltered and fainted, he watched the tragic eyes of Debora yellowing cat-like. His senses and imagination had been hypnotized by all this fracas and by the beauty of the girl. With such a mate and such formidable music, he could conquer the earth! His brain was afire with the sweetness of the odour that enveloped them, an odour as penetrating as the music of the nocturnal Chopin.
"Debora," he whispered, "you must never go away from me." She hung her head. The old man was not to be seen; the darkness had swallowed him. Ferval quietly passed his arm about the waist of the silent woman and slowly they walked in the tender night. She was the first to speak:—
"You did not hear a madman's story," she asserted in her clear, candid voice, which had for him the hue of a cleft pomegranate. "It is the history of my father's soul. It is his own sin he expiates."
"But you, you!" Ferval cried unsteadily. "Why must your life be sacrificed to gratify the bizarre egotism of such a—" He cut short the phrase, fearful of wounding her. He felt her body tremble and her arm contract. They reached the marble staircase of the Jeanne d'Arc memorial. She stopped him and burst forth:—
"Would you be willing to share his burden? Would you take upon your shoulders his sin? He may have committed the one unpardonable sin, for he discovered the true philosopher's stone, that can transmute metals, make mountains nod, the stars to stop, and command the throne of Jehovah—oh, what blasphemy has been his in his daring music! If he could persuade one other soul besides mine to help him, he might be released from his woe. Will you be that other?"
She put this question as if she were proposing a commonplace human undertaking. Ferval in his confusion fancied that she was provoking him to a declaration. To grasp his receding reason he fatuously exclaimed:—
"Is this a Salvation Army fantasy?"
With that she called out, in harsh resentment:
"Not salvation for you!"
She then thrust him from her so violently that he tumbled backward down the steps to the very bottom, where, unnerved by the ferocity of the attack and his head bruised by the fall, he felt his consciousness escape like gas from a punctured balloon. When found the next morning, he was barely covered by the old sin-eater's rags, while near by was scattered the entire orchestra of that eloquent wizard. Shudderingly he realized that it had been no dream; shudderingly he wondered if upon his soul had been shifted the unknown crime of the fanatic! The witching, enigmatic Debora haunted his memory;and with dismay he recalled the blistering vision evoked by the music, through which she had glided like some tremulous Lamia. Decidedly his imagination had carried him far. He cursed his easy credulity, he reviled his love of the exotic....
Ferval made inquiry of the authorities, but received little comfort. Salvation Army people they were not, this father and daughter; the tambourine, assumed garb, and prophet's beard had deceived him. Impostors! But of what incredible caliber, of what illusion-creating power! For years he could not see a Salvation Army girl without a sense of cerebral exaltation. If he could have met Debora again, he would have forgiven her sibylline deceptions, her father's chicanery. And how did they spin their web? Ferval, student of the occult, greedy of metaphysical problems, at first set it down to Indian Yogi magic. But the machinery—the hideously discordant human orchestra, the corybantic dancing! No, he rejected the theory. Music is sometimes hypnotic, but not such music; dancing is the most alluring of the spatial arts, and Debora's miming was a delight to the eye; but could it have so obscured his judgments as to paint upon the canvas of his fancy those prodigious frescoes of time and space?
In the iron solitude of his soul he tortured himself with these questions. His stupor lasted for days—was it the abrupt fall or wasit the result of his absinthe-like dreams? He was haunted by an odour that assailed his brain like one tune persistently played. The odour! Whence did it come with its sickly sweetness? Perhaps therein lay the secret of his hallucinating visions. Perhaps a drug had perverted his brain. But within the week the dangerous perfume had become dissipated, and with it vanished all hope of solving the riddle. Oh, to sense once more the enchantments of its fragrance, once more revel in the sublimated intoxication of mighty forces weaving at the loom of life! By the cadences of what infernal art had he been vouchsafed a glimpse of the profiles of the gods? Henceforth Ferval became a lover of shadows.
The tenderness of the growing night disquieted the dying woman.
"Aline!" she called. But it was only the name that reverberated within the walls of her brain, harrowed by fever. A soft air rustled the drawn curtains of lawn; and on the dressing table the two little lamps fluttered in syncopated sympathy. One picture the room held. It was after a painting by Goya, and depicted a sneering skeleton scrawling on his dusty tomb, with a bony fore-finger, the sinister word,Nada—nothing! The perturbation of the woman increased, though physical power seemed denied her. "Aline, my child!" This time a clucking sound issued from her throat.
The girl went to the bedside and gently fanned. Her aunt wagged her head negatively. "No, no!" she stuttered. Aline stopped, and kneeling, took the sick hands in her own. Their eyes met and Aline, guided by the glance, looked over at the picture with its sardonic motto.
"Shall I take it away, Aunt Mary?" The elder woman closed her eyes as if to shut out the ghoulish mockery. Then Aline saw the tabouret that stood between the windows—itwas burdened with magnolias in a deep white bowl.
"Do you wish them nearer?"
"No, no," murmured her aunt. Her eyes brightened. She pushed her chin forward, and the young girl removed the flowers, knowing that their odour had become oppressive. She was not absent more than a few seconds. As she returned the maid touched her arm.
"The gentlemen are waiting below, miss. They won't leave until they see you."
"How can I go now? Send them away, send them away!"
"Yes, miss; but I told them what you said this afternoon about the danger of Holiest Mother—"
"Hush! she is calling." Aline slipped into the room on hurried feet, her eyes dilated, her hair in anxious disorder. But the invalid made no signal. She lay with closed eyelids, the contraction of her nostrils a faint proclamation of life. Again the niece took her place at the headboard, and with folded fingers watched the whispering indications of speedy flight. The maid soon beckoned her from a narrowed door. Aline joined her.
"They say that if you don't go down, they will come up."
"Who says?" was the stern query.
"The Second Reader and the Secretary. I think you had better see them; they both look worried. Really I do, Miss Allie."
"Very well, Ellen; but you must stay here, and if Holiest Mother makes the slightest move, touch the bell. I'll not be gone five minutes."
Without arranging her hair or dress, Aline opened the folding doors of the drawing-room. Only the centre lamp was lighted, but she recognized the two men. They were sitting together, and arose as she entered. The burly Second Reader wore a dismayed countenance. His cheeks were flabby, his eyes red. The other was a timid little man who never had anything to say.
"How is Holiest Mother?" asked the Reader.
"Dying."
"Oh, Sister Aline! Why such a blunt way of putting it?Shemay be exchanging her earthly garb for a celestial one—but die! We do not acknowledge death in the Church of the New Faith." He paused and blandly stroked his huge left hand, covered with red down.
"Holiest Mother, my aunt, has not an hour to live," was the cool response of the girl. "If you have no further question, I must ask you to excuse me; I am needed above." She stepped to the door.
"Wait a moment, sister! Not so fast. The situation is serious. Hundreds of thousands of the faithful depend on our report of this—of this sad event. We may tell them that the female pope of our great religion"—he bent his big neck reverently—"was wafted to her heavenly abode by the angels. But there arethe officers of the law, the undertaker, the cemetery people, to be considered. Shall we acknowledge that our founder has died like any other human—in bed, of a fever? And who is to be her successor? Has she left a will?"
"Poor Aunt Mary!" muttered the girl.
"It must be a woman, will or no will," continued the Second Reader, in the tone of a conqueror making terms with a stricken foe. "Now Aline, sister, you are the nearest of kin. You are a fervent healer.Youare the Woman."
"How can you stand there heartlessly plotting such things and a dying woman in the house?" Aline's voice was metallic with passion. "You care only for the money and power in our church. I refuse to join with you in any such scheme. Aunt Mary will die. She will name her successor. Then it will be time to act. Have you forgotten her last words to the faithful?" She pointed to a marble tablet above the fireplace, which bore this astounding phrase: "My first and forever message is one and eternal." Nothing more,—but the men cowered before the sublime wisdom uttered by a frail woman, wisdom that had started the emotional machinery of two continents.
"But, great God! Miss Aline, you mustn't go off and leave us in this fix." Drops of water stood on the forehead of the Second Reader. His hands dropped to his side with a gesture of despair. His companion kept to the corner, a scared being.
"You know as well as I do thatsomebodyhas to take the throne seat after—after your Aunt Mary dies—I mean, after Holiest Mother is translated to eternity. Ask her, beg her, for some advice. We can't let the great undertaking go to pieces—"
"You have little faith, brother," replied Aline. "If that message means anything, then the New Faith will take care of itself—"
"Yes, yes, I know," was the testy interruption; "but the world is not so easily led in matters of religion. The message, as you say, is divine; but it may sound like meaningless twaddle to the world at large. If we are to heal mankind and dispel the heresy of disease and death, why can't Holiest Mother save herself? Mind you, I am looking at this thing with the eyes of the sceptics—"
"You are an unbeliever, a materialist, yourself," was the bold retort. "Do as you please, but you can't drag me into your money calculations." The swift slam of the door left them to their fears.
Her aunt, sitting as upright as a candle, was conducting an invisible orchestra when Aline returned. The frightened maid tried to hold the lean, spasmodic arms as they traced in the air the pompous rhythm of a march that moved on silent funereal pinions through the chamber. The woman stared threateningly at the picture on the wall, the picture of the skeleton which had come from nothingness to reveal nothingness tothe living. The now distraught girl, her nerves crisped by her doubts, threw herself upon the bed, her fears sorely knocking at her heart.
"Aunt, Aunt Mary—Holiest Mother, in Christ's name, in the name of the New Faith, tell me before you go—tell me what is to become of our holy church after you die—after you pass over to the great white light. Is it all real? Or is it only a dream,yourbeautiful dream?—What is the secret truth? Or—or—is there no secret—no—" her voice was cracked by sobs. The stately, soundless music was waved on by her aunt. Then Holiest Mother fell back on her pillow, and with a last long glance at the picture, she pointed, with smiling irony at the picture.
Nada, Nada ...
The night died away in tender complicity with the two little lamps on the dressing table, and the sweet, thick perfume of magnolias modulated into acrid decay as day dawned. Below, the two men anxiously awaited the message from the dead. And they saw again upon the marble tablet above the fireplace her cryptic wisdom:—
"My first and forever message is one and eternal."